People Making a Difference

"50 people who could save the planet" ~ from The Guardian

and

"Americans Who Tell the Truth" ~ from Yes Magazine


Exs. from - "50 people who could save the planet":

Aubrey Meyer
Musician and activist

Can a 60-year-old South African violinist living in a flat in Willesden, north London, actually change the world? It's a serious question because the odds are increasing that over the next two years rich and poor countries will come round to Aubrey Meyer's way of thinking if they are to negotiate a half-decent global deal to reduce climate change emissions.

Nearly 20 years ago, Meyer devised what he believed was the only logical way through the political morass dividing rich and poor countries on climate change. After a letter from him was published in the Guardian, he gave up playing professional music to set up the tiny Global Commons Institute in his bedroom. There he developed the idea that not only did everyone on earth have an equal right to emit CO2, but that all countries should agree to an annual per capita ration or quota of greenhouse gases.

That was the easy bit. But then the musician, who had played with the LPO and had written for the Royal Ballet, went further. Meyer proposed that each country move progressively to the same allocation per inhabitant by an agreed date. This meant that rich countries would have steadily to cut back their emissions, while poor ones would be allowed steadily to grow theirs, with everyone eventually meeting in the middle at a point where science said the global maximum level of emissions should be set. He called it "contraction and convergence" (C&C).

Meyer is nothing if not determined. Since 1990, earning next to nothing and sometimes practically begging for money so he could lobby international meetings, he has pressed C&C at every level of global government. Early opposition came from British civil servants, who said it was akin to communism, and major environmental groups, which were ideologically opposed to any kind of trading emissions. For many years the US government had no interest in any such deal.

But the climate stakes have risen with every new scientific report, and the politicians and environment groups have moved on. As the urgency for a global agreement has grown, so C&C has emerged as one of the favourites to break the international impasse.

"Its advantage is that it is far simpler and fairer than the Kyoto agreement, which applied only to a few rich countries," Meyer says. It also allows science to set the optimum level of emissions; it gets round long-standing US objections that poor countries should be part of a global agreement; and it is inherently pro-business, because it encourages rich and poor countries to trade emissions between themselves.

The long years of single-minded lobbying mean that Meyer's idea now has some powerful backers, including, in Britain, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution; 180 MPs have supported it in an early day motion, and the government, equivocal so far, is moving towards a version of it. It has become official policy in India, China and most African countries. Germany and India are expected to run with it in UN meetings. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has backed C&C publicly.

The long years of single-minded lobbying mean that Meyer's idea now has some powerful backers, including, in Britain, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution; 180 MPs have supported it in an early day motion, and the government, equivocal so far, is moving towards a version of it. It has become official policy in India, China and most African countries. Germany and India are expected to run with it in UN meetings. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has backed C&C publicly.

Other proposals are emerging and it will take two more years to thrash out a system that will please everyone. But few have the elegance of C&C. "It's the least unfair of all the proposals that have been put forward," Meyer says. "It secures survival by correcting both fatal poverty and fatal climate change in the same arrangement."

Writing music and calculating emissions have a lot in common, he says. "Look at a sheet of music and you would not know what it was. But when you hear it played, then it's beautiful. Equally, when you read the calculations on countries' gases, they mean nothing. But when you work out how you can reduce them, it's clear that it's the best thing for humanity."

Meyer still plays the violin every day, but seldom with an orchestra. "I just did not realise that it would take quite so long to change the world," he says.
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Ma Jun
Writer and activist

Ma Jun, 39, became an environmentalist in 1997 after hearing Chinese engineers boast that the Yellow River was a model of water management, even though he knew it was so over-dammed and exploited that it failed to reach the sea on more than 200 days each year. Now he is one of a growing number of people challenging the Chinese culture of official secrecy and saving face. His website names and shames companies and local governments that violate environmental standards, and the former journalist has called to account corporate executives and Communist party cadres with pollution maps. Ma Jun set up the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, which cooperates with the central government in a non-confrontational - but highly pragmatic - campaign strategy. Despite the tight controls imposed on independent organisations by the Communist party, there are now 3,000 registered green NGOs, up from fewer than 50 five years ago.
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Peter Garrett
Politician

Peter Garrett, 54, is the former punk lead singer of the disbanded Australian rock group Midnight Oil, who continued his weird journey from radical muso to establishment politician when he was appointed Australia's environment minister in November. He began with gigs outside Exxon offices and protests at the Sydney Olympics about Aboriginal rights, and found himself labelled a turncoat by some at the election. However, he was nominated here by Jonathon Porritt, for being "instrumental in shaping the Australian Labour party's climate change and environment policies". Within days of his taking office, Australia signed up to the Kyoto climate change treaty, and has broken with the obstructivist policies of President Bush.
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Exs. from "Americans Who Tell the Truth":

Medea Benjamin
Human Rights Advocate, Anti-War Activist, Author (1952 –)

Medea Benjamin was born Susan Benjamin but in college changed her name to that of the Greek mythological woman. She has a Master’s Degree in both Public Health and Economics, and has spent over twenty years advocating for human rights all over the world. Benjamin spent ten years in Latin America and Africa as an economist and nutritionist for such organizations as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization, and lived for five years in Cuba. She is the author of eight books, including Bridging the Global Gap: A Handbook to Linking Citizens of the First and Third Worlds (1989), and Greening of the Revolution: Cuba’s Experiment with Organic Agriculture (1995).

Benjamin and her husband Kevin Danaher co-founded Global Exchange, an organization dedicated to promoting “fair trade” practices, where environmental concerns and fair wages for the production of goods take precedence over corporate profits. She has fought against sweatshops, particularly in the garment and shoe industries, and with Global Exchange persuaded corporate giant Nike to investigate and monitor its overseas factories to ensure safe working environments and living wages. Global Exchange was also a prominent, key factor in organizing the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in December 1999.

It was after the attacks on September 11, 2001, however, that Medea Benjamin’s activism took on a different tone and color – pink. She co-founded CODEPINK: Women for Peace in 2002. It’s a “women-run, women-led peace organization”, whose activities range from personal meetings with members of Congress to dressing in pink surgical scrubs handing out “prescriptions for peace.” Their approach is inventive, often playful, and always in pink, but their goal for peace is serious. Their acts of civil disobedience can be confrontational and often involve members being arrested, but this merely strengthens their resolve. Code Pink’s Members include prominent figures such as Ann Wright and Diane Wilson, but also “regular” women from all over the country, participating in at least 250 chapters. In 2006, Benjamin and Code Pink brought six Iraqi women (Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd) to the US for International Women’s Day to travel and lobby to end the war. She is co-editor of Code Pink’s 2006 book, Stop the Next War Now: Effective Responses to Violence and Terrorism. It’s a collection of essays from people such as Barbara Ehrenreich, Alice Walker, Helen Thomas, and Arianna Huffington.

Medea Benjamin has involved herself in the peace and justice process in a myriad of ways besides Global Exchange and Code Pink. In 2000, she ran for US Senate (for California) on the Green Party ticket. She helped to bring groups together to form the coalition United for Peace and Justice. She’s traveled to Iraq several times and assisted in establishing an occupation and watch center in Baghdad. In 2005, Benjamin was nominated to receive the Nobel Peace Prize as part of the project, “1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005”, a collective nomination representing women who work for peace and human rights everywhere.
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Amy Goodman
Journalist, host of Democracy Now, 1957—

Amy Goodman has the perfect answer when asked who she represents: “Democracy Now.” As host of the only national radio/TV news show free of all corporate underwriting, she is able to present a range of independent voices not often heard on the airwaves. “Dissent,” she explains, “is what makes this country healthy.”

Goodman grew up on Long Island, the descendant of Hasidic rabbis and the daughter of radical parents. After graduating from Harvard in 1984 with a degree in anthropology, she spent 10 years as producer of the evening news show at WBAI, Pacifica Radio’s station in New York City. Democracy Now, which began in 1996, now airs on more than 225 stations across North America.

Goodman believes that media should be, in the title of the 2004 book she wrote with her brother David, The Exception to the Rulers. “The role of reporters,” she says, “is to go to where the silence is and say something.” For going to places like East Timor, Nigeria, Peru, and Haiti to report on stories ignored by the mainstream media, often as considerable risk, she has won many honors including the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism, George Polk, and Overseas Press Club awards.

“She begins broadcasting at 7 a.m., and works until near midnight,” a reporter wrote in the Washington Post. Her fellow journalist Danny Schechter has said, about her, “She works hard and when she's not working, she works harder. She is earnest to a fault, with little patience for folks who may have a more nuanced stance on certain issues than she does. But she is informed, committed, passionate, thorough and very uncompromising.” Goodman is, Schechter says, “in a class of her own.”
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Frances Moore Lappé
Writer, Activist 1944-

Frances Moore Lappe was born in Pendleton Oregon. A graduate of Earlham College in Indiana, she was a “26-year-old trusting her common sense” when she began the research that led to the publication of Diet for a Small Planet (1971), a book which sold over three million copies and changed forever the way people think about food. Her little book showed that human practices, not natural disasters, cause worldwide hunger. Food scarcity results when grain, rich in nutrients and capable of supporting vast populations, is fed to livestock to produce meat which yields only a fraction of those nutrients.

In Food First; Beyond the Myth of Scarcity (written with Joseph Collins, 1977) she went on to identify other causes of starvation: centralized control of farmland and economic pressures to produce “cash” crops rather than basic food products. The authors argued that western colonization of underdeveloped countries create the conditions for waste and poor distribution of food resources that allow whole populations to go hungry. Their vision for feeding the world is one of “food self-reliance,” in which communities produce the food they consume and manufacture the tools and fertilizers that they need.

A passion for the democratic process infuses her work as a co-founder of two national organizations: the Institute for Food and Development Policy based in California and the Center for Living Democracy, a ten-year initiative which encourages “regular citizens to contribute to problem-solving in all dimensions of public life.” In 1987 Lappe became the fourth American to receive the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the “Alternative Nobel,” for her “vision and work healing our planet and uplifting humanity.”

In 2002 Lappe and her daughter, Anna, published Hope’s Edge; The Next Diet for a Small Planet. Like other visionary leaders, Lappe sees hope as something to be lived not sought after: “A lot of people think we find hope by marshaling evidence and proving there is grounds for it. But hope isn’t what we find in evidence; it’s what we become in action.” It is not surprising, then, that her next book is called Choosing Courage in a Culture of Fear.
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Bill McKibben
Author, Environmental Activist, 1960-

Bill McKibben is a writer and avid environmentalist. Currently a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College in Vermont, he has written several books, and contributes regularly to publications such as The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Orion, and Mother Jones. He is on the board of Grist Magazine, for which he also writes articles.

McKibben’s books vary in nature; however, it was his first book that established him as an environmental writer. The End of Nature, published in 1989, spoke to the issue of climate change. Originally serialized in The New Yorker, it was considered the first public-oriented alarm about climate change. With tragedies like Hurricane Katrina finally bringing global warming into sharper focus for everyone (not only scientists and environmentalists), his writings have grown even more important. An active participant in the Methodist Church, he sees religion playing a vital role in protecting the future of Earth. A recent document called the Evangelical Climate Initiative led McKibben to write an article asserting that “even in the evangelical community, “right wing” and “Christian” are not synonyms…given that 85 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians, and that we manage to emit 25 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide – well, the future of Christian environmentalism may have something significant to do with the future of the planet.”

Today, he examines the economy, the environment, and the overall happiness of the US. McKibben writes that formerly, it was accepted that growing the economy would make people wealthier, and therefore happier. Now, he says, “Growth is bumping up against physical limits so profound – like climate change and peak oil – that trying to keep expanding the economy may be not just impossible but also dangerous. And perhaps most surprisingly, growth no longer makes us happier.” McKibben’s latest book, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, states the need “to move beyond growth…begin pursuing prosperity in a more local direction, with cities, suburbs, and regions producing more of their own food, generating more of their own energy…”. This idea builds on his 2003 book, Enough, which imagines genetic engineering, progress, and growth taken too far, and wonders whether it is not better to be fully human than unnaturally perfect.

In 2006, McKibben led a five-day walk across Vermont, demanding legislation to slow US carbon emissions. In early 2007, he founded stepitup2007.org. This unique idea called on people and local groups (including not-so-local groups such as the Sierra Club and the NWF), to organize their own rallies on April 14, 2007. The rallies ranged from a large group of people dressed in blue in Manhattan’s Battery Park, lining up approximately where the sea level would rise with continued glacial melting, to small groups viewing Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth. All called for Congress to pass strict laws to cut carbon emissions by 80 percent by the year 2050.