The next time you buy roses for your honey, consider this: The cut flowers in your Valentine’s bouquet were fumigated for insects and mildew, then drenched with preservatives for the long flight north. They may only make your lover sneeze – or perhaps break out in a rash – but the farmers who grow the flowers may suffer chronic poisoning. GPM producer Jen Moore sends us this report from Ecuador, a major exporter of cut flowers.
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Few industries provoke as much controversy as mining. When powerful companies seek out concessions in poor countries, communities rally around democratic institutions to defend their land and water. From the Andean mountains of Peru, Jen Moore brings us this story about how a democratic vote saved the day … perhaps.
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Isabel La Torre knew they’d finally hit upon the right idea when women’s participation in the Central Coffee Organization of Northwestern Peru (CECANOR) more than doubled in less than three years. For more than three decades, this vibrant Peruvian coffee marketer has been interested in addressing gender inequity on the farm. But after various attempts, putting a dollar value on women’s work is what has made a difference.
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Think about resources crucial to human survival. What comes to mind? Fresh, clean water for sure. Food tops the list. Earth’s primary living products – plants that grow from seeds – are the foundation of humanity’s food supply. Wheat, barley, oats, corn, potatoes and a dizzying variety of beans and legumes … Conserving these seeds of survival – as a common resource – is one of humanity’s greatest challenges … Never more so than in the age of global climate change and plant disease pandemics.
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Small farmers in the hills of Honduras are improving their lives through seed saving and on-farm experimentation. Jen Moore reports.
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They’re scrubby, fierce with mosquitoes and impossible to walk through, but salt water mangroves are the guardians of Earth’s tropical coastlines and nurseries for her fish. Coastal mangroves are endangered by unsustainable fishing and cutting practices. The mangroves of southern Cambodia, on the Gulf of Thailand, are a case in point.
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Dar es Salaam … City of Peace on Tanzania’s Indian Ocean coast. Driving a car into, out of or around the city, or commuting in one of the Tanzanian capital’s jam-packed dala-dalas, is anything but a peaceful enterprise — although the people of Dar are exceptionally friendly. Dar Rapid Transit (DART) is a dream now rising from the drawing board. Listen to this audio.
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Mumbai … the world’s third most populous city. This little neck of land dangling in the Arabian Sea is a Mecca for India’s corporate giants. Real estate prices have skyrocketed. But almost half of Mumbai’s eighteen million residents are poor and the real estate crunch is squeezing them out. Nowhere is the clash between global real estate forces and traditional residents more evident than in Asia’s “largest slum”: Dharavi
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It’s easy to forget – living in the middle of a continent – that there are limits to the amount of dross we can toss. But when you’re living on an island, in the middle of the ocean, trash can get in your face
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Spring is fast approaching. Wherever you are on the planet, the sun will shine down for twelve hours each day – assuming it isn’t cloudy. Nowhere are the sun’s warming rays more welcome than in Canada’s far north. In the Nunavut community of Cambridge Bay, just north of the Arctic Circle, people have another reason to rejoice.
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There’s a quiet killer living in the walls of traditional adobe houses in Central and South America. You can’t see it; you can’t hear it. It sneaks out at night, crawling or tumbling into your bed.
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For all the damage they’ve inflicted on their one and only home, many human beings reflect on where they’ve gone wrong, and the major changes they’ll have to embrace in order to survive. Here are a few voices we’ve managed to capture.
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Human beings are coming up with all sorts of ingenious ways to walk gently on planet Earth.
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Judging from this latest voice transmission, it seems that human beings are poisoning themselves and their planet — transforming the very chemistry of their blue-green home.
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Right-wing Jewish settlers in the Palestinian city of Hebron wear skull caps and carry Glock pistols. They have forcibly expanded their settlements, closed Palestinian shops, and expelled residents. Settlers say they are protecting Jewish land. Palestinians and progressive Israelis say the settlers make a peace settlement impossible. Correspondent Reese Erlich takes us from the Jewish settlements of Hebron to the streets of Ramallah.
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If there’s any hope for the human species, it draws sustenance from the collective wisdom of Planet Earth’s indigenous people — a highly diverse array of First Nations who’ve come to be dominated, over the course of hundreds of years, by alien forces of a more militarily and technologically powerful nature. But Earth’s native people draw on great inner strength. In their struggle, Earth’s future lies.
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Colonel Gaddafi was a genuine pan-Arabist, in the tradition of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, except more radically anti-West. Under Gaddafi’s autocratic rule Libya improved greatly, and things became much better, especially for the poor and women, with a distribution of wealth hitherto unknown in any country on the continent.
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Human beings discuss what Earth has in store for them … and the picture isn’t good …
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Human beings can’t decide how exactly their planet came to be. They have plenty of imaginative ideas.
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Astonishingly, the so-called ‘human’ species appropriates about twenty percent of its planet’s net productive capacity. If the voices in this captured transmission are to be believed, humanity’s insatiable consumptive thirst will have profound impact on the future development of life on Earth.
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Earth’s land surfaces are crisscrossed by mountains of great beauty — objects of wonderment and veneration for some, and greed for others.
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Twenty-four hours in Zanzibar. What’s a person to do? Following up on a contact, I go visit the Dhow Countries Music Academy … and am amazed.
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Human beings are deeply dependent on motorized machines to move themselves around. Trillions of these things now choke a vast and growing network of so-called “roads,” getting into deadly accidents and polluting the planet’s atmosphere.
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In this final chapter in our series, Christine Hamilton and I head off to a fishing settlement called Lushonga, in search of a woman named Josie, who suffers from an advanced case of AIDS.
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Human beings can’t decide whether to cherish trees or chop them down. This seems to be the take-away message in a tenth transmission we’ve just picked up from a far-off planet in crisis.
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Found in a time capsule … A Clayoquot Sound forest activist reflects on civil disobedience and the lesson she learned from a black bear, and sings a revised version of Danny Boy.
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One of Earth’s tens of millions of species has been mining colossal volumes of organic matter buried for ages — energy-rich liquids and gases that would have been buried for aeons still — and burning the stuff for fuel! Their garbage dumps have been seeping vast volumes of earth-warming methane. Bottom line: the creatures have managed to raise the surface temperature of their planet to a level higher than any time in the past hundred thousand years! Whether human beings can pull out of their nose dive is anyone’s guess.
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On the last day of September, a crowd of Winnipeggers gathered to hear one of Israel’s most courageous and incisive journalists — Ha’aretz reporter/columnist Amira Hass. In this supposed “information age” of ours, where bits of “fact” or shreds of news of any sort can be be procured in a flash…
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The third in a series of voicescapes from a visit to Bumbire Island, in Southwest Lake Victoria, Tanzania … Dale Hamilton and I travel to nearby Kinagi Island to visit a big fishing camp.
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So-called “industrial economies” on Earth value money above all else, while squandering finite resources and poisoning their little blue-green planet.
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An Interview with 1989 Right Livelihood Award winner Melaku Worede.
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