I rolled out of bed this morning watching the morning show on New York City’s local Fox affilate.
In a segment about the financial reform bill, the anchor was interviewing a Fox Business Reporter who proceeded to slam the financial reform bill in one of the most disgusting pieces of journalism I’ve ever seen.
Over at SexGenderBody, one of our regular contributors – Christina Engela is tirelessly drawing attention to the assault on the laws protecting the LGBTQI community from harassment, hate crimes and violence. These attacks come in the wake of their own “tea-party” of religiously intolerant politicians seek to gain power behind the cross and at the point of a gun. She is a member of the board of the South African Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation(SA GLAAD), and president of the Eastern Cape Gay & Lesbian Association (ECGLA). She is also active in local politics.
She posted this today at SGB and at her own blog, Sour Grapes. It is a good primer into how the politics of hate are burning in South Africa right now.
-gadfly
Cross posted from Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet.
For centuries, farmers in the Sahel-a band of land that crosses Africa at the southern fringe of the Sahara Desert-used rotational tree farming to provide year-round harvests and a consistent source of food, fuel, and fertilizer. But severe droughts and rapid population growth in the 1970s and 80s significantly degraded the Sahel’s farmland, leading to the loss of many indigenous tree species and leaving the soil barren and eroded. With the loss of the trees went the knowledge, traditions, and practices that had kept the region fertile for hundreds of years.
To save the land as well as local livelihoods, many traditional management practices are now being revived. One inexpensive method of farming that helps to restore the Sahel’s degraded land is so-called Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) (see also Millions Fed: “Re-Greening the Sahel: Farmer-led Innovation in Burkina Faso and Niger”). By pruning shoots that periodically and naturally sprout from below-ground root webs, farmers can promote forest growth and take advantage of a naturally occurring source of fuel, food, or animal fodder.
The trees produce fruit rich in nutrients and help to restore the soil by releasing nitrogen and protecting the ground from erosion by wind and rain. The cultivated but naturally occurring forest also creates a local source of firewood and mulch, reducing the time spent in gathering fuel for cooking meals and cleaning households (see Reducing the Things They Carry). The practice also cuts down on deforestation as the trees that are used for fuel are replaced with seedlings and tended by farmers.
“Farmer-managed natural regeneration is a fairly simple technique, but it produces multiple benefits,” explained Chris Reij, a natural resources management specialist with the Center for International Cooperation (and advisor to the Nourishing the Planet Project), at an Oxfam-hosted panel on locally driven agriculture innovations in Washington, D.C., last October. “Sometimes planting trees make sense, but in terms of costs and long-time success, in many cases it makes more sense to use natural regeneration.”
As important as the technique itself is, even more important is making sure that farmers in the Sahel know about it. When farmers learn how they can benefit from the practice, they are quick to adopt it, improving their own livelihoods and food security while regenerating local forests. Reij attributes the overwhelming success of FMNR in Niger-where many villages have 10-20 times more trees than 20 years ago-to the reduced central-government presence in rural areas. With the government distracted by political conflict, forest management now belongs almost completely to the local farmers who benefit from FMNR the most. (See also Aid Groups, Farmers Collaborate to Re-Green Sahel.)
To ensure that even more farmers know about FMNR and its benefits, the Web Alliance for the Re-Greening in Africa (W4RA), a joint project between African Re-Greening Initiatives (ARI), the Web Foundation, and VU Amsterdam, is helping to create web-based information exchanges between farmers. Meanwhile, the organization SahelEco has initiated two projects, Trees Outside the Forest and the Re-Greening the Sahel Initiative, to encourage policymakers, farmers’ organizations, and government leaders throughout the region to provide the support and legislation needed to put the responsibility of managing trees on agricultural land into the hands of farmers.
To read more about agroforestry and other ways that agriculture can restore degraded land, see: An Evergreen Revolution? Using Trees to Nourish the Planet, It’s About More Than Trees at the World Agroforestry Centre, Trees as Crops in Africa, and Mitigating Climate Change Through Food and Land Use.
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Cross posted from Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet.
As Iceland’s erupting volcano strands thousands of air travelers across Europe and worldwide, a less publicized but arguably more costly catastrophe is mounting 15,000 miles away: piles of gourmet produce and cut flowers, some of Kenya’s chief exports, are rotting in limbo. Meant to be shipped to upscale grocery stores throughout Europe, lilies, roses, carnations, carrots, onions, baby sweet corn, and sugar snap peas are going bad in heaps, on the vine, and in the ground because airport warehouses are already full and there’s no local market for the expensive produce in a country where half the population lives on less than a dollar a day.
As food prices continue to rise worldwide, reducing food waste will be a critical element in alleviating hunger and poverty worldwide. Already, Nourishing the Planet has highlighted the many ways that growing indigenous vegetables for local markets and improving storage techniques can help to both reduce food waste and improve access to food, in Kenya and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa.
To read more about food waste and ways it can be prevented, see: Reducing Food Waste, Finding Creative Ways to Grow Food in Kibera, Farming on the Urban Fringe, and Investing in Better Food Storage in Africa. Also, stay tuned for an entire chapter on the subject, written by Tristram Stuart, in State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet.
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Originally featured in the Montreal Gazette. Cross posted from Border Jumpers, Danielle Nierenberg and Bernard Pollack.
I grew up in Westmount as an only child with a relatively privileged middle-class life. I attended Selwyn House elementary, and we had season tickets to the Canadiens at the old Forum.
My upbringing seems a long way from the sidewalks of Antanarivo, Kampala, Lusaka, or the cities of any of the dozen or so African countries where I’ve been travelling the last six months.
It’s a little embarrassing, but these are the only images of Africa I had as a child:
When I turned up my nose at broccoli at the dinner table, my mom would guilt me into eating everything on the plate, “because people were starving in Ethiopia.”
While watching The Wonder Years, I saw commercials of B-list celebrities pleading for people to send money to feed emaciated children in Africa.
As I grew older, my view of Africa didn’t really change. It seemed that no good news came out of the continent. Everything I read and saw was about conflict, famine, HIV/AIDS, or disease. And for many of us, that’s all we know about Africa.
I felt, as most people do, powerless about the problems there. Most of us think of Africa as a lost cause.
It wasn’t until my partner, Danielle Nierenberg, received a grant through the Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet (www.nourishingtheplanet.com) to travel across the continent visiting innovations that offered sustainable ways of reducing hunger and poverty, that everything I thought I knew about the continent began to change. The grant culminates next year with the release of State of the World 2011, Worldwatch’s flagship publication, which will serve as a road map for the funding and donor community on projects working on the ground. I decided to take a leave of absence from my job to travel with her and learn as much as I could.
We started in Ethiopia in October 2009, and after six months visiting 120 projects, I quickly began to realize how much these individuals and organizations were doing with minimal resources. And that the news media seem to miss the real story: underneath the very real problems they were covering were hundreds of exciting innovations that were protecting the environment and improving people’s lives.
So let me share some examples of “good news” taking place across the continent – people and places that Danielle and I saw firsthand that gave us hope.
In Ethiopia, we met Kes Malede Abreha, a farmer-priest living near Aksum who, as part of a farmers’ group supported by the non-government organization Prolinnova is now a leading agricultural innovator in his neighbourhood.
In Kenya, we visited Kibera – one of the largest slums in sub-Saharan Africa, home to almost a million people. There, travelling with Urban Harvest, we met members of a women’s co-operative who are raising vegetables on “vertical farms” by poking holes in sacks, filling them with soil, and planting seeds.
In Tanzania, we visited the World Vegetable Centre in Arusha, where researchers and farmers are working together to improve diets and livelihoods.
In Uganda, we met with an organization run by two 20-year old volunteers that built school gardens to teach children about nutrition. It’s called Project DISC (part of Slow Food International).
In Rwanda, we met with families outside Kigali benefiting from a donation of small livestock from Heifer International.
In Mozambique, we attended a training session in which farmers were brought in from across the country to share with each other what was working. This will culminate in a free book of best practices, published in multiple indigenous languages.
In Zambia, we visited COMACO, whose sustainable, high-wage, non-profit peanut butter, organic rice, and honey under the label It’s Wild, were selling in major grocery stores across the country.
In Ghana, we met with a women’s co-operative that was processing palm oil.
As our plane landed at Dorval this week, we were filled with optimism and the African continent seemed not so far away, and much less hopeless. What we loved about many of the projects we visited is that they were Africa-led, often by local volunteers, and with very modest resources.
Bernard Pollack is travel blogging from Africa with his partner Danielle Nierenberg. You can follow them online at BorderJumpers (www.borderjumpers.org).
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Holy Jesus fuck! What a douchebag.
“Jesus help me, I’m gonna tap that boy’s ass tonight!”
In this story from the AP, some Bishop in Mexico is choosing to blame sex education for causing priests to molest children. The public education system in Mexico, in seeking to provide services that actually benefit the citizens of Mexico, choose to have a sex education system that uses facts about biology, reproduction, disease and prevention. This of course is a direct challenge to the Roman Catholic Church, who seek to suck the money out of people while glorifying themselves as special messengers of an invisible being they refer to as “God”.
(Cross-posted at SexGenderBody)
Crossposted from the Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet.
Wildlife conservation and sustainable farming practices are becoming increasing prevalent across sub-Saharan Africa (see Protecting Wildlife While Improving Food Security, Health, and Livelihoods, Helping Conserve Wildlife-and Agriculture-in Mozambique, and In Botswana, Cultivating an Interest in Agriculture and Conservation). Yet efforts to preserve elephants, rhinos, and other wildlife are difficult in countries plagued by political unrest and conflict.
In Zimbabwe, for example, “it’s pretty hard to get anything done,” says Raol du Toit, Director of the Rhino Conservation Trust. Although a new president, Morgan Tsvangirai, was elected in 2008, Zimbabwe’s 86-year-old dictator Robert Mugabe, who has ruled the country for more than 30 years, refused to cede power. A “power-sharing agreement” between the two leaders allows the country to function, but just barely. Unemployment rates are over 90 percent, and people who voice public opposition to Mugabe are often jailed and even tortured.
Despite these obstacles, du Toit is helping farming communities benefit economically from efforts to save dwindling populations of rhinos and other wildlife. While many conservation groups seek to protect wildlife from farmers, the Rhino Conservation Trust has a very different approach. Rather than telling farmers not to farm in areas where wildlife are present, they help communities realize that protecting wildlife can be in their own best interest.
“Wildlife is like a herd of cattle,” says du Toit, and farmers “will get benefits” if they manage and conserve local wildlife species. This “horns and thorns” approach gives farmers an opportunity to be paid for the ecosystem services they provide through more sustainable farming practices-including protecting wildlife, conserving water, preventing deforestation, and sequestering carbon in the soil. The solution is to help farmers practice agriculture “in appropriate areas, using appropriate practices.”
What’s needed, according to du Toit, is more “landscape-level planning” that takes into account the needs of wildlife, the environment, and farming communities. Rather than relying on development agencies and governments to decide where cattle fences should go or where farmers should plant their crops, local communities and stakeholders need to be part of the process. Development aid, says du Toit, should follow what local stakeholders need and perceive, not the other way around. “We need to trust people on the ground, rather than just planning for them.”
More locally based partnership arrangements, such as the Laikipia Wildlife Forum developed in Kenya, can help both farmers and wildlife survive. The Forum has united the community, from smallholder farmers to tourism ventures, in the fight to preserve wildlife and manage natural resources, helping to improve local livelihoods.
Educating children early about the benefits of wildlife is also important. The Rhino Conservation Trust has developed a school materials project that teaches children the importance of conserving rhinos.
And despite the political turmoil in Zimbabwe, the country still has wildlife resources that other countries don’t have, giving it the opportunity to both protect these assets and profit from their conservation.
For more about rhino conservation in Zimbabwe, see Raol du Toit’s presentation at the AHEAD workshop last year.
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By: Inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/
I think we all remember the 2008 Democratic primaries, that exciting and epic battle. In many ways the campaign caused more excitement than the general election, whose result was never really in doubt (especially after the financial crisis).
Both candidates drew upon distinctly different coalitions. In an influential article, Ronald Brownstein analyzes the difference this way:
Since the 1960s, Democratic nominating contests regularly have come down to a struggle between a candidate who draws support primarily from upscale, economically comfortable voters liberal on social and foreign policy issues, and a rival who relies mostly on downscale, financially strained voters drawn to populist economics and somewhat more conservative views on cultural and national security issues.
President Barack Obama assembled a coalition from the former, these “wine-track” Democrats. When most Americans think of liberals, they think of wine-track Democrats. Mr. Obama, then, was the liberal candidate; Mrs. Clinton the “beer-track,” working-class representative.
So candidate won the most liberal place in America?
The answer below the fold (or alternatively, in my title).
It has often been said that the arts promote learning and can inspire a culture of peace and hope. Along the same lines, there is an interesting resolution to story coming out of Israel this week that tests this adage.
The case began earlier this year with Ala Halihal, an Arab-Israeli or Israeli-Palestinian, seeking permission from the Israeli government to go to Lebanon to receive an award as winner of the “Beirut 39” literature competition. The event, which is awarding 39 Arab writers up to the age of 39, was developed as part of a UNESCO project. Essentially what happened was…
Former CNN denture rattler Lou Dobbs is considering a run for the Presidency, according to GQ’s Jeanne Marie Laskas. I know what you’re thinking. We’re talking about his white hot desire to park his flat, pimply ass in the in big chair at the I Hate Messicans Club, right? No, he means the Presidency of the United States.
Dobbs, a professional xenophobe who likes to fancy himself an ‘independent populist’ out to protect the American working man (namely from brown people and cotton pickin’ blacks like Condi Rice and Barack Obama) wants to be the leader of the free world. Maybe it’s ‘just a nit’, but Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour isn’t likely to be a running mate, since he’s eyeing the same prize himself. Maybe spelling/literacy expert Tom Tancredo meets muster, but damn it, where’s David Duke when you need him?
