(image via flickr user Xavier Bayod)
Gooooood Morning SuperForest!
Last week I posted about seeing the Cove and the powerful and inspirational effect it had on me. It was all thanks to SuperForester Aaron, whose wonderful post inspired me to get my butt to the multiplex.
Here’s what has happened since last week:
After seeing the movie, I decided that I had to do something to bring attention to the yearly killing and sale of wild dolphins.
But how?
SuperForest is a positivity blog, and I love it that way… How then to bring positivity and joy to a rather grim subject? How to promote awareness in the hopes of stopping the killing, without being a big ol’ downer?
When in doubt, I try to remember that the most important thing is to sing, and dance, laugh, and fall in love. With that in mind, I contacted SuperForester Aaron and together we hatched a plan:
We decided that instead of protesting, we would teach the children to sing! And dance and sing with them!
The idea is this: We will create a movement, a purely positive one. We will not condemn or disapprove, we will simply be very excited about how awesome dolphins are, and repeat to anyone who will listen that dolphins are awesome.
We will create an epic song! A happy, poppy, pop song about the total radness of the dolphin. And we will ask every creative spark we know to contribute to the song, open-source style.
Like a whale’s song, our tune will be long, complex and totally unforgettable.
We will craft this song together and next month, when the yearly dolphin harvesting begins, we will be in Taiji teaching the song to school children.
Simultaneously, we will have people in the US teaching the song to more children here.
We will create a collaborative, international song, with children of all races and ages singing together a simple message: Dolphins are Awesome.
And we will work with anyone who wants to be involved. The more minds attuned to this issue, the sooner it is resolved. And just to clarify, my issue is not that fishermen in Taiji are harvesting dolphins. The issue is that as humans we need to re-examine how we are treating the species of planet Earth, especially the creatures of the sea, upon whom so many humans depend for nutrition and livelihood.
My hope is that we can create a situation that will be a win for everybody involved. I don’t want to protest, or yell, or picket. I just want to show the world how we can sing and dance and laugh our way to a brighter future together.
I want to befriend these fishermen! I want to befriend everybody involved. And I’d love to help craft a song that was so sweet, so sticky, so smart, and loving that it stuck in everyone’s head.
By promoting awareness instead of condemning action, I feel like we will succeed, and hopefully spread a new meme about what it means to “protest” in this interconnected world. “Pro” means “for” anyway.
I have asked many of my musician friends to have a go at crafting pieces of the Song, and Aaron and I and many others are at work setting the trip up, getting the website up, and remembering to stay positive and compassionate.
Would you like to help? We need so much help. If our idea of positively spreading awareness via music and fun inspires you, and you want to take action, we could use the following things:
Could someone take charge of setting up a collaborative blog or site to aggregate the dolphin-positivity? We need a website that anyone can upload to. A place to piece together the song and also have room for drawings, and videos, and pictures, all supporting our “Dolphins are Awesome” message.
Does anyone have any contacts in Japan? Places to stay. Folks to hang with. Teachers, artists, SuperForesters, Cool cats, poets, musicians, dancers. The more folks involved, the better. If anyone knows of places to stay in Taiji, that would help greatly.
SuperForest is coming to Japan to party for Peace and prosperity!
Join in the fun. It’s the best party going right now.
Exciting times!
-Jackson
Recent Comments