SAVING THE PLANET

...The ingredients of success have been a vast network of women's groups and the neighborhood association's democratic administrative structure, which extends down to representatives on each block...

...The migrants described irrigation channels lined with plastic sheets, and the villagers reasoned that a reservoir could be sealed the same way...

...Thus, perhaps the greatest irony of community action for sustainability is that communities cannot do it alone...

...Bolstered by an unprecedented alliance with indigenous tribes and the scattered beginnings of a nationwide rubber tappers' movement, Acre's union has demanded an end to destruction of the land—and an end to violence against their members...

...Grass-roots action is on the rise everywhere from Eastern Europe's industrial heartland, where fledgling environmental movements are demanding that human health no longer be sacrificed for economic growth, to the Himalayan foothills, where multitudes of Indian villagers are organized to protect and reforest barren slopes...

...The next dry season they were well-supplied, which inspired neighboring villages to plan their own reservoirs...

...At base, action on poverty and the environment comes down to a question of the rights of people to shape their own destiny...

...Most impressive, the Zapotecs had organized intricate rotating work schedules for feeding the fish, maintaining the ponds, regulating water-flow rates, and harvesting a sustainable yield...

...The prospects for grass-roots progress against poverty are further limited in a world economy in which vested interests are deeply entrenched and power is concentrated in a few nations...

...Angeles went to town to find out what he could, and tracked down the Secretariat of Fisheries...

...in fact, millions have been engaged in them for years...

...They have helped reshape World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank lending policy by showing that, over the long run, natural-rubber production is more profitable and creates more employment per hectare than cattle ranching or farming...

...In 1987 alone, an area almost the size of Maine went up in smoke...

...In the Third World, traditional tribal, village, and religious organizations, first disturbed by European colonialism, have been stretched and often dismantled by the great cultural upheavals of the Twentieth Century: rapid population growth, urbanization, the advent of modern technology, and the spread of Western commercialism...

...The global threat is complex and manifold...

...But achieving a just and sustainable global economy will require an enormous number of simple acts...

...By promoting a sense of identity and self-worth, his method aims to break what Freire calls "the culture of silence" that traps large classes in power-lessness and vulnerability...

...Alone, this new class of organizations is far from powerful enough to set the world on a sustainable course...

...From day one, the community controls the process...

...Despite geologic conditions that quickly ruled out the standardized government design, the workers managed to build an odd assortment of irregular pools...

...The shared characteristics include the capacities to tap local knowledge and resources, to respond to problems rapidly and creatively, and to maintain the flexibility needed in changing circumstances...

...In developing countries, meanwhile, deepening poverty combined with often-catastrophic ecological degradation has led to the proliferation of grass-roots self-help movements...

...As the poorest nations struggle with these problems, some seventeen million of their children die each year of preventable Alan B. Duming is a senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, D.C...

...For each neighborhood that rallies to replace a planned waste incinerator with a recycling program, scores remain mired in inaction...

...In the close quarters of these urban slums, neighborhood associations form readily...

...The pressure to feed the growing number of people helps cause rates of topsoil loss unprecedented since the dawn of agriculture...

...By June 1987, twenty ponds brimmed with fish, water supplies were secure year round, and the risk of crop losses had been reduced with irrigation water conducted through garden hoses...

...Unfortunately, success is rarely as easy as it was for the Zapotecs...

...A year later, tired of waiting for a government inspector to bring them the promised fingerlings, Angeles went again to the city, where he convinced the secretariat to bend the rules and give him a plastic bag containing 175 young tilapia and carp...

...Worldwide, women's traditional nurturing role may give them increased concern for the generations of their children and grandchildren, while their subordinate social status gives them more to gain from organizing...

...Hundreds of communities are bucking the odds of government complacence and international neglect to meet the need for clean water...

...Sao Paulo, Brazil, alone has 1,300...

...As a result, organizing the dispossessed is much more difficult than organizing the fortunate...

...diseases...

...Kenya is waging war on soil erosion, as several thousand women's groups terrace mountainsides with shovels and hoes...

...Moving thousands of tons of earth by hand, they finished the pool before the rains returned...

...Poverty is an economic condition, but its effects ripple deep into the human psyche, devastating self-confidence and self-respect...

...Although most groups are little known beyond provincial borders, the outlines of an overall movement emerge by piecing together insights from scores of interviews, field visits, grass-roots newsletters, official documents, press reports, and academic papers...

...The world's largest rain forest—and largest concentration of species diversity-envelops the thousand tributaries of the Amazon River, forming a great fan that covers northern Brazil and spreads into Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia...

