Ice, Heat, Rain, Drought
How can someone in the Inland Northwest not think about weather, the future of our valley, what the aquifer will look like in decades and the potential impacts of some scenario unfolding that is twice (or four times) more extreme/devastating than the windstorm event Spokane, Washington, experienced late last year?
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has ordered Paraguay’s government to protect an uncontacted tribe from being wiped out.
In a highly unusual decision, the Commission, part of the OAS, has demanded that the authorities intervene to stop cattle ranchers illegally destroying the Paraguayan Chaco, a uniquely biodiverse area that is home to the last uncontacted Indigenous people outside the Amazon.
“Out! All of you!” That’s, more or less, a proper translation for the title of this article. It was the insurgent yell of the Argentine people directed at “their representatives,” all of them, when taking the streets in December 2001.
Yet, I don’t want to write about Argentina here, a country of which I empirically know only but a few areas. What I want to deal with is the country that I know best. More deeply than any other where I’ve been, worked and lived: Brazil.
“What is, or how is Brazil?”
Fires – almost certainly started by logging gangs – are raging across large areas of Maranhão state in Brazil. Despite global calls for action to protect the rare pre-Amazon forest and local uncontacted Awá tribespeople from being wiped out, so far the authorities have done very little to contain the blaze.
Northern California’s Sonoma County has been known historically as part of the natural Redwood Empire. Wine industry lobbyists re-branded it as the commercial “Wine Country.” Its economy has been so colonized by outside investors, who extract water and resources from the environment and export them, that re-branding would be appropriate. A more accurate description would be that Sonoma County is now part of the multi-national Wine Empire.
By the year 1897 the constitutional law was settled in Canada based upon the interpretation in the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council of section 109 of the Constitution Act, 1867.
Canadian rock legend Neil Young has taken to the road with a mission. Sunday night, he laid down the gauntlet on national TV, calling the Canadian government “completely out of control” as he began his “Honour the Treaties” tour in Toronto. His goal is to help First Nations in their fight against the expanding oilsands projects in Alberta. To the government, “Money is number one. Integrity isn’t even on the map.”
Ardaga Widor has been a journalist, ship cook, one-man industrial assembling firm, teacher … in more than just four corners of Mother Earth. He quotes the Portuguese poet and pantheist Teixeira de Pascoais who said: “A man is everything he has seen and every person he has met in his life.” Ardaga is a thus a genuine One World man. Today he’s mostly engaged in the hands-on striving for (social) justice and the empowerment of cultural diversity. He also works in the field of tourism.
