Auteur/autrice : Heidi Barathieu-Brun

Linked with our presentations of The Copenhagen Consensus Center, and of the
Copenhagen Consensus 2006.

He says: « Environmentalists said Kyoto would be virtually cost-free, most countries are starting to realise that it will be very costly ».

And he says also: « Two hundred years ago, the left was an incredibly rational movement. It believed in encyclopedias, in hard facts, and in the idea that mastery of these basics would help make a better society. Since then, the world’s do-gooders have succumbed to romanticism, they’ve become more dreamy. »

Bjorn Lomborg – Denmark

TWO years ago, a Danish environmentalist called Bjorn Lomborg had an idea. We all want to make the world a better place but, given finite resources, we should look for the most cost-effective ways of doing so. He persuaded a bunch of economists, including three Nobel laureates, to draw up a list of priorities. They found that efforts to fight malnutrition and disease would save many lives at modest expense, whereas fighting global warming would cost a colossal amount and yield distant and uncertain rewards. That conclusion upset a lot of environmentalists. This week, another man who upsets a lot of people embraced it. John Bolton, America’s ambassador to the United Nations, said that Mr Lomborg’s “Copenhagen Consensus” (see articles) provided a useful way for the world body to get its priorities straight. Too often at the UN, said Mr Bolton, “everything is a priority”. The secretary-general is charged with carrying out 9,000 mandates, he said, and when you have 9,000 priorities you have none. So, over the weekend, Mr Bolton sat down with UN diplomats from seven other countries, including China and India but no Europeans, to rank 40 ways of tackling ten global crises.

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Linked with our presentation of ‘Whom has North Korea provoked?‘, and of The Worries of the US Ambassador to Iraq, and also of Major Works by Immanuel Wallerstein.

He says: « Capitalism has been a remarkably successful system, in terms of its fundamental objectives: the endless accumulation of capital. As a consequence of doing it, it has expanded the means of production enormously. Capitalism has simultaneously been an incredibly polarising system, ever more polarising, and ever more impoverishing. Capitalism is in trouble today. It is not in trouble because there are social movements. Social movements are a consequence of the trouble. The processes it has used to accumulate capital have reached certain inbuilt limits. What we’re seeing in the world is not a sign of the success of capital, but the great difficulties of capital … « . (Read all on Al-Ahram).

Immanuel Wallerstein – USA

See his world system theory. This text is part of the Internet Modern History Sourcebook. The Sourcebook is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted texts for introductory level classes in modern European and World history.

Born in 1930 in New York, Wallerstein attended Columbia University, where he received a B.A. in 1951, an M.A. in 1954 and a Ph.D. degree in 1959, and subsequently taught until 1971, when he became professor of sociology at McGill University. As of 1976, he served as distinguished professor of sociology at Binghamton University (SUNY) until his retirement in 1999, and as head of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilization until 2005. Wallerstein held several positions as visiting professor at universities worldwide, was awarded multiple honorary titles, intermittently served as Directeur d’études associé at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and was president of the International Sociological Association between 1994 and 1998. Since 2000, he has been Senior research Scholar at Yale University. (Read all on wikipedia). See also: one – this disambiguation page of wikipedia, and second: – a description on the german wikipedia.

Read his text: Pax Americana, the eagle has crash landed.

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Linked with our presentation of Coopa Roca – Brazil, and … realities about business and poverty …

Maria Teresa Leal – Brazil

Maria Teresa Leal founded Coopa-Roca, a sewing cooperative located in Rocinha, the largest favela (slum) in Rio de Janeiro, in 1981. Nicknamed « Tetê, » Leal has a college degree in social science and a license to teach elementary school. It is unusual for a middle-class or wealthy Brazilian to set foot in a favela. But when Leal visited the favela with her housekeeper, who lived there, she saw that many poor women in the favela were skilled seamstresses — yet they had no opportunity to use their skills to generate income. So she got the idea to start a co-operative, which would recycle fabric remnants to produce attractive quilts and pillows. Gradually, as the women gained experience and developed skills in manufacturing and marketing, the work grew more professional. In the early 90s Tetê attracted interest from Rio’s fashion world, and in 1994 Coopa-Roca began producing clothes for the catwalk. In order to acquire the luxurious fabrics for high-quality designer clothes, Tetê sought out donations. She also convinced fashion designers to teach the women about production skills and trends. Coopa-Roca started getting media attention, which helped Tetê get more fabric and more contracts. Pieces produced by the co-op are unique, combining a particular type of craftsmanship originated in northern Brazil with luxe fabrics found in couture fashion. Tetê recently signed a contract with the European clothes manufacturer C&A, which she hopes will allow the co-op to expand its offerings and multiply the number of women who benefit from it. (Read more on pbs.org).

Tetê was strongly influenced early in life by three family members. Her father, a leading physician, was one of the first doctors to volunteer every Saturday in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. Her mother, a teacher, encouraged her to broaden her education to understand all of society’s ills and opportunities. Her oldest sister founded Rio’s first Arts Education School, the first school to teach education and the arts to mixed classes of wealthy, middle-class and favela children. The school, which opened in 1960 and still operates today, grew out of her sister’s civic work.

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Linked with our presentation of COICA Coordinadora de las Organizaciones Indigenas de la Cuenca Amazonica.

Antonio Jacanamijoy – Colombia

Antonio is from Colombiaâs Sibundoy Valley. He has a university degree, is married and has three children. Antonio speaks Spanish and Quechua. Antonioâs interests, concerns, and experiences are in indigenous rights, human rights, economic development, natural resource protection, biodiversity, and intellectual property rights. Antonio began working in his local community in the Colombian Amazon from which he rose to Colombian regional and national levels, and then on to such international arenas as the United Nations, the World Bank, OXFAM, and the Climate Alliance (Germany).

In each case, he has taken a leadership role that encourages and enables the sort of open dialogue and negotiation that, breaking with Latin Americaâs traditional hierarchies, moves toward participatory and deliberative democracy. Antonio assumed his first official leadership role as governor of the Colombian Inga Indigenous Community in 1987. From this position, he gained more powerful roles as he represented the interests of his community at increasingly wider regional and national levels. His representation of indigenous interests extended internationally when he assumed coordinating positions for Amazon basin indigenous groups in Ecuador and became a member of the directorate for the Forest Stewardship Council in Oaxaca, Mexico.

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Dean, School of Visual Arts, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore, Professor Salima Hashmi is a painter, art educationist, writer and curator. She was educated at the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore, the Bath Academy of Art, U.K., and the Rhode Island School of Design, USA. She taught for 30 years at NCA, Pakistan’s premier art institution, and retired as its Principal. She has exhibited her own work, travelled and lectured extensively all over the world, and has curated about a dozen international art shows in the U.K., Europe, the USA, Australia, Japan and India. She is a recipient of The President’s Award for Pride of Performance, Pakistan. (southasiafoundation).

She says: « The objective of art is to give life a shape and though artists cannot change the world they can, through their work, give flight to imagination, they can give you the direction ».

She says also: “You don’t understand the singing of birds but that does not mean it has no meaning. Similarly, if you watch it closely, your eyes start talking to the works of art”.

Salima Hashmi – Pakistan

Excerpt: … Last year, Salima Hashmi published a book titled Unveiling the Visible: Lives and Works of Women Artists of Pakistan. The book examines the lives and works of about 50 of Pakistan’s women painters since independence. As Murataza Rizvi wrote in his review of Salima’s book in Dawn, 09/2202, « She took to writing (the book) only because our writers had failed to document the history of Pakistan’s women artists. »

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