Blog Archives
Supporting WWF
Belated happy new year, everyone.
Another year rolls around, another calendar goes up on the wall. If you don’t have yours up yet, why not get this one?
I got it for my office wall, where I am writing now. And I also got this nice card with a note from Monika Kull, thanking me for renewing my WWF membership.
As you know, I have pledged to donate 10% of the royalties from my novels to this NGO which works to reduce and even stop species extinctions around the globe.
You should donate whatever you can, too. If you think your pet is important, imagine how much more important it is to save entire species which will otherwise vanish from our lands – from our television screens, even.
And how much less beautiful would our calendars be then, too?
Peter and the Little People
Out now on pre-order, with a discount, my new book, aimed at readers from 8 to 80 and parents who’d like to read to their kids a book they will enjoy themselves…
This is my fifth book under my own name.
Out on May 24th. Your kids’ll love it.
Here’s the blurb:
You’ve heard stories about Little People: leprechauns and their like. Ireland is full of people who’ve had strange experiences out in the fields in the early morning. All just tall tales and myths, of course.
At least, we assume so…
But Peter knows better.
A boy with a love of wildlife and talent for spotting animals, Peter often sees what he calls elves in the fields as he travels Ireland with his dad. Sometimes it’s just a flash as they drive by, but he catches sight of something too swift for most people to keep their eye on. And Peter is young enough to trust his own eyes more than the adults who tell him these creatures are not real.
When his family go to spend the summer with his granny on her farm, Gemma from the farm next door offers to show him the badger sett under an old Ring Fort. Peter accepts gladly. To his surprise and delight he finally gets a chance to do more than catch a glimpse of the Little People. Will the Little People be just as happy? Perhaps, when Peter learns about some plans for the farm, they might be.
10% of the Author’s Royalties will be donated to WWF, the World Wildlife Fund, and to IWT, the Irish Wildlife Trust.
I have decided to donate to IWT because they are the people who look after our Irish wildlife and ensure that the species Peter loves are protected from going the way of the animals the Little People used to see, and will remain in good health in the future.
Here’s an excerpt
When they travel in cars, most adults look at the road, to make sure that whoever is driving is doing it as well as they would if they sat at the steering wheel. Or else they watch for the signposts that tell you how far you are from the next town or where to turn off for Galway or Tullamore, if there is a junction coming up. Most children only look at the other cars—to see if they can spot a red one, or count how many white cars there are. Both adults and children look at the houses and people by the roadside. Few of them look at the trees and fields and hardly any look for animals.
Peter was an observant passenger, though. For this reason, he was more likely than most children to see the Little People. To Peter, seeing the Little People became very much like spotting a stoat or red squirrel. You had to be watching hard to know what you were looking for and to be able to pick it out from the leaves and twigs and grass around it. And you have to be satisfied with just a very quick glimpse.
Links:
http://www.amazon.com/Peter-Little-People-David-OBrien-ebook/dp/B01EQ77FI2
My Seventh Son might be an Angry Young Man…
So I’m working on edits to my novel, Peter and the Little People. This will be my seventh published book, none of them seem to be in the same genre – this one way different to the rest; my first children’s novel. I think it might be my last children’s novel. At least, I assumed it would be when I wrote it. The idea seemed perfect for a children’s book, but whether I am a children’s novel writer, I am not at all sure. I wish I could put my books in a handy category, but I can’t yet. Only the characters’ awareness, and love, of the natural world around them unites these very different stories. In that, they are all my children.
I also assumed I’d never write another young adult book when I finished The Soul of Adam Short, but I’m in the middle of writing another one now. I got the idea for a new one when I watched the profusion of gorse fires across Ireland last April, and it seemed an issue that teenagers might be likely to tackle rather than shake their heads and get on with their day.
Readers will know I’ve pledged to donate 10% of my royalties to WWF, the World Wildlife Fund. For Peter and the Little People, I also plan to give a further 10% to IWT, the Irish Wildlife Trust, which advocates for wildlife on the island of Ireland, and whose work Peter, and the Little People, would most certainly support. The Little People remember the animals with which we once shared our island, and are dismayed when Peter tells them they’re gone from every corner of it.
I don’t want to reveal too much about the story, but it is for kids and as long as you promise not to tell them before they get a chance to read it, I can tell you that there is a happy ending which is open to a sequel – which I never envisioned until my editor mentioned she’d like to see how Peter grew up.
Instead of the work to rewild Ireland, and return those missing species to it, for the benefit of the ecosystem, the delight of the Little People, Peter, Gemma and all the rest of us, which I might have the pleasure of writing about, it seems that some humans are not quite finished exterminating as much wildlife as they can.
