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  • Alan Weisman, Nancy Hand

    Worlds of Difference

    Cotopaxi Pilgrimage

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    Alan Weisman, Nancy Hand

    Worlds of Difference

    Cotopaxi Pilgrimage

    For the Tigua Indians of Ecuador, the spectacular 19,000-foot Cotopaxi volcano is both a sheltering spirit and a source of artistic inspiration. But the Tigua stopped visiting their sacred mountain when the government declared it a national park and began charging admission. Recently two Tigua painters led an improvised pilgrimage to the volcano’s glacier.

    The painter Julio Toaquiza was forced to work on a cacao plantation as a young boy. If he wasn’t in the fields by 6:00 a.m., the boss would come to his house with a whip. There was no local school for Julio to attend back then. He was married at 14 and had 12 children. He learned to paint, he says, in a dream.

    Julio’s was the last generation of Tigua to work under a whip. His children went to school. They helped with the family’s livestock and crops, rather than laboring at a plantation. And they learned to paint from their father.

    Julio’s oldest son, Alfredo, believes the style of painting his father developed is part of a resurgence of ancient indigenous art forms that were interrupted when Europeans arrived in the Andes. “The trunk was cut, but the roots have sprung up in different places among different people,” he says. “Here in Cotopaxi, in Tigua, it sprung up on its own. It’s a new school of indigenous art, where we express the feeling, the thinking, the way of life of our people.”

    Julio’s third son, Alfonso, sees his art as a way of preserving culture, and of sharing that culture with the larger world. “Pachamama, the earth spirit, has pushed us to show our way of life to different parts of the world. Our paintings reveal the hidden parts of the community.”

    For Alfonso, the paintings also tell a more urgent story. “Many people are destroying the forest and we say, ‘Please, don’t destroy that.’ Pachamama is crying. She doesn’t want more destruction. We need people to begin to talk about this so that this land that was once a paradise can return to being a paradise. That’s the idea we are always dreaming of.”

    After thirty years of painting scenes from the daily lives of his people as they live today – their work on the land, their ceremonies and celebrations – Julio has begun to paint about the past. “This is the slavery of the Tigua plantations,” he says, gesturing to a painting in progress. Instead of family plots of potatoes and small herds of llamas, the landscape is dotted with soldiers on horseback. The painting tells the story of a Tigua uprising against forced labor, and its violent suppression. It also tells the story of how much has changed in one man’s lifetime.

    “Our children are educated now. They know what laws are. They know about rights,” Julio says. “This painting is so that my history, the history of Tigua and of our ancestors who lived in this place, can go out from here. I like to paint stories and send them out to the world.”

    – Nancy Hand

    Date

    December 17, 2004

    Outlets

    Living on Earth

    Tags

    Themes: Culture
    Regions: South America
    Media: Audio, Text
    Other Contributors: Alan Weisman
    Other Tags: Andes, Ecuador, indigenous people

  • Alan Weisman

    Worlds of Difference

    Competing for Souls

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    Alan Weisman

    Worlds of Difference

    Competing for Souls

    Korea’s transformation into an industrial powerhouse has been accompanied by an equally dramatic spiritual shift. With Christians now dominant in political and economic life, Buddhists wonder whether they have a role to play in the country’s future.

    It shouldn’t have been that disconcerting to hear an evangelical Protestant minister extol God’s goodness for guiding the Pilgrims safely to America, where they could establish a Christian ethic that would one day shape the moral values of a nation. Granted, the church was stadium-sized, the 100-person choir was accompanied by a 32-piece orchestra and the service was being televised to millions, but we Americans are used to television ministries that have somehow managed to hybridize Puritan-inspired religion and Hollywood spectaculars. Except this wasn’t America: it was Korea, known in theology circles as home to the purest Buddhism in Asia.

    The pre-Thanksgiving Sunday service that I and 25,000 other attendees were witnessing took place in the Yoido Full Gospel Church of Seoul, South Korea, which, at 800,000 members (many of whom were watching via simultaneous transmission in satellite churches around the country) calls itself the biggest church in the world. Evangelical Christianity took hold here following the Korean War, when many Koreans studied in the United States, sometimes on church scholarships, and returned influenced by Western ideas. In recent decades, as South Korea’s social philosophy segued from the ancestor worship of Confucianism to free market capitalism, the country has undergone a spiritual conversion, and is now nearly fifty percent Christian. Christians and Buddhists alike told me, with pride and concern respectively, that to get elected these days, South Korean politicians have to be Christian. Although Korean Protestant churches maintain strong ties with their American evangelical counterparts, in this now-prosperous country they aren’t dependent on them. In fact Yoido Full Gospel actually sends missionaries to the United States, and maintains its own Bible college in Orange County, California.

    Korea’s religious transformation hasn’t been painless. In the 1990s, temples were burned and Buddha statues were beheaded as a Christian president openly equated Buddhist and Satanic images. The conflict is no longer so open. But Korean Buddhists today worry about being overwhelmed in a society where commercialism and religion grow increasingly indistinguishable. Downtown Seoul’s Jogye-sa Temple, center of the largest sect of Korean Buddhism, has recently been surrounded by 25-story buildings that in the past would never have been permitted. The glass from one of the highest skyscrapers reflects light so intensely into an adjacent temple that monks can’t meditate, even with their eyes closed. The building’s Swedish architect was horrified to learn this – in his country, reflective angles are carefully controlled to avoid violating a church’s holy sanctum. But here, a Buddhist monk told me, no one even bothered to consult them. “It’s like we no longer exist.”

    – Alan Weisman

    Date

    October 12, 2004

    Outlets

    NPR

    Tags

    Themes: Culture
    Regions: Asia / Oceania
    Media: Audio, Text
    Other Contributors: Alan Weisman
    Other Tags: korea, Evangelical Christianity, Buddhism

  • Alan Weisman

    Worlds of Difference

    Resurrecting the Zápara

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    Alan Weisman

    Worlds of Difference

    Resurrecting the Zápara

    The Zápara once ranged far across the western Amazon. By the 1970s, anthropologists concluded that their culture was extinct. But a handful of native speakers survived. Now they’re trying to resuscitate their language and culture. But a new danger looms.

    Bartolo Ushigua, leader of Ecuador’s Zápara Indians, was terrified. Not of New York’s massive buildings that towered far beyond the tallest tree in his native Amazon, not of the oily urban stench and stupendous traffic, not of the Babel of people constantly snapping his picture as though he were some exotic zoo mammal. What shook him so deeply was that for the first time ever, he couldn’t dream.

    To the Zápara, a dream is a rendezvous with guiding spirits. It was in a dream that Bartolo’s shaman father saw that his people, down to just a few dozen, weren’t supposed to vanish after all, as prophecy had foretold. It was in dreams that this same father, now dead, kept returning to instruct Bartolo how to lead. Bartolo Ushigua was barely twenty when he assumed his indigenous nation’s helm; within three years he had brought the Zápara practically from extinction to designation by UNESCO as a world cultural treasure.

    The path to recognition had been treacherous, filled not just with old enemies but also new friends whose helpful intentions portended to be equally deadly, should the Zápara come to depend on them too much. Mostly, though, the path was strewn with cash – not a lot, but enough to be tempting and disruptive.

    After a dreamless week at the UN, one afternoon an exhausted Bartolo Ushigua napped. Suddenly images formed in his sleeping mind. “In my dream,” he recalled, “there was a man with two faces, one bloody, one smiling. When the smile showed, people became happy. When the blood showed, their strength waned. Then the face said something intriguing: In time, money could gain a soul.”

    When we met Bartolo, he admitted that he didn’t entirely understand this dream. From our perspective, with the hunter-gatherer Zápara paradoxically now needing money to defend a way of life in which money had never been necessary, it was easy to attribute the dream to wishful thinking.

    After all, we were in Ecuador to document a community facing seemingly impossible odds. The Zápara, once the most numerous people of Ecuador’s Amazon region, had been all but wiped out. Then, in 1998, a 60-year border war ended, and a few Zápara were discovered living in Peru. All had lost their language, but one was a shaman. On the Ecuadoran side, the last shaman had recently died, but a handful of elderly native speakers remained. Each group had what the other lacked, yet could so few people possibly resuscitate a culture? Especially with a new threat hanging over their heads?

