ONE REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK:
GREENACCORD THIRD INTERNATIONAL MEDIA FORUM ON THE PROTECTION OF NATURE
Monte Porzio Catone (Rome), October 12-15, 2005
by Dick Russell
 I’ve considered myself relatively well-informed about what’s happening around our planet, when it comes to the environment. I was mistaken. I learned just how much more is going on – and who is trying to get the word out about it – in coming together recently with 60-some environmental journalists from around the world. It was an eye-opening experience, one I won’t soon forget.
When an E-mail came from out of the blue last summer inviting my participation, I’d never heard of Greenaccord. The Rome-based non-profit “cultural association” turns out to have been inspired by Pope John Paul II, who warned that “Christianity cannot be indifferent before an ecological catastrophe in the making,” with the intent of creating a network of friendship and solidarity among journalists. Every autumn’s gathering has a different theme, this year’s being “Protection of Nature, Way of Peace.”
Met at the airport in Rome, we were all bused some 20 miles to a lovely villa in the Alban Hills. The first evening was an opportunity to get acquainted over a four-course meal and some fine wine. I sat next to Darryl D’Monte from Mumbai (Bombay), former editor of the Bombay Times who resigned along with several others when the newspaper’s owners decided to “dumb down” – even letting people pay for “free” publicity without revealing the fact. He’s organizing a conference in New Delhi of the International Federation of Environmental Journalists. Was Hurricane Katrina changing the consciousness of people in the United States? he wondered. He spoke of how shocked people in India were at the televised images – shocked, too, that 60 percent of New Orleans’ black population had no cars to leave the city in – and the hopelessness in the body language of those stuck in the Superdome. Also at our table were a fellow with a foundation in Sri Lanka that links filmmakers across Asia; a Ghanaian and a white South African, a young woman from Bosnia, and a Romanian who enjoyed pouring the wine.
The forum began the next morning, up a long hill through a towering olive grove to the sprawling Villa Mondragone with its balcony view of all Rome. Erected in the 16th-century, this was the very spot where Pope Gregory VIII promulgated the Gregorian calendar by which we still mark our days (for the record, on October 5, 1562, people went to sleep and woke up on October 12). Later, from the villa’s terrace, Marconi made his first broadcast to Vatican City. Quite an auspicious place.
Dr. Paolo Bernardi, President of the Scientific Committee of Greenaccord, delivered the opening address. He, too, spoke of Hurricane Katrina. “Not only was a wonderful city flooded, but we watched a stressed population react to bad management of natural resources. If this happens in very civilized America, could it not in Europe? Us who are used to thinking as individuals, gods of ourselves – in moments of great stress, will we find the ability to unite?”
The first speaker was Loic Fauchon, President of the World Water Council. If you’re like me, and have only vaguely heard of this organization, it was created from a UNESCO initiative in 1993. Headquartered in France, it has 250 international members in 80 countries. “Too many people do not know this is a problem for the future,” Fauchon said, relating the astounding figure that in 2004, the poor quality or absence of water killed ten times more people than all armed conflicts in the world combined. Water-related diseases, according to the World Health Organization, kill 25,000 people a day!
Here’s the thing: fresh water constitutes only 2.5 percent of the world’s water, and only 1 percent is available and useable. And the half-billion inhabitants already suffering from water stress are constantly increasing. Complex climatic changes are accentuating the extremes, not only in terms of droughts but catastrophic flooding. At the same time, a billion more people are being added to the planet every decade. And, in Beijing for example, the water table is already dropping by 1.6 meters a year. Here are a few examples of what Fauchon described as “hydraulic inconsistency.” Asia, with 36 percent of the resources, has 60 percent of the population. North America consumes 700 liters of water a day, Europe 200, Africa 30.
We must consider the likelihood of more water-related conflicts. Two-thirds of major rivers cross borders; altogether, 263 trans-boundary river basins. The right to water, Fauchon concluded, needs to be made part of international treaties and the constitutions of each nation. “In the upcoming decades, we must manage better and consume less, consider water as a limited resource. We need drinking water before cell phones, latrines before Internet, taps before guns.”
Dr. Hartwig De Haen, an executive with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), followed with an equally eye-opening talk about hunger, conflict, and environmental stress. 820 million people are chronically undernourished, and 6 million children die yearly of diseases they would readily survive if they weren’t undernourished. “This is scandalous,” said De Haen, “because it is totally preventable.”
On the positive side, food production is two-and-a-half times greater than 40 years ago. The number of undernourished has dropped during this period, and the price of food has declined. Yet 60 percent of ecosystem services are being degraded or used unsustainably; as a result, the poor suffer more. More land has been converted to crops since 1945 than in the entire 18th and 19th centuries. Over the last decades, 25 percent of coral reefs have been destroyed and 35 percent of mangrove areas lost. Declines in soil fertility coincide with those of fish stocks. In Africa, conflicts between countries bear a direct correlation to food emergency hot-spots. FAO member governments have just adopted international guidelines on the right to food. “Breaking the vicious cycles are possible, but this requires targeted policies and public investment,” De Haen concluded.
Next speaker was Michael Renner, of the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute, on the topic of “natural disasters, environment, and peace-keeping.” While we tend to regard disasters as extraordinary events, the unpleasant truth is they are becoming more frequent and severe – more than 1,900 occurring just between 2000 and 2004. The silver lining is, sometimes these present fresh opportunities to bring long-running conflicts to an end.
After the tsunami, hope was expressed that civil wars in Aceh and Sri Lanka could be resolved. Nearly opposite outcomes have ensued, Renner informed. In Aceh, with a population of 4.2 million, a civil war killed 15,000 and the tsunami’s toll was 168,000 dead or missing. Talks between the rebels and the Indonesian government had collapsed in 2003 but, a month after the tsunami struck, peace negotiations began and an agreement was signed in mid-August. In Sri Lanka, however, following a groundswell of solidarity after the tsunami swept away some 38,900 people, basic rifts re-emerged before long in a civil war that has raged for more than 20 years.
“Humanitarian action can be a powerful catalyst,” said Renner, “but a rush of post-disaster goodwill alone is unlikely to carry through. Large-scale events are more likely to catalyze change, as opposed to a slow onset like drought, but reconstruction must be equitable. Enormous challenges are often experienced as shared vulnerabilities. For example, in Colombia, adversarial communities worked together to mitigate the impact of floods.” In the wake of the devastating earthquake in northern Pakistan, rival India was sending aid. “We see a growing array of environmental peacekeeping initiatives that include peace parks along borders, regional seas, and shared river agreements.”
Asked for examples of natural disasters creating new conflicts, Renner commented on hurricane Katrina. “It’s clear that disaster exposed the underbelly of American society, enormous economic and social inequities. How that translates into the future remains to be seen.” As a result of Katrina, another person asked, did the skeptics about global warming have a change of heart? “To some extent,” Renner replied. “Issues relating to climate change are now being discussed more matter of factly than before. In the past, the U.S. media have gone out of their way to find someone on the opposite side, who received far more exposure than was warranted. I feel that is changing quite substantially now.”
Later in the day, I learned about the University for Peace, first established by a United Nations General Assembly resolution in 1980. It is based in Costa Rica, which abolished its Army back in 1948. This year, 120 students from 39 countries pursue Master’s degrees in international peace studies, international law and gender, environmental security and peace. The average age is thirty. Affiliates currently exist in Canada, Ethiopia, Switzerland, and at the U.N. in New York. (The website is www.upeace.org) Julia Marton-Lefevre, who became rector six months ago, spoke of today’s “silos of knowledge unrelated to each other – too many declarations, too little action.” Most of the school’s graduates are “on the front lines,” many working in the U.N. system.
A question for Ms. Marton-Lefevre was posed by a journalist from Colombia: “What would you teach Bush about peace?” The room applauded. Her response: “Bush is surrounded by his friends, no one has had a chance to convince him and I’m not sure if they could….I am not going to give up, even on Mr. Bush.”
There was much to learn in private sessions, at coffee breaks and over meals. Sharing an espresso with Nalaka Gunawardene from Sri Lanka, I was appalled to learn that only 20 percent of the relief moneys sent to his country after the tsunami has been spent. These had fallen victim to “indifference, incompetence, and corruption.” When there are presidential elections in a month, this will be a key issue. The ruling party candidate has been accused of pocketing a million dollars in donations. Although the press revealed this in July, he was nominated anyway. As well, the charities were not wiling to go beyond their comfort zones and turf wars and then apathy set in – “compassion glut,” as he put it. And so, many people are still living in temporary shelters ten months later, becoming increasingly frustrated and angry.
At dinner I found myself next to Huma Beg, managing director of Serendip Productions in Islamabad, Pakistan. We were talking of traveling. Years ago, you could hitch-hike anywhere but not anymore, I said. She said it was the same in Pakistan, she wouldn’t even allow her children on the streets anymore as it got dark. What changed? I asked. She spoke of how, in the 1980s after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the U.S. had sent vast amounts of weapons to Pakistan and trained her people to join the fight. Suddenly, the kids in her school were walking around with assault rifles. It had changed the society. “You cannot inject a poison, and not expect it to remain,” she added sadly.
The next morning’s forum began with a long discussion about immigration. According to a recent U.N. report, there are 200 million migrant workers spread across the world today and the number is growing by the millions yearly. An African woman noted that today her continent is the main provider of nurses to European hospitals, where there is a shortage, “although we do not have enough ourselves.” A Bolivian journalist spoke of “ecological exile,” questioning why so many Latin Americans and Africans are abandoning their own countries looking for work. “The United States has closed its markets to ours, and we can no longer compete in Europe because of the traveling distance.” Attitudes have changed as well. Years ago, a woman from the Philippines said, Filipinos traveling abroad were considered to be “either students or spoiled brats”; today, they are assumed to be domestics. But the pull is strong, especially for the young, the glamorization of other lifestyles that is seen on TV.
One of the most impassioned speakers was Sindiwe Magona, a 62-year-old writer from South Africa whose latest of five books is a novel called Mother to Mother. “South Africa is supposed to be a success story,” she said, “but in 1994 nobody waved a magic wand and suddenly we were all equal. The present government is still fighting inequality. A lot of blacks continue to live in what are now called ‘informal settlements,’ but these are still shacks. Capetown is in a drought situation, and there are water restrictions. You are only to water your garden once a week for an hour, with a hose pipe. When you wash your car, you use a bucket. For showers, you must have a basin to catch and re-use the water. In the suburbs, people report to the police about neighbors using sprinklers and so on.
“But in the townships, nobody pays attention. The green debate has no implications for them. Men who have lived with leaking faucets for ten years, why not wash your car with a hose pipe? They live next to open sewers that nobody comes to mend. The debate in one area has not even begun to come to another. The word ‘imbalela’ means drought and when I asked in school, the children do not even know what the word means.”
Magona went on that, in many ways, South Africa remains “very significantly a Third World country. Several years ago, people were dying from hunger because the crops failed and the delivery system was not what it should be. It pains me to hear some people say, ‘My sister, if my country could be what it was 30 years ago, it would be a blessing.’ To pray for stagnation is very wrong.”
It angered her to have heard, earlier in the day, a woman from Spain complaining about a rise in African immigration. “We are in the beginning of another kind of colonization by the countries of the West,” Magona said. “The West is taking its nuclear garbage and burying it in Africa. And you talk of a few hundred Africans coming to your country! Talk of cleaning up your nuclear act in Europe! And where are the brave Africans standing up to our governments and saying no? That you cannot sell the future, with the connivance of European countries. I say no, no, no! Enough is enough!”
She was asked about the South African government’s decision to meter the water useage of each house, with a cut-off if more is consumed than has been allotted. “How are you to meter houses in villages with no taps?” Magona responded. “There is one communal tap often, and women still carry water with buckets on their heads.”
Did she see any greater hope, a young man from Zambia asked, with the advent of the African Union? “That is a very challenging question,” Magona said. “I worked at the United Nations for 20-some years. There was no absence of talk about African problems. I would love to say that the African Union is different from the OAU [Organization for African Unity], because I don’t see that much was done by the OAU. Africa would not be in the mess it is now, would it? I love Africa. I wish it could achieve something positive for the majority and not the elite. How long must we watch some sad, terrible images of children dying from being hungry? I heard the prime minister of Niger say that there are no food shortages there, that this is a political ploy. No amount of meetings or statements will change the fact that Africa is in dire straits.”
John Dee of Australia, the founder of Planet Ark, raised that group’s campaign against plastic bags, now to be banned altogether by 2008. He had heard of a similar campaign in South Africa. “This has gone very well,” Magona replied, “because the government did a clever thing. Now in the shop, you must pay for a plastic bag. So we all save them, and carry them with us. Once you must pay for something, it changes things. It is a common language.”
The next speaker was Hector Tizon, a writer from Argentina who spent a long period in jail and exile when a fascist government reigned. He, too, mentioned the specter of Hurricane Katrina for the U.S. “George Bush refused even to ratify [the] Kyoto [Treaty on greenhouse gas emissions] – but Katrina gave an answer. What more do you need, Mr. Bush? Are we condemned to die in a massive holocaust if we continue as Bush does? What must we do to overcome this obstinacy? The moment has arrived to denounce empty explanations. Because the true terror is visible – the monopolistic interests.” He spoke of how “globalization sharpens uniformity, diversity has no prestige any longer. It brings a loss of a sense of continuity and the dimensions of human experience…. Nowadays we need great courage to be optimists. We have to ask ourselves whether humanity has some control over its own destiny. We cannot limit ourselves to words.”
