Earlier this week UNESCO had a couple of additions to their World Heritage Site list. World Heritage Sites can include natural locations, buildings, monuments, and entire cities, and are believed to be of significant interest for humanity. In 1972, UNESCO created the program, initially know as the Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage, and it aimed at identifying significant sites, cataloging and conserve them for all our of enjoyment. On occasion this new status can obtain funds from the World Heritage Fund for preservation. As of last year there were a total of 830 designated sites.

This week the Sydney Opera House, built in 1973, and was declared a “great artistic monument accessible to society at large” by UNESCO, and India’s Red Fort Complex, completed in 1648 was said to include “all phases of Indian history from the Mughal period to independence”.

Other sites that to have been previously designated World Heritage Sites include the Iwami Ginzan Silver Mines on Honshu Island, Japan, Richtersveld mountainous desert region in South Africa, and Namibia’s Twyfelfontein. Click here for the complete list.

You can read more about this in the recent BBC article.

Image info here.

In April, Ireland came up with a very creative way of helping author collect royalties for their world, while simultaneously making their work available to the largest group of people. The Department of Trade and Employment set up a system by which authors gather royalties each time their works are checked out at the library, better yet, this set up doesn’t cost the patron a cent. Some countries have extended this system to include CDs, audio-visual material and works of art.

This set up is formally know as the Public Lending Right (PLR), and its intent is to compensate authors for potential sale losses when their work is made available through public libraries. Currently about 30 countries have Public Lending Rights, including Canada, the UK, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Netherlands, Israel, Australia, New Zealand and all the Scandinavian countries. There is some discussion of expending Public Lending Rights to cover all of the EU. PLR was first implemented in Denmark in 1946, and was followed shortly after by Norway in 1947, then the UK in 1979.

How Public Lending Rights are implemented tends to vary from country to country. The main division seems to be between countries that consider PLR part of copyright law, and those nations which wish to support culture, with a particular emphasis on local authors. Other differences include, whether foreign residing authors are excluded or not, payments often varies, with some countries making payment for each time a book is loaned, while others base the decision solely on whether the library owns the book.

The initiative is not without detractors. Some of the discontent in the EU circles around the issue of whether or not a country is conforming with EU Directives of Lending and Rental Rights while implementing PLR. These directives establish a framework that gives author and other right holders exclusive rights to license or prohibit lending. Along these lines, the PLR International has set up a website with advice for countries with existing PLR, and to council others considering the change.

Here is a paper presented at IFLA in 2002 about the issue, mainly as it concerns the EU.

Today Cape Verdians outside the island outnumber those who live on the island, and this dynamic which has been forming for years, even decades has transformed a nation and continues to redefine family and social ties. And yet Cape Verde is far from being the lone example of this new world order. Countries like Mexico and the Philippines, just to name two, also have very large populations abroad.

World wide it is estimated that 200 million people live outside their country of birth, and last year they send back about $300 billion dollars back home, nearly three times the world’s foreign aid budgets combines. And while having relatives abroad can help those who stay behind escape poverty, it also destroys families. Having a relative abroad can mean having the means to build a home, buy groceries and school supplied, but it also means that increasingly children are growing up with other relatives and friends of the family, instead of their parents.

In a world where developed countries have growing elderly populations, and it is increasingly common for both parents to work outside the home, immigrants provide necessary labor to keep these economies running. In turn immigrants are able to work, and help their own back home. But being raised by others is not the only drawback of this system. Nations with large populations abroad also experience brain drain, thus almost guarantying that their own situation at home is not likely to improve.

Interestingly, nations who tend to export people and tend to be large recipients of immigrants from other nations who might be escaping even worse poverty, or other hardship.

You can read more about this through this article in the NYT.

Kiva means “unity” in Swahili, but it is also a fascinating new way to help empower people in the developing world. After working in East Africa, two Stanford business students created Kiva.org in 2006, to promote one-on-one relations between lenders in the developed world and new entrepreneurs in the developing world. The site allows people to lend money, interest free, to others starting business. The site not only eliminated high lending fees, but also the usual bureaucracy involved in such transactions.

Kiva works by allowing you to lend as little as $25 through your credit card. This money will be loaned to the project of your choice and after the agreed upon time your loan will be paid back. At this time you can either withdraw your money, or reinvest it. Since internet is not always available, Kiva works with local organizations that help find potential borrowers, and helps direct the loans, or with international organization such as Mercy Corps.

Kiva’s marketing has continued to take advantage of the internet, and partners with giants such as Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Paypal, Starbucks, and YouTube, among others to promote the organization and the work they do. Kiva also sponsors fellows who will commit to spending at least 10 weeks in a host country,while getting to know the culture, and conducting interviews which will then be hosted on the organization’s website.

You can read a blog about the organization, and the projects it helps fund here. Carol Pucci of the Seattle Times also wrote an article about her experience with Kiva in funding a project in Bulgaria.

A similar project is run by Globalgiving.com, who connects donors to recipients.

This morning the BBC has an article about the first all-female UN peacekeeping troop. The group is comprised of 105 Indian women, who have been based in Liberia for the last 6 months. The group was initially set up as an experiment, and it was gone so well that their mission has been extended to a full year.

The women who make up this troop were selected from all over India and have been trained in drug raids, law enforcement, and crowd control among other things. It is also hoped that their presence will encourage local women to join local law enforcement groups. There is a push to bring more women into law enforcement in hopes to curb down sexual assault and exploitation, as well as helping local women feel safer.

Women in UN peacekeeping troops have been woefully underrepresented. In 2006 women made up only 4% of all peacekeeping troops. The UN currently encourages women to become involved in peacekeeping; here are a few highlighted stories.

Women have been making their mark as soldieries elsewhere around the world. Spain’s arms forces are currently 15% women, the Chinese island of Xisha also host an all women trope. Still it’s really too bad that so many of these articles focus not on the merit and ability of these women, but on their ability to add to the beautiful scenery (Israel recently had the “lovely idea” of having women soldiers pose in their underwear for Maxim magazine in order to boost the country’s image abroad!), or focus on how much these women miss their families (as if any soldier station abroad won’t miss their family).

The Christian Science Monitor has another article on the matter.

Image from Grewal, Shabnam. “All girl UN squad a success”, BBC, June 21, 2007.

In an effort to classify, and preserve the world’s wild plant diversity, the Millennium Seed Bank Project (MSBP), based in Britain, is serving as the globe’s depository. Motivated by global changes in climate patterns, the MSBP has set out to gather as much material as possible in the hopes that if any of these plants species were to die out, they might be able to reintroduce them to the wild at a later stage. In May the bank collected it’s 1 billionths seed, and counting. The MSBP works with over 100 partners world wide and so far has material for 18,000 plant species originating from 126 different countries. By 2010 they hope to have 10% of the planets flora covered.

Norway was started a parallel project, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, based in the Svaldbard archipelago, above the Arctic Circle; here they intend to gather seeds for the world’s food crops, in an effort to save them from natural disaster, wars, or other major catastrophes. A significant difference between these two projects is that the MSBP is collecting material to preserve species with no immediate, known, economic value.

The collecting of seeds, whether for profit or not, presents interesting dilemmas and discussion turns to how humans can “help” certain plants adapt to changing global weather patterns, thus directly manipulating natural selection.

When seeds are gathered scientist make note of the conditions the plant was living under. Next seeds are dried for several months, and once desiccated they are placed in silver envelopes and stores in temperatures of -20C. Under these conditions seeds are expected to last up to 500 years. The practice of banking seeds can be traced back all the way to Mesopotamians, who’s methods serve as the basis for todays seed banking approach.

Other seed bank projects include the Heritage Seed Library, which aims to make available vegetable varieties that are not common, and the Seed Savers Exchange, which focused on preserving heirloom seed.

You can read further on the subject by looking at an article in the Christian Science Monitor, and another article in News West.

Image info; boy with seeds, dandelion seeds, Svalbard Seed Bank.

26.02.08 - The Svalbard Seed Bank has received its first collections of seeds in a ceremony with Noble Prize winner Wangari Mathai. The vault is located in the remote region of the Svalbard Islands because they are geologically stable, remote, and the frigid temperatures will provide natural refrigeration. You can read more about this, and see a layout of the vault in an article from the BBC here, or from the NYT here.

Haskell Free Library and Opera House straddles the USA – Canadian border between Stanstead, Quebec, and Derby Line, Vermont. This library was built in 1904 by the American Carlos Haskell and his wife, Canadian, Martha Stewart Haskell to over services to both communities. And while the library has a life marking the border along with floor, patrons are free to freely cross the border within its walls.

Librarians available to assist patrons can be either USA or Canadian citizens, or both, and most are bilingual.

