Expert findings, personal research and a discreet fact-finding visit to the Dominion Farms project in Siaya, a rural agricultural district, also homeland of Democratic presidential contender, Barack Obama’s father, is all it took to conclude that the letter-writing group partly funded by the New Earth Foundation may have made the goof of the decade.

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Young people were busy then, ripe with lofty ideals about clean air, clean water, a cleaner environment and making the earth we live on a cleaner and safer place. They spoke out, paraded, chanted, ranted, raved and demonstrated, not all that bad, those efforts did indeed bring about some change.

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Gavin has majors in French, Italian, and Comparative Literature from the University of California, Davis. He currently teaches English language in Gangneung, South Korea.

Gavin’s favorite environmentally-minded work has included: co-founding the grassroots Nature Conservation Club at about age 8; interning for the Jane Goodall Institutes’s Roots & Shoots (R&S) program; representing R&S at the World Social Forum VI in Caracas, Venezuela; volunteering at the Marine Mammal Center of Sausalito; being a research assistant for a CAL lab studying climate change in Colorado; bicycling lots.

Join me as Gavin and I talk about his world, and Eco Worldly.

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Link to Barefoot Solar Engineers mentioned in my summation.

Link to Eco Worldly

But in 1989, one brave woman who we now know as Wangari Maathai, dared the then Daniel arap Moi government at the same park and took a heavy beating, spending time in hospital. Then and now, Uhuru Park, has been the darling of environmentalists and politicians in Nairobi alike. For politicians, it is where declarations on Grand Marches to Freedom have been made to the people; for environmentalists, Nairobi’s only serene recreational public park with an artificial pond, is too valuable for just being a talkshop. It is where Freedom for the Planet, ala Wangari Maathai, began. She almost single handedly stopped the Moi regime from putting up a 60 story business complex as a gift to the ruling KANU party and the world noticed her work that started in 1977 with the formation of the Green Belt Movement, a grassroots environmental non profit.

The Face of Environmentalism in Africa
Maathai is the face of environmentalism in Africa. No other African environmental activist has won as many accolades, including the Goldman Environmental Prize, as she has and when she in 2004 bagged the Nobel Peace Prize for her lifetime struggles and achievements for a greener Africa and the world her countrymen and women thought one of their own had finally been recognized by the global community. Shalini Ramanathan, a clean energy advocate, writing in Grist calls her “outspoken, accomplished and passionate” about the environment and what she stands for. The British Broadcasting Corporation has called her a leading campaigner on social matters.

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As many commentators have remarked, how can one possibly benefit from being bought a virtual drink? An empty gesture.

No empty gestures on this page though.

Stop Global Warming

Picture courtesy of Flickr here.

A much needed boost to city landscapes here in the UK.

And perhaps boots up the backsides of local authorities who thought citizens such as me were unaware of what was going on.

And beginning to disappear.

I don’t personally think that a city environment is a natural environment for an ape species. I don’t think any of us do.

We adapt. But we still need to see greenery.

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