All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

Pinned to Feminista on Pinterest

Description: Smith College 1902 basketball team
By Ned Hamson
Pinned to Feminista on Pinterest
Found on: http://bitly.com/1LmpjXL

INTERVIEWING A SHERO OF MINE

Interview Magazine asked me to interview Dr Jane Goodall for an upcoming issue. I’ve known Jane since the 1980s. I got to know her better in the decade I was married to Ted Turner who has long been a friend and supporter of her foundation. I always knew when he was on the phone with her because he’d answer the phone and start howling like a chimp.

I am in awe of the work she has done over the decades, but none more so than her program called TACARE (TakeCare), which she first told me about 2 years ago at a fundraiser in Pasadena. (She spends more than 300 days a year traveling, speaking and fundraising.)

janeolsen-drgoodall

GETTING AN OVERVIEW–LITERALLY

TACARE is a community-based conservation project. The idea for it came to Jane in ’94 when she flew in a small plane over the vast Gombe Ecosystem which contains Gombe National Park where she has studied chimps since 1960. There below her was the park, like an oasis, but where once there had been a vast unbroken forest, the rest of the ecosystem had been turned into bare hills. Gone were all the trees, cut down by people desperate for land to grow food on and wood to burn or sell. The habitat that the chimps depended on was in grave danger!

IMG_1407-web

This is not a picture of what Jane Goodall saw in 1994. It’s what I saw recently saw and photographed from a plane as we were coming in to land in Salt Lake City. This is what a copper mine has done to the mountains and natural habitat. We all need to look out of plane windows more often in order to catch a glimpse of the horrific reality we can’t often see on the ground.)

Everything in the Gombe Ecosystem was out of kilter because of population growth—too many people and not enough arable land, trees, food or water to sustain them. Jane saw immediately that she couldn’t save the chimps when the people living around their park were starving. She rounded up a team of local Tanzanians experienced in forestry, agriculture, water and health issues and they met with 12 villages surrounding Gombe Park to hear directly from villagers as to what they wanted and needed to improve their lives.

This was what really caught my attention when she first told me about the project. You see, all too many of the biggest funders/philanthropists (I won’t name names much as I’d like to) send in “experts” who are foreigners, who don’t listen to the people on the ground who are most impacted, who impose what they think should be done. And the problems aren’t solved sustainably. For instance, to stop malaria, toxic-chemical-laced mosquito nets were sent to countries where malaria is a problem without knowing that village people use the nets to fish, thereby unwittingly poisoning their waters.

Jane Goodall and her team, on the other hand, partnered with the villagers to design a holistic plan to train the local people to improve their lives in an environmentally sustainable way with agro-forestry, restoring fertility to over-used farmland without using chemical fertilizers, etc. Seeds planted in the ‘90s are now 20 feet tall trees and TACARE works in 52 villages where around 350,000 people live. The Greater Gombe Ecosystem which is home to more than half of Tanzania’s 2,000 wild chimpanzees is being brought back to life. A win-win…the chimps’ habitat is being protected by the local people themselves—they’ve learned how interwoven their long term survival is– and the lives of villagers have been vastly improved. With support from USAID, the Norwegian Government and individuals around the world, TACARE has also brought healthcare, family planning, scholarships for girls education and micro-credit opportunities, particularly for women, into the villages. (When women and girls are educated and able to bring in money to the family they tend to want fewer babies and can negotiate contraceptive use from a position of strength).

This is the transformative template that Jane Goodall and her JG Institute have created. They have replicated it in Uganda, the DRC, Congo-Brazzaville and Senegal and are ready to be scaled up and transferred to millions of people in other rural areas.

This template may well also be a road to peace in many African countries: when rebel soldiers, some as young as 8 and 10 years old, have an opportunity to earn a living through eco-farming, fishing, eco-tourism and such, they are more apt to lay down their guns.

Jane Goodall is known as the “lady who works with chimps.” Yes, and she’s so much more. A woman who understand to her core that we are all interdependent.

A disastrous end ..the story of the PA | nadiaharhash

I do believe that we are standing on a verge of a revolution as people. This time, it is inevitable, unless Israel makes a move to save the PA. While we are living under a life of daily attacks and killing, within a context that death of youngsters and corpses laid on the street bleeding is just becoming another normal scene. Like the checkpoint, the separation walls … the daily killings of alleged stabbing or whatever. It is a historical moment in the life of Palestinian people. A time when the occupation is no longer the only oppressive component in life under occupation. An oppression that is equally practiced on the people from the occupier and the guardians of that occupying power. This deterioration amid the ongoing oppression is almost impossible to believe. But yet it is happening. And like those dominoes pieces in a raw, everything is falling in a quick systematic fall. The PA managed to survive especially in the last years, within the absence of the rule of law that is basically represented by conducting elections, through the continuous oppression of the occupation. People tend to shut up infront of the bigger tragedies of life. How could we revolt against the government when Israeli forces kill our children and continue to humiliate our existence in every single manner and given opportunity?

Source: A disastrous end ..the story of the PA | nadiaharhash

The Messy House That Race Made | Race Files

Race is polarizing. That has always been its purpose, to divide humanity and exploit those divisions for the benefit of elites, at limitless human cost. In the words of Ruth Gilmore, “Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” That is the brutal project in which Liang was implicated, the one that led him to take Gurley’s life, knowingly or not. Unless we work together to end the particular violence that institutions from public housing projects to police departments inflict on Black communities, that violence will affect our lives as well – even the lives of those seeking validation in a badge and a gun. For Asian American racial justice activists, this is a time to build our ranks, not close them. We should challenge those in our communities who have bought into individualism and dominant racial thinking, but in ways that allow them to move, by acknowledging where they have legitimate concerns. There will always be those who disagree with us and who are determined to attack our position. We can’t move them and we shouldn’t concede to them. But we can split their base of support by showing that this is not a matter of Black or Asian interests; it’s a matter of both. Working for police accountability, combatting anti-Asian discrimination, and supporting Black liberation are not mutually exclusive. They are, and always have been, in our collective self-interest.

Source: The Messy House That Race Made | Race Files

FAO – News Article: Pollinators vital to our food supply under threat

A growing number of pollinator species worldwide are being driven toward extinction by diverse pressures, many of them human-made, threatening millions of livelihoods and hundreds of billions of dollars worth of food supplies, according to the first global assessment of pollinators. However, the assessment, a two-year study conducted and released today by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), also highlights a number of ways to effectively safeguard pollinator populations. The assessment, titled Thematic Assessment of Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production and the first ever issued by IPBES, is a groundbreaking effort to better understand and manage a critical element of the global ecosystem.  It is also the first assessment of its kind that is based on the available knowledge from science and indigenous and local knowledge systems.

Source: FAO – News Article: Pollinators vital to our food supply under threat

Northern Italy’s trees overrun by toxic caterpillar cobwebs – The Local

“Here the plague has reached biblical proportions and has been getting steadily worse for two years,” a resident in the small town of Conclonaz told La Stampa. “We are all full of painful rashes and it hurts to swallow because we’re constantly breathing in the hairs.”

Source: Northern Italy’s trees overrun by toxic caterpillar cobwebs – The Local

Did You Know that Uterus Transplants are for Realz? – The Ladies FingerThe Ladies Finger

in Sweden 9 transplants have already been undertaken successfully. According to the New York Times, the lead surgeon in the American team, Dr. Andreas G. Tzakis travelled to Sweden to learn more about the procedure. In Sweden, 4 of the 9 recipients have since given birth to healthy babies since. Uterus transplants are possible options for women born without uteruses or with uterine damage and who would like to experience childbirth. It could potentially be an option for transwomen. In fact,  one of the world’s first attempts at uterus transplants happened in 1931 with a Danish transwoman, Lili Elbe. That particular surgery ended tragically when Elbe died of organ rejection. Organ rejection remains a major danger even today which leads to a rather mind-boggling aspect of the current technology. These current transplants are meant to be temporary. Again according to the New York Times, “any children will be born by cesarean section and the mother will have the transplanted uterus removed after having one or two babies.” Other medical factoids which might interest you. One, the age of the donor doesn’t matter. Two, in the recent Swedish transplants the uteruses came from live donors (usually relatives) through a surgery that takes as many as 11 hours. Three, pregnancy will take place through IVF in advance of the transplant.

Source: Did You Know that Uterus Transplants are for Realz? – The Ladies FingerThe Ladies Finger

Donald Trump to Foreign Workers for Florida Club: You’re Hired – The New York Times

Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach describes itself as “one of the most highly regarded private clubs in the world,” and it is not just the very-well-to-do who want to get in. Since 2010, nearly 300 United States residents have applied or been referred for jobs as waiters, waitresses, cooks and housekeepers there. But according to federal records, only 17 have been hired. In all but a handful of cases, Mar-a-Lago sought to fill the jobs with hundreds of foreign guest workers from Romania and other countries. In his quest for the Republican presidential nomination, Mr. Trump has stoked his crowds by promising to bring back jobs that have been snatched by illegal immigrants or outsourced by corporations, and voters worried about immigration have been his strongest backers. But he has also pursued more than 500 visas for foreign workers at Mar-a-Lago since 2010, according to the United States Department of Labor, while hundreds of domestic applicants failed to get the same jobs.

Source: Donald Trump to Foreign Workers for Florida Club: You’re Hired – The New York Times