Native Americans, racism, the Mob, lead poisoning, strange cancers, undeclared Superfund site, Ford: sound intriguing?
Read it and weep.
http://toxiclegacy.northjersey.com/
And then make a small gesture:
http://www.change.org/petitions/protect-the-ramapough-mountain-indian-tribeclean-up-the-ringwood-superfund-site
Showing posts with label things to be mad about. Show all posts
Showing posts with label things to be mad about. Show all posts
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Saturday, June 18, 2011
"No queremos migajas, queremos sentirnos libres": Some thoughts on my internship
*"We don't want crumbs, we want to be free"- From a song by the amazing Anita Tijoux
Apologies de ante mano (beforehand), I sense an insanely long post coming on. Amazingly, I've already been working with Cultural Survival for over 2 weeks now. It's been a highly emotional experience, which I think will be apparent as I talk about it more.
The office staff and my fellow interns are really truly warm, intelligent and amazing people and I'm excited to continue to get to know them better throughout the summer. The office is super relaxed, which I'm learning is a working environment that I really value. A lot of the staff live far away and commute to the office only when they have to, so there's a changing cast of characters throughout the day(s). And just being around the office environment of a non profit provides an inside look and learning experience. Just from overhearing conversations, I'm getting a sense of the complexities of the politics of charity navigator ratings(somehow ours went down despite the % of dollars going directly to work increasing), the sometimes awkward dance with potential funders, the cycle of asking for donations, and shifting an organization to be relevant in the digital age. There are always funny surprises too, such as people leaving letters outside the office reading "What about the Indo-European tribes?" or a woman trying to donate her goat farm to us??????
I should give some background about my specific project, the Guatemala Radio Project. At the best moments, it feels like I'm part of an important struggle for human rights, a dramatic complex dance of David and Goliath. At worst, I feel like a imperialist hack, meddling where I don't belong, in a cultural context I don't fully understand, and for what, self aggrandizement? A sexy sounding job title? As if the US didn't have its own struggles and problems.
May have gotten slightly carried away with the hyperbole there...
ANYWAY, the actual projects I am working on are incredibly varied, from creating maps & video content to screening audio to translating/transcribing documents to testing a phone system to transmit radio messages over the air in real time. Lots of Spanish. Which is sorely needed, after I realized how bad things had gotten when I tried to talk to my old language partner the other night. The biggest project I am working on right now, however, involves a project to legalize community radio stations. Despite provisions in both international law and Guatemala's 1996 Peace Accords, Guatemalan Communications Law does not actually allow for frequencies to be allocated by any means other than expensive auctions. As a result, Mayan communities have limited access to media. And thereby are excluded from other important forms of information, such as news, health info, political info, especially in regions that mainly speak Mayan languages. So what we are trying to do as a last hurrah before elections in September is get the Junta Directiva of the Guatemalan National Congress to put a bill, Initiativa 4087, on the agenda to be voted on, which would provide a definition of community radio stations, creating a framework to legal challenge the shutdown of radio stations and simultaneously allow for their expansion. To do this, we are figuring out who is important politically and has power over the agenda: both political actors & sponsors of commercial radio stations, many of whom are internationally owned corporations or subsidiaries. Most of what I did today was look up the history of Coke (can anyone say depressing?) and Domino's pizza in Guatemala which made me realize how consolidated the world's corporate ownership is, yet just decentralized enough to avoid responsibility. Realizing some of this interconnection made me feel less like an interloper. Consider these linkages: Bain Capital is founded by Mitt Romney. Bain Capital buys Domino's Pizza. Domino's expands in Guate. Providing them with capital to advertise on commercial radio stations. When commercial radio station owners hear interference from other stations, they get the police to crack down on "piratas," pirates, because they have paid to use the waves and the others have not. Community radio station struggles to get back on its feet again if it can at all. Disparities in power abound, but I just indirectly connected a US presidential hopeful to a Mayan villager in about 5 giant leaps. Small freakin world.