...Of the two basic organizing philosophies, the first is action-centered while the second concentrates on consciousness-raising...

...In 1983, a Zapotec youth named Eucario Angeles returned home from university and began talking with people in the communities about their problems and priorities...

...Forest dwellers in the Amazon basin cannot quantify the mass extinction of species now occurring around them, but they know what it is to watch their primeval homeland go up in smoke before advancing waves of migrants and developers...

...In Africa, the sheer enormity of women's burdens unites them: Women bear primary responsibility for child care, cooking, cleaning, processing food, carrying water, and gathering fuel...

...The picture shows an expanding latticework covering the globe...

...To the contrary, the best hope for pressing governments to work with local groups is local groups themselves...

...Peasant associations cannot enact supportive agricultural policies or build roads to distant markets...

...In addition, although few groups use the term "sustainable development," their agendas often embody this ideal...

...In the late 1970s, a union of 30,000 rubber tappers from the remote Brazilian state of Acre decided to draw the line...

...The newcomers proceed to clearcut the woodlands and burn the fallen logs, causing unprecedented destruction and enormous releases of air pollution...

...Now practiced by independent groups worldwide, Freire's technique uses informal teachers who guide illiterate adults through discussions of basic concepts from everyday life—such as "food," "school," and "landlord"—to foster a critical awareness of the predicament of poverty...

...Reforms at the international level are as important as those in the village...

...Joint actions tend to create a sense of camaraderie that propels community efforts forward...

...The tasks are far from mysterious...

...second, the rich controlled the fishing rights...

...Women's groups cannot develop and test modern contraceptive technologies or rewrite bank lending rules...

...The motto of grass-roots development that emerged from the 1970s was, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime...

...Groups organize most readily to defend their resource base against such incursions of outsiders, but in the right circumstances they may organize to reverse deterioration driven by forces internal to the community...

...Villagers piled caged rocks by hand to form a dam four meters high and 180 meters long...

...The largest challenge in reversing global deterioration is to forge an alliance between local groups and national governments...

...Then, in December, two gunmen ambushed Francisco Mendes Filho, national leader of the rubber tappers, immediately behind his home, killing him instantly...

...Viewed closely, these groups vary enormously in most particulars but share many fundamental characteristics...

...His article is adapted from "Action at the Grassroots: Fighting Poverty and Environmental Decline," a much longer version which covers the industrialized West and East as well as the Third World, recently published by the Institute...

...Santa Marta is a vertical labyrinth of houses clinging precariously to a slope above Rio de Janeiro's city council offices...

...In the rare cases where national-local alliances have been achieved, extraordinary gains have followed...

...As cattle died of thirst, the land lost the manure supply and the children lost their milk, making them easy victims for the diseases that prey on the malnourished...

...Because of increased population and decreased agricultural productivity, per-capita grain yields have been declining in Africa since 1967 and in Latin America since 1981...

...Perhaps 500 million people live in the squalor of the Third World's mushrooming squatter colonies, and the number grows by thousands daily...

...The price has been high, but the rubber tappers have made modest gains...

...Alliances cannot be formed where governments do not want them, but that does not lessen the importance of grass-roots organization...

...Since the 1960s, a series of powerful economic and political forces has brought waves of landless peasants and wealthy land-speculators into the jungles, where they have driven the rubber tappers out— sometimes at gunpoint...

...For every peasant league that stanches the hemorrhage of topsoil from a watershed, dozens more fail...

...Self-help organizations formed in Philippine slums in the 1970s, for example, played an important role in the "people's power" revolution in 1986...

...These people understand global degradation in its rawest forms...

...In villages, neighborhoods, and shantytowns around the world, people are coming together to strike back at the forces of environmental and economic decline that endanger our communities and our planet...

...A committed organizer arrives on the scene unburdened with project blueprints or development budgets and begins a discussion to activate latent talents...

...Undaunted, Zapotec work parties set to digging...

...Most ominously, the entire planet's temperature appears to be rising as heat-trapping gases released by industrial processes and deforestation accumulate in the atmosphere...

...All local groups eventually collide with forces they cannot control...

...Zimbabwe has trained more than 500 community-selected family planners to improve maternal and child health and control population growth...

...No roads enter the tangle of canyons south of Oaxaca, Mexico, where the Zapotec Indians eke a meager existence out of parched soil...

...In some cases, they accomplish phenomenal things, as the stories of Santa Marta and Villa El Salvador show...

...This thumbnail sketch of fish farming in the drylands of Mexico is a microcosm of grass-roots development at its best...

