The GO Adirondacks 2011 team visits Mac Brook, a grass-fed cow farm in Argyle, NY

By Nicole Fogarty (originally posted in personal blog)

“Still going the veggie route, huh?!” That was the first line of an e-mail from my mother a few days ago when I requested she buy veggie burgers for me for when I come home.

My New Year’s Resolution this year was to try out vegetarianism (this directly relates to the GO Adirondacks project I went on). I’m proud to say I haven’t eaten meat since January 1, 2011… except for maybe three or four slip ups . Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE meat and absolutely believe we need to eat meat to live. Animals are cute and all, but they’re an important part of what I eat. You might be wondering, why is this girl a vegetarian? Well, I’ll tell you!

Going on my GO! Trip made me much more aware of the, for lack of a better word, EVIL meat industry in America. We talked a lot about the sustainable ways of obtaining food and the un-sustainable ways, and the meat industry definitely fell in the latter category.

I believe wholeheartedly in eating meat, but I want to put the best possible meat into my body. It’s unfortunately very difficult to do that, especially here at college. I realized I didn’t want to support the meat industry, nor did I want to put toxins and other baaaaaad stuff into my body. Each team member needed a New Year’s Resolution, so I chose only eating organic, locally grown, grass-fed (or other natural feeds) meats.

This quickly turned into not eating any meat, because I was able to have the good stuff so infrequently that, every time I ate it, I’d get sick because my body wasn’t used to meat. Being a vegetarian has become second nature to me, and it’s only been five months.

Now, I know a little bit about this, but compared to others I know absolutely nothing. Check out Sustainable Table for some great tips on how to live an overall more sustainable lifestyle. Also, here are some tips from Food, Inc.‘s website (I highly recommend watching the movie- it’s instant watch on Netflix!):

1. Stop drinking sodas and other sweetened beverages.
2. Eat at home instead of eating out.
3. Bring food labeling into the 21st Century.
4. Tell schools to stop selling sodas, junk food, and sports drinks.
5. Meatless Mondays—Go without meat one day a week.
6. Buy organic or sustainable food with little or no pesticides.
7. Protect family farms; visit your local farmer’s market.
8. Make a point to know where your food comes from—READ LABELS.
9. Tell Congress that food safety is important to you.
10. Demand job protections for farm workers and food processors, ensuring fair wages and other protections.

Like I said, I have so much more to learn about all of this… so learn with me!

The Florida everglades mark just one of the many regions threatened by recent political dialogue on conservation (Photo: jwkeith/flickr)

By Michelle Hardy

.

Short-term schemes for economic growth largely instigated the financial crisis we face today. Similarly, a short-term economic view recently caused a 16% reduction in the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget and a movement to loosen state control of conservation policy, all for the sake of balancing budgets. Can one short-term economic strategy alleviate the failings of another?

.

Recent debates are sharply divided across party lines, but a bit of context reveals conservation as a bipartisan economic philosophy. While some people relate conservation to a tree-hugger’s battle, this is historically inaccurate.

.

20th Century conservationists, the most famous of whom was conservative Teddy Roosevelt, wished to regulate the use of US land and wildlife to ensure there would be enough resources to benefit future generations. Conservatives nationalized a great deal of protected land and water in order to provide the greatest number of people with resources for the greatest amount of time. They equated these policies with stability and national security.

.

By the late 60′s, another mass movement erupted to protect our land for future generations.  Most environmentalists of the 60′s and 70′s identified as liberal, but another collaboration between parties led to a tremendous environmental feat. For reasons similar to those of his predecessors, President Richard Nixon signed the largest grouping of environmental laws ever accomplished by any president. This led to the Endangered Species Act, The Clean Air Act, The Federal Water Pollution Control Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act that created the EPA.

.

Flash forward almost four decades, and the EPA is offered up for sacrifice with a whopping $1.6 billion budget cut. Much of Congress and conservative state governments continue fighting to open up environmentally protected land for economic development. You don’t have to be a tree hugger to realize these actions endanger much more than “tree frogs and Canadian lynx,” as mentioned sarcastically by Maine’s governor. Limiting the strength of the EPA and state conservation efforts will create short-term growth while endangering long-term stability.

