Archive for the ‘Green’ Category
by Carolyn on Apr 3rd, 2012
Environmental activist Patrick Bond attended the recent Time of the Writer Festival at the University of KwaZulu-Natal where he listened to Ronnie Kasrils speak about his biography of his late wife Eleanor, The Unlikely Secret Agent, which won the last year’s Alan Paton Award. Bond had a few of his own discussions with Kasrils and admits to having been so “charmed [by Kasrils] as to confess I will now blindly follow him on any madcap adventure”.
However, in the following article, Bond, who is the author of Durban’s Climate Gamble and Politics of Climate Justice, among other books, also looks critically at Kasrils involvement in the opening of the industrial waste-water recycling plant in South Durban, owned by the world’s largest water privatiser, Paris-based Vivendi:
‘I don’t have the stomach or the taste to serve any more at this level,’ said the normally ebullient Minister of Intelligence Ronnie Kasrils, as he quit after fourteen years of service to the South African government. It was late September 2008, just after Thabo Mbeki was palace-couped.
Kasrils’ intelligence service was by then an international laughingstock, with spy-versus-spy intrigue spilling out wide across the political landscape. His own troops were locked in unending, ungovernable, internecine battles against each other’s factions, using hoax emails, other disinformation and extraordinary political contortions unknown in even the ugliest Stalinist traditions of the African National Congress (ANC). Recall that Mbeki’s police chief Jackie Selebi was also the head of Interpol, and to have the mafia penetrate such high levels made South African security farcical at best.
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Images courtesy Daily News and Mail & Guardian
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by wombatsamwilson on Feb 14th, 2012
Verdict: carrot
Christine Stevens has a life many corporate workers will envy.
She lives on a farm that provides her with a rustic lifestyle and organic vegetables.
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by Sophy on Dec 7th, 2011
Special to Books LIVE by Sarah Frost:
Tying in with the environmentally significant 17th Conference of the Parties (COP 17), taking place at the Durban International Convention Centre, last night Ike’s Books played host to the launch of five new titles relating to climate change: Politics of Climate Justice and Durban’s Climate Gamble by Patrick Bond, Earth Grab edited by Sylvia Gar, Nnimmo Bassey’s To Cook a Continent and African Awakening by Firoze Manji.
The verandah at Ike’s was crowded with Durban left-wing stalwarts as well as a number of international visitors. Patrick Bond, political economist and head of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, facilitated the event while also having two of his own works in the line up – Politics of Climate Justice, which he wrote while on sabbatical in Berkeley last year, and Durban’s Climate Gamble: Playing the Carbon Markets, Betting the Earth, a collection of essays of which he is the editor.
After speaking briefly about these two texts, Bond introduced Sylvia Gar from Uruguay, editor of Earth Grab: Geopiracy, the new Biomasters and Capturing Climate Genes. Gar expressed her concern that companies are “grabbing the earth” through new technologies and warned her audience that it is ‘much worse than we believe’.
Bond then invited Joel Covel, editor of prominent social journal Capital, Nature, Socialism and contributor to Durban’s Climate Gamble, to address the crowd. According to Covel, ‘we are delusional if we think COP 17 is going to make a difference in our economy’. He noted that, although he ‘rails against the psychopath polluters who make the big environmental choices,’ the real purpose of creating literature like this is to ‘go on and do what must be done which is to give this crisis the attention it deserves and break the cycle of exploitation.’ Covel argued that, although this particular collection celebrates Durban’s environmental struggles, an unprecedented revolution is necessary if we want to change the whole world.
Next up was renowned social activist, Ashwin Desai, one of the major contributors to Durban’s Climate Gamble, who offered many thought-provoking statements. He told activists in the audience that they have to be ‘serious about civil society as an antidote,’ questioning the NGOs that rely so much on funding that they forget how to organise. He said that, instead of ‘delivering a constituency to the ruling classes’, we should ‘f*ck them up’. In closing, Desai referred to Hans Christian Andersen’s story, The Emperor’s New Clothes, warning that ‘civil society is not what it says it is’.
Last up was Nnimmo Bassey, Nigerian grassroots activist and author of To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction and the Climate Crisis in Africa. Bassey emphasised his belief that Africa is not a lost cause, referring, in particular, to the on-the-ground activism of rural women who ‘will one day rise up and take their destiny’. He warned that, if polluting nations postpone curbing their emissions for another decade, Africa will ‘be evacuated of its citizens’. Bassey proposed that activists connect and learn from one another, forming a united front against so-called “Biomasters”. Each chapter of To Cook a Continent contains ‘snatches of poetry’, culminating in a poem he wrote about Shell’s extraction of oil in Nigeria: ‘we thought it was oil/ but it was blood’.
