Equalogy

Archive for the ‘ecology’ Category

Missed part 1? Check it out here

From AWID:

Since long before the issue garnered adequate concern on the world stage, women have been resisting, mitigating and even reversing the impacts of climate change, primarily at the local level. Moreover, not only do women tend to care for the environment, but they do so in a way that reflects how it is connected to the economy and livelihoods, health and social well-being.

This is the second article in a four-part series that explores the gendered impacts of climate change.

The first article discussed how women are impacted by climate change. Stay tuned in the coming months for part three, which explores how women are organizing in preparation for the December 2009 United Nations Conference on Climate Change; and part four, which discusses how the outcomes of the conference might impact women’s rights.

By Masum Momaya

Climate Change is now on the minds and lips of many people in local and international policy spaces. Yet, many women in large part due to their social roles as caretakers and their livelihoods as farmers, have been observing and mitigating the impact of climate change for generations. Today, they continue to care for the environment in their day-to-day interactions with it and also bring their experiences to legal and policymaking spaces at local, national, regional and international levels.

Because many live so intimately with the land and are often responsible for food, fuel, shelter, water and medicine in their families, women’s understanding of the climate change transcends science, statistics and physical changes to include the socioeconomic dimensions. Specifically, women have long been feeling the effects of agricultural policies dominated by corporate interests; the plunder and extraction of natural resource by governments and the private sector for profit; the oppression of indigenous peoples and their knowledge of biodiversity; the health impact of air, water and food pollutants; and the inadequacy of market-driven solutions in halting carbon emissions.

Grassroots Resistance

In Kenya, Wangari Maathai and the women of the Green Belt Movement have been planting trees and conserving water to replenish the rapid deforestation. What started out as a movement to simply replace trees that had been cut with seedlings has expanded to include a movement for peace, as Maathai herself found that environmental problems were a symptom and by-product of bad governance and widespread marginalization of women. The act of planting trees initially brought women together to exchange ideas and tap their knowledge of the environment. Yet, it eventually led them to work for peace and accountability, with some running for local and national positions. In this movement and various others worldwide, the destruction of the environment has politicized women and they have been at the forefront of an integrated analysis of and approach towards halting climate change.

In India, monocropping, or the strategy of planting one crop en masse for higher yields, and the increased used of harsh pesticides has eroded the soil. Large agribusiness corporations have developed and pushed the use of genetically modified seeds for these weaker soils, which have required harsher, more expensive pesticides and not necessarily yielded fruitful harvest. In desperation, such corporations have stolen seeds from local farmers, attempting to patent the seeds using intellectual property laws. [1] Women of the Navdanya movement in these farming communities have been selecting and saving strong seeds as a means of survival and resistance to large agribusiness and a means of maintaining indigenous biodiversity, and they are now fighting the patenting of their seeds in courts.

In Nigeria, partnerships between government officials and corporations have facilitated large-scale drilling and extraction of oil, releasing copious poisonous vapors and robbing local Nigerians of benefiting from or sharing in profits. Instead, local workers face low wages and hazardous working conditions while the surroundings environs are devastated. Using shaming tactics and strength in numbers, women in Nigeria have organized to either shut down the drilling or forced corporations to change their environmental and labor practices, ensuring that both people and the environment are protected.

In Bolivia, women played instrumental roles in community-based struggles against privatization of water provisions in Cochabamba. Faced with a government who decided to turn over the country’s water supply to be managed by large, multinational corporations, who in turn charged exorbitant, prohibitive prices for water, citizens rallied to create water associations and cooperatives, build water storage tanks, construct distribution networks, and drill wells, using limited resources. Acutely aware of the need for water for nutrition, disease eradication, sanitation, hygiene and farming, women worldwide are fighting the impacts of water privatization.

Influencing Policy

At the local level, many women lawyers are invoking legal systems to fight against environmental destruction and climate change. For example, Olya Melen has taken the Ukrainian government to task for allowing large cargo ships to dredge a canal across the Danube Delta wetlands, harming its biodiversity. In Papua New Guinea, Anne Kajir has been fighting for land rights on behalf of indigenous landowners who have seen massive logging in their rainforest. And in Kazakhstan, Kaisha Atakhanova has organized a movement to lobby against her country’s importing of nuclear waste, which has threatened to add to already high occurrences of genetic mutations, cancer and irradiated food resulting from decades of existing nuclear emissions.

At the national level, women form an increasing number of the ranks of Green Parties, which are advancing multi-issue social agendas, especially in Europe. In addition to pushing for environmental concerns to be at the forefront of policymaking agendas, many Green Parties are also concerned with grassroots democracy, sustainable development, nonviolence, women’s rights, indigenous rights and social justice – and many parties’ platforms are set and championed by women leaders in Parliaments.

Women’s rights groups and some researchers in various countries are also lobbying governments to include access to contraception and comprehensive reproductive health services in their agendas and funding to address climate change. A recent study concludes that universal access to reproductive health could be one of the most cost effective ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Also, according to RH Reality Check, an online publication committed to advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights, “rapid population growth can exacerbate existing vulnerability to the impacts of climate change.” The publication explains, for example, that “population growth rates in highly vulnerable low elevation coastal zones in Bangladesh and China are nearly twice as high as national averages; and in Ethiopia, the combination of rapid population growth and climate-induced declines in agricultural production will heighten food insecurity.” [2] Nevertheless, advocates must be cautious that women are not coerced as population control targets in their efforts to curb climate change. At the international level, women’s rights groups have been documenting and raising awareness about the gendered impact of climate change and also building the capacity of local organizations and regional networks to integrate an analysis of and advocacy around climate change integrate into the other issues they address via resource manuals, trainings and convenings.

Women’s rights organizations have also been increasingly participating in high-level climate change discussions, including questioning the dominance of market-driven solutions such as carbon trading to curb emissions. For example, Yifat Susskind of MADRE, an international women’s human rights organization, has explained that carbon trading “allows companies with high carbon emissions to fund projects that supposedly absorb carbon in exchange for their continued pollution. [This] does not address the root cause of climate change, which is unsustainable use of resources. It simply enables the continued emission of carbon. In a perverse way, [it] creates an incentive for carbon pollution by turning emissions into a tradable commodity.” [3]

Amidst a geopolitical landscape populated with powerful and marginalized stakeholders and influenced by complex political and private sector agendas, the upcoming United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen will provide yet another space in which to influence global policy and campaign for gender equality to be brought about in concert with environmental protection.

Learn more about Women’s Strategies to Address Climate Change:

Gender Action

Gender CC – Climate Justice for Women

International Union for Conservation of Nature Gender-Based Advocacy on Climate Change

Oxfam Campaign Against Climate Change

Women’s Environment & Development Organization Campaign on Climate Change

Usually when I post about women and water, I am talking about third world women.  But we can’t forget that there is also a water crisis going on in America.  Bijoyeta Das reports for We News on the conception of the Women Water Walkers in 2003 and also the global day of climate activism where over 4.400 events in 172 countries have been planned for Oct. 24 to draw attention to the need to cut greenhouse emissions.

(WOMENSENEWS)–Their lips wind-burned, feet blistered, shoes worn out. They keep walking.Sometimes they walk as much as 54 miles in a single day, taking turns carrying eight liters of water in a copper pail and an eagle staff, a six-feet long carved staff with eagle feathers attached, which serves as a flag for Native Americans. At night, they rest in the houses of their supporters or in lodging arranged by a casino. Some nights they camp out in the bitter cold.

For six springs, Mother Earth Water Walkers have walked nearly a month to circle one of the Great Lakes in North America.

Since 2003, they have walked the shorelines of Lake Huron, Lake Ontario, Lake Erie and twice around Lake Michigan.

