It’s been a long time since I updated this website. I’ve been living in Yellowknife for several months now, working at two positions in the health research and protected areas field. I am also teaching part time at the local college.

Over time, I have learned a bit about the local languages and geography of the Northwest Territories. The following documents are just a sample of the resources I have put together as I’ve gotten to know my new home.

• Dene Unicode Characters Chart
• Inuktitut Syllabics Chart
• Map of Northern Canada

The Beej Bachao Andolan web site is here.

The community-owned and -operated Mountain Shepherds tour company, mountainshepherds.prayaga.org, organizes excursions in Garhwal. These trips use locally hired staff and cost around $50 a day, which includes guides, cooks, equipment and transportation. Mountain Shepherds also plans to start longer excursions to local villages in the summer. Two visitors at a time will be able to travel with shepherds herding their flocks in the Himalayan meadows, with village homes available for rent.

Digging, heavy lifting and weeding doesn’t sound like a typical way to celebrate May Day, a day for workers to relax and celebrate. Yet on Saturday, May 1, more than 35 intrepid gardeners from York’s vibrant on- and off-campus community officially opened the gardening season as they braved the windy day for the Maloca Community Garden’s first annual Spring Dig-In.

The community garden is one of York’s best kept secrets. It is a place to get away from the classroom, the concrete and the stresses of the city. People can hardly believe it when they see this huge garden at York in full bloom, come August.

More can be found here. I’ll post the video here if I can find it.

Since I still have the original files on my hard drive, I was able to extract this Earth Day news item that was scanned at low resolution back in 1994. At the time my residence hall — Ecology House — was traditionally in charge of Earth Day festivities, and that year we decided to erect an endangered species graveyard to highlight the threat of extinction and loss of biodiversity. The university photographer decided to highlight this aspect of our efforts, even though the actual concert was quite a sight in itself. I’m pictured in the foreground. Unfortunately, I have marked few Earth Days since then, especially as April has become a very busy month in graduate school, but I hope to get back on the wagon soon, perhaps as more of a family activity!

However, I am providing the map at full print quality, so of course, printing is possible and encouraged. Finding 36″ by 23″ sheets though might be a problem outside of India where it seems standard. I could be wrong though.

Here’s the link to the 1.5 MB file: Map of Uttarakhand.

I am also in the process of creating a cover for a foldup version of this map. Here’s a sample, with a Mountain Shepherds ad on the back:

One of the ancillary benefits of this was tabling for the U2 Elevation Tour, along with other stalwart activist groups such as Amnesty International. Although stressful at the time (asking concert goers to sign postcards to the president, while missing out on a U2 concert!). I also managed to represent other Jubilee activists through my quote in the front page USA Today article that highlighted Bono’s global celebrity do-gooding.

Here’s my quote from the article:

Bono’s courting of politicians “is tricky. If you get too close to the centers of power you might not be able to see the issues as clearly,” says Rajiv Rawat, 26, of Brookline, Mass.

A local organizer for the Jubilee USA Network, the leading U.S. activist organization on the issue, Rawat and other Jubilee USA volunteers worked at tables set up at U2′s four Boston concerts last week. They spent several hours talking with U2 fans about the issue and passing out information as people arrived for the show.

Jubilee has staffed such tables at all U2′s concerts this year, and expects to collect about 10,000 postcards signed by U2 concertgoers to send to Bush.

I think the comment was appreciated, especially in regards to the high-flying tightrope act that Bono was conducting by courting politicians. Many Jubilee members were wary of these efforts, and my thoughts expressed this ambivalence in a cogent soundbite.

Interestingly, this leap day marks a leap forward in my experimental project to bring dynamic content to the IRIS web site. I have been working on the site for almost year, but Dawn Bazely, the director of IRIS, finally gave the go ahead with her first blog entry, beginning what may perhaps be the first official blog hosted by a department or research centre at York University. I’ll be tweaking this thing over the next few weeks, while also providing content. I’ve also added the rss feed to the sidebar on this site as I have a feeling that a majority of the posts will be mine until we aggregate a larger number of bloggers.

I edited this short piece using the primitive tool of Windows Vista Movie Maker, using a mix of footage and still shots towards the end. The following was compiled from only stills, yet the movement effects in Movie Maker were quite effective in giving momentum to the footage: