Imagine what it would be like to have your home water supply morph into a fire hazard — the liquid flowing from your tap liable to explode if you light a match.
Looking back over a 42-year career in the Canadian trade union movement — from a Chrysler assembly line to the national presidency of the Canadian Autoworkers — what strikes Ken Lewenza the most?
John K. Sampson’s poignant song about Winnipeg captures the cold anonymity of Prairie Canada’s capital on a grey dismal day. But there are as many reasons to love this town as to hate it. The Good Food Club is one.
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Inka Milewski was a marine biologist, not a public health researcher or epidemiologist, when she received a phone call from worried residents of her community. She took up that call. Had no choice. It was something she had to do.
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Midwives catch babies. The “mid” part of the word is derived from the German mit, or with. The French phrase for midwife is “sage femme,” or wise woman.
The Bay of Fundy, on the north shore of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, is one of Earth’s great wonders. Listen to Matt Abbott, a Fundy Baykeeper.
Saskatchewan’s Prairie School for Union Women has been building personal and leadership skills, and solidarity among women workers, for sixteen years.
In need of a hard-hitting enviro news fix? BC-based publication The Watershed Sentinel is your go-to source for cutting edge green news and trenchant analysis — from British Columbia and beyond.
When ten “tech” divers travel to Bikini Atoll for a week’s adventure in paradise, preparing to feast their eyes on the most famous collection of sunken nuclear warships in the world, the couldn’t guess what would happen next.
Follow a group of naturalists up New Brunswick’s Nashwaak River, from its mouth, across from the provincial legislature in Saint John, to its headwaters a hundred and fifty kilometers north, near a proposed tungsten-molybdenum mine.
In the summer of 2014, several hundred people gathered at a fracking “Day of Protest” in Kent County, between Moncton and Miramichi — Elsipogtog First Nations territory.
Winnipeg’s Social Enterprise Center builds community in the north end of Prairie Canada’s capital — from the inside out.
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Universities are engines of higher learning – also of national development and prosperity. No one knows this better than Israel – home to some of the world’s most prestigious universities. Palestinian schools struggle under Israeli occupation.
Until recently, Rwandan farmers knew when the rains would come; when best to plant their crops. These days, with varying weather patterns attributed to climate change, more and more Rwandan farmers struggle to grow food.
In January 2013, former Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel appeared before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, charged with approving his nomination as Defense Secretary. Was he sufficiently committed to a foreign country — Israel? Listen to Hagel’s inquisition.
For those who speak and write non-Latin languages, being able to type on a ‘standard’ computer keyboard is a major barrier to digital democracy. In Cambodia, this problem has been solved and communities are going wireless.
The city of Curitiba, in southern Brazil, is famous for innovation and rational development. It was one of the first cities to market itself as “green” in a 1980s advertising campaign. And it is.
When it comes to garbage, it’s a matter of perspective. One person’s trash is another person’s cash. Outside of Kigali, in the east African nation of Rwanda, villagers have figured out how to turn food waste into cooking fuel.
Weekly peaceful protests in villages across the West Bank are routinely greeted by Israeli teargas, sewage water, concussion grenades, and the occasional burst of live rounds. The village of Bi’lin is one of these.
Hanan Ashrawi is a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Executive Committee.
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Amira Hass is a columnist for the left-center Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. For over twenty years, her hard-hitting reports from the West Bank have shone a light on Israel’s occupation.
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Jeff Halper, a native of Hibbing, Minnesota, is the founder of the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions.
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According to Mahatma Gandhi, nothing poses more of a threat to an oppressive regime than well organized, non-violent resistance. Mubarak Awad — some call him the Palestinian Gandhi — is a case in point.
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Mustafa Barghouti is a Palestinian politician and democracy activist. He and I sat down for an interview in August 2012 in his office on the outskirts of Ramallah.
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The largest of Israel’s hundred or so checkpoints, Qualandia — between northern Jerusalem and the road to Ramallah — is a masterpiece in population engineering. Israeli Machsom Watch activists keep an eye on what happens there.
Thirty years have come and gone since the end of the American War – as the Vietnamese call it – and its toxic aftermath lingers on.
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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.
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When powerful corporations seek concessions in poor countries, communities rally around democratic institutions to defend their land and water.
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For more than three decades, the Central Coffee Organization of Northwestern Peru has addressed gender inequity on the farm. Putting a dollar value on women’s work is what has made a difference.
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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. They’re also threatened.
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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.
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Mumbai is 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. But almost half of Mumbai’s eighteen million residents are poor and real estate moguls are squeezing them out.
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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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A dozen Cambridge Bay muskox hunters go hi-tech, courtesy of Nunavut’s Wildlife Management Board. It’s all part of monitoring study aimed at conserving tundra species for future generations.
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.
If there’s any hope for the human species, it draws sustenance from the collective wisdom of Planet Earth’s indigenous people. In their struggle, Earth’s future lies.
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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. Humanity’s insatiable consumptive thirst will have profound impact on the future development of life on Earth.
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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.
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, and burning the stuff for fuel — raising the surface temperature of their planet to a level higher than any time in the past.
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A crowd of Winnipeggers gather to hear one of Israel’s most courageous and incisive journalists — Ha’aretz reporter/columnist Amira Hass.
