The Kenyan girls participating in the East African Girls' Leadership Initiative went back to school this week, the first term of their last year. The Tanzanian girls go back later this month.

Happy New Year from Brighter Green! Please take a look at our most recent newsletter for a summary of what Brighter Green has accomplished this year.

The highly anticipated India policy paper, Veg or Non-Veg? India at the Crossroads is now available for download.

The East African Girls' Leadership Initiative is holding a workshop in Morogoro, Tanzania.

Brighter Green participated in an official side event at the UN climate summit with partners Humane Society International and Compassion in World Farming. Mia MacDonald's presentation from the event on December 2 is posted here.

Brighter Green's documentary film, "What's for Dinner?" is screening as part of the 12th Annual San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Brighter Green is excited to spread the word about Food Day, a day for all Americans to push for healthy, affordable food produced in a sustainable, humane way.

Thanks to the hard work of translator Tibebe Mengistu, the Ethiopia video is now available with an Amharic narration. To view the rest of the Globalization of Factory Farming materials related to Ethiopia and other countries, click here.

Brighter Green's short documentary, "What's for Dinner?," is screening at the 12th Annual San Diego Asian Film Festival on Thursday October 27 at 5:20 PM (PST).

In this blog on the Huffington Post, Mia MacDonald reflects on Wangari Maathai's life, their work together, and what made Wangari remarkable.

Mia MacDonald is quoted in this article in the U.K. Independent about how Kenyans are dealing with the loss of Wangari Maathai. Mia recalls the day in 2004 when Wangari learned she had won Nobel Peace Prize -- Mia was there -- and how what happened after the news broke embodied Wangari's approach and the values she held.

Thanks to translator Tibebe Mengistu, the Amharic translation of the Ethiopia policy brief is now available in a smaller file size for dial-up internet connections.

Brighter Green's short documentary, "What's for Dinner?" exploring rising meat consumption and production in China, has been chosen to screen at the 12th Annual San Diego Asian Film Festival. The festival runs October 20-28, 2011 in San Diego, California. A schedule of screenings will be posted soon. In the meantime, view a short interview about the making of the film with "What's for Dinner?" director Jian Yi here.

Brighter Green's policy brief, Climate, Food Security, & Growth: Ethiopia’s Complex Relationship with Livestock is now available in an Amharic translation. Amharic is widely spoken in Ethiopia, among the Ethiopian diaspora, and is also the working language of the Ethiopian government. Countries in the Horn and East of Africa, including Ethiopia, are in the grip of a severe drought. Millions of people and livestock are affected, providing an important current context for Brighter Green's Ethiopia research and policy recommendations.

Brighter Green Executive Director Mia MacDonald was interviewed August 17 by REAL (Responsible Eating and Living) founder and radio host, Caryn Hartglass. For a podcast of Mia's interview, click here.

Former Brighter Green intern Whitney Hoot is chronicling her experiences as a supervisor in a climate change adaptation program in Pohnpei, Micronesia, a small island developing nation at risk from rising sea levels and other effects of global warming. This is the first blog in a three-blog series.

Most Micronesians do not have a firm understanding of climate change and its potential impacts on their lives—this could probably also be said for most Americans—however it seems especially consequential that islanders lack this knowledge, as the effects of climate change are likely to drastically alter the traditional ways of life in this region. In Pohnpei (in the Federated States of Micronesia), we have four seasons – “reken leng” (the season of the trees, when we eat breadfruit); “reken pwel” (the season of the ground, when we eat yams); “reken sed” (the season of the sea, when we eat fish); and “reken isol” (when there is nothing, so we survive on bananas and whatever else the earth provides).

This past Tuesday, I attended the Global Civil Society Worksop on the Rio+20 "Zero Draft" and Rights for Sustainability. The workshop lasted a little over three hours, with input from various representatives from international NGOs about how best to prepare for the much-anticipated Rio+20 conference in June of this year. It is called "Rio+20" because it is taking place 20 years after a similar meeting occurred in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, sometimes called the Earth Summit, or UNCED (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development). Like it sounds, the conference was an eleven-day discussion between heads of state, governments, and NGOs to address how human development could continue, while protecting the environment, natural resources, and local populations.

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’.”

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.

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.”

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 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?

A near-final version of Brighter Green's forthcoming policy paper, Veg or Non-Veg: India at the Crossroads (policy brief, here [PDF]), charting the climate change, food security, resource use and animal welfare impacts of the intensification of India's livestock sector is in the hands of a colleague of IPCC head Dr. Rajendra Pachauri. She said she'd be sure he got it. Pachauri runs a research institute, TERI, in New Delhi. I imagine he's pretty busy right now as the climate talks move to an inexorable conclusion here in Durban. But it turns out he had time to talk to Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, who's here, too, about why he's a vegetarian. Here are excerpts. He makes clear he's speaking personally, not on behalf of the IPCC (too bad). Thanks to Stewart David for sharing:

The quiet ones. That's how the falafel-maker at the Durban conference's outdoor food court described himself and other vegans and vegetarian food-producers. The loud ones, he said, are KFC and McDonald's and other meat and dairy-heavy fast-food chains. But, he said, he'd done very well at the conference. Falafel sales surpassed his expectations due, he thought, to the international nature of the . . . conference attendees.

KFC and McDonald's do loom large here, and market themselves intensively. That was a point made at a panel on veganism and the environment at the people's forum at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Effectively, they're so loud that people almost don't hear much else. A small bag of sweet potatoes here in Durban costs more than a meal at KFC, an anthropology graduate student confirmed. Amplification's needed. Fueled by falafel, perhaps.

Photo by PJ Chmiel

At a packed side event on China and low-carbon development featuring one of China's lead negotiators at the Durban climate talks, Brighter Green got to ask a question: what about the expanding livestock sector in China and rising meat consumption? How will China address this given the climate change and resource implications—and the fact that the industrialized world is, slowly, reconsidering the model of intensive animal agriculture that it created and has exported? Earlier, Su Wei, a senior member of China's delegation, had said: "We are not part of the cause of climate change, but we should be part of the solution."

Children at the climate talks? Ban Ki-moon talked the other night about a boy he met in Tuvalu who told Ban he can't sleep at night because he's so worried about floods from rising seas, the result of global climate change. Adam Ole Mwarabu who's a Maasai from Tanzania and a partner in Brighter Green's collaborative girls' leadership initiative and who's here in Durban for COP 17, told me he suggested to delegates that children be accredited to attend these climate conferences. “How old?” I asked. He said from young to youth, including adolescents. The point, of course, is that the decisions made or unmade in Durban will affect kids' lives much more than they will those of all the adults here. There are a number young people around, but they're not kids: more likely in their early 20s.

Seen at the climate conference in its waning days: lots of young people from all over the world wearing T-shirts emblazoned with "I [heart] KP," as in the Kyoto Protocol. News comes this a.m... however, that the KP may well be the dearly departed—dead but not quite buried (T-shirts are still visible). Last night I saw the adolescent German kid who'll take over the global Billion Tree Campaign in an underground parking lot after a lavish UNEP event with Monaco's green prince, Albert, and UNEP head Achim Steiner, to mark the campaign's success: conceived by Wangari Maathai, 12.5 billion trees have been planted world-wide as a result of it. Felix, the indomitable tree-planter, was wearing his Billion Tree vest and chasing even younger South African kids while holding a watering can. I'm not quite sure what he was watering, since this was a very human-centered landscape.

Martin Khor of the Third World Network spoke last night about China and consumption. Through the Web, the Chinese, he said, have plenty of access to representations of the American dream. He listed a few: three cars in each garage, a big house. They want these things, too. What, Khor asked, will consumption patterns and greenhouse gas emissions look like when the average Chinese income rises from about $4,000 today to $10,000, $20,000 or even $40,000? This, he said, was entirely possible in the span of a few decades given the rates at which China's been growing. How do you change your lifestyle—your consumption patterns—from that of the American dream in China?, Khor asked. "Unless the Chinese dream is different from the American dream, it's going to be a big problem . . . and a challenge for policy-makers," he answered. My colleague from Cape Town, Tozie Zofuka, who works with Compassion in World Farming, offered another angle on this dilemma.

Ban Ki-moon speaking at the UN climate summit a few minutes ago: Let us make Durban a "profile in courage." Jacob Zuma, South Africa's president followed him (yes, the bold face name leaders have arrived), reminding the delegates that while all will share the burden of addressing climate change, it's the developed world that caused the problem . . . with their development. Going off script near the end, he said: "We must not hesitate from taking correct actions [in Durban]. The world is watching us . . . with hope"—and, one could add, trepidation. It's not clear if anything big or concrete really will get done in Durban. Courage could be said to be in short supply, particularly from the rich world countries; it's not high profile.

Photo by Reuters

You'd think...that with food and agriculture and their links to global warming getting increased attention from climate change researchers and negotiators, including here at COP, that what's served would be more climate-friendly. You'd think that would be the case.

But you'd be wrong (like me). The main catering facility (UN-speak, I suppose) at the Durban Exhibition Center hardly has a plant-based item on offer. While both Rural Development and Agriculture Day and Forest Day (conferences of a sort held over the weekend here in Durban) had vegetarian options at lunch, they also had beef and chicken, with no indication that those had come from producers practicing "climate-smart agriculture," a catch-all phrase that can and does mean many things to many people here.

South Africa has a bifurcated agricultural sector: large, industrial operations producing, for example, most of the one billion chickens South Africans eat each year (including those at the ubiquitous KFC); and small-scale farmers working basically at subsistence levels. The first can be very wealthy; the latter are usually very poor. That divide has been acknowledged here in Durban, but there's an emerging narrative that "climate-smart agriculture" may well include more of each: sustainable intensification and greater assistance for small farmers.