Our native red deer of Killarney National Park, one of the very few symbols we have of wild Ireland, of the wildlife people come to Ireland to see, the image of which was put on our Punt coins when we had our own currency, are under attack from a group of Kerry politicians.
They are calling for a cull of an already tiny population for dubious reasons, and just yesterday, the IWT released a press-release describing how this is an indication of a move to treat wildlife as vermin, to depreciate their value and blame them for any perceived problems we may encounter with them. (http://www.iwt.ie/press-release-deer-culls-symptomatic-of-increased-verminisation-of-our-wildlife)
Photo: By Ken Billington (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
One Kerry senator has since declared that just the sika (an introduced species that is found in more parts of Ireland now than the native – and park escaped – red deer) should be culled, despite the fact that no evidence exists that the deer have caused any problems, and the fact that these deer are harvested every year both inside and outside the Killarney National Park. He also wants to fence in a section of the national park to restrict deer movement across a road that traverses the park, rather than ask motorists to cease speeding along that section.
How can we hope to rewild our island when this level of hatred of wildlife exists among our elected officials, when our representatives are so ignorant of the realities of wild animals, and are absolutely unwilling to give an inch in any real or perceived conflict, but instead prefer to bulldoze the wildlife out of the way. How can any children’s book have a happy ending when they are so willing to make vanish from our land the very things that children love – the wild animals and plants that we all know make life so much more worth living than any book we can read them or give them for Christmas, or any video game or toy they could get either.
If Peter does grow up under the tutelage of the Little People, I can see him becoming a very angry young man…
Cecil the lion – why it’s our fault.
The Cecil the lion story has taken over the internet (except for those concerned with a tiff between two rappers? what the hell is that all about?). It took a while, though. I first saw the story last week in the Spanish press, where the hunter was claimed to be Spanish. I posted a link and a comment on my personal facebook page, that it seemed there was always some dickhead waiting to give good hunters a bad name. And he was a dickhead for luring the lion out of a protected area – never mind the huge amount of money he paid to the outfit.
Anyway, the story evolved and was picked up by the media and then the internet got hold of it. And now we can’t avoid hearing about it.
We never heard of you before, Cecil, but we’ll never forget you…
Copyright @DeGeorgeous/twitter, taken from an interesting article:
And some have rightly questioned why we are all so up in arms over one lion when there is so much more “important” (it’s an opinion, after all) stuff going on.
The media are to blame, in large part, because they like to push these heartrending stories. To take our minds off the really important issues, of course.
And there are too many of those more important issues to list here.
But you know what they are.
So why do we allow the media to sucker punch us?
Because we don’t want to focus on those more important issues.
It would be too much.
The media don’t control facebook (exactly). People have shared and liked those photos all by themselves.
Why?
Because they can manage their rage at one dentist. They can see a cause and effect, a perpetrator and a victim. It’s easy to transmit all their feelings of rage and anger and helplessness into that and think they’re doing something for the planet.
It’s a natural reaction, understandable and human. We can’t deal with such huge statistics. Our brains don’t take it. That’s why I wrote a post about one little boy being snuck across a border by his dad rather than the seven hundred people who’d drowned that same week, after having said goodbye to fathers and sons and everyone else in the family to trek across the Sahara to an overloaded dingy in Tunisia. It’s why we can feel extreme sadness reading The Diary of Anne Frank, or watching The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas but are numbed when we see film of Auschwitz, and the idea of six million people in similar circumstances is just incomprehensible.
The broader issue is that though lions are not currently endangered in Africa, their future is not bright. But the fact that this lion could be hunted outside his reserve is more important than the fact he was lured outside. It shows us that protecting our large animals is not going to work with just a few reserves. The lions of Africa cannot only survive in a few national parks, just like the wolf cannot exist only inside the boundaries of Yellowstone National Park. It must be protected everywhere.
Cecil had a name and he was old and he stayed inside his reserve where he could be seen – he didn’t need to hide. But how many of his offspring had already left that park? How many of them, or other lions born in that reserve, were already hunted? How many are waiting, hidden from humans because they are not protected, ready to return and take over his pride?
But can we do anything to make African nations increase the size of their parks? Can we stop multinationals and other nations getting these African (and other nations with stunning biological diversity) to intensify their agriculture, to plant cash crops, to build more roads and railways that will carve up the remaining wild land so there is no hope of survival for an animal that leaves a park when it becomes overcrowded?
No. But we can call some trophy hunter names.
The future is not bright for a whole lot of species, especially the large ones like rhinos and elephants. Thousands of them, with and without names, are being slaughtered for their products. There are only thousands of them left. Or five of them left, if we’re talking some rhinos.
