A favorite quote among activists is Margaret Mead’s old encouragement: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

It’s a good rallying cry for the hopelessly outnumbered, which seemed a fair description of the two dozen people who gathered outside premier Gordon Campbell’s Vancouver constituency office last Saturday. The rally was scheduled to begin at noon; at ten after, organizer Ken Wu, the young and affable conservation biologist who is now director of the Western Canada Wilderness Committee (WC²), said “let’s give it a few more minutes. Our supporters operate on dooby time.” A car honked – “is that for us?” wondered Wu, gesturing to the placards encouraging drivers-by to honk if you love old growth, “or just the usual Vancouver traffic?” (more…)

“The Canadian lifestyle is an act of terrorism against the rest of the world.”

I heard this assessment of our national modus operandi unleashed by Usman Majeed, a young activist. He was one of the speakers at two conferences I attended last weekend: one on ‘Environmental Racism’ and the other titled ‘Why I oppose the 2010 Olympics.’ I went in part because 2009 marks the ten-year anniversary of the Battle in Seattle, a seminal event in the history of protest, and I can’t help but wonder where the movement’s at a decade on. The Doha Round may have collapsed, but so have most of the world’s ecosystems, and poverty’s march across the planet hasn’t much slowed. There’s a lot left to protest, in other words, and I’m interested in the wackos actually doing it. (more…)

You may have come across a television show last year that featured celebrities visiting strange places: MIA in Liberia; Cameron Diaz on the Peruvian altiplano; Joaquin Phoenix, well before his exotic journey into hip-hop, dancing in a grass skirt deep inside the Amazon. The spirit of activism came quickly across – these celebrities were out to do good – but strangely, no one was wearing any make up, adopting children, or composing euphemistic hymns for sale on ebay.

The show was 4REAL, and in a series of eight installments it brought household names to faraway places where they could shine some starlight on young leaders you’ve probably never heard of. Thus viewers are benignly tricked into learning about Tashka, who grew up in remotest Amazon, became his Yawanawa tribe’s youngest chief at 25, and is now campaigning to become Brazil’s first aboriginal senator; or Salim Mohamed, a Kenyan whose contribution to the health and happiness of Nairobi’s poorest residents I’ve profiled in earlier posts; or Vancouver’s own Liz Evans, a nurse whose mission lies just around the corner from 4REAL’s headquarters in what the Globe and Mail recently called ‘Canada’s slum’ – she comes to us via Eva Mendez, who sheds gorgeous tears after Evans introduces her to residents of Vancouver’s downtown eastside. (more…)

On February 12, news media across the country celebrated the preversary of the 2010 Winter Olympics. That’s my word for a date marking one-year-to-the-day before something happens, the kind of non-event beloved by news editors because of all the copy it enables. Fair enough; too many issues go unreported for lack of timeliness, after all. But notice that if, in the spirit of healthy sport, you play around with preversary, it becomes perversary.

Perverse, that is, just like the Games themselves – but that’s to be expected, at least up to a point. Even so it was startling to read James Christie’s front page story for the Globe and Mail that day, gleefully detailing how Canadian athletes are being given vastly preferential access to Olympic facilities; apparently we’re limiting foreign teams’ practice time on our tracks, slopes, rinks and racecourses so as to give our own contenders the advantage of familiarity on competition day. How sporting. I wonder what Dick Pound, the Canadian pitbull formerly in charge of the World Anti-Doping Agency, would say? I suppose he’d be happy no substances were being sanctioned, but it does seem to go against the principle of fair play he and WADA so vehemently espouse. (more…)

Have you paused lately to consider how extraordinary it is that our bodies can turn sunlight into bone? Vancouver’s winter cloud blanket has prompted some nostalgic investigation into the process by which that takes place (or would if I were living somewhere else), with some surprising results.

Very roughly speaking, the magic begins when ultraviolet light waves strike our epidermis, where they become vitamin D through a process that’s about as well understood as photosynthesis in plants – ie, not really at all. We’ll gloss over that elephant in the room, since we must, and follow vitamin D as makes its way to the kidneys, where it’s transformed (much more transparently) into something known as 1,25(OH)₂D. That little compound then helps calcium do its thing, and voila – bones develop in children, stay dense in adults, and nobody comes down with rickets. (more…)

In the spirit of existential angst now gripping the journalism industry, I paid a recent visit to the future of our trade. The route there took me through Vancouver’s downtown east side, a colorful, Dickensian neighborhood known chiefly for the homelessness on display at street level. Is this it, I wondered, picturing the New York Times’ Sulzberger family huddled on the sidewalk, begging Carlos Slim for a quarter billion dollars – but no, not yet it wasn’t. The future was inside an office high rise, four floors up and named after a fish.

The Tyee is an online magazine dedicated to investigative journalism of the kind we’re seeing less and less of on paper. It focuses primarily on issues facing BC, but many of the stories it breaks are geographically diffuse (ever heard of the 100-mile diet?), making it one of the premier news-gathering institutions in the country. (more…)

NAIROBI—It was all over. We were gathered on the patio of the national museum’s café , post-morteming in the shade, coffee cups shaking in our hands.

“By the time bodies start piling up, that’s just a detail.” — Ugandan journalist Kalundi Serumaga, speaking at the Kwani Litfest in Nairobi.

NAIROBI—It was all over. We were gathered on the patio of the national museum’s café , post-morteming in the shade, coffee cups shaking in our hands. Binyavanga Wainaina—the next Achebe, or maybe just a good talker—going on about where’s a razor to shave his dreadlocks off: “I just want to see the shape of my skull.”

(“Ah,” said David Kaiza, Kampala’s neurotic genius, “you’re going to scalp yourself before someone else does it for you.”)

Meanwhile, investigative journalist Parselelo Kantai was describing the 1000-shilling bribe he’d paid the cops who caught him smoking a cigarrette on the street at four in the morning last night, while Kalundi was grumbling about everything in a very analytic way—that all the intelligence in this country had been trained outside of it, that everything we’d been talking about throughout the litfest was probably irrelevant, that the waitress had passed him three times without bringing him a menu and it took a blond mzungu to get her attention. “Hey man,” I said, “you could have lifted your hand too.” (more…)

NAIROBI—He wasn’t born here; the father who was didn’t raise him; and he’s only visited three times in his life. But now that he’s got a clear shot at the White House, Barack Obama is every Kenyan’s Kenyan. The country’s Luo community, robbed by that Kikuyu antichrist Mwai Kibaki last Christmas, suddenly has a new presidential candidate to cheer for. But for once in Kenyan politics, tribe’s got nothing to do with it. All forty-two of them are cheering Obama on, and who cares if this time no one gets to vote?

Obama’s confident visage beamed out the front page of every paper in the country this morning, his first as the official Democratic nominee. And why not? There’s been precious little fodder for the patriotic cannon around here lately; Obama may be a distant son of the soil, but he’s a son nonetheless. Or perhaps more accurately, a grandson—the lineup outside his grandma’s hut on Lake Victoria is four reporters deep, and counting. Whether or not her humble lifestyle or down-to-earth views on Barack junior can shed any light on how he might behave in the Oval Office is debatable, but that won’t stop journalists from scouring his genetic homeland (half of it, anyway) for insights into how Kenya has influenced the man who would be Prez.
And what of the effect that man now has on the country that would be His? My Kenyan colleagues and I had an interesting day at the office today, debating exactly what it is that makes this country so happy about Obama’s surging fortunes. (more…)