The Biggest Floating Christmas Tree in the World,
is Inaugurated in Rio De Janeiro
Event brought together thousands of people at the Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil, Nov 29, 2008 The inaugural event of the 13th consecutive edition of the Christmas Tree of Bradesco Seguros e Previdencia, the biggest floating Christmas tree in the world according to the Guinness Book of Records, brought together thousands of people this Saturday (November 29, 2008). Considered the third greatest event in the city of Rio de Janeiro, after Carnaval and New Year's Eve, the Tree brings something new for 2008 in the form of "A melody of peace for the Brazilian family." The spectacle of lights and colors has taken on a musical touch. An electronic carillon, imported from Italy and similar to the one used in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican, has been installed within its structure to reproduce Christmas carols with bells played manually by professional bell-ringers. There are also fireworks scheduled for every Saturday.
The programming of the inaugural event, with a live television broadcast in real time by the Tree's hot site included a concert given by popular Brazilian artists such as singers Elba Ramalho, Joao Bosco, Roberta Sa and guitarist Turibio Santos, as well as the Choir of the Bradesco Foundation, made up of 112 young students. The American soprano Carol McDavit, who has been settled in Brazil for the past 20 years, also made an appearance.
The project has become the largest event sponsored by a single private company in Brazil. This is the 13th edition of the Christmas Tree of Bradesco Seguros e Previdencia, which for the first time will have thirteen flashing sequences of different images to dazzle the public. At the top of the 85- meter Tree, the star is now accompanied by two angels representing peace. The 52 kilometers of lighted strands are to evoke the Christmas theme, and 1,600 flashing lights are to evoke twinkling stars.
Certification in the Guinness Book
The second certification in the Guinness Book of Records, as the "largest floating Christmas tree in the world," was obtained because of the height of 85 meters in 2007 and recorded in the recently published 2009 edition. With its launching in 1996, the Tree was 48 meters high and up until the 2006 edition, 82 meters. The first certification in the Guinness book was awarded in 1999, when this symbol of Christmas measured 76 meters.
Technology and the Environment
For the past three years, the Christmas Tree of Bradesco Seguros e Previdencia has had generators fueled by biodiesel to reduce carbon emissions into the atmosphere. For the third year, to ensure rationality in the consumption of fuel, the generators will be controlled by a computerized system.
Neutralization of Carbon
Emissions of carbon gas into the atmosphere produced by the assembly, display and dismantling of the Tree will be neutralized by the planting of trees in regions of the Mata Atlantica rainforest.
WWW.ARVORENATALBRADESCOSEGUROS.COM.BR/FOTOS
rainforestpower Headline Animator
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Friday, November 28, 2008
Amazon deforestation rises slightly to 4,600 square miles in 2008
Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon increased slightly for the August 2007-July 2008 period, reports the country's National Institute of Space Research (INPE). The rise is the first since 2004 when 27,379 square kilometers were destroyed, but is lower than forecast. The 2008 figure is the second-lowest annual loss since 1991.
INPE estimates that 11,968 square kilometers (4,600 square miles) of rainforest were cleared during the recent period, a 3.8 percent increase from the 11,532 sq km lost during the prior year. The figures are lower than forecasts put forth earlier this year, possibly due to the recent collapse in commodity prices. Clearing in the Amazon is increasingly linked to beef and grain markets — as prices rise, farmers and ranchers convert more rainforest land.
The Brazilian government has also stepped up efforts to rein in illegal forest-clearing, including enacting new environmental laws, establishing protected areas, and launching a series of highly-publicized raids on illicit logging and farming operations. In August President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva unveiled a $21 billion donation-based fund to finance conservation and sustainable development projects in the region. Norway has already committed a billion dollars to the initiative.
While low commodity prices and increased government action may temper forest clearing in the Brazilian Amazon, Earth's largest rainforest is far from safe. Regional climate trends indicate that large swathes of the Amazon are increasingly susceptible to drought and fire. Coupled with continued deforestation, degradation, and fragmentation, some researchers say the Amazon is approaching a critical tipping point which could see more than half of the forest damaged or destroyed within a generation.
The Brazilian Amazon accounts for roughly sixty percent of the Amazon rainforest. The bulk of Amazon deforestation occurs in Brazil, although clearing is increasing in Peru due to infrastructure expansion and logging.
http://news.mongabay.com/2008/1128-amazon.html
INPE estimates that 11,968 square kilometers (4,600 square miles) of rainforest were cleared during the recent period, a 3.8 percent increase from the 11,532 sq km lost during the prior year. The figures are lower than forecasts put forth earlier this year, possibly due to the recent collapse in commodity prices. Clearing in the Amazon is increasingly linked to beef and grain markets — as prices rise, farmers and ranchers convert more rainforest land.
The Brazilian government has also stepped up efforts to rein in illegal forest-clearing, including enacting new environmental laws, establishing protected areas, and launching a series of highly-publicized raids on illicit logging and farming operations. In August President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva unveiled a $21 billion donation-based fund to finance conservation and sustainable development projects in the region. Norway has already committed a billion dollars to the initiative.
While low commodity prices and increased government action may temper forest clearing in the Brazilian Amazon, Earth's largest rainforest is far from safe. Regional climate trends indicate that large swathes of the Amazon are increasingly susceptible to drought and fire. Coupled with continued deforestation, degradation, and fragmentation, some researchers say the Amazon is approaching a critical tipping point which could see more than half of the forest damaged or destroyed within a generation.
The Brazilian Amazon accounts for roughly sixty percent of the Amazon rainforest. The bulk of Amazon deforestation occurs in Brazil, although clearing is increasing in Peru due to infrastructure expansion and logging.
http://news.mongabay.com/2008/1128-amazon.html
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
New Brazil plan to save Amazon tribes
Radar to be used to locate groups of isolated Indians
Rio de Janeiro: The Brazilian government has said it would employ heat-seeking radar in a last-ditch attempt to save the country’s remaining groups of isolated Indians. The body-heat sensors will be mounted on a Brazilian air force jet normally used to monitor rainforest destruction and will be used to locate an estimated 39 groups of isolated indigenous people, hidden deep in the Amazon rainforest.
The authorities hope the system will help to protect them from loggers, goldminers and ranchers.
Antenor Vaz, the coordinator for isolated tribes at Brazil’s National Indian Foundation, said the system would allow authorities to locate tribes without disturbing their way of life.
“We have been using planes more and more, not just to monitor [isolated tribes] but also to find new references,” he said. But even the use of small planes brought disruption to the tribes because they flew at low altitude, he said.
Brazil’s isolated Indians hit the headlines in May when aerial photographs of a remote tribe near the border with Peru were released. Several tribesmen could be seen firing arrows at the plane.
Mr. Vaz said the sensors mounted on planes flying at high altitude meant the tribes would not even know they were being monitored.
By locating Brazil’s last isolated tribes, campaigners hope the process of land demarcation can be speeded up, helping to guarantee the protection of their ancestral lands.
Campaigners say the Amazon may be home to the largest number of uncontacted tribes in the world. The authorities have long grappled with the dilemma of how best to treat indigenous groups who have had little or no contact with outsiders.
For hundreds of years colonisers and explorers have trekked through the jungle, coming into contact with these tribes, often with catastrophic results. There are thought to have been around six million indigenous people when the Portuguese arrived in Brazil in 1500. Today there are fewer than 3,00,000. Violence and western diseases such as flu have devastated many indigenous communities.
In the 1980s thousands of gold prospectors poured into areas inhabited by Yanomami Indians, in northern Brazil, triggering genocide, human rights groups claimed. Some sources say up to 20% of the Yanomami people died in seven years. Since the late 1980s government policy towards uncontacted tribes has shifted to a “stay away” approach. A handful of sertanistas, or explorers, work in the rainforest trying to locate tribes without coming into direct contact with them.
No life in danger
Fiona Watson, Brazil campaigner for Survival International, an indigenous rights group, said there could be as many as 20 uncontacted tribes living in the Amazon rainforest. “The idea of the remote sensors means you are not going to put any lives in danger [by making contact],” she said.