This year they walked up one coast of the St. Lawrence River, starting at Kingston, Ontario, on April 13 and down the other. They ended on May 1 at Riviere-la-Madeleine, Quebec.

Two Anishinawbe women lead the annual event, which started as a Women Water Walk on a cold wet Easter day in 2003 in Odanah, Wisc.

Along the way, many Native American men and women join them.

The goal is to raise awareness that water is essential and sacred.

Call to Lower Greenhouse Emissions

The United Nations Climate Change Conference is scheduled for December in Copenhagen, Denmark. World leaders are expected to clinch a comprehensive global treaty to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

Tomorrow, Oct. 24, over 4,400 events–called climate actions–are being planned in 172 countries to stir public awareness and urge leaders to commit to policies that will lower global levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million. That’s the level that James Hansen, a scientist with the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, has identified as needed to sustain human civilization. The current level, according to a dynamically updating monitor on 350.org, the grassroots group organizing Saturday’s events, is 387.

Along with building the buzz online and through posters, the campaign uses off-the-wall strategies, such as baking cookies at 350 degrees F and stringing up 350 socks and pieces of underwear.

The group’s leaders include Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the 1984 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his work against apartheid; Liz Thompson, an environmental leader for small island developing states, such as Barbados; and Vandana Shiva, an Indian activist for agricultural practices reform and adherent to the alter-globalization movement. The lead organizer is Bill McKibben, a Vermont writer who authored the first book about the dangers of climate change 20 years ago.

But the Water Walkers are not part of this or any media blitz. You won’t find them on Twitter or Facebook.

“We walk the talk,” said Josephine Mandamin, 67, a native of Thunder Bay, Ontario, and founder of the Mother Earth Water Walks, in a phone interview this week. “We don’t have to be on the media and television. You just walk with the water and the people get the message.”

Great Lakes Landscape Changed

The human population of the Great Lakes basin is approximately 42 million, according to a report “State of the Great Lakes,” which was prepared by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, and Environment Canada. Increases in population and urbanization have changed the landscape of the Great Lakes, which in turn may result in an increase in erosion, sediment transport and degradation of water quality in the tributaries and the near-shore areas. Between 1992 and 2001, 2.5 percent (2 million acres) of the Great Lakes basin was subjected to change in land use, according to the 2009 report.

“Some conditions of the Great Lakes are improving while others are deteriorating,” said Phillippa Cannon, a spokesperson for the EPA. One of the current programs of the EPA’s Great Lakes National Office is to clean up contaminated sediments from the most polluted parts, she said.

But when you ask Mandamin about human-made climate change and the havoc scientists say it is wreaking, she says Mother Earth is doing what she can by “cleaning herself” in the form of fires, floods and landslides.

Mandamin described herself as a grandmother “looking after the water for the next generation for the unborn.”

“In every nation, any country, any First Nations that I have heard, women were the carriers of the water, from the wells to the house,” she said.

According to the “State of the Great Lakes” report, the climate in the Great Lakes region is shifting. Winters are shorter, annual average temperature warmer and rain and snow are heavier. The air and water temperatures are increasing, while the lake ice cover is decreasing.

Cannon said that Congress is considering the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, in which the president has proposed $475 million to address the problems in the Great Lakes. “That would certainly make a big difference towards continuing the work of cleaning up the Great Lakes,” she said.

Inspiration for First Walk

The idea for the Water Walks welled up in 2002, from the Sundance Ceremony in Pipestone, Minn., where the Grand Chief E. Benton-Banaise-Bawdwayadun of the Anishinawbe reminded the women of a prophecy made about 10 years ago by an Anishinawbe elder:

“In about 30 years, if we humans continue with our negligence, an ounce of drinking water will cost the same as an ounce of gold.”

The leader also talked about how traditionally women have been the carriers of water and that it is believed that one day women would walk all of the Great Lakes.

That prompted Mandamin to initiate the first Women Water Walk.

In 2003, after a send-off ceremony and feast of moose stew, fish, wild rice and Bannok– a traditional native bread prepared by pan-frying–women from different clans came together to pace the 350 miles of the Lake Superior coastline.

For the last couple of years men have realized their duties, too, and are walking beside the women on the spring treks.

Since 2006, men hold the symbolic eagle staff to give strength during the walks; however, women continue to carry the pail of water. “There was a uniting of the minds for the water, with the water and because of the water,” Mandamin said.

Walking All Day

The Water Walkers wake up before dawn and walk until sundown, thriving on trail mixes, granola bars, fruits and hot soup at night.

They stop to refresh the bucket of water, offer tobacco and petition to the powers of the water. The walks are marked with water songs, hand drums and flute, rain, snow and gales of laughter.

Similar walks are organized elsewhere in North America. The women of Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians in Michigan organize one-day annual water walks.

In June 2008 the Many Horses Foundation, based in Woodstock, Ga., organized a 10-day Walk for the Water for 50 people who walked along the banks of Chattahoochee River.

Gary Fourstar, one of the founders of this event, said the female-dominated group led another 10-day walk for the water, starting at the headwaters of the Tiber River in Italy and ending at the Vatican in 2007. More than 80 people, including Native American elders, participated in the walk.

The goal of the water walk is to spur people to give thanks for their water and to realize that water is alive and needs protection, said Debora Fourstar, president of the Many Horses Foundation and married to Gary Fourstar.

She said the Western world has lost respect and connection with nature.

“We are not here to just take but as the guardian of the natural world,” she said.

Bijoyeta Das is a multimedia journalist based in Boston.

For more information:

Mother Earth Water Walk

Walk for the Water

State of the Great Lakes 2009

The Feminist Peace Network put out a great post for Climate Change Blog Action Day on how climate change, specifically in the form of natural disasters, affects women.

In conjunction with the Climate Change Blog Action Day, I want to focus in  particular on the gendered impact of climate change.  Nowhere is this more obvious than after natural disasters, when women and children are particularly vulnerable, a point illustrated all too well in the post earlier this week on the horrific situation for pregnant women in refugee camps in the Philippines in the aftermath of Typhoon Parma.

Gendered harms are also a consideration in understanding why utilizing population control is not a solution to Global Warming.

In the Different Takes Climate Change Series Winter 2009 issue, Betsy Hartmann lists 10 reasons why the linkage of population control and global warming is problematic.  Note in  particular points 3 and 4 below regarding reproductive and gender  justice. She writes,

Climate change is clearly one of the most urgent problems of our time.  It is also a highly contested policy arena with different actors from all sides of the political spectrum struggling to get a piece of the action. The population control lobby is no exception.  Today, a number of mainstream population and environment groups are claiming that population growth is a major cause of climate change and that lower birth rates are the solution. This view threatens to undermine a progressive climate justice agenda that seeks both to curtail greenhouse gas emissions and to reduce economic, social, gender and racial inequalities. It also poses a danger to reproductive rights.

1. The numbers don’t add up. The industrialized countries, with only 20 percent of the world’s population, are responsible for 80 percent of the accumulated carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere. The U.S. is the worst offender.  In 2002 the U.S. was responsible for 20 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per person, compared to only 0.2 tons in Bangladesh, 0.3 in Kenya and 3.9 in Mexico.

2. Blame games target the wrong people.Wealthy countries, corporations and consumers are getting off the hook. The challenge of climate change presents an opportunity for affluent Americans to rethink their wasteful lifestyles and get on board with a transition to a just and green economy.  The problem is not ‘those people over there’ — it is us, right here.

3. Population control programs erode reproductive rights. Viewing family planning as a means to solve the climate crisis will set back progress on the delivery of safe, voluntary and ethical reproductive health services.  That’s because there’s a big difference between family planning programs designed primarily to reduce birth rates and those premised on reproductive rights as an end that is worthy in itself.

