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.
Ithaca sustainability director Luis Aguirre-Torres (second from left) meets with college students, scientists, and artists at the Soil Factory maker space in Ithaca, NY.
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.
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 …
Manila, Philippines. Photo by Alan Weisman.
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 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.
Triptych: Ehmad and His Boat in the Central Marshes. Photo by Meridel Rubenstein, from Eden Turned on Its Side.
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.
A New Adam and Eve in the South Iraqi Marshes. Photo by Meridel Rubinstein from Eden Turned on Its Side.
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.
Sandy Tolan is in Gaza, reporting on the water crisis there. Here is a Facebook post from July 26: This morning in Gaza, a whiff of war in the air in the wake of Israel’s …
Sandy Tolan made five trips to North Dakota this past fall and winter to document the standoff between opponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline and the pipeline’s supporters in government and business. As he reported on …
Los Angeles is a rapidly aging city in a rapidly aging county. In fact, over the next 15 years, LA County’s senior population will double, to nearly one-fifth of the total population. Housing, health care, …
Sandy Tolan has returned to North Dakota to report on the status of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in the aftermath of the presidential order instructing the Army Corps of Engineers to expedite the approval of construction permits. …
One of Los Angeles’ NPR affiliates, KCRW, has launched Bear and Rux’s year-long multi-platform project about aging in the city’s working-class and immigrant neighborhoods. “Going Gray in LA: Stories of Aging along Broadway” is part …
The strawberries on your breakfast cereal might not taste so sweet if you knew how bitter life can be for the folks who pick them. As if backbreaking labor and extremely low wages weren’t enough, strawberry workers are …
Homelands’ co-founder and senior producer Alan Weisman is spending nearly a month in Colombia and Ecuador giving talks and interviews about his two most recent books, The World Without Us and Countdown.
Since August 13, Ecuadorians from across the political spectrum have been observing a nationwide strike and marching in the streets against the policies of President Rafael Correa. Homelands’ Bear Guerra has been documenting the protests, which have received little attention in the international …
This month, as part of a special issue on the environment, VICE Magazine asked leading thinkers to weigh in with their ideas about what to do about climate change. Below is Homelands’ Alan Weisman‘s essay, based …
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.
Marguerite Wells is the manager of the future Black Oak Wind Farm in Enfield, NY, just west of Ithaca. The seven-turbine, 11.9 megawatt facility will be partly owned by local investors. Wells was running a green roof plant nursery when she started volunteering on the project. Now it’s a full-time job. Photo by Jonathan Miller
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.
Mike McCoy works as an installer for Taitem Engineering, an Ithaca firm that participated in the Solar Tompkins solar incentives program in 2014 and 2105. In one year, the program more than doubled the number of residential solar systems in the county. McCoy began as an apprentice and is now a full-time employee. Photo by Jonathan Miller
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.
If you happen to visit Johnson City, NY, just outside Binghamton, you’re likely to pass under a stone arch inscribed with the words, “Home of the Square Deal.” The arch (there are actually two, one …
On the day Ruxandra Guidi arrived in Quito last year, she spoke with the owner of her bed and breakfast, an English-speaking Ecuadorean in his late twenties with obvious entrepreneurial savvy. He’d attended college in the U.S. on his parents’ …
Before we say goodbye to 2014 we thought we’d give you a sneak peek at what we’re cooking up for the year to come. If you feel it’s worth supporting, far be it from us to stand …
We were closely watching the Kickstarter campaign for “The SEAMS,” a new podcast and radio series probing the history, culture, class, gender politics, and other deeper meanings hidden in the folds of clothing and fashion. …
For the 60,000 residents of Cañar, Ecuador, the costs of migration can be great, especially for children. But the benefits can be great as well: unprecedented access to education and jobs, freedom of movement and financial independence for …
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)
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?
Stir-fried vegetables with mealworms. Photo by Jonathan Miller.
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?
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?
The Sahara Forest Project is intended to mimic a natural ecosystem, with the waste product of one component serving as the fuel or fertilizer for another. The project’s designers say the concept should work in any low-altitude desert area near a large source of salt water. Above, an artist’s rendering shows a full-scale commercial facility. Graphic provided by Sahara Forest Project.
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?
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.
The spread of modern grocery chains could lift millions of African farmers out of poverty. Or it could ruin them.
A new Pick n Pay supermarket in Lusaka, Zambia. Local small-scale farmers can prosper if they find ways to satisfy the chains’ finicky buyers. But if supermarkets bypass local farmers in favor of cheaper and more reliable imports, farmers’ livelihoods could be threatened. Photo by Gretchen Wilson.
The spread of modern grocery chains could lift millions of African farmers out of poverty. Or it could ruin them.
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.
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.
Hung Vuong Corporation is a vertically integrated operation, controlling everything from feed production to export. Fish farming is a booming industry, and businesses and scientists are working to find ways to operate sustainably at a large scale. Photo by Sam Eaton.
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.
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?
A farmer in Japan prunes his fruit trees. Photo by Sam Eaton.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Government-run Popular Restaurant No. 2, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, was an inspiration for former President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva’s Zero Hunger campaign. Photo by Cecilia Vaisman.
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.
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?
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
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.
More than one million Egyptian farmers have quit the land in the last 20 years, reshaping the country’s physical and political landscape.
This Cairo family is part of a wave of Egyptians who have left their lands and moved to the cities. Many blame high food prices on the government’s policies that promote export agriculture. Photo by Charlotte Buchen.
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.
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.
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
Nearly every prescription for feeding the world says we need to invest more money in science. What’s that money going to get us?
The sorting room at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico. The center ships experimental grain to plant breeders around the world at no cost. Photo by Jonathan Miller.
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.
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.
George F. Johnson (1857-1948) was a socialist as a young man. He went on to become president of the largest shoe company in the U.S., which was known for its generous benefits. But Johnson fought hard against unions in his factories. Photo from the Special Collections Research Center of Syracuse University.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Tarek Haidar Eskandar with his sister. Photo by Kelly McEvers.
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.
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.
Photo by Santiago Mujica Bustamante.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Can development based on spiritual values, local activism, and volunteer labor compete with a global system built on western market economics? From Sri Lanka, Sandy Tolan reports on a movement that seeks to improve the lot of millions of poor people with self-help programs steeped in Buddhist principles.
A global debate has emerged from the street protests of Seattle and Genoa and Prague. From the anarchist tree houses in the Pacific Northwest to the six-star hotels in Davos, globalization has come under scrutiny as never before. Defenders of the global economy acknowledge the need to address poverty, but insist globalization can wear a human face. Detractors say the system is rigged against poor countries; that there must be an alternative vision that puts people before profits.
In Sri Lanka, a tiny island nation off the southern coast of India, some say this vision has existed for decades. Sarvodaya is a village-based movement designed as a viable alternative to globalization.
Too often, says Sarvodaya’s founder, Dr. A.T. Ariyaratne, “development results in a few people earning lots of money while millions of people are getting marginalized. That kind of system cannot sustain.” So, beginning 45 years ago, “Dr. Ari” began traveling to the villages, slowly establishing a movement he came to call “Sarvodaya Shramadana” – a “village awakening,” with the “gift of labor.”
“We said development is an awakening process,” Dr. Ari says. “Within a couple of years this expanded into so many other educational institutions in the country, and this became an independent national movement; a movement where your gift of labor, your land, your money, your skills, are for the well-being of all.”
To see Sarvodaya in action is to see, for example, a score of teenage villagers shoveling rocks in the rain – their “gift of labor” part of the village’s assessment of its needs: in his case, a new wall for the village temple. Other basic projects include building schools and water lines.
But in an increasingly connected world, with the global influence of material goods, the pressure from financial institutions such as the IMF to keep wages low in Sri Lanka, and the pull on Sri Lankan women to seek work as housemaids in the Middle East, such an effort faces immense challenges.
“The pressures we have from the international financial system makes it next to impossible to think of a commonwealth of village republics, which is our idea,” says Dr. Ari. “Our ideal is decentralized political and economic power to the maximum to the village. Bring it down to the village. To bring a village to that level of economic self-sufficiency or to become independent, you have to use the existing financial network. And still not become a part of it. That is the most difficult thing.”
