Keith Powell, who plays the character ‘Toofer’ on the three-time Emmy-winning NBC series “30 Rock,” recently answered actress Alyssa Milano‘s challenge for ‘real men’ to contribute to NWF’s efforts to help Gulf Coast wildlife affected by the BP oil spill. Being a funny guy and a talented actor, he found a way to entertain us in the process.

Keith set up a fundraising page for donations and offered to make personalized videos–one each day–for donors “professing (his) admiration and/or love” for ‘internetters’ who support our efforts to help wildlife and restore coastal habitats:

Every day from now through August 31st, 2010, I will choose a donor at random and make a video dedicated entirely to him/her. I can accept donations after that date, but will not be making videos. Please be sure to leave a question or comment in the “comment” section so I can reply to you in a fun way.

Please give — and give multiple times — I’m not opposed to making more than one video dedicated to a single person.

Many thanks for your support — and don’t forget to forward this to anyone who you think might want to donate too!

You can see some of the tribute videos, which feature Keith doing a Cockney accent, hitting himself in the forehead, and talking about recycling pants, on his YouTube page. Anyone who has seen much of 30 Rock knows to expect brilliance. You only have a few days left to donate with a chance for a personalized video, so hurry up.

As an added incentive, Keith will be in Los Angeles for the 62nd annual Emmy Awards this weekend–and he may give a shout-out from the red carpet to one select donor. And yes, that last video was made on the set of 30 Rock. Eeeeee!!!

Ahem. Tell your friends, family-members, pages, rural jurors, and Bar-Mitzvad werewolves, to visit www.firstgiving.com/RealKeithPowell now and help wildlife recover from the disaster in the Gulf.

Links:

www.firstgiving.com/RealKeithPowell

www.youtube.com/user/PowellToThePeople

www.twitter.com/RealKeithPowell

www.facebook.com/realkeithpowell

We need your help!

Here are a few ways you can help by supporting us online. If you can think of others, let us know!

1.) Become our Friend: If you aren’t already part of the National Wildlife Federation family on Twitter, Facebook, Change.org, or any other site that you frequent regularly, we’d love to connect and band together to keep up to date on these issues.

2.) Join and Recruit People to NWF’s Facebook Cause: “Help Wildlife Impacted by the BP Oil Spill” by joining the cause, recruiting your friends, sharing photos and videos, and even starting a birthday cause to ask for donations to help Gulf Coast wildlife in lieu of gifts.

3.) Update Your Blogs/Sites: We’re posting the latest oil spill news (for wildlife) on http://www.nwf.org/oilspill and if you can’t be present to volunteer, the next best thing you can do is share your experience in terms of what news or coverage you’ve seen. If you have a blog post that you’ve written and would like NWF to see it, please send me an email at brigidad [at] nwf.org so that I can spread the word.

Here are a few additional pages that may offer up some great answers:

• How to Help With Volunteer Efforts
• Compare the Exxon Valdez to the BP Oil Spill
• How Crews are Cleaning Oiled Wildlife
• Ranger Rick Parent’s Guide: How to Talk With Kids About the Oil Spill

4.) Speak up for Wildlife: Taking action is an incredibly important way to help be proactive against future disasters. Edit and send this message to your senators demanding cleaner energy options. After you do, pass the page onto your friends to spread the word.

5.) Share Your Photos and Videos: On the ground along the Gulf Coast? Share your photos and videos on Flickr by tagging them SPILL_NW10.

6.) Share Your Status: Donating your support and time is another way that really makes a difference. If you don’t have the money to text, donate to Causes or otherwise–consider how much you can do just by spreading the word! Donate your Facebook status or Twitter updates and be sure to tag @NWF or @National Wildlife Federation.

Sample Messages to Re-Tweet and Repeat:

How the BP Oil Spill could hurt animals–and how you can help: http://www.nwf.org/oilspill
—
Volunteer with the National Wildlife Federation’s Gulf Coast Surveillance Teams: http://www.nwf.org/oilspill
—
Help Wildlife Impacted by the BP Oil Spill by joining NWF’s Facebook Cause: http://www.causes.com/oilspill

Please comment below if you have any ideas for other things people can do to help wildlife online. We truly appreciate all of you who have helped during this important time.

With nearly 25,000 followers, National Wildlife Federation’s Twitter feed has become the go-to place for the latest news on wildlife and the natural world. Planet Green says “@NWF is a must-follow for quick, interesting updates on animals, plants, ecosystems, and politics surrounding our planet.”

Thank you to all of those who helped vote NWF to the top of the list. And, if you are not already, be sure to follow NWF on Twitter: www.twitter.com/NWF.

The conversations that lead towards a sustainable society happen in many places–classrooms, coffeeshops, offices, student centers, fields, and mountains. More than any of these, however, the future of climate change activism is happening on the Web. Unlike many traditional forms of disseminating information, social media facilitates an all-way communication hub that make yesterday’s newsletter look like a dirt donkey path.

In some ways, sustainability and social media are diametrically opposed: sustainability is necessarily the stuff of real-life and intensely local concerns, whereas social media spans the globe with virtual connections. In practice, however, these two seemingly disparate elements of campus life often partner each other quite elegantly as international knowledge fuels and supports local practices.

Many colleges and universities already use social media to communicate about climate change and sustainability with their students, alumni, and other institutional investors. The wide variety of media available allow a school to blanket their target audiences with comprehensive coverage. Recently a class at American University on interactive media created a social media and discussion site for an American Forum on “The Climate Change Generation: Youth, Media, and Politics in an Unsustainable World.”

Features at the site include video interviews with AU students on the topic, a Twitter feed that student attendees and public radio listeners post to, a Facebook group, a news aggregator on climate change, and various topic driven discussion boards with topics ranging from policy options to evaluation of news coverage. This multifaceted approach multiplied the impact of the event with minimal additional organizing, therefore efficiently extending the ability of the school to affect public thinking about climate change.

The Web 2.0 world breaks down boundaries; much of the information shared to inform and engage students and other institutional investors around sustainability issues on campus comes from outside organizations or informal person-to-person communications. (This is often called “tribesourcing”.) Tribesourcing is particularly prevalent on twitter, where the practice of “retweeting” relevant bits of information or links causes interesting news to travel like wildfire-when food activist Michael Pollan recently suggested on Twitter that college students go vegan to affect climate change, his message was retweeted dozens of times within the hour to spread to audiences across the nation.

For many schools, it is often unclear with whom the responsibilities for social media should reside, which departments will be involved, and what new position(s) should be created. The long-term likelihood, though, is that social media and sustainability can be integrated and adopted at every level. This parallels the decentralization of information that has been driven by social media and the ability for students and others to produce their own content and to become active participants in media, rather than passive consumers.

Social media allows students to connect and collaborate with activists around the globe, both reducing the need for travel and allowing connections to be made that otherwise would be nearly impossible. And yet, this is just the first part of the process. Attracting a “fan” or “follower” is one thing; getting that person tangibly involved is another. While a valuable storytelling tool, social media is still the tool or the medium, not the change or the action.

Properly used, social media engages and encourages contributions as it moves people up the ladder of engagement. In the American Forum on climate change, contributor Matt Nisbet suggested participants frame climate change in less environmentalist terms, but rather in terms of health and stimulation of the economy through green jobs. His comments attracted feedback, acclaim, resistance, and criticism on twitter, facebook, and the American Forum website. It was, in other words, a resounding success.

