We’re now in the second week of negotiations at the COP21 conference in Paris, and momentum is building, with more and more countries acknowledging the crucial goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. It’s an ambitious target to hit, and we need your help to deliver a bold message to the delegates, negotiators, and observers. So we hope you’ll join us as we send a love letter from Earth to Paris this week. 

Climate negotiators in Paris are wrangling over [...] "caps" and "cuts" in greenhouse gases. Some environmentalists argue [...] that consumption [is missing]. In India, [...] little will change unless fossil-fuel-reliant rich countries moderate their own consumption […] "In the current world order, everyone wants to be an American. If that is the benchmark, then we all should forget about saving the planet," Bhushan says.

China’s top negotiator at the UN summit on climate change practically gushed as he described his country’s relationship with California […] And with a slew of agreements with foreign leaders, Gov. Brown has turned California’s Air Resources Board and Environmental Protection Agency into de facto diplomatic organizations […] “California basically has a foreign policy,” said David Victor, a UC San Diego professor.

For the first time in the 19-year history of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), civil society observers of the talks were walking out. So what? Because the so-called observers have become an integral part of the open U.N. negotiations, and the thousands of activists who attend the yearly climate conference serve as the unofficial conscience of the entire process.

Ordinary people are joining forces to create a global grassroots movement, geared towards taking on some of the biggest organizations and encouraging them to divest: take their money out of the fossil fuels, and [...] invest it in climate solutions. In the past three years, more than 400 institutions worth $2.6 trillion have pledged to divest, including the Rockefeller Foundation, an institution that made its fortunes from oil.

Art, as typically viewed in austere galleries, labyrinthine museums or collectors’ homes, is incredibly removed from its raw materials—nature. [...] It’s a type of denial of nature, even though humanity’s advanced culture is still part of nature. But with her series inconsequence / in consequence, artist Alison Moritsugu brings the natural world back into the gallery with new works that [...] highlight environmental urgencies.