Report Card
Nelson, Marcia Z.
REPORT CARD Marcia Z. Nelson Unnatural Acts NATURAL DISASTERS: ACTS OF GOD OR ACTS OF MAN? by Anders Wijkman and Lloyd Timberlake Earthscan, 1717 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC...
...Published by the privately supported U.S...
...Relief actions are always too late...
...El Salvador's desplazados urgently require an international, neutral body to coordinate relief...
...These desplazados, most of them women and children, remain within the borders of their native land, but they are refugees in every other sense of the word...
...In this timely report, authors Anders Wijkman and Lloyd Timberlake attempt to define the human policies leading to the massive loss of life that follows cataclysmic, seemingly uncontrollable natural events...
...Modern war tax protesters alarmed by U.S...
...Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, refused to pay for anything other than home defense and rebuked King Richard for unjust oppression...
...The authors also challenge the effectiveness of conventional relief efforts...
...Uprooted and deprived of their traditional source of income as migrant agricultural laborers, they squeeze into slums surrounding provincial capitals where the unemployment rate is 40 per cent, or they crowd into squalid refugee camps where crime and malnutrition prevail...
...The Dispossessed WORLD REFUGEE SURVEY 1984 edited by Rosemary E. Tripp AIDING THE DESPLAZADOS OF EL SALVADOR by John Mullaney U.S...
...The process will be difficult," author John Mullaney writes, "but the needs of over 500,000 displaced people cannot be ignored...
...War tax resistance has a long history...
...But the poor—who disproportionately are victimized by disasters—cannot afford anything other than marginal land that no one else wants...
...by Anders Wijkman and Lloyd Timberlake Earthscan, 1717 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20036...
...Humans become more vulnerable to disaster when they build on dangerous ground...
...Droughts, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, and tidal waves killed an average of almost 143,000 people each year in the 1970s, a sixfold jump over the average yearly death toll of the 1960s...
...The committee's report on refugees in El Salvador is less politically muted, however...
...military expenditures totaling 63 per cent of the fiscal 1985 budget can turn to the staff of the Conscience and Military Tax Campaign, which has assembled a packet of information and resources including a 105-page guide to refusing military taxes...
...Your Tax Dollars at War CONSCIENCE AND MILITARY TAX CAMPAIGN TAX PACKET Conscience and Military Tax Campaign, 44 Bellhaven Road, Bellport, NY 11713...
...The famine in Ethiopia that has starved millions is only the latest in a series of increasingly common disasters afflicting poor inhabitants of the Third World...
...Treatment of refugees the world over "continued to erode," the survey notes...
...More than nine million refugees who have fled political persecution in their native lands lived in exile last year, according to the World Refugee Survey, including four million Afghans, who accounted for one-fifth of that country's population...
...Technology is often inappropriate or intrusive...
...shortsighted and inequitable economic development has set them up for disaster to strike...
...Relief work today is like bandaging a wound that is constantly growing," they write...
...Desplazados, free...
...Only equitable development efforts—aimed at the marginal and rural poor whom disaster strikes in the greatest numbers—can prevent or mitigate catastrophe when it occurs...
...Committee for Refugees, 20 West 40th Street, New York, NY 10018.1984 Survey, $8...
...Land becomes more prone to disaster through human alteration: Deforestation and overgrazing strip it of defenses against catastrophic events...
...In 1197, England's King Richard I taxed his bishops to subsidize a war with King Philip Augustus of France...
...5.50...
...With military outlays soaring to arrogant new heights, paying for peace is more urgent than ever...
...Most disaster problems in the Third World are unsolved development problems," they write...
...An imaginative variety of options exist for taxpayers wishing to demonstrate concern over the military uses of their money: paying in pennies, forwarding taxes to a nonmilitary Government agency instead of the IRS, refusing to pay the Federal excise tax on telephone service, which has historically been used to fund war spending...
...Though the report fails to address the human rights violations that cause people to become refugees, it is nonetheless a useful resource...
...After his death, Hugh was canonized a saint...
...Committee for Refugees (unlike ninety-one other nations, the United States did not sign the 1951 Convention, adopted by the United Nations, that defines the rights of refugees), the survey provides a comprehensive overview of the world refugee problem, with feature articles, statistical tables, country summaries, a short bibliography, and a directory of relief organizations...
Vol. 49 • February 1985 • No. 2