    That new threat is oil. The surviving Zápara owe their existence in no small part to the fact that theirs was, until recently, the last sector of Ecuador’s jungle without an oil concession. Bartolo and his siblings and cousins, now responsible for their people’s future, told us that they have just a few years to learn to defend themselves before the road and the drilling rigs arrive.

    It seems impossible – until you meet them. We came away from the Zápara recalling that there’s a name for those people who occasionally confound probability and accomplish the impossible.

    They’re called dreamers.

    – Alan Weisman and Nancy Hand

    Date

    July 30, 2004

    Other Contributor(s)

    Nancy Hand

    Outlets

    Living on Earth

    Tags

    Themes: Culture, Environment
    Regions: South America
    Media: Audio, Text
    Other Contributors: Alan Weisman
    Other Tags: Zápara, UNESCO, indigenous, Amazon, Ecuador, Oil development, language revitalization

  • Barbara Ferry, Deborah Begel

    World Views

    Luis and Negra

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    Barbara Ferry, Deborah Begel

    World Views

    Luis and Negra

    Mexican-American writer Luis Alberto Urrea returns to the slums of Tijuana, where he worked as a young man, to see a woman he knew as a girl. His story, for This American Life, explores the sometimes uneasy relationship between “first world” writers and their “third world” subjects.

    In the late 1970s, Luis Alberto Urrea was working in the slums of Tijuana and Ana María “Negra” Calderón was a barefoot young girl, the unschooled daughter of garbage pickers. Nearly 25 years later, Luis is now a celebrated writer, winner of the American Book Award, and a tenured professor in Chicago.

    Back in Tijuana, Negra is struggling to raise her children and those of her sister, who was killed by her husband. In this piece Luis travels back to Tijuana to see Negra after an absence of seven years. He explores his sometimes uneasy relationship and the obligations that “first world” writers have toward their “third world” subjects.

    Date

    October 2003

    Other Contributor(s)

    Sandy Tolan, Alan Weisman

    Outlets

    This American Life

    Tags

    Themes: Lives, Culture
    Regions: North America
    Media: Audio
    Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan, Alan Weisman
    Other Tags: Luis Alberto Urrea, first world, third world, tijuana

  • Alan Weisman

    Worlds of Difference

    Chiloe: A Bridge Too Far?

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    Alan Weisman

    Worlds of Difference

    Chiloe: A Bridge Too Far?

    The island of Chiloé, off the coast of Chile, is known for its misty beauty, quaint architecture, and distinctive cuisine. Now Chile’s government is proposing to build the longest bridge in Latin America to connect Chiloé to the mainland. Islanders aren’t sure they want to be connected.

    Few human constructs are as innately graceful and pleasing as bridges. Literally and metaphorically, they connect us. Yet natives of Chiloé, an island the size of Puerto Rico off the coast of southern Chile, wonder lately if there may be such a thing as too much connection.

    Isolated from the mainland by a turbulent channel, Chiloé developed its own proud culture, whose music, myths, and charming architecture today entice thousands of tourists each summer. However, Chile’s government now wants to celebrate its 2010 bicentennial by building the longest bridge in Latin America, joining Chiloé to the continent. Many islanders fear this would replace the romantic sea change that visitors undergo during the twenty-minute ferry passage with a non-eventful, three-minute car ride.

    Worse, they claim, it would also end their uniqueness. They reject the rationale that a bridge means they’ll now have quicker access to emergency medical services on the mainland, arguing that it would be far cheaper simply to build Chiloé a decent hospital. The real reason for turning their island into a peninsula, they say, is development: The government has proclaimed that the bridge will make Chiloé the gateway to vast, hitherto inaccessible stretches of southern Chile, to extract lumber – and, especially, to cultivate an exotic fish.

