Environment

A retrospective of our journey this past year offering a picture of what is being born during this time of global transformation.

Don Alverto Taxo is a master Iachak of the Atis people from the Cotopaxi region of Ecuador. During a gathering of Andean Elders in 1989, he was given the responsibility of sharing the ancient Andean wisdom with the US and Europe. He has traveled to the US and Europe several times where he has taught and lectured. We met with Don Alberto in the village of Membrilla in the high Andes where he lives with his wife and children.

Stephan Fayon is an agriculture and organic farming expert who directs Kokopelli India, an international seed savers association based in Auroville, South India. A resident of Auroville for the past twelve years, he directs several reforestation programs and runs a tree farm. He has planted 250,000 trees over the past ten years.

Penny Livingston is a permaculture expert and founder of the Permaculture Institute of Northern California and the Regenerative Design Institute. She lives and works at the Commonweal Garden in Bolinas, California.

Jayesh Patel is the co-founder and director of Manav Sadhna, an NGO based in the Gandhi Ashram in Ahmedabad, India. Formed in 1990 with the mission to serve the underprivileged, Manav Sadhna now provides health and hygiene, education, and employment services to over 4500 women and children through over 38 projects.

Medha Patkar is a social activist who has led the struggle for the people affected by the controversial Sardar Sarovar Project on the Narmada river in Gujarat, India. She founded the Narmada Bachoao Andolan and National Alliance of People's movements and is recipient of numerous awards including the Goldman Environmental Prize, Amnesty International's Human Rights Defender's Award and the BBC's Green Ribbon Award.

Anjali Desai is a volunteer at Manav Sadhna, a NGO based at Gandhi Ashram in Ahmedabad, whose mission is to serve the underprivileged. Seva Cafe is one of its many projects in Ahmedabad.

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world.

Turn mankind's darkest hour into its finest.

Have you ever stopped to think of what would happen to your house without you? In The World Without You, Weisman explains how our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence; why some of our earliest buildings might be the last architecture left; and how plastic, bronze sculpture, radio waves, and some man-made molecules may be our most lasting gifts to the universe.