Pete plugs a new collection of his published articles, letters, drafts and notes edited by Rob and Sam Rosenthal, Pete Seeger: His Life in His Own Words and once he gets warmed up he has some stories to tell. You've probably heard about the centennial of Woody Guthrie's birth a few days back and of course interviewer Brian Lehrer asks about working with Guthrie. Pete also recommends a favorite magazine, Orion which reminded me that I had not checked in with this great source of inspiration for the environmental movement in a while. A sampler of things I enjoyed at the site: a visual ode to meaningful trees, Draw me a Tree, a poem Cherries, Luis Alberto Urrea (an author we should explore together) reading an eloquent column on respecting migrations from all directions, a critique of the current state of environmental education. And just to bring things back around, Alec Wilkinson, author of The Protest Singer has a piece in Orion about an Iranian scientist who is helping to diversify the fruit farms of Idaho and writes in The New Yorker about Pete Seeger: His Life in His Own Words and singing with Pete today,Then the microphones broke down. Seeger managed to have everyone sing a song with him by repeating the words to the people in the front row who could hear him, then having them repeat them for the people in the back. His voice was wobbly and not very loud but passionate. The halting quality of the lines, passed from one group of people to another, made them seem as if they were part of a protest song that was too dangerous to sing all at once.
this week (check your local PBS station for show times). PBS has a website for the show with a timeline, a map of tree planting projects around the world, extra features on the effects of deforestation, lesson plans, action guide and more. The video clips have me excited to finally see this. It looks like the film makes the Green Belt Movement come alive in a way Unbowed couldn't quite manage for me. Here's the trailer: 
Another in our periodic updates on Rights Readers authors, this time with an environmental twist:The organization’s goal is to augment its usual battle over specific endangered species issues—in Tejon’s case, the California condor—with a broader campaign to show that projects such as Tejon are precisely the sort of development, built far from existing cities and requiring residents to “leapfrog” through the outlying area to get to work, that must stop if we are to get serious about slowing climate change. It argues that state and federal laws should force developers at Tejon—and elsewhere—to quantify their contribution to global warming and then do everything feasible to eliminate that impact, from installing solar roofs to mandating zero-emission vehicles for residents.A little follow-up on Wiwa v Shell: Transcript of Ken Saro-Wiwa Jr. (In the Shadow of a Saint)
interview at CNN and here's a Reuters report on the impact of the case on Big Oil. Meanwhile Zina Saro-Wiwa, taking on a cultural ambassador role for African positivity premiers a film, This is My Africa.Epicenters of global biodiversity, it turns out, tend to be situated in exactly the same places as the epicenters of high cultural, linguistic, and food-crop diversity.Hey! Poets and scientists unite! You should also Check out this UN Tribute to Poetry in Endangered Languages with handy world poetry map!...Homogeneous landscapes — whether linguistic, cultural, biological, or genetic — are brittle and prone to failure. The evidence peppers human history, as Jared Diamond so meticulously catalogued in his aptly named book, Collapse. Whether it was due to a shifting climate that devastated a too-narrow agricultural base, a lack of cultural imagination in how to deal with the problem, or a devastating combination of the two, societies insufficiently resilient enough to cope with the demands of a changing environment invariably crumbled.
Our environmentally-themed novel for April, Yellowcake, introduces us to author Ann Cummins. Here is her faculty page at Northern Arizona University. Bookbrowse offers us an interview,Why did you choose this subject?Intrepid Reader Stevi (and our resident expert on all things nuclear) recommends the following links as background to the environmental themes of the novel:
I grew up in the Colorado Plateau area and, like some of my characters, I'm from generations of Colorado miners. So the history and landscape are personal to me. My father was a uranium mill worker in Durango, Colorado, and his company began operating a mill in Shiprock, New Mexico, on the Navajo reservation when I was nine. So the reservation, too, is personal to me. I lived there for nine years and went to public school there.
The website for the Greenbelt Movement does provide some reassurance that Wangari Maathai's security detail was reinstated on March 5. Of course the site is worth exploring to learn more about the movement (pictures!).Kenyan human rights defender and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Professor Wangari Maathai received three death threats on her cellular telephone on February 19, 2008, as did two people working for her.
These threats read, ‘‘Because of your opposing the government at all times, Prof Wangari Maathai, we have decided to look for your head very soon, you are number three after Were, take care of your life.” The threats were signed ‘‘Mungiki.” The “number three” refers to the two Members of Parliament who were killed at the end of January.
And in Africa, in particular, I know we have many wars. We have a war in Darfur. We have wars in many other countries like the Congo, in West Africa, in Somalia right now. We are still having these wars. And these wars, when you look at all of them, you realize that they are all about resources. It’s the question of who is going to control the resources in this country, who is going to be included, who is going to be excluded, who is going to be in charge of these resources.
Speaking of Faith has an interview and slideshow of Kenyan women (accompanied by Wangari Maathai singing!)I think that if we would get the message that the Norwegian Nobel Committee gave us in the year 2004, we would sit back and rethink again: Isn’t there another way of managing these resources, of sharing these resources, of being more inclusive, of allowing everybody to play a part to benefit, so that we do not have to fight and kill each other, so that we can have the supreme control of these resources?
For March we have chosen Wangari Maathai's memoir, Unbowed
,In Unbowed
“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.” -Chief Seattle, 1855Happy Earth Day!
Given that food or the lack of it is one of the themes in Louise Erdrich's Tracks, I encourage a visit to the White Earth Land Recovery Project website where you can learn about various programs from alternative energy and traditional agriculture restoration that aim to create an environment-friendly sustainable community. I found the project to encourage diets of native foods as a part of diabetes prevention particularly interesting. For more on White Earth, here is an NPR report from their "Hidden Kitchens" series, Ricing Time, which includes a gallery of pictures and recipes.
Our first day of spring yesterday included a little rain, not exactly the norm around here, but very welcome after a very dry winter. And today is World Water Day! This is a good heads-up for our April focus on environmental actions that often involve contamination of ground water.The Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees the rights to secure shelter, food, health, and the tools for basic sustenance — all of which are endangered by the extreme weather, disease outbreaks, crop failures, and famine caused by global warming. The impact of an increasingly unstable climate falls disproportionately on people in poor countries. They are hit hardest — not because nature discriminates against the poor, but because developing countries cannot afford the kinds of infrastructures, such as back-up food reserves, redundant generating systems, and accessible healthcare facilities, needed to buffer the effects of global warming.And from openDemocracy:
...there must be a conscious reframing of the climate-change debate in terms of human rights. One group of the world's peoples (namely the poor and vulnerable) have found that their right to live and prosper has been harmed by the actions of another group of people (namely the rich).Something to keep in mind as we plan our usual run of "Earth Day" events this spring. Hmmm... this has really turned into Science Week here at Rights Readers!
has weighs in at The Nation. Plus another article at openDemocracy observes tensions between the developed and developing world already heating up over global warming at the African Union meeting.
More Voices from Chernobyl:Throughout her work, she has sought to bring to light the hidden stories of the Soviet era. One of her first books, U voiny--ne zhenskoe litso ("War's Unwomanly Face"), an oral history of Soviet soldiers in World War II, which broke with the heroic narratives of official history, was suppressed for two years before Gorbachev allowed it to be published in 1985. That book and its follow-up, Poslednie svideteli (1985), a collection of 100 "children's stories" of war, sold millions of copies in the former Soviet Union and made Alexievich a glasnost celebrity. Her career hit its peak with Zinky Boys (1992), an unflinching look at the Soviet war in Afghanistan ("zinky" alludes to the zinc coffins in which more than 15,000 Soviet soldiers returned home).Finally for all those unanswered questions, the UN-sponsored Chernobyl - Tschernobyl - Information site is worth exploring.