Tizon called for a new form of international tribunal, to punish those found guilty of ecological crimes against humanity.
China’s Wang Yongchen offered an example of grassroots leadership – a young woman who started out as a radio journalist and now runs an NGO fighting to protect the isolated mountain area of the Nu River, and other waterways, from development. The Nu river region has six different religions and 26 minorities. Thirteen large dams are planned for the river, and Yongchen’s slides depicted the glaring difference between the deep beautiful blue of a pre-dammed river and the dark brown that followed. “China has developed so quickly,” she said. “Ten years ago, in my office, nobody had a car. Now only myself has no car.”
On the third day of the forum, we heard from the remarkable Father Sebastiano D’Ambra, a Catholic priest who started Harmony Village in the Philippines, an ongoing effort to bring Christians and Muslims together to learn about each other. Young people from each religion live together for months, in what is called the Silsilah Dialogue Movement. It began in 1984 near Zamboanga, a hotbed of Muslim rebel groups, “a city of 4,000 families – and 7,000 firearms….They tried to abduct me, but a commando in the group was a friend and warned me.” The courage of Father D’Ambra is an inspiration.
Kenya’s Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt movement and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, addressed the forum from the U.N. office in Nairobi via a video-conference. She has been planting trees for the past 30 years, “starting with seven on the first day, not knowing it would eventually be millions.” She suggested adding a fourth word, repair, to the three R’s (reduce, reuse, recycle).
To a question of whether she is an optimist or a pessimist, Maathai replied: “I am always an optimist. Those of us who understand what is happening, we must continue to raise our voices against those who would destroy the planet. Ignorance is one of the biggest problems. With climate change, for example, because it is not something visible and it is very scientific with complicated data, it is hard to convince our political leaders. We know the ice is melting on Mount Kenya and Mount Kilimanjaro. Maybe they will learn when the rivers start to flow from the mountains and the coastal towns are flooded.”
A journalist from Bulgaria asked about the over-consumption of the West being imposed on other countries and what could be done. “We have to raise our moral consciousness – to the point we recognize a new code. We must fight right here – where we are copying the West at the expense of our own people. It is not morally right that two billion people live on less than a dollar a day.”
Given the growing problems of deforestation in Africa, asked a journalist from Cameroon, how did she use her stature to influence African leaders? Eleven heads of state from around the Congo forest have asked her to be a goodwill ambassador, “because they do not have the resources to protect it from illegal logging. This is very important to the world, especially with respect to climate change. The Congo is the second largest forest, along with the Amazon these are the lungs of the earth. Most of the logging is by companies from outside, which do not carry moral responsibility.”
Wang Yongchen asked, but what can someone do if they’re not famous, but simply a local person? Maathai paused before saying, “It is not easy, my sister. If I was given better chances and listened to earlier, I would have been able to do much more. But I spent half my time fighting in the streets and in jail. Yet today, the same government that was persecuting me says, bravo. We are over-run by powers bigger than us – but I have been given a new voice by the Nobel Committee, because they wanted me to be a voice for the voiceless and the vulnerable. We must be able to tell young people, yes you have a future.”
Maathai told a story – a parable, really – about a hummingbird. It was originally related to her by a Japanese professor. In a huge forest, a fire breaks out. All the animals run to the edge of the forest, overwhelmed, believing they can do nothing. Only the hummingbird decides to put out the fire. “Don’t bother,” the hummingbird is told, “the fire is too big and you are too small.” Still, it starts bringing drops of water from a stream, one at a time. The little bird remains patient and refuses to be overwhelmed. It knows it won’t be able to put out the fire overnight.
“All of us are called to be like the hummingbird,” Maathai said. “And to say to the other animals, ‘I am doing the best I can.’”
The future, for those of us who came together as a small family of journalists these four days in October, will at least include one another. Environmental problems that were abstract before, became personal through learning about them face-to-face. The challenges ahead are tremendous. But I realized, through the Greenaccord experience, that there are many journalists who are prepared – like the hummingbird - to do the best they can.
Comments welcome
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10/27/05
"The Rome-based non-profit “cultural association” turns out to have been inspired by Pope John Paul II, who warned that “Christianity cannot be indifferent before an ecological catastrophe in the making,”"
Curious that such profound moral authority does not extend to birth control or AIDS prevention per condom use in Africa and elsewhere. These seem to be at least human catastrophies if not ecological calamaties.
Cheers
Stuart Beaton
Antigonish NS Can
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