Let me give an example that really sums up a lot of the ethical hurdles I've been pondering. This week, I was assigned the task of finding high quality examples of radio broadcasts about health that a specific funder had provided support for. In some ways, the series was great because it provided simple, easy to understand information about a variety of health problems. However, our sponsor, unnamed, happens to be founded by a conservative catholic, who is completely opposed to birth control and discussions of abortion so I was instructed to avoid anything seemingly controversial. This censorship in order to make the donor happy kind of pissed me off, especially since it was completely hypocritical since we had actually funded several spots, for example, about condom use, with their money. It also illustrated how, in order to fund something we feel is important, i.e. health information spread by radio, we covered up a discussion about the future role of women's reproductive rights in a very traditional country. Similar example of this pragmatic approach: asking Otto Perez Molina, a former military general cum politician generally believed although not convicted of crimes during the Civil War against Mayan villagers to support our campaign. This may or may not get you where you need to go, but boy it feels sleazy to me.
I got really mad though at one point when I listened to another radio broadcast from the same series about dengue fever. Follow with this example for a second. I've been thinking a lot about a study Paul Farmer did in Haiti, in which he surveyed sick patients in a rural Haitian village to see if they believed voodoo was responsible for their illnesses. A trial group who were given money for additional food and other such items fared far better in the long run, regardless of whether or not patients believed it was voodoo or microbes that made them sick. Back to the case at hand, it's clear that mosquitoes cause dengue, and in some ways those are easier to avoid than invisible microbes, alongside the eradication of sources of stagnant water. The thing that upset me though was that the underlying inequalities that lead to stagnant water in Guatemalan villages were completely unaddressed, which in a sense implied the patronizing notion that villagers only don't take action against dengue because of ignorance. How about a gigantic storage bin filled with stagnant water because your family, who despite technically having access to clean drinking water, only actually have access via a pump for 2 hours every day and therefore have no choice but to store what they can for future use? Or poor housing conditions with leaky roofs? Or how about chronic malnutrition rendering people vulnerable to disease despite lower middle income country status?
The problem is, you can't fundamentally address these inequalities without calling for a radical change to the order of things. And that's already been tried. But dark humor aside, this is one of the questions this summer's work has posed to me: is it enough to say you are working for social change if you are unwilling to deeply confront the issues that cause the problems you are trying to remediate? Are fair trade, corporate social responsibility and unenforceable human rights utter bullshit, vain attempts to justify a system that arguably isn't working for most people? Can we justifiably pressure corporations to not destroy indigenous homelands with massive infrastructure projects when our own consumption is fundamentally linked to the need for power? Is international partnership and collaboration an actual reality given the immensity of the disparities in wealth and power and influence?
I will say this: as tired and overstimulated as my brain is right now, longing for this weekend in the verdant pastures of New Jersey (intended unironically), I don't ever think I will want the sort of job I can stop thinking about when I leave the office. I doubt I'll be "selling out" for a while yet, although I think its pretty clear from the rant above that I'm not entirely sure how much more integrity the non-profit sector has anyway.
Apologies de ante mano (beforehand), I sense an insanely long post coming on. Amazingly, I've already been working with Cultural Survival for over 2 weeks now. It's been a highly emotional experience, which I think will be apparent as I talk about it more.
The office staff and my fellow interns are really truly warm, intelligent and amazing people and I'm excited to continue to get to know them better throughout the summer. The office is super relaxed, which I'm learning is a working environment that I really value. A lot of the staff live far away and commute to the office only when they have to, so there's a changing cast of characters throughout the day(s). And just being around the office environment of a non profit provides an inside look and learning experience. Just from overhearing conversations, I'm getting a sense of the complexities of the politics of charity navigator ratings(somehow ours went down despite the % of dollars going directly to work increasing), the sometimes awkward dance with potential funders, the cycle of asking for donations, and shifting an organization to be relevant in the digital age. There are always funny surprises too, such as people leaving letters outside the office reading "What about the Indo-European tribes?" or a woman trying to donate her goat farm to us??????
I should give some background about my specific project, the Guatemala Radio Project. At the best moments, it feels like I'm part of an important struggle for human rights, a dramatic complex dance of David and Goliath. At worst, I feel like a imperialist hack, meddling where I don't belong, in a cultural context I don't fully understand, and for what, self aggrandizement? A sexy sounding job title? As if the US didn't have its own struggles and problems.
May have gotten slightly carried away with the hyperbole there...
