How many times a day do you really think about the air you are breathing? Once? Twice? Never? I know that I never really did, until I saw this video by my favorite slam poet Prince Ea on his YouTube channel a few months ago.

Posted in April, Prince Ea's video addresses the never-ending argument about the existence of climate change, pollution and damage to the Earth that is so easily brushed under the carpet of social media, bigoted news stations and pop music.

It is because of these other distractions that many fail to realize just how important our environment is. Trees create the air we breathe every day, they make fertile soil, they house our wildlife, and they provide themselves for use as our shelter. But just because someone sacrifices themselves for you (i.e. Shel Silverstein's "The Giving Tree") doesn't always mean you should accept it or move on. If anything, we all need to reread Silverstein's beloved children's classic. It is about time that someone take a stand against deforestation, and I am happy to share information about an organization that I found most interesting and appealing.

Stand for Trees is a grassroots organization dedicated to the preservation of trees, and taking initiative to prevent deforestation. Stand for Trees states that "it's estimated that roughly 15 percent of global annual greenhouse gas emissions today are the result of deforestation and forest degradation." In other words, this 15 percent is equivalent to "the total annual CO2 emissions of China, or the emissions of the entire global transportation sector -- all the world's planes, ships, trucks and automobiles combined."

This is a photo of the "Blue Marble," more commonly known as Earth, in December 1972. One of the most popularly photoshopped and copied images in the history of technology, the Blue Marble perfectly encompasses the state of the Earth at one point in time. Since then, NASA has taken only five additional photos of the Blue Marble.

In comparison we can see just by looking at these two images the extreme nature of deforestation's effect on our planet. These photos teach us that we are not just American citizens, we are inhabitants of Earth. She protects us, cleans us, purifies us and in return all we do is cut her down. Present on the iconic Apollo 17 flight in 1972, NASA astronaut Eugene Cernan said, "You can see from pole to pole and across oceans and continents and you can watch it turn and there’s no strings holding it up, and it’s moving in a blackness that is almost beyond conception.”

Why do we have to send people to space to realize this? Loving Mother Earth shouldn't be this hard.

You can donate today to Stand for Trees via the link above.