How to Plant a Christmas Tree

by William S. Becker

Tip O’Neil, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, once declared that “all politics is local”. The same might be said for climate change. While its consequences are global, its root cause is the greenhouse gas emissions each of us emits directly or indirectly from our vehicles, buildings and appliances.

If anthropogenic climate change is the result of the millions of energy decisions each of us makes in the course of our lives, then it stands to reason that the solution to climate change lies in making those decisions differently. Each of us must sign a treaty with ourselves, a personal Kyoto Protocol. Without that individual commitment, no international agreement to mitigate global warming will be worth the recycled paper it’s written on.

This point came home recently when I met a woman named Clare Dakin in London. Clare is the UK’s representative for a program called Project Green Hands. Its objective is to reverse the desertification of Tamil Nadu, the seventh most populous state in India, by planting 114 million trees within the next 10 years.

So far, six million trees have been planted by 1 million people in three years, including 850,000 in a single day, a Guinness Book world record. The people who plant the trees are volunteers who each pledge to care for a single sapling for two years.

Clare is evangelical about this work. “The project is rare in its beauty, its wisdom, its depth of understanding of people and nature and its immediacy, logic and global significance,” she says. “It is aforestation on barren farmland…to tackle water scarcity, soil erosion and community rehabilitation through mass education around sustainability and mass participation in planting and tending.”

So far, Clare says, 1,000 villages have joined the project. The goal is to increase tree cover in Tamil Nadu from 17 percent to 30 percent or more – and to do it in a way that can be replicated in other parts of the world. Continued...

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Connecting the Dots on the Mumbai Attacks

by Janet Ritz

There has been a great deal of reporting, speculation, finger pointing and denials on the Mumbai attacks, much of which has focused on trees (dots) instead of forests.

After reading with empathy and horror of the death and destruction, the question remained, who was behind this and why? The Indian government has stated the surviving terrorist they've captured was Pakistani from the Muslim Punjab region who was trained as part of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani based Kashmir separatist group with purported ties to both al Qaeda and the Pakastani ISI.

Which leads to the following (dots) about the attacks:

• =>The style of attack was military - a special forces/commando type raid - in nature.


• =>The military training of the attackers purportedly by ex-Pakistani military officers.


• =>The repudiated claim by Hamid Gul, the ex-head of the Pakistani Intelligence Service (ISI), reported to be involved in the formation of the Taliban, that al Qaeda was not behind either the Mubai attacks or 9/11, blaming instead (on this Sunday's edition of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS) an "Israeli Zionist Neocon Conspiracy" which matches his ongoing denial that Bin Laden is a terrorist (George Stephanopoulos asked Condolezza Rice on THIS WEEK Sunday about reports that the U.S. has asked for Gul to be turned over for indictment. Rice declined to comment).
  


• =>The capture of a fishing trawler out of a Pakistani port.


• =>Initial targets that were designed to draw first responders away from two targets of note: the Taj Hotel and the Jewish Center.


• =>The Taj is owned by the leading industrialists of India, the Tata Group (Tata Steel, Tata Auto...), descendants of Zoroastrian priests known for their tolerance of others. The Taj was built in 1903 by Jamsetji Tata, India's pioneering industrialist, after he was denied access to a "whites only" luxury hotel, as a comparable (or better) facility that would accept everyone.


• =>The Nariman House Chabad Jewish Center established as a welcoming center to both Jewish travelers and the Mumbai Jewish community.


• =>The recent attacks in Pakistan that destroyed vehicles necessary for transporting supplies over the Khyber Pass to NATO forces in Afghanistan.


• =>The expectation of an Afghan Taliban offensive in the spring.

This raises the question, if the attacks originated in Pakistan, who is in charge there? The democratically elected government or the elements of the army and intelligence services that are seemingly aligned with (and/or in charge of) the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba, al Qaeda and other similar groups? The prevailing wisdom is to do as much as possible to support the democratically elected government.

That seems to be the approach thus far with India's thankfully measured response. It also may be because India was not the only target when all the dots are connected. In the larger chess-board that is South Asia, the focus shifts to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and the traditional spring offensive that can be expected from the Taliban. Continued...

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