Yet Dr. Ari’s ardent followers – of which there are many – would say that despite the obstacles, what Sarvodaya has achieved in reducing poverty and restoring dignity in the villages is remarkable.
“As Dr. Ari always says, there is a critical mass of spiritual consciousness that has been created by Sarvodaya,” says Krishna, who left the lucrative world of advertising to work for Sarvodaya (and who doesn’t use a last name). “So the effects of that critical mass have shed upon me. And I am absolutely happy here. Because I know that nothing can go wrong here. Because we are committed to the upliftment of human beings, and to awaken the human spirit.”
Hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankan women work abroad as housemaids, mainly in the Middle East. Their remittances are a cornerstone of their country’s economy, and a desperately needed source of income for their families. But their absence is keenly felt.
In a sitting room in a wealthy neighborhood of Amman, the Jordanian capital, three Sri Lankan maids – Mala, Manike, and Coomari – sit on plump couches, sipping sweet Arabic tea. Madame Shama is serving, for a change – and translating from the housemaids’ acquired Arabic. The women are here to explain why they’ve traveled thousands of miles to work for a hundred dollars a month. In a word: family.
“I love them so much and I was so desperate to make anything possible for them to live better and eat better and learn better,” says Coomari. “And I thought, it’s only two years. Maybe it will be worth it.”
By almost any measure, the housemaids’ salaries are tiny – some as little as 30 cents an hour, plus room and board, for 14-hour days of cooking and cleaning. Yet these women have been able to save for new homes in their villages. Their income now makes up the largest share of Sri Lanka’s foreign exchange. And as services that used to be taken for granted now keep their families alive, the women see themselves differently.
But there is so much that a desert kingdom cannot provide: carnations and bougainvilleas beneath a canopy of jackfruit trees; coconut oil burning from the shrine of the Buddha; the smell of curry and fresh fish. The sound of the ocean. And the touch of their children, who they will not see for years at a time.
“What hurts me a lot is that my daughter thinks my mother is her mother,” says Coomari. “When they tell her, ‘No, your mother is in Jordan,’ she says, ‘No, this is my mother.’ She doesn’t even know me.”
With so many mothers providing security from thousands of miles away, Sri Lankan society is undergoing a powerful shift – especially in the villages.“I’m trying to do what mother was doing,” says T. Ajit, the father of three boys, and husband of a housemaid working in the Middle East. As he spoke, from a small house in a village two hours from the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo, his sons looked on silently, bouncing a tennis ball on the cement floor.
The adjustments have challenged traditional gender roles about breadwinning and childrearing, and have given rise to countless – and often exaggerated – stories of abuse, both to the Sri Lankan women in Arab societies and among their children at home.
“All the social ills that assail the households, they put it down to the migration of the women,” says Myrtle Perera of the Marga Institute, a think-tank in Colombo. “The violence of youth, the alcoholism of men, promiscuity, teenage pregnancy – everything is put down to women going to the Middle East, migrating for employment.”
Yet there is no disputing that in relative terms, the migration has brought real wealth to the villages. “We found that the majority of the women who migrated and came back, over sixty percent of their households had benefited remarkably – education, housing, living standards,” says Perera.
At the same time, it is much easier to find people who reflect a deeply troubled sense that this global migration is tearing at the fabric of Sri Lankan society. One thing everyone agrees on: Good or bad, this mass migration of poor rural women – a product of an integrated global economy coupled with Middle Eastern oil wealth – is changing Sri Lankan society.
A Mexican immigrant organizes the residents of his slum on the Texas side of the Mexican border.
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.
How a humble bean spurred an international trade dispute and served as a metaphor for mounting intellectual property battles in the new global economy.
How a humble bean spurred an international trade dispute and served as a metaphor for mounting intellectual property battles in the new global economy.
A visit to a shelter for transients in the Mexican border town of Nogales, where would-be migrants prepare for the harrowing trip across the border to the United States.
A visit to a shelter for transients in the Mexican border town of Nogales, where would-be migrants prepare for the harrowing trip across the border to the United States. Tens of thousands of Mexicans and Central Americans have passed through the shelter, undeterred by the frequent deaths of their compatriots in the Arizona desert.
