Stories

• Jonathan Miller

  Special Projects

  The Town that Would Transform the World

  Play Now Download

  Jonathan Miller

  Special Projects

  The Town that Would Transform the World

  Homelands senior producer Jonathan Miller reports from Ithaca, New York, whose ambitious Green New Deal seeks to deliver drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and major benefits for the community’s most vulnerable members. It’s a hometown story with implications for hometowns everywhere.

  

  In “The Little Town that Would Transform the World,” Homelands senior producer Jonathan Miller reports from Ithaca, New York, whose ambitious Green New Deal seeks to deliver drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and major benefits for the community’s most vulnerable members. It’s a hometown story with implications for hometowns everywhere.

  The half-hour piece is the latest episode of Living Downstream, a podcast about environmental justice produced by Steve Mencher of Mensch Media and distributed by Northern California Public Media.

  Miller introduces us to Ithaca’s sustainability director, Luis Aguirre-Torres, a Mexican engineer (his Ph.D. research was on entropy) with a global vision and an activist’s passion for disruption. Aguirre-Torres is both an insider and an outsider, a veteran of international climate policymaking but new to Ithaca. Since he arrived this spring, he has sought to broaden the climate conversation to include social change agents and people whose lives are likely to be most affected by climate change — and by climate policies.

  We also meet Richard Rivera, an outreach worker at Ithaca’s sprawling homeless encampment, who deserves a podcast of his own, and civil rights activist and organizational consultant Laura Branca. Both know how hard social change can be, but both are hopeful that progress is possible. Both also appreciate a local government that doesn’t just see the connections between social justice and climate change, but pushes hard to bring the two together.

  Date

  September 22, 2021

  Outlets

  Living Downstream

  Tags

  Themes: Environment, Economy

  Regions: North America

  Other Tags: Climate change, Ithaca, Green New Deal, environmental justice

• Special Projects

  Is the coronavirus pandemic Mother Nature’s revenge?

  Special Projects

  Is the coronavirus pandemic Mother Nature’s revenge?

  On the 50th Earth Day, it’s long past time to recognize that this overcrowded planet has run out of room to cut us any slack. By Alan Weisman Originally published in the Boston Globe Magazine, April …

  

  On the 50th Earth Day, it’s long past time to recognize that this overcrowded planet has run out of room to cut us any slack.

  By Alan Weisman

  Originally published in the Boston Globe Magazine, April 22, 2020

  In China, I always admire how when it comes to food, nothing goes to waste. The Chinese eat practically everything: I’ve been served turtle knuckles, gelatin cubes made from duck’s blood, tuna eyeballs, sea horses, bowls of chicken feet, whole songbirds, and, yes, their nests. I once dined in a Chengdu Buddhist temple with biologists who counted more than 30 plant species on our plates.

  Since I don’t eat mammals, I’ve avoided horseshoe bats or the endangered, anteater-like scaly pangolins — rare Chinese delicacies that, as we’ve learned, harbor a virus they can tolerate, but humans can’t. But before blaming China for igniting a global pandemic, we should understand why its people are such extreme epicureans: their long, sad history of famines. The last one, just 60 years ago, killed an estimated 40 million people.

  Wouldn’t you eat everything you could find, too? Yet the reasons why you don’t have to — so far, anyway — make us all responsible for this plague’s breathtaking explosion, and explain why we can expect more. COVID-19 is a warning to brace ourselves for corrections that nature always makes when a species outstrips its environment.

  It’s painful, though, when your own species is the one being corrected.

  ***

  Calling this coronavirus Mother Nature’s revenge is evocative, but ecology — the science of how everything connects — doesn’t require a sentient, angry Gaia to smite us. Nature isn’t some peaceable kingdom from which we’ve strayed. It’s a violent place where big things devour smaller ones, which feed on even smaller ones. Nature’s balance is a bloody pyramid scheme that, since everything’s recycled, actually works, with multitudinous, prolific little critters below constantly being sacrificed to sustain the fewer but larger, more powerful predators above.

  Like every other species, we Homo sapiens once mainly spent our time searching for food—searching so far that by the end of the last ice age, we’d reached nearly everywhere but New Zealand. By then, we’d started to notice that seeds would germinate where we spilled them, so we didn’t have to roam as much. Likewise, instead of immediately killing animals, we could capture some to eat later — and, like those crops, we could breed even more.

  Since a few farmers can raise food for many, the population grew. But nature had limits: like other species, until fairly recently people died about as fast as they were born. Most children didn’t survive long enough to reproduce, and human life expectancy averaged around 40 years. A few good harvest years might let the settlements that sprouted near fields and water sources boom, until drought or disease regularly knocked their numbers back.

  Then, in 1796, a British surgeon discovered a vaccine for one of the most virulent scourges, smallpox. The 1800s brought pasteurization of milk, disinfectants, and even more vaccines and treatments for rabies, anthrax, diphtheria, and tetanus. As life spans lengthened and infant mortality plunged, the nearly flat-line graph of human population rose past 1 billion. After German scientists in 1913 discovered how to suck nitrogen from the air and slather it on the ground, we shot up like a rocket.

  No other invention has likely ever impacted the world so much. Previously, that essential nutrient was limited to what a few nitrogen-fixers like beans and legumes added to soils, and to how much manure we could spread. With artificial nitrogen fertilizer, we now grow far more plants than nature ever could; without it, nearly half of us wouldn’t be here. Despite two world wars and the murderous Spanish flu, by mid-century all that extra food pushed us past 3 billion. In the 1960s, after Green Revolution agronomists coaxed wheat, corn, and rice to produce far more grains per stalk, we skyrocketed again.

  In nature, no large animal’s population can quadruple in just one century, but we did it by forcing our food supply with chemistry. Unfortunately, the sprays to protect lab-bred crops also slay pollinators and natural pest-controllers. Artificial nitrogen fertilizer sterilizes soil; its runoff fouls downstream waters, and its production emits vast amounts of greenhouse gases. When it degrades, even more wafts skyward. The combined exhaust from our engines, agriculture, industries, appliances, furnaces, and air conditioners has so overloaded our atmosphere that it’s turned on us — turning our seas to carbonic acid, torching our trees, unleashing ticks and mosquitoes, perverting the weather, and sabotaging our future.

  Humankind’s presence on Earth is now so lopsided that growing and grazing our food supply requires nearly half the world’s ice-free land, literally pushing other species off the planet. As we invade their habitats, and poach remaining wildlife for market, their resident viruses and bacteria jump to the handiest species left: us. That’s how nearly 75 percent of new infectious diseases this century originated. As temperatures rise, even more will spawn.

  With 7.8 billion of us bound tightly by trade and travel, even comparatively weaker contagions like COVID-19 — much less lethal than, say, Ebola — can now trash our economy, crash our lives, and expose how shaky civilization’s scaffolding really is, including our now-flimsy food chain: The few genetically-enhanced monocultures we depend on — try counting the species on your plate — are as susceptible to plagues as we are.

  Yet even as we shudder to realize how near collapse looms, we marvel at strangely placid streets, at birdsong, and at glimpses of unexpected animals. Amid our yearning to throng those streets again, COVID-19 reminds us of the natural balance we miss, even to the point of wondering if collapse might not be so terrible.

  Following the Spanish flu, this country went on a binge called the Roaring Twenties. But that 1918 pandemic was conflated with a world war; an armistice celebration was inevitable. This one is coupled with a far greater existential threat, from which we’re momentarily distracted. When this coronavirus finally burns out, there’ll still be a deepening climate crisis that will take much longer than any pandemic to abate. Will our deadly brush with COVID-19 help us finally see that nature’s run out of room to cut us any slack?

  To get through this century alive, we must stop burning things for energy, and give animals the space they need — as Noah understood, we can’t save ourselves without them. (Underscoring United Nations warnings that we only have until 2030 to keep global warming from waxing out of control, a recent paper in the journal Naturefinds that by then — just 10 years from now — untold thousands of our companion species may be irretrievably beyond their temperature tolerance.)

  How best to clear space? Start by educating every girl alive. Rich country or poor, regardless of religion, females who get past high school average fewer than two children apiece, and are indispensable to the social equity needed to engage with problems facing us all. And as we salvage our wrecked economies, let’s discard the notion that growth equals health. Endless economic growth clearly isn’t possible on a planet that doesn’t grow — look where it’s gotten us.

  Real health means fewer of us crowding and infecting each other, clear skies and water, ample room to breathe, and thriving wildlife: not for sale, but in its element, where it’s thrilling to see, and where it can keep its microbes and viruses to itself.

  Alan Weisman is the author of The World Without Us and Countdown. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.

  Outlets

  The Boston Globe

  Tags

  Themes: Environment, Health, Food, Economy

  Other Contributors: Alan Weisman

  Other Tags: Earth Day, Countdown, The World Without Us, population, Covid-19, Alan Weisman

• Special Projects

  Back to the Garden

  Special Projects

  Back to the Garden

  Alan Weisman reconsiders the Genesis story in the light of what we now know came after it. His essay originally appeared in the 2018 book “Eden Turned on Its Side” by photographer Meridel Rubenstein.

  

  By Alan Weisman

  This essay originally appeared in Eden Turned on Its Side, by photographer Meridel Rubenstein, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Art Museum/University of New Mexico Press, 2018.

  We are stardust,
  billion-year-old carbon.
  We are golden,
  caught in the devil’s bargain.
  And we’ve got to get ourselves
  back to the garden.

  —Joni Mitchell, Woodstock, 1969

  Everyone knows which garden she meant. Something in us yearns to go back there. But could we, somehow? And to what, exactly, would we be returning?

  To anyone whose cultural roots are entwined with a certain mystical history emanating from the Middle East, the Garden of Eden evokes either a carefree time before sin appeared, or a pristine, untainted planet—or possibly both, if you believe that the twenty-first century’s eco-perils stem from our sins against nature. But whichever it may be, it hearkens to a time before any of us was alive—yet one for which we oddly feel a visceral nostalgia.

  That gut longing is even stranger, given that our notion of Eden comes not from experience, but from a book—in fact, from one of its most problematic passages. The Judeo-Christian Bible begins, logically enough, with God creating the world. Within six days, there are stars overhead, sun by day, moonlight by night, seas and sea creatures, land, plants, land animals, and finally people, both male and female. It’s a world we’d basically recognize, other than that it is entirely vegetarian: fruit, seeds, and green herbs shall be for meat, God tells humans and beasts alike.

  All of that is described in Chapter 1—where, incidentally, there’s no mention of any garden: the entire Earth is bountifully blessed. But in Chapter 2, after the seventh day when God rests, logic begins to unravel.

  Suddenly, the whole story starts over from scratch. This time, there’s no workweek plus a Sabbath; instead, God conjures up Heaven and Earth in a single day. And the sequence changes: again, he invents plants early on, but he sets them aside in some celestial nursery because, unlike before, he hasn’t created water yet. Next, he does so—then, just as the soil begins to moisten, he selects some dust to mold into a human being. A male.

  Only after breathing life up man’s nostrils does God add the foliage—but this time, it’s to a garden. However gorgeous and fertile it might be, Eden isn’t all bliss and leisure. Here, God intends for man to “dress,” “keep,” and “till the ground.” He sets guidelines about what can or can’t be harvested, designates a network of rivers for irrigation, and finally, lest man be lonely, creates animals.

  Adam gets to name these animals and to identify which are domestic and which are wildlife, yet they fail to assuage his solitude. So, borrowing one of his ribs, God clones him a more tempting companion. And you know the rest.

  Much has been made by Biblical scholars of these two conflicting, coexisting creation tales. As their syntax and even their names for God differ (Elohim in Chapter 1; Yahweh in Chapter 2), it’s widely assumed that they were written at different times by different authors, drawing on different versions of earlier Assyrian and Sumerian legends that were later conflated, often awkwardly, into a single testament by anointed redactors, who thrashed out what was canonical and what wasn’t.

  Small wonder religion breeds so much discord. To literalists who claim that the Bible is divinely inspired and thus entirely true, the second chapter simply details Chapter 1’s sixth day when man appears, to underscore God’s special relationship with us. (Thus, presumably, it’s more fitting that humans should precede the flora and fauna over which they hold dominion.)

  Babylonian Talmudists tried reconciling another notable discrepancy, over whether woman was born simultaneously with man or later ripped from his rib cage like a bloody afterthought, by declaring that both were true. Appropriating a Sumerian legend of a she-demon, they concluded that Chapter 1’s female was Adam’s rebellious first wife, Lilith, who disdained his authority and abandoned him. In Chapter 2, God tries to ensure that this doesn’t happen again. The woman fashioned from Adam’s own bone is merely his “help meet”—so subservient she doesn’t even get a proper name until after she also proves too disobedient and seductive to control and gets them booted from the garden.

  And us, too, so the tale goes—but that may well be why both creation myths are included in Genesis. Taken together, they reflect an evolutionary truth sensed by whoever compiled the Bible from collective memories inherited through their forebears’ stories and perhaps even through their cells and genes. In one version, we had the whole Earth’s bounty to pluck for our nourishment. (Archeology, littered with spear points, choppers, and blades, belies the vegetarianism, which probably seeped into the account much later, during the time of Isaiah: an ardent herbivore who condemned animal sacrifice and who prophesized a post-Messianic paradise where wolves would dwell among lambs and leopards lie peacefully with kids.)

  But in version two, we are no longer hunter-gatherers. We’re stewards of orchards, tillers of soil, and pastoralists of the cattle that Adam named. Thus was born agriculture. Yet by giving us a garden, was the Lord setting us up for a Fall?

  To grow, conveniently close at hand, food that we once roamed hither and yon to scrounge might have seemed to our ancestors an astonishing improvement over what Chapter 1’s God—or gods, or Mother Nature—had originally given us. But since a few farmers and herdsmen can feed many, the concentration of sustenance eventually led to concentrations of people. Soon our increasing numbers had to seek more fields and pastures, but they found that the greater world wasn’t all an oasis like Eden. Before long, as Genesis recounts repeatedly, people were warring over the choicest lands, and especially over water. This has not abated.

  What Genesis doesn’t mention, of course, is that we were fighting long before we were human: Our chimpanzee cousins have never traded foraging in trees for working the soil, but they battle for territory anyhow, as our common primate ancestors also surely did. What sets us apart from them, however, is what else agriculture ignited.

  Once farming and grazing were established, for the first time in our or any species’ history, a significant portion of the population didn’t have to spend all day finding food. Gradually people devised new things to do for a living: from artisanship to architecture to trade, from prostitution to priesthood. Soon many of us lived farther from crops and livestock and nearer to each other, in settlements, then villages, then cities. Whatever grief early urban dwellers might have sustained for some fabled, lost Edenic profusion gave way to the thrill of something entirely new: civilization.

  

  Long before that happened, successive waves of Homo sapiens had begun dispersing from our African origins. By fifty thousand years ago, we had spread all the way to Australia—and, by about fourteen thousand years ago, to the Americas. As a result, civilization emerged independently in several places. Among the first to appear was likely the one in the fertile crescent that our prehistoric ancestors followed from Africa into Asia. As we continue to learn about it, it turns out that Eden may be more than just a metaphor.

  Genesis locates the Garden of Eden quite precisely, near the confluence of four rivers: the Tigris and Euphrates—whose joint Mesopotamian valley is often called civilization’s cradle—and the Gihon and Pison. The 1611 English-language King James Bible placed the Gihon across the Red Sea in Ethiopia, rather far from Mesopotamia. But several modern scholars believe that its translators confused Ethiopia’s ancient name, Cush, with a similar Hebrew name for the land of the Kashshites, who lived in what is now Iran’s Zagros Mountains. From there a substantial river, the Karun, flows southward, reaching a delta just above the Persian Gulf at a point almost directly opposite Saudi Arabia and Kuwait’s north-flowing Wadi Al-Batin.

  That point is sixty miles below where the Tigris and Euphrates meet today, but back then—as noted by archaeologists who contend that the Karun and Wadi Al-Batin are the Bible’s Gihon and Pison—local topography was far different.

  Until about eleven thousand years ago, repeated Pleistocene glaciations locked much of the world’s water into ice sheets, and oceans were hundreds of feet lower than today. When the first Homo sapiens reached the Persian Gulf, its upper third was well above sea level. British archaeologist Jeffrey Rose calls it the Gulf Oasis: a luxuriant delta, continuously fed by nutrient-rich sediments borne by the Tigris, Euphrates, Karun, and Wadi Al-Batin.

  For hunter-gatherers, it would have been a paradise. But post-Pleistocene warming, which allowed their descendants to learn how to farm local wild wheat and legumes, also meant that to the north, vast glaciers were melting. As the thawing accelerated, worldwide coastal flooding commenced. At its peak, eight thousand years ago, Persian Gulf waters were encroaching so fast, according to American archaeologist and Middle East specialist Juris Zarins, that with each generation they advanced several kilometers farther inland. By the time civilization awakened in its cradle a millennium later, paradise had been lost beneath rising seas.

  Fall and flood: memories passed from prehistoric ancestors to Mesopotamia’s Sumerians, Assyrians, Akkadians, and Babylonians, who passed them on to the Hebrews, and to us. Today, the last traces we have of the oasis that inspired them are some lush wetlands in Iraq’s Tigris-Euphrates floodplain, upstream of that now-submerged Eden. During the 1990s these rare marshes were also nearly lost, when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein tried to drain them to expel Shia rebels. But following his ousting, a courageous local and international effort has recovered almost half of them.

  Staunching that ecological disaster is one of the few encouraging stories from that tortured region in recent years—but unless we act decisively, it could prove in vain, as ice is melting again. In an elaborate, circuitous lineage that humanity has confected, agriculture begat civilization, which begat industrialization, which inevitably—some might say incestuously—begat industrialized agriculture. Force-feeding soil with chemical fertilizer, and genetically developing hybrid grains with many extra kernels per stalk, we multiplied our foodstuffs far beyond what nature ever could supply. But unintentionally this unprecedented abundance also multiplied ourselves.

  Averting famine means more people live to beget more people. And so human numbers quadrupled during the past century—the most abnormal population leap for any large species in the history of biology. With all of us hooked on energy, the exhaust from our swollen industrial civilization keeps turning up the heat, forcing seawater up river deltas and over coastlines. If the result of Adam and Eve’s original sin was procreation, here we are again, headed for another fall.

  Pushed to this modern brink, more than ever we long to reclaim the fresh hope of Eden. Yet lest we despair, it’s comforting to realize that one day this Earth will surely see Eden restored.

  Should our yearning help us muster the environmental wisdom and the will to act upon it, we’ll do whatever it takes to bring humans back into balance with the rest of nature.

  Or, should we fail, we’ll drag many more species and much priceless Earthly beauty down with us. But not forever. This planet has endured enormous losses and massive extinctions before, from cataclysmic volcanic eruptions to colliding asteroids—yet each time, life, miraculously resilient, has rebounded, lovelier than ever. As it will again.

  One way or another, we’ll be there too. Either we’ll have survived our excesses, and, like Noah, saved enough animals to give our own species another chance—or, like Adam, we will have returned to the dust from which we sprang.

  Copyright Alan Weisman 2018

  Date

  July 28, 2018

  Tags

  Themes: Environment, Peace & Conflict, Culture, Health, Food, Economy

  Regions: Middle East

  Media: Photography, Text

  Other Contributors: Alan Weisman

  Other Tags: Bible, environment, Eden, iraq, population, Mesopotamia, Anthropocene

• Jonathan Miller

  Special Projects

  Power to the People

  Play Now Download

  Jonathan Miller

  Special Projects

  Power to the People

  As politicians argue about what to do about climate change, communities around the United States are taking matters into their own hands – pledging to reduce their carbon emissions, then hustling to make good on their promises. From Ithaca, NY, an hour-long special for State of the Re:Union.

  

  The climate is going haywire, and politicians are bickering over what to do about it, or whether to do anything at all. But around the country, communities are taking matters into their own hands, publicly pledging to shrink their carbon footprints, then setting out to make good on their promises. Leading, they hope, from below.

  

  In this special hour for State of the Re:Union, guest producer Jonathan Miller gives us a tour of his uber-progressive but practical-minded hometown of Ithaca, New York, where citizens and civic leaders are hustling to wean themselves from fossil fuels.

  Acknowledgments: Thanks to Judy Hyman for composing and performing most of the music in the program. Also thanks to Peter Bardaglio (Tompkins County Climate Protection Initiative), Gay Nicholson (Sustainable Tompkins), Ed Marx and Katie Borgella (Tompkins County Planning Department), City and Town of Ithaca Sustainability Planner Nick Goldsmith, Mike Sigler (Tompkins County Legislature), Jim Catalano, Dylan Brown, Annie and Marie Burns of The Burns Sisters, The Horse Flies, Jeff Claus, Richie Stearns, and the Cornell Glee Club.

  A list of all the music heard on the program can be found here.

  Links:

  Black Oak Wind Farm
  EcoVillage at Ithaca
  Sustainable Tompkins
  Sustainable Ithaca
  Tompkins County Climate Protection Initiative
  Solar Tompkins
  Cornell University Sustainable Campus
  Tompkins County Sustainability
  Town of Ithaca Sustainability
  New York State “Reforming the Energy Vision” Initiative
  New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA)

  Date

  April 22, 2015

  Outlets

  State of the Re:Union

  Tags

  Themes: Economy, Environment

  Regions: North America

  Media: Audio

  Other Contributors: Jonathan Miller

  Other Tags: renewable energy, fracking, carbon footprint, solar energy, community-shared solar, wind energy, cohousing, Svante Myrick, Black Oak Wind Farm, EcoVillage at Ithaca, Climate change

• Sandy Tolan

  Special Projects

  Children of the Stone

  Sandy Tolan

  Special Projects

  Children of the Stone

  Sandy Tolan’s book about freedom and conflict, determination and vision, and the potential of music to help children everywhere see new possibilities for their lives.

  It is an unlikely story. Ramzi Hussein Aburedwan, a child from a Palestinian refugee camp, confronts an occupying army, gets an education, masters an instrument, dreams of something much bigger than himself, and then, through his charisma and persistence, inspires scores of others to work with him to make that dream real. The dream: a school to transform the lives of thousands of children – as Ramzi’s life was transformed – through music.
  
  Musicians from all over the world come to help. A violist leaves the London Symphony Orchestra to work with Ramzi at his new school, Al Kamandjati. An aspiring British opera singer moves to the West Bank to teach voice lessons. Daniel Barenboim, the eminent Israeli conductor, invites Ramzi to join the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which he founded with the late Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said.

  “Ramzi has transformed not only his life, his destiny, but that of many other people,” Barenboim says. “This is an extraordinary collection of children from all over Palestine that have all been inspired and opened to the beauty of life.”
  

  In Children of the Stone: The Power of Music in a Hard Land, Homelands co-founder Sandy Tolan chronicles Ramzi’s journey – from stone thrower to music student to school founder – and shows how, through his love of music, he created something lasting and beautiful in a land torn by violence and war.

  This is a story about the power of music, but also about freedom and conflict, determination and vision. It’s a vivid portrait of life amid checkpoints and military occupation, a growing movement of nonviolent resistance, the prospects of musical collaboration across the Israeli-Palestinian divide, and the potential of music to help children everywhere see new possibilities for their lives.

  For book tour information, articles, excerpts, and other resources, visit Sandy’s author page on Facebook or his blog, Ramallah Cafe.

  Reviews

  “Eye-opening… Tolan’s exhaustive research and journalistic attention to detail shine through every page of this sweeping chronicle.” – Publishers Weekly

  “[Tolan] portrays the multigenerational Israeli-Palestinian conflict by focusing on the life and musical abilities of one youngster, Ramzi Hussein Aburedwan, and his family and friends… This is an engrossing and powerful story, moving skillfully amid the failure of the never-ending battles and ‘peace’ talks between Israel and Palestine and the determination of one brave young man to change his world.” – starred review, Booklist

  “A resolute, heart-rending story of real change and possibility in the Palestinian-Israeli impasse.” – Kirkus Reviews

  “A non-fiction account that reflects one individual’s belief in the power of music and culture to transform lives. His story is proof of the famous words of Margaret Mead – ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.’” – Yo-Yo Ma

  “Somewhere amidst the separation barriers and the countless checkpoints, the refugee camps and the demolished homes, the fruitless negotiations and endless conflict, there is a people yearning for a life of dignity and normalcy. You won’t see them on TV or in many newspapers. But you will find them in The Children of Stone, Sandy Tolan’s moving account of the dispossessed children of Palestine, and the transformative power that music has had in giving them meaning and reason for hope.” – Reza Aslan, author of No God But God  and #1 New York Times bestseller Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth 

  “Children of the Stone is alive with compassion, hope, and great inspiration. It is not necessary to believe in music’s power to defeat evil in order to be enchanted by this wonderful story.” – Tom Segev, Israeli historian and author of One Palestine, Complete

  “Sandy Tolan’s narrative artistry fuses the coming of age of a talented, ambitious, and fiercely dedicated musician with the story of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories conquered in 1967. A major contribution to our understanding of who they are and essential to a political resolution of the conflict.” – Joel Benin, Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Stanford University

  “Sandy Tolan has produced another gem on what is happening under the surface in Palestine. The book contains enthralling biographical trajectories of ordinary people fighting against the odds. Written in the style of investigative journalism, the book is riveting and uplifting, without skirting issues of contestation and controversy.” – Salim Tamari, Professor of Sociology, Bir Zeit University (West Bank), and author of Year of the Locust

  Date

  April 2015

  Outlets

  Bloomsbury USA

  Tags

  Themes: Culture, Peace & Conflict, Lives

  Regions: Middle East

  Media: Text

  Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan

  Other Tags: Palestine, intifada, West Bank, Ramallah, viola, israel, music, Ramzi Aburedwan

• Alan Weisman

  Special Projects

  Countdown

  Alan Weisman

  Special Projects

  Countdown

  In this monumental piece of reporting, Alan Weisman travels to more than 20 countries, beginning in Israel and Palestine and ending in Iran, on an urgent search for ways to restore the balance between our species’ population and our planet’s capacity to sustain us.

  In his bestselling book The World Without Us, Homelands co-founder Alan Weisman considered how the Earth could heal and even refill empty niches if relieved of humanity’s constant pressures. Behind that groundbreaking thought experiment was his hope that we would be inspired to find a way to add humans back to this vision of a restored, healthy planet – only in harmony, not mortal combat, with the rest of nature.

  With a million more of us every 4½ days on a planet that’s not getting any bigger, prospects for a sustainable human future seem ever more in doubt. For this long awaited follow-up book, Weisman traveled to more than 20 countries to ask what experts agreed were the probably the most important questions on Earth – and also the hardest: How many humans can the planet hold without capsizing? How robust must the Earth’s ecosystem be to assure our continued existence? Can we know which other species are essential to our survival? And, how might we actually arrive at a stable, optimum population, and design an economy to allow genuine prosperity without endless growth?

  By vividly detailing the burgeoning effects of our cumulative existence, Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? reveals what may be the fastest, most acceptable, practical, and affordable way of returning our planet and our presence on it to balance. The result is a landmark work of reporting: devastating, urgent, and, ultimately, deeply hopeful.

  Countdown was the winner of the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for science writing, the 2013 Paris Book Festival Prize for nonfiction, the 2014 Nautilus Gold Book Award, and the Population Institute’s 2014 Global Media Award for best book. It was a finalist for the Orion Prize and the Books for a Better Life Award.

