Monday, November 26, 2007

African Artists Community Development Project - Buying crafts from African Artists to fund local African Children's Aid Organizations.

I am back from my Thanksgiving trip - its always been my favorite holiday! We visited my boyfriend's mother at her home on Martha's Vineyard, sort of around the corner where the Pilgrims learned how to survive from the Native Americans.

While we were there, Marsha Winsyrg, a friend of Ruth's, was showing a short documentary she and her daughter created for their organization AACDP - African Artists Community Development Project. They buy crafts from (women!) artists in Zambia, sell their crafts in the US, and then donate the money they make to an orphanage and a center for disabled children.

At the end of the film, Marsha said, more eloquently, that she thought her role in the US was to:
1) act as facilitators between all parties
2) to support AIDs R&D in the US
3)

I don't remember #3... Suffice it to say, she had a great sense of what was the right role for her and her organization, which allows them to support local ideas and projects. Further their solutions touch other global problems - transportation, AIDs, education, etc. - but they keep their solution realistically sized so that they don't create a systemic mess.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Ship Breaking

Dr. Hopkins made a reference to single-hulled ships ditched in Bangladesh, which are being broken down by people with no other options. He showed pictures from a photographer, Edward Burtynsky. Here is a link to his website.

Greenpeace has been active in this area as well. Here is an article that asserts "the current practice of sending EU+ toxic old ships to developing countries is a carefully disguised form of the hazardous waste trade...It is clear that the EU+ has not only an enormous responsibility but an opportunity to bring the shipping industry into line with the norms of international guidelines on the transboundary trade in toxic waste. The EU+ cannot, on either legal or moral grounds, protect its beaches and environment from oil spills by exporting the threat to Asia and Turkey. There is an urgent need for shipbreaking facilities that can deal with the inherent legacy of toxics."

I also found this article, which calls for exporting greener, less toxic ways of scrapping to places like Bangladesh, India and Turkey because the steel claimed from these ships is important to local economies.

We really need to think these kinds of ideas all the way through.

(April 8, 2008, updated links).

Thursday, November 8, 2007

Review of Some Sources

Nicole, a classmate, sent me an email about Poverty Week at SJSU. There was some info about the Gulf Coast Civic Works Project, born at SJSU by sociology majors and Dr. Scott Myers-Lipton, and a link to Poverty.com. I'll write all about the GCCW later, when another classmate, Julia, finishes her big project and has time to tell me about her thoughts and experiences.

I hate to be a Scrooge, but I thought it was sensationalistic. They have a map and a list of people who have died recently from the effects of poverty, and then a note that says, "The world hunger map display above is representational only and does not show the names and faces of real people. The photographs are computer composites of multiple individuals." Further, the information they provided was not very in depth. They call for fulfilling the promises of the MDGs, and give you a link to click on to write a letter. I can be pretty sensitive. There's a lot of sadness out there already, and a lot of sad looking pictures. I don't need to be prodded to action by fake dead children. It is further dispicable to refer to these "people who died today" in the text of the website.

I'm all for the MDGs, but that site uses technical flashiness and appeals to emotion without considering the whole problem. That disturbs me. The point we share is important for the reasons why the US should do more, and why the US isn't doing what they promised. Global issues need to be examined carefully and thoughtfully. Our emotions should bring us to the table, but our minds and reason should inspire our solutions. Otherwise, we'll make a bigger mess than what we already have.

Then, I followed a link to their "sister site" Free Rice , which is kind of fun. You play a vocabulary game, advertisers' links appear, and you earn ten grains of rice for the UN's World Food Programme. I totally cheated and looked up words I didn't know at dictionary.com before I answered so I would win as much rice as possible. I also really like the idea of a job created for the individual who has to count out ten grains of rice at a time.

I was suspicious of this scheme at first. Anyone who wants to teach me vocabulary or encourage me to floss clearly has an alternative motive. So, I checked out www.wfp.org/english . It made me very happy. Here are two links I thought were intersting: the first explains their methodolgy, which demonstrates thinking! Remember, you can't just hand people food; it puts farmers and other food producers out of business, creating a poverty trap and the ongoing nature of such projects irritates those able to give. You'll see that they commit to buying food locally and the right time when possible, and they work through the logistics to get it to the right people and families, so that those who need it get it.

The second lists their operational priorities, which are action-oriented in specific ways in specific places. I learned earlier that one of the issues with poverty is that people often try to solve it with a panacea. Peter Stephens and Jefferey Sachs have shown us that no one thing will work in every place. An organization really committed to making something like this happen will think about it from the cultural and geographic perspectives of the people and places involved.

I'm very happy to where that email took me. Its fantastic to see an organization thinking things through and encouraging others to do so, and I wish the website where I began my search would take notice.

*edited title December 30, 2007.

Saturday, November 3, 2007

From my Environmental Studies Class

Some Interesting Ideas:

- The UN classifies the world's countries either as economically developed or economically developing. This is based primarily on their degree of industrialization and per capita GDP. Living standards and their improvement are described by economic growth. That seems pretty content neutral, except if we remember that the environment is limited by the pace by which we consume non-renewable resources and renewable resources past the point of their ability to renew themselves. Economic growth is presently not constrained as it should be by the environment.

- Bruce talked about how the global market economy is not governed by nation-states and democratic governments. It can be influenced by governments with things like interest rates, etc. Dr. Fried discusses the changing role of government as well, from the perspective of hyperglobalists (nation-state is hollow and a zombie), skeptics (globalization reinforces and enhances state's powers), and transformationalists (globalization transforms states' powers and the outcome is uncertain).

Global Citizenship

I attended another global talk for International Week by Dr. Jochen Fried, the distinguished faculty member at SJSU from Salzburg Global Seminar (where I have an internship this spring!!!), about global citizenship. Dr. Fried talked about what globalization means and our notions of citizenship and then pulled the two ideas together to discuss global citizenship. I'm just going to highlight a few things that popped out at me.

- Global citizenship is annoying because its an oxymoron. Citizenship means belonging to a political unit, but global is all-inclusive and there is no legal sense. Nationalistic citizenship appeals to common sense. But globalization teaches us that territory and space are relative and global warming, computer viruses, AIDs, etc. have no passports.
- We have to admit that we are inextricably bound to one another. Systemic challenges cannot be dealt with by a single nation state.
- The big, scary global issues require multidimensional and multilevel politics, management by citizens with different perspectives (global citizens)
- People cannot be categorized by one system of divisions, but are members of a variety of groups, and can have many identities at once. (Fried attributes this to Amartya Sen).

The Role of Education in Building a Sustainable World

I have been intesenly busy lately, so here's a quick series of posts for good measure.

This week, my school had its annual International Week. I attended two global talks: the first a talk by Dr. Charles Hopkins, of UNESCO, on the role of education in building a sustainable world. His main point was that individual educators should think in terms of what they can do in their discipline to teach to the greater good. It all tied into the problems of over-specialization, and reconnecting the disciplines to grow the common pool of understanding. He talked about the problem of single-hulled ships, which were "phased out" after several oil spills in favor of double-hulled ships. He showed us pictures of men dragging these abandoned ships up onto land and taking them apart with their bare hands for pennies a day. He also talked about Language Arts teachers in Bermuda who, in order to address problems of violence, began reading books about violence in class to bring up the issue safely.

I think we can extrapolate these ideas outside of education, although they're certainly important there. We should have a "take a big, scary global issue to work day" and all think about how we use water, what we design, what plans we implement, what we throw away, etc.