You can find a few articles on this curious library at wikipedia; Canadian content; pbpub.

Image info here.

Yesterday there was an article at SFGate about one of Google’s latest inventions, Google Street View. Just like it sounds, this new technology lets you travel through selected cities (San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, & Miami) at street level. The images are static, but still the technology sounds a little too invasive for me. A few unlucky people were caught on tape as Google came by to gather footage, some come out looking unglamorous, but others maybe have been caught in something illegal.

The benefits of technology of this kind can include helping us house hunt, learning our way around a city, or just exploring parts of our own city we might have never visited otherwise. Britain is covered in surveillance cameras, (about 1 for every 14 people) and locals seem to have learned to live with them, so why not go ahead with it here? Still, as Morford’s article ends; if this is what Google is going, imagine what the government is up to that we don’t know about yet…

Google street maps needs to be downloaded, and requires flash.

Yesterday was World Environment Day, and one more day to try to get our attention around the collective damage we are doing to the planet. World Environment Day was created by the United Nations’ General Assembly in 1972 in order to stimulate thinking and create awareness about environmental issues. This year’s theme was “Melting Ice - a Hot Topic?” In support of International Polar year major celebrations were hosted by Norway, with particular emphasis on the city of Tromsø.

In a spirit of environmental awareness, Rafael Correa, president of Ecuador has challenged wealthy country to actively engage in the preservation of our collective natural resources. Correa is asking for $350 million dollars, annually for 10 years, in exchange for not drilling in Ishpingo-Tipitini-Tambocacha fields which are part of the Yasuni National park and are located in the country’s northern jungle. This land has been declared a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO and it is said that is hold more plant and animal diversity than all of the USA and Canada combined.

Ecuador is a very poor country and they could definitely use the money, whether it comes from oil, or from protecting the jungle. Since president Correa is a known leftist, it would be a very interesting proposal to see him spend this money on education and social improvements, thus making the most of out the project. You can read an article in the International Herald Tribune about this.

This weekend I was in Philly to see the Tutankhamen exhibit at the Franklin Institute Science Museum. My mom saw this exhibit when it toured the USA back in the 1970s and she still raves about it today, so we met-up and saw the exhibit together.

I had read a good amount about the exhibit for a paper I wrote a while back and found out that this time around the exhibit was being promoted more as a rock concert than a cultural event. This was very much the case. The exhibit is surrounded by a lot of fanfare, and lots of publicity. It is being hosted by a partnership between the L.A. based Anschultz Entertainment Group (AEG) (better known for promoting rock concerts), Egypt’s Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, and National Geographic.

While it might be another 30 years before we are able to see world treasure such as Tutankhamen, this exhibit wasn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. My mom says that the first time around there were a lot more objects, and that while the museum was crowded, one could still enjoy the exhibit and see things in a leisurely manner. This time some of the more famous pieces were missing, including Tutankhamen himself along with his many sarcophagus, and seeing the pieces was challenging in the overly crowded rooms. I also saw a guy in a wheel chair who probably spend the entire time looking at people’s backs since he wasn’t able to get up close to the cases because there were so many people there. These short-comings might give credence to some of the criticism that has surrounded the exhibit, among them the challenge that AEG has outsourced museum curatorial jobs to others outside the field.

The Egyptian Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities Dr. Zahi Hawass explains that Egypt has a wealth of treasures that need to be preserved, not all as flashy as Tutankhamen, so the motivation behind the exhibit is to raise much needed funds to help with this preservation initiative.

In interviews, several Egyptologist said that most of what Dr. Hawass was doing for their field was long overdue, things as simple as installing air conditioning at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. He has instituted zoning around major antiquity sites and built visitor centers to prevent further degradation. He also has plans to build a regional museum in Egypt, including a sprawling new structure besides the pyramids (Waxman, 2005).

While this effort is certainly much needed, a tricky situation has been created whereby the hosting museums are needing to charge significantly higher admission prices than usual in an effort to brake even, since the Egyptian government must make 10 million per stop before the museum makes a penny. The Egyptian government claims that all the hosting museums made money during the first tour, while they made none, although this is contested.

I guess some balance needs to be found by which poor nations with treasures of importance to the world should be able to access needed funds for preservation and promoting education, but doing so in a way that doesn’t limit the amount of people who can see them because they have been priced out of the market. Treasures like Tutankhamen, in a way, belong to all of humanity and should be accessible to everyone, not just those with deep pockets.

Image info here.