ANYWAY, the actual projects I am working on are incredibly varied, from creating maps & video content to screening audio to translating/transcribing documents to testing a phone system to transmit radio messages over the air in real time. Lots of Spanish. Which is sorely needed, after I realized how bad things had gotten when I tried to talk to my old language partner the other night. The biggest project I am working on right now, however, involves a project to legalize community radio stations. Despite provisions in both international law and Guatemala's 1996 Peace Accords, Guatemalan Communications Law does not actually allow for frequencies to be allocated by any means other than expensive auctions. As a result, Mayan communities have limited access to media. And thereby are excluded from other important forms of information, such as news, health info, political info, especially in regions that mainly speak Mayan languages. So what we are trying to do as a last hurrah before elections in September is get the Junta Directiva of the Guatemalan National Congress to put a bill, Initiativa 4087, on the agenda to be voted on, which would provide a definition of community radio stations, creating a framework to legal challenge the shutdown of radio stations and simultaneously allow for their expansion. To do this, we are figuring out who is important politically and has power over the agenda: both political actors & sponsors of commercial radio stations, many of whom are internationally owned corporations or subsidiaries. Most of what I did today was look up the history of Coke (can anyone say depressing?) and Domino's pizza in Guatemala which made me realize how consolidated the world's corporate ownership is, yet just decentralized enough to avoid responsibility. Realizing some of this interconnection made me feel less like an interloper. Consider these linkages: Bain Capital is founded by Mitt Romney. Bain Capital buys Domino's Pizza. Domino's expands in Guate. Providing them with capital to advertise on commercial radio stations. When commercial radio station owners hear interference from other stations, they get the police to crack down on "piratas," pirates, because they have paid to use the waves and the others have not. Community radio station struggles to get back on its feet again if it can at all. Disparities in power abound, but I just indirectly connected a US presidential hopeful to a Mayan villager in about 5 giant leaps. Small freakin world.
Let me give an example that really sums up a lot of the ethical hurdles I've been pondering. This week, I was assigned the task of finding high quality examples of radio broadcasts about health that a specific funder had provided support for. In some ways, the series was great because it provided simple, easy to understand information about a variety of health problems. However, our sponsor, unnamed, happens to be founded by a conservative catholic, who is completely opposed to birth control and discussions of abortion so I was instructed to avoid anything seemingly controversial. This censorship in order to make the donor happy kind of pissed me off, especially since it was completely hypocritical since we had actually funded several spots, for example, about condom use, with their money. It also illustrated how, in order to fund something we feel is important, i.e. health information spread by radio, we covered up a discussion about the future role of women's reproductive rights in a very traditional country. Similar example of this pragmatic approach: asking Otto Perez Molina, a former military general cum politician generally believed although not convicted of crimes during the Civil War against Mayan villagers to support our campaign. This may or may not get you where you need to go, but boy it feels sleazy to me.
I got really mad though at one point when I listened to another radio broadcast from the same series about dengue fever. Follow with this example for a second. I've been thinking a lot about a study Paul Farmer did in Haiti, in which he surveyed sick patients in a rural Haitian village to see if they believed voodoo was responsible for their illnesses. A trial group who were given money for additional food and other such items fared far better in the long run, regardless of whether or not patients believed it was voodoo or microbes that made them sick. Back to the case at hand, it's clear that mosquitoes cause dengue, and in some ways those are easier to avoid than invisible microbes, alongside the eradication of sources of stagnant water. The thing that upset me though was that the underlying inequalities that lead to stagnant water in Guatemalan villages were completely unaddressed, which in a sense implied the patronizing notion that villagers only don't take action against dengue because of ignorance. How about a gigantic storage bin filled with stagnant water because your family, who despite technically having access to clean drinking water, only actually have access via a pump for 2 hours every day and therefore have no choice but to store what they can for future use? Or poor housing conditions with leaky roofs? Or how about chronic malnutrition rendering people vulnerable to disease despite lower middle income country status?
The problem is, you can't fundamentally address these inequalities without calling for a radical change to the order of things. And that's already been tried. But dark humor aside, this is one of the questions this summer's work has posed to me: is it enough to say you are working for social change if you are unwilling to deeply confront the issues that cause the problems you are trying to remediate? Are fair trade, corporate social responsibility and unenforceable human rights utter bullshit, vain attempts to justify a system that arguably isn't working for most people? Can we justifiably pressure corporations to not destroy indigenous homelands with massive infrastructure projects when our own consumption is fundamentally linked to the need for power? Is international partnership and collaboration an actual reality given the immensity of the disparities in wealth and power and influence?
I will say this: as tired and overstimulated as my brain is right now, longing for this weekend in the verdant pastures of New Jersey (intended unironically), I don't ever think I will want the sort of job I can stop thinking about when I leave the office. I doubt I'll be "selling out" for a while yet, although I think its pretty clear from the rant above that I'm not entirely sure how much more integrity the non-profit sector has anyway.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Seeing Flowers on Horseback
Word of the day (yep, bringing it back): despabilarse- to wake up, become aware, wise up
One of my professors described the way we had gone through the material for our class this way, which apparently is a Chinese saying for having passed by something incredibly quickly. I chose it as the title for today's blogpost because I feel like it captures this semester perfectly. So many beautiful fleeting moments, so much superficial learning, tempting me to go deeper, so much change, in ourselves and in the ever shifting landscape around us. And suddenly it is over. Or rather, beginning. It took me a couple semesters of college for me to realize that the things I learn the most from are self directed adventures, and that is exactly where I am headed for the summer. I have a list of books several pages long that I want to read, and about as many movies to watch and places to visit. I've finally solidified my plans for the summer somewhat, got housing and hopefully an internship, soon to be revealed because I'm superstitious that something will go wrong with it. Interview tomorrow!
Today as usual was a day of crazy contrasts. Writing on final projects, followed by a marathon of classes, and then to a conversation about peasant land struggles in Guatemala, which deeply affected me. There is no such thing as post war in Guatemala: so much of the ongoing violence is directly linked to past processes. I'm sharing the clip below because it needs to be seen and confronted and acted upon. The context of the clip is that a prominent landowner used the police and army to violently evict peasants for their lands, in order to plant biofuels there. A perfect example of how processes are no longer merely local or global.
Here's an article that gives a bit more background on the issue:
http://wilderutopia.com/international-issues/guatemala-biofuels-production-leads-to-violent-evictions/
And after this, I ended up at an insane mall getting ice cream with friends, which was extra weird because I'm pretty sure I hadn't been at a mall since I was back in Chile. It was the sort of place that people in other countries probably imagine when they think about the US: giant sculptures of Bostony themed things, lights, a giant green monster, cute jelly bean decorations. The hyperreal. Even more ironically for someone who's been writing a paper on water provision in developing world cities for what seems like ages, there was a giant over the top fountain show with music and lights. I felt like an overstimulated child.
It's a crazy world we live in. Safer and unsafer everyday. Just depends on what corner of the world you're looking in.
One of my professors described the way we had gone through the material for our class this way, which apparently is a Chinese saying for having passed by something incredibly quickly. I chose it as the title for today's blogpost because I feel like it captures this semester perfectly. So many beautiful fleeting moments, so much superficial learning, tempting me to go deeper, so much change, in ourselves and in the ever shifting landscape around us. And suddenly it is over. Or rather, beginning. It took me a couple semesters of college for me to realize that the things I learn the most from are self directed adventures, and that is exactly where I am headed for the summer. I have a list of books several pages long that I want to read, and about as many movies to watch and places to visit. I've finally solidified my plans for the summer somewhat, got housing and hopefully an internship, soon to be revealed because I'm superstitious that something will go wrong with it. Interview tomorrow!
Today as usual was a day of crazy contrasts. Writing on final projects, followed by a marathon of classes, and then to a conversation about peasant land struggles in Guatemala, which deeply affected me. There is no such thing as post war in Guatemala: so much of the ongoing violence is directly linked to past processes. I'm sharing the clip below because it needs to be seen and confronted and acted upon. The context of the clip is that a prominent landowner used the police and army to violently evict peasants for their lands, in order to plant biofuels there. A perfect example of how processes are no longer merely local or global.
