Issue of the Week: Environment, Human Rights, Economic Opportunity, Hunger, Disease

Last February, the worst earthquake in the modern history of Turkey and in western Syria dominated headlines and ongoing media coverage. Then, like all such natural disasters or other headline-grabbing issues, it virtually disappeared. As one of our team members from Planet Earth Foundation experienced first-hand last month, it has not disappeared for millions of Turks and Syrians. Lisa Blume, a principal at Planet Earth Foundation who has researched and produced multiple award-winning media campaigns over the years, travelled to the epicenter of the earthquake.

After a month of volunteering to help victims and refugees and taking significant risk in creating some astonishing video, on return, a short mini-documentary was produced by the Foundation team. Aesthetically, the piece is remarkable in being spare and yet so real as to create the sensation one could walk into the scenes.

Information accompanies the images at points so we won’t repeat it here.

The history of the location ranges from being part of the cradle of civilization to the last bastion of the Roman empire to the Ottoman empire to a democratic member of NATO with autocratic sympathies with Putin in some ways. Connected to the place, Syria, where Putin’s barbarism and the struggle between democracy and human rights and dictatorship and barbarism–that now has its focal point in Ukraine, but is truly global–began in many ways.

Nature doesn’t care of course. Although the upheavals of the earth seem to mirror all the issues humans create and must face.

Human misery, especially of the have-nots and of children, seems to bring out the best in us for moments, and then reverts to the worst. And what is the worst? That the plight of billions of people is untenable, yet the rest of us, more often than not, try to avoid the discomfort of looking. Nature reminds us that this never works in the end.

Pay attention to all the issues, the disasters, the barbarism that make up daily life for so may of us, especially after the most recent upheaval on the front page has disappeared. The need for help doesn’t disappear. The need to have a heart doesn’t disappear. And the need to create basic needs and human rights for all as the only antidote to the destruction of us all doesn’t disappear.

Here’s the video, with information on how to help at the end: