Activists Up Close: Meet Misael, a Water Defender in Mexico
Posts
Indigenous Kenyan activists successfully fend off evictions from their ancestral lands
The Embobut forest in Kenya is misty during the rainy season, filled with fresh, sweet air and chirping birds, rich biodiversity and flowing rivers — a gorgeous, lush landscape. It’s also the ancestral home of the Indigenous Sengwer people, who have lived throughout the forest for generations, stewarding and safeguarding its natural resources — until …
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“That’s not the world I want to live in”: Slow and steady, El Salvador’s climate monitors take action
Lucy Medina Serrano grew up with nine siblings in El Castaño, a tiny village along a river on El Salvador’s border with Guatemala. Her family has always relied on local groundwater from the well outside their home to grow tomatoes, peppers, yuca, aloe, basil, papaya, bananas and more. But for years, sugarcane processing plants upriver …
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Stories
Defending Land for Rural Farmers in Burma
Although the majority of Burma’s people live off the land, few Burmese laws give them any control over it. In most cases, the government owns the land, and it’s not difficult for government officials and agencies to take it back—or let a major corporation step in to develop it for their own profit. It’s particularly …
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Protecting Indigenous Communities from Mining
The rapid growth of mineral mining across Mexico has ravaged local communities. Poverty and disease have soared for workers and people who live near mines and other development projects. The digging has stripped local land—ruining it for farming—and polluted sources of drinking water, multiplying health problems and miscarriages.
Read MoreDvar Tzedek
Beha’alotcha
Parashat Beha’alotcha contains one of the many episodes of grumbling during the Israelites’ journey through the desert. Lamenting their limited diet of manna, they nostalgically remember the variety of food they ate in Egypt. A close look at their complaint, and the symbolism of the foods they crave, can shed light on the contemporary issue of global hunger and the current debate over how international food aid from the United States should be delivered.
Read MoreVayikra
Parashat Vayikra catalogues the slicing, pinching, quartering, flaying, scooping, sprinkling and burning that comprised ancient Israel’s practice of korbanot—sacrifices offered in expiation, celebration or thanksgiving to God. Ritual sacrifice was a thoroughly hands-on affair, with both offeror and priest physically participating in the labor. Such gritty involvement in the process must have channeled primal drives …
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