Resources: The Many Faces of Social Media

There are many forms of social media, with new options coming onto the market all the time. Here are just a few of the ways that campuses are using social media for sustainability:

• Popular facebook pages for sustainability offices at universities, like the one at New Mexico State University and for single-aspect initiatives, such as Recycle-Mania at Rice University or the Knox College Ride Board, a student-run initiative which boasts a fan base of 20% of the school’s enrolled population.
• Brief educational videos on Youtube, such as the Emory University sustainability video series.
• Lengthy educational videos for those who wish to delve deeply into issues of sustainability. Many of these can be found on Ustream , which hosts videos in a longer format than Youtube. The site offers series of videos from the University of British Columbia’s Office of Learning Technology and Institute for Sustainability Research and Education, Hosei University. Stand alone videos such as Working with Green Roofs from Portland State University allow access to university-level sustainability education to any student at any school at any time.
• Co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, Current.com hosts College Current Issues: Sustainability where student/citizen journalists can upload videos to the website and, following a voting process, potentially have them aired on its television-channel counterpart. Download a podcast or email Current to request a DVD copy for classroom use or to schedule an on-campus speaking appearance by one of their journalists.

See More:

Luring Students With the Promise of Green: ClimateEdu

Welcome to the University, Here’s Your Green Guide: ClimateEdu

In an effort to raise awareness for the decline in honeybee populations around the world, they are helping fund research for scientists to learn more about the problem and find solutions. Over the last three years, one in three honeybee colonies has died. Scientists are calling the phenomenon CCD for Colony Collapse Disorder. In CCD cases, all of the bees in a colony abruptly disappear, deserting the hive.

Fast Honeybee Facts:

• One of every three bites the average American eats is directly attributed to honey bee pollination.

• Honey bees are responsible for the pollination of more than 100 crops, including fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds.

• They provide 80 percent of the country’s pollination services.

• Without honey bee pollination, one-third of our food supply would be in jeopardy.

How You Can Help Honeybees:

• Tweet using #helphoneybees: For every tweet between Nov. 5-11 that includes #HelpHoneyBees, Häagen-Dazs will donate $1 to the University of California at Davis, which is doing great research into Colony Collapse Disorder. The donations are capped at a maximum of $500 for each of the 7 days (a total of $3,500). Find out more…

  For easy copying and pasting:

  Häagen-Dazs to donate $1 for every #HelpHoneyBees tweet Nov. 5-11 to fund Colony Collapse Disorder research http://su.pr/5oMnCY (via @NWF)

  ** UPDATE FROM TWITCAUSE ** “Following our extremely successful first day of #HelpHoneyBees, Häagen-Dazs has generously decided to DOUBLE their maximum daily donation, from the initial $500 to a new maximum of $1,000 per day (for a new grand total of $7,000)! We’re super excited with the news and want to send a special thank you to all of you that have been tweeting! Keep it up!”
   

• Learn more about Häagen-Dazs’ efforts to “Help the Honeybees”: Not only can you spark donations through Twitter, but also with your “bee built” ice cream purchases. They even created a special flavor as a tribute: Vanilla Honey Bee.

• Turn your garden into a Certified Wildlife Habitat™: Provide habitat suitable for bees, birds, butterflies and other pollinators.

More Honeybee info:

“The Buzz on Native Pollinators” – National Wildlife® magazine: As European honeybees decline, indigenous bees and other pollinating animals can provide a backup–with a little help from their human friends.

“Busy with Bees” – National Wildlife® magazine: In Bavaria, a team of industrious scientists uses high-tech tools to study the secret lives of honeybees–work that could shed light on the pollinators’ mysterious disappearances.

Three Ways to Plant for Pollinators

Get more tips from this National Wildlife® magazine web exclusive.

1. Select plants that provide a lot of nectar and pollen. Many ornamentals have been specifically bred to produce little or none of these essential foods.

2. Plant a diversity of species so your yard will provide bees, butterflies and other animals with nectar and pollen from spring through fall. To attract bats and nocturnal moths, consider night-blooming plants in addition to day-bloomers.

3. Be a “messy” gardener: Leave some patches of unmulched soil and brush piles that bees, birds and other animals can use to construct nests. Consider building or purchasing a bee house for wood-nesting wasps and bees.

This month YouTube has teamed up with actor Ben Stein to help animals. We need fellow wildlife lovers to be part of our mission by making their own fun or inspirational videos on behalf of NWF as part of YouTube’s Video Volunteers program.  The deadline for video submissions is October 22nd.