  Reviews

  “[Countdown] details the burgeoning effects that human population growth has on our environment. Weisman reveals what may be the fastest, most acceptable way of balancing this impact.” – Mother Earth News

  “Alan Weisman’s comprehensive and wide-ranging Countdown is the best, most important book on this vital topic in years and demands to be read by all.” – Edd Doerr, Secular Humanist

  “[Countdown] takes the reader on an exploratory global tour with Weisman to see how different cultures, religions, nationalities and tribes view childbearing and population growth and how they are coping with increasing strains on cropland, water supply, biodiversity and public health… I’d recommend it to teachers, students, or anyone looking to learn more about our rapidly growing world while enjoying a page-turner with a diverse cast of characters.” – Population Education

  “Please read this book. Take your time. You will weep and yet be cheered. As Alan said when he was here in Minneapolis, ‘there are saints out there’ so let’s support what they are doing and gain a little grace, each one of us.” – Louise Erdrich

  “Alan Weisman’s Countdown is rich, subtle and elaborate. His magisterial work should be the first port of call for anyone interested in the relationship between population and the environment… It’s a tightly argued, fast-paced adventure that crosses the planet in search of contrasts.” – Literary Review

  “His gift as a writer with a love of science is in drawing links for readers on how everything in our world is connected – in this case, population, consumption and the environment…The pleasure in reading Countdown is in the interplay of interviews with experts and with everyday working people around the world, all trying to figure out the size of family they want. Even the experts reveal themselves as a humane and committed lot.” – The Toronto Star

  “Countdown is a gripping narrative by a fair-minded investigative journalist who interviewed dozens of scientists and experts in various fields in 21 countries. “ – Wall Street Journal

  “Weisman makes a powerful case that the best way to manage the global population is by empowering women, through both education and access to contraception – so that they can make more informed choices about family size and the kind of lives they want for themselves and their children.” – Mother Jones

  “He makes a strong case for slowing global population growth – and even for reducing overall population numbers – as a prerequisite for achieving a sustainable future…. Weisman’s emphasis on expanding access to contraception as the next-best strategy is both pragmatic and workable, as past efforts have shown. It is to be hoped that his message may be heeded sooner rather than later.” – Nature

  “If, as Weisman posits, population growth is inextricably linked in today’s world with national security, what’s the solution? One answer on offer is through family planning development initiatives and women’s empowerment.” – US News and World Report

  “A must read for all those who are concerned about the human prospect.” – The Huffington Post

  “Spirited descriptions, a firm grasp of complex material, and a bomb defuser’s steady precision make for a riveting read…. Weisman’s cogent and forthright global inquiry, a major work, delineates how education, women’s equality, and family planning can curb poverty, thirst, hunger, and environmental destruction. Rigorous and provoking.” – Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

  “This is not a jeremiad but a realistic, vividly detailed exploration of the greatest problem facing our species.” – Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Provocative and sobering, this vividly reported book raises profound concerns about our future.” – Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  Date

  September 2013

  Outlets

  Little Brown & Company

  Tags

  Themes: Culture, Health, Food, Economy, Technology, Environment

  Regions: Africa, Central America, Asia / Oceania, Middle East, South America, Europe, Caribbean, North America

  Media: Text

  Other Contributors: Alan Weisman

  Other Tags: contraception, Palestine, Iran, family planning, China, carrying capacity, israel, population, Sahel

• Jonathan Miller

  Food for 9 Billion

  Alt Meat Lunch

  Play Now Download

  Jonathan Miller

  Food for 9 Billion

  Alt Meat Lunch

  As global demand for animal protein surges, so do the environmental costs of producing it. Researchers in the Netherlands are exploring alternatives, from lab-grown burgers to edible insects to faux meat made from plants. But will people eat them?

  

  As global demand for animal protein surges, so do the environmental costs of producing it. Researchers in the Netherlands are exploring alternatives, from lab-grown burgers to edible insects to faux meat made from plants. But will people eat them?

  Date

  August 2, 2013

  Outlets

  PRI's The World

  Tags

  Themes: Economy, Health, Food, Culture

  Regions: Caribbean, Europe, North America

  Media: Audio

  Other Contributors: Jonathan Miller

• Joshua McNichols

  Food for 9 Billion

  Foraged Lunch

  Play Now Download

  Joshua McNichols

  Food for 9 Billion

  Foraged Lunch

  In Seattle and other U.S. cities, a movement is growing to bring foraging from the margins to the mainstream as a hedge against climate change and food insecurity.

  

  In Seattle and other U.S. cities, a movement is growing to bring foraging from the margins to the mainstream as a hedge against climate change and food insecurity.

  Joshua McNichols is a producer for KUOW Presents and the author of The Urban Farm Handbook.

  Date

  June 3, 2013

  Other Contributor(s)

  Joshua McNichols

  Outlets

  PRI's The World

  Tags

  Themes: Environment, Food

  Regions: North America

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: foraging, Seattle, Melany Herrera

• Sam Eaton

  Food for 9 Billion

  Intensive Lunch

  Play Now Download

  Sam Eaton

  Food for 9 Billion

  Intensive Lunch

  Farmers in India say a novel way of growing rice and other crops has quadrupled yields while using less seed, water, and fertilizer. But some scientists doubt the gains are real.

  

  Farmers in India say a novel way of growing rice and other crops has quadrupled yields while using less seed, water, and fertilizer. But some scientists doubt the gains are real.

  Date

  June 6, 2013

  Outlets

  PRI's The World

  Tags

  Themes: Food, Technology, Environment

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: rice, System of Rice Intensification, Bihar

• Bianca Vasquez Toness

  Food for 9 Billion

  Recycled Lunch

  Play Now Download

  Bianca Vasquez Toness

  Food for 9 Billion

  Recycled Lunch

  In India, some farmers are replacing chemical fertilizers with the contents of their latrines. It’s cheaper and produces less greenhouse gas. Is it safe?

  

  In India, some farmers are replacing chemical fertilizers with the contents of their latrines. It’s cheaper and produces less greenhouse gas. Is it safe?

  Date

  June 13, 2013

  Outlets

  PRI's The World

  Tags

  Themes: Food, Environment, Health

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: nightsoil, Bangalore, fertilizer, human waste

• Mary Kay Magistad

  Food for 9 Billion

  Low-Water Lunch

  Play Now Download

  Mary Kay Magistad

  Food for 9 Billion

  Low-Water Lunch

  Growing more food with less water will be one of the biggest challenges in the coming era of surging populations and increasing climate disruption. In China, scientists say they’ve developed a new irrigation method that’s twice as efficient as today’s best technology.

  

  Growing more food with less water will be one of the biggest challenges in the coming era of surging populations and increasing climate disruption. In China, scientists say they’ve developed a new irrigation method that’s twice as efficient as today’s best technology.

  Date

  June 17, 2013

  Outlets

  PRI's The World

  Tags

  Themes: Food, Environment

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Audio

• Sam Eaton

  Food for 9 Billion

  Carbon-Neutral Lunch

  Play Now Download

  Sam Eaton

  Food for 9 Billion

  Carbon-Neutral Lunch

  Since announcing that it would become the world’s first carbon-neutral country, Costa Rica has been a laboratory for reducing the climate impact of agriculture.

  

  Since announcing that it would become the world’s first carbon-neutral country, Costa Rica has been a laboratory for reducing the climate impact of agriculture. Both small and large farms have been looking for ways to decrease emissions.

  Date

  June 20, 2013

  Outlets

  PRI's The World

  Tags

  Themes: Environment, Food

  Regions: Central America

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: Costa Rica, carbon neutrality, agribusiness, agroecology

• Jonathan Miller

  Food for 9 Billion

  Aquaponic Lunch

  Play Now Download

  Jonathan Miller

  Food for 9 Billion

  Aquaponic Lunch

  Aquaponics is a recirculating system for raising fish and vegetables that uses less land, water, and chemicals than traditional methods. For years it has attracted hobbyists but few others. A Ugandan entrepreneur thinks its time has finally come.

  

  Aquaponics is a recirculating system for raising fish and vegetables that uses less land, water, and chemicals than traditional methods. For years it has attracted hobbyists but few others. A Ugandan entrepreneur thinks its time has finally come.

  Date

  June 24, 2013

  Outlets

  PRI's The World

  Tags

  Themes: Environment, Food

  Regions: Africa

  Media: Audio

  Other Contributors: Jonathan Miller

  Other Tags: Uganda, aquaculture, aquaponics

• Mary Kay Magistad

  Food for 9 Billion

  Vegan Lunch

  Play Now Download

  Mary Kay Magistad

  Food for 9 Billion

  Vegan Lunch

  Meat consumption in China is soaring, and so are the greenhouse gas emissions that meat production causes. But there is a nascent counter-trend – a small but growing vegan movement in the country’s big cities.

  

  Meat consumption in China is soaring, and so are the greenhouse gas emissions that meat production causes. But there is a nascent counter-trend – a small but growing vegan movement in the country’s big cities.

  Date

  June 27, 2013

  Outlets

  PRI's The World

  Tags

  Themes: Health, Environment, Food

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: meat consumption, vegan, vegetarian, China

• Sam Eaton

  Food for 9 Billion

  Alt Staple Lunch

  Play Now Download

  Sam Eaton

  Food for 9 Billion

  Alt Staple Lunch

  Amaranth virtually disappeared from Mexican diets after the Spanish banned it because of its use in human sacrifice rituals. Now there are efforts to bring it back for its superior nutritional qualities and its hardiness in the face of climate change.

  

  Amaranth virtually disappeared from Mexican diets after the Spanish banned it because of its use in human sacrifice rituals. Now there are efforts to bring it back for its superior nutritional qualities and its hardiness in the face of climate change.

  Date

  July 1, 2013

  Tags

  Themes: Culture, Environment, Food

  Regions: North America

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: Mexico, amaranth, maize

• Jonathan Miller

  Food for 9 Billion

  Desert Lunch

  Play Now Download

  Jonathan Miller

  Food for 9 Billion

  Desert Lunch

  In the desert of Qatar, scientists and engineers are working to transform “what we have enough of” – sand, sunlight, sea water, and CO2 – into “what we need more of” – energy, fresh water, and food. Does their idea hold promise for the world’s driest places?

  

  In the desert of Qatar, scientists and engineers are working to transform “what we have enough of” – sand, sunlight, sea water, and CO2 – into “what we need more of” – energy, fresh water, and food. Does their idea hold promise for the world’s driest places?

  Date

  July 8, 2013

  Outlets

  PRI's The World

  Tags

  Themes: Environment, Technology, Food, Economy

  Regions: Middle East

  Media: Audio

  Other Contributors: Jonathan Miller

  Other Tags: desert agriculture, Sahara Forest Project, Qatar

• Serene Fang, Susanne Rust

  Food for 9 Billion

  California Looks to Milk China’s Dairy Demand

  Serene Fang, Susanne Rust

  Food for 9 Billion

  California Looks to Milk China’s Dairy Demand

  As U.S. demand falls, California dairies are finding new markets in China. That may make sense for the industry, at least for now. But what about the planet?

  As U.S. demand falls, California dairies are finding new markets in China. That may make sense for the industry, at least for now. But what about the planet?

  This story was produced by The Center for Investigative Reporting, edited by Richard C. Paddock, and copy edited by Nikki Frick and Christine Lee. You can see photos and read more here.

  Date

  June 14, 2013

  Outlets

  PBS NewsHour

  Tags

  Themes: Food, Economy, Environment

  Regions: North America, Asia / Oceania

  Media: Video

  Other Tags: China, California, dairy

• Jonathan Miller

  Food for 9 Billion

  Transgenic Lunch

  Play Now Download

  Jonathan Miller

  Food for 9 Billion

  Transgenic Lunch

  Scientists in the U.S. and Uganda have developed genetically engineered cassava plants that resist two devastating viral diseases. Is it a boon for small farmers or a Trojan horse?

  

  For years, proponents of genetic engineering have said that gene-splicing technology can help the world’s poorest farmers – making their crops more nutritious, or more productive, or protecting them against drought and pests and diseases.

  But they haven’t had much to show for those claims. Even in developing countries, most of the land area planted in GMOs is devoted to commercial crops on industrial farms. Opponents of GMOs have included that fact among their many arguments against transgenics.

  Today, though, there are dozens of genetically engineered crops in the pipeline that are specifically aimed at small-scale farmers in poor countries. In many cases, they are being developed by public sector scientists who plan to make them available at little or no cost.

  In this story, we travel to Uganda to meet researchers working on a genetically engineered cassava variety that resists two devastating viral diseases. The scientists say it’s the best hope for saving a critically important food security crop.

  But critics question whether the new variety is really necessary and suggest that the real goal is to break down resistance to GMOs on a continent that has been wary of the technology. Are GMOs a boon for Africa, or are they a Trojan Horse?

  Date

  July 15, 2013

  Outlets

  PRI's The World

  Tags

  Themes: Environment, Technology, Food

  Regions: Africa

  Media: Audio

  Other Contributors: Jonathan Miller

  Other Tags: Uganda, cassava, GMOs

• Sam Eaton

  Food for 9 Billion

  Farmers in India Find Promise in Ancient Seeds

  Sam Eaton

  Food for 9 Billion

  Farmers in India Find Promise in Ancient Seeds

  In India, climate change is forcing farmers to adapt to saltwater intrusion, flooding, and droughts. Scientists are racing to breed a new generation of climate-resilient crops that can survive these changes. But many farmers are turning to the seeds that sustained their ancestors.

  

  When a cyclone hits India, the sea-drenched soil can remain salty for years. You can see the evidence in the Ganges River delta, packed with more than 4 million people, four years after Cyclone Aila hit the region.

  Farmers are finding that new high-yielding rice varieties are not withstanding the salty onslaught. Vegetables are also nearly impossible to grow.

  The problem is expected to get worse as climate change brings higher sea levels, stronger storms, and more frequent droughts.

  Scientists are racing to breed a new generation of climate-resilient crops that can survive these changes. But many farmers are turning to the seeds that sustained their ancestors.

  This story was produced by The Center for Investigative Reporting.

  Producer, Reporter, Camera: Sam Eaton
  Editor: Linda Peckham
  Additional Editing: Adithya Sambamurthy
  Transcription: Karishma Suri
  Archival Footage: Oxfam International
  Thanks to: Soma Saha, WWF-India Sundarbans Program
  Senior Producer: Stephen Talbot
  Executive Producer: Sharon Tiller

  Date

  June 13, 2013

  Outlets

  PBS NewsHour

  Tags

  Themes: Food, Technology

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Video

  Other Tags: plant breeding, rice, Climate change, India, traditional seeds

• Sam Eaton

  Food for 9 Billion

  In Search for Food, Singapore Looks Skyward

  Sam Eaton

  Food for 9 Billion

  In Search for Food, Singapore Looks Skyward

  In Singapore, the challenge of feeding a growing population is pushing the concept of urban farming to new heights.

  Singapore has one of the highest population densities on the planet. More than five million people crowd into this small, wealthy island city. Land here comes at a premium, forcing people to expand up, rather than out. And it’s not just office towers and apartment complexes that are reaching skyward. Singapore now has one of the world’s first commercial vertical farms.

  This story was produced by The Center for Investigative Reporting.

  Producer, Reporter, Camera: Sam Eaton
  Additional Camera: Thomas Ahern
  Editor: Linda Peckham
  Additional Editing: Adithya Sambamurthy
  Transcription: Karishma Suri
  Senior Producer: Stephen Talbot
  Executive Producer: Sharon Tiller

  Date

  June 12, 2013

  Outlets

  PBS NewsHour

  Tags

  Themes: Food, Technology

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Video

  Other Tags: urban agriculture, Singapore

• Jonathan Miller

  Food for 9 Billion

  Could Agriculture Bloom in the Desert?

  Jonathan Miller

  Food for 9 Billion

  Could Agriculture Bloom in the Desert?

  Petroleum-rich Qatar has welcomed innovators seeking solutions to the challenges facing desert areas worldwide, from renewable energy to fresh water to food production.

  Petroleum-rich Qatar has welcomed innovators seeking solutions to the challenges facing desert areas worldwide – from renewable energy to fresh water to food production.

  One of the most ambitious experiments is the Sahara Forest Project, which looks to transform seawater, sunlight and carbon dioxide into fresh water, vegetables, trees, electricity, salt, biofuel, and animal feed.

  The technologies it uses – concentrated solar power, evaporative cooling, thermal desalination – aren’t new. The innovation lies in the combination of so many in one integrated system. Does this kind of complex, capital-intensive, high-tech solution make sense?

  This video was produced by The Center for Investigative Reporting. If the video link doesn’t work where you live, you can watch it on the PBS NewsHour website.

  Reporter: Jonathan Miller
  Producer and Camera: Charlotte Buchen
  Sound: Shiba Ranjan Das
  Editor: Linda Peckham
  Additional Editing: David Ritsher and Adithya Sambamurthy
  Additional Footage: Fay Abuelgasim, Elie Khadra, Fred de Sam Lazaro
  Thanks to: Qatar TV, VPRO Television, Chad Heeter
  Senior Producer: Cassandra Herrman
  Executive Producer: Sharon Tiller

  Date

  June 11, 2013

  Other Contributor(s)

  Charlotte Buchen

  Outlets

  PBS NewsHour

  Tags

  Themes: Environment, Technology, Food

  Regions: Middle East

  Media: Online, Video

  Other Contributors: Jonathan Miller

  Other Tags: Qatar, Sahara Forest Project, desert

• Mary Kay Magistad

  Food for 9 Billion

  No-Waste Lunch

  Play Now Download

  Mary Kay Magistad

  Food for 9 Billion

  No-Waste Lunch

  Agriculture is the third-largest emitter of global greenhouse gas pollution. Yet roughly one-third of what we produce is never eaten. Cutting down on waste is a major challenge in China, where a grassroots “Clean Your Plate” campaign is taking aim at deeply ingrained attitudes toward leftovers.

  

  Agriculture is the third-largest emitter of global greenhouse gas pollution. Yet roughly one-third of what we produce is never eaten. Cutting down on waste is a major challenge in China, where a grassroots “Clean Your Plate” campaign is taking aim at deeply ingrained attitudes toward leftovers.

  Date

  July 22, 2013

  Outlets

  PRI's The World

  Tags

  Themes: Environment, Food

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: China, food waste

• Sam Eaton

  Food for 9 Billion

  Costa Rica Farmers See Value in Biodiversity

  Sam Eaton

  Food for 9 Billion

  Costa Rica Farmers See Value in Biodiversity

  Scientists in Costa Rica are finding that biodiversity on and around farms can increase yields, lower input needs, and provide protection against environmental stresses.

  

  Scientists in Costa Rica are finding that biodiversity on and around farms can increase yields, lower input needs, and provide protection against environmental stresses.

  This story was produced by The Center for Investigative Reporting.

  Producer, Reporter, Camera: Sam Eaton
  Co-Producer: Cassandra Herrman
  Editor: Linda Peckham
  Additional Editing: Adithya Sambamurthy
  Translation: Ambar Espinoza
  Transcription: Karishma Suri
  Senior Producer: Stephen Talbot
  Executive Producer: Sharon Tiller

  Date

  June 10, 2013

  Other Contributor(s)

  Cassandra Herrman

  Outlets

  PBS NewsHour

  Tags

  Themes: Environment, Food

  Regions: Central America

  Media: Video

  Other Tags: biodiversity, Gretchen Daily, Costa Rica, full-cost accounting

• Jonathan Miller

  Food for 9 Billion

  Cafeteria Lunch

  Play Now Download

  Jonathan Miller

  Food for 9 Billion

  Cafeteria Lunch

  Some of the biggest players in the sustainable food movement are food service companies with the buying power to change the way millions of people eat every day.

  

  Some of the biggest players in the sustainable food movement are food service companies with the buying power to change the way millions of people eat every day.

  Date

  July 25, 2013

  Outlets

  PRI's The World

  Tags

  Themes: Environment, Food

  Regions: North America

  Media: Audio

  Other Contributors: Jonathan Miller

  Other Tags: climate-friendly cuisine, food service

• Sam Eaton

  Food for 9 Billion

  Vertical Lunch

  Play Now Download

  Sam Eaton

  Food for 9 Billion

  Vertical Lunch

  A new super-efficient vertical farming system is producing greens for Singapore’s 5 million residents. Inventor Jack Ng hopes to increase local food security while helping cut down on the climate impact of food production.

  

  A new super-efficient vertical farming system is producing greens for Singapore’s 5 million residents. Inventor Jack Ng hopes to increase local food security while helping cut down on the climate impact of food production.

  A video version of this story aired on PBS NewsHour.

  Date

  July 31, 2013

  Outlets

  PRI's The World

  Tags

  Themes: Food, Environment

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Other Tags: urban farming, Singapore

• Jonathan Miller

  Food for 9 Billion

  Taking the Climate Fight to the Table

  Play Now Download

  Jonathan Miller

  Food for 9 Billion

  Taking the Climate Fight to the Table

  Low-emissions cooking aims to slow global warming, one plate at a time. A celebrated Baltimore chef and an expert in climate-friendly cuisine join forces on a holiday meal.

  

  Low-emissions cooking aims to slow global warming one plate at a time. A celebrated Baltimore chef and an expert in climate-friendly cuisine join forces on a holiday meal.

  Date

  December 17, 2012

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Health, Environment, Food

  Regions: North America

  Media: Audio

  Other Contributors: Jonathan Miller

  Other Tags: cooking, climate-friendly cuisine

• Mary Kay Magistad

  Food for 9 Billion

  China Strains to Satisfy Demand for Meat

  Mary Kay Magistad

  Food for 9 Billion

  China Strains to Satisfy Demand for Meat

  China’s growing appetite for meat and dairy is driving big changes in everything from farming to food safety. For the country’s increasingly wary consumers, those changes can’t happen quickly enough.

  Over the past three decades in China, meat consumption per capita has quadrupled. This rapid change in diets has paralleled the massive migration from the countryside to the cities. City dwellers eat twice as much meat on average as those back in the villages.

  This has put a strain on the country’s land and water resources. Agricultural runoff, mostly manure from large-scale farms, is causing water pollution within the country. Because of water shortages, China imports 70 percent of its soybeans and increasing amounts of its corn from the United States, Brazil, and Argentina to feed its cows and pigs.

  

  The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has set up an office in Beijing to help train hundreds of Chinese companies, government inspectors and officials in food safety.

  But some say the Chinese government is relying too heavily on inspections and needs to focus more on prevention.

  Chinese fed up with waiting for government action have started to find other ways to access safer food – like buying imported, processed, or organic food.

  With the increasing calls for more safe, affordable and environmentally friendly food, China’s leaders will need to show creativity and balance to meet those needs.

  This video was produced by The Center for Investigative Reporting.

  Reporter: Mary Kay Magistad
  Producer: Cassandra Herrman
  Camera: Serene Fang
  Editor: Stephanie Mechura
  Field Translation: Yufan Zhang
  Additional Translation: Ah Ping
  Series producer: Cassandra Herrman
  Executive producer: Sharon Tiller

  Date

  November 13, 2012

  Other Contributor(s)

  Cassandra Herrman

  Outlets

  PBS NewsHour

  Tags

  Themes: Health, Environment, Food

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Video

  Other Tags: meat consumption, food safety, China

• Jonathan Miller

  Food for 9 Billion

  Greece’s Diet Crisis

  Play Now Download

  Jonathan Miller

  Food for 9 Billion

  Greece’s Diet Crisis

  The traditional diet on the island of Crete is one of the healthiest in the world. Trouble is, almost nobody follows it any more. And obesity rates are soaring, especially among kids.

  The UN estimates that more than 10 percent of the world’s population is chronically malnourished. Yet the number of overweight people is even higher. Over the last 30 years, the global obesity rate has doubled.

  To find out why, I traveled to the island of Crete, in southern Greece. Since the 1950s, study after study has shown that the Mediterranean diet, and especially the diet of Crete, makes you live longer, protects you from heart disease and cancer, and keeps you from getting too fat. Look at lists of the world’s healthiest diets, and the one from Crete often ranks at the top.

  

  Unfortunately, hardly anybody follows it anymore.

  I met a 16-year-old I’ll call Eleni with her mother in Chania, a port city of about 50,000 in western Crete. Eleni’s grandparents lived in the countryside, but she and her parents grew up in town.

  Eleni has struggled with her weight most of her life. Schoolmates have taunted her. Her mother told me she tries to lose weight, but then she lapses.

  “Sometime she eats a lot,” she said. “Whatever you can imagine. But other times she’s okay. I don’t know. That’s the problem.”

  She thinks her daughter’s weight issues have to do with lack of discipline and low self-esteem. But clearly there’s something bigger going on. Today Greece has the one of the highest obesity rates in the world. The proportion of overweight children – about 40 percent – may be the highest, except for some Pacific islands. The problem is especially bad in Crete, home to what could be the world’s healthiest diet. What gives?

  

  “It has to do with many factors,” said Christina Makratzaki, a local dietitian who also battled obesity as a teenager.

  “In the ’50s and ’60s, the people, they were poor, but they were healthy,” she explained. “They were eating very good foods – the olive oil, the olives, the green leafy vegetables that are our treasure. But they were enforced in a way because of their poverty to use these things.”

  Then people here got a little money – from tourism, from agriculture – and everything changed.

  “Now, we have many choices,” she said.

  Like processed food from the supermarket and fast food on the street. And soda and doughnuts and ice cream. All of it cheaper to buy, easier to prepare – and, especially for children, harder to resist – than what grandma used to make. And then there’s the marketing – a relentless bombardment of ads aimed at kids for products like soft drinks and breakfast cereal and processed meat.

  It’s all part of what’s known as “the nutrition transition.”

  “The nutrition transition happens very quickly,” says Marion Nestle, a nutritionist at New York University whose books include What to Eat and Why Calories Count. “As soon as people get money, they start buying more meat and more processed foods. Well, that’s fine if you don’t eat too much of it. The problem is that we as humans, when we’re confronted with large amounts of delicious food, we eat large amounts of food.”

  

  It typically starts with the upper classes, who do less physical work and can afford to buy more fattening food. For a while, being plump is a sign of wealth and health.

  But then, in most places, there’s a shift. People with money start to value thinness. At the same time, farmers move into the cities, women join the work force and have less time to cook, machines replace manual labor, kids watch more TV and packaged food becomes cheaper than fresh food. Pretty soon you have an epidemic, with the worst effects felt among those with lower incomes.

  “Health officials and policy makers are realizing what the costs of obesity are likely to be not only to the individuals themselves but to the society,” Nestle says. “The question is what to do about it. People are trying lots of different things, and more power to them. But nobody really has an answer.”

  The dietitian Christina Makratzaki showed me some of the things people are trying in Crete. A burger chain has started serving things like freshly squeezed juice and turkey wraps. The canteen at the local bus station is offering traditional Cretan dishes, bathed in olive oil. The association of school snack bar operators has told its members to cut out the sweets and sodas at the kiosks they rent, and most have complied.

  She took me to see the mayor of Chania, Emmanouil Skoulakis. He happens to be a doctor who served several terms as Greece’s deputy minister of health. Skoulakis said the obesity crisis was of great personal interest to him – that was why he was willing to see me.

  He told me the city sponsors exercise programs and a local food festival, where people could talk with chefs and sample traditional cuisine. Last spring, it helped organize visits by 14 dietitians to some of the schools. But money is tight. Beyond rallying volunteers, he said, there’s not much the government can do.

  That’s especially true now, with Greece in crisis. Unemployment is 25 percent and people are marching in the streets. I asked everyone I met if they thought the economic troubles may have a silver lining, sending people back to the old ways, eating fruits and vegetables and dessert just on Sundays. They all shook their heads. With junk food so much cheaper than fresh food, they say, the lighter people’s wallets, the heavier they’ll get.

  Date

  October 29, 2012

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Food, Culture

  Regions: Europe

  Media: Audio, Text

  Other Tags: obesity, traditional diets, nutrition transition, Crete, Greece

• Gretchen Wilson

  Food for 9 Billion

  Africa’s Supermarket Sweepstakes

  Play Now Download

  Gretchen Wilson

  Food for 9 Billion

  Africa’s Supermarket Sweepstakes

  The spread of modern grocery chains could lift millions of African farmers out of poverty. Or it could ruin them.

  

  The spread of modern grocery chains could lift millions of African farmers out of poverty. Or it could ruin them.

  Date

  September 26, 2012

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Food, Economy

  Regions: Africa

  Other Tags: smallholders, South Africa, markets, supermarkets, Lesotho

• Adriene Hill

  Food for 9 Billion

  Spilled and Spoiled in California

  Play Now Download

  Adriene Hill

  Food for 9 Billion

  Spilled and Spoiled in California

  About of one-third of all the food we produce is never eaten. In the developing world, losses tend to occur at the production end. In the U.S., it’s consumers who waste the most.

  

  We waste enormous amounts of land, water, labor, and fuel producing food that’s never eaten. How we limit the losses depends on where we live.

  In this piece, Marketplace’s Adriene Hill visits a school in Southern California, where students routinely toss their unopened milk into the garbage.

  This piece aired in tandem with Spilled and Spoiled in Senegal and was produced by Marketplace for the Food for 9 Billion series.

  Date

  August 27, 2012

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Food, Environment

  Regions: North America

  Other Tags: food waste, milk, school lunch

• Jori Lewis

  Food for 9 Billion

  Spilled and Spoiled in Senegal

  Play Now Download

  Jori Lewis

  Food for 9 Billion

  Spilled and Spoiled in Senegal

  How we limit food waste and losses depends on where we live. Jori Lewis visits small-scale milk producers in Senegal.

  

  We waste enormous amounts of land, water, labor, and fuel producing food that’s never eaten. How we limit the losses depends on where we live.

  In wealthy countries, waste tends to occur at the consumer end. In poorer countries, most food is lost between the field and the market.

  In this story, Jori Lewis visits small-scale milk producers in Senegal.

  Her piece aired in tandem with Spilled and Spoiled in California.

  Date

  August 27, 2012

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Food, Environment

  Regions: Africa

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: yogurt, Senegal, food waste

• Carrie Ching, Sarah Terry-Cobo, Arthur Jones

  Food for 9 Billion

  The Hidden Costs of Hamburgers

  Carrie Ching, Sarah Terry-Cobo, Arthur Jones

  Food for 9 Billion

  The Hidden Costs of Hamburgers

  Americans love hamburgers. They’re tasty, filling, and cheap. But not if you consider the damage they do to the planet.

  Americans love hamburgers – we each eat an average of three a week. They’re tasty, filling, and cheap. But what are the hidden costs? Learn more in this animated short.

  Produced by our partner, the Center for Investigative Reporting, with editing help from Homelands’ Jonathan Miller. Art and animation are by Arthur Jones. Visit CIR‘s story page to see an annotated transcript listing the sources for the information in the video.

  Date

  August 1, 2012

  Outlets

  Center for Investigative Reporting

  Tags

  Themes: Environment, Economy, Health, Food

  Regions: North America

  Media: Online, Video

  Other Tags: hamburgers, beef, greenhouse gases, meat consumption

• Sam Eaton

  Food for 9 Billion

  Vietnam Fish Farms Look for Future-Friendly Formula

  Play Now Download

  Sam Eaton

  Food for 9 Billion

  Vietnam Fish Farms Look for Future-Friendly Formula

  More than half the seafood eaten in the world today is farmed, not wild. As demand for protein soars, scientists and fish producers look to lessen the impact of factory farming.

  

  More than half the seafood eaten in the world today is farmed, not wild. As demand for protein soars, scientists and fish producers look to lessen the impact of factory farming.

  Date

  July 23, 2012

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Technology, Food, Economy, Environment

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: Vietnam, aquaculture, pangasius

• Fred de Sam Lazaro

  Food for 9 Billion

  Re-Greening the Sahel

  Fred de Sam Lazaro

  Food for 9 Billion

  Re-Greening the Sahel

  In Niger, farmers race to reclaim the desert and break the link between drought and famine.

  Perched on the edge of the Sahara Desert, Niger is one of the poorest countries in the world. As the desert moves southward, making the land ever less fertile, even a brief period of drought can lead to famine. Several efforts have sprung up in recent years to try to break the drought-famine link. One that has proven especially effective is Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration, or FMNR, a system developed in the 1980s by an enterprising farmer in Burkina Faso, Niger’s western neighbor.

  But for each step forward, population growth takes Niger two steps back.

  This video was produced by the Under-Told Stories Project and The Center for Investigative Reporting.

  Reporter: Fred de Sam Lazaro
  Producer and camera: Cassandra Herrman
  Editors: Cassandra Herrman and David Ritsher
  Consulting producer: Stephen Talbot
  Series producer: Cassandra Herrman
  Executive producer: Sharon Tiller

  Date

  July 12, 2012

  Other Contributor(s)

  Cassandra Herrman

  Outlets

  PBS NewsHour

  Tags

  Themes: Technology, Food, Environment

  Regions: Africa

  Media: Video

  Other Tags: Niger, reforestation, desertification, Sahel

• Sam Eaton

  Food for 9 Billion

  Graying Farmers Force Japan to Rethink Food System

  Sam Eaton

  Food for 9 Billion

  Graying Farmers Force Japan to Rethink Food System

  As the average age of its farmers creeps into the 70s, Japan grapples with a question that many industrialized nations now face: Who will grow our food in the future?

  

  The average age of a farmer in Japan is roughly 70 years old. That’s not a problem in its own right. Unfortunately, though, few younger people are showing an interest in taking over. And that is forcing officials, and the farmers themselves, to make some tough decisions.

  This video was produced by The Center for Investigative Reporting.

  Reporter/producer: Sam Eaton
  Camera: Sam Eaton and Irene Herrera
  Editor: Charlotte Buchen
  Local fixer: Winifred Bird
  Additional field translation: Toru Seno, Yuko Ota, Lindee Hoshikawa
  Series producer: Cassandra Herrman
  Executive producer: Sharon Tiller

  Date

  June 12, 2012

  Outlets

  PBS NewsHour

  Tags

  Themes: Culture, Food, Economy

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Video

  Other Tags: Japan, farming, aging

• Jori Lewis

  Food for 9 Billion

  Soil is Ground Zero in African Farming Debate

  Play Now Download

  Jori Lewis

  Food for 9 Billion

  Soil is Ground Zero in African Farming Debate

  In Africa, a debate is raging over the best ways to make small farms more productive. Most people agree that soil is the key. But how to boost fertility? Farmers in Ghana face tough choices.

  In Africa, a debate is raging over the best ways to make small farms more productive. Most people agree that soil is the key. But how to boost fertility? Some say farmers need to increase their use of synthetic fertilizers. Others say there are better ways to build soil health. Still others suggest that the answers will vary from place to place. Farmers in Ghana are facing tough decisions.

  Date

  June 4, 2012

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Food, Environment

  Regions: Africa

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: glyphosate, soil, Ghana, fertilizer, fertility

• Jonathan Miller

  Food for 9 Billion

  Water Man

  Play Now Download

  Jonathan Miller

  Food for 9 Billion

  Water Man

  Fast-growing India is pumping its aquifers dry. Rajendra Singh says solutions will come from the ground up.

  The average person drinks two quarts of water every day, but it takes more than a thousand times that to produce a day’s worth of food. That’s a problem everywhere, but especially in India, where scientists say nearly a third of the country’s underground aquifers are already in critical condition.

  Rajendra Singh has become known as “The Water Man” for his efforts to engage communities in grassroots conservation efforts. Among his accomplishments: Seven dry rivers in his home district are flowing year-round again.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  1 / 10

  Fullscreen Info

  Rajendra Singh at the headquarters of the organization he directs, Tarun Bharat Sangh (Indian Youth Association). Since the 1980s, the group has focused on community-based water management.

  Photo: Jonathan Miller

  Singh at the first water harvesting structure he built in the Alwar District of Rajasthan state.

  Photo: Jonathan Miller

  A cloth map shows the locations of water harvesting structures in Alwar. Singh says there are now more than 10,000 structures in the area, all built by hand by community members.

  Photo: Jonathan Miller

  The most common type of water harvesting structure in Alwar is a “check dam,” known locally as a johad. Different types of structures are used in other places.

  Photo: Jonathan Miller

  Villagers move rocks for a new johad. Water harvesting goes back hundreds of years, but was largely abandoned with the arrival of tube wells and electric pumps.

  Photo: Jonathan Miller

  Harshaye, 65, says he is confident that this area will be green and productive by next year.

  Photo: Jonathan Miller

  Singh now spends most of his time on national and regional water policy issues. He says the Indian government is beginning to see the value of grassroots water management.

  Photo: Jonathan Miller

  An employee of Singh’s nonprofit leads a field trip for university students from the central Indian city of Bhopal. Rainwater harvesting is enjoying a resurgence, but groundwater withdrawals still far outpace deposits.

  Photo: Jonathan Miller

  In Lapuria village in central Rajasthan, local leader Laxman Singh (right) listens as villager Chhotu describes his work planting trees. Singh says water conservation has revitalized the village.

  Photo: Jonathan Miller

  A girl draws drinking water from a well in Lapuria. The water table had dropped to more than 200 feet below the surface. Now it is 20 to 30 feet down, thanks to a range of conservation measures.

  Photo: Jonathan Miller

  Date

  May 4, 2012

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Environment, Food, Economy

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Audio, Photography

  Other Contributors: Jonathan Miller

  Other Tags: water crisis, India, Rajendra Singh, water harvesting

• Cecilia Vaisman

  Food for 9 Billion

  Brazil Delivers on Hunger Promise

  Play Now Download

  Cecilia Vaisman

  Food for 9 Billion

  Brazil Delivers on Hunger Promise

  In 2003, the Brazilian government declared that food was a basic human right. Then it found that ending hunger takes a lot more than a declaration.

  

  In the 1990s, the city of Belo Horizonte, in northeastern Brazil, was a hunger disaster area. Although Brazil produces more than enough food to meet the needs of its population, roughly one-fourth of Belo Horizonte’s children were malnourished.

  Since then, though, hunger has virtually vanished. The municipal food security agency has promoted low-price farmer’s markets, encouraged urban farming, established school gardens and school lunch programs, distributed food baskets to poor families, and linked the region’s “landless peasant” movement (which occupies and farms on abandoned lands) to consumers in Belo Horizonte’s favelas, or slums.

  Belo Horizonte’s program has become a model for Brazil’s national “Zero Hunger” program, based on former President Ignacio “Lula” da Silva’s declaration that food would henceforth be a basic human right. The national program has been remarkably successful, but it hasn’t been as easy as idealistic planners originally hoped.

  Lesson number one: There’s no simple formula. It takes imagination, flexibility, local leadership, and plenty of boots on the ground.

  Date

  April 4, 2012

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Economy, Food

  Regions: South America

  Media: Audio

  Other Contributors: Cecilia Vaisman

  Other Tags: Zero Hunger, Fome Zero, Brazil, Belo Horizonte, hunger

• Fred de Sam Lazaro

  Food for 9 Billion

  Business Fund Puts African Farmers on Road to Market

  Fred de Sam Lazaro

  Food for 9 Billion

  Business Fund Puts African Farmers on Road to Market

  A start-up in East Africa aims to give small-scale producers the tools they need to compete – and business is booming.

  In Kenya, Rwanda, and Burundi, a new service for small-scale farmers has spread to more than 100,000 families in just four years. An organization called One Acre Fund brings struggling farmers together to establish a market community and offers them a unique investment package of seeds, fertilizer, training, loans, and market access.

  To provide a hedge against drought or disease, One Acre’s “market bundle” includes crop insurance. Ninety-nine percent of the farmers repay their loans, and many double their income per planted acre. Could this sort of integrated development be a model for the rest of Africa?

  This video was produced by the Under-Told Stories Project and The Center for Investigative Reporting.

  Reporter: Fred de Sam Lazaro
  Producer and camera: Cassandra Herrman
  Editors: Cassandra Herrman and David Ritsher
  Consulting producer: Stephen Talbot
  Series producer: Cassandra Herrman
  Executive producer: Sharon Tiller

  Date

  April 3, 2012

  Other Contributor(s)

  Cassandra Herrman

  Tags

  Themes: Economy, Food

  Regions: Africa

• Cassandra Herrman, Beth Hoffman

  Food for 9 Billion

  In Ethiopia, a Battle for Land and Water

  Cassandra Herrman, Beth Hoffman

  Food for 9 Billion

  In Ethiopia, a Battle for Land and Water

  A controversial resettlement program in Ethiopia is the latest battleground in the global race to secure prized farmland and water.

  A controversial resettlement program in Ethiopia is the latest battleground in the global race to secure prized farmland and water. In this story, members of the Anuak ethnic group accuse the government of forcing them off their land to make way for a large Saudi-owned rice farm.

  This video was produced by The Center for Investigative Reporting.

  Reporters: Cassandra Herrman and Beth Hoffman

  Producer and camera: Cassandra Herrman

  Editor: Cassandra Herrman and David Ritsher

  Translation: Obang Okello

  Consulting Producer: Stephen Talbot

  Series Producer: Cassandra Herrman

  Executive Producer: Sharon Tiller

  Date

  February 28, 2012

  Outlets

  PBS NewsHour

  Tags

  Themes: Food, Peace & Conflict, Economy

  Regions: Africa

  Media: Video

  Other Tags: Anuak, Ethiopia, land grab

• Jonathan Miller

  Food for 9 Billion

  Bangladesh Farmers Confront New Climate Reality

  Play Now Download

  Jonathan Miller

  Food for 9 Billion

  Bangladesh Farmers Confront New Climate Reality

  Bangladesh has made dramatic progress in feeding its people. Can it stop a changing climate from erasing the gains?

  

  Bangladesh has made dramatic progress in feeding its people. Can it stop a changing climate from erasing the gains?

  Date

  February 27, 2012

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Environment

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: flooding, Sundarbans, Bangladesh, Climate change, displacement, salinization

• Sam Eaton

  Food for 9 Billion

  Philippines: Too Many Mouths?

  Play Now Download

  Sam Eaton

  Food for 9 Billion

  Philippines: Too Many Mouths?

  Once a leading rice producer, the Philippines can no longer feed itself. That leaves two options: increase supply or try to do something about demand.

  In the 1960s, the Philippines was one of the world’s leading rice producers. Since then its population has more than doubled and the country can no longer feed itself. Not only has demand for food shot up, but farmland has been lost to development. This has put pressure on all the country’s basic life-support systems. It is felt most acutely by the poorest families.

  While most of the countries in Southeast Asia have taken decisive action to slow population growth, the Catholic Church in the Philippines has resisted any form of population control. But some politicians are responding to a clamor among their constituents for family planning services.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  1 / 8

  Fullscreen Info

  The Philippines has one of the highest population growth rates in all of Southeast Asia. Its population, today just shy of 100 million, is expected to double by the end of the century.

  Photo: Sam Eaton

  Government warehouses, like this one, store imported rice. The Philippines imports more rice than any other nation on the planet in order to feed its growing population.

  Photo: Sam Eaton

  Scientists at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines are scrambling to introduce higher-yielding rice varieties.

  Photo: Sam Eaton

  Many farmers in the Philippines are poor -- with few tools at their disposal to boost rice yields.

  Photo: Sam Eaton

  Rice is the staple food of the Philippines.

  Photo: Sam Eaton

  The maternity ward at the Dr. Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital in Manila is packed beyond capacity with new mothers who have no choice but to share the limited number of beds. More than 2 million babies are born every year in the Philippines.

  Photo: Sam Eaton

  Population growth among the poor in the Philippines, where birth control remains largely out of reach, is about four times higher than the rest of the country.

  Photo: Sam Eaton

  The price of rice remains high, with poor Filipinos spending as much as 70 percent of their income on food.

  Photo: Sam Eaton

  Date

  January 23, 2012

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Food, Environment

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Audio, Photography

  Other Tags: poverty, family planning, rice, agriculture, farming, Catholic church, population

• Sam Eaton

  Food for 9 Billion

  Turning the Population Tide

  Sam Eaton

  Food for 9 Billion

  Turning the Population Tide

  When Filipino fishing families got access to birth control, the effects were dramatic: more food, kids in school, and a new will to defend their reefs.

  The Philippines’ swelling population is causing fishing villages to embrace birth control for the first time, and not just as a means to plan their families. They also see it as a path to long-term food security, ensuring that future generations enjoy the same abundance of fish.

  This video was produced by The Center for Investigative Reporting.

  Reporter/Producer: Sam Eaton
  Camera: Sam Eaton
  Editor: Charlotte Buchen
  Local fixer: Carlos Conde
  Additional field translation: Mercy Butawan
  Consulting producer: Stephen Talbot
  Series producer: Cassandra Herrman
  Executive producer: Sharon Tiller

  Date

  January 23, 2012

  Other Contributor(s)

  Charlotte Buchen

  Outlets

  PBS NewsHour

  Tags

  Themes: Health, Food, Environment

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Video

  Other Tags: family planning, population, reefs, fishing, Bohol, contraceptives, Philippines

• Sandy Tolan

  Food for 9 Billion

  Egypt’s Growing Pains

  Play Now Download

  Sandy Tolan

  Food for 9 Billion

  Egypt’s Growing Pains

  More than one million Egyptian farmers have quit the land in the last 20 years, reshaping the country’s physical and political landscape.

  

  One of the most potent sources of the Egyptian revolution was the fury of the poor who demanded economic security – including sufficient and affordable food. Fresh in the minds of the throngs in Tahrir Square was the food crisis of 2008, when sharp price hikes put many basic foods out of reach for the estimated 40 percent of Egyptians who live on less than $2 a day.

  In the wake of the revolution, some experts in Egypt say the country is setting itself up for future food crises, and needs to protect itself by becoming more “food sovereign.” In recent years Egypt has accelerated its export-oriented agriculture, using its precious (and possibly soon-dwindling) Nile waters to grow high-value crops like strawberries and table grapes for the European market, while relying on the international market for staples like wheat.

  These policies have brought in foreign exchange, but they have also forced more than a million poor peasant farmers off their land and into the cities. And, opponents argue, they have made the country as a whole more vulnerable to forces beyond its control.

  Now, as Egypt prepares to elect new leaders, the country finds itself at a crossroads. Should it integrate more fully in the global economy, as the IMF recommends, or should it seek to become more self-reliant?

  This piece aired on the eve of presidential elections in December 2011.

  Date

  December 12, 2011

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Food, Economy, Peace & Conflict

  Regions: Middle East

  Media: Audio

  Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan

  Other Tags: revolution, Egypt, export agriculture, food prices

• Sandy Tolan

  Food for 9 Billion

  In Egypt, Food for a Revolution

  Sandy Tolan

  Food for 9 Billion

  In Egypt, Food for a Revolution

  Egyptians used to grow nearly all their own food. Today, the country relies on imports. The people on the street aren’t happy.

  Anger over food prices helped contribute to the toppling of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Through the story of one migrant family, we explore how displaced farmers, angry about agricultural policies that favor “crony capitalists,” now struggle to put food on the table.

  This story was produced by The Center for Investigative Reporting.

  Reporter: Sandy Tolan
  Producer: Charlotte Buchen
  Senior Producer: David Ritsher
  Executive Producer: Sharon Tiller
  Production Assistant: Mary Jirmanus
  Camera: Charlotte Buchen
  Editor: Charlotte Buchen
  Local Fixer: Madiha Kassem
  Additional field translation: Magdy Kassem

  Date

  November 30, 2011

  Other Contributor(s)

  Charlotte Buchen

  Outlets

  PBS NewsHour

  Tags

  Themes: Food, Economy, Peace & Conflict

  Regions: Middle East

  Media: Video

  Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan

  Other Tags: Egypt, export agriculture, food prices, Tahrir Square, food sovereignty

• Jonathan Miller

  Food for 9 Billion

  Food for 9 Billion: The Scientific Challenge

  Play Now Download

  Jonathan Miller

  Food for 9 Billion

  Food for 9 Billion: The Scientific Challenge

  Nearly every prescription for feeding the world says we need to invest more money in science. What’s that money going to get us?

  

  Nearly every prescription for feeding the world says we need to invest more money in science. What’s that money going to get us?

  In this story we travel to Mexico, birthplace of the Green Revolution, where international scientists are working on a wide range of interventions, from hardier crop varieties to better ways to manage the soil. And we go into the field with a Mexican scientist whose grassroots work aims to put the knowledge of millions of farmers to work on improving yields.

  Date

  November 14, 2011

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Environment, Food, Economy, Technology

  Regions: North America

  Media: Audio

  Other Contributors: Jonathan Miller

  Other Tags: agricultural research, plant breeding, CIMMYT, agroecology, maize, Mexico, conservation agriculture

• Jonathan Miller, Joe Richman, Samara Freemark

  Special Projects

  The Square Deal

  Play Now Download

  Jonathan Miller, Joe Richman, Samara Freemark

  Special Projects

  The Square Deal

  An inside look at the legacy of George F. Johnson, an industrialist who offered his mainly immigrant workers decent working conditions and generous benefits in exchange for labor peace. Until it all fell apart under the pressure of competition.

  

  In the early 1900s, most shoes in this country were manufactured by just one company: The Endicott Johnson Corporation in the Triple Cities region of upstate New York.

  It was the largest shoe factory in the world. It churned out 52 million pairs of shoes a year and supplied boots to the U.S. Army in both world wars.

  But Endicott Johnson wasn’t only famous for its shoes. It was also famous for having some the best wages and working conditions in the U.S.

  The president of the company, George F. Johnson, was the first in the shoe business to introduce an 8-hour work day. He built libraries, parks, even hospitals, and offered his workers free medical care.

  Some people called it welfare capitalism. Johnson had a different name for it.

  “The Square Deal” was co-produced by Joe Richman and Samara Freemark of Radio Diaries and Homelands’ Jonathan Miller. The piece aired on NPR’s All Things Considered in 2010, then in 2015 on the Radiotopia podcast, and then again in 2015 on NPR’s Planet Money podcast. The audio here is from Radiotopia, with an introduction and afterword by Joe Richman.

  Date

  December 1, 2010

  Outlets

  All Things Considered, Planet Money

  Tags

  Themes: Lives, Economy

  Regions: North America

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: shoes, welfare capitalism, Radio Diaries, labor relations, Planet Money, unions

• Jonathan Miller

  WORKING

  Runner

  Play Now Download

  Jonathan Miller

  WORKING

  Runner

  Salina Kosgei always loved to run. At 16, she decided to make a career of it. Sixteen years and two kids later she found herself elbow to elbow with the defending champ in the most prestigious marathon in the world, with the finish line in sight.

  

  Salina Kosgei was the tenth and youngest child of poor farmers in the highlands of western Kenya. The family hut had no electricity or plumbing. As a kid, Salina used to run 10 kilometers to school, barefoot, just for the fun of it.

  But where Salina grew up, running wasn’t just a hobby. It was a well-worn path to financial security. The best houses in her area belonged to runners who had made good.

  So at 16 she decided to go pro. It was a long slog, with lots of ups and downs. Then one day she found herself elbow to elbow with the defending champ in the most prestigious marathon in the world, with the finish line in sight.

  Date

  July 16, 2009

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Lives

  Regions: Africa

  Media: Audio

  Other Contributors: Jonathan Miller

  Other Tags: marathon, runner, Salina Kosgei, Kenya

• Sandy Tolan

  WORKING

  Shipbreaking Worker

  Play Now Download

  Sandy Tolan

  WORKING

  Shipbreaking Worker

  Ismael “Babu” Hussein works as an assistant in one of Bangladesh’s shipbreaking yards, where armies of laborers dismantle old vessels the way ants devour a carcass. The work is perilous, the bosses abusive, the hours exhausting. Heavy stuff for a 13-year old kid.

  Ismael “Babu” Hussein works as an assistant in one of Bangladesh’s shipbreaking yards, where armies of laborers dismantle old vessels the way ants devour a carcass. The work is perilous, the bosses abusive, the hours exhausting.

  Babu’s reward? Just over two dollars a day, and nightmares about being crushed by giant sheets of steel.

  Heavy stuff for a 13-year old kid.

  Date

  June 18, 2009

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Economy, Lives

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Audio

  Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan

  Other Tags: shipbreaking, child labor, Bangladesh

• Sean Cole

  WORKING

  Banker

  Play Now Download

  Sean Cole

  WORKING

  Banker

  Risk, says Brandon Davies, is how we learn and grow as people. We should embrace it, not avoid it. At least that’s what he said in the summer of 2008. Then the global financial system collapsed.

  Brandon Davies’ life is all about risk.

  A guru of global financial markets, he’s on the boards of two new banks; he runs a trading operation, using his own money, just for kicks. Risk, he says, is how we learn and grow as people. We should embrace it, not avoid it.

  At least that’s what he said in the summer of 2008, when producer Sean Cole spent a few days with him in London.

  Then the global financial system collapsed.

  Date

  May 28, 2009

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Economy, Lives

  Regions: Europe

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: bank, banker, market, finance

• Ingrid Lobet

  WORKING

  Electronics Recycler

  Play Now Download

  Ingrid Lobet

  WORKING

  Electronics Recycler

  Vicki Ponce was in her 50s, selling tamales in the street, when she and some middle-aged women friends decided to start a company dismantling old TV sets. Business is good. It would be even better if the jealous mayor would turn on the electricity.

  For Mexican women of a certain age, finding decent work can be nearly impossible. Vicki Ponce was in her 50s, selling tamales, grateful for the money her daughter sent home from the U.S.

  Then she and some unemployed friends decided to make the leap into the booming trade in electronic waste. Today Las Chicas Bravas (“The Tough Girls”) spend their days dismantling old TV sets by hand.

  Now to convince the jealous mayor to turn on the electricity.

  Date

  April 29, 2009

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Economy, Technology, Lives

  Regions: North America

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: e-waste, recycle, electronic, recycling

• Gregory Warner

  WORKING

  Human Smuggler

  Play Now Download

  Gregory Warner

  WORKING

  Human Smuggler

  For 30 years, Alidad has been smuggling Afghans on a secret nighttime passage through the mountains of western Pakistan into Iran. “I have a lot of sad memories,” he says.

  For most Afghan refugees, fleeing the war-torn country is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. For Alidad, it’s a job.

  He’s spent 30 years smuggling Afghans on a secret nighttime passage through the mountains of western Pakistan into Iran. Sometimes he finds out too late they can’t handle the journey.

  “We go when it’s raining, when it’s snowing. People fall off the mountain, people die,” he says. “I have a lot of sad memories.”

  Date

  March 19, 2009

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Economy, Peace & Conflict, Lives

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: smuggler, Afghanistan, smuggling, refugees, migration

• Kelly McEvers

  WORKING

  Marriage Broker

  Play Now Download

  Kelly McEvers

  WORKING

  Marriage Broker

  If you’re a Korean man who wants to marry a Vietnamese woman, Hang Nga is your go-to gal. Vietnam’s government frowns on the match-making business, but Nga says it’s worth the risk. The money means a brighter future for her two young children.

  If you’re a Korean man who wants to marry a Vietnamese woman, Hang Nga is your go-to gal.

  She’ll help you select a bride, buy the rings, and arrange the ceremony, reception, and honeymoon. It only takes three days – and a few thousand dollars.

  Vietnam’s communist government frowns on the match-making business, but Nga says it’s worth the risk. The money means a brighter future for her two young children.

  Date

  February 12, 2009

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Economy, Lives

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: marriage, Vietnam, broker, korea, match-maker

• Sean Cole

  WORKING

  Circus Performer

  Play Now Download

  Sean Cole

  WORKING

  Circus Performer

  Svitlana Svystun spends ten months a year traveling around the United Kingdom. Her coworkers include a human cannonball, a crossbow artist, and a crew of Hungarian roustabouts. It’s a dangerous, nomadic life. But it’s surprisingly domestic, too.

  As a performer with The Great Moscow State Circus, Svitlana Svystun spends ten months a year traveling from fairground to fairground around the United Kingdom. Her coworkers include a human cannonball, a crossbow artist, and a crew of Hungarian roustabouts.

  Home is a cramped trailer that she shares with her ringmaster husband Andrey and their three-year-old son Maxim. She does two performances a day, six days a week, risking serious injury every time she steps into the ring.

  It’s a dangerous, nomadic life. But it’s surprisingly domestic, too.

