Cultural Freedom Awards by Year
Bradley Angel awarded 2008 Cultural Freedom Award
Bradley Angel is an international leader in the environmental health and justice movement, working with communities to stop pollution threats and to promote pollution prevention, clean technologies and safe jobs. He is the co-founder of Greenaction, which works to address health and environmental justice issues within urban, rural, and Indigenous communities. Since 1987, Mr. Angel has worked with hundreds of diverse low-income and working class communities and Native Nations impacted and threatened by pollution. He has played a leading role helping communities win some of the most important struggles in the history of the environmental justice movement. Some of those victories include defeating a hazardous waste incinerator planned to be sited near the farming community of Kettleman City, California; stopping a proposed nuclear waste dump on land sacred to several tribes in Southern California and Arizona; and preventing a hazardous waste dump in Mexico on lands sacred to the Tohono O’odham tribe. Prior to co-founding Greenaction, Mr. Angel was the Southwest Toxics Campaign Coordinator for Greenpeace USA from 1986 though 1997. He also served as co-director of the San Francisco Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign in 1985.
Malcolm Margolin awarded 2008 Cultural Freedom Award
Malcolm Margolin is the founder of Heyday Books, established in 1974. The mission of Heyday Books is to deepen people’s appreciation and understanding of California’s cultural, natural, historic, literary, and artistic resources. Mr. Margolin’s vision has led the press to be especially active in publishing works by and about the California Indian community. Heyday has published more than thirty books on California Indians and since 1987 has been distributing News from Native California, a quarterly magazine devoted to California Indian culture and history. Many of the existing tribes indigenous to the state of California were nearly wiped out, due to disease, enslavement, and institutionalized genocide. Today, while a number of traditional cultural practices and Native languages are on the brink of extinction, News from Native California has been a strong force in helping to spark a revitalization of California Indian languages and cultures throughout the state. In his role as publisher Mr. Margolin has supported the revitalization of Native language, dance, basketweaving, storytelling, and religious practice. Mr. Margolin is the author of four books, the best known of them being The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area.
Clive Stafford Smith awarded 2008 Cultural Freedom Award
Clive Stafford Smith is an attorney and the founder of Reprieve, a human rights organization focusing on the rights of death row prisoners and Guantánamo detainees. He spent nine years as a lawyer with the Southern Center for Human Rights working on death penalty cases and other civil rights issues. He also launched the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center, a non-profit law office specializing in representation of poor people in death penalty cases. As director of Reprieve, Mr. Stafford Smith oversees legal support to prisoners unable to pay for it themselves. Reprieve prioritizes the cases of prisoners accused of the most extreme crimes, such as acts of murder or terrorism, as it is in such cases that human rights are most likely to be jettisoned or eroded. Reprieve’s lawyers currently represent over 30 prisoners in Guantánamo Bay. The organization also continues to assist British nationals facing the death penalty around the world, and is conducting investigations into “extraordinary renditions” and secret prisons. Mr. Stafford Smith has recently authored Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side: Seeking Justice in Guantánamo Bay, which recounts his personal experiences representing more than fifty of these prisoners.
Isabel Garcia awarded 2008 Cultural Freedom Award
Isabel Garcia is the co-chair of the Coalición de Derechos Humanos, a grassroots organization based in Tucson, Arizona, that promotes respect for human and civil rights and fights the militarization of the border region in the American Southwest. She is also the legal defender of Pima County, Arizona. Ms. Garcia has been at the forefront of immigrant and refugee rights since 1976. As a lead speaker on behalf of Derechos Humanos, Ms. Garcia holds press conferences and interviews, hosts media crews, leads demonstrations, weekly vigils, symposiums, and marches to draw attention to the unjust policies and inhumane treatment of immigrants. She works to counter anti-immigrant hysteria and to change stereotypes and misinformation about immigrants. According to Ms. Garcia, “Immigration policy has been a total failure and needs to be changed. It has not prevented people from attempting to cross the border but has put the lives of thousands of men, women, and children in serious danger. Their deaths are the direct result of U.S. policy.” Ms. Garcia has received many awards for her work, including the 2006 National Human Rights Award from the Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos de México.
