This is a few months old now, but frankly, the content is ancient. Why is it mission critical when it’s in our own backyard, but business as usual elsewhere?

Nigeria is in my top five place to report from. Top five. In fact, it might even occupy position number one.

Ok, so it’s a great jam and all, but the idea of Wyclef as an actual president is perhaps, well, misguided.

CBC is reporting that Wyclef Jean has registered to run for office in Haiti’s fall election. Although he’s yet to officially decide whether or not he will run, he’s filled out the appropriate paper work and has been cleared as a potential candidate.

I just finished writing an op-ed column (to be published in September) about my own experience with disaster relief in Haiti. During the research I discovered this little report by the smoking gun. It suggests that Wyclef’s charity, the Yele Haiti Foundation, functions as much as a front to personally enrich the hip hop star, as it does to raise money for Haiti. The details are sketchy, perhaps even complex, and I’ll leave it to you to form your own opinion.

HT Mr. Myles Estey.

Ok, so today’s Earth Day, the day where we all celebrate the Earth and champion for its protection. A day where we can sit around and congratulate each other on cleaner rivers and less acid rain. A chance to lament recent failures, and cry concern over the current climate crisis. One day a year that’s completely focused on our own pale blue dot.

Or is it?

Forty years ago, Earth Day was launched by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson. His goal was to draw attention to environmental issues. At the time, passion for earth issues was just picking up. Rachel Carson had published her seminal essay, Silent Spring in 1962. The late 60’s brought a number of major oil spills that further catalyzed public opinion on the environment. 1971 marked the year of mercury poisoning in Minimata.

Point is, at the time there was a lot going on to shake public perception. People cared. Awareness mattered.

Here’s my question; Forty year on, do we still need more awareness? Arguably the environmental movement is at its all time peak in popularity. People are more aware of issues of biodiversity and climate change than ever before. When does all this awareness cease to be productive and just become self-congratulatory hype between those who were already in the know?

Moreover, what does Earth Day mean to those outside the minority world? A lot of the clean up in North America has occurred by shipping toxic industry’s offshore. We know about e-waste in Ghana, uranium-tailing ponds in Kyrgyzstan, lead poisoning in the Dominican Republic. The western world continues to call on developing nations to do more to curb CO2 emissions, to clean up toxic industry, yet it’s western owned companies that are often creating the mess to begin with.

There are a lot of people on this Earth. If only a handful are celebrating Earth Day, congratulating their own “awareness,” is it really a day worth celebrating at all? And if our only solution to clean up is to ship industry out of our own backyard and into another, arguably we’re not as aware as we’d like to believe. We are, in fact, just blind.

I’ve just finished reading Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place. It’s got me thinking about the nature of travel and tourism. I travel a lot (too much for someone who claims to have a green thumb.) These days it’s less as a tourist, and more for work. Still, I’m forced to admit a certain degree of voyeurism in the work that I do. There are tough ethical questions that need to be asked, and after Zambia, I can’t help but ask them every day. A Small Place is a good read, and made me reexamine some of my own assumptions on post-colonial landscapes.

From the book:

Antigua is a small place, a small island. It is nine miles wide by twelve miles long. It was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493. Not too long after, it was settled by human rubbish from Europe, who used enslaved but noble and exalted human beings from Africa (all masters of every stripe are rubbish, and all slaves of every stripe are noble and exalted; there can be no question about this) to satisfy their desire for wealth and power, to feel better about their own miserable existence, so that they would be less lonely and empty — a European disease. Eventually, the masters left, in a kind of way; eventually, the slaves were freed, in a kind of way. The people in Antigua now, the people who really think of themselves as Antiguans (and the people who would immediately come to your mind when you think about what Antiguans might be like; I mean, supposing you were to think about it), are the descendants of these noble and exalted people, the slaves. Of course, the whole thing is, once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your masters yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings.