Halo and welcome, smart viewers, to Planet Earth: Our Loving Home. In honor of Earth Day, which is celebrated April ２２nd each year, today's program is the first in a two-part series featuring voices from around the world expressing their concerns and hopes for our one and only planet in light of the climate change crisis facing humanity.

(In English) A (m): This video is about your life.

B (m): And my life.

C (f): And mine.

E (m): Today, we are all linked together…

F (m): in one common destiny…

G (f): wherever we are…

H (f): you and I, on this planet.

I (m): This video is about us.

J (f): We are people of the world.

K (m): And we are appealing to you.

Girls Together (f): And we are appealing to you.

L (m): Our home planet is in crisis. And this is her final wake up call to us.

Nicolas Beriot - French Ministry of Ecology, head of French delegation to IPCC (M): We see changes in temperature, we see the sea level rising every year, and we see changes in the precipitation patterns. In some countries it already has strong effects, and people really feel the consequences.

Anthony Kleanthous (M) Senior Policy Adviser on Sustainable Business and Economics World Wildlife Fund UK We have lost ３０％ of the biodiversity on this planet in just ４０ years. And in the tropics we're talking about ６０％ declines in biodiversity. That just cannot continue. If it does we won't have anything to eat and we won't have anything to fuel our economy.

Shailee Basnet - Team coordinator, Mount Everest summiteer, vegan Nepal during expedition (F): We saw and heard from experienced climbers about the changes that were evident in the Himalayas. And in our later trips also in different parts of the country, we kept hearing about how monsoons were not the same anymore, how the crops were being affected by unpredictable weather, and how new insects were showing up in higher altitudes. So, all this really motivated us to take the message of climate action with us.

N(f): The climate crisis is staring at us right in the face.

O (m): Can we, as the human race, react fast enough to save ourselves？

P(f): It is a worldwide crisis. It will affect you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Haiti_earthquake#Casualties

Khalid Elfadli - Libyan National Meteorological Center (M): The natural disasters now are clear, repeated, and the frequency of such disasters, like floods, like droughts, like heat waves, repeat frequently and much more than before. So, this is clear evidence.

Professor David Karoly Respected climate scientist University of Melbourne, Australia Prof What we've seen this year with the very strong La Niña is very low rainfall over southwest of Western Australian. We've had record low rainfall for the whole of ２０１０ over Perth, southwest of Western Australia, and record low inflow into their reservoirs. These situations of course, the heavy rainfall in the northeast of Australia and the low rainfall in the southwest of Australia have been accentuated or made worse because we also have record high ocean temperatures around the whole of Australia.

That's not linked to La Niña, that's linked to global warming or climate change caused by increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

HOST: Another frightening consequence of global warming is the rapid melting of ice sheets at the poles….

British explorer and swimmer raising awareness on climate change Lewis Gordon Pugh (m): I've seen so many changes in the Arctic. Every year you see less and less sea ice. You see the ice getting thinner and thinner. I've seen glaciers retreating up mountains; every year I see less and less polar bears. I see all these changes occurring year on year on year.

In ２００７ a large open area of sea was found at the North Pole so I went and did a swim there. You should not be able to swim at the North Pole. If the ice in the Arctic melts, if the sea ice melts, if the glaciers melt away, no matter where you are in the world, you will be affected by it. We live now in a world which is totally interconnected; you damage one ecosystem and you are going to affect any other ecosystem on this Earth.

HOST: The Greenland ice mass, the largest ice mass in the Northern Hemisphere, is on the verge of collapse and if this was to occur tomorrow, the scale of destruction would be unfathomable…

Veli Albert Kallio - Frozen Isthmuses Protection Campaign of the Arctic and North Atlantic Oceans (M): The sea level rise, first of all, would be about between ７ and １０ meters. As the ice falls into the sea, it displaces its own weight of water and that raises the sea level.

Veli Albert Kallio (m): It could happen virtually tomorrow, and then we would suddenly find out that our society and our way of life would be dramatically crippled by this event.

HOST: Scientists have also been observing many alarming signs about our planet's precarious state in our seas.

Nicola Temple - Marine biologist, Australian Marine Conservation Society (F): The pH has remained stable for millions of years, and its changing at a rate that is unbelievable in the last １５０ years. And, it's going to essentially disintegrate our coral reefs.

All of the animals and organisms that sequester carbon into their skeletons and into their shells are not going to be able to do so - including the very oxygen producers that we rely so heavily on.

Nicola Temple (F): Oceans drive our climate, and our weather. They are responsible for producing the oxygen - one in every two breaths we take. One of the things we can do that's within our power immediately is, of course, to reduce our footprint, to reduce our carbon emissions. And that's something that's essential and has to happen in conjunction with trying to protect what we can while we still have it.

So large marine reserves that protect a huge percentage of the population will instill some resilience into the ecosystems so that they can have a better chance at fighting things such as global climate change.

British explorer and swimmer raising awareness on climate change Lewis Gordon Pugh (m): If we are not able to stop climate change, if we are not able to draw the public's attention to what's happening in these vital ecosystems, there is no future.

The Amazon Rainforest - Our Earth's Lungs Vandana Shiva, PhD (Vegetarian) Indian environmental advocate, physicist and author Founder of Navdanya (In English) Dr. Shiva (f): These are the highest sources of absorption of carbon dioxide. These (are) the regulators of the climate's temperature, rainfall, winds and climate patterns. And if the Amazon goes, we will not have our lungs, we will not have our liver, we will not have our heart.

Rajendra Pachauri, PhD (Vegetarian) Chairman, UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Rajendra Pachauri(m): And ７０％ of previously forested land in the Amazon is occupied by cattle pastures, and crops for animal feed cover a large part of the remainder.

Professor Matthew England Esteemed climate scientist Co-director, Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Australia Matthew England (m): Climate change is one problem, but also the way we've changed the natural environment is another problem. And combining the two creates more problems than just having only climate change to deal with, or just the way we've changed the natural environment. The natural vegetation is a very important part of the ecosystem. It's certainly a very important way that the Earth can absorb greenhouse gases. So clearing land does affect, for example, some of the mudslides you see in some nations.

If you've cleared land there, having no vegetation to keep the soil in place is a real problem. You can have massive landslides that result from the combination of very heavy rains and a changing of the natural landscape.

Q (f): While the world waits for one another to take responsibility, global warming is getting worse by the day.

R (m): To save our lives…

R１(m): we have to help save the planet ourselves.

T (f): Help！

U (m): Global warming is killing you and me. But what is the main cause of global warming？

V (f): What produces more greenhouse gases than all of the world's transportation combined？

W (m): Methane is ７２ times and nitrous oxide is ３１０ times more potent than carbon dioxide. So who really is the world's largest producer of these greenhouse gases？

Y (m): What drives one-third of the world's deforestation？

The Meat Industry

Patrick Brown, MD PhD Research scientist and professor of biochemistry The Stanford University School of Medicine, USA VEGAN Dr. Patrick Brown (m): Animal farming is by far the most environmentally destructive activity that humans are engaged in. Thirty percent of the dry surface area of the planet right now is devoted to animal farming, either grazing or raising crops to feed animals. And ２０％ of the biomass of the planet is animals that are being raised for food.

Patrick Brown, MD PhD Research scientist and professor of biochemistry The Stanford University School of Medicine, USA VEGAN Dr. Patrick Brown (m): Clearing that land so that it would be available for animal farming historically over the past couple of hundred years released as much carbon into the atmosphere as burning fossil fuel at the current rate releases in a period of １７ years. And to the extent that that land can be retired from animal farming and allowed to convert CO２ into biomass, we could potentially lower atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

Patrick Brown, MD PhD Research scientist and professor of biochemistry The Stanford University School of Medicine, USA VEGAN Dr. Patrick Brown (m): I think a lot of it is also a failure of imagination; it's very hard for people to get their heads around the idea that essentially the easiest way for them to have a huge impact on greenhouse gas emissions is simply to eliminate meat from their diets, which is completely non-essential.

Supreme Master Ching Hai: We see the pattern is that no society can last long if they refuse to sustain the lives of their own members and fellow beings; I mean, including all the beings, like animals and trees. Or, if they destroy the environment they live in, then that society cannot live long.

Supreme Master Ching Hai: The real problem is our meat consumption, the tendency of mass killing that we have made a part of our lives, and we look at it as a normal life.

Supreme Master Ching Hai: We cannot earn a living or sustain a living by death.

Supreme Master Ching Hai: So, if we don't eliminate meat consumption, we could never reach even a low, low impact on the environment, no matter what else we do. We must stop the most inefficient, unsustainable, life-destroying practice of murdering animals and stop it now.

Stop it yesterday.

The animal-meat industry has to go - be it animals from the air, the land or the sea.

DD (m): This video is about us.

Together (m): We have the power！

EE(f): Because we can choose not to eat meat.

FF(m): While it takes decades to change our massive infrastructure of cars and power plants…

GG (f): being veg is something every person can do every day to effectively combat global warming.