4. Population control is no substitute for gender justice.

5.  Linking population and the environment bolsters anti-immigrant agendas. By attributing environmental degradation to population growth, population and environment groups play into the hands of conservative anti- immigrant forces. In the greening of hate, anti- immigrant groups strategically deploy population arguments to gain support among environmentalists.

6.  Fear-based stereotypes of overpopulation contribute to the militarization of climate change.

7.  Population stereotypes victimize the displaced.

8. Population alarmism encourages apocalyptic thinking and distracts us from
the search for practical solutions to the climate crisis.

9. Shifting the blame for the climate crisis to the Global South prevents international solidarity.

10. Inserting population into the climate change debate divides the environmental movement at a time when we should be coming together. The implicit and explicit race, class and gender biases of population control are detrimental to building an inclusive movement for climate justice. This narrow worldview also blocks a deeper understanding of the economic and political forces that both drive climate change and prevent effective solutions.

In her conclusion, Hartmann writes,

Climate justice, not population control, is the starting point from which we can begin to build the kind of national and international solidarity that is needed to address climate change.  The world is waiting.  we are way behind, and there is no time to lose.

In framing this as an issue for which the solution is solidarity, not control, Hartmann crucially addresses the point that the human made causes of global warming and climate change are, at their root because of our attempts to control our physical world using a power over paradigm which inevitably means that those and that over which power is asserted become powerless.  In contrast, solidarity implies the utilization of power by connection which is a far more sustainable model for transformative change and empowerment.  Hartmann’s work exemplifies the kind of matridynamic paradigm shift that is an absolutely crucial requirement for responsibly addressing the issue of climate change.

———-

Addenda:  The latest issue of Sister Song’s Collective Voices is devoted to Environmental Justice and has several excellent pieces regarding reproductive justice, gender and climate change.  Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice also has a report, Looking Both Ways: Women’s Lives at the Crossroads of Reproductive Justice and Climate Justice which should be considered essential reading in understanding why the holistic linking of these issues is so crucial.

Please also see my post on Reclaiming Medusa, A Plea For The Planet.

Elinor Ostrom won half the Nobel economics prize, making her the first woman ever to receive that honor.

Ostrom, who describes herself as a political scientist and not an economist, won half the 10-million-kronor (1.42-million-dollar, 980,000-euro) prize “for her analysis of economic governance” especially relating to the management of common property or property under common control, such as natural resources. Ostrom’s reaction to her win.

Her work challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatised, the jury said.

A professor at Indiana University whose name has circulated as a possible winner in recent years, Ostrom told Swedish television her first reaction was “great surprise and appreciation,” and said she was “in shock” over being the first woman to clinch the honour.

“If we want to halt the degradation of our natural environment and prevent a repetition of the many collapses of natural-resource stocks experienced in the past, we should learn from the successes and failures of common-property regimes,” the jury said.

“Ostrom’s work teaches us novel lessons about the deep mechanisms that sustain cooperation in human societies,” it added.

She conducted numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes and groundwater basins, and concluded that the outcomes are “more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories,” the jury explained.

Read more about Ostrom and Williamson here

Two powerful videos showing women’s relationship with the environment, from the Women News Network:

Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug passed away last month and in his wake we can study the real effect the green revolution has on the world.

Jill Richardson from the Commonweal Institute writes:

Last month, the world lost a Nobel laureate. In the many tributes following his death, Norman Borlaug was credited with saving more lives than any man in history. Borlaug’s legacy was the Green Revolution – bringing industrial agriculture to Mexico, India, and Pakistan. Pesticides, ammonia fertilizer, irrigation, and hybrid seeds resulted in a predictable outcome: lush green fields full of high-yielding crops. At last, mankind had the tools at its fingertips to overcome hunger.

And yet, hunger has not been banished from the developing world, or even the developed world. Four decades after the Green Revolution the world produces enough food to feed everybody, and yet an estimated billion people are hungry. In his last year, Borlaug joined policy makers in calling for a “Second Green Revolution.” While a global effort to stamp out hunger is needed, a repeat of the first Green Revolution is a bad idea.

