Kuna Yala from the air
The Kuna Yala region is home to Panama’s healthiest forests. Photo by Bear Guerra.

Ruxandra Guidi and Bear Guerra recently returned from a two-week visit to the indigenous communities of Kuna Yala, on Panama’s Caribbean coast. They were exploring the Guna (also known as Kuna) people’s relationship to their mainland forest, which is among the best preserved in the region.

Their trip was supported by a Mongabay Special Reporting Initiative fellowship on the role of community forest management in efforts to limit climate change.

recent report by the World Resources Institute looked at deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions in the world’s most heavily forested countries. The researchers found that land held by local and indigenous communities tends to be significantly less affected by deforestation – and to produce far fewer emissions–than land managed by governments or private entities.

Rux and Bear will publish their print, radio, and multimedia stories this fall.

Photo from Peru by Bear Guerra.
Homelands’ inaugural Facebook profile picture by our own Bear Guerra.

Move over, Rupert Murdoch. First a website, then a blog, then a Twitter account… now Homelands is making its move on Facebook, a Silicon Valley start-up that describes itself as a “social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them.”

We understand it also provides companies, governments, criminal syndicates, and other institutions a convenient way to to keep track of everything we think and do. If you do Facebook, please visit us, talk to us, and like us!

Homelands producers
Homelands producers Bear Guerra, Ruxandra Guidi, Cecilia Vaisman, Sandy Tolan, Jonathan Miller, and Alan Weisman

Back in the early 1990s, Homelands’ four founder-members lived together in a rented house in Costa Rica while working on the Vanishing Homelands series. But after that we scattered, and for the last 22 years or so we’ve been a pretty virtual crew. It’s a rare treat when we’re all together in one place.

So it was when we gathered for a day and a half in Los Angeles last month, to catch each other up on our comings and goings and hatch plans for the future. It was the first Homelands convergence with Rux and Bear, who were on their way from a fellowship year in Colorado to a new life in Quito, Ecuador. We were also joined by our excellent board member Maria Blanco, who snapped the picture.

Took a while, but Homelands Productions is now betwittered. (Twitterated? Atweet?) We’re tweeting about journalism, storytelling, documentary, and some of the things that move us: the environment, international development, cultural identity, migration, climate. Today we actually tweeted about baseball, but we don’t expect that to continue. Please follow us at @HomelandsProd!

Pretty soon we’ll update our website, which is current but very 2004. Could a Facebook account be far behind?

Weisman on RT
In speeches and media appearances, Alan Weisman argues that humane and effective ways exist to bring Earth’s human population in line with the planet’s carrying capacity.

Homelands co-founder Alan Weisman’s “Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?” was awarded the 2013 LA Times Book Prize in the science and technology category. “Countdown” was also named the best general nonfiction book of 2013 at the Paris Book Fair and won the 2014 Population Institute Global Media Award for best book.

Ruxandra Guidi‘s story about the relationship between the mother of a victim of gun violence and the person who shot him airs this week as part of the hour-long radio documentary “Guns in America.” The program is the latest episode in the BBC’s “Real America” series.

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Casson Evans was three when he was killed by a stray bullet in Denver.

Ruxandra shares the story of Sharletta Evans, who lost her three year-old son, Casson, when a stray bullet pierced her car. The teenager responsible, Raymond Johnson, was caught and imprisoned, but Sharletta didn’t let things end there. She bound herself to Raymond, and to the mother of an accomplice, in extraordinary ways.

“Real America” is a product of the BBC Public Radio Partnership, which engages independent radio producers in the US to create original work for broadcast on the BBC World Service as well as on public radio stations across the United States.

Other producers contributing to “Guns in America” are Kelly Jones, Lu Olkowski, Dmae Roberts, and Skye Fitzgerald.

Members of the BBC Public Radio Partnership are the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR), the Public Radio Exchange (PRX), WBEZ in Chicago, WBUR in Boston, and KPBS in San Diego. The programs are distributed by American Public Media.

The public radio program Interfaith Voices has received a Wilbur Award from the Religion Communicators Council for its “God and Government” series, which looks at the relationship between religion and the state in 14 countries around the world. The award will be presented at a ceremony on April 5 in Nashville, Tennessee.

The winning entry, a half-hour segment about the struggle over Islam in Egypt, included a feature story by independent producer Kimberly Adams and a discussion with historian Khaled Fahmy of the American University of Cairo and anthropologist Jessica Winegar of Northwestern University.

Interfaith Voices is a weekly religion newsmagazine created and hosted by Maureen Fiedler. Laura Kwerel is the senior producer and Jocelyn Frank is the producer and editor of the “God and Government” series. Homelands’ Jonathan Miller is a consultant for the project.

Flooded village
Children walk through floodwaters in Ustupu Island village in the Kuna Yala region of Panama. With sea levels rising and storms in the islands getting stronger, indigenous Kuna leaders are planning to relocate entire villages to the mainland. Photo by Bear Guerra.

The environmental website Mongabay.org has selected Homelands producer-members Ruxandra Guidi and Bear Guerra for a Special Reporting Initiative award for their multimedia project on climate change and community forestry in Panama.

Climate Change in Kuna Yala
Ustupu Island chief Leodomiro Paredes (pictured with his wife, Imelda) says developed nations responsible for climate change should help pay for his people’s move. Photo by Bear Guerra.

Ruxandra and Bear have reported from the area before, for The Atlantic. With support from Mongabay, they’ll return to do more reporting this spring and summer. They plan to publish their work later this year under a Creative Commons license.

Other winners of Mongabay’s Special Reporting Initiative awards are Robert Eshelman for his look at deforestation in Indonesia and Dominic Bracco II and Erik Vance for an investigation of sustainable fisheries in China.

Radio and print journalist Ruxandra Guidi and photographer Bear Guerra joined Homelands as producers and board members in February. They co-founded the multimedia group Fonografia Collective.