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Whether you want to get woke, or stay woke, we’ve got you covered with these audiobook suggestions.

Let’s face it; this year has been a rough one and the new year isn’t shaping up to be any better. For many who are already woke to the world of social inequality and injustice, that’s nothing new. While it could be argued that not much has changed in the United States regarding race, it could also be argued that much has, in fact, changed.

Regardless of where you stand on the issues, there is certainly room for conversation(s) about race and social injustice. And the fact that the Oxford Dictionary shortlisted “woke” as the “Word of the Year” means something. While it may seem like appropriation in a way, the reality is that where there is wokeness, there is a way forward.

For those who want to get woke (and let’s face it, we can all get more woke), but who may be short on time, audiobooks are the way to go. Whether you use a subscription service or the library, listening to audiobooks has really never been easier.

3 Must Listen to Audiobooks for Getting Woke

1. “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates

In “Between the World and Me,” Coates shares a letter to his adolescent son–and his readers–looking at our nation’s past, present, and future and calling out the false construction of race we have created and continue to live by. It’s a compelling book which Toni Morrison calls “required reading”.

2. “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” by Michelle Alexander

Author Michelle Alexander takes dead aim on the racial inequalities of our modern criminal justice system and illustrates just how broken that system is. It’s been called the “secular Bible of a new social movement” by some, including activist Cornel West. There are also companion study and organizational guides available on the book’s website for those who want to share their wokeness.

3. “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption” by Bryan Stevenson

Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, through the story of a man falsely accused of a crime, shares the corruption, inequality, and racial disparity that is a cornerstone of our criminal justice system. You will find yourself getting lost in this sad but true tale that explores justice and mercy, or the lack thereof of both.

Related on EcoSalon

Stephen Colbert Learns About White Privilege, Gets Woke [Video]
This is Why #BlackLivesMatter [Video]
‘Lemonade’ Made it Official—Openness is ‘In’: #NowWhat

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How a film about children sold into slavery reveals the plight of those working daily to restore broken lives.

“I realize what I’m doing is just a ripple in the larger scheme of things,” says filmmaker Jody Hassett Sanchez, who is traveling the world to promote her documentary Sold. The film is a horrific yet hopeful window into adults who sell and traffic children and the modern day abolitionists  risking life and limb to end the $27 billion-a-year industry.

A ripple perhaps, but the small film is leaving audiences devastated in its wake at screenings across the globe, from formal showings to the British Parliament to warm meet and greets at St. Luke Presbyterian Church in San Rafael. It poses the question: Can one person make a difference when it comes to ending child slavery today? Three inspirational activists including a Hindu in India, a Christian in Africa and a Muslim in Pakistan are each doing their part to combat the buying and selling of humans, which has flourished under globalization. We see what they are up against in the harshest of settings where blood is not always thicker than water when faced with starvation.

Desperate parents must make a Sophie’s Choice of sorts in allowing a trader in their village to whisk away one of their children with the promise of a reunion in four years or so. The parents are reassured the children will be treated well, a delusional bargain at best.

In reality, boys as young as three have been ripped from their homes in Pakistan and sold to the UAE as camel jockeys for sport and entertainment. Fed water and crackers to stay underweight, the boys have suffered permanent genitalia damage when strapped on the camels and forced to ride 14 hours a day on desert racetracks.

But because of the political and diplomatic rescue efforts of attorney Ansar Burney in Karachi, the Saudis have enacted new laws to outlaw the brutal practice pledging to only use riders age 18 or over. Burney is one of three abolitionists starring as the main characters of the film and emerges a hero as he reunites the boys with their families and to repair their broken spirits.

“I’m not sure if they can be totally restored because of what they have been through and the idea of therapy is a western notion,” says Sanchez about what happens to these children once returned to schooling or household duties back home. “But there is a feeling of hopefulness and they do receive a great deal of love from the people around them.”

It seems no one is more loving than former Hindu nun Dr. Sunitha Krishman, a social activist and co-founder of Prajwala, an institution rescuing trafficked women and girls and helping them find shelter.  She organizes brothel raids and oversees 17 schools for young girls she rescues from forced prostitution in India. The film has us cringing when describing how the youngest virgins reap the highest prices. Krishman evokes the image of Mother Teresa as she embraces the girls who are given new identities and a fresh start. The brave crusader admits she has been shot at several times and is deaf in one year from the violence inflicted by traffickers.

And in rural Togo, Symphorienne Kessouagni gently helps to re-socialize and educate former slave children. Most tell the story of their parents sending them away to live with distant relatives only to end up in the hands of brokers who smuggled them across the border to do heavy labor, doing work even strong adults would find grueling.

The film is clearly faith-based, relying on religion as a healer and unifier as witnessed in the first Abolition Movement and throughout history. What’s missing from the film is the exposure of the sinister elements, ambush interviews with brokers or underground footage of rich Saudis delighting in child jockeys. Sanchez, a former ABC News producer, explains she made the deliberate choice to omit the “other side to the story,” arguing it wouldn’t add a thing.

“This is not another movie about what is wrong in the world but one that focuses on those who are making a difference trying to solve the problems,” she says. “We want our audiences to be outraged that there is more slavery than ever before in history, but we also want them to move from anger to action.”

Images: Emirates 24/7: Hyderabad Burpp; Jodyhassettsanchez; Ansar Burney

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Some people say knowledge is power. I say access to affordable, healthy food to grow your body and your brain is power.

There’s been a lot of talk about the sustainable food movement being elitist when so many people don’t have enough to eat.

Whether or not you believe that to be true, you should know there are organizations working to make sure that people in lower socio-economic classes, and those who live in neighborhoods without access to healthy, fresh foods aren’t left behind in the movement. One such organization is Growing Power.

Will Allen, former professional basketball player, onetime Proctor and Gamble marketing executive and 2008 McArthur Foundation Fellow has turned what started out as an urban farm in Milwaukee into a national non-profit program and land trust that helps communities obtain equal access to healthy, high-quality, safe and affordable food.

Hands-on workshops, demonstrations and technical assistance teach people how to grow, distribute, and market food sustainably. The organization runs urban farms, community gardens, school gardens, farm-to-market distribution and farmers’ markets in both Milwaukee and Chicago.

Growing Power’s mission is to provide people with the skills to develop their own sustainable and affordable community-based food systems. The Milwaukee headquarters offers training to schools, universities, government agencies, farmers, activists and community members and the organization is now working with other organizations to establish Regional Outreach Training Centers. Nothing elitist about that.

The next time you find yourself feeling guilty about your organic arugula addiction, check out one of the non-profit member organizations of the Community Food Security Organization. There are members all over the country and they’d likely welcome your help or donation.

Image: Natalie Maynor

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Living in New Zealand, a country that has, in my opinion, the best and safest drinking water, it’s hard to imagine that one-sixth of the world’s population (nearly one billion people) are without clean water on a daily basis.

Most of us simply acknowledge information such as this by finding an organization to donate some money to help fund clean water campaigns and then move on to the next pressing issue. But some Iowa engineering students didn’t. They heard the facts and then rolled up their sleeves and designed a $5, hand-held device that can sanitize water, saving lives as a result.

What started as a simple class project has developed into something much, much bigger. The hand sanitizer took away the First Prize at the 2008 Environmental Protection Agency Awards, a prize that is worth $75,000. The win is prestigious enough but to the students at UI College of Engineering, the money is the key, for it’s going to be used to make water sanitizers available to Ghana and other developing countries in the future.

Source

Image: Snap

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With the Obama administration igniting fervor for hope and change, perhaps the world will take heed of the decade-strong work that has been generating from the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

Since 1998, MSF has been producing a “Top Ten” list of the worst humanitarian and medical emergencies in the world. According to their website, the compilation was inspired when a devastating famine in southern Sudan went largely unreported in U.S. media. Drawing on MSF’s emergency medical work the top ten list seeks to generate greater awareness of the magnitude and severity of crises that may or may not be reflected in media accounts.

Massive forced civilian displacements, violence, and unmet medical needs in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Iraq, Sudan, and Pakistan, along with neglected medical emergencies in Myanmar and Zimbabwe are some of the worst humanitarian and medical emergencies in the world. The report underscores major difficulties in bringing assistance to people affected by conflict.

Also included on the list is the lack of global attention to the growing prevalence of HIV-tuberculosis co-infection and the critical need for increased global efforts to prevent and treat childhood malnutrition – the underlying cause of death for up to five million children per year.

Learn how you can help Doctors Without Borders.

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Princess Isabella of Spain outlawed slavery in Brazil on May 13, 1888. And that would seem to be that. But it’s not. Raj Patel, in his book Stuffed and Starved, writes that there are somewhere between 25,000 and 50,000 people enslaved in Brazil.

Though sugarcane and cattle ranches are known culprits, slavery happens on soy plantations, too. In 2003, the last year for which figures are cited, 4,932 slaves were freed from farms in Brazil – and that’s just the farms that were inspected.

As we saw in our last piece on soy, deforestation for biofuels, soy, sugar cane, cattle ranches, and other uses ruins the land that indigenous people once lived on. Combine that with massive inequalities in land ownership, and you have a recipe for slavery. As the rural poor are left with few options to make a living, they are vulnerable to promises of good jobs with decent wages on faraway plantations. What they find instead once they arrive is that they owe money for meals and transportation as well as their housing and clothing. The good wages they were promised never materialize and pretty soon they find themselves in debt bondage – stuck with no way home.

This article details some of the conditions workers endure on Brazil’s soy plantations. Workers often toil 7 days a week for more than 12 hours a day, without adequate shelter, toilets, or drinking water. They are exposed to pesticides and beaten if they try to leave. (Here’s a graphic that illustrates the problem geographically.)

This is tragic, but there is hope:

Brazil’s Landless Rural Worker’s Movement, or MST after its Portuguese name (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra), is a huge and successful social movement comprised of rural farm laborers and peasant farmers ousted from land they once farmed. According to Patel’s book, in 2002 there were 5 million landless families in Brazil, with 150,000 camped out on the side of the road. The MST secures land for these families – land that they can live on, work, and begin to build a functional society upon.

Here’s how MST works: A group of people occupies unused land and works to build a society from scratch complete with farms, schools and clinics, while petitioning the government to win title to the land. After years of struggle, often violent, these groups sometimes do win title to the land.

Though some of the settlements are farmed collectively, the movement is built on democratic ideals with a highly egalitarian structure. Importantly, there is also a strong foundation in sustainable agriculture. One key tenet assures the rights of farmers to save their own seeds, which preserves biological diversity and ensures that the farmers don’t become dependent on companies like Monsanto.

Farmers on the settlements grow a variety of crops for local, human consumption and eschew the IMF and World Bank encouraged model of primarily growing cash crops for export, a practice that has led to food insecurity and famine in other developing countries. (Climate change is likely to reduce the demand for soy, incidentally.)

From the website of MST: Since 1985 the MST has won land titles for more than 350,000 families in 2,000 settlements. As a result of MST actions, and 180,000 encamped families currently await government recognition. Land occupations are rooted in the Brazilian Constitution, which says land that remains unproductive should be used for a “larger social function.”

Forget the smoothie. Put down that soy protein powder and look for Friday’s recipe using miso, one of the traditional, fermented soy products that are good for your heath.

Note: Slavery figures come from the International Labor Organization.

Image: Peter from Wellington

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The television ad begins with a romantic winter scene of snow flakes falling and a couple frolicking. A slick male voice-over describes the ideal gift for that special someone. What is the present that lets you sum up your feelings, he asks? You are certain it will all end with DIAMONDS. But, wait…

The gift of livestock! What a great twist. That’s why this commercial, and cause, really sparkles. I love the spin on retail consumer mania and how we should redirect our compulsion to shop and buy to purchasing survival gifts to all of those around the globe who are suffering.

The first time I watched it I was impressed and wrote down the name of the sponsor, Changing the Present. I learned that this non-profit website offers a vehicle for giving the kind of gifts that change the world.

You are directed to browse and shop the site’s causes under a wide rage of categories like Aging, Children and Youth and Disaster Relief. It’s akin to shopping online for furnishings or fashion, but instead of locating just the right handbag, you are buying food, education tools and medical supplies. Among the non-profits supported on the site are Unicef, the Institute for One World Health, Freedom from Hunger and the Brazilian Network to Combat the Wild Animal Trafficking.

“It’s a great alternative to that bath set or luxury sweater,” say the founders. Indeed, the gorgeous blond woman in the ad appears moved to tears when finding the sheep wrapped with a red bow on her doorstep. Imagine how thrilled the recipients are in those third world villages!

Image: Andrew*

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When Kerry and Anne Hilton uprooted their lives to help the people of Calcutta, it broke their hearts to witness women selling their bodies just to keep from starving. Appalled that so many souls resort to prostitution as a means of survival, it was clear that they had found their calling.

The Hiltons decided to take advantage of the surplus of jute in West Bengal and pursue what they called “the business of setting people free” with the establishment of Freeset Bags. Here, many troubled victims of the sex trade, lacking even basic sewing skills, went from novices to master artisans with the help of Kerry and Anne. To further support their cause, you can buy their handcrafted totes, slings and messenger bags at Original Good.

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I just came back from an extended vacation to find my clothes hanging off of me in loose folds. No, I didn’t go to a fancy weight loss retreat. My vacation was an all-inclusive of sorts, but instead of a ship’s buffet of delicacies served up 3 times a day, I was studying Spanish, living with a Guatemalan family, and eating my meals with them.

The headline isn’t meant to be offensive. It’s just that this is the first time I haven’t had to make a New Year’s resolution to drop those extra 5 or 10 pounds. As I think about the crazy diets that people all over the country are starting this week – The Cookie Diet, The Eat-Whatever-You-Want-For-One-Hour-A-Day-And-Starve-Yourself-the-Rest-of-the-Time Diet, the Caveman Diet – I can’t help but reflect on the almost unfathomable privilege inherent in not only being able to choose what and how much to eat at any time of the day, but also in our efforts to not eat, when a large part of the world struggles to get enough to eat. Guatemala being only one such place.

My experience wasn’t typical compared to other students I spoke with. It was better. My host mom ran a small restaurant in her home kitchen, so she’s a very good and resourceful cook who provides meals with more variety than most students are treated to.

Here’s a typical day:

Breakfast: Mush – a very thin, watery oatmeal with a banana cut up in it (if you are lucky) and lots of sugar. We’d also get a pancake, but that wasn’t typical, and coffee – very nice!

Lunch: This is the big meal of the day. Usually a 2 or 3-ounce portion of some type of meat and a half-cup of rice or potatoes – always accompanied by tortillas (the one thing there was always more of). Sometimes we’d have a vegetable, but not always. On another day, we’d get a clear chicken broth with potatoes and squash in a small bowl, accompanied by a small piece of chicken (usually a back or part of a thigh) and occasionally, a quarter of an avocado.

Dinner: A small scoop of beans, two fried eggs and more tortillas.

This was it. No snacks, no desserts, no seconds, no big feasts, nothing. On Christmas Eve we had tamales, which were special, but it wasn’t a feast, it was tamales with sliced white bread, nothing more.

Though I was hungry some of the time, I was living quite well compared to most Guatemalans. So, I was surprised to discover that I’d lost about 7 pounds.

Here’s a snapshot of what poverty in Guatemala means:

According to the World Bank, Guatemala has one of the most unequal income distributions in the hemisphere. The wealthiest 10% of the population receives almost one-half of all income; the top 20% receives two-thirds of all income. Somewhere between 32% and 70% of the population lives on less than $2 a day (or about 15 Quetzales) depending on whom you ask and when the statistic was gathered. The cost of basic food items has gone up 40% in the past two years, pushing many people into poverty. By some estimates, up to half of children in Guatemala live with chronic malnutrition.

The poverty in rural areas is worse than in the cities. A schoolteacher or well-paid factory worker in a city makes about  $130 – $150 a month, or about 1,000 Quetzales. What does this money buy, foodwise? It’s hard for me to tell, because when I went to a market or restaurant, I paid tourist prices. A typical and cheap breakfast in a restaurant cost me about 20 Q. At the market a dozen tortillas cost 2 or 3 Q; a few pieces of fruit, 5 Q; a bag of rice, 10 Q; a half a chicken, 14 Q. Even if you consider that the prices for locals might be a bit less than the prices I paid, it’s not difficult to see how hard it would be for a family to get enough nourishment.

Many Guatemalan people (especially indigenous rural dwellers) have nothing to eat all day except tortillas. Some days they might get beans or rice, but not every day. Luckily, many rural Guatemalans are able to practice subsistence farming, or they would surely starve. But for many, even this tenuous way of life is threatened. As the country opens to more foreign investment and privatization through organizations like the World Bank, and treaties like CAFTA, more and more lands are being opened up to extractive industries that contaminate the land and push rural Guatemalans into lives of even more miserable poverty in the cities. You can read about Guatemalan resistance to open pit mining here.

The next time you’re worried about those extra holiday pounds, please take a moment to count your blessings. I know I will.

Image: greencolander

The post Need to Lose a Few Extra Pounds? Visit a Developing Country and Try the Poverty Diet. appeared first on EcoSalon.