Winning videos will appear on YouTube's homepage.  Your video can help NWF raise awareness about wildlife!

Get Started!

1. Read the complete contest rules here.
2. Learn more about NWF and read our Video Tips (see below).
3. Grab your video camera and your creativity and start shooting your video for NWF.
4. Edit your video. Your video must be under 3 minutes.  
5. Go to YouTube’s Video Volunteer page, click on submit and upload your video no later than October 22nd.
6. Grab the family, watch your video and smile – knowing you had fun, created lasting memories and helped a good cause! 

Learn More about NWF

Want a little more background on NWF?  Try these links:

• This is NWF's video and NWF’s YouTube Channel
• Our Home Page and Mission
• Ranger Rick Children’s Magazine website 
• NWF’s Be Out There campaign website – get inspired with outdoor activities and more
• National Wildlife Magazine
• NWF’s Social Media Sites

Video Tips

Here are some tips for making your video:

• It’s okay to have fun, get a little crazy and be creative!
• You don't need to be an actor, just be yourself.
• Show us as well as tell us what you think about wildlife.  Action is good.
• Short and sweet is good when it comes to videos.  Three minutes is the limit.
• If you have kids or animals in the video, get down on their level to shoot them.

Need Inspiration?

Here are some questions to think about if you're having trouble coming up with an idea for your video:

• NWF focuses on wild animals and so should your video.  Why are wild animals important to you?
• What is your favorite kind of wildlife and why?  What's the coolest, most beautiful, strangest or inspiring wild animal for you?
• Why do people like cute and cuddly wild animals better than scaly, slimy or many-legged ones?
• What is your favorite childhood memory of being outside in nature? What were the smells, the sights, the feelings you experienced? What wild animals did you see and/or enjoy watching? What wild animals do you or your kids enjoy seeing in your backyard?
• Why do you care about protecting wild animals?  What are the biggest threats to wildlife and what should we do about them?
• Do you have any photos, poems, drawings, songs, costumes or even wild animal imitations that you want to share in your video?
• What is your most memorable wildlife experience?

Good luck!  We can't wait to see all of your videos!

AFP reports:

“Users of the social networking sites Facebook and Twitter will be able to “befriend” rare Ugandan mountain gorillas and track their movements, a Wildlife Authority spokeswoman said Monday.

In a scheme designed to promote Uganda’s nascent tourism industry, users will receive regular updates about their endangered primate friends, Lillian Nsubuga told AFP.

‘Through geo-tracking and GPS, you’ll be able to get information about new births within the family and other information,’ she said, referring to a programme that will launch online next month.

Wildlife officials also plan to install cameras around Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, home to roughly half of the world’s estimated 740 mountain gorillas, one of most endangered species on the planet.”  See full article.

I’m a bit biased, of course, and chose for my searches to go toward the National Wildlife Federation’s Facebook Cause.

So now, 1 cent is donated to support NWF’s work to protect wildlife every time I wonder just what is up with a star-nosed mole…

…or just how come the axolotl is always so happy…

Now you’re wondering, right? Well before you google axolotl, set up the new search bar, and give a penny to NWF.

Here’s how:

1. If you haven’t already, download the Facebook Causes Application.
2. Find a cause to support, such as National Wildlife Federation or Protect Wildlife
3. Download the new Facebook Cause search bar, and set it to donate to your favorite wildlife group.
4. Get to searching!

Everytime you use the search bar to look up something new, Causes will donate one cent to the cause of your choice (NWF, right?). This app is brand new, and will only work in Firefox and Internet Explorer at the moment.

Does that mean it’s buggy? Yeah, it’s got a few kinks to be worked out, but the developers are quick to get back to you if you’ve got a question, and they’re looking to make the toolbar better. Become an early adopter–two good deeds for the price of one.

Leave a comment below if you try out the toolbar, and want to let us know what you think. And leave a comment if your searches lead you to find any other interesting creatures.