Kenyan Girls Back in School 1/6/12

2011 Year-End Review 12/30/11

India Case Study Now Available 12/16/11

Girls' Leadership Workshop Underway 12/9/11

Durban COP 17 Presentation Available 12/6/11

San Diego Asian Film Festival in Progress 10/26/11

Upcoming Event: Food Day 10/21/11

New Ethiopia Video with Amharic Narration 10/12/11

Update on California Film Festival 10/5/11

Huffington Post Blog: Recollections of Wangari Maathai 9/29/11

Remembering Wangari Maathai 9/27/11

Brighter Green Ethiopia Research in Amharic Now Available in Smaller File Size 9/21/11

What's for Dinner? to Play at California Film Festival 9/9/11

Brighter Green Ethiopia Research in Amharic 9/6/11

REAL Radio Interview 8/23/11

Presentation from FoodFight Conference Now Available 7/12/11

Literary Animal: Reading India, Part III

This installment of the Literary Animal: Reading India series will be a slight foray into linguistics.

Part III: The Language of Violence

Katherine Russell Rich’s Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language is part travel memoir, part scholarly inquiry into the science of language acquisition. Rich documents her time in Udaipur, Rajasthan where she enrolled in a Hindi study program. The beginning of her studies coincided with September 11, 2001. The event and its aftermath influenced the Hindi words she would acquire those first few weeks.

“There are Hindi words from those days I used so often, they’re hardwired for all time: ‘terrorism,’ ‘fanaticism,’ ‘safety,’ ‘exploitation,’ ‘war’.”

Literary Animal: Reading India, Part II

Coinciding with the launch of our recent India case study, Veg or Non-Veg? India at a Crossroads, we are continuing our blog series examining where recent writings on a changing India intersect with Brighter Green's interests in animal agriculture, food security and climate change.

Part II: The Cow Broker

In my visits to Indian dairies, when I asked what happens to the ‘spent’ cows and buffaloes and unwanted male calves, I often heard about “the middleman,” who would come and take the cows away or sell them to slaughter. In the October 10, 2011 issue of the New Yorker, Akash Kapur writes about one such middleman, in his article “The Shandy: The Cost of Being a Cow Broker in Rural India.” Here we meet R. Ramadas, a cow broker in a shandy, or cow market in Tamil Nadu.

Kapur is interested in this new India where, “rice fields were giving way to highways, farmland to software complexes, and saris to pants.” While these changes are more pronounced in the big cities, Kapur examines the changes in a rural context. The shandies, he learned, were once big agricultural fairs, but now are dominated more by businessmen than farmers. Local produce used to be sold there, but now none can be found.

Literary Animal: Reading India, Part I

Over the past several years, there has been a considerable amount of writing about modern(izing) India. From different angles, writers are witnessing and documenting a subcontinent undergoing significant shifts. The New York Times recently launched their first country specific blog, India Ink. At Brighter Green, we’ve been most interested in the social and environmental issues that are emerging with a changing country, a changing diet, and a changing climate. Our recent paper Veg or Non-Veg? India at the Crossroads, and our videos on India’s chicken and dairy industries delve into this further. In this blog series, we hope to highlight writings on India and where they intersect with our work with respect to sustainability, equity, and rights, particularly in the context of food security and climate change.

Part I: Red Sorghum and ‘F&B’

In his recent book, The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India, Siddhartha Deb examines the growing inequity that has paralleled India’s economic growth. Deb notes:

“Even as the number of millionaires and billionaires has increased, followed by the aspirers from the middle classes, the poor have seen either little or no improvement at all…In 2004-5, the last year for which data was available, the total number of people in India consuming less than 20 rupees (or 50 cents) a day was 836 million—or 77 per cent of the population.”

India Paper at Last!

Brighter Green's multi-year, multi-media project, Climate Change and the Globalization of Industrial Animal Agriculture is now complete with the release of the India case study, "Veg or Non-Veg? India at the Crossroads."

India's status as a vegetarian society is slowly changing, partly due to the growing industrialization of of its livestock sector. This paper examines India's ability to manage the continued intensification of its poultry, dairy, and beef industries while achieving food security for its people, making agricultural more resilient to changing weather patterns (including the annual monsoon), and protecting its natural resources and the global climate.

Large Scale or Small Scale

Are wind turbines, like these in Holland, feasible in today's Kenya?

Large-scale projects may sound beneficial and grandiose but whether they actually provide the necessary benefit is questionable. Recently, a large Kenyan power company, Lake Turkana Wind Power, released a plan to construct 350 wind turbines on leased land in a desert area. However, their project has stalled over the past couple years, and has failed to benefit the off-grid Kenyans who need the power the most. The project has yet to create jobs and will eventually displace people and ecologically disturb the land. In projects such as these, financial obligations and political will may also muddle the vision. The Kenyans who most need this benefit—which could increase their well being substantially by being connected to the grid or attaining a form of electrification—are not being addressed. Yes, the wind turbines will increase usage of a renewable source of energy, but will they provide the added benefit that’s necessary?

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Sangamithra Iyer's Blog Series

Brighter Green Associate Sangamithra Iyer is writing a blog series examining where recent writings on a changing India intersect with Brighter Green’s interests in animal agriculture, food security, and climate change.

Brighter Green at COP 17 Climate Change Conference

Mia MacDonald recently represented Brighter Green at the 2011 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Durban, South Africa. Read Mia's blogs from the conference here.

Brighter Green Videos

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Countries in the Horn of Africa, including Ethiopia, are experiencing the worst drought in 60 years. This video explores Ethiopia's meat and dairy industries and the climate change and food security consequences of each.

Brighter Green Project on Climate Change and the Globalization of Industrial Animal Agriculture

This series of policy papers and short videos forms the foundation of Brighter Green's Program on Food Policy and Equity. The papers document the globalization of industrial animal agriculture in Brazil, China, Ethiopia, and India through the lens of climate change. They also explore additional environmental, food security, equity, livelihood, and animal welfare impacts of this phenomenon.

What's for Dinner?

Can people in the developing world eat as much meat and dairy as people in the industrialized countries without destroying the planet? And do they really want to? We’re exploring these issues in China through the medium of film. Read more about the film, from shooting in Beijing, Jiangxi, and Guangdong, China to our film festival screenings.

East African Girls' Leadership Initiative

"I would like to help Maasai women become economically empowered so that they can fight for their rights," says fifteen-year-old Hellen Naipanoi Kipaili, a participant in Brighter Green's collaborative Girls' Education, Leadership and Rights Training Initiative. The program's intent is to invest deeply in a small number of girls with significant potential but who are trapped by their families' poverty. Learn more about the girls and the program here.

Stella Zhou Reports from China

Brighter Green Associate Stella Zhou spent the summer of 2010 in her native China researching the growth of intensive animal agriculture, as well as urban attitudes towards changing diets and rising meat consumption. Read her blogs written from various parts of of China.

Brighter Green at COP 16 Climate Summit

A delegation from Brighter Green attended the recent 2010 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Cancun, Mexico, held November 29-December 10, 2010. Read our blogs from the conference, and see details of the events we organized.