    Chile, which has no native salmon, is now the world’s second biggest salmon producer; with this bridge it could become number one. Marine biologists, already worried over the environmental strains of intensive fish farming, have further doubts about turning Chile’s entire southern coast into a giant salmon factory. Local stocks of sardines, mackerel, and anchovies used to make feed for farmed salmon, they warn, are already dangerously overdrawn. What, they ask, is the sense of building more fish farms, if there’s nothing left to feed them?

    Chilean President Ricardo Lagos has promised that no public funds will be spent on the bridge. Instead, the first forty years’ toll revenues will go to the bridge’s private financiers. Industry projections, however, suggest that tolls could take more than a century to recoup construction costs, so no one is yet willing to undertake the $300 million project without guaranteed government subsidies. In turn, President Lagos, a former Minister of Public Works who won’t abandon the dream for this grand national monument, keeps postponing the construction bidding until a financing plan emerges.

    Opponents say that a bridge makes no cultural, fiscal, or ecological sense—that it no longer symbolizes connection, but a profound disconnect between human pride and human wisdom. Yet many fear the president will renege on his promise not to subsidize, and build it anyway. Chiloé lore tells how local mythic spirits have dealt with hubris in the past: vanquishing the perpetrators with the likes of floods and earthquakes. In such an act of revenge, a legendary sea serpent named Quaiquaí originally separated Chiloé from the mainland. Since the bridge, if built, will be anchored to a notoriously unstable sea bottom, a question heard on Chiloé these days is: Might Quaiquaí strike again?

    – Alan Weisman

    Date

    September 26, 2003

    Outlets

    Living on Earth

    Tags

    Themes: Culture, Environment
    Regions: South America
    Media: Audio
    Other Contributors: Alan Weisman
    Other Tags: Chile, salmon, Chiloe

  • Alan Weisman

    Border Stories

    LA Ecovillage

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    Alan Weisman

    Border Stories

    LA Ecovillage

    Bringing ecological living to an urban slum neighborhood and a Mexican-American barrio, complete with electric low-riders and solar-powered rap recording studios.

    bldg19The term “ecovillage” evokes pastoral visions of earthen homes and glistening solar panels. But in cosmopolitan Los Angeles, the idea of ecological alternative living gets stretched to include an urban slum neighborhood and a Mexican-American barrio, complete with electric low-riders and solar-powered rap recording studios.

    Date

    June 2002

    Outlets

    Living on Earth

    Tags

    Themes: Lives, Culture, Environment
    Regions: North America
    Media: Audio
    Other Contributors: Alan Weisman
    Other Tags: California, los angeles, LA, ecovillage

  • Alan Weisman

    Border Stories

    Casas de Paja Sonorense (Spanish)

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    Alan Weisman

    Border Stories

    Casas de Paja Sonorense (Spanish)

    A story of the birth of a sustainable housing movement in Sonora, in northern Mexico. In Spanish.

    Kids and AdobesA story of the birth of a sustainable housing movement in Sonora, in northern Mexico.

    This Spanish-language version of “Straw Bale Homes in Mexico” was reported and produced by Alan Weisman and narrated by Marco Vinicio Gonzalez.

    Date

    June 2001

    Other Contributor(s)

    Marco Vinicio Gonzalez

    Outlets

    Radio Bilingüe

    Tags

    Themes: Environment
    Regions: North America
    Media: Audio
    Other Contributors: Alan Weisman
    Other Tags: Mexico, Sonora, adobe, casa, paja

  • Alan Weisman

    Border Stories

    Laguna Madre

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    Alan Weisman

    Border Stories

    Laguna Madre

    A profile of people and place – a fragile ecosystem spanning both sides of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo near the Gulf of Mexico.

    A profile of people and place – a fragile ecosystem spanning both sides of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo near the Gulf of Mexico.

    A Spanish-language version is also available.

    Date

    April 2001

    Outlets

    Living on Earth

    Tags

    Themes: Environment, Lives, Culture
    Regions: North America
    Media: Audio
    Other Contributors: Alan Weisman
    Other Tags: rio grande, rio bravo

  • Alan Weisman

    Border Stories

    Laguna Madre (Spanish)

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    Alan Weisman

    Border Stories

    Laguna Madre (Spanish)

    A profile of people and place – a fragile ecosystem spanning both sides of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo near the Gulf of Mexico. Spanish version.

    A profile of people and place – a fragile ecosystem spanning both sides of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo near the Gulf of Mexico.

    This Spanish-language version of an English feature by the same name was reported and written by Alan Weisman and narrated by Guadalupe Carrasco.

    Date

    April 2001

    Other Contributor(s)

    Guadalupe Carrasco

    Outlets

    Radio Bilingüe

    Tags

    Themes: Lives, Environment
    Regions: North America
    Media: Audio
    Other Contributors: Alan Weisman

  • Alan Weisman

    World Views

    Gloria Flora and the Elko Uprising

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    Alan Weisman

    World Views

    Gloria Flora and the Elko Uprising

    A rising star in the U.S. Forest Service runs afoul of monied interests – and her own agency – as she tries to protect public lands from depredation.

    Gloria Flora was a rising star in the U.S. Forest Service, one whom many thought might become the first woman to head the agency. But her promotion to head a national forest in Nevada ended up scuttling her career. The story of Flora’s downfall demonstrates the widening war between local citizens and federal natural resource managers over who should determine the fate of public lands.

    Date

    March 2000

    Outlets

    Living on Earth

    Tags

    Themes: Lives, Environment
    Regions: North America
    Media: Audio
    Other Contributors: Alan Weisman
    Other Tags: resource management, nevada, public land, forest service

  • Sandy Tolan, Alan Weisman

    Searching for Solutions

    Solar Energy and Middle East Peace

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    Sandy Tolan, Alan Weisman

    Searching for Solutions

    Solar Energy and Middle East Peace

    Developing solar energy is part of the Israeli-Jordanian peace agreement, but the modest plans may be overwhelmed by market forces.

    Legend has it in the third century BC, the Greek scientist Archimedes devised a spectacular weapon to save the ancient city of Syracuse – a giant concave mirror that bounced concentrated sunbeams onto the sails of invading roman ships. The sails caught fire, the ships sank, and Syracuse was saved. This may have been the only time the sun was harnessed to wage war.

    But now, in the heart of the Middle East, the sun is a player in the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan. Some say the sun will soon be harnessed in the service of peace. Others wonder if the peace process itself will undermine the prospects for developing clean solar power at a time when developing renewable energy is becoming more and more critical.

    Date

    September 1995

    Outlets

    All Things Considered

    Tags

    Themes: Economy, Environment, Peace & Conflict
    Regions: Middle East
    Media: Audio
    Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan, Alan Weisman
    Other Tags: solar, energy, israel, jordan, solar power

  • Alan Weisman

    Searching for Solutions

    Can Hydrogen Fuel the United States?

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    Alan Weisman

    Searching for Solutions

    Can Hydrogen Fuel the United States?

    Although scientists and engineers have shown that hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, is a clean substitute for fossil fuels, politicians and big business may never be ready to switch.

    During the next 25 years, as developing nations like China and India industrialize, world energy consumption is expected to double. With oil and gas supplies diminishing even faster, many scientists believe that hydrogen – the most abundant element, comprising three-fourths of the mass of the universe – will be the energy carrier for the future.

    Although scientists and engineers have shown that hydrogen is a clean substitute for fossil fuels, politicians and big business may never be ready to switch.

    Date

    August 1995

    Outlets

    All Things Considered

    Tags

    Themes: Economy, Environment, Technology
    Regions: North America
    Media: Audio
    Other Contributors: Alan Weisman
    Other Tags: hydrogen, fuel

  • Sandy Tolan, Alan Weisman

    Searching for Solutions

    The State of Solar Energy

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    Sandy Tolan, Alan Weisman

    Searching for Solutions

    The State of Solar Energy

    In Israel, where developing alternative energy was always seen as a matter of survival, solar technology is pointing a way out of dependence on fossil fuels. Story produced in 1995.

    Nearly everyone agrees that fossil fuels will run out someday – some say we’ll start feeling the pinch within 30 years.

    Predictions of disastrous floods that global warming could bring to island nations like Japan, and to coastal areas of Europe and the United States, may force us to phase out petroleum-based fuels even faster.

    If so, are clean, renewable alternatives really viable? And can they be developed in time?

    In Israel, a Middle Eastern country with no oil or coal reserves, scientists have studied one option, solar energy, longer than anyone.

    Date

    Summer 1995

    Outlets

    Weekend Edition

    Tags

    Themes: Environment, Technology
    Regions: Middle East
    Media: Audio
    Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan, Alan Weisman
    Other Tags: solar, israel, solar power, solar energy, alternative energy

  • Alan Weisman

    Searching for Solutions

    Gaviotas

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    Alan Weisman

    Searching for Solutions

    Gaviotas

    A group of Colombian visionaries has created a sustainable community in one of their country’s most inhospitable and dangerous places. This piece formed the basis of Alan’s award-winning book “Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World.”

    In the early 1970s, a group of South American visionaries realized that the coming population crisis would one day require people to live in places formerly considered unsuitable for human habitation. They decided that this was an opportunity to try to design a workable future, by and for the Third World, from limited resources.

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    The place they chose was on the desolate, barren plains of eastern Colombia, a country too often thought of as producing only coffee, cocaine, and bloodshed. The village they founded, called Gaviotas, has become a bright example of how to fashion an ideal tropical society.

    Many of the ingenious, affordable technologies they’ve created have spread to other developing nations, and may have much to offer the developed world as well.

    This piece formed the basis of Alan Weisman’s book Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World.

    Date

    August 1994

    Outlets

    All Things Considered

    Tags

    Themes: Economy, Culture, Environment
    Regions: South America
    Media: Audio
    Other Contributors: Alan Weisman
    Other Tags: colombia, community, sustainable, sustainability

  • Alan Weisman, Chris Brookes

    Searching for Solutions

    The Great Hydrogen Car Race

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    Alan Weisman, Chris Brookes

    Searching for Solutions

    The Great Hydrogen Car Race

    While German automakers race to produce the world’s first pollution-free, hydrogen-powered car, the world’s largest consumer market for automobiles, the U.S. remains stuck in a Faustian bargain with fossil fuels. From 1994.

    The automobile is one of the miracles of the 20th century, giving us unprecedented freedom and power over time and space. But like the legendary Dr. Faustus, this power could one day turn on us, as the poisonous curses of pollution and global warming undermine the society that cars have made possible.

    In Germany, where haze straight from hell or Los Angeles often chokes the Rhine valley and the autobahns, scientists and automakers have been racing to save us from this dilemma by designing a car that would run on pollution-free hydrogen.

    Date

    May 1994

    Outlets

    Marketplace

    Tags

    Themes: Environment, Technology
    Regions: North America, Europe
    Media: Audio
    Other Contributors: Alan Weisman
    Other Tags: hydrogen, fuel, car

  • Cecilia Vaisman, Alan Weisman

    Vanishing Homelands

    Flowers for Export

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    Cecilia Vaisman, Alan Weisman

    Vanishing Homelands

    Flowers for Export

    Outside Bogotá, some of Latin America’s best soils have been covered with a sea of greenhouses for growing flowers for export.

    During the 1980s, carnations, roses, and chrysanthemums became more abundant and cheaper than ever on street corners and in supermarkets throughout North America.

    Most are grown in a sea of greenhouses surrounding Bogotá, Colombia. For Colombia, flowers now rank with coffee as a major source of employment and foreign exchange.

    But they also convert some of Latin America’s best soils from the production of food to luxury crops. And the chemicals required to produced perfect flowers endanger the environment and the health of the workers.

    Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.

    Date

    August 1992

    Outlets

    Weekend Edition

    Tags

    Themes: Food, Economy, Environment
    Regions: South America
    Media: Audio
    Other Contributors: Cecilia Vaisman, Alan Weisman
    Other Tags: colombia, cut flower industry

  • Sandy Tolan, Alan Weisman

    Vanishing Homelands

    Caribbean Dreams

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    Sandy Tolan, Alan Weisman

    Vanishing Homelands

    Caribbean Dreams

    Different sorts of dreams collide in the Dominican Republic, where industrial parks, sugar cane fields, and a posh resort all belong to a single U.S. corporation.