Townsfolk debate the fate of an abandoned 19th century paint factory on Gloucester’s inner harbor. It’s symbolic of a larger debate over Gloucester’s economic and cultural identity.
Townsfolk debate the fate of an abandoned 19th century paint factory on Gloucester’s inner harbor. Developers want to transform it into a luxury condominium; some citizens worry that the town is turning its back on its industrial past. It’s symbolic of a larger debate over Gloucester’s economic and cultural identity.
Part 4 of the Gloucester at the Crossroads series.
Over the last four centuries, Gloucester has lost, on average, one fisherman every thirteen days. The memory of the dead, and the knowledge that there will be more, have always haunted the town and its people.
Over the last four centuries, Gloucester has lost, on average, one fisherman every thirteen days. The memory of the dead, and the knowledge that there will be more, have always haunted the town and its people.
Part 3 of the Gloucester at the Crossroads series.
For nine nights each summer, the Italian-Americans of Gloucester gather to pray to the patron saint of fishermen. It’s been a tradition since the 1920s. But with the depletion of the fish stocks, townsfolk are beginning to contemplate a very different future.
For nine nights each summer, the Italian-Americans of Gloucester gather to pray to the patron saint of fishermen. It’s been a tradition since the 1920s. But with the depletion of the fish stocks, townsfolk are beginning to contemplate a very different future.
Part 2 of the Gloucester at the Crossroads series.
Gloucester was once one of the greatest fishing ports on earth. Today it’s a gritty place where fishermen struggle to make a living. A debate over a proposed foreign-owned herring processing plant casts light on the challenges facing a town – and an industry – in transition.
Gloucester was once one of the greatest fishing ports on earth. Today it’s a gritty place where fishermen struggle to make a living. A debate over a proposed foreign-owned herring processing plant casts light on the challenges facing a town – and an industry – in transition.
Part 1 of the Gloucester at the Crossroads series.
Developing solar energy is part of the Israeli-Jordanian peace agreement, but the modest plans may be overwhelmed by market forces.
Legend has it in the third century BC, the Greek scientist Archimedes devised a spectacular weapon to save the ancient city of Syracuse – a giant concave mirror that bounced concentrated sunbeams onto the sails of invading roman ships. The sails caught fire, the ships sank, and Syracuse was saved. This may have been the only time the sun was harnessed to wage war.
But now, in the heart of the Middle East, the sun is a player in the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan. Some say the sun will soon be harnessed in the service of peace. Others wonder if the peace process itself will undermine the prospects for developing clean solar power at a time when developing renewable energy is becoming more and more critical.
Although scientists and engineers have shown that hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, is a clean substitute for fossil fuels, politicians and big business may never be ready to switch.
During the next 25 years, as developing nations like China and India industrialize, world energy consumption is expected to double. With oil and gas supplies diminishing even faster, many scientists believe that hydrogen – the most abundant element, comprising three-fourths of the mass of the universe – will be the energy carrier for the future.
Although scientists and engineers have shown that hydrogen is a clean substitute for fossil fuels, politicians and big business may never be ready to switch.
City officials from throughout Latin America come to Curitiba, Brazil, to learn about low-cost, environmentally sound planning from urban planner Jaime Lerner.
The southern Brazilian city of Curitiba has the reputation for being the livable place in Latin America. With a population of a million and a half, Curitiba is known for its extensive parks, its efficient public transport system, an a highly successful recycling program.
The man largely responsible for Curitiba’s success is Jaime Lerner, the city’s three-time mayor and a pioneer of environmentally sound urban planning. Now, Lerner and his colleagues have set up a training center – the Jaime Lerner Institute – where Brazilian and other Latin American mayors and city officials can learn how Curitiba solved its problems, and how their cities might do the same.
Indians have long considered “food security” to be a national priority. Now, dependence on the global economy sends India on an uncertain and, some say, dangerous course.
Indians have long considered “food security” to be a national priority. Now, dependence on the global economy sends India on an uncertain and, some say, dangerous course.
A group of Colombian visionaries has created a sustainable community in one of their country’s most inhospitable and dangerous places. This piece formed the basis of Alan’s award-winning book “Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World.”