  Date

  January 15, 2009

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Lives, Culture

  Regions: Europe

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: russia, performer, circus

• Sandy Tolan

  WORKING

  Labor Inspector

  Play Now Download

  Sandy Tolan

  WORKING

  Labor Inspector

  Leandro Carvalho had a comfortable job as an insurance agent on Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach when he decided to join Brazil’s anti-slavery task force. He says he won’t quit until the last slave is freed.

  In the mid-1990s, journalists and human rights groups began to uncover a web of slave labor linked to some of Brazil’s biggest export industries: cattle, soy, sugar cane, and pig iron used in making steel for automobiles.

  The Brazilian government responded, setting up rapid-response teams to find and liberate victims of forced labor. Since 2000, more than 30,000 slaves have been freed.

  Leandro Carvalho had a comfortable job as an insurance agent on Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach when he decided to join the force. And he says he doesn’t want to quit until the last slave is freed.

  Date

  December 18, 2008

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Lives, Economy

  Regions: South America

  Media: Audio

  Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan

  Other Tags: Brazil, indentured servitude, slavery

• Gregory Warner

  WORKING

  Miner

  Play Now Download

  Gregory Warner

  WORKING

  Miner

  Fidele Musafiri spends his days, and often his nights, banging away at a wall of stone in a crude tunnel under a Congolese mountain. He’s a small man with a hammer, a spike, and a dream of striking it rich. But danger is never far away.

  Your cell phone or laptop wouldn’t work without a mineral called coltan. The Democratic Republic of Congo has about 80 percent of the world’s coltan reserves, and that has spawned a corrupt and violent industry. Military factions vie for control of the mines, earning millions of dollars while the miners themselves barely scrape by.

  One of those miners is Fidele Musafiri, a small man with a hammer, a spike, and a dream of striking it rich. But danger is never far away.

  Winner of the Richard H. Driehaus/Third Coast Festival award for best news feature.

  Date

  November 20, 2008

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Lives, Economy, Peace & Conflict, Technology

  Regions: Africa

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: Democratic Republic of Congo, mining, coltan

• Kelly McEvers

  WORKING

  Pirate

  Play Now Download

  Kelly McEvers

  WORKING

  Pirate

  Agus Laodi could barely feed his family with his earnings as a cocoa farmer. So he left his Indonesian village to seek his fortune on an island in the Strait of Malacca. Now he slips out at night to rob cargo ships with a machete.

  Agus Laodi could barely feed his family with his earnings as a cocoa farmer. So eight years ago, with his wife’s blessing, he left his Indonesian village to seek his fortune on an island in the Strait of Malacca.

  Now he works as a buccaneer, chasing down and boarding ships on the high seas. Sound romantic? Think again.

  Date

  October 30, 2008

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Lives, Economy

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: Strait of Malacca, Pirate, Indonesia

• Jonathan Miller

  WORKING

  Industrial Designer

  Play Now Download

  Jonathan Miller

  WORKING

  Industrial Designer

  Industrial designers are the anonymous people who decide how the things around us look and feel. For Raffaella Mangiarotti, design isn’t about colors or shapes. It’s about solving problems.

  There’s a huge amount of human effort buried in almost everything around us. You just need to know where to look.

  Peer deep into a toaster or a loaf of bread and you’ll find engineers and farmers, bankers and accountants, scientists, secretaries, architects, and graphic artists, not to mention politicians and tax collectors, health inspectors and extension workers, truck drivers and mechanics.

  Industrial designers may be the ultimate “embeds.” They’re the anonymous people who decide how the things around us look and feel. Raffaella Mangiarotti lives in Milan, the global capital of design. She designs everything from plungers and toilet brushes to vacuum cleaners and washing machines.

  For Mangiarotti, design isn’t about objects or colors or shapes. It’s about solving problems.

  Date

  September 18, 2008

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Culture, Lives, Economy

  Regions: Europe

  Media: Audio

  Other Contributors: Jonathan Miller

  Other Tags: industrial, design, italy

• Kelly McEvers

  WORKING

  Sex Worker

  Play Now Download

  Kelly McEvers

  WORKING

  Sex Worker

  Samanta plies her trade in Baku, an oil boom town. In a corrupt and violent society, it can be a very dangerous life – especially for a woman who was born a man.

  Samanta moved to Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, for the same reason that thousands of other foreigners did: the oil boom.

  As the eastern terminus of a new pipeline carrying oil from the former Soviet Union to Europe and points west, the city has swelled with oil workers, construction workers, businessmen, and engineers. And, as in boomtowns everywhere, with sex workers like Samanta.

  In a corrupt and violent society, it can be a very dangerous life – especially for a woman who was born a man.

  Date

  August 14, 2008

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Culture, Lives, Economy

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: prostitute, prostitution, sex work, azerbaijan, baku, transgender

• Janna Graham

  WORKING

  Iceberg Wrangler

  Play Now Download

  Janna Graham

  WORKING

  Iceberg Wrangler

  With the Newfoundland fishing industry in the tank, Whyman Richards says he’ll give anything a try. So he steers his homemade boat toward the dreaded mountains of ice that break off the Greenland ice sheet every summer.

  Whyman Richards says he’ll give anything a try.

  A fisherman from a tiny town in northern Newfoundland, he has struggled to make ends meet since the cod fishery collapsed in the early 1990s. So when a local businessman asked him if he’d be willing to steer his homemade boat toward the fearsome mountains of ice that break off the Greenland ice sheet every summer, he said why not.

  Whyman and his brother Dale snag chunks of ice with a giant net, haul them on board with a hydraulic lift, and chop them up with axes. Hours later the water is in plastic bottles, heading for Texas.

  Date

  July 10, 2008

  Other Contributor(s)

  Chris Brookes

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Lives, Environment, Economy

  Regions: North America

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: iceberg, bottled water, ice, fisheries, Newfoundland

• Gregory Warner

  WORKING

  Tannery Worker

  Play Now Download

  Gregory Warner

  WORKING

  Tannery Worker

  Mohmen left his village at 13 and quickly found work stacking animal skins in one of Karachi’s many tanneries. Now 17, he’s still doing the same job. The longer he works, the deeper his debt. “I don’t want to smile,” Mohmen says, “but it’s all I can do.”

  Mohmen left his village at 13 and quickly found work stacking animal skins in one of Karachi’s many tanneries. He wasn’t allowed to stand by the window when the fumes overtook him. Now, at 17, he’s still doing the same job.

  His boss says Mohmen’s a good kid – smart, hard-working, easy to get along with. But with no education, he’s gone about as far as he can go.

  Mohmen sends almost all of his money home. Sometimes, he says, he feels caught in a loop: the longer he works, the deeper his debt; the older he gets, the more his parents depend on his income. But sometimes he finds himself smiling.

  “I don’t want to smile,” he says, “but it’s all I can do.”

  Date

  June 12, 2008

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Economy, Culture, Lives

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: Pakistan, tannery, child labor, leather

• Jonathan Miller

  WORKING

  Movie Director

  Play Now Download

  Jonathan Miller

  WORKING

  Movie Director

  Nigeria’s Nollywood film industry may be the third largest in the world, but with little government support, daily power failures, no real studios, and rudimentary equipment, Nigerian filmmakers must be masters of making do. That describes Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen to a tee.

  Nigeria produces more movies per year than any other country but India and the United States. Since the 1990s, “Nollywood” videos have been an entertainment staple – and a source of pride – for Africans everywhere.

  But with little government support, daily power failures, no real studios, and the most rudimentary equipment, Nigerian filmmakers can’t just be artists. They need to be masters of making do.

  That describes Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen. At 37, the man known as “The Governor” has already directed more than 150 films. And every single one has been a struggle.

  Date

  May 14, 2008

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Economy, Culture, Lives

  Regions: Africa

  Media: Audio

  Other Contributors: Jonathan Miller

  Other Tags: director, nigeria, Nollywood, movie

• Kelly McEvers

  WORKING

  Trader

  Play Now Download

  Kelly McEvers

  WORKING

  Trader

  Hussein Ralib Esfandiari crosses back and forth between Dubai and his native Iran laden with whatever bargains he can find at market. The Gulf is one of the most politically volatile regions on earth. But politics is the least of Hussein’s worries.

  For thousands of years, traders have plied the waters of the Persian Gulf, braving pirates, warships, and sudden storms in wooden cargo boats called dhows.

  Hussein Ralib Esfandiari is one such trader, crossing back and forth between Dubai and his native Iran laden with whatever bargains he can find at market.

  The Gulf is one of the most politically volatile regions on earth. But politics is the least of Hussein’s worries.

  Date

  April 3, 2008

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Economy, Lives

  Regions: Middle East

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: Iran, dhow, trader, embargo, persian gulf, dubai

• Kelly McEvers

  WORKING

  Cargo Agent

  Play Now Download

  Kelly McEvers

  WORKING

  Cargo Agent

  Foreign workers have the same rights in Saudi Arabia, as long as they’re alive. But when non-Muslims die there, as thousands do each year, they have to go home for burial. And somebody’s got to get them there. Meet Wahid Khan Habibula.

  About one-fourth of the people who live in Saudi Arabia are foreign workers. Many come from Sunni Muslim countries such as Indonesia, Pakistan, or Bangladesh. But others are Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, and minority Shiites.

  All foreign workers have the same rights in the kingdom, as long as they’re alive. But when non-Muslims die there, as thousands do each year, they have to go home for burial. And somebody’s got to get them there.

  Meet Wahid Khan Habibula.

  Date

  March 3, 2008

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Lives, Economy, Culture

  Regions: Middle East

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: sunni, migrant workers, saudi arabia, islam, muslim

• Jonathan Miller

  WORKING

  Chocolate Taster

  Play Now Download

  Jonathan Miller

  WORKING

  Chocolate Taster

  Chloé Doutre-Roussel is in great demand around the world – not just because of her extraordinary palate and her memory for scents and flavors but because of her brutal honesty. “Diplomacy is not one of my known traits,” she laughs. Nor is self-satisfaction.

  The New York Times called Chloé Doutre-Roussel a “goddess.” International chocolate guru Martin Christy compares her to Joan of Arc.

  As a freelance chocolate expert, she is in great demand around the world – not just because of her extraordinary palate but because of her brutal honesty.

  “Diplomacy is not one of my known traits,” she confesses.

  Nor is self-satisfaction. Globetrotting chocolate taster may be many people’s idea of the best job in the world, but Doutre-Roussel says it has its drawbacks.

  Date

  February 12, 2008

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Food, Lives

  Regions: South America, Europe

  Media: Audio

  Other Contributors: Jonathan Miller

  Other Tags: chocolate, Ecuador, France

• Sandy Tolan

  WORKING

  Cabinet Minister

  Play Now Download

  Sandy Tolan

  WORKING

  Cabinet Minister

  Gordana Jankuloska’s assignment is clear: to clean up decades of police corruption and violence in a former East Bloc country desperate to catch up with the rest of Europe. It’s a lot to ask of a young woman with a taste for nature shows and stuffed animals. She says bring it on.

  Remember Hercules, the hero from Greek mythology? He’s famous for the twelve labors he was forced to perform by one of his rivals. One of the toughest was to get rid of 30 years worth of manure left by a herd of royal cattle.

  That’s a lot like the job facing Macedonia’s interior minister Gordana Jankuloska. Only in her case the mess is decades of corruption and violence in a former East Bloc country desperate to catch up with the rest of Europe.

  At barely five feet and 100 pounds, she doesn’t quite have Hercules’ physique. But she’s got the shovel, and she’s determined to use it.

  Date

  January 31, 2008

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Lives, Culture, Peace & Conflict

  Regions: Europe

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: corruption, interior minister, politics, macedonia

• Jonathan Miller

  WORKING

  Textile Worker

  Play Now Download

  Jonathan Miller

  WORKING

  Textile Worker

  Marco Moreno’s parents were tailors, with a tiny shop in a working-class neighborhood in Lima, Peru. He and his brothers decided they could do better. But nobody said it would be easy.

  The garment industry is a place where dreams are more often shattered than fulfilled. The margins are low, the work is exacting, and the competition is brutal. It’s hard to imagine why anyone would actually choose to get into the business.

  But that’s what Marco Moreno Gonzales did. Moreno’s parents were tailors, with a tiny shop in a working-class neighborhood in Lima, Peru. Eventually they gave up and moved to Italy.

  Marco and his brothers decided they could do better.

  Date

  Decmber 20, 2007

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Lives, Economy

  Regions: South America

  Media: Audio

  Other Contributors: Jonathan Miller

  Other Tags: Peru, textile, garment

• Jonathan Miller

  WORKING

  Basketball Scout

  Play Now Download

  Jonathan Miller

  WORKING

  Basketball Scout

  Nigerian Sam Ahmedu is a foot soldier in the NBA’s army of international recruiters. A few of his finds have made it to the pros, but that’s not what motivates him.

  More than one-fifth of all NBA players are from outside the United States, including some of the league’s biggest stars. Most of these foreign players have been on the league’s radar since they were barely old enough to dunk. That’s thanks to a global army of basketball gumshoes, scouring the planet for talent.

  Sam Ahmedu is a foot soldier in that army. He’s based in Nigeria, but his brief is all of Africa. A few of Ahmedu’s finds have made it to the NBA, but that’s not what motivates him.

  Date

  November 8, 2007

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Lives, Economy

  Regions: Africa

  Media: Audio

  Other Contributors: Jonathan Miller

  Other Tags: scout, nigeria, basketball

• Claudine LoMonaco

  WORKING

  Lobster Diver

  Play Now Download

  Claudine LoMonaco

  WORKING

  Lobster Diver

  Romulo Greham, a Miskito Indian on Honduras’ Caribbean coast, almost lost his life while diving for lobsters for the U.S. market. Now he’s trying to keep other divers from the repeating his mistakes.

  Walk into your local chain restaurant and you can get a lobster tail for around 15 bucks. Ever wonder where the lobster comes from, or why it’s so cheap?

  The U.S. imports about 100 million pounds of lobster from international waters every year. Much of it is caught by hand by divers in the Caribbean Sea.

  In Honduras, about 3,000 men make their living that way. Every year several dozen of them get seriously hurt, and some of them die.

  Romulo Greham, a Miskito Indian, almost lost his life in a diving accident. Now he’s trying to keep other divers from the repeating his mistakes.

  Date

  October 11, 2007

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Food, Lives, Economy, Culture

  Regions: Caribbean

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: lobster, disability, diver, Honduras, diving

• Chris Brookes

  WORKING

  Oil Worker

  Play Now Download

  Chris Brookes

  WORKING

  Oil Worker

  Blair Ghent left a good job in Toronto to return home to rural Newfoundland. But work is hard to come by on the island, and soon he found himself joining thousands of unemployed Newfoundlanders commuting 3,000 miles to the oil sands fields of Alberta.

  Pam Pardy and Blair Ghent left good jobs in Toronto to return home to rural Newfoundland. They thought the quality of life would be better there for their son Brody.

  But work is hard to come by on the island, and soon Blair found himself joining thousands of unemployed Newfoundlanders commuting 3,000 miles to the oil sands fields of Alberta.

  The fields raise big questions about the planet’s energy future. But for Blair and Pam, they raise more immediate questions – like who will help Brody with his homework, and whether their marriage will survive the time apart.

  Date

  September 13, 2007

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Lives, Economy, Environment, Culture

  Regions: North America

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: tar sands, Canada, oil, oil sands, alberta

• Rachel Louise Snyder

  WORKING

  Silk Merchant

  Play Now Download

  Rachel Louise Snyder

  WORKING

  Silk Merchant

  Chanta Nguon says Cambodian women are supposed to be quiet and cool, like moonlight. She’d rather be sunlight.

  Like thousands of educated Cambodians, Chanta Nguon fled the Khmer Rouge and spent years in exile. When she returned, she decided not to be a victim anymore.

  She moved to the remote rural town of Stung Treng and started a non-profit for the unemployed and underemployed women there.

  Today she is CEO of Mekong Blue, a hybrid business-NGO that produces beautiful handmade silk products for the international market. She says Cambodian women are supposed to be quiet and cool, like moonlight. She, in contrast, is sunlight.

  Date

  August 16, 2007

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Economy

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Other Tags: silk, cambodia

• Sandy Tolan

  WORKING

  Express Mail Driver

  Play Now Download

  Sandy Tolan

  WORKING

  Express Mail Driver

  Mr. Wang has traveled through Beijing picking up perhaps a quarter of a million packages destined for dozens of countries. Does he ever wonder what’s inside? “No,” he says, “I just want to make some money!”

  Every weekday, Mr. Wang says goodbye to his daughter and his beloved pigeons in an old-fashioned Beijing neighborhood, mounts his bicycle and ventures into the chaos of the city.

  His destination is a local post office, where he parks his bike and climbs into a green express mail van.

  Over the last 12 years, Mr. Wang (known as Laowang, or “Wang the Elder”) has picked up perhaps a quarter of a million packages destined for dozens of countries. Does he ever wonder what’s in those packages? Or who will receive them on the other end? Or why there’s such a big rush?

  “No,” he says, “I just want to make some money!”

  Date

  July 19, 2007

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Lives, Economy

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Audio

  Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan

  Other Tags: beijing, mail, courier, driver, China

• Alan Weisman

  Special Projects

  The World Without Us

  Alan Weisman

  Special Projects

  The World Without Us

  How would the Earth respond if humans were suddenly to disappear? How quickly would our cities, our objects, our waste, and the myriad other changes we have wrought disappear – or would they disappear at all? Most urgently, asks this New York Times bestseller, what can we do to lessen the damage we’re inflicting on the only planet we have?

  In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman offers an utterly original approach to questions of humanity’s impact on the planet: he asks us to envision our Earth, without us.

  In this far-reaching narrative, now translated into 34 languages, Weisman explains how our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence; what of our everyday stuff may become immortalized as fossils; how copper pipes and wiring would be crushed into mere seams of reddish rock; why some of our earliest buildings might be the last architecture left; and how plastic, bronze sculpture, radio waves, and some man-made molecules may be our most lasting gifts to the universe.

  The World Without Us (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2007) reveals how, just days after humans disappear, floods in New York’s subways would start eroding the city’s foundations, and how, as the world’s cities crumble, asphalt jungles give way to real ones. It describes the distinct ways that organic and chemically-treated farms would revert to wild, how billions more birds would flourish, and how cockroaches in unheated cities would perish without us.

  Drawing on the expertise of engineers, atmospheric scientists, art conservators, zoologists, oil refiners, marine biologists, astrophysicists, religious leaders from rabbis to the Dalai Lama, and paleontologists – who describe a pre-human world inhabited by megafauna like giant sloths that stood taller than mammoths – Weisman illustrates what the planet might be like today, if not for us.

  From places already devoid of humans (a last fragment of primeval European forest; the Korean DMZ; Chernobyl), Weisman reveals Earth’s tremendous capacity for self-healing. As he shows which human devastations are indelible, and which examples of our highest art and culture would endure longest, Weisman’s narrative ultimately drives toward a radical but persuasive solution that doesn’t depend on our demise.

  A New York Times bestseller, The World Without Us was rated the number one nonfiction book of 2007 by Time and Entertainment Weekly. It was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award, winner of a Salon Book Award, and was listed among the best books of the year by Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kansas City Star, Mother Jones, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Hudson’s, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

  Reviews

  “It makes for obsessive reading. This is perhaps my favorite book this year. At once the most harrowing and, oddly, comforting book on the environment that I’ve read in many years.” – Louise Erdrich, author of Love Medicine and of National Book Award finalist The Birchbark House

  “Prodigious and impressive.” – Janet Maslin, The New York Times

  “One of the most satisfying environmental books of recent memory, one devoid of self-righteousness, alarmism or tiresome doomsaying ” – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  “I don’t think I’ve read a better non-fiction book this year.” – Lev Grossman, TIME 

  “This is one of the grandest thought experiments of our time, a tremendous feat of imaginative reporting!” – Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and The Durable Future

  “The imaginative power of The World Without Us is compulsive and nearly hypnotic–make sure you have time to be kidnapped into Alan Weisman’s alternative world before you sit down with the book, because you won’t soon return. This is a text that has a chance to change people, and so make a real difference for the planet.”
  —Charles Wohlforth, author of L.A. Times Book Prize-winning The Whale and the Supercomputer

  “A refreshing, and oddly hopeful, look at the fate of the environment.”
  —BusinessWeek

  “Alan Weisman offers us a sketch of where we stand as a species that is both illuminating and terrifying. His tone is conversational and his affection for both Earth and humanity transparent.” – Barry Lopez, author of Arctic Dreams

  “Brilliantly creative. An audacious intellectual adventure. His thought experiment is so intellectually fascinating, so oddly playful, that it escapes categorizing and clichés… It’s a trumpet call that sounds from the other end of the universe and from inside us all.” – Salon

  “Extraordinarily farsighted. A beautiful and passionate jeremiad against deforestation, climate change, and pollution.” – Boston Globe

  “The scope is breathtaking… the clarity and lyricism of the writing itself left me with repeated gasps of recognition about the human condition. I believe it will be a classic.” – Dennis Covington, author of National Book Award finalist Salvation on Sand Mountain

  “Grandly entertaining.” – TIME

  “Alan Weisman has produced, if not a bible, at least a Book of Revelation.” – Newsweek

  “One of the most ambitious ‘thought experiments’ ever.” – The Cincinnati Enquirer 

  “The book boasts an amazingly imaginative conceit that manages to tap into underlying fears and subtly inspire us to consider our interaction with the planet.” – The Washington Post 

  “Fascinating, mordant, deeply intelligent, and beautifully written… This is a very important book for a species playing games with its own destiny.” – James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency

  Date

  June 2007

  Outlets

  Thomas Dunn Books/St. Martin's Press

  Tags

  Themes: Environment

  Regions: Africa, Central America, Asia / Oceania, Middle East, South America, Europe, Caribbean, North America

  Media: Text

  Other Contributors: Alan Weisman

  Other Tags: environment, thought experiment, regeneration, nature

• Sandy Tolan

  WORKING

  Pop Singer

  Play Now Download

  Sandy Tolan

  WORKING

  Pop Singer

  Diana Dimova says she’s never so moved as when she sings the ancient mountain music of her native Bulgaria. But it’s no way for an ambitious, attractive young woman to make a living.

  Diana Dimova says she’s never so moved as when she sings the ancient mountain music of her native Bulgaria. The music, distinguished by its haunting harmonies, was briefly popular in western Europe, and still enjoys a small but loyal audience.

  But it’s no way for an ambitious, attractive young woman to make a living. So Diana (better known by her stage name, Dayana) has decided to become a pop star.

  She sings chalga, a popular form of dance music in central Europe. She performs for $10 a night at clubs, plus tips. It’s hardly glamorous, but stardom could be just around the corner.

  Date

  April 26, 2007

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Culture, Lives, Economy

  Regions: Europe

  Media: Audio

  Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan

  Other Tags: bulgaria, singer, pop, Chalga

• Kelly McEvers

  WORKING

  Fixer

  Play Now Download

  Kelly McEvers

  WORKING

  Fixer

  Tarek Haidar Eskandar can deliver an interview with a rebel commander or an interview with a victim of the latest catastrophe. Or at least that’s the promise. It’s a seat-of-the-pants business, and Tarek’s a seat-of-the-pants type of guy.

  

  Read a dispatch in the world news section of your local paper, or listen to a foreign feature on the radio, and there’s a good chance a fixer helped make the story possible.

  Tarek Haidar Eskandar doesn’t work for the A-list news organizations. He hangs around Beirut’s popular journalists’ hotels, looking for people looking for access. He can deliver an interview with a rebel commander, or an interview with a victim of the latest catastrophe.

  Or at least that’s the promise. It’s a seat-of-the-pants business, and Tarek’s a seat-of-the-pants type of guy.

  Date

  April 3, 2007

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Economy, Culture, Lives

  Regions: Middle East

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: fixer, beirut, lebanon

• Jonathan Miller

  WORKING

  Metal Worker

  Play Now Download

  Jonathan Miller

  WORKING

  Metal Worker

  Pedro Córdoba’s says his job in a giant Peruvian smelter has made him seriously ill. And he’s not going to take it lying down.

  

  Almost everyone in La Oroya, Peru, depends on the giant multi-metal smelter and refinery that sprawls across the valley floor. It doesn’t just dominate the city visually, aurally, and olfactorily, but also economically, politically, and psychologically.

  That makes most townspeople tolerant of conditions that elsewhere might lead to open rebellion.

  Not so Pedro Córdoba Valdivieso, a mechanic who works in the smelter. He is suffering from an incurable lung disease caused by years of inhaling rock dust. And he’s determined to make the company pay.

  Date

  February 28, 2007

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Health, Economy, Environment, Lives

  Regions: South America

  Media: Audio

  Other Contributors: Jonathan Miller

  Other Tags: metal worker, Peru, La Oroya, mine

• Sandy Tolan

  WORKING

  Mine Clearer

  Play Now Download

  Sandy Tolan

  WORKING

  Mine Clearer

  Valdet Dule is a Kosovar and father of two young children whose job is to find and detonate explosives left over from the wars of the 1990s. Until the land is safe, he says, his people won’t be able to realize their dream of independence.

  Long after the fighting ended in Kosovo in 1999, the people of the region are still struggling to free themselves from the legacy of war.

  Thousands of landmines and unexploded bombs remain in farmers’ fields, in forests, along roadsides.

  Valdet Dule is a Kosovar (and father of two young children) whose job is to find and detonate those explosives. Until the land is safe, he says, his people won’t be able to realize their dream of independence.

  Date

  January 31, 2007

  Outlets

  Marketplace

  Tags

  Themes: Lives, Economy, Peace & Conflict

  Regions: Europe

  Media: Audio

  Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan

  Other Tags: kosovo, mine clearer, landmines

• Sandy Tolan

  Special Projects

  The Lemon Tree

  Sandy Tolan

  Special Projects

  The Lemon Tree

  The tale of a simple act of faith between two young people – one Israeli, one Palestinian – that symbolizes the hope for peace in the Middle East. Winner of a Christopher Award, Booklist’s best adult non-fiction book of 2006, and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

  In 1967, Bashir Khairi, a 25-year-old Palestinian, journeyed to Israel with the goal of seeing the beloved stone house with the lemon tree behind it that he and his family had fled 19 years earlier.

  To his surprise, when he found the house he was greeted by Dalia Eshkenazi Landau, a 19-year-old Israeli college student, whose family had fled Europe following the Holocaust.

  On the stoop of their shared home, Dalia and Bashir began a rare friendship, forged in the shadow of war and tested over the next half century in ways that neither could imagine on that summer day in 1967.

  In The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, Sandy Tolan brings the Israeli-Palestinian conflict down to its most human level, demonstrating that even amid the bleakest political realities there exist stories of hope and transformation.

  The Lemon Tree grew out of Sandy’s award-winning documentary for NPR’s Fresh Air. The book won a Christopher Award for “affirming the highest values of the human spirit” and was Booklist’s “Editor’s Choice” for best adult non-fiction book of 2006. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

   

  Date

  May 2006

  Outlets

  Bloomsbury USA

  Tags

  Themes: Peace & Conflict, Lives

  Regions: Middle East

  Media: Text

  Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan

  Other Tags: Palestine, bulgaria, West Bank, Ramallah, israel

• Sandy Tolan, Elif Shafak

  Worlds of Difference

  The Street of the Cauldron Makers

  Play Now Download

  Sandy Tolan, Elif Shafak

  Worlds of Difference

  The Street of the Cauldron Makers

  Modern Turkey emerged in the 1920s as a secular, westernized nation where the rule was always to look forward, never back. But novelist Elif Shafak says buried memories have a way of rising to the surface. She takes us on a tour of an Istanbul street, where battles over identity, modernity, ethnicity, and minority rights have played out in miniature.

  Turkey has long been known as a nation at a crossroads between East and West, Islam and Christianity. Literally straddling Europe and Asia, it is considered by many to be the exception in the Islamic world: a large country with a majority Muslim population and a westernized, secular political culture. It seemed a natural place to explore the heightening tension between tradition and change – a central theme of the times in which we live, and the central interest of the Worlds of Difference project.

