War requiem -- by Ksenia Simonova

Ukrainian sand artist Ksenia Simonova's 8½ minute requiem for those who died in WW2. If you recognize parts of sound and music tracks, please comment.

It is based on her family's story. She uses special volcanic sand mixed with salt, but says just about any powder would do as well. Ksenia, who has been animating sand for less than a year, took it up after becoming a victim of the financial meltdown.

The crisis took everything from us. We had a very successful business and in one moment it just collapsed. Many people got crazy, but we didn’t because we did this. Thank to the crisis we started doing thisNow I can’t live without this and everything I see in my life, I see in a sand projection.

For example I see you and I see how to draw you in this material, I see the shadows, the half-shadows, the light on your face, everything." She sleeps about 4 hours a day. "I’m a mother, I have a son. And I don’t have time to do this. I do this from 11 pm till 4am. Maybe I’m a bit obsessed about it now, but I think I’m just in a constant process of creating and it is good. -- Interview courtesy of RT.com.

A Russia of My Own -- by Josefina Lundblad

Excerpts with the author's permission, from blog A Russia of My Own. Josefina Lundblad is a 22 year old Swede who teaches Swedish at Ural State University while working on her MA in Russian literature.

Feb 2009 -- Ulitsa Chapaeva where I live.

There’s about half a meter of snow here in Yekaterinburg, and when I went on my run this evening it snowed even more. On Saturday it was minus 34! Now it’s only minus 10....

How can I be sure that I am actually back in Russia, and not somewhere else? Today when I paid with my card at the grocery store, the cashier wasn’t pleased with the way I signed the receipt, so she said to me: “No, no, that won’t do, you have to write like it’s written here, on the back of your card. Can’t you see? Do it again!” No suspicion of fraud, no frown of lip nor brow, just the usual Russian way of dealing with things when correcting the mistakes of sloppy foreigners. I signed it a second time, making it look just like my signature on the card, below my first slapdash signature, and she was pleased.

March -- Last night I called my mom, and then my dad, and spoke with both of them for some forty minutes each, which led my brain to dream in Swedish during the night...

Ksenia and I went to the hospital to visit Marina after her operation.... The hospital is located in the outskirts of Yekat, and because they’re doing ‘remont’ (they’re always doing ‘remont’ in Russia, especially here for some reason) on one of the main roads, we had to drive around it and the bus got stuck in traffic. Only in Russia can one get stuck in traffic on a Sunday! The whole day I kept repeating what I read in my favorite weekly dose of news – Russian Reporter – on Saturday night: «не страна, а анекдот!» (not a country, but an anecdote! or joke). I wasn’t the first to say it, but I have been wanting to say it for a long time. It’s true, the more you think about it, the more you come to realize that you’re not really living in a country, but in an anecdote. And since everybody loves a good anecdote, and Russia is indeed the best one, everybody loves Russia. We brought Marina fruit and juice and chocolate and she looked good... We lingered there for an hour or two, trying to solve Swedish crosswords, but only in the end did we manage to finish one – the one for kids.

July --Tomorrow I’m heading out into the Urals, the Pilorama Festivale at the former GULAG camp “Perm-36”. It will be a weekend full of all the things I love most in life – Ural nature, Soviet concentration camp and poetry slams!In 1931 Varlam Shalamov stood and looked out over the river Вишера (the Vishera) and thought to himself: Мне уже 24 года и я еще ничего не делал для бессмертия (I am already 24 years old and I haven’t done anything for immortality yet : from his Антироман Вишера, The Vishera Antinovel). In 2009 Josefina stood and looked out over the same river and thought to herself that the first step towards immortality had been taken already some time ago – when I was baptized in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

Varlam began his trip to the GULAG in 1929. On my 24th birthday I had made it, two hours by bus, to Krasnovishersk, a road that took Shalamov five days on foot.