In the early 1970s, a group of South American visionaries realized that the coming population crisis would one day require people to live in places formerly considered unsuitable for human habitation. They decided that this was an opportunity to try to design a workable future, by and for the Third World, from limited resources.
The place they chose was on the desolate, barren plains of eastern Colombia, a country too often thought of as producing only coffee, cocaine, and bloodshed. The village they founded, called Gaviotas, has become a bright example of how to fashion an ideal tropical society.
Many of the ingenious, affordable technologies they’ve created have spread to other developing nations, and may have much to offer the developed world as well.
Outside Bogotá, some of Latin America’s best soils have been covered with a sea of greenhouses for growing flowers for export.
During the 1980s, carnations, roses, and chrysanthemums became more abundant and cheaper than ever on street corners and in supermarkets throughout North America.
Most are grown in a sea of greenhouses surrounding Bogotá, Colombia. For Colombia, flowers now rank with coffee as a major source of employment and foreign exchange.
But they also convert some of Latin America’s best soils from the production of food to luxury crops. And the chemicals required to produced perfect flowers endanger the environment and the health of the workers.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
Different sorts of dreams collide in the Dominican Republic, where industrial parks, sugar cane fields, and a posh resort all belong to a single U.S. corporation.
To most Americans, a Caribbean holiday sounds like a dream. For many, the dreamiest of all is a stay at the Dominican Republic’s Casa de Campo, a place where people can, for up to $2,000 a night, luxuriate in the region’s poshest, most complete resort. Even the maids here are postcard perfect, dressed in kerchiefs, peasant skirts, and aprons designed by Oscar de la Renta.
But outside the oasis of pleasure lies the rest of the Dominican Republic, one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere, where, increasingly, the people who live and work there are seeing their own dreams dissolve.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
In Brazil, a peasant cooperative has planted native crops using methods designed to preserve the delicate forest soils. But the farmers have little formal education, and even less experience managing a business.
Since the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of poor peasants have streamed into the Brazilian Amazon in a desperate search for farmland.
Many of them arrive only to find that rainforest soils cannot sustain the kinds of crops they knew back home. So they end up in a vicious cycle – slashing and burning new areas of forest year after year.
Now, a small group of farmers living in the most devastated region of the Amazon is trying an alternative. Some say it may become a model to stop the destruction of the jungle.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
In the Mexican state of Chiapas, Chamula Indian artisans are trying to create a tourist economy on their own terms.
More than almost any country in the Americas, Mexico has turned to tourism to help its economy. Entertaining tourists is touted as a clean industry that creates jobs, attracts dollars, and promotes friendly international relations.
But critics say that tourism reinforces an image of Mexicans as servile to rich Americans, and that villages and seacoasts are being defiled by developers.
Katie Davis visits the Chamula region, where some say that colorful traditions will only survive if a way can be found to market them.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
Deep in the Brazilian Amazon, seasonal rubber tappers harvest Brazil nuts to sell to Ben & Jerry’s. But the tappers aren’t happy, and the relationship with their NGO sponsor has frayed.
Rainforest Crunch, the candy and popular ice cream made with Brazil nuts, is an example of a new merchandising strategy known as green marketing.
Shoppers today, the theory goes, want products whose consumption somehow helps save the planet.
Developed by Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream and the Boston-based organization Cultural Survival, the Rainforest Crunch scheme is intended to prove that it’s more profitable to keep the Amazon intact than to convert it to cattle ranches.
The plan is to give thousands of people who live and work in the forest a stake in preserving it. But some question whether this really is responsible development.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
A giant dam project on the border of Paraguay and Argentina raises questions about the social and environmental impact of major infrastructure projects.
Dozens of dams were built in South America between the 1960s and early 1990s. Many were financed by the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, to bring progress to the continent by harnessing its powerful rivers for industry and growing urban populations.
The largest of these dams was Yacyretá, on the border between Paraguay and Argentina. Yacyretá was to produce thousands of megawatts of energy. But it was also to flood the biologically richest area of both countries, and force the largest urban displacement by a development project in history.
In the latter half of the 1980s, the banks held up loans to Yacyretá, pending plans to address environmental and social concerns. Then, despite protests that people and endangered animals would be left homeless, the banks began preparing to restart the loans, raising questions about the policy of international lenders to leave environmental protection and resettlement to the borrowing countries.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
Part 2 of a two-part report from Honduras examines attempts by foreign and private relief agencies to regenerate the soil and help farmers stay on their lands.
For decades, inequitable land distribution, slash-and-burn farming, and uncontrolled erosion have turned entire regions in Latin America into desert, and forced hundreds of thousands of farmers into towns and cities.
This has created a new kind of migrant: the environmental refugee.
But two programs in southern Honduras are looking at ways to help restore the damaged soils, and keep farmers on their lands.
One is a grassroots effort that could serve as a model for small-scale development projects. The other is a U.S.-funded plan that is trying to change the way people farm across the entire country.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
Part One of a two-part feature about the effects of deforestation and desertification follows poor farmers in Honduras who are fleeing their damaged lands to an uncertain life in Tegucigalpa.
In many parts of Latin America, the ecological crisis of deforestation and soil erosion has become so severe that hundreds of thousands of farmers and their families have been forced to abandon their lands and flee to the cities.
In southern Honduras, a generation of poor land distribution and slash-and-burn farming has turned once-fertile lands into useless patches of rock.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
Backed by U.S. government funds, salt flats along the southern Honduran coast have been converted into giant shrimp farms where lax enforcement of environmental, social, and labor laws are the norm.
Throughout the Americas, the U.S. government and international lenders are implementing a vast new policy designed to turn the hemisphere into one big common market.
The plan first calls for a North American Free Trade Agreement. Then, all of North and South American would be linked under the so-called “Enterprise for the Americas.”
Under this strategy, member countries would privatize national industries, implement austerity programs, and convert their economies to produce exports for the United States.
In many nations, this new policy is already in place. In this story, we travel to Honduras, where U.S. and World Bank loans have helped build prosperous shrimp farms along the country’s southern coast. But some critics warn of serious environmental and social costs.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
During the 16th century, the hills of southern Ecuador were a center of gold production for the Spanish. Today the region booms anew, its mines worked by thousands of desperate peasants.
One November day in 1532, Spanish general Francisco Pizarro began the conquest of the Incan empire in South America. In the first attack, thousands of Indians were slaughtered, and their king, Atahualpa, was captured.
To spare his life, Atahualpa proposed a ransom: an entire room filled with gold.
Soon, fine gold vases and figurines began appearing, brought by his subjects throughout the Andes. To make room for more gold, the Spaniards smashed the objects into small pieces. When the room was full, they melted down the gold, shipped it to Spain, and killed Atahualpa.
Today, centuries after the quest for El Dorado, poor peasants, struggling to survive, have taken up the search for gold. They fill the pit mines of Brazil, the rivers of Peru, the hills of Bolivia.
In Ecuador, thousands of people have rediscovered old mines of the Spanish crown. Armed with picks, dynamite, and mercury, they revisit a legacy that began with the death of King Atahualpa.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
The construction of a road and hydroelectric dam in eastern Panama has threatened the survival of Guna Indians who live in the area.
In the early 1970s, many Latin American nations looked to the untapped resources of their jungles as the key to prosperity and modernization.
Huge development projects – dams, coal and gold mines, oil exploration projects, colonization and road-building programs, cattle and cash crop export strategies – were funded by international development banks.
In Panama, the World Bank loaned the government nearly $70 million for its master plan for the jungle. First, a dam would be built, to help generate new industry, and wean Panama from its dependence on the U.S. and the canals.
Second, to promote land reform and new settlement, a road would be carved into new lands in the jungle.
The dam flooded the homelands of the 1,500 Guna (also known as Kuna) Indians, who were relocated to villages along the highway. Now, nearly 20 years later, tens of thousands of landless peasants have streamed down the new road, and have come face to face with the Gunas.
This is a story of two cultures colliding on the fragile soils of a new frontier.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
In the Amazon of Ecuador, two native villages have radically different attitudes toward oil development.
Government officials, industrialists, and Indian activists are staking out turf in a battle over the future of Ecuador’s Amazon.
In this story, Sandy Tolan and Nancy Postero visit two Quichua Indian towns with radically different attitudes toward oil development. At the center of the dispute is an ARCO oil rig in the heart of the jungle.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
Faced with crushing debt and pressure from lenders, Ecuador is rushing to open its section of the Amazon to oil development. But spills and dumping threaten settlers, indigenous people, and the land itself.
In the 1970s, large deposits of oil were discovered in Ecuador’s Amazon. The country’s leaders turned to Texaco to build an oil industry in the jungle and help pull the country out of poverty.
Now oil provides for more than half of the country’s national budget and foreign debt payments. But the ecological costs have been huge. And now many Ecuadoreans are beginning to question whether the benefits of the industry have been worth the price.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
Once the largest tribe in South America, the Guaraní have nearly all left their native forests. But one last band is holding out.
The Guaraní Indians were the once the largest tribe in South America. Their home was a forest that stretched from the Argentine pampas to the Brazilian Amazon.
Four centuries ago, Jesuit priests arrived in Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil to evangelize the Guaraní, a story told in the 1985 movie “The Mission.” The Jesuits coaxed the nomadic, hunter-and-gatherer Guaraní to live in Catholic missions called reductions.
Some Guaraní, however, never accepted the church, and remained hidden in the forest. Today, their descendants confront a world in which paper mills, dams, settlers, and tourism development have so diminished their habitat that, increasingly, the forest’s edge is all that’s left.
In 1992, when this story was reported, the government of Argentina was planning to relocate the last of that country’s Guaraní onto small plots of farmland. Yet one small band of Indians, in northern Argentina’s Misiones Province, was still holding out.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
Preparations for the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas raise questions about the value of celebrating the event that led to the European conquest.
For the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, the government of the Dominican Republic is throwing a gala party. They’ve spent millions of dollars to refurbish the capital city of Santo Domingo, which Columbus founded on his first journey in 1492.
The centerpiece is a huge lighthouse, which officials say will be a beacon of culture for the Americas. Heads of state from around the world will attend its inauguration.
But may Latin Americans object to the idea of celebrating the arrival of Europeans and the conquest that followed. Among those are more than 100,000 people who have been displaced for the construction of the Columbus lighthouse.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
On Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast, Miskito Indians and American investors face off in a battle over the future of the region’s resources.
During the 1980s in Nicaragua, the Sandinista government nationalized lucrative timber and seafood concessions held by U.S. companies on the country’s Atlantic coast.
They accused the Americans of exploiting the resources and leaving the region in poverty.
Now, with the Sandinistas out of power, American investors are coming back. But thousands of Miskito Indians who fought for their Atlantic Coast homeland in the decade-long Contra war against the Sandinistas have also returned. With their villages wrecked and no jobs, many now pin their hopes on foreign investment.
But the reappearance of American businessmen has touched off a battle over who should develop the rich resources of the Miskito Coast – and for whose benefit.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
Haitian sugar cane workers in the Dominican Republic live in squalid conditions. Although the sugar they produce is exported to the United States, the U.S. government has declined to intervene.
On his second voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus brought sugar cane to the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. Sugar is now the biggest industry in the Dominican Republic, which shares the island with its impoverished neighbor, Haiti.
Early in the 20th century, and American company began importing Haitian field hands to work its Dominican sugar holdings. Every since, the backbreaking task of cutting cane in the Dominican Republic has belonged to migrant Haitians and their descendants.
The cane cutters live in hundreds of rural ghettos known as bateys. The living conditions of these permanent labor camps are considered to be among the worst in the hemisphere.
Recently, reports by human rights groups denouncing treatment of the cane cutters prompted the United States to review trade relations with the Dominican Republic. The U.S. concluded that workers’ conditions are improving and decided not to impose economic sanctions, thus preserving the Dominican Republic’s broad duty-free access to U.S. markets.
But, in much of the country, little has changed.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
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.
Brandon Davies’ life is all about risk.
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.
For most Afghan refugees, fleeing the war-torn country is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. For Alidad, it’s a job.
If you’re a Korean man who wants to marry a Vietnamese woman, Hang Nga is your go-to gal.
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.
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.
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.
There’s a huge amount of human effort buried in almost everything around us. You just need to know where to look.
Samanta moved to Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, for the same reason that thousands of other foreigners did: the oil boom.
Whyman Richards says he’ll give anything a try.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.