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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
rhenley
Published Letters: 83 Editor's Choice: 5
This is not what this article in the Chronicile said just last summer:
"In addition to the San Francisco probe, a second investigation netted an unknown number of arrests in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Anaheim and elsewhere, authorities said."
"Law enforcement authorities and those who counsel women rescued from sexual slavery say the sex trade smuggles 18,000 to 20,000 undocumented sex workers into the United States each year. Typically, sex slave victims pay tens of thousands of dollars to get here, only to be forced into prostitution to pay off their debts. In some cases, the girls or women have been kidnapped from their home countries."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/07/01/BAmassage01.DTL
> The notion of being sold into sexual slavery is little
> more than a punch line here in the States
The current issue of Science (24 March 2006) has new climate change and melting glacier articles and reports available:
Special Online Collection:
Climate Change -- Breaking the Ice
http://www.sciencemag.org/sciext/ice/
Since Arizona also contains the Hopi's among many other native populations, I find at least some mention of their unique native voice rather disturbing when I peruse this book list.
As noted, the issue is popularly contemporary as to how modern people have failed to understand the landscape that holds them now in these places we have manufactured for our lives.
It should only take one visit to Phoenix tap water to understand that not only is the water being improperly mined, but deadened with chemicals at the same time. So quickly then the relationship of water in the modern desert is directly, intimately presented to us as out of balance.
Where can we then turn for the understanding we need to beat a path out of the manufactured desert into that real one ?
The contemporary failure to understand one's landscape is more rooted in the loss of the ancient language and images associated with inhabited space than we would like to acknowledge.
By dropping out whole sections of the native voice of the landscape from this list you only entice us down a meandering trail that dissipates much too soon.
While there are other books that don't so readily come to my mind with a non-bioregional Arizona centric focus, and are long missing from my bookshelf, or are quite unavailable; I would at least think that the books of Frank Waters: The Book of the Hopi, Masked Gods, etc. should have rated some mention here.
At about the same time you are suggesting, the Chinese philosopher and essayist Liu Zongyuan wrote the following lines:
The official guardian's axes have spread through a thousand hills,
At the Works Department's orders hacking rafter-beams and billets.
He was commenting on the people who had been charged with protecting the forests and natural resources, with the opposite - the campaign which essentially removed the vast old growth forests in China.
So much lumber was removed then that the life blood of the mountains, the soil, flowed down the Yangzi and Yellow rivers out approximately 90 km. into the sea.
The presently sinking Shanghai built on land formed from the silt deposited long ago from denuded forest mountains appears to re-affirm the shuffling of one economic consequence for another.
Based on a third of the timeframe covered in the Nature report, Mark Elvin's recent book 'The Retreat of the Elephants: an environmental history of China', would seem to suggest that the hand of man may figure larger than you suggest in the report's climatic inventory.
In his book, he discusses those ideas we all have in mind, how nature, climate, man, culture and the philosophical/economic system of a time come together, to form a lasting impact on the environment we call home.
While relying on the work of one Chinese poet after another, Elvin neglects any mention of Yang Guifei when those forests fell.
Well netflix doesn't carry movies I think are important to watch, but I digress.
I've been waiting all week for some mention of this film with four showings at Sundance: "The Devil Came on Horseback" by Ricki Stern & Annie Sundberg.
So either it's a dog, or the whole idea was such a turnoff no one saw it:
"The subject is Darfur. The journey takes place over the course of 18 months. Steidle went to Sudan as an unarmed military observer working for the African Union. He left as a witness to what many believe is genocide in the western Darfur region, a conflict that has claimed 400,000 lives and displaced 2.5 million people. In the transformation from soldier to observer to witness and activist, we see a man at first confounded by his naiveté and then confronted by the urgency of a humanitarian catastrophe that he sees unfolding firsthand."
"An everyman figure, Steidle is initially unequipped to absorb the horror around him. Like many, he would rather not engage with something so incomprehensible and terrible. But he does, and Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern's (The Trials of Darryl Hunt, Sundance 2006) astonishing film journeys from Darfur to the United States, then to Chad, Rwanda, and finally the United States again. His odyssey becomes ours as the more than 1,000 photographs he took become evidence of a crisis that cannot be denied." — Cara Mertes
http://festival.sundance.org/filmguide/popup.aspx?film=7539
http://www.thedevilcameonhorseback.com
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
