CELESTIAL MOON AND STARS Silver Dangle Earrings

Description

MOON AND STARS Silver Dangle Earrings

As a special donation, over 100% of the proceeds - 85% of the sale price - of this item will be donated to charity.

These are a very nice pair of sterling silver fishhook earrings with special beads of a crescent moon and stars, finished with a single star at the end. They are 1 and 7/8 inches long and are very light so that they won't pull on the ears.

We are very happy to say that these earrings were featured in a Treasury by mompotter.etsy.com called "SHE is Fresh and New". We were honored to be part of this Treasury.

The charity that will be benefitted from the sale of this item is the Michoacán Reforestation Fund. Every year, monarch butterflies travel thousands of miles to spend the winter in certain forests in Mexico. Their journey there from places as far north as Canada is amazing, because most of them have never been to these Mexican forests before and because of the sheer distance that they must travel to reach their destination. Once they get to Mexico, they coalesce on the huge trees in these forests and wait out the winter. There have been many books written and TV shows made about this, and it’s breathtaking to see pictures of hundreds of thousands of butterflies completely coating tree trunks and branches. Sometimes a branch breaks and they all fly up from it like a great cloud of bright orange dust.

Now we come to the problem. The place where these forests are, where the monarch butterflies go, is a very remote, rural, and poor part of Mexico. The forests are supposed to be a reserve, but many people live nearby, and the laws are hard to enforce and easy to get around. Much land has been cleared to plant pasture, oats, and cornfields, in the families’ attempts to scrape together more of a living. And when a man’s family is freezing in the middle of winter, he doesn’t have much choice but to cut down the trees. The Fund is well aware of the straits these families living in poverty are in:

“‘Every day when I get up, I think about one thing: where do I get enough food for my family and myself to eat at least once a day?’ a farmer despaired. Yes, there are people who live in the Oyamel and pine forests and who share it with the monarch butterflies. They are poor farmers. They live in indigenous communities and in communal groups called ejidos. The indigenous community members and ejiditarios eke out a living in and from the forest and play a large role in determining how much of the forest will be intact when monarchs come back each November. To subsist they have cleared large areas of forest to plant corn and oats and graze their cattle on thin soil. Each day they must trek farther into the forest to cut wood for cooking or to build or repair their crude shelters. But a growing population and overly intensive use of the land makes this way of life an unsure one. As the economist David Bray of Florida International University surmised: ‘There are two miracles in the monarch overwintering areas. The first is that the monarch butterflies have survived. The second is that the ejidatarios have survived.’”

So many trees have been cut down that there aren’t enough of the largest trees anymore for the monarchs to be on. Smaller trees don’t hold enough warmth, and when there is a deep frost all of the hundreds of thousands of monarch butterflies unfortunate enough to be on the smaller trees freeze to death. Over the last few years, the monarch butterfly population has been falling at an exponential rate. The Fund says: “There has been 45% degradation of the forest canopy in and around the Monarch Butterfly's Overwintering areas over the past thirty years. The degradation has been so severe that a severe winter storm in January 2002 killed 75 – 80% of the monarch butterfly population. Reforestation is the core element of restoring healthy ecosystems.”

This is where the Michoacán Reforestation Fund comes in. Since it was founded in 1997, the Fund has planted over 2 million trees in and around the forests where the monarch butterflies overwinter. In their own words, the Fund explains that their “projects help local ejidos and communities convert degraded cornfields back into the original pine and oyamel forest, a difficult task due to the deteriorated soil conditions and lack of shade. Once the trees take hold their growth rate accelerates, from one meter the first year, to three meters a year as the balance of sun and shade and quality of soil improve. Restoring the original forest in the buffer zones in and around the Monarch's Overwintering Sites is crucial to the survival of the butterflies, the health of the environment, and the well being of the local people, who in a few years are able to selectively harvest trees in a sustainable forest environment thanks to their participation in our programs.” By working so closely with the local peoples, the Fund teaches them how to selectively choose which trees to cut down so that the forest won’t be stripped bare, and so that there will be enough of the right sort of a trees left standing for the monarch butterflies. Stardust Love is working to make a donation that will pay for the planting of 100 more trees, because we believe this is a wonderful organization – in one integrated mission, it is saving the environment, conserving a threatened species, and helping families in poverty. All of our earrings with "Celestial" in the title will be benefitting the Fund.

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
Albert Einstein

Added on Oct 22, 2009