She said contact between isolated tribes and government employees had proved disastrous in the past, with 50% of some tribes being wiped out by disease in the first year after contact.
Mr. Vaz said the radar’s first mission would be to confirm the existence of isolated tribes in the Amazon state of Mato Grosso, a region that loggers, ranchers and soy farmers have turned into ground zero for rainforest destruction.
“The priority will be Mato Grosso where the process of devastation is happening the quickest,” he said.
He said members of the military and representatives of the National Indian Foundation would meet soon to plan “when and where” the flyovers would take place.
‘Emergency’
In an interview with the Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo, the president of Brazil’s National Indian Foundation, Marcio Meira, admitted that time was running out for isolated Indians in the region. According to newspaper reports there were only two male members left of one of the region’s tribes, the Piripkura.
“The situation there is an emergency,” Mr. Meira said.
Ms. Watson said several of the region’s tribes were “facing genocide unless the Brazilian authorities take immediate action to demarcate and protect their land”.
www.thehindu.com/2008/11/24/stories/2008112455482000.htm
Rio de Janeiro: The Brazilian government has said it would employ heat-seeking radar in a last-ditch attempt to save the country’s remaining groups of isolated Indians. The body-heat sensors will be mounted on a Brazilian air force jet normally used to monitor rainforest destruction and will be used to locate an estimated 39 groups of isolated indigenous people, hidden deep in the Amazon rainforest.
The authorities hope the system will help to protect them from loggers, goldminers and ranchers.
Antenor Vaz, the coordinator for isolated tribes at Brazil’s National Indian Foundation, said the system would allow authorities to locate tribes without disturbing their way of life.
“We have been using planes more and more, not just to monitor [isolated tribes] but also to find new references,” he said. But even the use of small planes brought disruption to the tribes because they flew at low altitude, he said.
Brazil’s isolated Indians hit the headlines in May when aerial photographs of a remote tribe near the border with Peru were released. Several tribesmen could be seen firing arrows at the plane.
Mr. Vaz said the sensors mounted on planes flying at high altitude meant the tribes would not even know they were being monitored.
By locating Brazil’s last isolated tribes, campaigners hope the process of land demarcation can be speeded up, helping to guarantee the protection of their ancestral lands.
Campaigners say the Amazon may be home to the largest number of uncontacted tribes in the world. The authorities have long grappled with the dilemma of how best to treat indigenous groups who have had little or no contact with outsiders.
For hundreds of years colonisers and explorers have trekked through the jungle, coming into contact with these tribes, often with catastrophic results. There are thought to have been around six million indigenous people when the Portuguese arrived in Brazil in 1500. Today there are fewer than 3,00,000. Violence and western diseases such as flu have devastated many indigenous communities.
In the 1980s thousands of gold prospectors poured into areas inhabited by Yanomami Indians, in northern Brazil, triggering genocide, human rights groups claimed. Some sources say up to 20% of the Yanomami people died in seven years. Since the late 1980s government policy towards uncontacted tribes has shifted to a “stay away” approach. A handful of sertanistas, or explorers, work in the rainforest trying to locate tribes without coming into direct contact with them.
No life in danger
Fiona Watson, Brazil campaigner for Survival International, an indigenous rights group, said there could be as many as 20 uncontacted tribes living in the Amazon rainforest. “The idea of the remote sensors means you are not going to put any lives in danger [by making contact],” she said.
She said contact between isolated tribes and government employees had proved disastrous in the past, with 50% of some tribes being wiped out by disease in the first year after contact.
Mr. Vaz said the radar’s first mission would be to confirm the existence of isolated tribes in the Amazon state of Mato Grosso, a region that loggers, ranchers and soy farmers have turned into ground zero for rainforest destruction.
“The priority will be Mato Grosso where the process of devastation is happening the quickest,” he said.
He said members of the military and representatives of the National Indian Foundation would meet soon to plan “when and where” the flyovers would take place.
‘Emergency’
In an interview with the Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo, the president of Brazil’s National Indian Foundation, Marcio Meira, admitted that time was running out for isolated Indians in the region. According to newspaper reports there were only two male members left of one of the region’s tribes, the Piripkura.
“The situation there is an emergency,” Mr. Meira said.
Ms. Watson said several of the region’s tribes were “facing genocide unless the Brazilian authorities take immediate action to demarcate and protect their land”.
www.thehindu.com/2008/11/24/stories/2008112455482000.htm
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Tribe and Tribulation
DANIEL Everett looks and talks much like the middle-aged American academic he is — until he drops a strange word into the conversation. An exceptionally melodic noise tumbles from his mouth. It doesn't sound like speaking at all.
Apart from his ex-wife and two ageing missionaries, Everett is the only person in the world beyond the sweeping banks of the Maici River in the Amazon basin who can speak Piraha.
Just 350 Piraha (pronounced Pee-da-HAN) hunt and gather from their simple homes in the Brazilian rainforest. Linguists believe their language is unrelated to any other. This obscure Amazonian people speak using only three vowels and eight consonants (including the glottal stop) but their language is far from simple.
Like Chinese, for example, Piraha is tonal, and speaking in a different pitch transforms the meaning of a word. Unlike other tonal languages, Piraha can also be hummed and sung. The Piraha have no socially lubricating "hello" and "thank you" and "sorry". They have no words for colours or numbers and no way of expressing any history beyond that experienced in their lifetimes.
In the late 1970s, Everett was dispatched to the Amazon to learn their language, translate the Bible and convert them to Christianity. The idea that we can be enlightened or destroyed by living with exotic people has transfixed Western societies since before Joseph Conrad's rogue trader Kurtz was corrupted in the Congo. Yet Everett's life could be a more dramatic example of enlightenment and destruction than any fictional encounter with a drastically different culture.
Thirty years of living with the Piraha destroyed his evangelical faith in God, wrecked his marriage and estranged him from two of his three children. It also dismantled his intellectual framework and set him on a collision course with one of the most influential intellectuals in the world.
Today, he is continuing his fight with Noam Chomsky in a debate that could transform our understanding of human language.
Everett is taking a working break from his professorial duties at Illinois State University. He grew up in a "redneck" home on the Mexican border. His father was a cowboy but Everett developed an interest in language after mixing with Spanish speakers at school. He was "pretty heavily into drugs" in '60s California, he says, until he met Keren Graham at high school. She had spent her childhood with her missionary parents in the Amazon; Everett was converted. "I credit religion with getting me out of drug culture," he says.
He and Graham were married at 18 and had three children. After joining a missionary organisation and studying linguistics, Everett and his young family were dispatched to the Piraha, where two other missionaries had spent two decades struggling to pick up the language and failing to convert any Piraha. Everett's first visit ended when his wife and daughter nearly died from malaria. He persevered, spending all of 1980 with the Piraha and returning to live with them for four months or so every year for the next two decades.
Despite close encounters with snakes and Brazilian traders who incited the Piraha to kill Everett, the missionary/linguist befriended the Piraha and painstakingly picked up their extraordinary language.
Everett's discovery of the elegant linguistic theories of Chomsky was his second conversion experience. At the time, Chomsky was not merely known for his trenchant, left-leaning political activism but was revered as the father of modern linguistics for his theory of "universal grammar".
Following Chomsky's idea that humans are innately programmed to produce language according to a fixed and finite set of rules, Everett studied for a doctorate in the '80s and took advice from Chomsky. Gradually, however, as he spent more time with the Piraha, he came to doubt Chomsky's claims of universality.
These doubts exploded three years ago like "a bomb thrown into the party", in the words of psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker, who initially welcomed Everett's findings against Chomsky before becoming more critical. In 2005, Everett published a paper about the Piraha that rocked the foundations of universal grammar.
Chomsky had recently refined his theory to argue that recursion — the linguistic practice of inserting phrases inside others — was the cornerstone of all languages. (An example of recursion is extending the sentence "Daniel Everett talked about the story of his life" to read "Daniel Everett flew to London and talked about the story of his life".) Everett argued that he could find no evidence of recursion in Piraha.
This was deeply troubling for Chomsky's theory. If the Piraha don't use recursion, then how could it be a fundamental part of a universal grammar embedded in our genes? If the Piraha don't use recursion, then is their language — and, by implication, other languages — determined not by biology but by culture?
Thirty years of living with the Piraha has taught Everett that they exist almost completely in the present. Absorbed by the daily struggle to survive, they do not plan ahead, store food, build houses or canoes to last, maintain tools or talk of things beyond those that they, or people they know, have experienced. They are the
"ultimate empiricists", he argues, and this culture of living in the present has shaped their language.
Everett's claims created a furore. Chomskyites rushed to defend universal grammar and academics cast doubt on Everett's view of the Piraha. Nineteenth-century anthropologists had judged exotic peoples similarly, saying they had no creation myths and apparently crude languages that could not count or convey abstract thought, before it was proved it was our erroneous understanding of these "primitive" societies that was primitive.
"By framing his observations as an anti-Chomsky discovery rather than as un-PC Eurocentric condescension, Everett was able to get away with claims that would have aroused the fury of anthropologists in any other context," wrote the increasingly sceptical Pinker, who argued that even if there was "a grain of truth" in the Piraha's preoccupation with the here and now, it was by no means unique to their society. In other words, Everett was an almost racist throwback to the days of, well, missionaries.
Yet Everett's life with the Piraha didn't just cause a gradual disenchantment with the Chomskyan intellectual framework he had once cherished: it also triggered another, even more dramatic, de-conversion.
Soon after he first arrived in the Amazon, Everett was nearly killed when the Piraha discovered he was ordering passing river traders not to give them whisky. The Piraha were rarely violent, but intensely rejected any kind of coercion.
Crucially, Everett came to see his religion as fundamentally coercive. His academic studies were ultimately designed to help him translate the Bible into Piraha. When they heard the word of God, his evangelic mission believed, they would be converted. Everett translated the Book of Luke, read it to the Piraha and they were utterly unmoved. By 1985, he had privately lost his faith.
"It's wrong to try and convert tribal societies," he says. "What should the empirical evidence for religion be? It should produce peaceful, strong, secure people who are right with God and right with the world. I don't see that evidence very often.
"So then I find myself with the Piraha. They have all these qualities that I am trying to tell them they could have. They are the ones who are living life the way I'm saying it ought to be lived, they just don't fear heaven and hell."
His wife, Keren, and three children were all committed Christians. Extraordinarily, Everett couldn't tell them of his loss of faith until the late '90s. "I kept hoping that I might get my faith back," he says.
He likens telling his wife to coming out as gay. "I said, 'I just can't do this any more, I can't pretend, I don't believe this stuff.' So she immediately called the kids to tell them. It was just such utter shock and revulsion."
Did they feel betrayed? "Yes, they felt betrayed. My youngest daughter said, 'Were you a hypocrite the whole time you were raising us? Did you teach us to believe one way, which you never believed?' I did believe. I had a genuine, sincere conversion experience. I was quite a successful evangelist. I've had people write to me and say, 'Gee, I'm a Christian because of you and I hear you're not a Christian, that's shocking to me.' I don't take these things lightly but that's who I am. I can't change it."
Murder is rare among the Piraha. The only punishment they regularly practise is ostracising members of their society. It seems a bitter irony that Everett's loss of faith caused his ostracism not from the Piraha, but from his own family. His marriage broke up. "After a couple of months I tried to get us back together and she said, 'Only when you come back to religion will I even consider it,' and I said, 'Well, then it's over.' "
Two of his grown-up children, Shannon, a missionary like her mother, and Caleb, an anthropologist like his father, cut off all contact. Three weeks ago, after the death of a close friend, they got back in touch for the first time in years. "Now they are coming around." An almost imperceptible tremor registers in Everett's voice. "Maybe I'm coming around. We're approaching one another and realising the most important thing is love."
Everett, who has remarried, has not visited the Piraha since January 2007. It has been his longest period apart from them. Occasionally, his ex-wife, who is still pursuing her missionary work on the banks of the Maici, will put them on the satellite phone.
"I know they are not understanding why I haven't been there," he says. But it is difficult to return with his ex-wife there. "There will always be tension," he says. "She believes that if the Pirahas reject the gospel, it's because it hasn't been communicated clearly. I believe it has been communicated clearly and they reject it because it's utterly irrelevant."
It's almost tragic: Keren's beliefs impugn Everett's competence; Everett's findings attack her entire belief system.
For academics rushing to the defence of the Chomskyan model there is another problem: Everett is the only linguist in the world who is fluent in Piraha and virtually the only academic to have gathered data on the language. It must be hard not to feel possessive of the Piraha, but Everett claims he wants academics to go there and test his theories. He just doesn't want to be dragged along to translate for them.
Despite challenging the linguistic theories he once followed, Everett insists he still has tremendous respect for Chomsky. "I'm not denigrating his intelligence or his honesty but I do think he is wrong about this and he is unprepared to accept that he is wrong."
Everett hopes his story of his life with the Piraha will demolish charges that his account of their society is crude and politically incorrect. "If you can find evidence that I am making 19th-century claims, I will be shocked and disappointed in myself," he says. "If anything, they are superior in many ways to us. Thinking too much about the future or worrying too much about the past is really unhealthy. The Piraha taught me that very lesson.
"Living in the moment is a sophisticated way to live. I don't see depression. I don't see some of the things that afflict our society — and that's not because they don't face pressures. People who claim that I'm Eurocentric and putting these people down need to read the book and decide for themselves."
THE Piraha population has climbed back to 350 after a measles epidemic is believed to have reduced it to about 100 in the 1950s. They have had contact with traders and missionaries for 200 years and have proved remarkably resistant to change. They live on a 300,000-hectare reservation, which is reasonably secure, says Everett. So far, at least, no precious minerals have been found in the area as has happened elsewhere in the Amazon, bringing miners, deforestation, pollution and disease.
Everett, however, is pessimistic about their future. Missionaries and government officials see Piraha society as poor and seek to help by giving them money and modern technology.
"The Piraha aren't poor. They don't see themselves as poor," he says. He believes capitalism and religion are manufacturing desires. "One of the saddest things I've seen in Amazonian cultures is people who were self-sufficient and happy that now think of themselves as poor and become dissatisfied with their lives. What worries me is outsiders trying to impose their values and materialism on the Piraha."
I wonder whether Everett feels grateful for his life with the Piraha or scarred by it.
"It has been a traumatic experience," he says. "There is a lot of good and there has been a lot of pain. There are times when I think of the Piraha with great nostalgia and want to be with them, and there are other times I think I am really tired."
He hopes to return next winter to help a BBC/HBO documentary and continue his research, but only on the condition that the visitors do not disrupt the Piraha.
What does he miss the most? "I miss the evenings. After I've gone down to the river to have a bath, I would make coffee for everyone in the village. We'd sit around on logs out in the open and wait until the night fell, and talk. They are just an incredibly peaceful, sweet people to be with. The time spent talking to them, these will always be the best memories I have."
http://www.theage.com.au/world/tribe-and-tribulations-20081121-6e47.html?page=-1
Apart from his ex-wife and two ageing missionaries, Everett is the only person in the world beyond the sweeping banks of the Maici River in the Amazon basin who can speak Piraha.
Just 350 Piraha (pronounced Pee-da-HAN) hunt and gather from their simple homes in the Brazilian rainforest. Linguists believe their language is unrelated to any other. This obscure Amazonian people speak using only three vowels and eight consonants (including the glottal stop) but their language is far from simple.
Like Chinese, for example, Piraha is tonal, and speaking in a different pitch transforms the meaning of a word. Unlike other tonal languages, Piraha can also be hummed and sung. The Piraha have no socially lubricating "hello" and "thank you" and "sorry". They have no words for colours or numbers and no way of expressing any history beyond that experienced in their lifetimes.
In the late 1970s, Everett was dispatched to the Amazon to learn their language, translate the Bible and convert them to Christianity. The idea that we can be enlightened or destroyed by living with exotic people has transfixed Western societies since before Joseph Conrad's rogue trader Kurtz was corrupted in the Congo. Yet Everett's life could be a more dramatic example of enlightenment and destruction than any fictional encounter with a drastically different culture.
Thirty years of living with the Piraha destroyed his evangelical faith in God, wrecked his marriage and estranged him from two of his three children. It also dismantled his intellectual framework and set him on a collision course with one of the most influential intellectuals in the world.
Today, he is continuing his fight with Noam Chomsky in a debate that could transform our understanding of human language.
Everett is taking a working break from his professorial duties at Illinois State University. He grew up in a "redneck" home on the Mexican border. His father was a cowboy but Everett developed an interest in language after mixing with Spanish speakers at school. He was "pretty heavily into drugs" in '60s California, he says, until he met Keren Graham at high school. She had spent her childhood with her missionary parents in the Amazon; Everett was converted. "I credit religion with getting me out of drug culture," he says.
He and Graham were married at 18 and had three children. After joining a missionary organisation and studying linguistics, Everett and his young family were dispatched to the Piraha, where two other missionaries had spent two decades struggling to pick up the language and failing to convert any Piraha. Everett's first visit ended when his wife and daughter nearly died from malaria. He persevered, spending all of 1980 with the Piraha and returning to live with them for four months or so every year for the next two decades.
Despite close encounters with snakes and Brazilian traders who incited the Piraha to kill Everett, the missionary/linguist befriended the Piraha and painstakingly picked up their extraordinary language.
Everett's discovery of the elegant linguistic theories of Chomsky was his second conversion experience. At the time, Chomsky was not merely known for his trenchant, left-leaning political activism but was revered as the father of modern linguistics for his theory of "universal grammar".
Following Chomsky's idea that humans are innately programmed to produce language according to a fixed and finite set of rules, Everett studied for a doctorate in the '80s and took advice from Chomsky. Gradually, however, as he spent more time with the Piraha, he came to doubt Chomsky's claims of universality.
These doubts exploded three years ago like "a bomb thrown into the party", in the words of psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker, who initially welcomed Everett's findings against Chomsky before becoming more critical. In 2005, Everett published a paper about the Piraha that rocked the foundations of universal grammar.
Chomsky had recently refined his theory to argue that recursion — the linguistic practice of inserting phrases inside others — was the cornerstone of all languages. (An example of recursion is extending the sentence "Daniel Everett talked about the story of his life" to read "Daniel Everett flew to London and talked about the story of his life".) Everett argued that he could find no evidence of recursion in Piraha.
This was deeply troubling for Chomsky's theory. If the Piraha don't use recursion, then how could it be a fundamental part of a universal grammar embedded in our genes? If the Piraha don't use recursion, then is their language — and, by implication, other languages — determined not by biology but by culture?
Thirty years of living with the Piraha has taught Everett that they exist almost completely in the present. Absorbed by the daily struggle to survive, they do not plan ahead, store food, build houses or canoes to last, maintain tools or talk of things beyond those that they, or people they know, have experienced. They are the
"ultimate empiricists", he argues, and this culture of living in the present has shaped their language.
Everett's claims created a furore. Chomskyites rushed to defend universal grammar and academics cast doubt on Everett's view of the Piraha. Nineteenth-century anthropologists had judged exotic peoples similarly, saying they had no creation myths and apparently crude languages that could not count or convey abstract thought, before it was proved it was our erroneous understanding of these "primitive" societies that was primitive.
"By framing his observations as an anti-Chomsky discovery rather than as un-PC Eurocentric condescension, Everett was able to get away with claims that would have aroused the fury of anthropologists in any other context," wrote the increasingly sceptical Pinker, who argued that even if there was "a grain of truth" in the Piraha's preoccupation with the here and now, it was by no means unique to their society. In other words, Everett was an almost racist throwback to the days of, well, missionaries.
Yet Everett's life with the Piraha didn't just cause a gradual disenchantment with the Chomskyan intellectual framework he had once cherished: it also triggered another, even more dramatic, de-conversion.
Soon after he first arrived in the Amazon, Everett was nearly killed when the Piraha discovered he was ordering passing river traders not to give them whisky. The Piraha were rarely violent, but intensely rejected any kind of coercion.
Crucially, Everett came to see his religion as fundamentally coercive. His academic studies were ultimately designed to help him translate the Bible into Piraha. When they heard the word of God, his evangelic mission believed, they would be converted. Everett translated the Book of Luke, read it to the Piraha and they were utterly unmoved. By 1985, he had privately lost his faith.
"It's wrong to try and convert tribal societies," he says. "What should the empirical evidence for religion be? It should produce peaceful, strong, secure people who are right with God and right with the world. I don't see that evidence very often.
"So then I find myself with the Piraha. They have all these qualities that I am trying to tell them they could have. They are the ones who are living life the way I'm saying it ought to be lived, they just don't fear heaven and hell."
His wife, Keren, and three children were all committed Christians. Extraordinarily, Everett couldn't tell them of his loss of faith until the late '90s. "I kept hoping that I might get my faith back," he says.
He likens telling his wife to coming out as gay. "I said, 'I just can't do this any more, I can't pretend, I don't believe this stuff.' So she immediately called the kids to tell them. It was just such utter shock and revulsion."
Did they feel betrayed? "Yes, they felt betrayed. My youngest daughter said, 'Were you a hypocrite the whole time you were raising us? Did you teach us to believe one way, which you never believed?' I did believe. I had a genuine, sincere conversion experience. I was quite a successful evangelist. I've had people write to me and say, 'Gee, I'm a Christian because of you and I hear you're not a Christian, that's shocking to me.' I don't take these things lightly but that's who I am. I can't change it."
Murder is rare among the Piraha. The only punishment they regularly practise is ostracising members of their society. It seems a bitter irony that Everett's loss of faith caused his ostracism not from the Piraha, but from his own family. His marriage broke up. "After a couple of months I tried to get us back together and she said, 'Only when you come back to religion will I even consider it,' and I said, 'Well, then it's over.' "
Two of his grown-up children, Shannon, a missionary like her mother, and Caleb, an anthropologist like his father, cut off all contact. Three weeks ago, after the death of a close friend, they got back in touch for the first time in years. "Now they are coming around." An almost imperceptible tremor registers in Everett's voice. "Maybe I'm coming around. We're approaching one another and realising the most important thing is love."
Everett, who has remarried, has not visited the Piraha since January 2007. It has been his longest period apart from them. Occasionally, his ex-wife, who is still pursuing her missionary work on the banks of the Maici, will put them on the satellite phone.
"I know they are not understanding why I haven't been there," he says. But it is difficult to return with his ex-wife there. "There will always be tension," he says. "She believes that if the Pirahas reject the gospel, it's because it hasn't been communicated clearly. I believe it has been communicated clearly and they reject it because it's utterly irrelevant."
It's almost tragic: Keren's beliefs impugn Everett's competence; Everett's findings attack her entire belief system.
For academics rushing to the defence of the Chomskyan model there is another problem: Everett is the only linguist in the world who is fluent in Piraha and virtually the only academic to have gathered data on the language. It must be hard not to feel possessive of the Piraha, but Everett claims he wants academics to go there and test his theories. He just doesn't want to be dragged along to translate for them.
Despite challenging the linguistic theories he once followed, Everett insists he still has tremendous respect for Chomsky. "I'm not denigrating his intelligence or his honesty but I do think he is wrong about this and he is unprepared to accept that he is wrong."
Everett hopes his story of his life with the Piraha will demolish charges that his account of their society is crude and politically incorrect. "If you can find evidence that I am making 19th-century claims, I will be shocked and disappointed in myself," he says. "If anything, they are superior in many ways to us. Thinking too much about the future or worrying too much about the past is really unhealthy. The Piraha taught me that very lesson.
"Living in the moment is a sophisticated way to live. I don't see depression. I don't see some of the things that afflict our society — and that's not because they don't face pressures. People who claim that I'm Eurocentric and putting these people down need to read the book and decide for themselves."
THE Piraha population has climbed back to 350 after a measles epidemic is believed to have reduced it to about 100 in the 1950s. They have had contact with traders and missionaries for 200 years and have proved remarkably resistant to change. They live on a 300,000-hectare reservation, which is reasonably secure, says Everett. So far, at least, no precious minerals have been found in the area as has happened elsewhere in the Amazon, bringing miners, deforestation, pollution and disease.
Everett, however, is pessimistic about their future. Missionaries and government officials see Piraha society as poor and seek to help by giving them money and modern technology.
"The Piraha aren't poor. They don't see themselves as poor," he says. He believes capitalism and religion are manufacturing desires. "One of the saddest things I've seen in Amazonian cultures is people who were self-sufficient and happy that now think of themselves as poor and become dissatisfied with their lives. What worries me is outsiders trying to impose their values and materialism on the Piraha."
I wonder whether Everett feels grateful for his life with the Piraha or scarred by it.
"It has been a traumatic experience," he says. "There is a lot of good and there has been a lot of pain. There are times when I think of the Piraha with great nostalgia and want to be with them, and there are other times I think I am really tired."
He hopes to return next winter to help a BBC/HBO documentary and continue his research, but only on the condition that the visitors do not disrupt the Piraha.
What does he miss the most? "I miss the evenings. After I've gone down to the river to have a bath, I would make coffee for everyone in the village. We'd sit around on logs out in the open and wait until the night fell, and talk. They are just an incredibly peaceful, sweet people to be with. The time spent talking to them, these will always be the best memories I have."
http://www.theage.com.au/world/tribe-and-tribulations-20081121-6e47.html?page=-1
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Brazil's endangered species list triples in size
Deforestation and illegal animal trade have done enormous damage to the species of Brazil over the last 20 years. The country's list of endangered animals now stands at 627 species -- 288% higher than the 218 species that were on the same list in 1989.
It's not clear if this is the first major revision to Brazil's endangered list since '89, but it's a significant update: 489 species were added to the list, while 79 were considered recovered enough to be dropped from the list.
Environment Minister Carlos Minc said "Industry is expanding, agriculture is expanding, people are occupying protected areas and our conservation units do not have the protection needed," but "We'll fight to remove the largest number of species possible from that list."
Minc reported that 90% of Brazil's Atlantic rainforest, where most of these newly endangered species reside, has been chopped down. More than 232,000 square miles of Brazilian forest have been destroyed since 1970.
Minc took over as Environment Minister earlier this year, after his predecessor, Marina Silva, resigned, citing government "stagnation" in the fight against deforestation.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
A new global order: Bretton Woods II
Dangerous climate change could trigger tipping-points in the Earth system. The Amazon rainforest could fall victim to desiccation. The monsoon systems in Asia could collapse. Forty percent of the world's species could vanish. In a report published in 2008, the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) pointed out that climate change constitutes an international security-risk; entire regions could be destabilised by water scarcities, collapsing agricultural systems and food crisis.
Global leaders are preparing to meet in Washington on 15 November 2008 for a summit of the G20 group of states and representatives of leading international financial institutions. The gathering is being ambitiously named "Bretton Woods II" - echoing the conference on 1-22 July 1944 which established the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). With George W Bush presiding, and Barack Obama waiting in the wings, the delegates' task will be to fix a global financial system which has failed with spectacular and highly damaging results. They need to succeed. However, they also need to realize that financial failure is symptomatic of more fundamental failures and fissures in the global order. Fixing the plumbing will be of little help if the house is falling down.
This, by the way, was also true in 1944. The Bretton Woods conference was officially the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference. Elsewhere - at Dumbarton Oaks on 21 August-7 October 1944, and in San Francisco on 25 April-26 June 1945 - the political framework for the United Nations was being established and the charter written. These grew out of the vision of Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, first expressed in the Atlantic Charter in August 1941. A financial initiative set in the context of a vision of global peace and progress: Is that not the kind of platform needed today?
Certainly, the challenges are of a scale to match those of the 1940s.
A world of insecurity
The present financial debacle marks the end of the "Milton Friedman model" of globalization, based on the notion that self-interest and the market are sufficient to organize national economies and the world economy. The economist Jagdish N Bhagwati has pointed out that the collapse of self-regulation has unleashed a huge potential for "destructive creation" - a reversal of the idea developed by Joseph Schumpeter that technological innovation leads to a process of "creative destruction" (see "We need to guard against destructive creation", Financial Times, 16 October 2008). The "Milton Friedman model" is closely linked with the concept - propagated since the Ronald Reagan-Margaret Thatcher era - of TINA: "There is no alternative" to the unrestrained market economy. All of a sudden, TINA has given way to a supple AUN: "Alternatives urgently needed"!
But alternatives cannot be designed by western powers alone. China is already what the United States has always claimed to be, an indispensable actor of world politics and the world economy. China, the world's second-largest economy in purchasing-power parity terms, now holds the world biggest currency reserves, amounting to US$1.8 trillion. If India continues on the path of economic success it embarked on in 1991, the two Asian giants will in the coming two decades profoundly alter the structures of the global economy. In addition, countries like Brazil, South Africa and some Arab Gulf states are on the rise.
The emerging prospect is that the G8-driven global order is coming to an end. Whether the power-transition is managed with trust and sensibility will determine whether we move to a new and uncomfortable hegemony, power politics and bitter rivalry between "old" and "new" powers, or a more inclusive and cooperation based multipolar world order (John J Mearsheimer, the US political scientist, is not alone in arguing that "the rise of China will not be peaceful"). It will be more than interesting to observe what new ideas China, India, South Africa and Brazil bring to the debate on our collective future.
Poverty-reduction will surely feature prominently in their vision - their version of the Atlantic Charter for the 21st century. It is apparent that the recession just beginning will do more damage to the world than financial contagion through the banking system. Even before the crisis hit, World Bank estimated that more than 2 billion people were living below US$2 per day; and the food-price increases of 2007-08 meant that an extra 100 million people had been dragged back below the miserable poverty-line of US$1 per day.
The impact of the recession on poor countries can be gauged by the 1970s precedent (see Paul Rogers, "The world's food insecurity", 24 April 2008). The combination of the oil-price shock of the late 1970s and successive debt crises pushed many developing countries (especially in Africa) into balance-of-payments and fiscal problems which left them running for help to the IMF and the World Bank. The long period of so-called "structural adjustment" followed. Slowly, and often controversially, macro-economic balances were re-established. But in the meantime, growth was often negative, investment collapsed, poverty rocketed and malnutrition spread. The 1980s became known as the "lost decade" of African and Latin American development. By its close, Africa had fallen even further behind the rest of the world.
What can developing countries expect in coming months? Their exports will fall, in both price and volume - affecting also service exports like tourism. Remittances will shrink. Foreign direct investment (FDI) is likely to fall. Aid is very unlikely to rise as promised. Another lost decade is on the cards (see "Development in a downturn", 4 July 2008). But we should understand: a densely interconnected world with 2 billion marginalized people will never be either secure or stable.
The global order and Europe
As solutions are sought to these problems, an overriding issue is climate change - in essence an energy, food and security crisis that will pose far greater challenges for industrial growth than the ongoing collapse of the financial system. Dangerous climate change could trigger tipping-points in the Earth system. The Amazon rainforest could fall victim to desiccation. The monsoon systems in Asia could collapse. Forty percent of the world's species could vanish. In a report published in 2008, the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) pointed out that climate change constitutes an international security-risk; entire regions could be destabilised by water scarcities, collapsing agricultural systems and food crisis.
The OECD countries must by 2050 reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions by 80 percent. In the wake of 200 years of natural-resource-driven growth, there will need to be a transition from a fossil to a non-fossil world economy - a truly millennial task. This "third industrial revolution" (of which John Schellnhuber of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research has been speaking for years) is unlikely to come about on the basis of corporate pledges and self-regulation of the market - not even an Alan Greenspan would today make such a claim.
Five steps mark the path to a reshaping of the global order. We see a special role for Europe in this - for the European Union is the largest trading partner of the developing countries, the largest provider of development aid, the key protagonist on climate change, and a region with dense cultural and political networks across all developing regions. As the global development agenda moves rapidly from a national preoccupation to one which requires cross-country collaboration, Europe is well-placed to bring together its economic, political and also military assets.
The paths to progress
The five steps are as follows.
First, successful management of crisis requires a clear-sighted focus on the welfare of the poorest. In the 1980s, UNICEF in particular pioneered the idea of "adjustment with a human face." Thirty years later, we need to focus on the safety nets, welfare programs, long-term investment in health and education, and employment prospects of the poorest. Britain's prime minister Gordon Brown has recognized this in the United Kingdom context. The European Union should now play a far more visible role in the multilateral development agencies, and it should take the lead by presenting, without delay, a development-policy action-plan designed to respond to the impacts of the financial crisis in the developing world. Globally, we need to "manage recession with a human face."
In practice this means a double guarantee: to individuals that their welfare will be protected by means of social-security programs; and to countries, that help will be provided with the costs of social protection, so that budget deficits and inflation do not spiral out of control. The world showed that it could mobilize on these fronts to tackle 2008's crisis of rising food prices. It must do so again to tackle 2009's crisis of failing livelihoods.
Second, the search for a new globalization must not become the march to anti-globalization. Markets have stumbled, not failed. They need to be managed not mauled. For a generation, trade has grown at twice the rate of economies overall, and this has contributed to poverty reduction on a scale not seen since the industrial revolution.
Income inequality has risen too fast and has sometimes reduced the size of benefits to the poor, so better and more progressive tax regimes are needed around the world. Investment in better regulation and better public goods are also needed to reverse recession, and create the possibility of further, shared growth.
Trade liberalization would be of value, but we are realistic about the scope for a successful Doha development deal, at least in 2009. As others have observed, however, there may be other routes to trade facilitation, not least investment in infrastructure in the poorest countries, to reduce costs. In Uganda, for example, the Commission for Africa led by Tony Blair estimated that poor roads are equivalent to an 80 percent tariff on textile exports.
Third, the climate summit set for Copenhagen on 30 November-11 December 2009 must not end in failure. The looming recession has led some in the business community and some governments to question the EU's climate targets. Instead, Europe must retain its pioneering role in climate policy, with concrete proposals for what the New Economics Foundation and Achim Steiner at the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) have called a "green new deal." The forces in support of the status quo are considerable. But long-term, strategic thinking and decision making are required, with significant low-carbon investments.
A key priority is the creation of an international carbon market: carbon taxes, a cap-and-trade system, a renewable-energy mandate - or some combination of all of these. Unambiguous commitments, like those proposed in Britain's climate-change bill, would create the incentives for transformative behavior by businesses and for "green innovators" across the globe.
Large-scale public and private investments in renewable energy are part of this new deal. The German Advisory Council on Global Change has proposed setting up an internationally visible "European-Chinese-Indian Research Institute for Efficient Energy Systems" dedicated to jointly training the engineers needed to get on with the task of building a non-fossil global energy system. A climate-and-energy flagship project of this kind with the two central new powers of the 21st century would serve to underline that the next wave of innovation in the world economy must be based on low-carbon technologies.
It is possible that the incoming Barack Obama administration would be interested to join such a transformative initiative. At the same time, and mindful of the need for a global balance of interests, rich countries should launch an initiative designed to provide significant contributions to reducing the energy-poverty presently affecting 2.3 billion people throughout the world.
The EU should also launch a significant program designed to develop climate-compatible cities. Over 50 percent of mankind lives in cities, and the figure is rising. Cities are responsible for 75 percent of global energy consumption and 80 percent of energy-related greenhouse-gas emissions. By 2020 it will be important for 200 European cities to be able to demonstrate how greenhouse-gases can be effectively reduced by 80 percent by the year 2050. An initiative of this kind would be a major generator of jobs an innovation. There are already some models. In the south of Shanghai, an ecocity called Dongtan is being built for a population of 80,000; in Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates) a sustainable city is planned.
It is important to think positively and strategically. The next few years might see an interesting domino-effect: imagine the EU moving in a low-carbon direction, improving its future-oriented competitive advantages, and imagine the new United States president translating into political and economic practice what his climate-policy advisors have been repeatedly saying during the election campaign - that fighting climate change via innovation is like investing in the next green Silicon Valley.
If this dynamic was created, then accelerated, there would be a rethinking of economic strategies in Beijing too. This scenario is about leadership, vision, and realism - one based on accepting the limits of the Earth system, and adapting to them creatively in the interests of all.
Fourth, it follows that aid flows must be not just sustained but increased. Rich countries made ambitious promises at the Gleneagles, Scotland summit of the G8 in 2005, and have repeated them many times since, most recently at the EU council in June 2008 and the G8 summit in Hokkaido, Japan, in July 2008. But actual delivery is currently 30 percent below the target for 2010.
Meanwhile, the talk is of cutting aid, not increasing it. Italy, for example, has proposed cuts of up to 56 percent in its latest budget. Britain so far is holding firm, and Germany is working hard towards its target. Quite right: it would be a bad start for the project of building "a social-market economy on a global scale" of which Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel has spoken if the bailout of the global banking system were to entail budget cuts affecting the poorest 30 pecent of mankind. Those intent on preventing the emergence of further anti-western resentments should have no trouble understanding rthe logic of aid.
On 29 November-2 December 2008 in Doha, governments will meet to review progress since the Monterrey conference of 2002 on financing for development. The Doha declaration should be generous and unequivocal - and rich countries should be held clearly to account. That includes all the members of the G8, but also others. Is it not time that rich oil-exporters in the middle east signed up to 0.7 percent of GNP in aid, as many developed countries have done?
Fifth, the need for collective action is an inescapable conclusion of recent events. Coordinated action has been essential to prevent financial contagion. Even the outgoing George W Bush has recognized that new initiatives will be needed to buttress the security of financial markets, with new regulatory regimes.
It is important to make sure that developing countries are fully engaged in these discussions. Resentment is already evident about who is or who is not on the invitation list for Washington. It cannot be right for all except the richest members of the world community to be presented with a "done deal" imposed without consent.
Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, has observed that there is no time to argue the fine points of who might or might not have a United Nations Security Council seat or membership of the G20. A flexible, network solution is needed, open and participatory, but focused on decision-making. A middle way is needed between the closed-shop of the UN Security Council and what has come to look like the talking-shop of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). It is important to make sure that developing countries are fully engaged in these discussions.
The EU may have models to offer for more inclusive global governance. The model of qualified majority voting reflects many painful compromises in EU councils, but does offer a way of taking different interests into account. Could this be applied in the United Nations Economic and Social Council (Ecosoc), or even in the UN general assembly? Alternatively, is it time to revisit the idea of an Economic Security Council, taking into account the enormous challenges that global poverty, resource-scarcity and climate change imply?
2009 is an important year for the EU, with elections to the European parliament in June and a new commission taking office in November. The survival or otherwise of the Lisbon Treaty will also be decided. European partnership is difficult, even stressful. But this is Europe's time. Not alone. Acting with others. Delivering Bretton Woods II - and also San Francisco II.
http://www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Current-Affairs/Security-Watch/Detail/?ots591=4888CAA0-B3DB-1461-98B9-E20E7B9C13D4&lng=en&id=93723
Global leaders are preparing to meet in Washington on 15 November 2008 for a summit of the G20 group of states and representatives of leading international financial institutions. The gathering is being ambitiously named "Bretton Woods II" - echoing the conference on 1-22 July 1944 which established the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). With George W Bush presiding, and Barack Obama waiting in the wings, the delegates' task will be to fix a global financial system which has failed with spectacular and highly damaging results. They need to succeed. However, they also need to realize that financial failure is symptomatic of more fundamental failures and fissures in the global order. Fixing the plumbing will be of little help if the house is falling down.
