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| NEW INTERNATIONALIST 230 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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THIS MONTH'S THEME | |||||||||||||||||||||
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Green justice The scars of Umlungu The fridge, the greenhouse My collection Southern embraces Armada against Narmada Look here, gringo! Talking garbage Tread gently on the
Earth Action |
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Green Justice |
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| FROM THIS MONTH'S EDITOR | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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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 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. |
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Letters FRONT COVER: AN AFAR NOMAD FROM THE DANAKIL DESERT,
ETHIOPIA, BY CLAUDE SAUVAGEOT |
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David Ransom
for the New Internationalist Co-operative |
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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.