And we know this.
But it’s so fucking hard to do anything about it.
We watch helplessly as numbers of extinctions rise, as coral reefs bleach, as dams are built to drown swaths of rainforest, as jungles are cleared for palm oil plantations.
We watch helplessly as our elected politicians (I won’t use the word leader) fuck around in multiple planes. They fuck around shouting at one another, fuck around blaming people who walked half way across Africa, or Central America for their country’s problems while they eat caviar on the deck of some billionaires yacht. They fuck around with shit that’s just not important in the grand scheme of things and wash their hands of their blame for all the problems what are, indeed, important to the lives of their citizens.
And we wring our hands a little because, well, we are all a little to blame, too.
We know the electricity our computers and internet use is partly responsible for the coral beaching. We know the trip we take to go visit animals like lions, while giving money to the local economy (just as hunters do) to stop the locals just killing these lions and be done with it, is also making the Arctic melt. We know that buying shampoo and other stuff with palm oil is going to make it harder for the orang-utan babies we love to actually move out into a rainforest. We know that buying all those great cheap throwaway clothes in big retailers is contributing to global warming and poverty.
But what are we to do? We’re caught in a whirlpool that just drags us down with it.
One thing we can do, which I’ve done, is be concerned for all endangered animals. Not just one old lion, but all lions, all African megafauna, all species facing the threat of annihilation, along with their habitats.
We can join the amazing NGOs that are standing against these extinctions and actively protecting species.
Join your local wildlife trust (The Irish Wildlife Trust if you’re in Ireland).
Go to WWF and click a donation in the name of a lion, or a tiger, or a green turtle.
Become a member and get a sticker for your bumper to tell others that you’re doing sometime proactive rather than reactive like all this anger going around the internet.
You’ll feel much better about yourself, and a little bit better about the planet.
Charitable donations
Hi all,
As you know, I’ve pledged to give 10% of my royalties from both Leaving the Pack and Five Days on Ballyboy Beach to WWF, the World Wildilfe Fund.
I’ve been giving to WWF for ten years now, and I hope that as sales for my books (the ones in the future will also have similar pledges) increase, so will my donation. At the moment, since I am only starting out in the world of novelist, I am not nearly at the stage where even 100% of royalties cover 10% of my donation, but the plan is that will change as I publish more books (an erotic novella out in Jan under a pseudonym and a YA out next spring/summer with Muse It Up!), all going well!
Anyway, this time of year is when my membership comes due, so I thought I’d post the receipts (with the number of dollars written as X and the transaction numbers deleted to maintain my privacy) to show that I am making good on the pledge.
So, now, before I paste it in, go and tell your friends to buy a book which will help a good cause, or better yet, go and donate to said cause yourself if you can!
David
shopper@worldpay.com
To
Me
Today at 3:16 AM
| Transaction ConfirmationPlease retain for your records |
Thank you
Your transaction has been processed by WorldPay, on behalf of WWF – World Wide Fund for Nature (World Wildlife Fund).
::: This is to confirm :::
Transaction details:
Transaction for the value of: USD X
Description: Payment 11 of FuturePay agreement ID _____________
From: WWF – World Wide Fund for Nature (World Wildlife Fund)
Merchant’s cart ID: newmember,Dr. David O’Brien,optedin,19/March/1974
Authorisation Date/Time: 24/Oct/2014 01:16:06
WorldPay’s transaction ID: 1________
This is not a tax receipt.
::: Questions? :::
Email Monika Kull at mkull@wwfint.org, and attach this email receipt.
::: WorldPay Says :::
Enquiries
This confirmation only indicates that your transaction has been processed successfully. It does not indicate that your order has been accepted. It is the responsibility of WWF – World Wide Fund for Nature (World Wildlife Fund) to confirm that your order has been accepted, and to deliver any goods or services you have ordered.
If you have any questions about your order, please email WWF – World Wide Fund for Nature (World Wildlife Fund) at: mkull@wwfint.org, with the transaction details listed above.
Thank you for shopping with WWF – World Wide Fund for Nature (World Wildlife Fund).
Monika Kull
To
Me
Today at 9:37 AM
Dear David,
Many, many thanks for renewing your annual contributions to WWF by updating your credit card details with WorldPay, our online processor ! I just received your generous payment of USD X for 2014.
Your regular and long-lasting support of our work to protect nature and wildlife is much appreciated !
With my best wishes
E-mail: | 1196 Gland, Switzerland | WWF International | | Development Monika Kull mkull@wwfint.org
David JM O'Brien 