  As with all our stories, we wanted to capture that tension in a lyrical, sound-rich way that would privilege the voices of ordinary people. In the end we found a voice that is quiteextra-ordinary: that of Elif Shafak, a young, fiercely intelligent Turkish novelist and social scientist whose own work drills deep into the multiple layers of her nation’s history and psyche.

  In late 2004, I called Elif, the author of five novels, including The Flea Palace and The Saint of Incipient Insanities. She splits her time between Istanbul and Tucson, where she was an assistant professor of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona. In Turkey, she explained, the secularized, western orientation engineered by the country’s modern founder, Kemal Ataturk, taught Turks always to look forward, never back. This one-way gaze came at a cost, she said: the loss of a national memory, of both the beauties and the atrocities of the past. I thought this sounded fascinating. But how could we turn such an abstract idea into a radio documentary? She had an immediate answer: Let’s approach it through the voices on a single Istanbul street.

  She had the perfect street in mind: Kazanci Yokushu, the “Street of the Cauldron Makers,” an unremarkable, litter-strewn lane tucked below Taksim Square and the Iskitlal pedestrian thoroughfare. Elif saw the street, where she once lived and wrote a novel, as a metaphor for Turkey’s modern history – a place where the nation’s battles over identity, modernity, ethnicity and minority rights have played out in miniature over the decades. A walking tour from top to bottom would reveal more about modern Turkey than any scholarly treatise.

  I admit I was skeptical. How could a single street serve as a metaphor for a great nation’s history? But in the voices of the butcher, the barber, the grocers, the tailor and the domino players, I believe we were able to unearth a good many layers beneath the gray, gritty stones of the Street of the Cauldron Makers.

  According to Proust, the smell of a biscuit dipped in tea can liberate memories long sequestered or suppressed. I feel fortunate to have traveled with Elif Shafak to her old street as she searched for a way to unlock some of her nation’s memories, and to dig for clues to its future.

  – Sandy Tolan

  Date

  October 15, 2005

  Other Contributor(s)

  Melissa Robbins

  Outlets

  Weekend Edition

  Tags

  Themes: Lives, Culture

  Regions: Asia / Oceania, Europe

  Media: Audio, Text

  Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan

  Other Tags: Istanbul, Ottoman, Turkey, memory

• Melissa Robbins

  Worlds of Difference

  Fighting the Water

  Play Now Download

  Melissa Robbins

  Worlds of Difference

  Fighting the Water

  On the tangled braids of earth and marsh that form the Mississippi Delta, the Houma Indians have lived for centuries, isolated by water. But now the land is dissolving beneath their feet, and many Houma fear that their unique culture will dissolve along with it.

  “If we get a major hurricane, this place could be wiped out tomorrow. It’s not a question of if we get hurricanes. We know we get hurricanes. It’s just a question of when.”

  – Louisiana wetlands activist Kerry St. Pe, February 2005

  In early 2005, I took a trip to the bayous of southern Louisiana to report on how the United Houma Nation is confronting an environmental and cultural crisis: the loss of their traditional lands to coastal erosion, and the resulting threat to their viability as a people. A story that felt urgent and compelling at the time has, since the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, taken on an almost symbolic importance for me. The voices, which seemed then to be pleading for an audience, have become eerily prescient echoes in my head.

  For 200 years, the isolation of the bayou has been a blessing for the Houma, helping them to maintain strong ties to each other and to pursue their traditional livelihoods as shrimpers and oystermen. But dams and levees along the Mississippi River have deprived the delta of silt from natural flooding, and the Barataria Terrebonne region, southwest of New Orleans, is now the fastest eroding land mass on earth. The loss of wetlands has left the coast increasingly vulnerable to hurricanes and flooding. In recent decades, vast expanses of the Houma’s traditional territory have disappeared under water. And one by one, Houma families have been forced from their homes.

  Houma leaders fear that this gradual dispersal will soon undermine tribal identity. As Vice Principal Chief Michael Dardar, puts it: “Native American existence is about a people and a place, a community and its relationship to each other and its relationship to the land it belongs to. So if you lose that, you’re still individually Houma, but you lose that sense of nationhood. And you lose what we’ve struggled to maintain for 200 years.”

  Like dozens of other Native American tribes, the Houma are not recognized by the federal government, which means they don’t have the protection of a permanent reservation. Michael Dardar and other leaders have been looking for ways to purchase a plot of land where the entire community can relocate – where tribal traditions can be kept alive for future generations. But not everyone is on board. The proposal, like the flooding, has divided the tribe. Many Houma can’t bear the idea of abandoning the lands they have occupied for centuries, and have vowed to hold on for as long as they can.

  Postscript:

  My reporting was completed before Hurricane Katrina and Tropical Storm Rita devastated much of coastal Louisiana in August and September, 2005. The community of Isle a Jean Charles, which is featured in my story – the ancestral home of Curtis Hendon, Virgil Dardar and Chris Brunet – was spared the worst of the storms’ damage. But many other Houma, spread throughout the Gulf Coast region, suffered terribly.

  – Melissa Robbins

  Date

  October 1, 2005

  Outlets

  Homelands.org

  Tags

  Themes: Economy, Environment, Culture

  Regions: North America

  Media: Audio, Text

  Other Tags: Louisiana, flooding, relocation, Houma

• Marianne McCune

  Worlds of Difference

  Relearning the Peace

  Play Now Download

  Marianne McCune

  Worlds of Difference

  Relearning the Peace

  Burundi’s Hutus and Tutsis practice the same religion and speak the same language. Intermarriage is common. But decades of violence have made even the most imaginary differences tragically real. In 2005, voters in Burundi approved a constitution that requires the two groups to share power. For the country’s new leaders, that means unlearning bad habits. Marianne McCune attends a retreat for the newly integrated national police.

  After decades of violence and civil war, the Hutus and Tutsis of Burundi, in Central Africa, are trying to govern the country together. Their new constitution requires power sharing in every government agency. Yet many on both sides of the conflict are still armed, and few have experience negotiating political disagreements without violence.

  Howard Wolpe, a former U.S. congressman and President Clinton’s special envoy to Africa’s Great Lakes region, says the problem is not that Hutus and Tutsis hate each other. Burundi’s colonists and corrupt leaders taught them to blame their problems on each other, he says. And once war and violence took hold, the conflict was self-perpetuating.

  “War creates a situation where people are convinced that their own survival can only come at the expense of the other,” Wolpe says. “The challenge is trying to change the culture that war creates.”

  To do that, Wolpe is bringing to Burundi an American-style corporate leadership workshop that Burundi’s new senators and generals and police chiefs swear is helping them work more constructively together. The idea is to interrupt the culture that war has created and reintroduce a culture in which people understand that their own survival depends on their ability to collaborate.

  “It’s true in all conflicts that when people get into a war, communications break down,” Wolpe says. “Stereotypes emerge. Barriers are put up. So the techniques we use are techniques that open up the lines of communication and equip people with the means of transcending their earlier conflict.”

  When Tutsi General Jean Bikomagu and Hutu rebel spokesman Jerome Ndiho arrived at one of the earliest workshops, they had never met – but they despised each other nevertheless.

  “I had the feeling that he had helped create all the unhappiness of the country,” recalls Bikomagu. And Ndiho says he was shocked when he found they would be spending the week together. “You understand how I hated this man. We had been launching shells at each other!”

  By the end of the week, they say, it was their colleagues who were shocked—that they had publicly agreed on several points about Burundi’s future.

  Participants in a session for the High Command of Burundi’s National Police ranged from young Hutu rebels, who came of age fighting in the woods, to Tutsi leaders of the government’s Gendarmerie, a force that was notorious for helping massacre Hutus. Together for a week in a walled-off Catholic seminary, they learned techniques like “active listening” and brainstorming. During one exercise they argued over whether a woman in a drawing was old or young – only to discover the image was a composite of two women, one old and one young.

  The moral: in a conflict, it’s possible that both sides are right. They simply have different perspectives.

  The workshops include lessons on the importance of preparing your position before entering a negotiation, and on identifying the causes of a problem before trying to find its solution. The men spend one day doing a “social simulation.” Each person is assigned to an imaginary geographical region in an imaginary country and asked to operate in the region’s interest, but with the goal of making the whole society survive. Some regions are rich, others are poor; some have resources but few people, others have few resources buy many people. These imaginary societies often fail miserably. But in their discussions afterward, participants find plenty of useful parallels with real life.

  The application of such techniques to Burundi’s devastating conflict can seem, at times, absurd. A leader of the famously intimidating Gendarmerie scurried between the red region and green region, begging for food tickets so he and his region-mates can survive. Fiercely proud military-types try to use active-listening phrases (“So what you’re telling me is …”), mustering all their patience to resist the urge to launch into their own arguments. But by the end of the workshops, participants seem quite moved by the experience. One former general claimed that with these tools, he could have averted one of the first battles of Burundi’s Civil War.

  Howard Wolpe and his team have been asked to take the workshops to the war-ravaged Republic of Congo, where the situation is much less stable than in Burundi. The first challenge will be to get leaders there to buy into the process. Wolpe has to convince them that it’s in their interest to work together.

  “I believe that fundamentally people will never alter the way they behave toward one another unless they see that as a matter of self interest,” he says. “We try to assist people to come to an appreciation, first, of their interdependence. That there’s value in collaboration, even with people they’d historically defined as enemies. But secondly, that they can do that. That it’s possible to rebuild trust, to rebuild the ability to communicate.”

  – Marianne McCune

  Thank you to the Burundi Leadership Training Program and to Burundi’s new National Police for allowing me full access to their week-long training.

  Date

  July 17, 2005

  Outlets

  Weekend Edition

  Tags

  Themes: Peace & Conflict, Culture

  Regions: Africa

  Media: Audio, Text

  Other Tags: Burundi, Hutu, Tutsi, police, reconciliation

• Karen Michel

  Worlds of Difference

  Seeking the Middle Way

  Play Now Download

  Karen Michel

  Worlds of Difference

  Seeking the Middle Way

  For decades, the goal of the tiny Himalayan Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan has been neither to keep pace with the rest of the world nor to hide from it, but rather to increase what the king calls “Gross National Happiness.”

  Before going to Bhutan, I read as much as possible about the country and talked to folks who’d been there. The published articles agreed on two things: tourism was limited to 6,000 people a year and the country was Shangri-La. The people who’d visited agreed on nothing: being a Western Buddhist was an advantage/would be ridiculed; everything was expensive/everything was reasonable; adjusting to the altitude was difficult/the altitude was no big deal; and it was inevitable that the cold would get to you/wearing layers made everything easy.

  Let me address the tourism assertion first: it’s a myth, wrong, false. In fact, tourist arrivals have been as high as 9,000 people in a recent year, and Bhutan encourages people to come: you just have to write a letter to the Minister of Protocol asking permission, and stating why you want to go. And you have to wire $200/day for the duration of your expected stay. (The idea is that this will keep “the backpackers” out.) The letter, I would learn, is pro forma, getting a visa doesn’t take long, and the $200/day covers your guide (mandatory), hotel, meals, permits (required for visiting monasteries and government compounds) and transportation, and is, therefore, not a bad deal at all.

  As for Bhutan being Shangri-La, well, too many places in that part of the world claim the title. If you ask me, Bhutan is quite amazing; I’ll leave it at that. I prefer the notion that we all have our own vision and version of Shangri-La, whether influenced by James Michener or not.

  What did matter, after all, is that I am a practicing Buddhist, of the Kagyu branch of Tibetan Buddhism; so are the Bhutanese. My guide, Pema Tshering, made a point of telling people that I was a Buddhist: it made a difference to him, and to – it seemed – everyone I met. It meant, among other things, that I was open to a society based in Buddhist principls, a place where generosity was expected, moderation (the middle way) always a goal, loving kindness and compassion a way of life, and stupas, monks and monasteries everywhere. It meant, critically, that – by Bhutanese lights – I knew how to behave in both the secular and sacred realms. And so I was able to meet with high lamas, go into inner sanctums of monasteries, receive blessings, have discussions on the dharma. I had access to aspects of life that, I was told, were generally unavailable to tourists.

  was not really a tourist, of course, but a journalist. Yet I was traveling on a tourist visa. This made me nervous. Getting a journalist visa took much more time, and I didn’t have but a few weeks between assignment and anticipated arrival. I figured that having a small tape recorder was less obvious than a video camera, but still I was concerned: Bhutan maintains a tight control over its internal and external image. So before I left I met with Gyaltshen Penjor, the First Secretary of the Mission of the Kingdom of Bhutan to the United Nations. He was friends with a friend of a friend, it turned out. And that, too, mattered.

  I told him that I was going to Bhutan both as an academic interested in issues of media and cultural change (which was true) and as a journalist. “Should I be worried about that?” I asked him. He responded by querying me about my Buddhist beliefs. Why was I a Buddhist? For how long? What did that mean for my life? My answers satisfied him: he said I’d be fine, that I should use his name as necessary during my travels, that he wanted me to meet his brothers and to spend time with his mother in her village home.

  After our meeting, I sent him an article I’d written several years before, “The Journalist in the Lotus,” about reconciling the practices of journalism and Buddhism. He said he wanted to talk with me more about the dharma when I returned.

  During my too-brief stay in Bhutan, as I tried to understand the impact of recently-introduced media on a profoundly Buddhist culture, I thought often about the conflicting advice I’d been given by visitors, about the falsehoods in the (always gushy) Western press, and about how fortunate I was to have met Gyaltshen. I had a meal with members of his family in Thimphu, and spent an extraordinary afternoon with his mother in her village near Paro.

  What I experienced in those 10 days in Bhutan will take me years to unravel; I hope I’ll be back before too long to add more to the skein.

  – Karen Michel

  Thanks to Valeria Vasilievski, Pema Tshering, Deki Wangmo, Gyaltshen Penjor, Bob Vye, Yeshey Dorji, Tshering Pema, and Hotel Dragon Roots.

  Date

  May 20, 2005

  Outlets

  Living on Earth

  Tags

  Themes: Economy, Culture

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Audio, Text

  Other Tags: Bhutan, development, Buddhism, Gross National Happiness

• Tatiana Schreiber

  Worlds of Difference

  Café Rebeldía

  Play Now Download

  Tatiana Schreiber

  Worlds of Difference

  Café Rebeldía

  The Mutvitz cooperative in Chiapas, Mexico, sells a portion of its coffee on the growing global “solidarity market.” The farmers, who are part of the Zapatista rebel movement, see the coffee business as a way not just to move forward economically, but to strengthen their Mayan heritage.

  Climbing into the mountains with members of the Mutvitz coffee cooperative, one is struck by how hard these farmers work. Most coffee growers in this part of Chiapas, Mexico, live in ejidos; that is, land held in common by the entire community, and worked by individual families. Generally the village is located in the center of the ejidal land, and the coffee fields (usually 2 to 10 acres each) are spread out around it, high in the moutains. Farmers must walk two, three, or more hours over extremely steep terrain just to get to their fields.

  The members of Mutvitz (Mutvitz is a Tzotzil word that means “mountain of birds”) do not shrink from hard work. Determined to obtain a better price for their coffee, as well as to protect their own health and that of their land, they abide by all the practices required of them by CERTIMEX, the Mexican organic trade certifying agency. These practices include composting; terracing; using “living fences” of small trees and shrubs to protect their fields from neighboring farms where chemical fertilizers and pesticides may be applied; planting a variety of tree species within their coffee fields to enhance biodiversity; and draining the water used for washing the coffee beans into wells, so as to avoid sending the run-off to mountain streams.

  Once, walking to a coffee field with a farmer in central Chiapas, we lost the trail and I followed as best I could as he hacked his way through thick tropical undergrowth using his trusty machete. When we finally arrived at the field, the farmer proudly showed me his work: he’d built individual terraces around each coffee tree to prevent the torrential rains from washing precious topsoil down the mountain. He’d gathered materials for compost – leaves, coffee pulp, animal manure and beneficial weeds – and, after months of turning the huge mounds, had applied several shovelfuls to each tree. He kept the area around each tree cleared of weeds using only his machete. He’d carefully regulated the amount of light by pruning the shade trees at regular intervals. His entire family was involved in the harvest, which requires many trips to the coffee field and back, carrying the 100 pound sacks of coffee fruit (the freshly harvested fruit is about the size and shape of a cherry) on their shoulders. The women often carried a child on their backs as well.

  For coffee farmers, the work does not stop with the harvest. Newly picked coffee must be “wet processed” in the community. First, a hand cranked machine is used to depulp the beans, removing the outer fruit from the inner seed. Next, the beans must be soaked and stirred in several changes of water over several days to begin fermentation. Then the coffee is spread out on a concrete patio to dry in the sun. The beans must be raked and turned daily, and sometimes taken up and covered if rain comes. (In the Chiapas highlands it’s not uncommon to have rain ten months out of the year.) Finally the dried green coffee beans are selected, with only the best beans gathered for sale.

  The sacks of beans are again hauled on farmers’ backs, hoisted into trucks and taken to the cooperative’s warehouse for further quality checking and weighing. Then they are reloaded onto trucks to go to the beneficio , or dry-processing facility, where the outer husk of the bean will be removed and the coffee will be roasted.

  For all the work involved, Mutvitz members and other Chiapas coffee farmers I have met are always willing to take time out to notice what’s going on around them. On the way back from the field that day, I asked the farmer to identify for me all the various bird sounds we were hearing along the way. Appreciative of my interest, he named them all, and also stopped to point out to me something I’d never seen before – a tiny hummingbird nest hanging delicately from an inner branch of a tree. Chiapas is home to 39 of the 55 species of hummingbirds native to Mexico. The coffee farmers, working hard to preserve their livelihood and culture, are also protecting critical habitat for birds.

  I once asked Mutvitz farmers how much they thought their work was really worth. What would be a really “fair” price? They could only laugh. Ten dollars a pound? A hundred dollars a pound? In the end it was impossible to put a value on their coffee, and all that it means, grown below a craggy promontory called Mutvitz, mountain of birds.

  – Tatiana Schreiber

  Date

  May 15, 2005

  Outlets

  Public Radio Collaboration

  Tags

  Themes: Economy, Culture

  Regions: North America

  Media: Audio, Text

  Other Tags: Zapatistas, Chiapas, fair trade, Mexico, coffee, markets

• Chris Brookes

  Worlds of Difference

  A Map of the Sea

  Play Now Download

  Chris Brookes

  Worlds of Difference

  A Map of the Sea

  For centuries, the Newfoundland fishery was hailed as the greatest in the world. Then, in 1992, the cod disappeared. Now the islanders must find a way to keep that culture from going the way of the cod. An award-winning meditation on memory, fishing, music, and dance.

  In Newfoundland today, there are two sounds that haunt me. The first one I heard twelve years ago. I was talking with the great traditional singer Anita Best about the sudden closure of the North Atlantic cod fishery. This cod stock was once the largest fish biomass on the planet. A year earlier Canadian fisheries scientists had belatedly woken up to signs that the cod were in serious trouble. A temporary fishing moratorium had been announced in hopes the stock would rebound. As Anita and I chatted then, one year into the moratorium, the signs were not good. People were beginning to think the unthinkable.

  In public the talk was all about the economic impact. Thirty thousand fishery workers were out of work. But Anita’s concern was cultural. “I fear,” she said, “that the codfish off Newfoundland may be like the buffalo on the Great Plains. When they were wiped out the repercussion wasn’t only economic for the societies that depended on them. It pulled the rug from under their whole culture. And I really think we may have done it here, just like they did to the buffalo.”

  I had asked her to sing a traditional song with the line “Lots of fish in Bonavist’ harbour,” and as I held my microphone her voice broke. “Please turn your tape off,” she said, and her body shook with a great wailing sob.

  Today, the fish haven’t come back, and the cod fishery is still closed. Rural Newfoundlanders have left in droves. Some communities are turning to tourism for survival, and Petty Harbour is one of these. They’ve developed a four-year plan to attract tourists to come and see their 500-year-old fishing history. Central attractions will be a museum and fishery heritage interpretation center. Mayor Nat Hutchings says, “It’s a culture shock. I mean, your culture all your lifetime is the fishery. You’re living and breathing the fishery and all of a sudden, that’s gone. It’s like a death. But after awhile you start thinking I’ve got to do something. And that’s what Petty Harbour is doing. We’ve moved from fishing for cod, to fishing for tourists.”

  Other rural communities have died. The 17th-century fishing community of Harbour Deep vanished from the map three years ago when the last of its residents left. But its ghost survives in the culture, because of a traditional “set dance” that Harbour Deep people had danced for longer than anyone could remember. It was unique to the place. Although the community has disappeared, the dance survives and is now stepped out by other feet – ironically including those of summer tourists looking for an “authentic” taste of Newfoundland outport life.

  The tapping of those feet is the other sound haunting me. A 500-year-old society trying to keep its feet after cataclysmic change. An economy once based on the greatest fishery in the world, now retooling to replay its memory to strangers.

  – Chris Brookes

  Date

  January 28, 2005

  Outlets

  Living on Earth

  Tags

  Themes: Economy, Culture

  Regions: North America

  Media: Audio, Text

  Other Tags: music, cod, tourism, dance, fisheries, Newfoundland

• Kate Davidson

  Worlds of Difference

  Saints and Indians

  Play Now Download

  Kate Davidson

  Worlds of Difference

  Saints and Indians

  Between 1954 and 2000, tens of thousands of Native American children went to live with Mormon families during the school year. For some, it was a chance to overcome the stresses of reservation life. For others, it was a repudiation of their identity. For everyone, it was a life-changing experience.

  Between 1954 and 2000, tens of thousands of Native American children went to live with Mormon families during the school year. For some, it was a chance to overcome the stresses of reservation life. For others, it was a repudiation of their identity. For everyone, it was a life-changing experience.

  This story was edited by Deborah George. Thanks to the Navajo educator and artist Pauline Begay for use of her song “Cradleboard Lullaby” in the piece. Her award-winning work is available from Cool Runnings Music.

  Thanks also to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for providing archival material for this piece.

  And many thanks to the Placement students and families who shared their stories and let me into their lives this year, little by little. That experience, for me, is the richest part of the project.

  — Kate Davidson

  Date

  January 23, 2005

  Other Contributor(s)

  Deborah George

  Outlets

  All Things Considered

  Tags

  Themes: Culture, Lives

  Regions: North America

  Media: Audio, Text

  Other Tags: Mormon, Navajo, Native American, missionary, Placement Program

• Alan Weisman, Nancy Hand

  Worlds of Difference

  Cotopaxi Pilgrimage

  Play Now Download

  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: Ecuador, Andes, indigenous people

• Frank Browning

  Worlds of Difference

  Kinvara: A Spirit of Place

  Play Now Download

  Frank Browning

  Worlds of Difference

  Kinvara: A Spirit of Place

  For much of the 20th century, the town of Kinvara, on Ireland’s west coast, was rich in charm but poor in just about everything else. Then the Celtic Tiger awoke. Today, Kinvara is crawling with developers and speculators. The boom has forced the townsfolk to ask tough questions about where they want their community to go.

  In 1973, when Liadain O’Donovan first showed me around the “west country” of Ireland, we joked that you’d find more black-cassocked priests on the roads than utility poles. There were fewer cars on the back lanes than horse-drawn carts. Thatched cottages seemed still to be the standard. And the region’s greatest export was its children. As late as the 1980s as many as two-thirds of Irish high school graduates emigrated to survive.

  Today, Ireland ranks as one of the ten richest countries in the world in per capita terms. Its economic growth rate is about 6 percent, unemployment is below 5 percent, its trade surplus is the highest in Europe. At the same time, the scandals of the 1990s, which revealed rampant child abuse by Catholic priests who until very recently ran nearly all the schools, have brought shame and massive disaffection from the Church. In the wake has come a radical transformation in everything having to do with daily life in Ireland.

  To travel these days through the west country, in Galway and Clare counties, is to see a mad dash of unregulated new construction – from gaudy block and brick two-stories to hives of holiday cottages lined out along the seaside slopes. The churches have not disappeared, but no longer is it conceivable that the priest could, with a single nod, block the sale of a field or a house to a prospective buyer deemed morally suspect.

  What diet fed the unrestrained growth of this so-called Celtic Tiger?

  By most analysis, it was the convergence of three forces: the collapse of Church control over nearly every element of public and private life; a near 100-percent literacy rate, which was possibly the church schools’ greatest contribution; and the arrival of a high-tech information industry in the early 1990s, which turned Ireland into the primary manufacturing and sales center for American personal computer production in Europe.

  Low manufacturing taxes and interest rates, combined with high language skills, lured American companies and stimulated enormous growth in service sector spending.

  Results? Dublin now claims the most expensive real estate in Europe, where a simple two-story, four-room frame and stucco house can go for $1 million. Houses in Kinvara go for half a million (Phil Moylan, the owner of Winckle’s pub there, recently rejected an offer of 1.2 million euros). Locals and tourists alike now eat out and demand better food—a pleasant change from the boiled potatoes and roasted lamb gristle of 30 years ago. But prosperity has not come without its price. Ireland now suffers the highest alcoholism rate in western Europe. The newspapers are full of stories about drunken brawls and highway deaths. And little towns like Kinvara query themselves endlessly about the fate of the famous land of artists and poets.

  – Frank Browning

  Date

  December 4, 2004

  Outlets

  Weekend Edition

  Tags

  Themes: Culture, Economy

  Regions: Europe

  Media: Audio, Text

  Other Tags: Ireland, folk music

• Lorne Matalon

  Worlds of Difference

  The Reindeer People

  Play Now Download

  Lorne Matalon

  Worlds of Difference

  The Reindeer People

  About 40 percent of all Mongolians are nomads, but officials there say they want most of them to settle down. With their reindeer herds dwindling and government support disappearing, the Tsachin people have to decide whether to abandon their ancient way of life.

  For thousands of years, reindeer herders have roamed the taiga of northern Mongolia, a hauntingly beautiful wilderness of mountains, forest, rock and ice which straddles the country’s border with Siberia. The herders, known as the Tsaschin, or Dukha, rely on their animals for transportation, and for the staples of their diet: milk, cheese, yogurt, and dried milk curds.

  But disease and inbreeding have reduced the Tsachin’s herds from more than 2,000 in the 1970s to less than one-third of that today. And that, in turn, has threatened the Tsachin’s way of life.

  “Reindeer are more than simply the animal which provides a livelihood in the taiga,” says Daniel Plumley of the Totem Peoples Project, an NGO based in New York state. “They represent the culture here. Without the reindeer, the culture would cease to exist.”

  Through his NGO, Plumley has been raising funds for veterinary research. He has also been lobbying the Mongolian government to recognize the Tsachin – with just 44 families, Mongolia’s smallest nomadic group – as a unique society deserving of official support. State financial and veterinary assistance for the herders was withdrawn with the fall of communism in the early 1990s.

  Never more endangered

  Plumley says it’s in everyone’s best interest that the Tsachin survive in their native habitat. They are responsible stewards of the land, he says, with a deep knowledge of plants, weather and animals that they’ve accumulated over the centuries. “It is a culture which we in the West can learn from,” he says.

  But the future of the Tsachin has never been more endangered. The government is urging them to settle down. The herds are dwindling. And the world around them is changing. Many Tsachin children go to school in towns, where they are exposed to television and consumer goods. They know that the nomadic life provides little in the way of cash, or opportunity for social advancement.

  “One of my fears is that the young people may decide to leave the taiga, and that old people like me will end up alone,” says Sanjim, a Tsachin elder.

  Breaking the cycle

  Myagmar Nansalmaa, a veterinarian with the Mongolian State Veterinary Laboratory in Ulaanbaatar, hopes that strengthening the herds will help prevent that from happening. She is one of several researchers who are currently investigating the health problems of the reindeer. Since the government ceased providing support for the Tsachin, Nansalmaa has been traveling to the taiga during her own vacation time.

