GOOD NEWS SERVICE #47: NOV.2016 Editorial, Nov 16/16: This issue follows the unprecedented election to President of the United States of a man described as a racist, misogynist, serial liar and cheat, groper of women and other similar descriptions, a person who wants to build walls and solidify borders to keep out those he considers undesirable; a long list, including a wall along the Mexican border. His exclusiveness is matched by demagogues and similar strongmen in several conflict zones in the world today. Vladimir Putin maintains an iron group in
Russia and his nuclear military forces provide the ability to destroy any who would challenge him. The Israeli president also favours walls and keeps Palestinians in a state of subservient crisis.
The nuclear armed forces of India and Pakistan daily glower at each other along a 1,500 mile border, unwilling to give an inch and threatening to ignite the SubContinent in a nuclear holocaust. China claims ownership of the South China Sea, based on its absurd claim to an island base yet to be built.
North Korea has its own wall, the 38th Parallel for more than 50 years, and steadily increases its nuclear weapons power which daily threatens the people of South Korea and Japan.
However, this newsletter also contains more hopeful stories, such as the boundary dispute between Canada and Denmark (see #3, below) complete with the good-natured sharing of each country’s favourite drink, a light touch badly needed today. Two other articles herein describe the value and beauty of inclusiveness: the story of Pinball Clemons, and the 500 young Buddhist nuns who bicycled from Nepal to India to witness against trafficking.
1.Will President-elect Trump be another Republican Nuclear Disarmer?
November/16. By Hans Kristensen, Federation of American Scientists.
Republicans love nuclear weapons reductions as long as they’re not proposed by a Democratic President. That is the lesson from decades of US nuclear weapons and arms control management.
If that trend continues, then we can expect the new Donald Trump administration to reduce the US nuclear weapons arsenal more than the Obama administration did. What? I know it sounds strange but the record is very clear: During the post-Cold War era, Republican administrations have – by far – reduced the US nuclear weapons stockpile more than Democratic administrations. Even if we don’t count numbers of weapons (because arsenals have gotten smaller) but only look at how much the nuclear stockpile was reduced, the history is clear: Republican presidents disarm more than Democrats.
It’s somewhat of a mystery. Because Democratic presidents are generally seen to be more likely to propose nuclear weapons reductions. President Obama did so repeatedly. But when Democratic presidents have proposed reductions, the Republican opposition has normally objected forcefully. Yet Republican lawmakers won’t oppose full size reductions if they are proposed by a Republican president.
Conversely, Democratic lawmakers will not oppose Republican reductions, nor will they oppose reductions proposed by a Democratic president.
As a result, if the Republicans control both the White House and Congress, as they do now after the 2016 election, the chance of significant reductions of nuclear weapons seems more likely.
Whether Donald Trump will continue the Republican tradition remains to be seen. US-Russian relations are different today than when the Bush administrations did their reductions. But both countries have far more nuclear weapons than they need for national security. And Trump would be strangely out of tune with long-held Republican policy and practice if he does not order a substantial reduction of the US nuclear weapons stockpile..
2. Hundreds of Nuns trained in Kung Fu are biking the Himalayas to oppose human traffickingSept 16/16,Nita Bhalla. Via Reuters. Forwarded by Linda Cobb of Ottawa, ON
Clad in black sweatpants, red jackets and white helmets, the hundreds of cyclists pedaling the treacherously steep, narrow mountain passes to India from Nepal could be mistaken for a Himalayan version of the Tour de France. The similarity, however, ends there. This journey is longer and tougher, the prize has no financial value or global recognition and the participants are not professional cyclists but Buddhist nuns from India, Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet.
Five hundred nuns from the Buddhist sect known as the Drukpa Order, on Saturday complete a 4,000-km (2,485 mile) bicycle trek from Nepal's Kathmandu to the northern city of Leh in India to raise awareness about human trafficking in the remote region. "When we were doing relief work in Nepal after the earthquakes last year, we heard how girls from poor families were being sold because their parents could not afford to keep them anymore," 22-year-old nun Jigme Konchok Lhamo told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
"We wanted to do something to change this attitude that girls are less than boys and that it's okay to sell them," she said, adding that the bicycle trek shows "women have power and strength like men." South Asia may boast women leaders and be home to cultures that revere motherhood and worship female deities, but many girls and women live with the threat of violence and without many basic rights.
From honor killings in Pakistan to feticide in India and child marriage in Nepal, women face a barrage of threats, although growing awareness, better laws and economic empowerment are bringing a slow change in attitudes.
The bicycle trek from Nepal into India is nothing new for the Drupka nuns. This is the fourth such journey they have made, meeting local people, government officials and religious leaders, to spread messages of gender equality, peaceful co-existence and respect for the environment. They also deliver food for the poor, help villagers get medical care and are dubbed the Kung Fu Nuns due to their training in the martial arts. Traditionally, Buddhist nuns are treated very
differently from monks. They cook and clean and are not allowed to exercise. But His Holiness thought this was nonsense and decided to break the trend, said Carrie Lee, president of the Live to Love International, a charity which works with the Drupka Order.
Over the last 12 years, the number of Drupka nuns has grown to 500 from 30, said Lee, largely due to the progressive attitudes of the 53 year old Drupka leader, who was inspired by his mother to advocate for gender equality. He also participates in the bicycle journeys, riding with the nuns as they pedal through treacherous terrain and hostile weather and camp out in the open.
The Drupka nuns say they believe they are helping to change attitudes. "Most of the people, when they see us on our bikes, think we are boys," said 18-year-old nun Jigme Wangchuk Lhamo. "Then they get shocked when we stop and tell them that not only are we girls, but we are also Buddhist nuns," she said. "I think this helps change their attitudes about women and maybe value them as equals."
3.Denmark & Canada in spirited fight for tiny island; will a condominium end it, with two bottles of cheer? 9 Nov/16 New York Times, By Dan Levin: International disputes over territory can be ugly affairs, waged with all the nastiness of a divorce, backed with the force of armies. Just in the last few years, China has built islands topped with military bases to back its claim to vast stretches of ocean, in conflict with half a dozen other Asian countries, while Russia has forged a path of bloodshed and destruction in Ukraine over its annexation over Crimea. But that’s not how Canada and
Denmark roll. Their way of contesting ownership of an uninhabited island in the Arctic would better suit a dinner party than a battlefield: It comes down to BYOB!
Hans Island is really just a large Rock, but it happens to be smack dab in the middle of the Nares Strait, a 22 mile channel of very cold water separating Canada and Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark. The Island falls within the 12 mile territorial limit of either shore, allowing both sides to claim it under international law. Canada and Denmark set out to establish a definitive border between the strait in 1973 but couldn’t agree on what to do about Hans Island so left the issue aside to be resolved later.
The calm, diplomatic waters grew choppy in 1984 when Canadian troops visited the Island, planted their nation’s flag and left another symbolic marker as well – a bottle of Canadian whisky. The Danes couldn’t let that stand. The country’s Minister of Greenland Affairs soon arrived on the island to replace the offending Canadian symbols with a Danish flag, and a bottle of Danish schnapps, along with a note saying “Welcome to the Danish island”. And so began a spirited dispute, one that has lasted decades, with each side dropping by the island periodically to scoop up the other side’s patriotic bottle, and replace it with their own.
Hoping to encourage the negotiations, two academics put forward a proposal in 2015 to blend realpolitik with real estate: Make the island a condominium of shared sovereigny under two flags – and presumably two bottles.
4. “Pinball” Clemons extends his reach to the worldGlobe & Mail, Toronto, by Deirdre Kelly: Michael (Pinball) Clemons grew up in public housing in Florida, living opposite the town sewer until he was 14. His single mother, who had attended a segregated high school, gave birth to him when she was still a teenager. He rarely saw his father, who remained miles away in another town while he was a boy. To say his life wasn’t easy would be an understatement. But Mr. Clemons, a black man who triumphed over personal struggle to become a prominent and widely celebrated member of the Canadian Football League, is not embittered.
Today a We Day ambassador and motivational speaker, if he reflects on his past it is to allow him a measure of how far he, and society, has come. His message is inclusiveness, a lesson learned as a person of colour growing up in the American south.
“None of us is alone”, he says during a recent morning conversation in which he lives up to the nickname given to him when he first joined the Toronto Argonauts back in 1989. As he was on the playing field, nimbly dashing between opponents to grab the advantage, in conversation Mr. Clemons is a jolt of shiny energy, a forward-moving ball getting a high score for sheer positivity. A man on a mission.
“None of us is as good as all of us together”, he continues with a pep that makes redundant the day’s first cup of coffee. Mr. Clemons instantly focuses your attention. But not on himself, more on the causes in which he believes. “When I was growing up it was “I,I,I,” he said, referring to his single-minded ambition to graduate from high school with a football scholarship to Virginia’s College of William & Mary, his ticket out of life on the margins. “But these young people today are “We,We,We”. They are all about helping others, giving to their communities and the rest of the world. I wanted to support that”.
A naturalized Canadian citizen, Mr. Clemons joined We Day in 2009, volunteering to go into local schools in Toronto and Oakville, where he lives with his wife and three children, to boost the cause. He also pledged the support of his own Pinball Clemons Foundation to raise $1 million. He thought he was done. But then a We Day trip to Kenya to help a couple of much-needed classrooms in an impoverished community, worse than anything he had ever known, radically altered his plans. “Two schools became a commitment to do 132 schools”, he says. “Now we are looking at 250 classrooms in addition to adopting a small community in Kenya through Feed the Children/We Day, and a couple more special projects in Ecuador”. He’s now covering more ground than he ever did when playing football. “We practice inclusiveness. You have to volunteer in your community to be invited to attend, and so many have done this and they come and say “how can we do more?” They are looking at the rest of the world,” observes Mr. Clemons, marvelling at the enormousness of it all. “They’ve already been inclusive and are engaging in bigger acts of kindness, spreading love, not just in their own communities but across the
planet. It is this movement that involves and moves more diverse cultures than I have ever seen in my lifetime.” And he has seen a lot, enough to know how far he’s come.
5. Ottawa U leads the way for divestment campaignsCCPA Monitor, July-Aug/16, compiled by Elaine Hughes: In April, the University of Ottawa became the first Canadian university to divest from fossil fuels and move that money into clean energy, ahead of pending decisions on whether to do the same at Dalhousie, Queen’s, UBC, the University of Toronto and McGill. Geoff Carter, an organizer with Fossil Free uOttawa said the university “has made a smart financial and ethical decision that will make a real difference in the fight against climate change.”
Around the same time, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund began divesting from coal in line with a 2015 decision to pull funding out of mining or energy groups that derive more than 30% of their sales or activities from the dirty fuel. The world’s largest fund has excluded 52 coal-related companies from the US, China, India, Japan and several European countries. “Further exclusions will follow in 2016”, claimed Norway’s Central Bank, which manages the Fund.
On the flip side of divestment, the Ontario government announced a new Climate Change Action Plan in June that will inject $7 billion over four years into 80 different policies – from retrofitting buildings to incentives for electric vehicles to helping transition the energy grid away from all carbon – with the objective of lowering the province’s carbon footprint by 2020.. “It’s a transformation that will forever
change how we live, work, play and move”, said the province. /rabble.ca /Agence France-Presse / The Globe & Mail
6. Waving hello to clean energyCCPA Monitor, July-Aug/16. Undersea turbine arrays present significant advantages: the tides are predictable, the arrays are out of sight, they can produce four times more electricity than a wind turbine, the danger to birds is totally eliminated, and because the blades turn very slowly the damage to fish and marine animals is low. Canada is one of several coastal countries – including the UK, China, South Korea, the US and Australia – that are eyeballing the technology, with special interest in the Bay of Fundy, with its record-setting tides. Two gigantic turbines will soon be submerged into a waiting “berth” at the Fundy Ocean Research Centre (FORCE) to test large-scale in-stream tidal turbines, connect them to the power grid and bring emissions-free electricity to Nova Scotia.
7. Treebark: a new industry that contributes to both social and ecological development in Uganda
From Derek Paul, Montreal, November 7/16: According to Jacqueline Bashir, a citizen of Uganda, treebark has a remarkable ability to contribute to our social needs and to our ecological development.
“Barkcloth products build and affirm community. In the communities where they are made, the men usually own the land and the trees thereon. Treebark enterprise has facilitated the formation of five women’s groups and community-based organizations along with four youth groups in Uganda. Through exhibitions in Kenya, several farmers have developed an interest in growing the tree. The skill of de-barking (okuyimbula) and malleting (okukomaga) have hitherto been the preserve of the older generation. An increasing number of young people are now joining the production line of treebark products.
“The fiscus natalaensis tree is organically grown. The bark of the tree is manually removed from the trunk, then it is pounded manually into the fabric. No fossil fuels, no chemicals, just natural manual processes. Consumers of treebark products are responsible consumers. For every treebark item purchased, one is saying yes to tree planting, yes to more sustainable jobs and yes to sustainable community development. Tree bark enterprise looks forward to more critical consumers to keep this operation going.”
8. Ethical Food Evolution in the Northern Barents Sea
From CCPA Monitor, July-Aug/16: Major food chains McDonald’s, Tesco, Young’s Seafood and Iglo have joined Norwegian, Russian and European members of the fish industry to take action against trawling and the expansion of cod fishing in the previously frozen Northern Barents Sea area.
The area is twice the size of France and home to polar bears, bowhead whales and Greenland sharks – all threatened by large-scale fishing. The Greenpeace ship, Arctic Sunrise will be monitoring the self-imposed moratorium this summer. A recent study valued the 2015 demand for certified sustainable seafood at US$11 billion. “By giving fishermen an economic incentive to protect the environment, these initiatives have the potential to help link sustainable livelihoods to sustainable production practices” said lead author Jean Potts, a senior associate at the International Institute for Sustainable Development. Guardian UK/ Greenpeace/IISD.
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The Good News Service is written and produced by Murray Thomson, of Ottawa ON [email protected] in cooperation with Randy Weekes of Lanark, ON [email protected] Comments and discussion are welcome. Tel: 613.224.8155
