   5 Nov 2008 @ 16:58, by Heiner Benking
"CHANGE HAS COME TO AMERICA" - THE WORLD REACTS [link] I read in Uffington Press Blog. But how about Africa and the rest?
I was pleased to hear Bishop Tutu speak up and was congratulating. MY hope would be to revisit AFRICA BEYOND POVERTY. Lots of work done between 1993 and 1995 with strong support from Bishop Tutu but also the Finish and Dutch governments, and also revisit not just "footprints", but proportions and consequences.
Lots of work was lost as the event was so much contested and as our conference president Odera Oruka "passed away" the day after the Conference in Nairobi in 1995. osts of work, content and vistas have been lost - the central outcomes and workshops not even published ! Only some big potatoe speakers were published - as we expereicne that in too many technical-scientific-economic-political conferences.
But AFRICA BEYOND POVERTY [link]
was not only different, but timely and critical - if you consider the urgencies and importancies - proportions and consequences "touched".
I hope there is a chance to revisit and up-date - so we can ask the contributors to have their up-dated contribution in ! AND THE ISSUES so get tabled.
We should involve the sponsoring governments - and also our new OBAMA - and involve Tutu, Pentii,... and others of the drivers, stakeholders and risktakers form 1995.
please check out "AFRICA and the WORLD BEYOND POVERTY" and certain sections like ECOLOGY and ETHICS - not just talks like ROBUST PATHS and REBOUND EFFECT Papers which have been published widely...
One step would be to revisit scales and proportions, how come that we still have a distorted world-map-picture in our minds and schools - and very oftern also on our monitors !
OBAMA might want to revisit the WEST WING series and our Earth Literacy - Map Alphabetisation efforts with the UN Decade for Sustainability Education UNESCO-ESD.
[link]
http://in-betweener.org/flatworlds/ more links about the Frankfurt Bookfair and Literacy - or with Cartography Experts of ICSU-CODATA about this themes can be found there. Maybe this article mentioning Georg W. Bush and his Earth Illiteracy after an INTERCARTO 2006:
[link]
It would be silly to blame just George W. Bush, as he never really has been alone outside of his "sweet isolation", so I asked 2 weeks ago the Nobel Peace-Laureate José Ramos-Horta from East Timor - he as president and being with the UN, a globally active and politcally insightful person all his life - I asked, if he was aware of how strange pictures guide our policy bodies and leaders - and he was not aware but had always wondered why traveling the miles traveling 3 days in his country and the miles traveling 3 days for example in Europe where sooo different. But oldies seem to have forgotten to check if they are puzzeled. But I hope Obama is young and curious enough in his mind and having been in the FareEast and Africa - to revist the West Wing series on WorldMaps after looking at the different shape and size of AFRICA on the WorldMap of the SAME ! United Nations organisation ! (UNESCO) - nobody seems to care - even when the issue has een posted and distributed widely !
Please see these WestWing YouTube scenes of the Parody US Television Series: [link] Please see these youtube.com Trailers:
WEST WING - WHY ARE WE CHANGING MAPS !? [link] Arno Peters: Radical Map, Remarkable Man [link]
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