Why We Need To Take The Environment Seriously

You’ve likely seen the Google Doodle with Earth replacing one its “O”s, or splashed headlines with news of environmental initiatives. But this Earth Day, rapper and activist Prince Ea’s “Dear Future Generations: Sorry” video has gone viral for its skewering of willful environmental ignorance and the ways in which we’re losing all our most precious resources to greed. It's also a call to arms to do what we can to save our planet before it really is too late — a time which we're fast approaching.

The six-minute video is a poetic exploration of the way we’re damaging the Earth, apologizing to future generations while he stands in an imagined barren desert where the Amazon Rainforest used to flourish. “Sorry we were too caught up in our own doings,” he says, “to do something.” And Prince Ea takes no prisoners when it comes to pointing the finger at GOP leaders who’ve purposefully and knowingly misled the public about the long-term and irreversible repercussions of mining fossil fuels: “Hey Fox News, if you don’t think climate change is a threat, I dare you to interview the thousands of homeless people in Bangladesh," he says. "See, while you were penthouse nestled, their homes were literally washed away beneath their feet due to rising sea levels.”

This, of course, is as good an opportunity as any to remember the many-times-favorited tweet by CNN’s Bill Weir addressing this very topic:

But Prince Ea's hardest-hitting dish of truth is delivered to Sarah “Africa Is a Country” Palin, whom he addresses with the following:

And Sarah Palin, you said you loved the smell of fossil fuels. Well I urge you to talk to the kids of Beijing who’re forced to wear pollution masks just to go to school. See you can ignore this, but the thing about truth is it can be denied, not avoided.

The video ends with a call to arms and an explainer on Stand For Trees, which calls itself a grassroots campaign to preserve our forests and minimize CO2 emissions. Watch the video in its entirety below.

Images: Prince Ea/YouTube (3)