Here's an article that gives a bit more background on the issue:
http://wilderutopia.com/international-issues/guatemala-biofuels-production-leads-to-violent-evictions/
And after this, I ended up at an insane mall getting ice cream with friends, which was extra weird because I'm pretty sure I hadn't been at a mall since I was back in Chile. It was the sort of place that people in other countries probably imagine when they think about the US: giant sculptures of Bostony themed things, lights, a giant green monster, cute jelly bean decorations. The hyperreal. Even more ironically for someone who's been writing a paper on water provision in developing world cities for what seems like ages, there was a giant over the top fountain show with music and lights. I felt like an overstimulated child.
It's a crazy world we live in. Safer and unsafer everyday. Just depends on what corner of the world you're looking in.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Get your ire on!
This week was a pretty good reminder that there is no shortage of injustice and short-sited thinking and greed in the world.
On Tuesday, I squeezed in a lecture by controversial academic Lawrence Lessig on the subject of institutional corruption. Using a variety of examples from US politics, he proposed the very simple yet profound idea of institutional trust as a cyclical problem. If there is a perception, regardless of its validity, that politicians or institutions are biased, or outright corrupt, democratic participation in that institution will drastically drop off because its assumed that nothing can be done to fix the problem, which only makes it easier to get away with questionable behaviors.
So then, the day after, I went to see Gaslands, a documentary about the relatively new process of natural gas extraction through hydralic fracturing or "fracking," that has gotten a ton of press lately with its Oscar nod and backlash from gas companies who challenge its message. With dark humor and a homemade aesthetic, filmmaker Josh Fox tells personal and institutional histories of what appears to be yet another faustian bargain for "cheap" energy. Harking back to Lessig's message: even if he had fabricated the entire thing, as many gas companies have the audacity to claim, the fact that we live in a world where it's completely plausible for serious exceptions to the Clean Water Act to have been made for special interests, where water could be polluted with impunity and where budget cuts could have obliterated environmental accountability says more than whatever did actually transpire behind the closed doors.
Plug: Watch the movie.
Finally, this weekend, was the annual EPIIC conference, a big conference bringing in speakers and students from all over the world to address one theme. This year's was "Our Nuclear Age," pretty much the biggest example of humans being short sited that I can think of.
I made it to 2 panels:
-The first was on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty System, addressing whether or not the system was actually functioning and addressing areas of contention that have been exploited by states with intentions to nuclearize.
-One really interesting statistic I happened to remember from the panel: every year, the US makes about as many nuclear weapons as Pakistan and India have made in the last 20. Funding $$$ for NPR and education anyone? (Naively oversimplified, I know.) But, as is quite evident, how can we expect other states and actors to not want weapons when we continue to send a signal that they are desirable?
-The second, "Re-Thinking Iran" provided fewer truly innovative solutions than might have been expected given the pre-fix, but still had some really interesting perspectives on what Iran's capabilities truly are and will be, the role that a divided political elite within the country has on nuclear policy, the effectiveness (or not) of sanctions, regional power politics and the role of the 6/12 elections and spreading protest in the middle east. What I had really wanted to hear was someone say, ok, well since it seems pretty obvious that they are going to get weapons eventually, what do we do when they do?
So, as usual, lots of things to think about. And fight for/against.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
My weigh in on Tucson
I'm not going to make a political statement here because anyone who has read my blog for a while can guess what I would probably say. Rather I do want to make a sad observations about our culture. Yesterday, while every radio in the country is still blaring news and opinions about the causes of the tragedy, I saw a harried mother at Target buying a large fake water rifle at Target for her child. I wish I were making this up. And then when I was getting pizza with my Dad, a hyperactive 3 or 4 year old had his hands pointed into guns, "shooting" at his sister. Guns have trickled down to be something that is so commonplace that even young children know what they do, even if they can't fathom what it would really mean to take a life. And this is only seen as a game.
So where can start to "make America as good as she imagined it?": teach our kids that violence is wrong, even jokingly. And in the meantime start making our political discourse fitting for adults instead of duking it out playground style. And yes that includes you too Democrats.
So where can start to "make America as good as she imagined it?": teach our kids that violence is wrong, even jokingly. And in the meantime start making our political discourse fitting for adults instead of duking it out playground style. And yes that includes you too Democrats.
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