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Naturaleza bella posted a photo:
Naturaleza bella posted a photo:
Double Reflection
trail riders
minus6 (tuan) posted a photo:
after the trail – 2016
minus6 (tuan) posted a photo:
Prairie View Trail Ride’s camp, circa 2016, the oldest African American trail ride in the nation.
Jeremy Corbyn addresses the crowd at the Stop Trident national demo
Andy Worthington posted a photo:
On Saturday February 27, 2016, the largest anti-nuclear protest for a generation, organised by CND (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) took place in central London, when tens of thousands of people from across the UK marched from Marble Arch to Trafalgar Square to call for the British government not to renew the Trident nuclear submarine programme, which, it is estimated, will cost £100 billion over 25 years. This photo shows Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, addressing the crowd, as the last speaker.
As a lifelong opponent of nuclear weapons, I find it mind-boggling that the Tories — and large parts of the Labour Party — want to renew this ruinously expensive programme when we are supposed to be committed to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which calls for disarmament as well as non-proliferation, and when we can clearly ill-afford it, as the Tories’ “age of austerity” continues to wither and destroy the very notion of the state as something that should provide a safety net for everyone, without which we seem to be committed only to an ever-increasing gulf between the rich and the poor.
MPs are expected to vote on the renewal of Trident at some point this year.
For CND, see: cnduk.org/home
For an article about the Parliamentary debate about Trident, in January 2015, see: http://bitly.com/21AaftH…
For the current cost, see: http://bitly.com/21AaftK…
For my website, see: http://bitly.com/1PDRYF8
For my most interesting photos, see: http://bitly.com/1PDS1AM…
Native American Kids – 31 Rare Vintage Photos of Indian Children in the late 19th Century
A women’s basketball team at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, 1902
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.)
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!
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.
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