The launch of these books heralded a much-needed discussion around climate change in Africa, which one hopes will continue to remain in focus once COP17 concludes on Friday.
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by Sophy on Nov 29th, 2011
UKZN Press, Unisa Press and Pambazuka Press invite you to the launch of a series of recently released titles related to the current COP17 Climate Change Conference. The launch, which takes place on 6 December at Ike’s Books, will celebrate the publication of two new titles by political economist Patrick Bond, Politics of Climate Justice and Durban’s Climate Gamble. Other titles being launched on the night include Pambazuka Press books Earth Grab, To Cook a Continent and African Awakening. Don’t miss this important event!
Event Details
- Date: Tuesday, 06 December 2011
- Time: 5:30 PM for 6:00 PM
- Venue: Ike’s Books and Collectables,
48a Florida Road
Durban | Map
- RSVP: Cedric Sissing,
cedric@adamsbooks.co.za,
031 303 9214; 082 873 2702
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Photo courtesy the Mail & Guardian
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by Carolyn on Nov 29th, 2011
Uitspraak: wortel met heelwat kritiek
Het jy geweet as jou rekenaar oornag aangeskakel bly, mors dit soveel krag as wat gebruik sou word om 800 A4-fotostate te maak?
Dat ’n oorvol ketel genoeg krag mors om ’n TV 26 uur lank aangeskakel te hou? En ’n lekkende kraan wat ’n koppie binne 10 minute vol maak, binne ’n jaar 52 baddens sou kon vol tap?
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by Chiara on Nov 22nd, 2011
Tomorrow, 23 November 2011, sees the opening of the exhibition Don’t/Panic at Durban Art Gallery to coincides with COP17, the United Nations’ international conference on climate change. Durban-born curator Gabi Ngcobo told the Mail and Guardian‘s Percy Zvomuya that she put together the 30-plus works based on their “poetic not evangelical disobedience”.
Dont’/Panic showcases the talents of artists such as David Koloane, Mlu Zondi, Clive van den Berg and Moshekwa Langa, all of whom have created works that have a “subversive ways of looking at” climate issues. It runs until 19 February 2012.
The exhibition Don’t/Panic is a homecoming of sorts for Durban-born curator Gabi Ngcobo. It is opening next week to coincide with COP17, the United Nations’ conference on climate change.
The show, running at the Durban Art Gallery, features more than 30 works by South African artists, including David Koloane, Mlu Zondi, Clive van den Berg and Moshekwa Langa, Nigerian-born artist Otobong Nkanga, Eritrean artist Dawit L Petros, Nigerian George Osodi and Moroccan-born artist Batoul S’Himi.
Ngcobo has returned from Bard College in New York, where did a master’s degree in curatorial studies last year.
The environmental summit which takes place in Durban from 28 – 9 December will also feature a range of A-list celebrity speakers including Leonardo DiCaprio, Angelina Jolie, U2 frontman Bono, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sir Richard Branson.
A-list celebrities including Leonardo DiCaprio, Angelina Jolie and U2 frontman Bono are set to attend the environmental summit Conference of the Parties (COP 17) in Durban, reports Daily News.
Other celebrities also planning to attend include politician and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger and British billionaire Sir Richard Branson.
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by Chiara on Sep 30th, 2011
On Sunday 25 September, Wangari Maathai, the first African Women to win the Novel Peace Prize, passed away. To honour the memory of this stalwart environmental and political activist, we bring you excerpts from three of her books – Unbowed, The Challenge for Africa and Replenishing the Earth.
In an article by Jeffrey Gettleman for the New York Times, Achim Steiner, the executive director of the United Nations’ environmental program, called Mathaai a “force of nature” and compares her to an acacia tree: “strong in character and able to survive sometimes the harshest of conditions.”
Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan environmentalist who began a movement to reforest her country by paying poor women a few shillings to plant trees and who went on to become the first African woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize, died here on Sunday. She was 71.
The cause was cancer, said her organization, the Green Belt Movement. Kenyan news outlets said that she had been treated for ovarian cancer in the past year and that she had been in a hospital for at least a week before she died.