В этой могиле мы умирали 3 суток и всё же не умерли. Крепитесь, товарищи! -- “In this grave we were dying for three days and yet we did not die. Stay strong, comrades!” These famous words on the wall of the cellar of the monastery in Solikamsk, where – possibly – Shalamov spent a night in April 1929, are from his short story “The First Tooth”... in the story he looks up at the wall and sees these words. Not the real graffito, though, this is by Shalamov fans who have written the quote – twice! – there in his honor.

After the museum excursion we tried to have some dinner at the ‘food court’, as I nicknamed the tents which served different kinds of very Russian dishes (buckwheat, anyone?), and were almost successful. We looked at the many different people gathered at the festival and marveled at the amount of tents already in place... Everywhere people were drinking beer – despite the fact that the museum’s website clearly said ‘alcohol forbidden’ – we concluded that Russians do not count beer as alcohol....

I cannot stop reading Evgeniya Ginzburg. I am in love with her. Now she was a real woman. In prison, in labor camps, on Kolyma – she was first and foremost a woman. She makes me proud not only of my sex, but my profession. Who knew being a philologist could be a secret weapon?

November - Memorabilia - oпыт феноменологического рассказа

I remember a late, warm evening one summer somewhere in a small Russian village. He’s waiting for me with hot, black tea in glasses – not cups – and dry cookies in the almost empty kitchen of his little summer house.
The sun is far from setting, though it is already late, and I look around as I step out of the tiny building which is his banya [= sauna] that he has built with his own two hands. I am warm and wet and clean and smell of strawberry soap and birch trees… Everything around me is full of stillness, stillness of the coming night, stillness remaining after another lazy summer day in the countryside; the trees are bending down heavy over the small garden and the blue, cloudy sky seems lower and lower by the hour, but it is not going to rain; no, tonight it will not rain. I wrap the towel around my wet hair, leaving a couple of strands to fall down my damp back…

The front door is open and he’s standing there, smoking his BelamorKanal [the White Sea Canal, one of Stalin's GULAG megaprojects], watching me as I step down the little stone path leading from the banya up to the house. The house is almost empty now. We’re the only ones here now. His wife is in the hospital. He has been alone for three weeks and now I’m here to clean off the dirt of dusty Russian summer roads that I’ve walked, walked, walked barefoot while picking berries in the fields and looking around me in the woods and thinking that after all, despite of everything: this must be it.

I remember how he cared for me that evening; I remember how he turned out to be something of a country gentleman... from another time very long ago. I remember his heavy grey eyebrows and his long, straight forehead, and his hair that lay like curly silver on top of his large head, and those big, blue eyes as he placed the glass in front of me on the table. I sit down on the chair by the table; he places himself on the bed behind the table as to be closer to me. We talked of old times and of his wife and he told me of his grand children and I listened to his soft voice echoing in such a poor room… There was nothing on the walls. Not even a single picture. Except for the icon over the stove. There was only one single, lonely light bulb hanging from the ceiling. It was the only light. The cookies placed on the wooden table without anything underneath them. The glass was old and steaming with hot tea. I sip and he sips as he watches me and I remember how I liked the way his blue eyes kept looking at me. I remember his large hands, I remember how they lay so still placed on his knees and how we discussed old times and how I couldn’t help but not to forget that we belong to different generations; of this we also talked and he sat so close to me and kept filling my glass with more tea and never tired of caring for me. He didn’t let a single glance of mine pass unseen. His name is Anatoly, but he insist I call him Tolya. Uncle Tolya. I do not object; I call him uncle Tolya and he smiles. Sitting there in that kitchen in a Russian summer house that evening made me remember another kitchen in another Russian summer house two summers before this….

