In Gabon, a country without a culture of civic engagement, Marc Ona led efforts to publicly expose the unlawful agreements behind a huge mining project threatening the sensitive ecosystems of Gabon’s equatorial rainforests.
Marc Ona Essangui, 45, is president and founder of the environmental NGO Brainforest and president of the network of NGOs called Environment Gabon. Wheelchair-bound due to childhood polio, Ona also works for handicapped rights and Internet availability for Africans.
In December 2008, Ona and several other civil society leaders were arrested and held without charge and without access to legal representation in deplorable conditions in a basement cell for five days. Ona was later transferred to prison and charged with possession of documents allegedly for dissemination and propaganda with intent to incite rebellion against the state authorities, a charge which he denies. After media reports about the unlawful arrest from outlets in Africa, the EU and the US, the government released Ona, though the charges have not yet been dropped.
Ona and five other activists were awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize—the world’s largest award for grassroots environmental activists, which this week celebrated its 20th anniversary in the San Francisco Opera House.
You can read the rest of the story and see a video about the Ivindo National Park, a 3,000 square kilometer park with forest elephants, western lowland gorillas, chimpanzees, and forest buffalo. The park is cherished by the Gabonese people. The park is also home to the Kongou and Mingouli Falls, the most admired waterfalls in the equatorial forests of Africa, drawing international tourists to the rural West African country.
: http://goldmanprize.org/2009/africa
Good news. As I look around on this earth day, I see plenty of reasons to feel good. From where I stand, I see more and more people participating in a positive way in the community around them.
More gardens are being planted, more voices standing up for the planet, more children being reunited with the natural world, more care for the world that still remains.
Maybe the way I’m looking at it is a matter of a glass half-full or half-empty but it’s also exponential the way one act can touch off a chain reaction. When I moved into this urban apartment after living in remote rural places most of my life, I felt totally cut off from the natural world. I got a few houseplants and put them around my apartment and then I expanded to a little potted garden on my balcony and now I feel like I live in a jungle! And my neighbors have started growing flowers and food, too. Now we are looking for a place to have a real garden.
People in the town where I live are taking more interest in what happens to the parks, the quality of the air, mass transit, bike lanes - a lot of issues that have been languishing for years. More people are finding ways to interact with the community to support themselves. What I see is people regaining their sense of self-determination and self-respect, willing to work for what they believe in.
To do the things we must do to survive as a species and as a society, it is going to take collective action. But first it is going to take heart. And I believe that each seed we plant and each cause we take on nurtures the heart of change. So I wish you the best in all your endeavors. May we all find peace and abundance in harmony with each other on this blue pearl in the vastness of space.
I’m busy in my balcony garden planting flowers, herbs and Italian pole beans to go with my grapevine and pear tree. I love this video so I’m passing it on . . . enjoy . . . more soon . . . swan . . .
Every morning I get up and drink my coffee by the window and watch the sun come up. Birds fly up from the trees across the way. They are mostly pigeons and grackles, city street scavengers, and I just see them in sort of an abstract way as shapes against the sky.
The only sound besides their scrawking is the occasional motor of a central air conditioning unit running downstairs behind the building. So it’s usually a squawk or a mechanical hum and that’s it for a morning concert and I kind of tune it out. But this morning as I sat there, sipping my coffee, my mind innocent from sleep, one bird flew over and I heard . . . the sound of a bird’s wings flapping - the sound of a bird’s wings flapping! It was so amazing. Flap, flap, flap, flap. No other sound. Just flap, flap, flap.
I have never from that window heard that sound - of the thousands of birds that I’ve watched fly over every morning as I have sat there for 2 1/2 years. Suddenly there was a pause in the squawk and the hum and there it was - the sound of one bird flapping . . .
I made a mistake. When I first started following the story of the Global Seed Vault I was intrigued. I watched as they built a very technologically advanced vault in the permafrost on the Norweigan island of Svalbard north of the Arctic circle. I noted that one of the sponsors of the site was the Global Crop Diversity Trust. I looked over their website and it looked like an okay non-profit organization but I didn’t look deep enough.
Remember the green revolution?
The Green Revolution started in 1943. Financed by the Rockefeller Foundation it propagated cutting-edge US agricultural technology, dwarf grain varieties, petrochemical fertilizers and large-scale irrigation systems throughout much of Latin America and Southeast Asia. The effect was a boom for agribiz and devastation for small-scale farmers who could not afford the initial investment in seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation projects. The environmental and social costs of this “revolution” are now well-known. In The Fatal Harvest Reader, Jason McKenney describes how petrochemicals literally change the physical structure of soils, making them less efficient at storing water, air, and nutrients. Heavy reliance on irrigation compromises arable land through the process of salinification, salts building up in over-watered soil. And then there is the cost to the environment and human health from the toxic pesticides and burning of fossil fuels in farm machinery and transport vehicles.
Unfortunately, the Global Seed Vault is backed by the same people who brought us this fatal harvest. Except this time they are pushing the technology of genetic modification - which is why the seed vault is key.
GMOs represent another technical fix dreamed up by outside “experts” and marketed by transnational agribusiness giants.
I noticed as the publicity ramped up that the seed vault was being sold on fear. It was being called the “Doomsday Vault,” supposedly able to withstand catastrophic disasters of all kinds. The real catastrophe is that they are trying to control the food supply in the name of “protecting” us. Seeds do not need to be in deep storage, available only to the “scientists” who manipulate the genes so that we have franken-food with untested effects on future generations and farmers who can be sued by the likes of Monsanto if Monsanto’s seeds drift into the farmer’s fields and contaminate the farmer’s crops (yes, this really happened).
Seeds need to be used, planted every year so they can adapt to changing climate conditions. Besides seeds get old. The germination rate goes down every year and after a few years they will not produce any more. The seeds in the vault are not seeds that you and I could go get and plant in our gardens. They are genetic material for people who want to experiment on them - and us.
I wish I could believe that Global Crop Diversity Trust was a righteous organization but given the fact that Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow Chemical and Pioneer are direct sponsors of the project I do not have much trust.
For myself, I’m counting on the local farmers, my friends at Seeds of Change and grassroots seed savers all over the world.
I found out from reading Restoring Mayberry,
a blog by Brian Kaller, a journalist in County Kildare, Ireland, that the Irish Seed Savers is the only organization supplying seeds to farms and gardens in Europe other than those imported from the Third World and Australia which means they are grown (and adapted to) places far, far away from the people who actually grow them. If anything were to happen to transportation, or to the harvest in faraway countries, Seed Savers would be the lifeline for 500 million people.
The solution to the food crisis exists, and is being fought for in many communities. It is called food sovereignty. Via Campesina is an international movement of peasants, small- and medium-sized producers, landless, rural women, indigenous people, rural youth and agricultural workers from 56 countries in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.
Saving your seeds is a very satisfying thing to do. Seeds of change has an excellent rundown on how to do it for us ordinary gardeners here.
Sometimes lately I’ve thought about that line from a Paul Simon song, “miracles and wonder,” and surely seeing Pete Seeger up there at 89 years old still singing “This Land is Your Land” qualifies. That man was singing when I was born - and I have eleven grandchildren and one great grandchild! Talk about a bridge between generations.
I’ve always loved folk music. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Paul Simon, folk festivals and fairs . . . I was young in the early sixties. I was a bridge, too. I have been in large gatherings out in the natural world, away from cities, where cynicism and divisiveness fell away and people came together in harmony with each other and the forces of nature, for the music and the sharing and the healing. And I’ve watched with sorrow as many of these gatherings have become polluted with despair and violence.
Then I watched as the group dynamic changed and people began to protest what was happening in the world, from the protests against the WTO raping the planet to the environmental justice groups taking on the silent deadly enemies of chemical pollution, the sickness that hides in a cookie or a child’s toy or your next breath of air. Now I see people coming together with slow food, farmer’s markets, and home gardens.
And local self-sufficiency. Austin, Texas is about to put up the country’s largest solar array! Imagine that. We have learned the hard way about nuclear power plants (nuclear waste? what nuclear waste? ooops, sorry, grandkids . . .), got slapped down about coal and we’re too close here in Texas to the source of oil (and refinery stink) to kid ourselves about the future of oil. Say, did you see where Exxon just made a record $45 billion quarterly profit while the economy tanked by 3.8%? Who are they kidding? Out of which pocket into which pocket?
Thirty years ago some of us were publishing well researched articles about the environmental and economic advantages of solar. We had the solar technology then. All we needed to do was develop it. I’m sorry we had to go down this long dark road to get here but I’m glad we have finally arrived.
And now here we are. Pete’s been singing “This Land is Your Land” all this time and I guess our land has been what we made of it but it did my heart good to hear him sing - can you believe it at 89 years old! - at Obama’s inauguration. This is a really cool video of him and it shows Obama listening to him, too. (If you are getting this in an email, go to http://goodwordswan.wildflowerstew.com and watch it).
Seeger’s grandson reported that Obama spoke to Seeger after the performance and asked him how he stayed so fit and Seeger told him that he lives in the woods and chops and carries his own firewood . . . chopping wood, carrying water . . . where have I heard that before . . .
I have been reading accounts of people who were there in the mall for the inauguration on January 20. Two million people! Freezing in the cold. People from all over the country came just to be there. They were jammed in there for hours and everyone says there were no complaints, no “incidents” - just joy, joy and tears of joy.
People all over the world feel that change is coming. It’s not just Barack Obama. He is there because we - collectively - were ready for him to be there. The most promising thing to me was when Bush was booed. The very proper British boo unpopular members of Parliament all the time. To them that’s honest self-expression. I was glad to hear some honest self-expression here.
People in the crowd describe how everyone watched intently (and silently) while the helicopter carrying Bush flew over and disappeared. When it had become just a dot on the horizon, wild cheering broke out. I guess you have to thoroughly reject what you don’t want before you can completely rejoice in what you do want.
Every day now the new world is taking place and there are opportunities for everyone to participate.
Change.org is a social action network where you can learn about causes, connect to other people and organizations and take action.
The Whitehouse now has a website with a Office of Public Liaison where you can send your comments directly to the Whitehouse. The little box for the comments right now is limited to 500 characters but they promise to offer more ways to communicate soon. I believe that it makes a difference to comment and sign petitions. I’ve been doing it for years and I have noticed that when a lot of people email/send petitions/phone-in on an issue, it does have an impact. After all they do work for us and have to be elected by the us, the voters, at regular intervals, remember?
Another way to communicate with your public servants is through govit.com - “a nonpartisan website built by a regular citizen to help you interact with the government and each other.” I found this one through the Born Again American website. If country music and flag waving gets your passion going, this video is the one for you: http://bornagainamerican.org
Actually it’s cool to watch anyway just to see all the different musicians and the lyrics are radical - check it out. The website says “The Born Again American movement is committed to the rebirth of American citizenship through informed and thoughtful activism.” It’s a very interactive site. You can share your story by remixing your own videos and photos into the Born Again American music video. Then you can upload a video of yourself singing them and remix it into the music video using the Remix America Editor. That sounds fun. There’s even a contest and the winners will be determined by a panel which includes Norman Lear and Keith Carradine.
So, let’s get on our soapbox, keyboard, video cam or microphone and build our new world.