Esther Chávez Cano awarded 2008 Cultural Freedom Award
Esther Chávez Cano is a human rights activist who addresses the horrific effects of widespread violence against women and children in Juarez, Mexico, one of the most crime-ridden cities on the planet. She has worked relentlessly to bring to the world’s attention the hundreds of murders of Mexican women and girls in the Juarez area. She has founded or co-founded several non-governmental organizations defending the rights of women and children, including Casa Amiga, a violence treatment and prevention center that has sheltered thousands of victims of sexual crimes and other types of violence in the border region of Chihuahua, Mexico. Services at Casa Amiga include psychological counseling, medical assistance, and legal aid for the victims of domestic violence and incest. Casa Amiga also educates the public on the rights of women and violence prevention in general. Casa Amiga is a model, both nationally and internationally, for empowering victims of violence. Ms. Chávez Cano has received many awards for her work in promoting the understanding and prevention of violence against women, including the 2008 National Human Rights Prize in Mexico (El Premio Nacional de los Derechos Humanos).
David Barsamian awarded 2006 Cultural Freedom Fellowship
David Barsamian is founder and director of Alternative Radio, an independent award-winning weekly series based in Boulder, Colorado. He has been working in radio since 1978. In addition to his radio work he is an author and lecturer. His interviews and articles appear regularly in The Progressive and Z Magazine. His latest books are Original Zinn: Conversations on History and Politics with Howard Zinn; Imperial Ambitions with Noam Chomsky, and Speaking of Empire & Resistance with Tariq Ali. His earlier books include The Checkbook & the Cruise Missile with Arundhati Roy; Propaganda and the Public Mind with Noam Chomsky; Eqbal Ahmad: Confronting Empire, and The Decline and Fall of Public Broadcasting.
The Institute for Alternative Journalism named him one of its “Top Ten Media Heroes.” Barsamian lectures in the U.S., Canada, Brazil, the Middle East, India and Europe on U.S. foreign policy, the media, propaganda, and corporate power. In 2003 he received ACLU’s Upton Sinclair Award for independent journalism, the Democracy Media Award, and the 2006 Rocky Mountain Peace & Justice Center Award.
...HidePratap Chatterjee awarded 2006 Cultural Freedom Award
Pratap Chatterjee is an investigative reporter, producer, and managing editor of CorpWatch, an organization that investigates and exposes corporate violations of human rights, environmental crimes, and fraud and corruption around the world. His work to support social justice causes over two decades has spanned many causes: from the continuing environmental and human rights tragedy of the Northern California Gold Rush to the occupation of Iraq and the war on terrorism. He is the author of “Iraq Inc.: A Profitable Occupation“ (Seven Stories Press, 2004), “Gold, Greed and Genocide: Unmasking the Myth of the 49ers“ (Project Underground, 1998) and “The Earth Brokers: Power, Politics & World Development“ (Routledge Press, 1994), on the 1992 Rio Earth Summit.
Under Chatterjee’s direction, CorpWatch has also produced investigative reports on the failure of reconstruction in Afghanistan and the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, as well as three alternative annual reports on Halliburton. He is working on a new report on Iraq, titled “Baghdad Bonanza: What Happened to Iraq’s Oil Money?“ (winter 2006) and another report on the privatization of intelligence (winter 2007).
A British citizen, Chatterjee grew up mostly in Calcutta and Darjeeling in India and has resided in Northern California for many years where he has been active in local media and politics.
...HideFernando Garavito awarded 2006 Cultural Freedom Award
“Fernando Garavito”:http://www.fernandogaravito.com/, now residing in the United States, is a journalist, writer, and professor who was forced into exile after being threatened for speaking out against government corruption in his native Colombia. In 2002, Garavito was a full-time professor in the department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Rosario in Bogotá when he wrote about Colombia’s drug cartels and right-wing paramilitary groups. He left for the United States with his family and found work teaching in Maine. Later, he was invited to join the International Cities of Asylum project, which provides refuge for threatened writers and their families. With help from PEN New Mexico, Garavito and his family relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico. He worked at University of New Mexico in Albuquerque as a lecturer and Artist-in-Residence in the Department of Latin American Studies.
Garavito is currently a Master’s candidate in Spanish, with an emphasis in Hispanic Literature, in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of New Mexico. He writes a weekly column for the The Santa Fe New Mexican on politics and current affairs, and teaches Spanish to elementary school students.
...HideLeanne Hinton awarded 2006 Cultural Freedom Award
Leanne Hinton is a linguist and advocate for the perpetuation and revival of Native American languages. Dr. Hinton is chair of the Linguistics Department at the University of California at Berkeley and has been a professor in that department since 1978. She is a founding member of the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, whose mission is to assist California Indian communities and individuals in keeping their languages alive.
She strongly supports interdisciplinary approaches to linguistics and linguistic research that relates to community needs and interests, as well as to theory. Dr. Hinton has published 8 books and numerous articles on the state of indigenous languages. She co-developed a language learning technique for communities in which the only Native speakers are elderly and few in number. Called the Master Apprentice approach, this immersion method pairs an elder, fluent speaker with a younger non-speaker, where the language is taught and learned in a culturally meaningful setting. She also organizes the bi-annual Breath of Life Workshops at UC Berkeley, where California Indians with no living speakers of their Native languages use scholarly and other resources to reconstruct and start speaking their Native languages again.
...HideCharles Kernaghan awarded 2006 Cultural Freedom Award
Charles Kernaghan is the director of the National Labor Committee, an independent, non-profit human rights organization focused on the protection of worker rights—especially those of the young women in Central America, the Caribbean, China and other developing countries, who assemble garments, shoes, toys, and other products for export to the U.S. Kernaghan became involved in the struggle to defend international labor rights after participating in a peace march through Central America in December 1985. He became the director of the NLC in 1990. Pre-1985, Kernaghan taught at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and at SUNY’s Harry Van Arsdale Labor College in New York City. He has worked as a photographer, furniture mover, carpenter and shop steward (Carpenters Union Local 608), and as a cab driver.
Under Kernaghan’s directorship, the National Labor Committee has played the leading role in bringing the issue of sweatshop abuses and child labor before the American people, and placing it squarely on the national agenda. Kernaghan has led numerous fact-finding missions to Central America and the Caribbean—most recently bringing a delegation of U.S. university students to investigate working conditions in the free trade zones. He and the NLC have hosted U.S. tours of workers from Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti and China, made several videos, written numerous research reports, and run a number of highly successful international solidarity/corporate campaigns, which have gained enormous media attention and helped the NLC to develop one of the best social justice networks in the country. The NLC now works with over 10,000 religious, labor, student, women’s, human rights, solidarity, and community groups across the country.
...HidePatricio Martin awarded 2006 Cultural Freedom Award
Paricio Martín is a staff attorney for the Mexican Center for Environmental Law, a non-governmental organization (NGO) founded in 1993 that works to protect Mexico’s environment and natural resources. Based in Cancun, Patricio is the only staff attorney working to protect the fragile coral reef ecosystems of the region from threats by high-density hotel development, urban sprawl, and other forms of environmentally destructive economic development. Martín provides legal support for NGO’s, other social organizations, individuals, public officials, and members of the private sector who are working on protecting the natural resources of the state of Quintana Roo. He organizes conferences, workshops, and press events, and writes informational materials to increase the public’s awareness of the importance of mangrove protection, the consequences of over-growth of the tourist destinations, and how to keep abreast of the complex environmental situation of the Mexican Caribbean.
A significant project that Martín is working on is the protection of Cayo Centro, a three-mile long barrier island in the Banco Chinchorro Biosphere Reserve, the Caribbean’s largest atoll, whose healthy and breathtakingly varied ecosystem is currently threatened by the cruise-ship industry. Martín and other antidevelopment activists hold workshops at fishing cooperatives and schools, encourage residents of the island to speak out, to learn zoning laws, and to expose violations by the developers.
...HideHugo Morales awarded 2006 Cultural Freedom Award
Hugo Morales is the Executive Director of Radio Bilingüe, Inc. In 1976, Mr. Morales and an all-volunteer staff of farmworkers, former farmworkers, and artists founded Radio Bilingüe, which began radio broadcast operation over the entire San Joaquin Valley in California, on July 4, 1980, to affirm the First Amendment free speech rights of Latinos.
Radio Bilingüe is a transnational satellite community radio service in Spanish, English and Mixtec (an indigenous Native American language in Mexico) that serves Latino radio audiences in the Northern Hemisphere. It has its headquarters in Fresno, CA. Regional offices are in Salinas, Lamont and El Centro. The national production studios are in San Francisco. Radio Bilingüe is the recognized national Spanish-language radio service for the public radio system in the United States. It serves over half a million listeners with its pioneering daily Spanish-language national talk show, Línea Abierta, its independently produced news service, Noticiero Latino, and its rainbow of Spanish-language folk music for its national Latino audiences. The entire 24-hour daily operation is devoted to informing hard-to-reach, low-income, Latino populations in California and across the U.S.
Mr. Morales is a Mixtec Indian from Oaxaca, in southern Mexico. He was raised in Oaxaca until the age of nine when his family immigrated to California. Throughout his youth he was a farmworker. After graduating from high school in 1968, he went on to graduate from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. In 1994, he became the first resident of the San Joaquin Valley to be a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
...HideMaude Barlow awarded 2005 Cultural Freedom Fellowship
Maude Barlow educates people all over the world about the crisis of water privatization, and documents how commodification of water results in soaring rate increases and severe water shortages. In her work she particularly advocates for the world’s poor, who in some cases pay more for potable water than do wealthier people in the same communities. She travels and lectures widely, arguing that water is a basic right and should not be a commodity .
Ms. Barlow is the National Chairperson of The Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest citizen’s advocacy organization with over 100,000 members. She is also founder of the Blue Planet Project, which works to stop commodification of the world’s water. She is also a Director with the International Forum on Globalization, a San Francisco based research and education institution opposed to economic globalization. Ms. Barlow is the recipient of numerous educational awards and has received honorary doctorates from four Canadian universities for her social justice work. She is the best-selling author or co-author of fourteen books. Her most recent publications are Blue Gold, The Fight to Stop Corporate Theft of the World’s Water (with Tony Clarke), now published in 40 countries; Profit is Not the Cure, A Citizens’ Guide to Saving Medicare; Making the Links: A Peoples’ Guide to the WTO and the FTAA (with Tony Clarke); and The Canada We Want: A Citizen’s Alternative to Deep Integration . Ms. Barlow resides in Ottawa, Ontario.
...HideBobby Byrd and Lee Merrill Byrd each awarded 2005 Cultural Freedom Fellowship
Lee Merrill Byrd and Bobby Byrd are the founders of Cinco Puntos Press, a publisher of non-fiction, fiction, poetry and children’s literature that brings the multicultural literatures of the American Southwest, the U.S./Mexico border region, and Mexico to a national audience. The Byrds started the press in 1985, naming it after their neighborhood in El Paso, Texas. Cinco Puntos, or “Five Points” in Spanish, received the American Book Award for excellence in publishing and was inducted into the Latino Literary Hall of Fame.
They have received five publishing grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and three similar grants from the Texas Commission for the Arts. The Border Regional Library Association, in addition to awarding Southwest Book Awards for three of their books over the last decade, presented Cinco Puntos with a special Southwest Book Award in 1993 for outstanding achievement in bringing national recognition to their regional literature.
They have also received two grants from the Fideicomiso para la Cultura de México y Estados Unidos (funded jointly by the Belles Artes and the Rockefeller Foundation). In addition to their work in publishing, the Byrds are authors. Lee Merrill Byrd has written short stories and children’s books, and Bobby Byrd is a poet and essayist.
...HideElouise Cobell awarded 2005 Cultural Freedom Fellowship
Elouise Cobell, a banker from Browning, Montana, is the lead plaintiff in one of the largest class action lawsuit against the United States government, for breach of its trust duties to thousands of individual Native Americans. Cobell vs. Norton is an on-going legal attempt to force the United States Department of the Interior to fix its accounting system and properly account for billions of dollars it manages on behalf of individual Indians.
Ms. Cobell’s persistence in bringing the charges to trial has shone a bright light on more than a century of government malfeasance and dishonesty. Indeed, the District Court Judge presiding over the case called the government’s mismanagement of the funds “fiscal and governmental irresponsibility in its purest form.”
Ms. Cobell is the Executive Director of the Native American Community Development Corporation, a nonprofit affiliate of Native American Bank. She also served as Chairperson for the Blackfeet National Bank, the first national bank located on an Indian reservation and owned by a Native American tribe.