  There she has teamed up with Plumley, Jerry Haigh of the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, and Morgan Keay, a wildlife biologist based in Boulder, Colorado.

  The researchers have found that a significant portion of the reindeer population is plagued by Brucella suis, bacteria that cause a serious form of brucellosis. The infectious disease attacks the reindeer’s reproductive system, causing stillbirths or abnormally small offspring. The bacteria also trigger bursitis, a swelling of the joints that is particularly debilitating for nomadic animals. Nansalmaa believes the blood parasite anaplasma has also infected the herd.

  The poor health of the herd sets a vicious cycle in motion. As the animals’ health declines, life in the taiga becomes more difficult. Herders are tempted to settle in towns, or to move to lower altitudes. Some have brought their reindeer to a lake where, for a fee, they pose with their reindeer for tourists.

  “Remaining in one place is unsuitable for animals used to constant movement,” Nansalmaa says. “And hotter temperatures in the summer leave the animals vulnerable to insects, and to the parasites the insects carry, making them weak just as winter arrives.”

  Strengthening the stock

  Inbreeding may be the greatest concern, Nansalmaa says. Inbreeding causes bone deformities, vulnerability to disease, and lameness, a frequently fatal affliction. Wolves can easily kill weak or slow reindeer when they fall behind the herd.

  “In 1962 and again in the late 1980s, the government of Mongolia brought in reindeer from a Siberian herd to replenish the genetic stock of the reindeer in the taiga,” Nansalmaa says. “But with state support for herders ending, inbreeding began, and its negative consequences were soon apparent.”

  The herder Bayandalai owns 97 reindeer – the largest herd in the taiga. “The reindeer our ancestors used to herd were healthy,” he says wistfully. “Today I have only one wish, and that is for the government to bring in reindeer from Siberia, Scandinavia, or Canada. If not reindeer, then reindeer semen.”

  “Artificial insemination is a key to regenerating the size and genetic quality of the herd,” says Haigh, the Saskatchewan veterinarian. Haigh and his colleagues have identified donor bulls in Canada, and hope to begin an insemination program in the coming months.

  “Herders here represent one of the last truly nomadic cultures on Earth,” says Myagmar Nansalmaa. “We want to help the taiga people live a full life, just as their ancestors did.”

   – Lorne Matalon

  Thanks to the herders of the East and West Taiga of Mongolia and their families; to translators Ganhuyag Demid, Gerelt Od Dash, Bayar Lhavgasuren, Binderiya Dondov, and Badamtsetseg Tsedennya; to Peter Marsh (American Center for Mongolian Studies), Stevan Buxt (PACT), Morgan Keay (Itgel Foundation), Daniel Plumley (Totem Peoples Project), Myagmar Nansalmaa (Mongolian State Veterinary Laboratory), Anna Sirena (Russian Academy of Sciences); and special thanks to Allan Coukell for his companionship and collaboration.

  Date

  November 26, 2004

  Other Contributor(s)

  Allan Coukell

  Outlets

  NPR

  Tags

  Themes: Culture, Economy

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Audio, Text

  Other Tags: Mongolia, nomads, reindeer, veterinarian

• Allan Coukell

  Worlds of Difference

  The Face of the Shaman

  Play Now Download

  Allan Coukell

  Worlds of Difference

  The Face of the Shaman

  For thousands of years, the Mongolian shaman has been the intermediary between the human and spirit worlds. Shamanism was suppressed for 70 years under communism. Now it’s back in the open, competing for customers in a market that’s crowded with alternatives.

  Talk to Ghoste. That’s what everyone says. There are three shamans here among the nomadic reindeer herders of northern Mongolia. Or maybe six, depending whom you believe. But Ghoste is the real deal, the most powerful. They say you should talk to Ghoste, and then in the same breath, they say “but Ghoste doesn’t like to talk.”

  Soyun is the oldest shaman, at 100. She’s a tiny woman, ancient, with bad knees. She struggles in her oortz, or teepee, to move between her sleeping platform and the kettle of salty milk-tea on the stove. When she steps outside, which isn’t often, she walks with the aid of two crooked sticks.

  But they say that when Soyun performs her full shamanic ritual, those long nights, when she pounds the drum until the trance begins and the spirits – the ongots – enter her body, they say then she leaps and dances like a child.

  Her drum is kept behind a curtain, in the place of honor opposite the door of the tent. She will not show it to a visitor. In fact, she is tired of all the questions. Talk to Ghoste, she says, talk to Ghoste.

  Soyun was born across the border in Tuva, which is part of Siberia, and though the children now all speak Mongolian, Soyun still prefers the Tuvan language. During Mongolia’s communist period, her own daughter, Tsend, briefly made a living in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, as a singer of Tuvan folk songs.

  Tsend is about seventy now, and nearly blind. She has long returned to the taiga, high in the mountains where the reindeer herders live. Tsend, like her mother and her grandmother before that, is a shaman.

  One bright and frigid morning, Tsend came out of her oortz, in her long green tunic and bare feet, to welcome some visitors. It had snowed the night before, and the visitors, having just ridden over a high mountain saddle, were swathed in gloves and wool hats and layers of synthetics. Tsend laughed about the cold. Her face is permanently etched with a squint and a smile. Bare feet, she said, are good for your health.

  A shaman is a conduit to the spirit world. Shamanism is among humanity’s oldest religions. Not everyone can become a shaman, and Tsend’s story is typical. She was seven years old, when she became ill, falling to the ground with seizures. Her grandmother performed a shaman ceremony for her, dressing Tsend in her own costume. After that, Tsend developed the ability. Now her grandmother, Urel, is Tsend’s most important spirit.

  To go to the spirits, the shaman needs some kind of transportation. Tsend sometimes travels by playing the mouth harp, but that, she says, can take her only so far. The most powerful transportation is the drum. A drum is like a horse. It can take you anywhere.

  She does her ritual only once each season, or when someone comes to her with an illness or some other problem. When that happens, a shaman cannot refuse. Tsend agrees to play her mouth harp, but says it is not the right phase of the moon to show the drum.

  Only about 200 nomadic reindeer herders remain in northern Mongolia. Geographically, they are divided into two distinct groups, known as the East and West Taiga. Tsend lives in the East; her mother and Ghoste in the West. She is happy to hear that her mother is well. Of Ghoste, she says, “he’s very strong.”

  Ghoste is a striking man, about 50, with a broad face and high cheekbones. His eyes contain a glint of mischief, but also something a little frightening. He lives a little apart, higher up the mountain than the other reindeer herders. “Probably people think, because I live all alone in the wilderness,” he says, “that I am a wild man.” But he explains that this way is better for the reindeer. Later, he will say privately that it also helps him avoid the curiosity of outsiders. For several days, he avoids visitors. Eventually, though, he agrees to talk.

  His tent is barer than most of the others. Reindeer skins and old pieces of canvas cover the floor. Tea is poured and a bowl of reindeer cheese offered around. A basin of bones and meat bubbles on the stove. Ghoste smokes constantly, rolling his cigarettes in pieces of torn newspaper.

  “It is not easy being a shaman,” he says. A shaman receives many people who are struggling with sickness. “I cannot refuse. If I do, the spirits get weaker.” Ghoste says he has a responsibility for the people in the community, people who come and ask for help and believe with their hearts. If they believe, it will work for them.

  He says the shaman’s job is to help people who have lost their hemur, or good fortune. The shaman can call it back for them. “I can’t cheat anyone or it would harm my family,” he says. “That is what happened in my life.” Ghoste is divorced. His son is dead.

  “Once someone who was becoming unconscious came to me for help. I helped them, but they didn’t give me any offerings. That was bad for me, being the mediator in between. That’s why my son died.”

  There are things Ghoste will not talk about: the ritual, his spirits. And, of course, he cannot show the drum. “This is not play,” he says. “Some people treat it like theater.”

  It is customary and polite to give a gift to a person who has shown hospitality. So, the interview concluded, a few small things are produced, including a bottle of vodka. The translator leaves. The visitor goes outside to stretch, and then, a few minutes later, ducks back from the bright day into the dim tent, to say goodbye.

  But instead, Ghoste motions him to return. Ghoste pats the ground in front of the green curtain. The visitor sits. In silence, the drum is produced. The shaman costume is unpacked: bundle after bundle of cloth strips, a feathered headdress, solid iron bells or clappers that hang across his shoulder blades. The skin drum is round, large, open on one side. Ghoste grins, and plays it ever so softly, like a heartbeat: thump thump, thump thump.

  – Allan Coukell

  Thanks to translators Binderiya Dondov, Badamtsetseg Tsedennyam, and Hosbayar Enkhtaivan (translators); Professor Gurbadar Purvee (Mongol Business Institute), Daniel Plumley (Totem Peoples Project), Judith Hangartner (Institute for Ethnology, University of Berne), and Nansalmaa Myagmar (Mongolian State Veterinary Laboratory).

  Date

  November 25, 2004

  Other Contributor(s)

  Lorne Matalon

  Outlets

  NPR

  Tags

  Themes: Health, Culture

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Audio, Text

  Other Tags: Mongolia, shamanism

• Marianne McCune

  Worlds of Difference

  The Zapotec Bible

  Play Now Download

  Marianne McCune

  Worlds of Difference

  The Zapotec Bible

  In the indigenous Mexican village of Yaganiza, Rebecca Long is slowly translating the New Testament into the local language. But her presence, like the group she works with, has not been without controversy. A complex story about language, religion, tradition, and trust.

  The Catholic church is more than the physical center of the pueblo of Yaganiza, high in the Sierra Norte of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Catholicism is intricately woven into the identity of this indigenous Zapotec village. Local traditions from long before Spanish conquerors arrived have been incorporated into Catholic ritual. Cemented into the church wall are stones from a pre-Hispanic building with Zapotec markings on them. For centuries, the town has required all residents to help take care of the church and take part in its ceremonies. In Yaganiza and pueblos like it, residents will tell you that the Church is the glue that holds the community together.

  So ten years ago, when one of Yaganiza’s 900 inhabitants refused to help pay for an upcoming fiesta, town officials balked. The man argued that because he was an evangelical Christian, he shouldn’t have to contribute to a celebration that includes heavy drinking, raucous dancing and Catholic ceremonies – all anathema to his religion. Soon other evangelicals joined his cause, and 40 families were saying they, too, would not pay for fiestas or do town service in the Catholic church. Town Hall responded by throwing the men in jail and depriving their families of basic services: clean water, access to collective land and use of the village mill.

  “According to the Mexican constitution, we can’t obligate anyone to believe in what we believe, but that wasn’t the situation,” says local indigenous rights activist Abel Montes. “We weren’t defending the Catholic religion. We were fighting for the harmony of the internal life of the community.”

  Rebecca Long, of the Dallas-based group SIL International (formerly the Summer Institute of Linguistics), waited until after the controversy died down to come to Yaganiza and begin translating the New Testament into the local variant of Zapoteco. SIL International aims to increase native language literacy worldwide, but evangelical Christianity is what motivates its translators: the group has completed 500 translations of the New Testament and 1,000 more are in progress. Long wanted to make the words of the Bible accessible to those in Yaganiza who don’t speak Spanish – but she says she did not want to fuel the conflict between evangelicals and Catholics. So only after Yaganiza’s evangelicals reluctantly signed a promise to comply with the pueblo’s traditional obligations did Long make her way to the community.

  Her presence has been controversial since the moment she arrived.

  “It does threaten the status quo,” Long admits. “We don’t have anything like this in our own culture, where everybody from this town has lived here for generation after generation after generation. It’s their land, it’s their town, it’s their language.”

  Seventy-year-old Elena Caballero is thrilled that Rebecca Long has come to town. Caballero is a member of Yaganiza’s Pentecostal church. She says Long’s translations of biblical texts have been invaluable to her: not only does she now understand what God is telling her, she says, but she knows what she wants to say to God. But some of Caballero’s Catholic neighbors feel differently. The local Catholic priest, who only speaks Spanish, says he wouldn’t mind his parishioners having copies of the Bible in their own language, even though Catholic doctrine discourages individuals from interpreting the Bible on their own. What he objects to, he says, is the lessons evangelicals take from the Bible.

  “Here we understand the word of God, but as a way of creating community,” he says, “to strengthen customs that they are letting disappear.”

  But the Zapoteco language has been under pressure since long before the Evangelicals arrived. Decades ago, teachers punished students who spoke the language in the classroom. In Yaganiza and in indigenous pueblos across the country, public schools aimed to drum Spanish into the minds of indigenous children in an effort to unify the country. There are pueblos not far from Yaganiza in which hardly anyone can remember the local dialect.

  Education policies have changed in recent years; now officials encourage bilingual instruction. But materials are in short supply. Rebecca Long has collected and published local folk tales, riddles and songs. Yet the schools have not taken advantage of her work. Local school director Salvador Galindo says this makes him sad. He and other officials are struggling to find the resources to write and publish children’s texts in local dialects. But most are suspicious of Rebecca Long and SIL International. They fear that the group is trying to convert residents to evangelical Christianity. And they are wary of outsiders threatening the town’s traditions.

  All kinds of people with all kinds of ideas come to Oaxaca’s mountain pueblos. One Pentecostal preacher traveled from miles away to lecture on the evils of short hair; some locals return from stints in the United States determined to transform the way the villages are run. They all force the communities to weigh which traditions are worth keeping and which they can let go. While Rebecca Long is helping to save one of Yaganiza’s most cherished traditions, her very presence endangers others. And that means more difficult choices for Yaganiza.

  – Marianne McCune

  Date

  October 23, 2004

  Outlets

  Weekend Edition

  Tags

  Themes: Culture

  Regions: North America

  Media: Audio, Text

  Other Tags: Bible, Mexico, Zapotec, SIL International, missionaries, Yaganiza

• Alan Weisman

  Worlds of Difference

  Competing for Souls

  Play Now Download

  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: Buddhism, Evangelical Christianity, korea

• Julian Crandall Hollick

  Worlds of Difference

  Occitan Rock

  Play Now Download

  Julian Crandall Hollick

  Worlds of Difference

  Occitan Rock

  Since Napoleon declared it the official language of the republic, French has been at the core of national identity. Now some southerners are challenging that notion, using a blend of reggae, Brazilian rhythms, and the musical forms of the medieval troubadors.

  Before 1789, France was a loose community of regions, each with its own languages and dialects: Alsatian, Breton, Catalan, Corsican and perhaps 70 more. Occitan was the family of languages from Occitanie, the region that stretched from Bordeaux and the Pyrenées in the southwest to the Alps and northern Italy in the southeast. It and its several variants were linked to a rich creative history, particularly in literature and song.

  Then came the French Revolution, and then Napoleon, and a new constitution that declared France “one people, one nation, one language.” Occitan all but disappeared.

  But not completely. More than 200 years later, Occitan is still spoken in the French countryside and in the north of Italy, where it’s recognized as an official regional language. (A 2001 attempt by the French culture ministry to recognize regional languages was rejected by the country’s constitutional council.) No one really knows how many people use Occitan regularly because the French government has never done a survey. Unofficial estimates suggest that several hundred thousand speak one or another form of Occitan as a private, or “intimate” language, at home and among close friends. Almost nowhere in France is it used in the workplace.

  Even the Occitan accent is effectively banned from public life. If one wants to get ahead in the French civil service, one must drop one’s Occitan or Provençal inflections. (Provençal is perhaps the most widely used variant of Occitan.) Today just a handful of private secondary schools offer classes in Occitan. A few cultural groups, inspired by the Nobel Prize-winning 19th century Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral, quietly promote the language and literature.

  The most visible – and audible – proponents of Occitan today are not linguists or history buffs, but contemporary musicians. These are no purists: their music blends modern folk music, the music of the medieval troubadors, Brazilian rhythms and, most notably, Jamaican reggae. The two groups featured in this piece – the Fabulous Trobadors from Toulouse and Massilia Sound System from Marseille – play highly danceable music whose often-humorous (and often-political) lyrics mix French with Occitan, so as not to alienate French-speaking audiences. Other groups add a dose of Beur, the popular Arabic spoken by North Africans all over France.

  The result is a music that borrows cheerfully across centuries and borders – but that signals an increasingly serious disenchantment with the suppression of regional identities, languages and cultures.

  – Julian Crandall Hollick

  Date

  August 21, 2004

  Outlets

  All Things Considered

  Tags

  Themes: Culture

  Regions: Europe

  Media: Audio, Text

  Other Tags: language revitalization, Occitan, France, music

• Jonathan Miller

  Worlds of Difference

  The Free Monks

  Play Now Download

  Jonathan Miller

  Worlds of Difference

  The Free Monks

  In Greece, the Orthodox Church has always presented itself as the guardian of national identity. But some think it’s not doing enough to protect the country from western domination. We meet a rock band made up of black-robed monks whose music rails against globalization and the “New World Order.”

  In Greece, national identity has been a hot topic since long before the country declared its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1821, and the Greek Orthodox Church has always been at the center of the discussion. The Church took a leading role in the war of independence, and has considered itself the guardian of Greek identity ever since. Until recently, few Greeks challenged that.

  In the last few years, things have gotten a little more complicated. Greece is now part of the European Union (EU); immigration is gradually increasing; Greeks travel abroad and use the Internet; tourism and mass media have exposed almost everyone to foreigners and their ways. For a country that takes great pride in its ethnos (the word means “nation”), the outside world is both a temptation and a threat. Not surprisingly, Greeks are divided on how to move forward.

  The Orthodox Church has always been resistant to change – especially change that comes from outside. That resistance has hardened under the leadership of Archbishop Christodoulos, who has been highly vocal in his opposition to the forces of western-led globalization.

  The archbishop was particularly visible during a recent controversy over national identity cards. The previous government, which was socialist, wanted to replace the old cards with new ones that would comply with EU standards. That meant, among other things, eliminating any mention of religious affiliation.

  Archbishop Christodoulos led the battle against the proposal, ultimately collecting three million signatures out of a total population of just under 11 million. The government prevailed, but the popular view was that the prime minister had caved in to foreign pressure and foreign ideas.

  Fr. Nektarios Moulatsiotis, founder of the Free Monks music group (and of the monastery of Saints Augustine and Seraphim Sarof), has made it his mission to keep young Greeks from caving in. He turned to popular culture after working for years in youth recreation programs and summer camps and seeing the power that the media had over teenagers. He hosts regular call-in shows on TV and radio, and publishes two magazines (one for youth, one for adults). Each of these efforts is part of a larger campaign to reach out to the nation’s youth through the mass media.

  Christian media (and Christian Rock) may be old news in the US, but in Greece the idea is revolutionary. For generations, the Church has been seen as benign and dignified, appreciated for its stability, its historic importance, and its role in celebrating rituals like baptisms, weddings and funerals. Because nearly all Greeks are born Orthodox (more than 95% of the population is baptized), the Church has seen little need to reach out to youth. The belief has been that if teens need help, they will come and seek it.

  Citing new threats to the Greek ethnos, Fr. Nektarios blasts priests for their complacency, accusing them of being more interested in collecting their paychecks (priests and bishops are state employees) than in defending the Church and the nation.

  But his message to youth is even stronger. The Free Monks’ songs are not just about the redeeming power of God’s love or the importance of Christian values. Lyrics speak of Satan disguised as western culture, of the brainwashing of Greeks by multinational corporations, of the dangers of electronic surveillance, of a global conspiracy to steal away souls. Whether young people are internalizing the message or not, they are buying the albums. Although the media frenzy has died down since Free Monks’ debut in 2000, the group has remained a fixture on the Greek pop scene.

  – Jonathan Miller

  Thanks to: Lina Molokotos Liederman, Effie Fokas, Maria Paravantes, Fr. Athinagoras, Matthew Brunwasser, Faidra Papavasiliou.

  Date

  August 16, 2004

  Outlets

  NPR

  Tags

  Themes: Culture

  Regions: Europe

  Media: Audio, Text

  Other Contributors: Jonathan Miller

  Other Tags: nationalism, Elefthiri, Greek Orthodox, Greece, anti-globalization, New World Order

• Frank Browning

  Worlds of Difference

  Roma Love Story

  Play Now Download

  Frank Browning

  Worlds of Difference

  Roma Love Story

  In May 2004, eight Eastern European countries joined the European Union, whose laws forbid child marriage. Some Roma see this as a death sentence for their culture. But not Gyula and Marika Vámosi of Pecs, Hungary.

  Returning from almost any journalistic raid – which is what I always feel I’m conducting when I enter the private lives of people I don’t know, bearing a microphone – it’s the unrecorded sounds and gestures that linger longest.

  Rolling by train through the flat Hungarian countryside from baroque, sophisticated, once imperial, now global Budapest, I see tiny village after tiny village beside the railway stops. Small wooden, stone or stucco houses; thick, dark windows. One church steeple, invariably Catholic. An electric line, loping across immense fields, tilled by the sorts of enormous tractors you see in Kansas or Nebraska.

  One day Gyula Vámosi and I drove to one of those villages a half hour outside his home city of Pecs. We were trying to find a young Roma woman who had been abandoned by her husband. The houses seemed to be in good condition. There were maybe 45 or 50. I asked Gyula what these people did. They are farmers, he answered. I told him I didn’t understand how that could be possible – there were too many houses, too many people for the number of farms. Big fields and big tractors mean only a few people are actually working the land.

  It’s hard to explain, he said. Once upon a time, the farmers all lived in the village and had little plots. This was before the war, before the Soviet era. Then the farms were collectivized. After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, many of the old farmers got their land back, but most didn’t really want to farm anymore. And anyway, the big tractors had already come, and you can’t go back to the old ways. So now a lot of the people in the village have a cooperative share in the farms, from which they get, say, so many bushels of wheat, so many tons of sugar beets.

  And what might a household do with seven tons of wheat? Well, they don’t actually get the wheat, he said. A kind of informal barter market opens up. I’ll trade my seven tons of wheat to a bigger “farmer” who will give me a credit he has with a plumber. If I don’t need any plumbing, the plumber will trade my plumbing credit for a credit he has with a car mechanic, who can fix my car or maybe get me a used car from his brother, who sells them.

  And the Roma, can they take part in all this? Gyula raised his eyebrows. No… and yes. The Roma, of course, never got to own farms, even if they lived in the villages. That’s still true, but you know how markets are. Then he returned to the theme he struck again and again during our days together. We don’t ask, we Roma, for anything special. Just to stop the discrimination so we can live like anybody else.

  In the meantime many, maybe most, Romas live in a world that’s betwixt and between. Not fully Hungarian, not fully traditional. Not always official, not always underground. Often they make money doing what others would prefer not to do. Gyula’s father-in-law became a successful dealer in junk and scrap metal, a respectable business. But other junk metal dealers find it easier to work the chopped-up car parts game in certain large American cities.

  Talking to Gyula about all this brought me back to something Marika, his wife, had told me about child marriage. By the time the boys are 17 or 18, and working two jobs, with their wives at home feeding three babies, they simply give up. They drink. They go away. They find some kind of “easy work” – buying and selling whatever it is that wealthier Hungarians would like to have, leaving teenage mothers in little places that look like farm towns but have no farmers.

  – Frank Browning

  Date

  August 28, 2004

  Outlets

  Weekend Edition

  Tags

  Themes: Culture

  Regions: Europe

  Media: Audio, Text

  Other Tags: Roma, child marriage, Hungary

• Jonathan Miller

  Worlds of Difference

  Return of the Hellenes

  Play Now Download

  Jonathan Miller

  Worlds of Difference

  Return of the Hellenes

  More than 95% of all Greeks are Orthodox. But recently there’s been a revival of interest in the pre-Christian past. For some, that means taking another look at ancient Greek ideals like reason and democratic debate. For others, it means worshiping the Olympian gods. All say their eyes are on the future.

  Modern Greeks tend to be proud of their past, and with good reason. Ancient Greece produced an astonishing array of philosophers, scientists, architects, planners, poets, and dramatists. It also produced a memorable cast of celestial beings, whose exploits have entertained and enlightened countless generations around the world.

  It’s an oddly double-sided legacy. While the great thinkers engaged in rational debate about the nature of things, the gods used trickery and force to get what they wanted. While Plato and Aristotle tried to determine how humans should behave, the gods often acted like, well, humans: petty, jealous, capricious, and cruel.

  Eastern Orthodoxy, which became Greece’s official religion in the 4th century, drew from both these traditions. It incorporated aspects of paganism (allowing cults of the Virgin Mary and of many saints, along with the veneration of religious icons); it also claimed some concepts of classical philosophy as central to its dogma. For the Church, Orthodoxy (it means “right belief”) is therefore the ultimate expression of Greek civilization. And indeed, for more than 1,500 years, most Greeks have viewed their legacy through an Orthodox prism.

  In the last few years, though, some have come to distrust that prism, and to say so in public. While Church membership is still extremely high (more than 95% of all Greeks are at least nominally Orthodox) and the leadership is still deeply involved in state affairs, there has been a resurgence of popular interest in the pre-Christian past. With it has come a small explosion of pagan groups, philosophical societies, Spartan schools, “Hellenist” magazines, and performances of classical theater.

  Zissis Papadimitriou, a sociologist at the University of Thessaloniki, in northern Greece, says foreign travel, international integration, and economic pressure have ironically fueled the renewed interest in antiquity. “Because of globalization, because of the European Union, the Greek people are in a period of transformation,” he says. “So they are seeking a new identity – a Greek identity.”

  Papadimitriou says national identity has long been a political football in Greece, and the Orthodox Church has always been right in the middle of the game. The Church played a crucial role in the battle for Greek independence in the 19th century, and still works hard to connect itself in people’s minds with the very concept of “Greekness,” based on what it calls “Helleno-Christianity.” The political right has often called on Greece’s glorious past to rally public opinion against foreign influence.

  But Papadimitriou says the new Hellenism is different. Although the revivalists are diverse – some are New Agers, others atheists, others humanists – the overall impulse isn’t nationalist, he says, but cosmopolitan. “As a country, as a people, we are too small to be important economically. We have to play a cultural role in the world, and to play this role we have to have a very strong identity.”

  Like many of those propelling the revival, Tryphon Olympios became fascinated with classical Greece – and with his own Greek identity – when he moved overseas. Olympios, founder of the “Return of the Hellenes Movement” (an umbrella group for revivalists of many stripes), fled to Sweden under Greece’s military junta and taught philosophy at university in Stockholm for 18 years. Although he presides over neo-pagan rituals, he says he is not religious. His philosophical work deals with the future, not the past. He says ancient Greece provides a model of a world where freedom of thought – and freedom of religion – is paramount.

  “We want to develop a free individual, free from superstitions and free from dogmas. No one tries to impose on you how to worship your god or practice your faith.”

  One of the most visible facets of the revivalist movement has been the campaign for recognition for the Dodecatheon, or “Religion of the Twelve Gods.” The campaign has hardly been successful: polytheists have twice applied to the Greek religion ministry for official status, and twice they have been ignored. Coverage of the movement in the popular press has not been flattering. (The word many Greeks use when asked about the pagans is “funny.”) But the movement has been attracting attention.

  Not everyone who practices the old religion is a true believer. Many Hellenes see pagan-inspired ritual not as an expression of religious conviction, but as a way to bring people together – and to provide a platform for their complaints about the Church.

  “If people want to believe in the gods they can, but we don’t believe that,” says Marina Tontis, a computer programmer who attends the “Return of the Hellenes” gathering on Mount Olympus each year. “The difference between philosophy and religion is that philosophy is open to all ideas, and religion is based on dogma.”

  Tontis, who spent eight years in Chicago, helped found a philosophical club in Thessaloniki. The Apollonian Society meets twice a week in a former storefront. It has no sign, but the door is open during meetings and anyone is free to join. Apollo is their favored deity, and the group can talk for hours about cosmology and mythology, but they are not believers. “We support the investigation of our cultural background,” Tontis says. “To find messages, good messages, to bring to today’s world.”