.

In other words, a government bailout of the environment will be much trickier. Just as our generation and our children’s generation will be paying off the debts of our financial crisis, we will be struggling to survive on improperly managed national resources if we short-sightedly devalue historically effective conservation policies.

.

Admittedly, I do find myself between a rock and a hard place when it comes to politically-charged environmental debates. My reasons for supporting environmentalism are almost entirely apolitical. Some of my reasons are even spiritual. I also have friends and family members of drastically opposite political persuasions, and it’s hard to completely disregard any of their perspectives on natural resource management while knowing where those perspectives come from.

.

But emotions aside, the current debate in Congress is an economic one. Reconciliation will be possible only if politicians recall the mutual benefits of strictly managed finite resources, as well as their mutual party ties to such policies.

.

This is all to say that in the end, we must live by one chilling bipartisan reality; we can write the rules of our economy, but we can’t write the rules of nature.

.

Check out Leslie Kaufman’s article from Friday’s New York Times – it does a wonderful job of showing just how dangerous this debate has become.

Anti-government student protesters in Yemen demand President Ali Abdulah Saleh to step down (Photo: yemenmuja/flickr)

By Eric Horvath (originally published in The Ram)

After trillions upon trillions of chickens and eggs having been laid and hatched, I feel any debate about their origins would yield nothing but frustration. The discovery that one or the other comes first does nothing to abate the cyclicality of one perpetuating the other. That being said, considering the Al Qaeda-friendly Yemen, we are doing a respectable job of incubating eggs that are now violently hatching.

Yemen is a remote country at the southernmost tip of the Arabian Peninsula. Its western coastline is less than 50 miles from the perpetually volatile Horn of Africa. Rampant unemployment (40 percent) is fueled by a lack of jobs and infrastructure. Poor leadership and governance by President Ali Abdullah Saleh has left 40 percent of Yemeni adults illiterate and more than half of the country’s children malnourished.

Saleh has ruled Yemen since 1978 through cronyism and corruption. Many of Yemen’s economic woes are caused by Saleh’s blatant patronage politics: 70 percent of Yemen’s revenues come from the oil industry, a sector overrun by Saleh’s exploiting relatives. Corruption under Saleh, however, is much more complicated than the typical bribery for political influence.

Yemen is an ethnically fractured country, and Saleh directs a lion’s share of his bribes towards tribal leaders (as do the Saudis) in exchange for some peace and some quiet. Plagued by a civil war in the early 1990s, Yemen’s tribal loyalties continue to foment an unrest that is simmering. Erratic and easily distracted, Saleh has managed to keep mass uproars of conflict down despite unfavorable circumstances.

Saleh’s ability to hold together a semblance of a state in Yemen has won him millions of dollars in U.S. counterterrorism support. His willingness to assume responsibility for U.S. airstrikes on Al Qaeda bases in Yemen has made our marriage with him possible. We funnel millions of dollars to Yemen — the Middle East’s poorest country — in order to, as Saleh does with Yemeni tribes, ensure that no one gets too rowdy. After weeks of violent governmental crackdowns and international pressure, however, our hand is being forced to endorse the call for Saleh’s expulsion.

It is only a matter of time before Saleh is removed from power (although that was said about Colonel Qaddafi several weeks ago, too) and anarchy becomes a legitimate possibility. Without a central figure doling out bribes for peace, a gaping power vacuum is imminent. Protestors will be dissatisfied if Saleh’s vice president assumes power, yet with over three decades of largely unopposed rule, one has to wonder how many oppositional factions have the organizational experience to weave Yemen’s intricately tribal web.

As we scramble to flip our foreign policy toward Yemen and the proliferation of an Al Qaeda safe haven looms larger, it is terrifying to think that all of our financial support and all of those chickens may be coming home to roost.

It’s about time! Starting next fall, Fordham will offer a new introductory course for FCRH and GSB in sustainable business practices.

The course will fill a much needed gap, covering environmentally sustainable business strategies and the potential for profit creation in underserved communities.

