Samarco Mineiracoes, a 50-50 joint venture between Australia’s BHP Billiton and Brazil’s Vale, operates an iron ore mine in Mariana, in the Brazilian south-eastern state of Minas Gerais where three dams used to hold millions of cubic metres of tailings, or mining waste. One of the dams, its second largest, burst on November 5, unleashing 62 million cubic metres of sludge into the Doce River at about 70km/h. It destroyed the town of Bento Rodrigues, killing at least 13 people (12 are still missing), displaced thousands of others, affected water supplies to an estimated 250,000 people and killed fish stocks along 600 kilometres of river in two states.
Last week, the mud arrived at the river mouth in Espirito Santo state on Brazil’s Atlantic coast, endangering protected marine species and polluting beaches at important tourist destinations. Indigenous people from the Krenac ethnic group have also been affected, with 126 families of the riverside Atora tribe accusing the company of destroying their sacred river. “A lot of people think the river is just water and fish. For us the river is a source of survival and culture. Now the river is dead,” Atora chief Leomir Cecílio de Souza told media outlet UOL.
Indigemama’s Ancestral Healing helps hundreds of women each year attain optimal feminine health. Inspired by Mexican Traditional Medicine with over three dozen workshops offered throughout California, the Midwest, the East Coast and internationally. Indigemama believes that women are the bearers of culture, our first teachers, and healers of the family unit. We acknowledge that all human life comes through a woman’s sacred passageway and that an intimate connection with the divine and Earth are maintained through this channel. Indigemama seeks to honor this by helping maintain a balance within yourself, your family, and the Earth, beginning with your womb. Through in-person consultations, phone and Skype sessions, and pre-recorded distance courses, Indigemama aims to contribute to your education with ongoing support and guidance. To date, Indigemama has assisted more than a thousand women in 11 different cities using womb healing and sobadas (womb massage), herbalism, holistic pregnancy coaching, and full-spectrum doula services.
The Girl Effect is a movement based on the unique potential of adolescent girls to end poverty for themselves and the world. It’s about getting girls on to the global development stage and driving massive resources to them. It is based on the common belief in the field of International Development that when given the opportunity, girls and women are more effective at lifting themselves and their families out of poverty, thereby having a multiplier effect within their villages, cities, and nations.
When girls are specifically included in education, health and economic investment, the world has a better chance of preventing issues such as child marriage, teen pregnancy, HIV/AIDS and breaking the inter-generational cycle of poverty. But girls still need the world to listen to them and invest in their potential.
Today the Girl Effect is driven by hundreds of thousands of supporters who believe in the potential of 250 million adolescent girls living in poverty. Girleffect.org exists to help this community continue to make a powerful case for supporting girls, by equipping them to do the best work with and for girls.
Seven months after terrorists kidnapped nearly 300 schoolgirls in Nigeria, many local students are afraid to go to school. In other parts of the country, children don’t go to school because schools don’t exist; cities and villages can’t afford enough teachers. Across the nation, more than 10.5 million children aren’t in school, more than in any other part of the world.
One Nigerian city now has a prototype of a new type of education that doesn’t involve a school or teachers. The Hello Hub is an outdoor computer kiosk hooked up to free, solar-powered Internet and filled with hundreds of educational games. It’s rugged enough to handle dust storms, rain, and thousands of users. Built and owned by the community, it’s available for anyone–adults or children–to use anytime.
The project was inspired in part by Sugata Mitra, the 2013 TED Prize winner who argues that schools as we know them are obsolete. Mitra has shown in experiments that self-directed learning works; children in slums or remote locations who were given a computer, and zero instruction, were able to teach themselves things like English and even the basics of biotechnology. In those experiments, the computers were eventually lost or broken, so the Hello Hubs take a different approach.
“We don’t show up in a community and build a Hello Hub for them,” says MacMillan. “If we were to do that, it would take a day to knock up a Hello Hub, put it on Facebook, and get out. But it wouldn’t last, and I don’t think people would value it or use it as much as they do. I think it would be likely to go unmaintained after a while–that’s what Mitra’s research shows.”
Instead of giving a donation, the project involves the entire community. “We take parts of the tech and the expertise, but we don’t have what we need to complete it,” MacMillan explains. The community has to help negotiate for the solar power, find the land, feed and transport the visitors from the organization–and help build the computer kiosk from scratch, sometimes building and taking apart the server several times so everyone who wants to can learn how it works.
The Brazilian government is building the world’s third largest hydroelectric dam on the Xingu River, a major Amazon tributary. Now over fifty percent complete, the Belo Monte Dam complex is designed to divert eighty percent of the Xingu River’s flow which will thus devastate an area of over 1,500 square kilometers of Brazilian rainforest and cause the forced displacement of up to 40,000 people. This project gravely impacts the land and livelihoods of thousands of riverine, urban families and communities, and indigenous peoples from several neighboring areas.