  – Jonathan Miller

  Thanks to: Matthew Brunwasser, Jamil Said, Gail Holst-Warhaft, Barry Strauss, Aristoteles Mentzos, Faidra Papavasiliou.

  Date

  August 5, 2004

  Outlets

  NPR

  Tags

  Themes: Culture

  Regions: Europe

  Media: Audio, Text

  Other Contributors: Jonathan Miller

  Other Tags: pagan, Orthodox Church, Greece

• Alan Weisman

  Worlds of Difference

  Resurrecting the Zápara

  Play Now Download

  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: language revitalization, Ecuador, Amazon, Oil development, Zápara, UNESCO, indigenous

• Dmae Roberts

  Worlds of Difference

  Tell Me Wai

  Play Now Download

  Dmae Roberts

  Worlds of Difference

  Tell Me Wai

  Musicians Mina Ripia and Maaka McGregor learned to speak Maori in college, after the New Zealand government made it an official national language. Now they’re part of a new generation of Maoris who have decided to move their culture forward rather than leave it behind.

  I’ve been interested in Maori culture since I saw my first Tiki jade pendant and wondered about the story behind the symbolic carving. The movie “Whale Rider” further sharpened my desire to visit New Zealand and learn more about the Maoris.

  In 2003, I spent a month in beautiful Aotearoa (the Maori name for New Zealand means “land of the long white cloud”). I toured Maori towns and went to traditional performances and concerts. What stood out was the palpable sense of pride felt by both performers and audiences. It seemed a new pride, fresh and hopeful. And in fact I learned that it was new, having emerged largely after the Maori language became “official” in 1987.

  I was especially impressed by how the revival of the language and the resurgence of interest in Maori traditions had not just boosted the morale of the Maoris, but of white New Zealanders as well. Everywhere in New Zealand, Maori is present alongside English in street signs, in advertising and on television. Every New Zealander I met used the Maori phrase kia ora – an all-purpose greeting, goodbye, and exclamation.

  It is against that backdrop that I discovered WAI. The name means “water” in Maori. Many contemporary New Zealand groups sing in Maori, but WAI does it expressly with the mission of passing on the language on to the young. I heard their CD and knew I had to contact them.

  Mina Ripia and Maaka McGregor welcomed me into their home on Titahi Bay near Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. They told me that they’d only learned to speak Maori in college. They had been part of the English-language music scene before they decided to sing strictly in the language of their ancestors. When I asked Mina to identify herself she launched into a long recitation of the names of those ancestors, ending with her own name as the latest descendant.

  Maaka took a 200-year-old conch shell that had been soaking in the bathtub and played it like a trumpet. As I was to learn when I saw WAI perform in Seattle, they use the shell to begin their shows. Then comes the electronica, which seems to grow organically from beats of the poi – balls on strings that they swing so they hit each other in rhythmic patterns.

  Whenever I heard traditional Maori singing in New Zealand, the music reached deep inside me – the plaintive calls to ancestors, the retelling of old stories that seemed somehow to insist on their continued relevance, even their urgency. WAI’s music has that sense of urgency to me. It seems to say, “Here I am. Remember me. I’m alive.”

   – Dmae Roberts

  Date

  July 26, 2004

  Outlets

  NPR

  Tags

  Themes: Culture

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Audio, Text

  Other Tags: New Zealand, music, language revitalization, Maori

• Vera Frankl

  Worlds of Difference

  Connecting the Hebrides, Part 2

  Play Now Download

  Vera Frankl

  Worlds of Difference

  Connecting the Hebrides, Part 2

  Scotland’s Outer Hebrides are home to some of the purest Gaelic culture on earth – but they’re a tough place to make a living. That may be changing. In the second part of a two-part series, Vera Frankl looks at how the Internet is transforming the economy and helping keep the culture alive.

  Scotland’s Outer Hebrides are home to some of the purest Gaelic culture on earth – but they’re a tough place to make a living. That may be changing. In the second part of a two-part series, Vera Frankl looks at how the Internet is transforming the economy and keeping the culture alive.

  Vera’s reporter’s notebook accompanies Connecting the Hebrides, Part 1.

  Date

  July 6, 2004

  Outlets

  NPR

  Tags

  Themes: Economy, Culture

  Regions: Europe

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: Hebrides, Internet

• Vera Frankl

  Worlds of Difference

  Connecting the Hebrides, Part 1

  Play Now Download

  Vera Frankl

  Worlds of Difference

  Connecting the Hebrides, Part 1

  In the first part of a two-part series about change in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, Vera Frankl visits “crofters” (small-scale farmers) who are finally taking control of their land after centuries of working for absentee landlords.

  Driving down the two-lane road that links north and south Lewis, I panicked. It looked and felt like driving through a moonscape – flat, featureless moorland and peat bog, with not a human being nor a house in sight. The road signs, written in Gaelic, with English translations in much smaller characters, just added to my sense of dislocation. It made me want to drive very, very fast – if only in the hope of seeing a tree. I could have saved myself the effort. On this island, I was to find out, there are none.

  The monotony of the landscape was broken by an occasional cluster of small grey houses, dominated by churches so large they looked completely out of place. Their appearance spoke volumes: this island, like most in the Outer Hebrides, is a stronghold of Presbyterianism. The Sabbath is so strictly observed that no one, I was told, would risk hanging out their washing on a Sunday. It’s only a few years since planes from the Scottish mainland, forty miles away, were granted permission to land here on the Sabbath. Ferry companies are still fighting for the same privilege.

  I live in London, but being on the Isle of Lewis felt very much like being in a foreign land, and in a way it was. A foreign land battered for much of the year by lashing gales and driving rain. Only in summer, when the days are long and (sometimes) the sun shines, can a visitor truly appreciate its stark beauty: vast skies, endless white beaches and silence, pierced only by the sound of wheeling seagulls. But as one person put it, it takes a certain intestinal fortitude to live here. Even in company, the sense of solitude and isolation can be overwhelming.

  This string of islands some 150 miles long, forty miles off the Scottish coast in the North Atlantic, is of course part of Great Britain. But the islands’ remoteness – and until recently, their inaccessibility – has ensured that they retain a character all their own. The Gaelic and Norse history of the communities here is ancient and unique; many still grow up with Gaelic as their first language. The music that they make also celebrates this uniqueness – tunes hundreds of years old, played on the bagpipes, the accordion, the tin whistle, the fiddle and a small harp known as the clarsach. Not to mention the utterly haunting sound of unaccompanied Gaelic singing.

  But decades of depopulation and unemployment have taken their toll on these islands, undermining the viability of both the economy and the culture. The challenge they face now is to open up to the world outside and embrace the future. Not all the islanders are ready for that. But it may be the only way of conserving what they value most about their way of life.

  – Vera Frankl

  Date

  July 5, 2004

  Outlets

  NPR

  Tags

  Themes: Economy, Culture

  Regions: Europe

  Media: Audio, Text

  Other Tags: Hebrides, land rights, crofters

• Sandy Tolan

  Worlds of Difference

  Ladino Transformation

  Play Now Download

  Sandy Tolan

  Worlds of Difference

  Ladino Transformation

  Bulgaria’s Jews are survivors, but the language they have spoken for centuries is in trouble. Sandy Tolan visits with some of Bulgaria’s last Ladino speakers as they try to keep the tongue from going silent.

  Put yourself in their place: You are told that unless you quit the country you’ll be killed. You must leave behind your home, your land, your belongings, your wealth. You bundle up your children and head for – where? You’ve heard that you will be safe in a faraway place, so you go, on carts or wagons or ships, taking with you little but your clothes, your stories, your songs, and your language.

  So it has been for millions of refugees through the ages. And so it was for more than 150,000 Jews expelled from Spain by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492 under the infamous Alhambra Decree. Most went to Portugal or North Africa, but tens of thousands traveled north and east to the Balkans, where the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire welcomed them. Over the years their 15th century Spanish changed—absorbing bits of the languages of Turkey, Serbia, Greece, Croatia and Bulgaria, along with touches of Hebrew and Arabic. Eventually it took on a name of its own: Ladino.

  In 2003, I traveled to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, to research a chapter for a book called The Lemon Tree, about an Arab and a Jew and their common history in the city of Ramle, in present-day Israel. The Israeli woman left Bulgaria as an infant in 1948; in tracing her story I’d come to understand how it was that she came to be born – how most of Bulgaria’s 50,000 Jews escaped the Holocaust.During my interviews with elderly Bulgarian Jews I was surprised to find that I could communicate in Spanish – not perfectly, as many of the words and pronunciations were different, but we could understand each other. They described, in Ladino, the astonishing drama of March, 1943 – how they and their families avoided the trains bound for Treblinka.

  One of those Jews, Sophie Danon, is the leader of the Club Ladino, which meets on Tuesday evenings to reminisce, to share poems and proverbs, and to teach the next generation – sprightly 60-somethings – what they know. Often they’re joined by a singer named Lika Eshkanazi, whose beautiful voice converts simple lullabies into haunting evocations of a long, deep history.

  If that history has been hard on the Jews, it has also been hard on Ladino. Countless speakers were killed in the Holocaust. In Bulgaria, where most Jews survived that horror, communism and Zionism took the greatest toll. After the war, nine out of every ten Bulgarian Jews moved to the new state of Israel, where Hebrew would take hold. Most who remained were proud communists, ready to set aside Ladino in favor of the secular national language. So, beginning in the 1940s, Ladino began to move from the streets to the kitchen. While its decline has been slower in other countries, in Bulgaria Ladino is destined for the archives. For the few speakers who remain, the hope is that the language won’t die there – that the tongue may go silent, but that its heart will keep beating.

  – Sandy Tolan

  Date

  July 5, 2004

  Other Contributor(s)

  Melissa Robbins

  Outlets

  All Things Considered

  Tags

  Themes: Culture

  Regions: Europe

  Media: Audio, Text

  Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan

  Other Tags: bulgaria, Ladino, Jews, language revitalization

• Victoria Mauleón

  Worlds of Difference

  Basque Family Ties

  Play Now Download

  Victoria Mauleón

  Worlds of Difference

  Basque Family Ties

  American filmmaker Victoria Mauleón has always avoided political topics on her yearly visits to her father’s family near Pamplona. This time she packed a microphone.

  My heart flutters as I swerve along the one-lane road leading to Arroniz, the medieval village where my father was born. I’ve spent almost every summer of my life here, in this town, population 500, where half the people share my last name. But this is the first time I’ve come with an ulterior motive: I want to get my family, divided for generations on the issue of Basque nationalism, to talk about what it means for them to be Basque.

  I round the final hairpin turn and smile at the first site of Arroniz, its rows of stone houses hugging the slopes of a steep mountain. I drive along the only paved road, flanked by the few bars that comprise the town’s cultural center. I turn and climb the hill toward Carasol, my family’s ancestral home. When I step out of the car, the sweet familiar scent of sage greets me. A swarm of sparrows circles above. I call our street the “widows’ row,” because the only people left are a half-dozen whiskered ladies, always dressed in black. They’ve known my family forever. They call me “La Americana.” As soon as they see me, they squeeze me and kiss me and fill me in on the town gossip.

  Carasol is vacant most of the year, but today my cousins, my Uncle Pedro and Aunt Yosune and I will fill the place with the scents and sounds of a chuletada – lamb chops roasted over dried grape vines. I’ve always known that this branch of the family believed in an independent Basque state. But this is the first time all of us have sat down to talk politics. We are all shocked when our uncle Pedro declares his support of the terrorist group ETA. For the first time, my cousin Samuel expresses his sadness over his inability to learn Basque, thanks to repression by the former dictator, Francisco Franco.

  Also for the first time, my cousin Juan Mari talks about having to overcome negative stereotypes about the Basque people.

  As we talk, it dawns on met that we are speaking Spanish, but this place somehow doesn’t feel like Spain. Yet I can’t quite figure out what defines these people, this setting, even me, as Basque. Here is part of our conversation:

  Pedro: I personally consider myself Basque. I’m not Spanish.

  Juan Mari: I, of course, also consider myself Basque.

  Samuel: I also consider myself Basque. And I have nothing against Spaniards or anyone, or Americans.

  Yosune: I also consider myself, like he just said. And I have nothing against Spaniards or anyone, but I consider myself Basque, Basque, Basque.

  Samuel: (sings a Basque song) It means I’m Basque and I’m proud.

  Yosune: When people hear this, they’re going to think these guys are…

  Juan Mari: They’re going to say, ‘Vicky, are you sure you feel safe over there, because it sounds like they’re all terrorists.’ (laughs)

  Victoria: (laughs) I feel very, very safe. My most daunting interview is with my aunt Mari Carmen and her husband Jose Mari. Mari Carmen is my father’s youngest sister, and when she married the pro-Franco heir to a canned asparagus empire, she alienated her brothers, most of them landless laborers. And although over the years, my uncles have put aside their differences long enough to celebrate weddings, communions and chuletadas together, there’s always been an underlying resentment.

  I sit down for a meal with Mari Carmen, Jose Mari and Uncle Pedro. About a minute into our discussion Uncle Pedro gets up and quietly excuses himself. It strikes me that for my uncles’ generation, people in opposing ideological camps can share a meal together, but they can’t talk politics without one or both of them walking away. But Pedro’s absence enables Jose Mari to speak more freely. I can only imagine how Pedro would have reacted upon hearing his brother-in-law call Basques “hicks,” or call the influx of Basque-speaking people into Pamplona an “invasion,” or compare the Basque independence movement to Hitler.

  Years ago, Jose Mari and I hiked to the top of Monjardín, a Roman-era fortress. We looked out over the miles of vineyards, olive orchards and wheat fields, and he said, “You’ll never see a more beautiful place than Navarra.” Now, sitting at the table listening to him, I realize his condemnation of the separatist movement comes from the fear that they’ll take his beloved Navarra away.

  Like his father Pedro, my cousin Txema (pronounced Chema) always embraced the idea of Basque independence. So I’m surprised when he says the fight for statehood is unrealistic and unwise. He’s now the minister of culture for a left-leaning political party, Batzarre, and Txema explains the party’s approach to ending violence in the region.

  When I meet up with my cousin Armando in Madrid, Armando says he’s “sickened and saddened” by “the fear and the blackmail” that make discussion of the issues so difficult. “That’s the problem: not only has this fight been radicalized between the ETA and the governing powers, but it’s also been radicalized between everyday people.”

  But we both take comfort in the direction our family is going. We cousins embrace dialogue, compromise, tolerance. My aunt Yosune’s sons have even joined with my aunt Mari Carmen’s sons to open a hotel – Hotel Mauleón. That’s something our parents’ generation would never have dreamed of doing.

  On my way to the airport, I get that choked-up feeling I get every time I leave my family. I feel I’m being yanked apart from people who share more than just my pale skin, my black hair, my last name, my blood. What does it mean to be Basque? What’s the best way forward? I think about how the fight over these questions has ripped so many families apart. While our parents still bear the scars of this struggle, for my generation, the scars seem to be fading. And while this discovery might not have given me the answers I was looking for, it has given me hope.

  – Victoria Mauleón

  Date

  July 3, 2004

  Outlets

  Weekend Edition

  Tags

  Themes: Peace & Conflict, Culture

  Regions: Europe

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: autonomy, Navarra, identity, Basque

• Jonathan Miller

  Worlds of Difference

  Maasai Schools

  Play Now Download

  Jonathan Miller

  Worlds of Difference

  Maasai Schools

  The Maasai people of Kenya have long considered public education as a trick designed to rob them of their culture. Now many see the schools as a key to survival – and as a way to change some aspects of their culture that need changing.

  From Afghanistan to Arizona, schools are at the center of nearly every struggle over cultural identity. Governments use schools to instill common values, to prepare young people to contribute economically, to create citizens. Minority groups often see them as machines designed to strip their people of their language, their traditions, their beliefs.

  Until recently, that was the prevailing view among the Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania. The Maasai (numbering about 400,000) are traditionally cattle herders who follow their animals on seasonal migrations. They are proud of their warriors, or ilmuran, and fiercely defensive of their independence. When the British ruled East Africa, the Maasai used passive resistance to ensure that their culture remained intact – refusing to take up agriculture, to settle in towns, or to send their children to school.

  Now the Maasai are finding that passive resistance isn’t enough. Agriculture and urbanization have eaten up much of their grazing land. Communications and roads have exposed young Maasai to the temptations and opportunities of the outside world. Many are now questioning traditional practices such as polygamy, early marriage, and female circumcision (also known as female genital mutilation, or FGM).

  Some Maasai worry that change is coming too fast. “The foundation of our culture is respect and unity,” says Oloiboni Ole Pareiyo, a 65-year-old herder. “What is happening with modernity is that it is undermining the very principle on which the culture is founded.”

  Others disagree. They say the only way to survive as a people is to adapt to changing realities. Education, they argue, need not be seen as a surrender to mainstream culture, but rather as a way to fix those aspects of their own culture that need fixing – particularly in the treatment of women and girls. In the end, they say, their culture will be stronger.

  Minority groups in many parts of the world have tried to reconcile these sorts of differences by establishing “bicultural” models of education, where modern skills are taught alongside traditional concepts and practices. The idea is not to force young people to choose between two systems, but rather to help them see that western-style modernity and tradition can coexist – and even reinforce one another.

  Koitamet Olekina, executive director of the nonprofit Maasai Education Discovery, says his organization hopes to bring elders into the schools and incorporate cultural teachings into the public school curriculum (an idea that the government, concerned about divisions between the country’s 40 ethnic groups, has resisted). He is also pushing for flexibility in the school calendar, to respect the rhythms of the herding life. But staying away from school, he says, is not an option. The only way the Maasai can defend their interests is if they can find ways to succeed economically and politically. That means mastering modern skills.

  For Kenya, emerging from decades of authoritarian rule, modern education is a top priority. In 2003, incoming President Mwai Kibaki made primary education compulsory and free. Despite a range of problems (including teacher shortages and a lack of classroom space), that year saw a significant jump in the number of Maasai students attending rural schools.

  But primary education is only part of the picture, particularly when it comes to preparing students for a modernizing economy. Secondary schools (many of them residential) are still too costly and too distant for most Maasai families. When children are away at school, they cannot help with herding or other daily responsibilities. And for many parents, sending a daughter to secondary school is considered a poor investment, given that she will live with her husband’s kin once she is married. As a result, the number of Maasais with secondary school or college diplomas is still very small.

  Maasai journalist Michael Ole Tiampati is a great believer in education. He left his village for one of Kenya’s most competitive high schools, and has traveled and worked in America and Europe. Yet he also takes part in traditional age-group ceremonies and says becoming a respected elder is a major life goal. Rather than see education as a threat, he says, the Maasai have to see it as way to move the culture forward. But he acknowledges the danger.

  “Enlightenment, not bombardment is what we need,” he says. “The Maasai need knowledge to manage the situation that is facing us. We know in the back of our minds that there is no escape. The noose is tightening.”

  – Jonathan Miller

  Date

  June 7, 2004

  Outlets

  Morning Edition

  Tags

  Themes: Culture

  Regions: Africa

  Media: Text, Audio

  Other Contributors: Jonathan Miller

  Other Tags: education, Kenya, Maasai, child marriage, FGM

• Sandy Tolan

  Worlds of Difference

  The Imaginary Village

  Play Now Download

  Sandy Tolan

  Worlds of Difference

  The Imaginary Village

  In 1948, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to flee their homes to make way for the new state of Israel. More than 50 years later, the villages of Palestine remain intact in the imaginations of refugees and their descendants.

  I’ve been traveling to the Holy Land for about ten years now, and early on in my journeys I came across something deeper, quieter, and more melancholy than the noise and blood and rage of endlessly recurring headlines. I could see it in the faces of aging women in exile, transfixed before the television screen on Christmas Day, gazing at the Church of the Nativity, just at the end of Star Street, where they were born. I could hear it in the voices of grandfathers remembering a family lemon tree, or the silk and indigo of the Wednesday market, or the truckloads of zetuns bound for the olive press at harvest time.

  This was longing: an attachment to land and village going back to 1948, when 750,000 Palestinians fled or were driven out of their homes in the new state of Israel.

  In my trips to the West Bank, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon, I would come to understand that this sense of longing could not be disconnected from the current violence, or from the “peace process” that never leads to peace.

  Indeed, the longing for 1948 seems the one main thing unexamined in the countless words of copy and miles of videotape spilled over the Arab-Israeli conflict.

  For the elderly refugee living in a camp in southern Lebanon, who can gaze upon the lights of his native land, or for the middle-aged exile in Nebraska whose mother still holds the key to a stone house that no longer exists, the longing forges into political and human aspiration, embodied in a phrase that is never far from Palestinian lips: the right of return. Yet the longing also creates a physical and psychic disembodiment. For many refugees, the memories, even passed onto the third generation removed from the village, seem more vivid and real than the camps where their families have lived for more than 50 years.

  “My home,” a young man in a camp near Beirut told me, “is the homeland I have never seen.”

  Despite several UN resolutions, and after years of ambiguous language, the United States has now endorsed Israel’s long-standing position: that a Palestinian return to the 1948 homeland is no longer an option. And indeed, that homeland is, in some ways, imaginary. Yet the aspiration is real, and as deep and abiding as it has ever been.

  – Sandy Tolan

  Thanks to Jay Allison and our friends at Transom.org. Original music composed and performed by Mohsen Subhi Abdelhamid.

  Date

  June 5, 2004

  Other Contributor(s)

  Melissa Robbins

  Outlets

  Transom.org

  Tags

  Themes: Culture, Peace & Conflict

  Regions: Middle East

  Media: Text, Audio

  Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan

  Other Tags: israel, Ramallah, Palestine, refugees

• Marianne McCune

  Worlds of Difference

  Mezcal Dreams

  Play Now Download

  Marianne McCune

  Worlds of Difference

  Mezcal Dreams

  Mexican migrants to the U.S. send back billions of dollars to their families every year, but their absence comes at a price. Marianne McCune reports on one tiny pueblo that is brewing up plans to keep its people from leaving.

  When Americans debate how to regulate the hundreds of thousands of Mexicans crossing the border to work in the U.S. each year, they sometimes forget the toll migration takes back home. That toll is especially high in rural areas, where families are divided, villages are deserted and cherished traditions are gradually slipping away.

  But in the tiny pueblo of Zoochila, in Mexico’s southeastern sierra, a group of would-be entrepreneurs is brewing up a reason to keep their friends and neighbors from leaving.

  “The idea is to create a source of work so that people don’t have to go,” explains Francisco Siguenza, the pueblo’s volunteer treasurer. Instead of exporting workers to America, Siguenza and about 20 other Zoochilan men hope to send thousands of bottles of top-quality, hand-made mezcal – a fiery local liquor made from the spiky maguey plant.

  It may sound like a simple plan, but it is full of hubris. The forces driving the Mexican migration have been building for decades. Since World War II, tens of millions of Mexicans have been drawn to the U.S. by the promise of jobs and economic opportunity. Communities throughout Mexico have come to depend on the dollars the migrants send back. About half of Zoochila’s 300 families are now based in America, most of them in Los Angeles.

  Erasmo Luna Mateos lived in L.A. for about 20 years before returning to Zoochila. But he’s one of the few who have come home for good. “Once people get used to making money over there, it’s hard for them to come back,” he admits.

  Visit Zoochila during its annual fiesta and you’d think the town was booming. There are bull-wrangling competitions, basketball matches and native dance performances. Local bands parade up and down the dusty streets. Returnees from LA videotape everything and dance the local jarabe into the wee hours. Their cash and the local mezcal make for a festive blend.

  But when the celebration is over the picture looks very different. Sturdy new houses stand empty in their lots. The handsome town hall has been restored, but the all-volunteer government is stretched perilously thin. Residents fear that Zoochila, like other nearby mountain villages, could become a ghost town.

  Members of Zoochila’s mezcal collective know it won’t be easy to compete with more established producers for a piece of the export market. One of the few companies that sells traditional, single-pueblo mezcal in the United States has only just begun to have some success. “I’ve devoted nine years to building a market,” says Ron Coooper, owner of the export company Del Maguey. “It’s overwhelming.”

  Zoochilans are well aware of how time-consuming and expensive it is to produce a distinctive liquor of consistently high quality. And they know that they’ll need to do more than just break even if they want to lure their townsfolk back from America. But they’ve done the math and they believe they can succeed.

  Erasmo Luna’s daughter, Mercedes, has also done the math. She says she probably couldn’t have gone to high school if her father hadn’t been sending money home. But she insists that 20 years without him wasn’t worth it. “Who cares if we didn’t have money?” she says. “We wanted our Papa to take care of us, to hug us.”

  – Marianne McCune

  Date

  April 21, 2004

  Outlets

  All Things Considered

  Tags

  Themes: Culture, Economy

  Regions: North America

  Media: Text, Audio

  Other Tags: Mexico, migration, mezcal, Zoochila

• Barbara Ferry

  Border Stories

  Borderland Jaguars

  Play Now Download

  Barbara Ferry

  Border Stories

  Borderland Jaguars

  On the trail of an elusive cat that used to prowl the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico.

  Jaguars, native to the tropical jungles of South America, used to be found in the southwest deserts of Arizona and New Mexico. Though jaguars no longer live in the United States, occasionally one will travel across the border from Mexico.

  During the past few years, several jaguars have been seen in Arizona. Mexican researchers are taking advantage of Arizonans’ interest in the cats to bolster their own efforts to preserve the species in Sonora.

  Date

  April 2004

  Outlets

  Living on Earth

  Tags

  Themes: Lives, Environment

  Regions: North America

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: cat, environment, border, borderland, jaguars, animal, feline

• Allan Coukell

  Worlds of Difference

  North End Neighborhood

  Play Now Download

  Allan Coukell

  Worlds of Difference

  North End Neighborhood

  Boston’s North End is bursting with Old World charm. But a proposed commercial development has newcomers and old-timers at odds over the type of neighborhood they want to live in. Their positions aren’t what you might expect.

  When the Molinari brothers agreed to show a visitor around their historic neighborhood, they could have chosen to meet at Caffe Vittoria, with its marble countertops and towering Pavoni espresso machine. Or at Maria’s, a bare-bones bakery with marzipan in the window and the best sfogliatelle in Boston. They could have chosen any of more than 100 Italian cafés, pastry shops and restaurants within a five-block radius. But they didn’t. They picked Starbucks.

  The Molinaris (Richard, 56, and Ben, 58) have lived most of their lives in Boston’s North End, and as they walk through the neighborhood they point to some of its invisible history. The condominium where they live today was an abandoned warehouse where they played as boys. Up the street is a wine store owned by an aunt. At the Sacred Heart Church, they stop to greet Father Vincenzo Rosato. “The church was like just another room in our house,” says Ben. “And it still is!”

  They remember the stoop where their grandfather used to sit in the evenings, singing and playing the mandolin. (He was a successful silversmith, as was the North End’s most famous resident, Paul Revere.) They point to the house where their mother was born, across the street from the birthplace of Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, whose grandparents came from Ireland long before the Italians started arriving. For more than 200 years, the North End of Boston was the classic American immigrant ghetto. Its narrow streets and brick tenements were home to wave upon wave of working class immigrants – English, African, Irish, Jewish and, beginning the late 1800s, Italian. When Richard and Ben Molinari were boys, the North End was known to outsiders as “Little Italy.” But to residents, a street wasn’t simply “Italian”, but Genovese, Sicilian, Milanese, or Neopolitan.

  Most of the Italians are gone now, driven out by gentrification and soaring real estate values. And while their legacy is visible everywhere – in colorful pastry shops, noisy restaurants and boutique grocery stores – it’s a prettified version of the way things used to be. An “Italian stage set,” Richard says.

  Newer residents talk about the North End’s distinctive character, its Old World charm. Older residents shrug when they hear that. Back when it was their neighborhood, there were only a handful of restaurants. But for them, the North End has never been about restaurants or shops, let alone about authenticity or character. It’s about the connections between people. The shared history, the church, the thousand kindnesses and petty grudges that bind neighbors together. Today the North End may look something like it looked 50 years ago, but it’s a different place.