Students enrolled in this course can look forward to topics such as:

- Environmental, ethical, and scientific foundations of sustainable business.

- Case studies and guest speakers from companies embracing sustainable business practices and green technologies, including big names such as GE and Vodafone.

- Opportunities for social entrepreneurship.

- Inclusive markets and doing business for profit, social benefit, and sustainability in the 21st Century.

The course will be Wednesdays 11:30am – 2:30pm. To sign up, look for these course numbers:

- FCRH: 16670 ECON 3430 R01

- GSB: MGBU3430 R01

For more information, FCRH students can contact:

Dr. Mary Burke at mburke@fordham.edu or Dr. Daryl McLeod at mcleod@fordham.edu

GSB students can contact:

Dr. Michael Pirson at pirson@fordham.edu or Dr. Frank Werner at fwerner@fordham.edu

By Mike Haskins

Because Global Outreach facilitates cultural immersion projects in foreign countries, student participants encounter different perspectives on race than those typically presented in the United States. To understand those differences, students dialogue and reflect upon their experiences. If those discussions become heated, it is partly due to the warped understanding of race in this country. While most people would agree that diversity and tolerance promote well-being, many fail to understand how that language functions to dissimulate race in the name of assimilation.

In the United States, race is discussed in the liberal context with the aim of creating a “colorblind” society. Diversity is said to provide alternate perspectives or to enrich cultural understanding—as if the presence of people of color somehow adds “flavor” to society. I think that any meaningful discussion of race needs to take the idea of difference as a starting point and acknowledge the function of race in society. I think that campus diversity provides grounds for exploration in this area.

From the perspective of difference, each person is constituted by multiple factors, such as gender, class, sexuality, etc. These factors inform each person in a variety of ways. For example, society expects women to attend to certain norms – like wearing make-up – that it does not expect of—or even disapproves of – in men. Race is one of these factors and it entails certain norms, although these norms can be and are contested.

To deny race, or to pretend that we live in a colorblind society, requires us to ignore the norms society expects of people based on their race; to ignore their differences. When we talk about diversity without talking about difference, we replicate in language a society that normalizes difference but refuses to recognize it. This failure to recognize difference can help us understand why racism persists despite putative equality in law, although this failure does not provide the whole story. Society should not expect certain, different norms from different racial groups and simultaneously treat those groups the same in its legal framework.

One of the results of the civil rights movement has been the establishment of affirmative action policies on college campuses. In a charitable light, affirmative action extends the right of higher education to racial minorities as groups. In a harsher light, the same policy actually facilitates assimilation by fracturing racial minorities along class lines—wealthy minorities (those who can afford to pay for college) earn the opportunity to advance, and thus to establish themselves within and on the terms of the dominant culture, while low-income minorities remain excluded.

The most complete understanding of affirmative action probably involves some of both of these cases. When we praise diversity on campus, we are lauding the results of these policies. One of the problems with this conversation is that it rarely moves beyond jejune praise or accounts for the role of affirmative action, which is of course hotly contested, challenged, and decried.

Diversity is meaningless, even insidious, if it perpetuates ignorance. By starting from the idea of difference, my hope is that the conversation around diversity will be more likely to move forward. An understanding of difference can reveal the contradictions and inconsistencies in the idea of a colorblind society. An understanding of difference can also give students the means to discuss race cogently, rather than ignore the issue for fear of offending others.

For further reading on difference and diversity in an academic context, see Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture. For topical discussions, see the blog ColorLines.

The 2011 Go Peru Team

By Mike Beckage

Upon arriving in Newark, NJ from Lima, Peru in January of this year, the only words I saw fitting to describe my GO! experience were, if anything, vague and abstract:  indescribable, unbelievable, unparalleled, etc.  Quite honestly, I had never experienced anything like what I just gone through, and my foremost problem upon returning was explaining what exactly I did and saw.  With a new semester in full swing and weeks already flying off the calendar, I still find it difficult to sit back and adequately sort everything out.

Imagine your thoughts and ideas about the world stored in a large, neat filing cabinet, everything in its place.  Now imagine watching drawer after drawer being taken out and emptied onto the floor in an unintelligible heap of ideas, sentiments, and thoughts.  This is the feeling I had upon touching down at Newark International Airport.  Luckily, I’ve had the help of my fellow team members and some close friends to help me put my thoughts back into a new order, but the process will be an ongoing one.

With the help of Community Links International, our time in Peru was split among working with a local parish and community center, San Esteban, and going on cultural excursions to archaeological sites, museums, and the like. As such, GO! Peru is a hybrid project – half immersion based and half service based.  The twelve members of our team, as well as eleven volunteers from Washington University of St. Louis, stayed in the house belonging to the family of our Community Links contact, Grower Rios Castillo.

This being my first time out of the United States, the opportunity to live with a Peruvian family for a week was something I anticipated eagerly.  I wanted to absorb the salient details of what life in Lima, Peru was like, and with the help of Grower and his family I truly felt that I accomplished this goal.  We were prepared meals, taught how to dance, and taken all over the city and the region.

In the second half of our week in Lima, I experienced one of the more revelatory and significant days in my life.  After trekking through the pre-Incan ruins of Pachacamac, we piled into the bus that took us around the region all week.  I didn’t know exactly where we were going, but soon enough, we were driving through one of the more impoverished areas surrounding Lima.

I had noticed these regions from afar earlier in the week, sitting in the comfort of an air-conditioned bus; I saw vast stretches of very small, flimsy houses built into the sides of what seemed to be huge sand dunes – sand mountains even. There was no grass to speak of, only sand.

Now, in the middle of one of these regions, our bus came to a stop, and we got out.  We were ushered into a church by a nun who introduced herself as Sister Claire from County Clare, Ireland.  She had moved to this region, which I found out was called Villa El Salvador, with the intent of staying there only three years.  She has now been living and working there for fourteen.

In the middle of this arid district, which I initially saw only as poor and dilapidated, I suddenly found myself wanting to drop everything and move there to devote all that I could to these people.  Sister Claire sat us all down and spoke with us about the history of the region and the spirit of the people.  As she went on, and as my questions piled up, she seemed to be reading my mind and answering them one by one.  She spoke with a confidence and clarity seldom found among people today, at least people that I have met.  After our talk, we agreed to a tour of the region led by the Sister.

As our group took a closer look at Villa El Salvador, I noticed the depressed state of the area further.  Where we have grass on our ground at home, they had sand and trash.  Dogs had free roam of the place, and children were tramping around this trash-littered sand barefoot.  But the most striking feature I noticed amid this landscape had nothing to do with what the people didn’t have, but rather what they did have:  smiles.  Almost every person whom we met in Villa El Salvador greeted us with a smiling face, an amiable disposition, and genuine hospitality.

Sister Claire had explained to us that much of the social progress in the region was achieved through the hard work and sacrifice of those who lived there; residents of V.E.S. were happy to have a chance to make a difference for their community.  Indeed, electricity, sewage, and water services were all attained by those in the community, and progress is only improving.  New sewage pipes were being installed as we walked around the district.  Indeed, I saw more smiling faces in the hour I spent walking around V.E.S. than I have seen in New York City in the two years I have lived here.  As Sister Claire led us back to our bus and saw us off, I was sure that what she imparted to me and what I saw was a game-changer for me; indeed, it was a life-changer.

My feelings about poverty before this experience were feelings of charity with a hint of condescension, although this was not intentional.  I had always seen the issue as a matter of what I have versus what those in poverty don’t have materially, as well as what I could give to others.  I always thought that those living in places such as V.E.S. automatically wanted the help of others. I never for a second paused to think about what those in poverty could give to me immaterially.

What I learned on that dry summer day in Peru with the guidance of Sister Claire and my team members was that value does not, and indeed should not, stem from those material things that you have or can give to others.  I recognized the worth and impact of the spirit of people I met, and I saw what a community motivated to work together can accomplish.  I learned that considering myself to be altogether “privileged” wasn’t exactly the right way to see things, and that I stand to gain much from interaction with and observation of others, whether they have twice as much as I or half as much materially.