The Xingu River basin is a living symbol of Brazil’s cultural and biological diversity; it is home to 25,000 indigenous people from 40 ethnic groups. The Xingu flows north 2,271 kilometers from the central savanna region of Mato Grosso to the Amazon River. Nominally protected throughout most of its course by indigenous reserves and conservation units, the Xingu basin is severely impacted by cattle ranching and soy monocultures. Belo Monte is the first in a planned network of mega-dam projects which will pose additional devastation to an already threatened region.
A project hailing from Brazil’s military dictatorship, Belo Monte continues to exhibit the same alarming authoritarian tendencies associated with this brutal regime. To understand more about the history of this project, explore an interactive timeline, which chronicles thirty years of injustice surrounding the approval and construction of the mega-dam.
Since the initiation of construction in 2011, the city of Altamira has witnessed a massive influx of migrants, provoking a spike in criminal activities, as well as the collapse of health, education, and sanitation services. Brazil’s Ministry of Mines and Energy set December 15th as the date to auction the construction of the massive São Luiz do Tapajós hydroelectric dam, the first in a series of large dams slated for construction on the Tapajós River, one of the Amazon’s largest tributaries. The announcement immediately provoked the condemnation of local indigenous peoples, who criticized the federal government’s failure to ensure respect for their rights, as guaranteed by the Brazilian Constitution and international human rights agreements.
The move enflamed tensions in this precarious and remote region, while portending conflict with the region’s threatened indigenous peoples, particularly the Munduruku people, one of the largest surviving Amazonian tribes, whose territories and communities span much of the Tapajós basin.
In response to the announcement, the indigenous organization Movimento Munduruku Ipereg Ayuissued an open letter denouncing the Brazilian government’s “lies”, citing a recent meeting with high-level federal officials who promised that the dam would not proceed without a process of free, prior, and informed consultation with indigenous and traditional communities. Domestic law and international human rights agreements such as International Labor Organization Convention 169 (ILO169), to which Brazil is a signatory, require such consultations.
“We know that prior consultation should take place before any decision concerning the dam,” affirms the Munduruku statement, which demands the immediate cancellation of the auction. “Is the government throwing ILO169 in the garbage? Once again the government shows that it does not aim to dialogue with us.”
“This decision is another enormous blow to the indigenous right to consultation, just as we’ve seen with the Belo Monte dam,” said Maíra Irigaray of Amazon Watch. “President Rousseff’s administration’s disregard of Brazil’s traditional populations is shameful.”
The announcement of the São Luiz do Tapajós dam auction comes on the heels of an escalating controversy over the ambitious Amazon dam-building plans of the Rousseff government. Recent mega-dam projects – such as Belo Monte on the Xingu River, and Santo Antônio and Jirau on the Madeira river – have been plagued by major construction delays and massive cost overruns, in addition to serious socio-environmental impacts that have been left largely unmitigated by dam-builders. Suspicions of corruption within the dam industry have been heightened by a recent scandal involving Minister of Mines and Energy Edison Lobão, accused with grafting kickbacks from the state oil company Petrobras, which he oversees.
When we consciously relate to our ancestors, it can be a tremendous source of healing, guidance and companionship. It can help us to relate more positively in our communities. Making it a daily ritual to honor the people who have come and gone before us is so important for any kind of spiritual work. It opens the door to a part of ourselves we haven’t yet healed or acknowledged. Even if you do not know anything about your lineage or blood family, try to find the place inside yourself to honor those who have come before you. Honoring our ancestors includes not only our blood relatives. We can draw upon strength of anyone who has come before us to inspire or influence. Writers, artists, healers, activists, etc.
Now is the time to strengthen our bonds within our communities. When people come together with a common intention or purpose, we can make huge changes and empower one another. There are many forms of community and many ways to come together for a purpose. Find a way of connecting that works for you.
We’re in a time where the news is full of scarcity, violence and corruption. How can we make room for abundance and call in the wisdom of our ancestors? What can we do personally to support and strengthen our own community? How can we stand up for those who are not being heard? For the people who are struggling everyday just to survive and for their basic rights. For those of us who have more choices and have more options, how can we show up even more for those people whose voices aren’t heard?
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The world’s first rent-free, premises-free, free “POP-UP clothing store” for the poor, found entirely on the street and curated by you. The Street Store is a unique concept which allows people from all over Cape Town to drop off clothes and shoes that they no longer need. Then, set up in an innovative ‘on-the-street-shop’, these clothes will then be available for the homeless and disadvantaged. A store made just out of posters. It’s where you “hang up” donated clothes and drop shoes into “boxes”, and then the homeless help themselves.
To get involved and implement The Street Store in your own community, find out more at http://www.thestreetstore.org
A person’s culture is a collective of beliefs, methods, way of life, and social perspective which a person acquires in their mind. We’ve been conditioned since the day we were born by religion, educational systems, government, corporate advertising and media in an attempt of socialization. We make moral judgments all the time and these are largely influenced by cultural conditioning. Hasty moral judgments are deeply ingrained blocks to thinking critically, for the values upon which they are based typically are imparted very early in our lives, well before we can seriously examine them and the belief systems they spawn. Thus, before we’re mature enough to think intelligently about subjects of religion, race, sex, and politics. As a result we tend to acknowledge what supports our acquired moral value systems and to ignore or dismiss what does not. We wall ourselves off from disclosure contrary to our preconceptions, thereby purchasing security at the price of insight and understanding.
The exposure of conditioning and cultural programming in which an individual receives to form their perception then creates the parameters of their thoughts, motivations, and ultimately their behavior; essentially limiting the practice of true free will. A mind that is largely free of cultural conditioning is one which uses methods of analysis, evaluation, validation, and integration on all information being presented. This type of mind does not typically respond to events or information based solely on cultural programs, but yet seeks verification, establishment of context and evaluation of underlying influences. A free mind challenges reason, often in opposition of information at face value.
Cultural conditioning will always be apart of the foundation of an individual’s social architecture. It’s important as a community to begin to promote and instill in our future generations the values of self awareness and critical thinking in attempt to breed optimal leaders to excel and supersede the unimaginable barriers of current society. Encouraging true self assessment into the natural process of thinking is a critical component in development of one’s self. Being capable of relying less on the experts outside our ourselves, and more on the greatness within to promote the establishment of genuine independent thought and self-empowerment.
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We are on the verge of a shift, the feminine, intuitive energy is recycling into our lives to balance the dominant male-oriented thought forms that have set the tenor for modern societies. The current state of our military industrial-complex exemplifies exactly what we must evolve away from. Such aggression is the age-old impulse to dominate and control through fear.
A polarity runs throughout the universe. It is a form of energy you might be familiar with as yin and yang, or female and male. This polarity is reflected in humans as the left and right brain hemispheres. The left brain is the domain of the male force — logic, intellect, analytic thought, science and math. As the source of intuition, feeling, holistic thought, art and abstract creativity, the right brain is more femininely oriented.
Ancient spiritual texts identify the yin, or female force, the feminine face of God, if you will, as that which led the fall or dispersal of consciousness into creation. When consciousness first fell into material form, this feminine force would have dominated the minds of our early ancestors. History does tell us that most societies prior to 3,000 BC were feminine oriented and worshiped some form of the goddess in their mysteries. The world would have seemed magical to the early humans as they intuited their way through life in pulsations with the rhythms of nature.
But now consciousness found itself embodied in physical form subject to all the laws and perils of physical existence. Wild beasts preyed on our ancestors. They needed to gather food and seek shelter. They had to organize and analyze in an effort to understand and control their environment.
The left brain, or male way of thinking, eventually came to dominate the human thought process so successfully that today we are practically destroying ourselves for the sake of dominance and power as we find ourselves living in the vestiges of modern patriarchal societies today.
The gateway to higher consciousness is balancing our male/female energies to make intuition and intellect work in harmony. It is through this female energy (creativity, compassion, emotional, understanding) that the evolution of our planet will become whole. The male energy force (focused, direct, logical, statistical) has served it’s purpose through science and technology allowing us to progress to this point. However, it is now time for our spiritual emotional higher self to be expressed; originating from LOVE.
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Despite an increased awareness of overfishing, the majority of people still know very little about the scale of the destruction being wrought on the oceans. This film presents an unquestionable case for why overfishing needs to end and shows that there is still an opportunity for change.
Over the past 55 years, as fisheries have returned lower and lower yields, humans have begun to understand that the oceans we’d assumed were unendingly vast and rich are in fact highly vulnerable and sensitive. Add overfishing to pollution, climate change, habitat destruction, and acidification, and a picture of a system in crisis emerges.
Many scientists say most fish populations could be restored with aggressive fisheries management, better enforcement of laws governing catches, and increased use of aquaculture. And in many regions, there is reason for hope. But illegal fishing and unsustainable harvesting still plagues the industry. And a public grown accustomed to abundant seafood and largely apathetic about the plight of the oceans complicates efforts to repair the damage we’ve done.
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