  The Molinaris don’t blame anyone for that. They say the changes started long ago, part of a natural process for an immigrant neighborhood. “People come searching for a better life,” Ben says, “and they move in the direction of acquiring more things, bigger houses and so on.” Sitting in Starbucks, talking about the old days, the brothers’ conversation begins to sound less like a lament for a vanishing neighborhood, and more like a tribute to the way things are supposed to work in America. But then Ben pauses. “A lot of the good was jettisoned in the move toward wealth. It’s hard to hold onto your values. You have to look back as well as forward.”

  – Allan Coukell

  Date

  April 13, 2004

  Outlets

  NPR

  Tags

  Themes: Culture

  Regions: North America

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: Boston, Italian-American

• Reese Erlich

  Worlds of Difference

  Singapore Renewal

  Play Now Download

  Reese Erlich

  Worlds of Difference

  Singapore Renewal

  Singapore’s Chinatown used to be a crowded and chaotic place. Then the government renewed the life right out of it. Authorities are working to restore the neighborhood’s authenticity, but with little success. Little India, meanwhile, has retained its character. Is there a lesson here?

  A generation ago, Singapore’s Chinatown was a crowded and chaotic place. Then the authorities launched a massive urban renewal campaign. They razed derelict buildings, modernized services and cracked down on informal businesses. Part of their justification was to make the district more attractive to tourists. But tourists stayed away, complaining that the place had lost its soul.

  For the last two decades, officials have been working to bring back Chinatown’s authentic feel. Architecturally the project has been a success, but it hasn’t restored the old vitality. Critics say the streets today feel more like a shopping mall than a living neighborhood.

  Little India is a very different story. You can still see the original shophouses built by the British, with commercial space on the bottom floor and living quarters above. Because the Indian community still comes here to shop, Little India remains a vibrant mix of neighborhood stores, restaurants, and temples.

  Is there a lesson to be learned here?

  Date

  March 2, 2004

  Outlets

  Common Ground Radio

  Tags

  Themes: Culture

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: urban renewal, historic preservation, Singapore

• Frank Browning

  Worlds of Difference

  Rethinking France’s Republican Deal, Part 2

  Play Now Download

  Frank Browning

  Worlds of Difference

  Rethinking France’s Republican Deal, Part 2

  Exploring the rapidly changing worlds of France’s Muslims and Jews. In the second part of a two-part series, we meet the Chefegs, a Muslim family from the suburbs of Paris.

  In France, the notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity apply to individuals, not groups. And indeed for more than 200 years, members of ethnic and religious minorities have tried to integrate as completely as possible.

  But today, French Muslims and Jews are under tremendous pressure to declare their differences.

  In the second part of a two-part series, Frank Browning takes us into the world of the Chefegs, Muslims from the suburbs of Paris. For a fuller description, see Rethinking France’s Republican Deal, Part 1. 

   

  Date

  February 19, 2004

  Outlets

  NPR

  Tags

  Themes: Culture

  Regions: Europe

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: muslim, France, republicanism, islam

• Frank Browning

  Worlds of Difference

  Rethinking France’s Republican Deal, Part 1

  Play Now Download

  Frank Browning

  Worlds of Difference

  Rethinking France’s Republican Deal, Part 1

  Exploring the rapidly changing worlds of France’s Muslims and Jews. In the first part of a two-part series, we meet the Alters, a Jewish family from Toulouse.

  In France, the notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity do not extend to ethnic or religious groups. The legal system does not recognize minority rights, and there is little patience for concepts such as affirmative action or identity politics. And indeed for more than 200 years, immigrants and ethnic minorities have tried to integrate as quickly and completely as possible.

  Today, though, Muslims and Jews are under tremendous pressure to declare their differences. The sources of this pressure are myriad, from the Israel-Palestine crisis and the global “war on terrorism” to simmering domestic issues of poverty and race. Religious fundamentalists (Muslim and Jewish, French and foreign) are urging young people to renounce the secular, assimilationist ways of their parents. Intellectuals are challenging one another to proclaim their Jewishness or Muslimness—to stop hiding behind their Frenchness, to take sides.

  The “Republican Deal”

  In the late 18th century, the “Republican deal” (recognition of individual rights, no recognition of the rights of communities) offered French Jews something they had never had before—the full benefits and protections of citizenship. For the French government, which had fought for centuries to suppress religious and regional identity movements, it was a way of settling once and for all the question of divided loyalty among its people, whether Bretons or Basques or Roman Catholics. Indeed, the period just after the revolution saw the seizing of church lands, and the beheading of priests and bishops.

  By the early 20th century, France had removed the Church from running the public schools, and banned school prayer and crucifixes from school property. Meanwhile, French Jews (more commonly known as “Israelites”) enjoyed the most secure position they had ever known in Europe. Although Jewish identity did not disappear, it became private, nearly invisible. The ideals of the Republic melded easily with the universalist creed of the Ashkenazi Jews (i.e., Jews of central or eastern European origin) under the rubric of laicite : a commitment to secularism in all elements of public life.

  The New French

  Then came the Sixties. France, enjoying possibly the greatest boom in its history, needed workers. They came by the boatload, from the readiest source on hand—the old French colonies and protectorates of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. Most assumed they would return home after a few years. But their attitude changed when they began having children – children who, little by little, were becoming French. By 1980, huge, austere housing complexes had sprouted in the outskirts of Paris, Marseilles and Lyon, filled largely with North Africans. Meanwhile, large numbers of Sephardic Jews (i.e., Jews of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern origin) moved from North Africa to France, bringing with them a much more public form of Judaism than that practiced by the Ashkenazis.

  The economic boom subsided, jobs declined, and disaffection grew among the recent immigrants. A generation of North Africans grew up being told that they were French citizens, but finding few opportunities after their schooling was finished. The government had few answers. To the republicanists, American notions of “affirmative action” smacked of the sort of divisive group rights that the laic principle had sought to eliminate.

  The current unrest was spurred by two seminal events: the second Palestinian Intifada , launched in 2000, protesting Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank; and the terrorist attacks on the US on September 11, 2001. Angry over their worsening situation in France, frustrated by the prospect of becoming (as their parents had been) day laborers and street sweepers, many young French North Africans took the Intifada as a symbol of pride and self-determination. Fanned by sermons from extreme Islamist leaders, some came to see the “House of Israel” as a prime symbolic target.

  The Pressure Mounts

  Anti-Semitic incidents rose sharply from 2000 to 2002. Graffiti appeared, some children wearing yarmulkes were attacked, and a few Jewish schools and synagogues were burned. Ironically, these attacks became campaign fodder for the extreme rightist and one-time neo-Nazi leader Jean-Marie LePen. Not only an anti-Semite, LePen campaigned to send the Muslims back to Africa. In the presidential race of 2002, he won 20 percent of the vote.

  Meanwhile, the global resurgence of Islamic identity began to resonate among middle class immigrants who, for the most part, had kept their religion quiet. More adult women began to don the headscarf, or foulard . Some of their husbands refused to let them be treated by male gynecologists and surgeons. And some of their daughters decided to wear the foulard to school. The “Republican deal” was of little interest to young men and women who felt they were being treated as second class citizens anyway.

  President Jacques Chirac responded by appointing a commission to examine the question of Muslim integration. It produced 26 recommendations, from special job training to safer housing to more aggressive social support programs in predominantly Muslim schools. The commission also recommended two new school holidays, one Jewish and one Muslim, as counterweights to the many holidays of Christian origin. And it recommended an absolute ban on “ostensible” religious symbols (including headscarves, large crosses and yarmulkes ) in the public schools. So far only the headscarf ban has received serious attention by the Chirac administration.

  – Frank Browning

  Date

  February 18, 2004

  Outlets

  NPR

  Tags

  Themes: Culture

  Regions: Europe

  Media: Text, Audio

  Other Tags: France, multiculturalism, republicanism, laicité, judaism, religion

• Reese Erlich

  Worlds of Difference

  Higher Ground: Borneo Resettlement

  Play Now Download

  Reese Erlich

  Worlds of Difference

  Higher Ground: Borneo Resettlement

  In the late 1990s, the government of Malaysia uprooted 15,000 indigenous people to make way for the giant Bakun dam. Most were resettled in “model” towns, where unemployment, drugs and crime took root. About 400 members of the Kenyah tribe decided to build their own resettlement center instead.

  In the late 1990s, the government of Malaysia uprooted 15,000 indigenous people to make way for the giant Bakun dam. Most were resettled in “model” towns, where unemployment, drugs and crime took root. About 400 members of the Kenyah tribe decided to build their own resettlement center instead. Why does this model community work better than the official ones?

  Date

  February 17, 2004

  Outlets

  Common Ground Radio

  Tags

  Themes: Culture, Environment

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: Kenyah, Borneo, resettlement

• Allan Coukell

  Worlds of Difference

  Bringing Home the Bones

  Play Now Download

  Allan Coukell

  Worlds of Difference

  Bringing Home the Bones

  Members of the Haida nation retrieve ancestral remains from a museum in Chicago and carry them home for proper burial in the Queen Charlotte Islands, off Canada’s Pacific coast. It’s a journey full of pain and healing – and part of a worldwide movement among native groups to reclaim what is theirs.

  The remains of 48 people sit in cedar boxes at the front of the Anglican Church in the village of Massett, at the northern end of Canada’s Queen Charlotte Islands. “Maybe we don’t know who these people are,” says the Reverend Lily Bell, “but we know they are our people.”

  “Yes,” nods 83-year-old Ethel Jones, seated where she can see the boxes. Nonny (grandmother) Ethel’s life spans perhaps the most dramatic period of cultural change in the thousands of years since the Haida settled on this rainy archipelago.

  Nonny Ethel was born during a period of decline. She grew up speaking only Haida, but by the middle of the 20th century, she had seen the language and many traditions all but abandoned. Now, seated among the bones of her ancestors, she wonders if she may be witnessing the return of what was lost.

  Until the late 1800s, at least 10,000 Haida lived in large settlements scattered throughout these islands. An abundance of salmon, halibut and shellfish provided the material support for a culture that produced massive cedar houses, intricately carved and painted artifacts, and monumental totem poles that recorded family history and legend. Then smallpox came, killing nine out of ten Haida in the space of a few years. All but two of the villages were emptied. Museum collectors arrived to buy or steal artifacts and pillage graves.

  The remains that will be reburied today were returned by Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, where they spent more than one hundred years in boxes and drawers. Another 84 bodies will be interred tomorrow. Other museums have also returned remains, more than 400 so far. More are yet to come. To describe the repatriations, the Haida use the word Yaghudangang, “to pay respect”. It is an important concept in a culture where respect for one’s elders and ancestors is inseparable from self-respect.

  For the Haida, the repatriations are part of a much larger cultural and political resurgence. Driven by education, a renaissance in carving and other arts (and a new appreciation for Haida art on the part of outsiders), the movement has been gathering speed since the 1970s.Protests and negotiations in the 1980s led to protected status for much of the Queen Charlotte Islands. The Haida, who never signed a treaty with England or Canada, are still pursuing a legal case against the government, seeking the recognition of full aboriginal title over the archipelago.

  And Nonny Ethel, along with other elders, now spends much of her time in the schools, teaching the language to a new generation. “In the old days, we snuck to speak it,” she says. “That’s why I’m in school trying to teach to the younger people. I think it will survive.”

  Note that this story aired in two separate parts on NPR’s Day to Day.

  Date

  January 15 & 16, 2004

  Outlets

  NPR

  Tags

  Themes: Culture

  Regions: North America

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: Haida, Queen Charlotte Islands, repatriation

• Jonathan Miller

  Worlds of Difference

  Andean Harvest

  Play Now Download

  Jonathan Miller

  Worlds of Difference

  Andean Harvest

  Peasant farmers in Peru’s central highlands grow hundreds of varieties of potatoes. Now they’re being encouraged to sell them to high-end consumers. But potatoes are more than just food in the Andes – they’re part of a complex spiritual, biological, and cultural universe. Will the market change that?

  The anthropologist Richard Chase Smith describes indigenous culture in the Americas as “a tapestry woven from the vicissitudes of history, place, and daily life.” In the Andes, where daily life sometimes seems like it has been stripped to its bare essentials, that tapestry is far more intricate – and far stronger – than it may first appear.

  Andean culture is a dense weave of the ancient and modern, the mystical and scientific. When planting or harvesting, farmers pay close attention not just to the weather, but also to the moon and stars. They say prayers to Catholic saints and make offerings to Pachamama, the earth mother. They consult with wise persons qualified to read the signs of nature. They listen to visitors: travelers, aid workers, scientists, pesticide salesmen. They watch to see what farmers in other communities are doing.

  And before they make any major decisions, they meet with their neighbors and talk.

  The system is extraordinary both for its complexity and its stability – and biodiversity is at its heart. Farmers in the Andes grow as many as 3,000 different kinds of potatoes, and hundreds of types of other crops. Diversity is not just a source of variety, or testimony to the staggering range of microclimates and ecological zones – it’s also a proven tool against diseases, pests, and other scourges.

  Indeed a major reason for the great famine in Ireland in the 19th century was the fact that farmers there planted only one potato variety, which offered no resistance to phytophthera infestans, the “late blight” pathogen. The Irish disaster remains a powerful metaphor for the dangers of monoculture, both biological and human.

  Lately the world has come to appreciate the value of agricultural biodiversity, as well as of the traditional knowledge of those who maintain it. Not surprisingly, there has been much talk within development circles about how to convert those assets into cash. But many farmers in the Andes are wary.

  “They fear the possibility of losing their portfolio of native varieties,” explains Peruvian economist Manuel Glave. “Because they feel – and they know it is a fact – that the market does not demand 50 varieties. The market tends to demand a more homogeneous product.”

  The market can also be fickle. For decades, Andean farmers were advised to replace their native potatoes with more marketable “improved” or “modern” varieties, particularly at lower altitudes. Tens of thousands did as they were told, then watched the prices fall so low that some years they can’t afford to harvest what they’ve sown.

  But peasant farmers know that standing still is not an option. Even the most isolated Andean communities are fast becoming incorporated into the cash economy. How they manage the transition may determine whether their ancient tapestry will be torn to shreds, or made even more resilient and lovely.

  – Jonathan Miller

   

  Date

  January 11, 2004

  Outlets

  Weekend Edition

  Tags

  Themes: Economy, Culture, Environment

  Regions: South America

  Media: Text, Audio

  Other Contributors: Jonathan Miller

  Other Tags: biodiversity, potatoes, markets, Peru

• Jonathan Miller

  Worlds of Difference

  Welsh Renaissance

  Play Now Download

  Jonathan Miller

  Worlds of Difference

  Welsh Renaissance

  Languages around the world are disappearing at an unprecedented rate. But Welsh is making a comeback, and children are leading the way. Now the challenge is to move Welsh from the classroom to the living room. Meet the Steel family of Clydach.

  Along the border between England and Wales stand some of Great Britain’s most imposing castles. They are testimony to centuries of conflict between the two countries. The cannons have long been silent, and motorists cross the frontier today without encountering so much as a sign of welcome or good-bye. But in Wales, pride of place and pride of culture are still very much alive.

  Nowhere is this more evident than in the effort to promote the Welsh language. In the 1890s, at least 70% of the people of Wales spoke Welsh. By the middle of the 20th century, the national language (known as Cymraeg, related to Cornish and Breton) appeared to be dying. It was still dominant in some areas (mainly to the west and north), but virtually everyone in Wales spoke English, and everything from road signs to traffic tickets were written in the imperial language. Students were punished for speaking Welsh in school, and the mass media flooded the country with English pop culture.

  Linguists assumed that Welsh would go the way of Gaelic in Scotland and Ireland – the focus of much nationalist rhetoric, but spoken on a daily basis only in the poorest and most isolated areas.

  Today the revival of Welsh is shaping up to be one of the world’s most impressive linguistic success stories. The census of 2001 showed, for the first time, an increase in Welsh speakers both in real numbers and as a percentage of the population. The rise was especially marked among the young, and in traditionally English-speaking areas in the south and east.

  “We can now say, hand on heart, that the language is in the ownership of people throughout Wales,” says John Walter Jones of the Welsh Language Board. “It is not something that is being ghettoized and left in a corner. It is there throughout society.”

  Language activist Heini Gruffudd credits a century of grassroots campaigning for the resurgence of Welsh. As a young man, Gruffudd would dismantle English road signs in the dead of night. Other activists would ride their bicycles down the wrong side of the street, then refuse to pay their fines until the tickets were translated into Cymraeg.

  Over time, the tactics became less symbolic and more practical. In 1971, parents founded the Nursery School Movement (Mudiad Ysgolion Meithrin), and began setting up Welsh pre-schools and childcare centers. Today Welsh-medium education is solidly mainstream. About 25% of all primary-age children are enrolled in Welsh immersion schools. Studies show that these schools don’t just provide students with a strong foundation in the national language – graduates also do better in English.

  Government has played its part. Laws enacted by Britain in 1967 gave Welsh official status in the courts. In 1993, parliament passed a much stronger Welsh Language Act, creating the language board and erasing the remaining legal inequities. Today the board supports innovative programs like “Twf” – a word that means “growth” in Welsh, and also stands for “Taking Welsh to Families.” In Twf (pronounced “toove”), parents are encouraged to speak Welsh with their children. That’s a challenge in a country where the great majority of young adults are native English speakers.

  The Language Board claims that in homes in which both parents speak Welsh, there is a 92% chance that the children will also speak the language. Where only one parent speaks Welsh, the rate for the children drops to about 50%. Jones says English-speaking parents must come to believe that raising bilingual children makes educational and – especially – economic sense. Marketing materials produced by the language board tout the intellectual advantages of multilingualism, and point out that more and more companies require Welsh proficiency of their employees. But learning a new language is a serious commitment, and not everyone is sure it’s worth the effort.

  No one in Wales expects Welsh to replace English. Nor does anyone claim that an ability to speak or understand a second language necessarily means that people will use it in everyday life. There may be Welsh classes and plays and poetry readings and road signs, but walk down the street in Cardiff or Swansea and you will rarely hear anything other than English.

  “It’s a gradual thing,” says Jones. “You don’t invest in a language today and see the results tomorrow. Language does take time. We lost it over two or three generations. We’re going to regain it in two or three generations.”

  – Jonathan Miller

  Date

  December 25, 2003

  Outlets

  NPR

  Tags

  Themes: Culture

  Regions: Europe

  Media: Text, Audio

  Other Contributors: Jonathan Miller

  Other Tags: Wales, bilingualism, Welsh, Swansea, language revitalization

• Sandy Tolan

  Border Stories

  Agua en Juárez (Spanish)

  Play Now Download

  Sandy Tolan

  Border Stories

  Agua en Juárez (Spanish)

  The explosive growth in Ciudad Juárez has put unprecedented pressure on the region’s water resources. Residents and officials search for solutions as the aquifer drains. In Spanish.

  The explosive growth in Ciudad Juárez has put unprecedented pressure on the region’s water resources. Residents and officials search for solutions as the aquifer drains.

  This Spanish-language version of “High and Dry in Juárez” was reported and written by Sandy Tolan and narrated by Marco Vinicio Gonzalez.

  Date

  December 2003

  Other Contributor(s)

  Marco Vinicio Gonzalez

  Outlets

  Radio Bilingüe

  Tags

  Themes: Environment

  Regions: North America

  Media: Audio

  Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan

  Other Tags: scarcity, Mexico, Ciudad Juarez, water, agua

• Barbara Ferry, Deborah Begel

  World Views

  Luis and Negra

  Play Now Download

  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)

  Alan Weisman, Sandy Tolan

  Outlets

  This American Life

  Tags

  Themes: Lives, Culture

  Regions: North America

  Media: Audio

  Other Contributors: Alan Weisman, Sandy Tolan

  Other Tags: Luis Alberto Urrea, first world, third world, tijuana

• Victoria Mauleón

  Border Stories

  Colonia Panorama, Tejas (Spanish)

  Play Now Download

  Victoria Mauleón

  Border Stories

  Colonia Panorama, Tejas (Spanish)

  A Mexican immigrant organizes the residents of his slum on the Texas side of the Mexican border. In Spanish.

  The misery of Mexican slum colonias has long been visible just across from many U.S. border towns. Over the past decade, however, despite the economic promise of NAFTA, the phenomenon has spread to the U.S. side.

  Today, a half-million Texans live in more than 1,500 colonias that lack running water and sewage treatment. We follow Mexican immigrant Oscar Solís of Panorama, Texas, as he organizes his community to fight for changes.

  This Spanish-language version of the piece “Panorama, Texas” was reported and written by Victoria Mauleon and narrated by Marco Vinicio Gonzalez.

  Date

  October 2003

  Other Contributor(s)

  Marco Vinicio Gonzalez

  Outlets

  Radio Bilingüe

  Tags

  Themes: Lives, Culture, Economy

  Regions: North America

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: colonia, slum, texas, Mexico

• Alan Weisman

  Worlds of Difference

  Chiloe: A Bridge Too Far?

  Play Now Download

  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

• Sam Quiñones

  World Views

  Tijuana Opera

  Play Now Download

  Sam Quiñones

  World Views

  Tijuana Opera

  Tijuana has been known for bullfights and beer, but the Mexican border city also has a growing opera community. Recitals and lectures are frequent, Tijuana natives are studying and performing in opera’s European citadels, and the city now has its first opera.

  Tijuana has been known for bullfights and beer, but the Mexican border city also has a growing opera community. Recitals and lectures are frequent, Tijuana natives are studying and performing in opera’s European citadels, and the city now has its first opera.

  Date

  August 2003

  Outlets

  Weekend Edition

  Tags

  Themes: Culture

  Regions: North America

  Media: Audio

  Other Tags: Mexico, tijuana, opera

• Sandy Tolan

  Worlds of Difference

  Camisea: A Light in the Jungle

  Play Now Download

  Sandy Tolan

  Worlds of Difference

  Camisea: A Light in the Jungle

  For the native peoples of the Amazon, petroleum development has often been an environmental and cultural nightmare. But in Camisea, a huge natural gas deposit in eastern Peru, the oil companies say they’re committed to getting it right. The Machiguenga people aren’t yet convinced.

  Long ago, in the hot, moist folds of the Amazon, a people walked and walked to keep the sun from setting. According to Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, the Machiguenga believed if they ever stopped walking, the sun would fall from the sky. Then the missionaries came with new beliefs. Soon after, settlers arrived from the coast and the highlands. And now another wave, this time of businessmen who tell of a new kind of sun, below the ground, waiting to be transformed into light and money.

  For a consortium of seven energy companies, including Hunt Oil of Texas, the vast natural gas deposit at Camisea represents potentially large profits through exports to the U.S., where demand is rising, and the conversion of vehicles and factories in Peru to natural gas. Officials in Peru say the Camisea field, one of the largest in the Americas, could mean energy independence for the nation. For the 10,000 Machiguenga navigating their way along the “River of the Moon,” the Camisea gas project means change, and the unknown.

  Environmentalists and human rights organizations warn of irreparable damage to the Amazon and its people if the project moves forward as planned. They cite previous petroleum projects in Peru and Ecuador as reason to proceed with extreme caution, if at all, in Camisea. The energy companies respond that they have learned from the mistakes of the past, and that Camisea can be a model of how to do things right. It’s a debate that could affect the future of rainforest oil development around the world. And the Machiguenga are caught in the middle.

  Date

  August 1, 2003

  Other Contributor(s)

  Jason Felch, Chris Raphael

  Outlets

  Morning Edition

  Tags

  Themes: Economy, Culture, Environment

  Regions: South America

  Media: Audio

  Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan

  Other Tags: gas development, Amazon, Machiguenga, Peru

• Jonathan Miller

  Worlds of Difference

  To Perpetuate Life as it was Meant to Be

  Play Now Download

  Jonathan Miller

  Worlds of Difference

  To Perpetuate Life as it was Meant to Be

  By almost every measure, native Hawaiians are the worst off of Hawaii’s many ethnic groups. One of the biggest problems is drug abuse. Ho’omau Ke Ola is a community treatment program that looks to island traditions for a way forward.

  Fourteen people stand together on a shady path in a tropical forest. Half are men and half are women; they wear flip-flops, tee-shirts and shorts. They take a deep breath in unison, close their eyes, and begin to sing. The song is breathy and low, a tumble of words coming quiet at first, then building momentum.

  The song is a request for permission to enter an ancient shrine, or heiau – a cluster of bamboo buildings built on low stone platforms among the trees. Just a few minutes from here are fast food restaurants, tumbledown houses and beaches full of partiers and surfers. But these people aren’t thinking about those places now. They’re thinking about their kupuna, or ancestors, and hoping for a sign that their own presence here is wanted.

  When they’re done with their chant, a breeze comes from nowhere and rustles the leaves. “Did you feel that?” asks Momi Cruz Losano, the cheerful woman who has brought them here. “You didn’t believe it, did you?”

  The singers are drug addicts, most of them sent by the courts or social service agencies to live, study, and heal at Ho’omau Ke Ola. Ho’omau Ke Ola is a non-profit, residential and outpatient substance abuse treatment program based in Waianae, on the west (or leeward) coast of Oahu. Waianae is one of the most depressed communities in Hawaii. The center was founded by community members in 1987 to help confront an enormous drug problem in the area, particularly among native Hawaiians. From the outset, it used traditional Hawaiian teachings as part of its therapeutic program. This spring Ho’omau Ke Ola went a step further, converting the cultural component into the program’s central feature.

  The clients study Hawaiian history and genealogy, cooking and craft-making, storytelling and navigation. They work at a local demonstration farm, and take intensive language lessons. And they learn key concepts of Hawaiian philosophy and spirituality: the importance of ohana (family), malama ‘aina (care for the land), kuleana (responsibility), and pono (balance). The idea, program officials say, is to help the clients see that they are connected to something larger than themselves – that they are heirs to a sophisticated civilization, and that that civilization has lessons to teach them about making their way in the modern world.

  Program director Jim Lutte, who spent 15 years with substance abuse programs in Pennsylvania, says the approach works. “Even though they’re in a treatment setting and they’re from different families, they’re from the same area and they consider themselves ohana, which means family. There seems to be a sense of safeness to take emotional risks that you don’t usually see in traditional programs.”

  The biggest challenge for clients is to apply what they learn in treatment to their lives on the outside. Lutte says it helps that family, feasting, and fellowship are central to everyday life in Hawaii. “It’s not like they go through treatment and they have all this cultural awareness and now they’re back out in society and it’s not applicable. They actually fit in better when they go through this, because this is part of the way people live here.”

  But for generations, people in Waianae have also lived with drugs, alcohol, poverty, violence, and despair. Those are difficult cycles to break. The drug of choice in Waianae – crystal methamphetamine, or “ice” – is extremely addictive. Like substance abuse programs everywhere that serve low-income clients, Ho’omau Ke Ola is chronically underfunded. Federal and state grants, which used to fund up to six months of residential treatment, now cover only 60-75 days – rarely enough for full recovery. Not to mention that the number of clients Ho’omau Ke Ola does serve is only a tiny fraction of the thousands of Hawaiians in need of help.

  While treating addiction under these conditions is hard enough, there is an even more ambitious idea behind the center’s work. Ho’omau Ke Ola is part of a broader movement that seeks not just to help Hawaiians cope in society, but to make that society more sustainable and humane. All over the islands, natives and non-natives are studying the old ways – from farming and fishing to building canoes and dancing hula. The goal is not to escape the modern world, they say, but to change it.

  “There’s no magic bullet,” says Eric Enos, director of Ka’ala Farm, a “cultural learning center” where Ho’omau Ke Ola’s clients come once a week to work in the taro patches, move rocks or clear brush. “Drugs are what you turn to when there’s a vacuum to fill. When you’re full of purpose, when life has a meaning, then you’re filling yourself up with something else, something positive. And when you’re filled with positive things then the junk doesn’t have as much room to enter.”

  – Jonathan Miller

  Date

  July 17, 2003

  Outlets

  Morning Edition