Ms. Cobell was one of the lead organizers of the bank and was instrumental in the formation of the Blackfeet Reservation Development Fund. A member of the Blackfeet Indian Nation, Ms. Cobell served for thirteen years as the tribe’s treasurer. In addition to operating a working ranch with her husband, she is active in local agriculture and environmental issues.
...HideAmira Hass awarded 2005 Cultural Freedom Fellowship
Amira Hass lives in Ramallah in the West Bank, where she covers Palestinian affairs for the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz, making her the only Jewish Israeli correspondent on Palestinian affairs to live among the people about whom she reports. Ms. Hass writes insightful columns about the daily lives and hardships of Palestinians.
The child of Holocaust survivors, Ms. Hass was born in Jerusalem in 1956 and studied history in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. After working as a teacher, she started her career in journalism in 1989 as a staff editor at Ha’aretz and began writing about the Palestinian Territories in 1991, undaunted by danger and criticism from both Israelis and Palestinians. She moved to Gaza in December 1993 after the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian agreements and settled in Ramallah in the West Bank in 1997.
She is the author of Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege and Reporting From Ramallah: An Israeli Journalist in an Occupied Land.
...HideJulián Cardona awarded 2004 Cultural Freedom Fellowship
Ten years ago, Julián Cardona, a photojournalist from Juárez, Mexico, began to document the devastating effects of globalization on the U.S.-Mexico border. Since that time he has amassed thousands of photographs bearing witness to the harsh reality of border life, from the hundreds of unsolved murders of Mexican women in Juárez, to the social effects caused by low wages paid in border factories; from the exodus of Mexican immigrants fleeing their country and its collapsing economy, to the shanty town communities living in slum conditions right next to the wealthiest country in the world. His photo documentation of the violence, poverty and social upheaval he witnesses tells a story that one hundred years from now will still cause people to feel the wounds of an era.
Born in Zacatecas, Mexico, Mr. Cardona was a small child when his family moved to Juárez. He attended school there, received vocational training, and worked as a technician in a maquiladora (a foreign owned factory), where he worked to earn money to buy his first camera. A self-taught photographer, in 1991 he moved back to Zacatecas to teach beginning photography at the Centro Cultural de Zacatecas. Two years later he started his photojournalism career at the publications El Fronterizo and El Diario de Juárez. In 1995 he organized a group show called “Nada que ver” (Nothing to See), which contained the work of photojournalists who document the daily violence, death and poverty that accompanies life in Juárez. Photographs of that show were featured in Harpers Magazine in 1996. In 1998 Mr. Cardona’s work appeared in the book Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future, which features essays by Charles Bowden, Noam Chomsky, and Eduardo Galeano. Mr. Cardona’s photographs of the interior of maquiladoras in Juárez were published in Aperture No. 159, “Camera of Dirt.”
Mr. Cardona’s photographs have been featured in exhibits in Mexico, the United States, and Europe.
...HideLucy Boulanger and John Fogarty awarded 2004 Cultural Freedom Fellowship
Click below to view video clips from “HOMELAND: Four Portraits of Native Action” a production of Katahdin Foundation, courtesy of Roberta Grossman.
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| John Fogarty and Lucy Boulanger with their patient, June Kalleco, at the Crownpoint Indian Hospital on the Navajo Nation. |
Dr. Lucy Boulanger and Dr. John Fogarty, physicians and public health advocates, are a wife and husband team working to develop a new energy economy based on renewable sources. The two believe that responsible planning and the right leadership will lead to prosperous communities and a better future for generations to come.
They are presently developing a diverse network of advocates who are helping society transition from fossil and nuclear fuels to new energy sources such as wind and solar. Their work will have a variety of impacts including the creation of new jobs in some of the lowest income communities, reduction of air pollution, preservation of water supplies, and the slowing of climate change.
In recent months they have been organizing advocates from Native American and Hispanic communities along with environmental and business leaders to develop renewable energy models to replace polluting methods currently in use. They are also working to develop new communications strategies to more effectively reach broader audiences.
Dr. Boulanger and Dr. Fogarty’s advocacy efforts around clean energy started after working as clinicians on the Navajo reservation. As physicians they have witnessed an epidemic of lung and kidney disease among their patients, stemming from previous decades of uranium mining activities on Navajo lands. Uranium used in the first atomic bombs and for much of America’s nuclear weapons stockpile came from more than 1,100 uranium mines operated on the Navajo Nation. Underground miners were exposed to high levels of radiation, and the mining activities left behind radioactive waste in many communities. This waste now contaminates water supplies, harms air quality, and threatens future generations.
Although the last uranium mine on Navajo Nation closed in 1986, new uranium mining operations have been proposed for two Navajo communities, Crownpoint and Church Rock, located in New Mexico. These new mines will likely contaminate the only source of drinking water for 15,000 Navajos living in a high mountain desert area. Dr. Boulanger and Dr. Fogarty have worked with local community members to help mount effective opposition to the new mines, and to date no new mining has occurred.
Realizing that nuclear and fossil-fuels energy systems disproportionately affect communities of color, Dr. Boulanger and Dr. Fogarty are looking to a new roadmap for energy development.
Dr. Boulanger was born in Burlington, VT and received her medical degree from the University of Vermont. She completed her internal medicine residency at Highland Hospital in Oakland, CA, and then moved to New Mexico in 1996 with the Centers for Disease Control as an officer in the Epidemic Intelligence Service. She also is Board Certified in Infectious Disease after having completed a fellowship at the University of New Mexico and received the Diploma of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene from the London School of Tropical Medicine.
Dr. Fogarty was born in Iowa City, IA and received his medical degree from the University of Washington. He completed his residency training at the University of New Mexico and is Board Certified in Family Practice. Since 1997 he has worked with the Pueblo, Apache, and Navajo peoples of New Mexico as a physician in the Indian Health Service. Dr. Fogarty also has a strong interest in public health and teaches courses on health, human rights, and globalization at the University of New Mexico.
...HideSubhankar Banerjee awarded 2003 Cultural Freedom Fellowship
Slide show and phone interview audio.
Santa Fe, NM—Lannan Foundation announced that it has awarded its first Cultural Freedom Fellowship to Subhankar Banerjee, a wilderness photographer based in Bellevue, Washington, who is working to increase public awareness about issues that threaten the health and well-being of the planet.
Mr. Banerjee’s current work involves advocating for permanent protection of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, located in the remote northeast corner of Alaska. Over a period of two years he traveled approximately 4,000 miles photographing the vast wilderness of the refuge, one of the most breathtaking, pristine and culturally significant ecosystems in the world. This land is considered sacred by the Gwich’in people who reside in Alaska and Canada, but industry lobbyists have long attempted to persuade the United States government to open up the refuge to drilling for oil and gas.
Mr. Banerjee, who is from Kolkata (Calcutta) India, received $100,000 to continue his work to protect the Arctic and to study other topics related to the environmental and social effects of globalization. In addition to the fellowship, Lannan is also providing financial and technical support to promote the story of his Arctic journey by funding a lecture tour and a series of exhibitions of his photographs. Mr. Banerjee’s lecture tour is based on the book Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land (The Mountaineers Books, 2003), which features his photographs and essays by prominent conservationists advocating for permanent protection of the refuge.
“We are extremely pleased to award the first Lannan Cultural Freedom Fellowship to Subhankar Banerjee,” said foundation president Patrick Lannan. “Subhankar is more than a conservationist - he is a cultural freedom fighter who points out the importance of interdependent relationships between land, water, wildlife, and the various human cultures that make up the world. At his own personal expense, he gave up a lucrative career in the field of computer science and went into debt to finance his visit to the refuge. His spectacular photographs achieved what others could not - exposing the lie that the Arctic Refuge is a frozen wasteland - put forth by those who place short-term profit above cultural diversity and the health of the planet.”
“The phrase ‘Cultural Freedom’ is a wonderful one—I take it to mean freedom to continue one’s way of life,” says Banerjee. “The word ‘culture’ to me signifies both cultures of our own species as well as various cultures of all other living beings with whom we share this planet, and their freedom to continue their ways of lives. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a wonderful place to experience such a freedom—a pacific loon that I saw nesting up there on the bank of a lake on the coastal tundra is a species that is 20 million years old. It is the same place where the Inupiats and Gwich’in have subsisted for over 10,000 years—nature and culture living in harmony for all these years that we may disrupt and ruin because of the profit and greed of a few.”