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Mamas Mopping Up the World
When ordinary women use their Mama and Grandma power to tackle the environmental challenges in front of them, watch out! Sometimes they even get nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize; )
...to plant your own tree, or to blow the whistle on a corrupt politician, or to refuse to support the corporate dictatorship with your hard-earned money. Read on; ) Hazel Henderson
Hazel Henderson was a young mother in the 1960's, was a brand-new immigrant from England to New York, when she took on the authorities and the political system of New York over the issue of air pollution......and won. She's now recognized as one of the world's leading thinkers on the issues of "quality of life" and sustainable economics. It all started when she took her daughter to play in the park near their apartment and the little girl would come home covered with black grime. Hazel had grown up in Bristol, a really polluted English city, and she still remembered the "Killer Fog" of London in 1952 that killed and sickened so many people. She knew the soot wasn't nice stuff to breathe, but New Yorkers didn't seem to understand that smog can kill. So she said to herself, What can I do? She started asking other mothers whose children played in that park what they thought of the soot in the air.
More... Wangari Muta Maathai
Dr. Wangari Muta Maathai, former professor of veterinary anatomy at the University of Nairobi, won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize and founded the Green Belt Movement in Kenya... ...while raising three kids by herself and trying to stay one step ahead of the dictator's henchmen. On the campaign trail with her (now ex!) husband, she heard him make promises to the people that he quickly forgot once elected, but Wangari took those promises seriously and vowed to keep them herself. Listening to the poor women from the countryside, she realized that everything they were suffering was due to damage done to the environment. Loss of forests and natural vegetation, loss of soil, malnutrition, lack of water - all of it could be linked directly to misuse of the land for short-term profits. It came to her: Why not plant trees? "This is how the Green Belt Movement began," she writes in her wonderful autobiography, Unbowed. "If I'd picked something other than trees my efforts might have failed...."
More... Vandana Shiva
Dr. Vandana Shiva, physicist, ecologist, farmer, activist, author.This is my favorite story about Dr. Shiva. When she was thirteen, she decided that instead of the handwoven cotton dresses she'd always been given to wear by her mother, she wanted a new synthetic-fabric dress like all her friends were wearing. Her mother, an educator and farmer, replied that of course she could have the dress she wanted - however, buying that dress would help a rich man buy a new car...while buying a handwoven cotton dress would put food on a poor family's table: Her choice. She chose the hand-made cotton, and that choice set the table for the rest of her life.
More... Frances Moore Lappe
Frances Moore Lappe, author of "Diet for a Small Planet" and "Hope's Edge", and food abundance activist.She was in her twenties, in graduate school, when she proved through extensive and rigorous investigation that hunger around the world is not caused by lack of food, but by lack of democracy. That investigation led to her first book, "Diet for a Small Planet", which was groundbreaking, to say the least. It schooled a whole generation about hunger and food scarcity. Then thirty years later, she found to her surprise that the "green revolution" scientists were using the same - wrong - arguments that she'd known were false all those years before. People were dying of starvation, and the modern answer was to introduce genetically modified crops that would "feed the third world". She couldn't believe her ears! Her children, now grown, encouraged her to continue with the work she'd started years ago with "Diet...", and a project was born. She traveled with her daughter, Anna, to India, to Pakistan, to Tibet, to South America - to the mostly-women small farmers and tree-planters who resist "Western" corporate food production.
More... Overwhelmingly, we women care about the environment.
Bottom line: Global warming is not an issue to leave to the BOYS. Since when have they ever been able to figure out when enough is enough; time to get up off the couch and DO something??
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