This, by the way, was also true in 1944. The Bretton Woods conference was officially the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference. Elsewhere - at Dumbarton Oaks on 21 August-7 October 1944, and in San Francisco on 25 April-26 June 1945 - the political framework for the United Nations was being established and the charter written. These grew out of the vision of Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, first expressed in the Atlantic Charter in August 1941. A financial initiative set in the context of a vision of global peace and progress: Is that not the kind of platform needed today?
Certainly, the challenges are of a scale to match those of the 1940s.
A world of insecurity
The present financial debacle marks the end of the "Milton Friedman model" of globalization, based on the notion that self-interest and the market are sufficient to organize national economies and the world economy. The economist Jagdish N Bhagwati has pointed out that the collapse of self-regulation has unleashed a huge potential for "destructive creation" - a reversal of the idea developed by Joseph Schumpeter that technological innovation leads to a process of "creative destruction" (see "We need to guard against destructive creation", Financial Times, 16 October 2008). The "Milton Friedman model" is closely linked with the concept - propagated since the Ronald Reagan-Margaret Thatcher era - of TINA: "There is no alternative" to the unrestrained market economy. All of a sudden, TINA has given way to a supple AUN: "Alternatives urgently needed"!
But alternatives cannot be designed by western powers alone. China is already what the United States has always claimed to be, an indispensable actor of world politics and the world economy. China, the world's second-largest economy in purchasing-power parity terms, now holds the world biggest currency reserves, amounting to US$1.8 trillion. If India continues on the path of economic success it embarked on in 1991, the two Asian giants will in the coming two decades profoundly alter the structures of the global economy. In addition, countries like Brazil, South Africa and some Arab Gulf states are on the rise.
The emerging prospect is that the G8-driven global order is coming to an end. Whether the power-transition is managed with trust and sensibility will determine whether we move to a new and uncomfortable hegemony, power politics and bitter rivalry between "old" and "new" powers, or a more inclusive and cooperation based multipolar world order (John J Mearsheimer, the US political scientist, is not alone in arguing that "the rise of China will not be peaceful"). It will be more than interesting to observe what new ideas China, India, South Africa and Brazil bring to the debate on our collective future.
Poverty-reduction will surely feature prominently in their vision - their version of the Atlantic Charter for the 21st century. It is apparent that the recession just beginning will do more damage to the world than financial contagion through the banking system. Even before the crisis hit, World Bank estimated that more than 2 billion people were living below US$2 per day; and the food-price increases of 2007-08 meant that an extra 100 million people had been dragged back below the miserable poverty-line of US$1 per day.
The impact of the recession on poor countries can be gauged by the 1970s precedent (see Paul Rogers, "The world's food insecurity", 24 April 2008). The combination of the oil-price shock of the late 1970s and successive debt crises pushed many developing countries (especially in Africa) into balance-of-payments and fiscal problems which left them running for help to the IMF and the World Bank. The long period of so-called "structural adjustment" followed. Slowly, and often controversially, macro-economic balances were re-established. But in the meantime, growth was often negative, investment collapsed, poverty rocketed and malnutrition spread. The 1980s became known as the "lost decade" of African and Latin American development. By its close, Africa had fallen even further behind the rest of the world.
What can developing countries expect in coming months? Their exports will fall, in both price and volume - affecting also service exports like tourism. Remittances will shrink. Foreign direct investment (FDI) is likely to fall. Aid is very unlikely to rise as promised. Another lost decade is on the cards (see "Development in a downturn", 4 July 2008). But we should understand: a densely interconnected world with 2 billion marginalized people will never be either secure or stable.
The global order and Europe
As solutions are sought to these problems, an overriding issue is climate change - in essence an energy, food and security crisis that will pose far greater challenges for industrial growth than the ongoing collapse of the financial system. Dangerous climate change could trigger tipping-points in the Earth system. The Amazon rainforest could fall victim to desiccation. The monsoon systems in Asia could collapse. Forty percent of the world's species could vanish. In a report published in 2008, the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) pointed out that climate change constitutes an international security-risk; entire regions could be destabilised by water scarcities, collapsing agricultural systems and food crisis.
The OECD countries must by 2050 reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions by 80 percent. In the wake of 200 years of natural-resource-driven growth, there will need to be a transition from a fossil to a non-fossil world economy - a truly millennial task. This "third industrial revolution" (of which John Schellnhuber of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research has been speaking for years) is unlikely to come about on the basis of corporate pledges and self-regulation of the market - not even an Alan Greenspan would today make such a claim.
Five steps mark the path to a reshaping of the global order. We see a special role for Europe in this - for the European Union is the largest trading partner of the developing countries, the largest provider of development aid, the key protagonist on climate change, and a region with dense cultural and political networks across all developing regions. As the global development agenda moves rapidly from a national preoccupation to one which requires cross-country collaboration, Europe is well-placed to bring together its economic, political and also military assets.
The paths to progress
The five steps are as follows.
First, successful management of crisis requires a clear-sighted focus on the welfare of the poorest. In the 1980s, UNICEF in particular pioneered the idea of "adjustment with a human face." Thirty years later, we need to focus on the safety nets, welfare programs, long-term investment in health and education, and employment prospects of the poorest. Britain's prime minister Gordon Brown has recognized this in the United Kingdom context. The European Union should now play a far more visible role in the multilateral development agencies, and it should take the lead by presenting, without delay, a development-policy action-plan designed to respond to the impacts of the financial crisis in the developing world. Globally, we need to "manage recession with a human face."
In practice this means a double guarantee: to individuals that their welfare will be protected by means of social-security programs; and to countries, that help will be provided with the costs of social protection, so that budget deficits and inflation do not spiral out of control. The world showed that it could mobilize on these fronts to tackle 2008's crisis of rising food prices. It must do so again to tackle 2009's crisis of failing livelihoods.
Second, the search for a new globalization must not become the march to anti-globalization. Markets have stumbled, not failed. They need to be managed not mauled. For a generation, trade has grown at twice the rate of economies overall, and this has contributed to poverty reduction on a scale not seen since the industrial revolution.
Income inequality has risen too fast and has sometimes reduced the size of benefits to the poor, so better and more progressive tax regimes are needed around the world. Investment in better regulation and better public goods are also needed to reverse recession, and create the possibility of further, shared growth.
Trade liberalization would be of value, but we are realistic about the scope for a successful Doha development deal, at least in 2009. As others have observed, however, there may be other routes to trade facilitation, not least investment in infrastructure in the poorest countries, to reduce costs. In Uganda, for example, the Commission for Africa led by Tony Blair estimated that poor roads are equivalent to an 80 percent tariff on textile exports.
Third, the climate summit set for Copenhagen on 30 November-11 December 2009 must not end in failure. The looming recession has led some in the business community and some governments to question the EU's climate targets. Instead, Europe must retain its pioneering role in climate policy, with concrete proposals for what the New Economics Foundation and Achim Steiner at the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) have called a "green new deal." The forces in support of the status quo are considerable. But long-term, strategic thinking and decision making are required, with significant low-carbon investments.
A key priority is the creation of an international carbon market: carbon taxes, a cap-and-trade system, a renewable-energy mandate - or some combination of all of these. Unambiguous commitments, like those proposed in Britain's climate-change bill, would create the incentives for transformative behavior by businesses and for "green innovators" across the globe.
Large-scale public and private investments in renewable energy are part of this new deal. The German Advisory Council on Global Change has proposed setting up an internationally visible "European-Chinese-Indian Research Institute for Efficient Energy Systems" dedicated to jointly training the engineers needed to get on with the task of building a non-fossil global energy system. A climate-and-energy flagship project of this kind with the two central new powers of the 21st century would serve to underline that the next wave of innovation in the world economy must be based on low-carbon technologies.
