Assi Ghat: Benares (Varanasi)

Varanasi (Benares) .. Assi Ghat

Next door, fifty long-haired orange-robed saddhus hear their miked-up guru; immediately to my right musicians bang cymbals and drums in endless ryhthmless cycles; above in a shitty-barked vibrantly red-flowered tree about a hundred manically-chirping chaffinch-like birds busy about the foliage whilst their quieter white-breasted cousins prefer to preen on the nextdoor Neem; in front through whirlpools of murky brown clay-water an unending stream of bathers ignore rigor-mortis-ridden cows as they drift, hoofs upward, pecked raw by Ravens; to the Holy Bathers' photogenic left a long-beardy-loincloth man with a sheet-white face and formidable black trident slung over his shoulder waters the plants on the deck of his delicate red houseboat. To the swimmers' right seventy huge oily-black Water Buffalo wallow lugubriously as they watch the rest of this neighbourhoods' human inhabitants shit on the riverbank in front of them. Just in front of me, ten men hammer together a new clinker row-boat, occasionally taking a break to rest from the strong August sun in one of the chai stalls that look onto the parade of trinket-salesmen, beggars, gnarled one-legged postcard vendors, and rickshaw and boat-trip touts that vie for our attentions every time we step off this balcony. Goats patrol for refuse as the rich thick air dampens the cacophony with the promise of the next monsoon torrent.

Philippines: 'Community Tree Planting'

As we walk around town, there is clearly tension in the air. Some folks cautiously glance our way in a certain disbelief that white tourists should still be here at all. Our host family has had a good laugh about all they money they'll make when they shop us to the kidnappers. But we feel safe with Evelyn and Ditdit looking out for us. Evelyn attended a CHE field trip in the Hebrides and is now a researcher at Davao University; Ditdit came to study a short course in sustainability and now directs the Davao office of the Philippine Development Institute, a government sustainability think-tank.

We're in time to participate in a celebration of a hundred years of the Philippine Civil Service 'community tree planting'. From every department, bureaucrats converge on a patch of government land to plant a mahogany monoculture forest. Two army trucks and machine-gun touting camouflaged troops guard a long line of employees who each take three saplings to insert into the earth at pre-marked positions. Our group from the Development Institute is all done in fifteen minutes. I notice a crew from the department of Budget and Accounts alongside us. They spot a snake trying to wriggle away, the women scream, and the alpha male grabs a huge knife and flails at His Enemy until there's no life left. No-one takes notice but I'm stifling tears.

That afternoon, back in town, I wander into a cyber-cafe to check the email. The vacuum of the information world sucks me in again. The room crashes and booms with twelve teenage schoolboys networked together and kicking the hell out of whoever it is they're fighting on today's game. As usual, the volume is enormous. I log off and buy a paper and read about the Jolo kidnap crisis and think of a nation of schoolboy gamers shooting each other over the net.

Warfare outside, warfare inside.

INDONESIA - Serge's story

Serge Marti: "I am working as a facilitator, trying to help improve the services that NGO's and local government provide to communities, connecting communities who have common agendas, trying to get forest-dwelling people involved in policy dialogues with power-brokers, helping to open a national dialogue on tenurial issues and instruments, finding ways to challenge the status-quo and to change thinking so that the problems of forestry in Indonesia are tackled not simply from the points of view of legitimate and illegitimate business interests or from that of the conservationist lobby.

Instead we are pushing the agenda that natural resource management is about human rights abuses, particularly the rights of indigenous peoples but also of other forest-dependent poor. There are at least seven thousand conflicts in Indonesia that are linked to the question of access to natural resources. Forest-dwelling peoples must have choice about how they want to live their lives. At the moment the only choice is to watch the bulldozers come in, buy the Monsanto chemicals sold by local government pushers, join in the illegal logging for lack of any other economic alternative. Trying to help communities obtain access and gain decision-making power is part of the fight to stop not only the whole-sale destruction of biodiversity but the cultural and linguistic destruction which comes with it. We have to call a halt to this system which creates monocultures of the mind, soul, and soil.

Learning to love Nusantara (Indonesia's other name) has reminded me to be open about the world, open to connections, wide-open to change. Two weeks ago I attended a ritual to strengthen the power of the spirits in a forest that is being protected by the community against all odds from rampant illegal logging. I am going back to a rising moon ceremony in another community of Dayak long-house dwellers."

Bali; a stand-off between worlds

Australia starts in Kuta, Bali. The suburban beach mall package delight. The stench of neon light hitting off surfware outlets. But Bali still exists, even here. Every morning thousands of fresh petal offerings at insections and entranceways, revivifying the Gods with freshest rice on banana leaves. A little further out of the tourist belt, and Hindu Bali basks in tropical lushness. I jump aboard a bemo for the climb up Mount Agung, Bali's Great Mother Volcano, to Tirta Gingga ­ temple of the water of the Ganges. The sun set beneath deeply marooned clouds, the pastels echoing off verdant baize paddy fields washed out by the afternoon downpour. I check into an empty guesthouse ­ they're all empty here. The owner is desparate for custom, fidgets wildly. We chat about the cock fight tomorrow. I'm making excuses when we're joined by a friend whose eyes shine intensely as we sink deep into a conversation about Yoga as a source of life; the Hindu deities' lessons about the unity of mind, body and spirit. The Gods are vivid and alive in every relationship in traditional Bali. Across families andcommunities the Gods and the land are alive, zinging, hugely green, verdant, templed. The industrious village arts and business are productive, integrated, fertile ­ a solid indentity face to face with the Huge Death of the consumer west, fighting the cancer, losing ground only very slowly. My friend has a deep and profound understanding of this cancer, and how to prevent it. Strong identity; unity of mind, body and spirit through Yoga. Hope.

AUSTRALIA, BYRON BAY:

14th October 2001 www.ric.org

URGENT ACTION EMAIL

Dear UK Friends

I wonder if you could help me with a very important matter? We're looking for organisations and individuals in London who could help us in an international day of action to protect the Ecuadorian rainforests.

We're trying everything we can to stop the OCP oil pipeline from being built from the Ecuadorian Amazon over the Andes and to the coast. If it is completed, it will DOUBLE the amount of oil that can be removed from the Amazon headwaters and this will impact on numerous national parks, nature reserves and indigenous communities. There's comprehensive information about the issue at www.amazonwatch.org

At the request of "Accion Ecologica", an NGO in Ecuador, the Rainforest

Information Centre has helped send 2 trainers from the Ruckus Society in the US to go down there and teach tree-sits and other direct action techniques and purchased a video projector so that Accion Ecologica can show their excellent anti-oil industry video all along the proposed route.

We are presently co-ordinating an international action against WestLB,

AUSTRALIA: Ecovillage Convergence

Crystal Waters is a well-established eco-village, which they define as "A human scale, full-featured settlement in which human activities are harmlessly integrated into the natural world in a way that is supportive of healthy human development and can be successfully continued into the indefinite future" (Diane and Robert Gilman).

The Australasian eco-village network is a well-established and diverse experiment into alternative living, especially concerned with creating sustainable livelihoods for all residents. Crystal Waters, with 200 residents, demonstrates many principles of permaculture design and the key ingredients to the design of a viable local economy that can offer viable employment for residents.

Arriving in the West

Lock in your kids

Lock out your heart

Tranquilise the spaces in between.

But it's ALRIGHT 'cause you can

chill out on your weekend break

Take the kids to the movie on

suburban beach culture hell

Build a bungalow to retire

to in your dead-end days

And SLEEP and sleep

in the arms of the God

of the consumer age

Wealth is fear

Fear builds walls beyond walls

Tranquilises the spaces in between.

Your power's locked in

Your heart's locked out

Get ANGRY you're

about to make a start

Find your tranquillisers

Transform them one by one

'Till they're the tools you'll use to

spread the message on

SAN FRANCISCO

Creative Direct Action: puppets against evictions and the WTO; building murals (thanks to Mark Tully, CHE Fellow)

AOTEAROA New Zealand

Liberal coalition-partner James Anderton -lay in the balance. We met Sue half an hour after she and her colleagues hadagreed to lend their support to the bank on several conditions that obliged the new institution to build community banking concepts into its plans.

Sue is also the Aotearoa COMMACT contact. Her concerns to promote and protext local economies are at the forefront of her agend. In her maiden speech she challenged the Labour PM, Ms Clark, about the government's commitment to free trade and globalisation: "I believe that one of the critical pathways away from foreign control and towards economic sovereignty is through progressing cooperative and community owned financial institutions in this country."

Sue Bradford, Green MP

After thirty years as an community development activist for the unemployed, Sue hadweathered the tabloid press'wrath for years. But after only a year as an elected list MP for the Green Party, she had picked up two media awardsfor 'best 'and 'most effective' backbencher.

Ten months earlier in India, Father Michael Jacob, a Bangalore slum-worker,had recommended we meet her. We dutifully made contact when we arrived in Wellington, sure that you don't become an effective MP byagreeing to meet travelers from the other side of the world at short notice. We couldn't have been more wrong.

We arrived on a Thursday afternoon after a busy week. The ruling Labour/Liberal coalition need either Green Party, or right-wing National Party, support on budget bills. The week we arrived, the future of one of the most contentious budgetry plans for the government -for a National 'Peoples'Bank'sponsored by

The next Green MPs? Catherine (right) is thinking of standing next time around ...