Read the rest of her article here on Common Dreams

Johan Hari of The Independent/UK has reported an amazing story this week about a woman who set out to save trees in Africa.

She was born on the floor of a mud hut with no water or electricity in the middle of rural Kenya, in the place where human beings took their first steps. There was no money but there was at least lush green rainforest and cool, clear drinking water. But Maathai watched as the life-preserving landscape of her childhood was hacked down. The forests were felled, the soils dried up, and the rivers died, so a corrupt and distant clique could profit. She started a movement to begin to make the land green again – and in the process she went to prison, nearly died, toppled a dictator, transformed how African women saw themselves, and won a Nobel Prize.

Her name is Wangari Maathai, and she considers herself a “daughter of the soil”.  Humbled be humans needs for trees, she returned to Africa after coming to the U.S. for college.  She was the first woman ever to get a PhD in East or Central Africa.  She convinced international aid organizations to pay some woman from the National Council of Women of Kenya to plant trees.  As Hari says, planting trees turned to planting ideas, and her own husband began to see her Maathai as a threat.

The very public divorce from her husband did not deter her from protesting and soon other men began to see her as a threat also.

But the initial reaction to her protests was frightening. She began to receive anonymous phone calls telling her should shut up or face death. Moi called her a “madwoman,” and announced: “According to African traditions, women should respect their men! She has crossed the line!” When she carried on, she was charged with treason – a crime which carried the death penalty – and was slammed away in prison. She had arthritis, and she says: “In that cold, wet cell my joints ached so much I thought I would die.” But she would not apologise, or give in. “What other people see as fearlessness is really persistence. Because I am focused on the solution, I don’t see the danger. If you only look at the solution, you can defy anyone and appear strong and fearless.”

She went on to get national recognition and has left Africa to spread her knowledge

The rainforests can be killed from two directions – by the saws of men like Moi, or the warming gases of people like us. That is why she has left the land she loves, armed with the Nobel Peace Prize she won in 2004, and travelled so far: to try to persuade us to let the forests live. “There are moments in history when humans have to raise their consciousness and see the world anew. This is one of those moments. We are being called to assist the earth in healing her wounds, and in the process we can heal our own. We can revive our sense of belonging to a larger community of life. We can see who we really are.”

I strongly suggest reading the rest of this amazing woman’s life here

Via Feministing:

New research (PDF) from the London School of Economics (LSE) says that, when it comes to fighting climate change, investing in contraception is five times more effective than technologies such as wind and solar power.

Meeting basic family planning needs along the lines suggested would save 34 gigatonnes (billion tonnes) of CO2 between now and 2050 – equivalent to nearly six times the annual emissions of the US and almost 60 times the UK’s annual total.

In response to the report, some enviro-bloggers have called for “breaking the taboo” on linking population policy with environmental policy. Writes Lydia DePillis at TNR,

[I]t’s simply about reducing the number of footprints as well as their size, through increasing access to reproductive choice–a key element of the development agenda, and something the Obama administration itself endorsed eight months ago, by scrapping the gag rule on family planning. Too bad it looks like that’s totally off-limits in the American environmental discourse.

Now, I do understand that rapid population growth can exacerbate the impact of climate change. And I’m all for meeting global family planning needs. But linking these goals is problematic. I know the LSE report contains a prominent caveat that this is about non-coercive family planning, but using fears about climate change as a way to expand contraceptive use is eerily reminiscent of “population control” policies, some of which were coercive and all of which were rooted in the idea that certain people should be having fewer babies. (For some examples of the historically problematic use of “population control,” check out this report from Hampshire College.) I wonder whether liberals who are favorably linking to the LSE research are aware of how close its rhetoric is to racist talking points about population. Some taboos exist for a reason.