I remember waking up in the double bed next to ___, on white, wet sheets; I remember stretching out my arms to touch the yellow sunrays coming in through the open window; his body was sweaty and young next to mine and I was wearing a purple silk nightgown and we had the entire house to ourselves. We had the entire day to ourselves. We had the entire world to ourselves. There was nothing outside our window but blue sky and green trees and deep Russian woods and somewhere, further down the road, a river running through from somewhere, and all of this belonged to us. We were young and we had never promised each other anything, and in the mornings I would make him breakfast while he walked the dog – yes, there was a dog, we had a dog – I fried eggs, made a salad from fresh vegetables that I picked in the garden, brewed black coffee and cleaned the table from what had been left there the night before: an empty wine bottle, a torn copy of some Murakami book in a poor Russian translation, a half-empty package of condoms… And then we sat there and ate together, playing with each other laughing about something, drinking our coffee slowly and looking out over the garden, expecting nothing but another hot day filled with sunshine. I remember we took long walks together with the dog. I remember how we sat together in the dark in the evenings and read Murakami together, how we discussed everything and nothing and then it really seemed to me that there would be no end to this summer. That there would be no end to our youth, that we would always be this young and that this summer house would forever stand in sunshine and warmth and that the fall would never come, that our arguments would never begin, we would never fight, we would never have any worries every again but stay like this. Right there. I remember running through the wet grass in the evenings down to the lake after sitting in the banya for an hour, sweating and beating each other’s naked bodies with birch trees… I remember jumping into the water, I remember swimming side by side with him; I can’t forget the way the grass felt against my bare feet, how the water felt to my naked body, how free we were that summer. It was as if everything in the whole world was just us: the house, the dog, he, I.

This and following photo: Tanya Emshanova's Ural series on Flickr.com

I remember standing outside in the small garden with uncle Tolya, we’re standing barefoot in together the grass and he’s smoking BelamorKanal and I’m smoking what he calls ‘women’s cigarettes’; it is dark outside now. The sun has set, the moon has come out. We’re watching our shadows on the grass in front of us, the light coming from the kitchen is behind us and falls before us on the grass. His shade is bigger than mine; his shoulders are broad, the smoke coming from his cigarette is thicker, fuller than the smoke coming from mine. My hair has almost dried now and I remember letting it out of the towel as we stand there looking at our two shadows – so different and yet almost the same – on the ground before us and in silence we contemplate. Somehow both of us know that life must go on, that life always goes on, that I will have to take my things and walk back from where I came, that his wife will come back from the hospital, and that we’ll never have an evening together like this again. We want to tell each other what’s important, what matters, and I remember thinking that even in silence, even when we’re not saying anything, we’re still staying within the territory of what matters the most, what is truly important in this world. “I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone,” I say and he nods. “What makes you think that?” “All of this is so new to me…” He smiles: “It is new to all of us, my dear.” “Can you love more than once in your life?” “You can love a million times,” he answers. “But will it ever be like the first time?” “Every time is special, every time is a universe in itself,” he says and continues: “Every relationship is a world of its own, and you will never know that world if you don’t close your eyes and let go and fall into it with your back first… keeping your arms stretched out as if you wanted to fly, as if you not only could fly, but knew that this is the time that you’ll really soar.” “I think I’m scared,” I say.
I remember how uncle Tolya looked at me, how his stern face of an old man who’s served over thirty years in the Russian army broke into the kindest, the warmest glow and how his one hand took a hold of mine. “I don’t know what it is like for you young people these days…” “I think it is nothing new, I think it is the same as it was for you, just…” “Just?” “Just nothing.” He smiles again and again and again. “I want to love another man now, and I want to give him everything, but I’ve already given everything once and that…” “We’re not in this for eternity, we’re in it for the moment,” says uncle Tolya. “It is not about forever?” I ask. He shakes his head. “No, my dear, it is all about now.”

The right to be cold - by Sheila Watt-Cloutier

photo: earthjustice.org
According to the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, there is enormous evidence that our climate is changing very rapidly. The Arctic is getting warmer a lot quicker than anywhere else. And our hunters and elders have been noticing so many changes in the last decade. The ice is depleting—forming later in the year and breaking up earlier in the spring—leaving sea-ice hunting time a lot shorter for us as well as for the polar bears who are also sea hunters. That is quite an alarm for us.

The coast is literally eroding in Western Canada and Alaska, the permafrost is quickly melting, and we’ve had to move people’s homes. The glaciers are also melting quite rapidly. Streams that hunters used to be [able to] cross have now become torrent rivers, and we’ve had drownings.

We’ve also been witnessing a lot of different species of insects, birds and fish that are finding their way up into the Arctic because of the warming. Our cultural survival is at stake as well... We have never lost that strong, strong connection to our way of life even in terms of all the changes we’ve been going through in becoming wage earners and institutionalized. We are trying to maintain our way of life that has sustained us for millennia. We have never yet depleted one species of an animal in that millennia, so we know a little bit about sustainability....

What happens to the planet happens first up here. We are hoping that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights can declare this as a violation of the human rights of the Inuit of the world [see inset below]. Then we can be given a bit of an equal playing field when the two hemispheres negotiate these things globally. Right now we are barely on the radar screen.

Article VII. Right to Cultural integrity 1. Indigenous peoples have the right to their cultural integrity, and their historical and archeological heritage, which are important both for their survival as well as for the identity of their members. 2. Indigenous peoples are entitled to restitution in respect of the property of which they have been dispossessed, and where that is not possible, compensation on a basis not less favorable than the standard of international law. 3. The states shall recognize and respect indigenous ways of life, customs, traditions, forms of social, economic and political organization, institutions, practices, beliefs and values, use of dress, and languages. The Right to Cultural integrity, in proposed Rights of Indigenous Peoples addition to the OAS Convention on Human rights

What is happening in the Arctic is very much a connectivity issue. I’ve always said that the Inuit hunters falling through the depleting ice here is connected to the cars we drive, and is connected to the disposable world that we have become, and the industries that we’ve come to rely upon. [The fact] that Inuit mothers have to think twice about nursing their babies should surely be a wake up call. My hope is that we can have the world understand through our story and our challenges that the planet and its people are one.

-- Excerpted from “The Right to be cold” Satya interview with Sheila Watt Cloutier at COP-15. See full text.

Originally from Kuujjuaq, Nunavik, in Northern Quebec and currently based in Iqaluit, Nunavut, Sheila Watt-Cloutier was the Canadian President of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (the ICC), and International Chair of the ICC 2002-2006, representing 155,000 native people. Though she has been given National Aboriginal and two UN awards, as well as the Order of Canada, successive Canadian governments have avoided taking the action on climate change that she urges. In 2005, she and 62 hunters filed a petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, arguing that the effects of emissions and greenhouse gases from the U.S. was a violation of human and cultural rights of the Inuit. She is now working with the Climate Action Project and 1sky.org.

See also
Inuit Tapirisat president Mary Simon "My homeland is melting" 24 Oct 09
Wikipedia on Watt-Cloutier's work and the Washington-based IAHR, her Dec 2007 testimony to IAHR
RealClimate reply to deniers of the 2005 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA). Many of the deniers were later proven to be funded by fossil-fuel companies.
Pew Centre on Global ClimateChange FAQ on the ACIA global warming effects on the Arctic and the USA
BBC videos from the Canadian Arctic: interviews with Inuit, breakup of Arctic ice shelf 2007.
CBC videos and updates on climate, Arctic
US-based EarthJustice news on Arctic

Éco-vidéos en français, English, Maya Ixcatec

photo: (c) Damaso Reyes - self-portrait

This is only a sampling of eco=blogs / ce n'est qu'un échantillon:
vloggeurs en français: Tristan Mendès France et Alban Fischer sur les réfugiés environnementaux au Kirghizstan et ailleurs. Seb et Aude en Tunisie & en Turkiye, Sophie Guérin au Brésil, Marie-Pierre Savard et Annie Larouche Ouellet La Traversée podcasts et videos: Maroc, Mauretanie, Sénégal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Cap-Vert.
blogues éco: Jacinthe Bordeleau, écotouriste en Nicaragua, Alexis Durand-Saddier au Thibet,
Maéva Gauthier en expédition scientifique Neptune, au large de la C-B, Philippe Terrier en expédition Antarctique
au Québec: Emile Baillargeon interpelle un autochtone attikamek de Manawan, le chanteur Reggie Brossard, va à la pêche à Ashuapmushuan. Au Rouyn-Noranda, Guillaume Fortier filme les écolos d'Aux Arbres Citoyens, Michael Berrigan les désouvrés de l'industrie forestière, l'impact des transports routiers et maritimes du Québec et l'environnement.
Philippe Laterreur montre les fermes et rivières des Laurentides et la jeunesse folle à Rouyn,
Annik Blanc Longueil faubourg montréalais.
vloggers in English: Yung Chang's award-winning Up the Yangtze, Mike Swanton meets the last Ixcatec speakers in Mexico, *Karl Mann exposes Burma's market of wild animal parts, *PETA shows tortured animals on Chinese fur farms, *Humane Society exposes abuse in US beef and *PETA in US chicken plants (* = these are NOT recommended for kids), Oxfam Be the Change! videos and discussion forums, Nick Anderson in Darfur, Peru rebuilding after the 2007 earthquake, US hurricane's Forgotten Communities, Unmet Promises Sept 2006 in Louisiana and Mississippi, and Tambogrande Peru (threatened by a Canadian mining co). BC ecologist Guy Dauncey on global warming and what we can do, Gambian women become barefoot solar engineers. Vivoleum: Yesmen's satire on oil use.
blogs et photos: Chiquitano in Bolivia, mothers on four continents speak out against No Dirty Gold, Bahamas Beautiful Oceans group blog, podcasts. Photojournalism by Damaso Reyes in Europe, Rwanda, Iraq, Indonesia and Tanzania.

Tell us about others / signalez-nous d'autres...

War and the environment

photo "Firefight" from pzzz.tripod.com
This is not an in-depth analysis, but a brief survey of the many environmental impacts of war.

Human consequences
- Racism in war: when "you" are the enemy, interviews with Asian American Vietnam vets by Tony Chan. See his blog
- PTSS aka shell shock affects a generation of civilians and veterans
- civilians maimed by mines, children by cluster bombs
- Depleted Uranium weapons in Kuwait (Gulf War I) Bosnia, Serbia, Iraq; see also Gulf War Syndrome, cancer epidemic in Basra; US rejects cleanup in Iraq
- British germ warfare tests on their own population
- the downwinders in Utah
- cost of wars in Africa: child mortality +50%, illiteracy +20%, undernourishment +15%, impacts that will last for a generation or more (p.5, Africa's Missing Billions). Equivalent to "all international aid from major donors", says Oxfam, the $300b wasted on war since 1990 could have stopped epidemics of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, funded education, clean water and sanitation (p.3).

Toxic and nuclear pollution
- toxics in Vietnam: Australian reports 1993 and 2005.
- toxic military bases in the USA: Bay Area, North Carolina, Alaska , Hawaii. See also the maps in Bob Feldman, War on the Earth
- in Canada: Agent Purple at Camp Gagetown NB, Dene natives of Yellowknife
- Russian and US nuclear dumps in the Arctic

Reliable information
Climate costs of the Iraq war from oilchange.com 19 Mar 08
Project Ploughshares, Center for Defense Information USA, SIPRI in Sweden,
Learn Peace UK, Sierra Club USA

Dangerous new trends
- 3-block war: new US doctrine ends the distinction between blitzkreig of civilians / peacekeeping / humanitarian aid; doctrine adopted by Canadian army
- WF Engdahl on the "doomsday seed bank"
- tactical nukes aka "theater war", shifting to "first strike"

DU map posted in a SF Bay area blog May 2007
click on map to see in full screen