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Issue No. 413
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Are you missing out? To get the latest NI magazine in your hands, you have to be one of our valued subscribers. Below is the contents index for this months issue.

Endgame in the Amazon
Is Ecuador’s bold proposal not to exploit a billion barrels of oil in the Yasuní National Park a serious option for combating climate change? If so, the world is going to have to move fast, warns Vanessa Baird.

Save Yasuni - ACTION
Donate a book, send an NI magazine or contact your local group.

‘Speak to us first!’
People from the Ecuadorian rainforest tell Fabrício Guamán what they think of their Government’s proposal to leave petroleum in the ground.

Toxic Blocks
No-one said oil was clean. But Ecuador’s experience of extracting fossil fuels is about as bad as it gets, reports David Ransom.

Costing the Earth
Adam Ma’anit navigates the snakepits of global carbon trading in the context of Yasuní.

Action
To save Yasuní, the oil must stay in the ground.

News, views, and & voices

SPECIAL FEATURE

As if poetry mattered
Poems that confront human challenges – an international selection.

Letter from Cairo

A hold-up at the bank
Maria Golia tackles taboos about money in Cairo.

Currents
The companies making a killing from the food crisis; Planktos – RIP; apartheid accomplices Coca-Cola, Barclays, BP et al are heading for court; inside China’s jails; women in Orissa, India, have ways of dealing with calamity.

BigBadWorld
Polyp takes aim at Global Warming Bush.

Mixed Media
Includes fado diva Mariza’s box of delights and Billy Bragg’s latest; a best-selling novel from Egypt inspired by taxi rides; an earthy fusion of cultures in Abdellatif Kechiche’s film from France; and, better late than never, a black-and-white classic from the US gets its release – 30 years after it was made.

Southern Exposure
Blue eyes in a Bangalore stone quarry captured by photographer Selvaprakash L.

Making Waves
Dheepthi Namasivayam interviews the Indian Community Welfare Organization.

Essay: FOK-U: The Façade of Kindness & Understanding
A seminar in effective leadership (PR & Spin) by Peter Greenwall.

Country Profile – Timor Leste


 

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A load of shit

Every day, everyone on the planet emits from their body a certain quantity of waste. This process is physiologically unavoidable. Even the perfect saint – as was believed in ancient India – cannot absorb every morsel he or she consumes. But because the subject is taboo in virtually every culture, it is ignored.

Maybe that doesn’t matter where a simple push or pull on a porcelain contraption flushes excreta away into a septic tank or sewer, and its subsequent confinement or treatment protects soil and waterways from pollution. But 2.6 billion people around the world don’t have a WC or any other kind of decent toilet. Because ‘faecal perils’ land up on hands, feet and lips, two million of them – mostly children – die of diarrhoeal disease every year. The toll in indignity and distress, especially among women, is less measurable but arguably far worse.

This is the International Year of Sanitation, and slowly the subject is coming out of the closet. Out on the excretory frontier, toilet pioneers are strutting their stuff with goose-necks and water-seals, sanplats and the ecological approach. But they won’t get far unless people – rich and famous, poor and deprived – can be persuaded to confront the unmentionable and call a spade a spade.

‘A good sewer’, declared John Ruskin, the Victorian artist and social critic, ‘is far nobler and a far holier thing than the most admired Madonna ever painted’. The next issue of New Internationalist looks at who and what are carrying the sanitary flame in the 21st century.

COMING SOON: • Plastic • TAX JUSTICE