...UNICEF estimates that unclean water combined with inadequate sanitation causes 75 per cent of all disease in developing countries...

...They want economic prosperity without sacrificing their health or the prospects for their children...

...This nonviolent method was met with violent reprisals that continue today...

...Residents assembled two work parties, which quickly excavated two rudimentary ponds...

...The traditional inhabitants of this great basin include dozens of tribes of Indians and 300,000 rubber tappers, a guild of workers who earn their living by tapping the rubber trees spread liberally through the region...

...Sri Lanka's Sarvodaya Shramadana overcomes impediments to grass-roots activity by combining the two philosophies in massive work parties and communal feasts where villages come together to speak, listen, and learn...

...Despite the extreme poverty of the town's inhabitants and a population that has shot up to 300,000, illiteracy has fallen to 3 per cent—one of the lowest rates in Latin America—and infant mortality is 40 per cent below the national average...

...As environmental decay accelerates in industrial regions, communities are organizing in growing numbers to protect themselves from chemical wastes, industrial pollution, and nuclear-power installations...

...With help from international environmental groups, the union has called on the Brazilian government to set off large "extractive reserves" where tappers can carry on their way of life in perpetuity...

...Over the weeks of discussion among local residents, a consensus emerged: They should dig ponds at the springs to store their scarce water supply...

...Shramadana" means "gift of labor," and "Sarvodaya" means "village awakening...

...After lengthy discussion and debate, the community agreed to the plan, and in 1986, all but a few stayed home during the dry season to get the job done...

...Meanwhile, hundreds of Naam farmers have adopted a simple technique of soil and water conservation developed by Ox-fam-U.K., in which stones are piled in low rows along the contour to hold back the runoff from torrential rains...

...A noteworthy characteristic of community movements throughout the Third World is the central role that women play...

...By giving their labor, people awaken the talents within their village and set self-development in motion...

...No line can be drawn between economic development and environmental protection...

...At first, their tactics were simple and direct: Where the chain saws were working, men, women, and children would peacefully occupy the forest, putting their bodies in the path of destruction...

...third, fish stocks were dwindling...

...I Those who live beyond the borders lof the world's industrial economy subsist on nature's surplus—on organic soil fertility for food, on stable hydrological cycles for water, and on forests for fuel...

...That aphorism turned out to be triply flawed...

...Santa Marta's local organization came together with the simple goal of starting an informal day-care program...

...In 1984, Burkina Faso immunized three-fourths of its children against measles, meningitis, and yellow fever in the space of three months...

...Indeed, over the long run, community groups could fundamentally alter the world's political landscape...

...Thus it was the women who decided, upon talking with community organizers in 1981, to build a permanent reservoir to trap the seasonal rains...

...In the face of such enormous threats, isolated grass-roots initiatives appear minuscule—ten women plant trees on a roadside, a local union strikes for a nontoxic workplace, an old man teaches neighborhood children to read—but, when added together, their impact has the potential to reshape the Earth...

...they grow 80 per cent of the food, raise half the livestock, and give birth to twenty-seven million babies a year...

...Within weeks of my visit last year, a landlord's hired assassins allegedly gunned down an allied peasant politician and a rubber tapper...

...A few minnows whimsically thrown into a pool unexpectedly multiplied, which reminded someone that a visitor had once said something about farming fish...

...Those who live with economic and environmental decline are not only the most cognizant of the perils facing our planet, they are the ragtag front line in the worldwide struggle to end poverty and environmental destruction...

...In Lima's Villa El Salvador, Peruvians have planted a half-million trees, built twenty-six schools, 150 day-care centers, and 300 community kitchens, and trained hundreds of door-to-door health workers...

...Residents along the lower reaches of the Mississippi may not be able to name the mutagens and carcinogens that nearby petrochemical factories pump into their air and water, but they know how many of their neighbors have miscarried or died of cancer...

...Whether these scattered beginnings rise in a global groundswell depends only on how many more individuals commit their creativity and energy to the challenge...

...With origins in Burkina Faso, it now spills over under different names in Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Niger, and Togo...

...At the local level, particularly among the close to four billion humans in developing lands, it appears that the world's people are better organized in 1989 than they have been since European colonialism disrupted traditional societies centuries ago...

...By June 1988, however, the group had achieved far greater things: water lines, paved stairways (in lieu of roads), electricity, health clinics, a superb day-care facility, and drainage systems to prevent mud slides, which had wiped out two dozen homes four months earlier...

...The second organizing philosophy is typified by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire's teaching method...

