While Canada has announced it will withdraw combat troops from Afghanistan by 2011, the U.S. is engaged for the long haul. Almost a hundred thousand U.S. troops now serve in Afghanistan, but the insurgency continues and expands. GPM contributor Reese Erlich visited with a group of anti-war activists, including an American marine who had fought there.
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In the 1940s and 50s, journalist Tom Patterson became convinced that Shakespeare could help revitalize his hometown of Stratford, Ontario. Today, Suchitoto, El Salvador hopes to begin a culturally-driven economic revitalization that will build on Tom Patterson’s legacy through a novel partnership with Stratford.
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If everyone on Earth earned what their labour was actually worth, global poverty would be a lot less rampant. Paying people what their labour is worth is what the so-called Fair Trade movement is all about. Victoria Fenner sends us philosophical musings on the subject from Guatemala about the personal ramifications of free trading.
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Of all the conflicts in Latin America, none was more brutal or costly in human lives than the forty-year civil war in Guatemala. Two hundred thousand people died, most of them impoverished peasants of Mayan ancestry. Today, former rebels are presenting their perspective of the struggle–to tourists.
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GPM producer Victoria Fenner has recently returned from a trip to Central America. In Honduras, she spent a few days on the side of a big mountain, gazing down on clouds soaked with rain. On the bottom of Panacam’s slopes farming communities depend on her fresh waters and are trying to keep them clean. Here’s Victoria’s story.
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Stuart Franklin is turning air miles into trees. Franklin — the founder of a grassroots carbon offsetting project in Ecuador — calculates how many seedlings he has to put in the ground in order to generate a carbon bank big enough to capture the carbon dioxide emitted by tourists jetting to the popular Galapagos Islands each year.
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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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Think about threatened waters and their wildlife … what comes to mind? Whales … declining codfish stocks … bleached coral reefs. In the U.S. Territory of Puerto Rico, tiny, luminescent creatures are taking it on the chin. Chemical and light pollution threaten to quench their bioluminescence.
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