It is possible that the incoming Barack Obama administration would be interested to join such a transformative initiative. At the same time, and mindful of the need for a global balance of interests, rich countries should launch an initiative designed to provide significant contributions to reducing the energy-poverty presently affecting 2.3 billion people throughout the world.
The EU should also launch a significant program designed to develop climate-compatible cities. Over 50 percent of mankind lives in cities, and the figure is rising. Cities are responsible for 75 percent of global energy consumption and 80 percent of energy-related greenhouse-gas emissions. By 2020 it will be important for 200 European cities to be able to demonstrate how greenhouse-gases can be effectively reduced by 80 percent by the year 2050. An initiative of this kind would be a major generator of jobs an innovation. There are already some models. In the south of Shanghai, an ecocity called Dongtan is being built for a population of 80,000; in Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates) a sustainable city is planned.
It is important to think positively and strategically. The next few years might see an interesting domino-effect: imagine the EU moving in a low-carbon direction, improving its future-oriented competitive advantages, and imagine the new United States president translating into political and economic practice what his climate-policy advisors have been repeatedly saying during the election campaign - that fighting climate change via innovation is like investing in the next green Silicon Valley.
If this dynamic was created, then accelerated, there would be a rethinking of economic strategies in Beijing too. This scenario is about leadership, vision, and realism - one based on accepting the limits of the Earth system, and adapting to them creatively in the interests of all.
Fourth, it follows that aid flows must be not just sustained but increased. Rich countries made ambitious promises at the Gleneagles, Scotland summit of the G8 in 2005, and have repeated them many times since, most recently at the EU council in June 2008 and the G8 summit in Hokkaido, Japan, in July 2008. But actual delivery is currently 30 percent below the target for 2010.
Meanwhile, the talk is of cutting aid, not increasing it. Italy, for example, has proposed cuts of up to 56 percent in its latest budget. Britain so far is holding firm, and Germany is working hard towards its target. Quite right: it would be a bad start for the project of building "a social-market economy on a global scale" of which Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel has spoken if the bailout of the global banking system were to entail budget cuts affecting the poorest 30 pecent of mankind. Those intent on preventing the emergence of further anti-western resentments should have no trouble understanding rthe logic of aid.
On 29 November-2 December 2008 in Doha, governments will meet to review progress since the Monterrey conference of 2002 on financing for development. The Doha declaration should be generous and unequivocal - and rich countries should be held clearly to account. That includes all the members of the G8, but also others. Is it not time that rich oil-exporters in the middle east signed up to 0.7 percent of GNP in aid, as many developed countries have done?
Fifth, the need for collective action is an inescapable conclusion of recent events. Coordinated action has been essential to prevent financial contagion. Even the outgoing George W Bush has recognized that new initiatives will be needed to buttress the security of financial markets, with new regulatory regimes.
It is important to make sure that developing countries are fully engaged in these discussions. Resentment is already evident about who is or who is not on the invitation list for Washington. It cannot be right for all except the richest members of the world community to be presented with a "done deal" imposed without consent.
Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, has observed that there is no time to argue the fine points of who might or might not have a United Nations Security Council seat or membership of the G20. A flexible, network solution is needed, open and participatory, but focused on decision-making. A middle way is needed between the closed-shop of the UN Security Council and what has come to look like the talking-shop of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). It is important to make sure that developing countries are fully engaged in these discussions.
The EU may have models to offer for more inclusive global governance. The model of qualified majority voting reflects many painful compromises in EU councils, but does offer a way of taking different interests into account. Could this be applied in the United Nations Economic and Social Council (Ecosoc), or even in the UN general assembly? Alternatively, is it time to revisit the idea of an Economic Security Council, taking into account the enormous challenges that global poverty, resource-scarcity and climate change imply?
2009 is an important year for the EU, with elections to the European parliament in June and a new commission taking office in November. The survival or otherwise of the Lisbon Treaty will also be decided. European partnership is difficult, even stressful. But this is Europe's time. Not alone. Acting with others. Delivering Bretton Woods II - and also San Francisco II.
http://www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Current-Affairs/Security-Watch/Detail/?ots591=4888CAA0-B3DB-1461-98B9-E20E7B9C13D4&lng=en&id=93723
Sunday, November 2, 2008
World Heritage Site: Brazilian Atlantic Islands: Fernando de Noronha and Atol das Rocas Reserves
Peaks of the Southern Atlantic submarine ridge form the Fernando de Noronha Archipelago and Rocas Atoll off the coast of Brazil.
They represent a large proportion of the island surface of the South Atlantic and their rich waters are extremely important for the breeding and feeding of tuna, shark, turtle and marine mammals.
The islands are home to the largest concentration of tropical seabirds in the Western Atlantic. Baia de Golfinhos has an exceptional population of resident dolphin and at low tide the Rocas Atoll provides a spectacular seascape of lagoons and tidal pools teeming with fish.
Justification for Inscription
Criterion (ix): FNNMP/AdRBR represents over half the insular coastal waters of the Southern Atlantic Ocean. These highly productive waters provide feeding ground for species such as tuna, billfish, cetaceans, sharks, and marine turtles as they migrate to the Eastern Atlantic coast of Africa. An oasis of marine life in relatively barren, open ocean, the islands play a key role in the process of reproduction, dispersal and colonisation by marine organisms in the entire Tropical South Atlantic.
Criterion (vii): Baía dos Golfinhos is the only know place in the world with such a high population of resident dolphins and Atoll das Rocas demonstrates a spectacular seascape at low tide when the exposed reef surrounding shallow lagoons and tidal pools forms a natural aquarium. Both sites have also exceptional submarine landscapes that have been recognised worldwide by a number of specialised diving literatures.
Criterion (x): FNNMP/AdRBR is a key site for the protection of biodiversity and endangered species in the Southern Atlantic. Providing a large proportion of the insular habitat of the South Atlantic, the site is a repository for the maintenance of marine biodiversity at the ocean basin level. It is important for the conservation of endangered and threatened species of marine turtles, particularly the hawksbill turtle. The site accommodates the largest concentration of tropical seabirds to be found in the Western Atlantic Ocean, and is a Global Centre of Bird Endemism. The site also contains the only remaining sample of the Insular Atlantic Forest and the only oceanic mangrove in the South Atlantic region.
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1000
They represent a large proportion of the island surface of the South Atlantic and their rich waters are extremely important for the breeding and feeding of tuna, shark, turtle and marine mammals.
The islands are home to the largest concentration of tropical seabirds in the Western Atlantic. Baia de Golfinhos has an exceptional population of resident dolphin and at low tide the Rocas Atoll provides a spectacular seascape of lagoons and tidal pools teeming with fish.
Justification for Inscription
Criterion (ix): FNNMP/AdRBR represents over half the insular coastal waters of the Southern Atlantic Ocean. These highly productive waters provide feeding ground for species such as tuna, billfish, cetaceans, sharks, and marine turtles as they migrate to the Eastern Atlantic coast of Africa. An oasis of marine life in relatively barren, open ocean, the islands play a key role in the process of reproduction, dispersal and colonisation by marine organisms in the entire Tropical South Atlantic.
Criterion (vii): Baía dos Golfinhos is the only know place in the world with such a high population of resident dolphins and Atoll das Rocas demonstrates a spectacular seascape at low tide when the exposed reef surrounding shallow lagoons and tidal pools forms a natural aquarium. Both sites have also exceptional submarine landscapes that have been recognised worldwide by a number of specialised diving literatures.
Criterion (x): FNNMP/AdRBR is a key site for the protection of biodiversity and endangered species in the Southern Atlantic. Providing a large proportion of the insular habitat of the South Atlantic, the site is a repository for the maintenance of marine biodiversity at the ocean basin level. It is important for the conservation of endangered and threatened species of marine turtles, particularly the hawksbill turtle. The site accommodates the largest concentration of tropical seabirds to be found in the Western Atlantic Ocean, and is a Global Centre of Bird Endemism. The site also contains the only remaining sample of the Insular Atlantic Forest and the only oceanic mangrove in the South Atlantic region.
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1000
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