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Earth is home to an astonishingly diverse array of creatures — as the voices in this captured transmission recount — but the planet appears to be in the midst of a huge crash.
Bumbire Island sits on the northern tip of a sliver of an archipelago in southwest Lake Victoria, Tanzania, East Africa. The landscape is gorgeous, but hardscrabble fishing camps tell a different story.
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A former senior justice official of Earth’s most powerful nation vents his rage at the war machine his country has become.
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Human beings love money, as this fifth captured transmission testifies.
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In this third captured transmission from a planet in crisis, voices describe how life evolved here.
Little Rwanda will soon commemorate the twenty-second anniversary of the 1994 genocide. Between April 6 and early July 1994, an estimated 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and some tens of thousands of Hutus perished.
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I had been pressing Marshall Islands conservationist Ben Chutaro to take me to Mili Atoll, to see the marine/nature conservancy he was setting up — but weather ended up not permitting. We went to Arno instead.
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Amid growing concerns about how to survive on a paltry income, Rwandan teachers turn to a traditional practice, whereby groups of people communally contribute money to help one another out.
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Young girls run and shout here at the Afghans4Tomorrow girl’s school, much as they do everywhere in the world. But the sight is unusual in Afghanistan because these girls wear school uniforms, not all-encompassing burkas.
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During South Africa’s Apartheid years, black families were routinely evicted from their land. Women and girls fared the worst. Sixteen years after the collapse of Apartheid, life in South Africa is as difficult as it’s ever been for women.
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Agriculture is the backbone of Tanzania’s life and economy. Three quarters of her people are small-scale, peasant farmers. Policies that empower farmers — particularly women — need to be implemented.
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Palestinian rap is only about a decade old, but it has spread throughout Israel, Palestine, and now to Lebanon. The rappers look to Tupac Shakur and the socially conscious rappers, and reject the gangsta image so popular in the west.
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One night, Mariana dreamed that she was happy to go to work. Her supervisor greeted her and Mariana was delighted to find a comfortable ergonomic chair waiting for her in front of the machine that she operates. Then she woke up.
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Water is one of Tanzania’s scarcest commodities. In the capital city of Dar es Salaam, about sixty percent of households don’t enjoy a reliable supply. The surest bet is a twenty-liter bucket of precious water for one dollar.
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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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Afghanistan produces ninety percent of the world’s heroin. The Canadian and U.S. governments admit the Taliban controls this drug trade.
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In the 1950s, journalist Tom Patterson became convinced that Shakespeare could help revitalize his hometown of Stratford, Ontario. Today, Suchitoto, El Salvador hopes to do the same, in partnership with Stratford.
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Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley has produced wine for over four thousand years. That tradition continues today, with Lebanon boasting some world-class reds. But vintners have had to deal with fundamentalists, civil war, and invading armies.
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Ethiopia is renowned for the diversity of its seeds, with native resistance to drought, pests and climate change. Listen to 1989 Right Livelihood Award winner Melaku Worede talk about seed diversity in his homeland, Ethiopia.
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Southern Lebanese farmers are in a bind. On the one hand, Israeli cluster bombs continue to pollute their fields. On the other hand, they’ve been abandoned by Lebanon’s political elite, who prefer to see Lebanon import its food.
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It’s hard to imagine a development tool more powerful than a radio station. For the past few years, a little station called FADECO has been promoting rural development in the community of Karagwe, in northwest Tanzania.
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By its very nature, water can only be successfully managed by consensus. When conflicts arise, smart solutions are often the exception. Nowhere are water conflicts more common than in the landlocked South American nation of Bolivia.
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Poor farmers have always set off to the nearest big city in search of income. Opportunities are often a dream, and obstacles abound. Many forsake their most valuable asset – their own traditions.
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Victoria, B.C. native Kevin Neish set off to Gaza at the end of May on the Mavi Marmara — and almost made it. He recalls Israel’s hijacking and brutalization of the Mavi’s passengers.
If everyone on Earth earned what their labour was truly worth, global poverty would be less rampant. Paying people what their labour is worth is what the so-called Fair Trade movement is all about.
A joint training project between the Departments of Psychiatry at the Universities of Toronto and Addis Ababa are turning out some of Africa’s most skilled practitioners.
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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. Today, former rebels are presenting their perspective of the struggle–to tourists.
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On the bottom of a mountain slope in Honduras, farming communities depend on fresh waters and are trying to keep them clean.
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Stuart Franklin is turning air miles into trees. Franklin — the founder of a carbon offsetting project in Ecuador — calculates how many seedlings he needs to plant to capture the carbon dioxide emitted by tourists jetting to the Galapagos Islands each year.
Israeli activist Jeff Halper came to Winnipeg at the end of January to speak about the current situation in Palestine-Israel, and about the work of the Israel Committee Against House Demolitions.
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Palestinian farmers face a myriad of challenges. In the “West Bank,” Israel’s so-called “Security Barrier” has walled them off from their olive and vegetable groves. Farmers in Gaza are liable to be shot by soldiers manning Israel’s “security” perimeter.
Rwandans have grown rice, bananas, tea and coffee for generations. On one mountainside, villagers earn extra money processing their own coffee beans — thanks to a fellow Rwandan educated in Canada.
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[…] US military nuclear testing site. At the time, residents were relocated to nearby Rongerik and Kwajalein atolls before arriving at Kili Island in […]