...Tropical-forest habitat is being cleared so rapidly that one-fifth of the Earth's species may be extinct by early in the next century...

...Environmental degradation, consequently, has direct, tangible results: hunger, thirst, and fuel scarcity...

...This leaves them vulnerable to the water-borne germs that cause diarrhea, which alone takes the lives of five million children every year...

...To them, creeping destruction of ecosystems has meant lengthening workdays, failing livelihoods, and deteriorating health...

...While halting soil loss, these diguetes increase crop yields dramatically...

...Indeed, despite all the activist priests and Gandhian workers, the poor remain the least organized of the world's people...

...In 1975, the Catholic diocese of Ma-chakos, Kenya, initiated a literacy program that, by 1984, involved some 60,000 participants...

...The shantytown is home to 11,500 of Rio's two million squatters...

...National development efforts, like the roads, have passed them by, but development itself has not...

...Because self-reliant localism cannot tackle the broader issues of resource distribution, legal rights, and ecological decline, many self-help movements have turned increasingly to political struggle...

...Every organizing technique is essentially an attempt to liberate the wealth of creative ideas and resources that all human groups possess...

...Meanwhile, increasing industrialization has produced acid rain and air pollution, causing the slow death of thousands of lakes, streams, and forests in northern latitudes and endangering human health...

...The inescapable lesson for each of us is distilled in the words of Angeles Serrano, a grandmother and community activist from Manila's Leveriza slum: "Act, act, act...

...The particulars include cooperatives, mothers' clubs, suburban ground-water committees, peasant farming unions, religious study groups, neighborhood-action federations, collective-aid societies, tribal nations, and innumerable others...

...Neighborhood committees cannot implement citywide recycling programs or give themselves a seat at the table in national energy planning...

...The actual project can be anything at all: building a school, painting a church, or leveling a soccer field...

...As in much of the world, fetching water in Dhandhuka is women's work...

...In a Romanian city, an underground environmental movement gathers data on the pollution that laces their air and water...

...At least 1.5 billion people worldwide still lack potable water...

...According to program coordinator Francis Mulwa, "Literacy-class discussions became the springboard to other development," generating ventures in handicrafts, tree planting, primary health care, cooperative farming, soil conservation, savings and credit, and water supply...

...In Dhandhuka, on the barren coastal plain of India's Gujarat state, a generation of excessive fuelwood gathering and overgrazing has led to desertification, which in turn has triggered social and economic disintegration...

...You can't just watch...

...Then one thing followed another...

...Conflicts erupted over water that seeped into brackish wells, and in the worst years four-fifths of the population had to migrate to survive...

...There, aquaculture experts supplied him with elaborate specifications for regulation ponds but advised that uneducated Indians would never succeed...

...As community members discover their strengths, they mobilize local knowledge, labor, and materials to address the needs they have defined...

...Each year during the dry season, thousands of Naam villages undertake projects that they choose and design with minimal assistance from outsiders...

...Saving the Planet In the Third World the action starts where people live BY ALAN B. DURNING Women on the banks of the Ganges may not be able to calculate the infant-mortality rate, but they know all too well the helplessness and agony of holding a child as it dies of diarrhea...

...First, women—even more than men—were the ones who needed fish...

...Along with five neighboring communities, for example, Somiaga built a large dam and a series of check dams to trap drinking and irrigation water and to slow soil erosion...

...The work required—from slowing excessive population growth to reforesting the planet's denuded watersheds—will involve an unprecedented outpouring of human energy...

...In a Brazilian favela, young doctors work with a team of neighborhood women to teach preventive health care...

...Environmental quality is not a luxury...

...Clean drinking water is a high priority for many communities...

...At the grass roots, campaigns are under way on every continent: In Zimbabwe, villagers assemble at dusk to combat drought...

...Despite the heartening rise of grassroots action, humanity is losing the struggle for sustainable development...

...And among the rubber trees of Acre, they have built community schools and health posts...

...The first, typified by the Zapotec fish-farming example, emphasizes producing a tangible product as rapidly as possible...

...And it has pushed many of them to act...

...Small may be beautiful, but it can also be insignificant...

...An African federation popularly known as Naam is among the most successful of the world's grass-roots movements at mobilizing people to protect and restore natural resources in an area degraded from overuse...

...Building on precolonial self-help traditions, Naam taps vast stores of peasant knowledge, creativity, and energy to loosen the grip of poverty and ecological deterioration in the drought-prone Sahel...

...In this case, an idea from migrant laborers provided the pull that complemented the push of water scarcity...

...Each year, more babies are added to the world's population than ever before, primarily in the poorest nations...