This is why I think the immersion aspect of GO! Peru was unbelievably important.  It not only exposed me to another way of life, but it forced me to bring together mine with another wholly different one in order to create a more holistic, informed, and passionate view of the race which I belong to – the human race.  I learned that those things uniting us take preeminence over those that divide us.  This is something invaluable and precious to me, and as I continue to process the lessons learned on my project, I will always remember the week as the most formative experience of my life.

The 2011 Belize team after building a house with Hand in Hand Ministry.

By Valerie Grant

Our trip to Belize lasted nine days—just enough time for the eleven of us to establish nightly rituals of yo-yoing, Garifuna singing and dancing, and cherished late-night conversations; to adjust to each other’s sleeping habits and our new rice and bean diets; and most importantly, to adapt to life in a foreign country that differed from our own in many obvious and some unexpected ways.

As soon as we stepped off the plane on New Year’s Day, the warm night that greeted us let us know we had left snowy New York City far behind.  Our trip coordinator Roxanne and her family greeted us at the airport and drove us to our accommodations, the Starfish House located in Belize City.  We began the next day by walking down the street to the beach, where the beautiful and well-kept properties that gave us an impression of Belize as a coastal environment that was not radically different from the beaches back home.  We spent the remainder of the day travelling just outside Belize City to Altun Ha, the site of the Mayan Temples.  A tour guide told us about the daily lives of Belize’s original inhabitants, and we had the chance to climb the awesome and somewhat terrifying pyramids.

Our main service project, building a Hand-in-Hand ministry sponsored home for a woman named Guadalupe, started bright and early on the third day of the trip.  The short ten minute drive from the Starfish brought us to a strikingly different neighborhood.  Giant potholes interrupted the dirt road every few feet; poorly constructed and barely maintained homes surrounded the worksite; and previous visitors to our empty lot had covered the overgrown grass with trash.  It seemed hard to imagine that this would be the place for Guadalupe’s fresh start.

Fortunately, our tight schedule did not allow for too much time to be spent on culture shock.  The two contractors, Bata and Alfonso, put us right to work: weeding, disposing of trash, and mixing cement to seal the cinderblock foundation.  Soon, we started constructing the wooden base of the house, and by the end of the day, the entire base was constructed and water-sealed.  The next three days, work on our sixteen-by-sixteen foot house mostly continued as it had began, but each day, various members of Guadalupe’s family would come help us work.  Her sister, Virginia, and her father quickly won us over with their great work ethic and ability to laugh at our construction blunders (and then quickly fix our mistakes). By the end of the third day, we were ready to raise the walls.  While a couple of us held the first, upright wall in place, the remainder of the team pushed the adjacent wall into place on Bata’s count of three.  For a moment it seemed that our entire house might go toppling over; instead, the walls fit perfectly together.

Just in time for the house dedication ceremony, Bata nailed the roof’s last shingle into place.  The ceremony brought together the coordinators of Hand-in-Hand ministries, everyone who helped construct the house, and Guadalupe and her family.  Fr. Joe offered a blessing, than we all sang hymns and our team gave Guadalupe truly Belizean housewarming gifts: rice, hot sauce, and fruitcake and presented Guadalupe with the keys to her brand-new home.  The freshly painted wooden house had transformed the formerly homely lot into a welcoming place where we could easily imagine Guadalupe’s family gathering together.

With just two days left in Belize, we had enough time to explore the city a bit further.  We spent one morning visiting Hand-in-Hand’s outreach center and nursery for children affected by HIV, and the hours spent playing with the children – who ranged from six months to six years – were definitely a trip highlight for us all.  That night, Garifuna dancers came to share their interesting heritage with us through song and dance, and we all had fun attempting to “shuffle” and sing-along with them.

Our final full day was spent taking a boat to Caye Caulker where we explored the beautiful island and snorkeled with sharks, sting rays, and the coral reefs.  Our relaxing beach day served as the perfect conclusion to a trip that was at times physically and emotionally challenging, and allowed us to see the Belize that attract thousands of tourists each year.  Though our nine days in Belize passed quickly, our trip lasted just long enough for each member of our team to form a lasting attachment to the country and to one another.