Read an excerpt from Maathai’s memoir, Unbowed:
I was born the third of six children, and the first girl after two sons, on April 1, 1940, in the small village of Ihithe in the central highlands of what was then British Kenya. My grandparents and parents were also born in this region near the provincial capital of Nyeri, in the foothills of the Aberdare Mountain Range. To the north, jutting into the sky, is Mount Kenya.
Two weeks into mbura ya njahi, the season of the long rains, my mother delivered me at home in a traditional mud-walled house with no electricity or running water. She was assisted by a local midwife as well as women family members and friends. My parents were peasant farmers, members of the Kikuyu community, one of forty-two ethnic groups in Kenya and then, as now, the most populous. They lived from the soil and also kept cattle, goats, and sheep.
The Challenge for Africa is Maathai’s call for a “moral revolution” among Africans, who she says are “culturally deracinated, adrift between worlds”:
The challenges Africa faces today are real and vast. Just as I began work on this book, my own country of Kenya was plunged into a pointless and violent postelection political conflict and humanitarian crisis that claimed more than a thousand lives and left hundreds of thousands homeless. As I write, internecine fighting still wracks the Darfur region of Sudan, Chad, southern Somalia, the Niger Delta, and eastern Congo. Zimbabwe’s most recent election was marred by violence and a failure to tally the vote properly and reach a negotiated political settlement. Meanwhile, a series of violent attacks in South Africa against immigrants from other African countries left more than forty dead and forced tens of thousands to flee from their homes. South Africa, a political and economic beacon in the region, appeared in peril of facing the conflicts many other African nations have experienced.
Replenishing the Earth is Maathai’s argument that spiritual values can help the world save the environment:
Within a few years of its inception in 1977, the Green Belt Movement (GBM) expanded from a small, tree-planting project at the National Council of Women of Kenya to a full-time engagement. Simultaneously, a small number of community groups grew to a network of thousands of such groups. As this occurred, it became clear that both the groups and the individuals were not upholding standards of behavior that they expected of others, especially those in government, which was already much criticized. These standards included honesty, hard work, and a commitment to transparency and accountability. It gradually became clear that the Green Belt Movement’s work with communities to repair the degraded environment could not be done effectively without participants embracing a set of core spiritual values.
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Photo courtesy Sustainability Ninja
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by Chiara on Jul 21st, 2011
IDASA, ANSA Africa and Lobby Books invites you to the launch of Stefan Raubenheimer’s book, Facing Climate Change: Building South Africa’s Strategy. Raubenheimer will be in conversation with Richard Calland, author of The Vuvuzela Revolution, at Lobby Books on Tuesday, 16 July.
See you there!
Event Details:
- Date: Tuesday, 26 July 2011
- Time: 5:30 PM for 6:00 PM
- Venue: Lobby Books
Idasa’s Cape Town Democracy Centre
6 Spin Street
Cape Town | Map
- RSVP: Andreas Späth,
aspath@idasa.org.za or 021 467 7606.
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by Carolyn on Jul 14th, 2011
Siber Ink and Little White Bakkie are giving away 15 eBook copies of renowned environmental attorney Cormac Cullinan’s Wild Law: 2nd edition.
The eBook is available for purchase from the Little White Bakkie online store at the already tempting price of R99 (a hard copy in a retail store costs about R250), but now 15 lucky readers will have the chance to download the eBook for free!
Wild Law has played a seminal role in inspiring the global movement to recognise rights for Nature. In the book, Cullinan, who led the drafting of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, dicusses how governance systems should change to address climate change.
To stand a chance to win a copy of the Wild Law ebook, for download from the Little White Bakkie store, follow these simple steps:
- Post a comment below this post on Siber Ink’s Facebook Wall, describing what you do to lead a more environmentally friendly lifestyle and reduce your carbon footprint. In what creative ways are you helping Mother Earth?
- Entrants will go into a draw to win an eBook
The competition closes on Tuesday, 16 August 2011.
Good luck!
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by Sophy on Jul 1st, 2011
Ever struggle to work out which fish are safe to eat and which are not? David McCandless, author of Information is Beautiful and a main act at Open Book Cape Town in September, has compiled the latest data and done it, well, beautifully.
Recently featured in the Guardian, McCandless’s “Which Fish are Okay to Eat?” is adapted from his “information atlas”, Information is Beautiful.
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Image courtesy the Guardian
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