Green justice
David Ransom looks under the eco-babble for the real environmental culprits.

The scars of Umlungu
Scarred land, scarred faces. Sindiwe Magona reflects on South Africa.

The fridge, the greenhouse
and the carbon sink
The figures are being fixed against the South - Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain do the sums differently.

My collection
A poem by Dinyar Godrej

Southern embraces
The world - gentle and brutal - according to Eduardo Gakano

Armada against Narmada
The people of the Narmada Valley in India are still fighting a huge dam-building project funded by the World Bank. Medha Patkar explains why.

GREEN JUSTICE - THE FACTS

Look here, gringo!
Alex Shankland reports on rubber tappers in the Amazon as they get ready to take over an Extractive Reserve.

Talking garbage
There's less rubbish in Sri Lanka than Canada. Lasanda Kurukulasuriya picks over the reasons.

Simply - grief and globaloney

Tread gently on the Earth
Environmental activists from the South Vandana Shiva, Martin Khor Kok Peng, Charles Abugre and COICA set out their stall for the 'Earth Summit'.

Action
Useful addresses, contacts, campaigns, ideas for action and a guide to what's worth reading.

Why don't you let the South speak for itself'?' 'Can you please stop blaming the North for everything and come up with something more constructive for a change?' These are the kinds of questions I'm sometimes asked. This issue of the magazine is at least a partial response to them. Most of the contrib- utors I've included live and work in the South. But to get Southern voices heard takes more than just making space for them in a magazine.

I am reminded of a conversation I once heard between a very good English writer and that great Peruvian story-teller, Mario Vargas Llosa. The English writer painted an attractive picture of gauchos in Patagonia sitting round camp fires reading stories to each other late into the night after a long day rounding up cattle. That, said Vargas Llosa, must have been a rare scene indeed, because most of them would almost certainly have been unable to read.

The point is that if you haven't got the resources for education, for making or buying books and magazines, or for paying writers to write, no amount of wishful thinking can make them materialize. Many countries in the South don't have these resources. For one reason or another, including censorship and repression, Southern voices do not get heard enough even in their own cultures, let alone in the North.

Then there is the question of how to edit the text. 'Spiking' (rejecting) a piece that comes in from the South when you're supposed to be letting the South speak for itself might seem, well, a bit paradoxical. You might be charged with 'cultural imperialism' and not have a leg to stand on - not a position the liberal conscience likes to maintain for very long.

Perhaps I don't have a liberal conscience. I can't off-hand think of any good reason for including something I otherwise wouldn't simply because it comes from the South. That would be condescension of the worst kind.

You might well ask if there is a 'Voice from the South'. The answer is, of course, that there is not one voice, but many, many voices. There are times, however, when different voices come together to say very much the same thing about a particular subject. I think this is one such time, and the environment is one such subject. And what they are saying might seem to you remarkably like just blaming the North for absolutely everything.

On closer examination you may find that this is not really the case. If the South reminds the North of its power and responsibility then it is doing all of us a service, because that's where you have to start if you want to get anything constructive done. If, in the process, we discover things we did not know before then I think we will have got closer to seeing the Earth as it really is - and to what it is about the Earth that is worth saving.

Letters
Letter from India
Updates
Reviews: plus Marion Woodman classic
Curiosities
Endpiece
Country profile: Lesotho

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