    To most Americans, a Caribbean holiday sounds like a dream. For many, the dreamiest of all is a stay at the Dominican Republic’s Casa de Campo, a place where people can, for up to $2,000 a night, luxuriate in the region’s poshest, most complete resort. Even the maids here are postcard perfect, dressed in kerchiefs, peasant skirts, and aprons designed by Oscar de la Renta.

    But outside the oasis of pleasure lies the rest of the Dominican Republic, one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere, where, increasingly, the people who live and work there are seeing their own dreams dissolve.

    Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.

    Date

    August 1992

    Outlets

    All Things Considered

    Tags

    Themes: Lives, Economy
    Regions: Caribbean
    Media: Audio
    Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan, Alan Weisman
    Other Tags: Dominican Republic, Haiti, Sugar cane, tourism

  • Cecilia Vaisman, Alan Weisman

    Vanishing Homelands

    Life on the Edge of the Ozone Hole

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    Cecilia Vaisman, Alan Weisman

    Vanishing Homelands

    Life on the Edge of the Ozone Hole

    The world’s southernmost population, in Chile’s Magallanes province, finds itself on the brink of a deepening danger that may one day force them from their beautiful homeland – and eventually imperil us all.

    The world’s southernmost population, in Chile’s Magallanes province, finds itself on the brink of a deepening danger that may one day force it from its beautiful homeland – and eventually imperil us all.

    Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.

    Date

    June 1992

    Outlets

    Soundprint

    Tags

    Themes: Environment
    Regions: South America
    Media: Audio
    Other Contributors: Alan Weisman, Cecilia Vaisman

  • Cecilia Vaisman, Alan Weisman

    Vanishing Homelands

    Yacyretá

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    Cecilia Vaisman, Alan Weisman

    Vanishing Homelands

    Yacyretá

    A giant dam project on the border of Paraguay and Argentina raises questions about the social and environmental impact of major infrastructure projects.

    Dozens of dams were built in South America between the 1960s and early 1990s. Many were financed by the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, to bring progress to the continent by harnessing its powerful rivers for industry and growing urban populations.

    The largest of these dams was Yacyretá, on the border between Paraguay and Argentina. Yacyretá was to produce thousands of megawatts of energy. But it was also to flood the biologically richest area of both countries, and force the largest urban displacement by a development project in history.

    In the latter half of the 1980s, the banks held up loans to Yacyretá, pending plans to address environmental and social concerns. Then, despite protests that people and endangered animals would be left homeless, the banks began preparing to restart the loans, raising questions about the policy of international lenders to leave environmental protection and resettlement to the borrowing countries.

    Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.

    Date

    May 30, 1992

    Outlets

    Weekend Edition

    Tags

    Themes: Economy, Culture, Environment
    Regions: South America
    Media: Audio
    Other Contributors: Cecilia Vaisman, Alan Weisman
    Other Tags: displacement, World Bank, Argentina, Paraguay, dams, hydroelectric

  • Cecilia Vaisman, Alan Weisman

    Vanishing Homelands

    Argentina’s Guaraní Indians

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    Cecilia Vaisman, Alan Weisman

    Vanishing Homelands

    Argentina’s Guaraní Indians

    Once the largest tribe in South America, the Guaraní have nearly all left their native forests. But one last band is holding out.

    The Guaraní Indians were the once the largest tribe in South America. Their home was a forest that stretched from the Argentine pampas to the Brazilian Amazon.

    Four centuries ago, Jesuit priests arrived in Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil to evangelize the Guaraní, a story told in the 1985 movie “The Mission.” The Jesuits coaxed the nomadic, hunter-and-gatherer Guaraní to live in Catholic missions called reductions.

    Some Guaraní, however, never accepted the church, and remained hidden in the forest. Today, their descendants confront a world in which paper mills, dams, settlers, and tourism development have so diminished their habitat that, increasingly, the forest’s edge is all that’s left.

    In 1992, when this story was reported, the government of Argentina was planning to relocate the last of that country’s Guaraní onto small plots of farmland. Yet one small band of Indians, in northern Argentina’s Misiones Province, was still holding out.

    Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.

    Date

    January 12, 1992

    Outlets

    Weekend Edition

    Tags

    Themes: Economy, Culture, Environment
    Regions: South America
    Media: Audio
    Other Contributors: Cecilia Vaisman, Alan Weisman
    Other Tags: indigenous rights, Argentina, Guarani

  • Sandy Tolan, Alan Weisman

    Vanishing Homelands

    Celebrating the Discovery

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    Sandy Tolan, Alan Weisman

    Vanishing Homelands

    Celebrating the Discovery

    Preparations for the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas raise questions about the value of celebrating the event that led to the European conquest.

    For the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, the government of the Dominican Republic is throwing a gala party. They’ve spent millions of dollars to refurbish the capital city of Santo Domingo, which Columbus founded on his first journey in 1492.

    The centerpiece is a huge lighthouse, which officials say will be a beacon of culture for the Americas. Heads of state from around the world will attend its inauguration.

    But may Latin Americans object to the idea of celebrating the arrival of Europeans and the conquest that followed. Among those are more than 100,000 people who have been displaced for the construction of the Columbus lighthouse.

    Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.

    Date

    October 14, 1991

    Outlets

    Morning Edition

    Tags

    Themes: Economy, Culture
    Regions: Caribbean
    Media: Audio
    Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan, Alan Weisman
    Other Tags: Dominican Republic, Columbus, conquest

  • Cecilia Vaisman, Alan Weisman

    Vanishing Homelands

    Miskito Coast

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    Cecilia Vaisman, Alan Weisman

    Vanishing Homelands

    Miskito Coast

    On Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast, Miskito Indians and American investors face off in a battle over the future of the region’s resources.

    During the 1980s in Nicaragua, the Sandinista government nationalized lucrative timber and seafood concessions held by U.S. companies on the country’s Atlantic coast.

    They accused the Americans of exploiting the resources and leaving the region in poverty.

    Now, with the Sandinistas out of power, American investors are coming back. But thousands of Miskito Indians who fought for their Atlantic Coast homeland in the decade-long Contra war against the Sandinistas have also returned. With their villages wrecked and no jobs, many now pin their hopes on foreign investment.

    But the reappearance of American businessmen has touched off a battle over who should develop the rich resources of the Miskito Coast – and for whose benefit.

    Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.

    Date

    September 7, 1991

    Outlets

    All Things Considered

    Tags

    Themes: Economy, Culture
    Regions: Central America
    Media: Audio
    Other Contributors: Cecilia Vaisman, Alan Weisman
    Other Tags: Nicaragua, Contra war, foreign investment

  • Sandy Tolan, Alan Weisman

    Vanishing Homelands

    Sugar and Sorrow in Hispaniola

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    Sandy Tolan, Alan Weisman

    Vanishing Homelands

    Sugar and Sorrow in Hispaniola

    Haitian sugar cane workers in the Dominican Republic live in squalid conditions. Although the sugar they produce is exported to the United States, the U.S. government has declined to intervene.

    On his second voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus brought sugar cane to the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. Sugar is now the biggest industry in the Dominican Republic, which shares the island with its impoverished neighbor, Haiti.

    Early in the 20th century, and American company began importing Haitian field hands to work its Dominican sugar holdings. Every since, the backbreaking task of cutting cane in the Dominican Republic has belonged to migrant Haitians and their descendants.

    The cane cutters live in hundreds of rural ghettos known as bateys. The living conditions of these permanent labor camps are considered to be among the worst in the hemisphere.

    Recently, reports by human rights groups denouncing treatment of the cane cutters prompted the United States to review trade relations with the Dominican Republic. The U.S. concluded that workers’ conditions are improving and decided not to impose economic sanctions, thus preserving the Dominican Republic’s broad duty-free access to U.S. markets.

    But, in much of the country, little has changed.

    Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.

    Date

    July 22, 1991

    Outlets

    All Things Considered

    Tags

    Themes: Lives, Economy
    Regions: Caribbean
    Media: Audio
    Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan, Alan Weisman
    Other Tags: Dominican Republic, Haiti, migrant workers