Equalogy

Posts Tagged ‘united nations’

The World Health Organization (WHO) conducted the first ever study of women’s health around the globe.  In a press release, they summarized some of the main points:

1.  Women provide the bulk of health care but rarely receive the care they need

2.  Women live longer than men but these extra years are not always healthy

3.  Despite some biological advantages, women’s health suffers from their lower socio-economic status

4.  Policy change and action is needed within the health care sector and beyond

The study also concluded that HIV is the leading cause of death and disease of women ages 15-44

From the NYT:

In its first study of women’s health around the globe, the World Health Organization said Monday that H.I.V. is the leading cause of death and disease among women between the ages of 15 and 44. Unprotected sex is the leading risk factor in developing countries for these women of childbearing age; others include iron deficiency and lack of access to contraceptives, said the W.H.O., a United Nations agency. Throughout the world, one in five deaths among women in this age group is linked to unprotected sex, the agency said. The data was included in a report intended to highlight the unequal health treatment a woman faces from birth to death.

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:

I was inspired by a few creative responses to climate change that I saw this week and decided to share two of them with you.  First, a poem about the proposed mining of Liverpool Plains in South Wales and then a demonstration that took place outside the United Nations calling for a reduction in carbon emissions.

Susan Hawthorne wrote and posted this poem in her blog that she is writing from India where she is attending a conference on climate change.  Here it is, via the Feminist Peace Network:

armour dp225

she dreams of making armour for the earth
a helmet to prevent the drillers from beginning
a breastplate so they cannot cut open her heart
greaves to stop the underground lines
breaking through to the water table

it confounds her that anyone would want
to mine Liverpool Plains
to make the earth a corpse to strip
back the muscle layer by layer
to let light in under all that rich deep earth
to groom her for profit burn coal embers
in the asthmatic air the heat increasing
to burn away everything for the emptiness
of waterdrained lungdrained flatlands

Let them eat coal not food.

Here is the demonstration, reported by the ITN News: