BLUE HELMET SOLDIERS PLANTING TREES IN BID TO ‘GREEN’ PLANET
FOUR BILLION TREES IN THE GROUND NOW
Seven billion trees by 2009!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
New York, Jul 22 2009 6:00PM

United Nations peacekeepers are no strangers to working in some of the world’s most hazardous regions, and they are now helping out on a new battlefront: combating climate change.

“The care and protection of our environment is everybody’s concern,” said Lieutenant Colonel Um Bello, who heads the Alpha Company of the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia (<"http://unmil.org/">UNMIL).

He is leading his troops in a new exercise: planting 1,000 trees in the country’s west this year, as part of the tree-planting campaign of the UN Environment Programme (<"http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=593&ArticleID=6254&l=en&t=long">UNEP), which seeks to plant 7 billion trees – or one for every person in the world – by the end of 2009.

“As a contingent, we have resolved to join efforts with the international community” and others to ensure that the war against climate change “is fought, won and our planet Earth is saved,” he said.

With the destruction of natural forests emitting more greenhouse gases every year than the transport sector, planting trees – which absorb carbon dioxide and store nearly 300 gigatonnes of carbon in their biomass – is a crucial defence in the fight against global warming.

Blue helmets have already planted nearly 30,000 saplings in 11 peacekeeping missions worldwide, in countries including Timor-Leste, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Georgia and Lebanon.

To date, more than 4 billion trees have been planted, with 169 countries having taken part in UNEP’s Billion Tree Campaign. Ethiopia alone has planted 1.4 billion trees, while Turkey has planted 707 million and Mexico has planted 537 million.

For its part, the joint African Union-UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur, known as <"http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/missions/unamid/">UNAMID, has embarked on a scheme to plant 1,000 seedlings at all of its compounds in the war-ravaged Sudanese region by December.

UNEP, which hopes its tree-planting initiative will pressure nations to “seal the deal” on an ambitious new climate change pact this December in Copenhagen, Denmark, planted a tree for each of the more than 10,000 people who signed up for the ‘Twitter for Trees’ initiative on the Internet-based social networking site Twitter by World Environment Day on 5 June.

Groups such as the World Organization of the Scouts Movement, with 28 million members in 160 countries, committed to plant 65,000 trees as well.

At a recent press conference Jim Channon confirmed the four missions of the proto-mythical First Earth Battalion. He stressed that the main reason the unit exists is to profess the positive visions for the future for Armed Forces of the Planet and those independent global members who aspire to the warrior monk archetype. He reviewed the following mission elements:

BE ALL YOU CAN BE the constant work of the battalion is the integral assembly of advanced human performance skills, the paranormal, and optimal states of being.

CREATE A PARADISE ON PLANET EARTH the deliberate acceptance of the idea that this earth is totally suitable for the creation of a paradise like world and that our only real obstacle is believing that idea and acting collectively upon it.

RECOVERING THE BIOSPHERE the realization of the plan called Operation Noble Steward where all the respective military forces on the planet conspire to the recovery of our most important long range resource ...our biosphere.

GLOBAL PUBLIC UNITY as a prerequisite for our final move into the next world we want to establish the need and value of a planetary citizenry that re-purposes all the institutions we have already created to operate in a progressive and sustainable global manner and achieves natural security for our planet.

After the press conference Colonel Channon cut a short you tube video called Combat of the Collective Conscience. Just go to you tube and search for Jim Channon. For other background on Jim check the wikipedia. See the new website created by the cav.

Recent successes have included improving the trauma recovery skills of Army medical units like the brain rangers in Irag, sharing psy op approach plans to enter villages w/o creating collateral damage, and improving the distance sensing skills for soldiers entering danger zones using on board psi tools. We can do war another way!!!!!

--Jim Channon

-