Two catastrophes have taken place in Belarus: the catastrophe of capitalism and the cosmic catastrophe. People can understand the former - poverty, misery, the new way of life - but they cannot grasp the cosmic catastrophe. Ukraine and Belarus are a sort of laboratory, you could collect the evidence, evaluate it and share it with humanity. But the Belarussian government is committing an assault on its own people and on humanity at large. One scientist who proved that even low doses of radiation can lead to illness was thrown into prison and only released after international protests. Instead there is much talk of optimism. Belarus is a closed-off, abject country. My book has appeared in 21 states but is banned in Belarussian. Otherwise people would ask: Where is the medicine? Where are the church masses? Where are the uncontaminated provisions? A totalitarian regime saves itself first.Center for Book Culture offers another interview. Here's a bit about the oral history form and the writing process,
It occurred to me that life offers so many versions and interpretations of the same events that neither fiction nor document alone can keep up with its variety; I felt compelled to find a different narrative strategy. I decided to collect the voices from the street, the material lying about around me. Each person offers a text of his or her own. And realized I could make a book out of them. Life moves on much too fast—only collectively can we create a single, many-sided picture...From each person’s 100-page story, not more than five pages are left and sometimes maybe just half a page. I ask many questions, I select episodes, and, thus, I participate in the creation of each book. My role is not just that of an ear eavesdropping in the street, but also that of an observer and thinker. To an outsider it may seem a simple process: people just told me their stories. But it’s not really so simple. It’s important what you ask and how you ask it and what you hear and what you select from the interview. I think you can’t really reflect life’s broad scope without the documentation, without the human evidence. The picture will not be complete.And because translators never get their due, how about an interview (from Maud Newton) with translator Keith Gessen,
...what I think the book does cumulatively with this randomness is suggest that, well, splitting up with your wife is more important than Chernobyl. These major events organize experience, they form a backdrop to experience, but they do not constitute experience as such. I’m not sure how much leeway I had as the translator, in this regard, but, functionally, the book is framed by these two devastating monologues by women whose husbands received very heavy doses of radiation and then just literally fell apart in front of their eyes, and these are just horrible — but in between there’s a lot of funny stuff, or random stuff is more like it, that fills in the background to those stories.All three interviews have great insights, check them out!
Despite the rain (we were able to move our table indoors) at the LA County Environmental Education Fair last weekend, we were able to coax 110 children to lend their handprints to our effort get clean water to the people of Bhopal. Adult petitioners came through for us as well. You haven't missed your chance! Here's the online petition: Link
Ten years after Nigerian authorities executed Niger Delta writer and community activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, popular anger and unrest continue to grow, while warnings of a calamitous slide into violence abound. Saro-Wiwa campaigned for a greater share of oil wealth for the population and protested environmental damage, but little progress has been made since his death...
"Unless something drastic is done, there will not be peace around here. There's going to be trouble," prominent human rights activist Anyakwee Nsirimovu said.
With the decline in traditional occupations like fishing and farming because of environmental degradation, many young people are easily recruited into militias or crime cartels, which get their funding from oil "bunkering," or theft...
Ledum Mitee, spokesman for the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, the group Saro-Wiwa founded, accused the company and its contractors of "divide and rule" tactics, bribing certain people or offering contracts to circumvent community opposition and get its work done in the region, which has half a million people and massive oil reserves. Mitee faced trial with Saro-Wiwa and is often seen as his successor.
One community chief in the Ogoni village of Kegbara Dere, Clement Goni Badom, said people were still so opposed to the company that calling someone an agent of Shell was like using a swear word.
The company said in e-mailed answers to questions from The Times that it would only return to the area if welcomed by the community. Despite the anger, the company argued, communities have turned to Shell to address poverty in the region instead of looking to the government. Shell said it had adopted a new approach across the delta region, abolishing ad hoc payments to communities or individuals to get access to sites.
Activist Nsirimovu said Shell's policies were "beautiful on paper. But those standards don't apply here."
Baakpa Birabil, 60, a farmer in Kegbara Dere, is angry that his small plot of land was destroyed in a spill two years ago. "My anger is toward Shell, who just came to my land and exploited it without leaving anything for me. You can see we are very poor people." He said people had expected good things when the oil companies first arrived, decades ago. "We never expected it would bring bad things," he said.
Today is the tenth anniversary of the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa. How to commemorate this date? Revisit the other posts on this site about the on-going struggle of Nigerian activists to protect their environment in the face of degradation caused by the oil industry and take the recommended actions. Read Ken Wiwa's piece on his father in the Guardian (also linked on this blog), and let's let Saro-Wiwa the writer speak for himself: Sydney PEN Center has a tribute which includes a couple of his poems plus tribute poems by Ben Okri and Jack Mapanje. I used to read "The True Prison" at the end of every talk I gave for Amnesty/Sierra Club's Just Earth Network. A creation of a memorial poetry collection, Dance the Guns to Silence is part of the international effort to recognize this date, but alas the book appears to have no US publisher at this point. 