Of course, the LSE report is carefully worded and clearly aware of this history. But it still doesn’t sit right with me. I mean, the study was commissioned by a group called the Optimum Population Trust. Apparently “optimum population” is the new way of saying “population control.” And it seems that Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, is one of the group’s patrons. In the late 1960s, Ehrlich’s book set off a panic that overpopulation would lead to mass starvation in the coming decades — and spurred the U.S. to create its first global family-planning policies, which were not super feminist. (Read Michelle Goldberg’s book for more on this.)

As Claire, guest-blogging at Feministe recently, asked, “Has science ever actually defined the number of people the world and it’s resources can support, or is this fear of a “population bomb” about something else, more to do with which babies are being born than how many are being born?” (Emphasis mine.) Which is why I reject the “population control” frame altogether. Put another way, by Adam Werbach in a 2005 article about population and immigration,

In the population-control frame, the number of people and their placement on the planet is the root problem that needs to be solved. But is that really the problem? Family planning has succeeded only where economic security has been improved for women, including access to food and shelter, health care, and education. With this as background, the real population problem may be the treatment of women on the planet.

We all understand that empowering women to determine their own reproductive fates leads to other benefits — economic, societal, and yes, environmental. But given the history of population policy, to me the only acceptable international family planning policy is one that is motivated by increasing the empowerment and choices for women. Full stop. When we try to intervene in women’s reproductive lives for any other reason, the potential for abuse is just too high.

For more, check out this report from Hampshire College, Rethinking the Link: A Critical Review of Population-Environment Programs (PDF). It looks at this question on a more local scale.

I first heard about Majora Carter on Earth Day in 2006.  She came to speak at my school and her presentation on Sustainable South Bronx was memorizing.  She’s always been on the forefront of the green movement, helping out those who need it most.  Raised in the Bronx, she later returned to turn her community around with campaigns like “green the ghetto”.  GritTV has interviewed her to kick off Climate Action Week, an event with the goal of influencing leaders at the United Nations to take the climate change seriously when they meet in December at Copenhagen.

I’ll let this video do the rest of the talking:

Climate change has forced The Massai – a tribe in Kajiado, Kenya – to compete with animals over the water supply.  The tribe is struggling against the new seasonal weather patterns although they have been residents of the land for centuries.  Their quest for water takes the men into the capital, Nairobi.

As traditional cattle herders, the Maasai have found themselves leaving their homes for months at a time in search of pastures and water for their animals. In most cases this means vulnerable women, children and the elderly are left behind to fend for themselves in the villages.

Ebby Nanzala Wamatsi who wrote the article on The Massai for the Women News Network says in some cases women walk over 10 kilometers to fetch water and still there is a chance that they will return empty handed.   However, with the help of the United Nations Environment Programme, women are also taking action to change their situation.

The project is being spearheaded by the United Nations Environment Programme and the Regional Land Management Unit of the World Agro-forestry Centre. The organisations are providing equipment and training for the women.

To date, over 200 tanks have been constructed under the initiative. The women are also involved in digging mini reservoirs or ‘earth-pans’ to collect run-off water from sloping land. This in turn is used for irrigation purposes to water their crop and vegetable fields.

The women of Kajiado have also begun a tree-planting project to encourage the Maasai to adopt a more settled communal way of life as arable farmers. It makes it compulsory for every household to plant at least a hundred trees.

“It’s time to determine our own destiny. I am anticipating cooler weather. We are fed up with scorching temperatures and spending entire days searching for water,” says Luise Mwoiko, chair of the Mataanobo Women’s Group.

The women’s initiative cooperates to construct water tanks from one homestead to another. And they are proud of their work, as Mwoiko makes clear. “We never bother our men to climb up the tanks and make the final touches. We do it ourselves,” says Mwoiko as she adds that the women’s husbands assist financially in the projects.

Another member, Jerusha Lasoi, said their projects will ensure that the Maasai will no longer require food aid from outside their community. Pointing to her secure reservoir of water, a milk cow and thriving business in vegetable sales, Lasoi felt confident in their future.