News of the Earth
"Homero is one of the planet's great environmental heroes."--Jacob Scherr, Director of Global Strategy & Advocacy, Natural Resources Defense Council, Washington, DC
News of the Earth chronicles Homero Aridjis's relationship with the natural world through his writings and his activism as president of the Grupo de los Cien Group of 100], Mexico's influential environmental group composed of one hundred prominent personalities in the arts, culture, and science, which Aridjis founded in 1985. Under his leadership, the group's efforts led to a ban on the capture and commercialization of sea turtles, legislation reducing the amount of lead in gasoline, daily monitoring of air quality in Mexico City, and official designation of sanctuaries for the monarch butterfly. Aridjis waged a lifelong battle against threats to endangered ecosystems and wildlife in his country, many with global implications, including campaigns to save the gray whale, bottle-nosed dolphin, bee population, giant saguaro cactus, endangered coral reefs, and rainforests of Mexico. This book highlights these crucial battles, with detailed documentation of critical environmental victories.
Homero Aridjis, one of Latin America's foremost literary figures, is the author of forty-eight books of poetry and prose. He served as Mexico's Ambassador to Switzerland, The Netherlands, and UNESCO, and as president of PEN International. He received awards from the United Nations (Global 500 Award), the Orion Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, Global Green USA, and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Betty Ferber Aridjis was born in New York and graduated from Bryn Mawr College. She served as the International Coordinator of the Grupo de los Cien (Group of 100) since its founding in 1985. Her lifelong commitment to the environment was also honored by Mikhail Gorbachev and by Global Green USA with the Green Cross Millennium Award for International Environmental Leadership. She is the translator of several books by Homero Aridjis into English.
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"Since the establishment of the Group of 100 in 1985, Homero Aridjis has been an inspiration to fellow environmentalists all over the world. That combination of lyrical intensity, unwavering personal commitment, and deep moral principles has made him a most formidable advocate for change both in Mexico itself and internationally"
---Jonathon Porritt
Founder Director
Forum for the Future
Co-Director of the Prince of Wales's Business & Sustainability Programme
Chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission between 2000 and 2009. "No one in Mexico has made a more important contribution to protecting that country's environment, an effort that has had ripple effects throughout the world," says
---Lester Brown, the US environmentalist and founder of both the Worldwatch and Earth Policy institutes. "The American writer Pete Hamill, Aridjis's longtime friend, says: 'Homero has not felt, as Vaclav Havel has in the Czech Republic, that you either have a commitment to civil society or to art. He's been able to continue to do both. In Mexico in particular, there's a constant conflict between the issues of environment and the realities of the way business is done. Homero brings an amazing decency - and great effectiveness - to a subject that can make people absolutely cynical...Yet, ' adds Hamill, 'Aridjis also manages to find the time and quiet necessary for writing...His poetry has what I would call an innocent eye, the kind of talent that makes me think of Wordsworth. He's not afraid to look at a landscape as if he's the first person ever to see it, with an eye that's not jaded - a direct encounter with what's being observed. Reading Octavio Paz's poetry, I get the sense there's a professor leaning over his shoulder. Reading Homero, there's a bird leaning over his shoulder."
---Pete Hamill in "Poetry in Motion," Dick Russell, The Amicus Journal. Jacob Scherr, an NRDC staff attorney who has worked closely with Aridjis, describes him as "extraordinarily courageous, willing to speak out in circumstances where he's really put his own well-being on the line. This is someone who doesn't have to do this. Homero is one of the planet's great environmental heroes."
---Jacob Scherr, Director, Global Strategy & Advocacy, Natural Resources Defense Council, Washington, DC, The Amicus Journal. The Group of 100 is a movement of conscience that strives to change our relationship with nature. Thanks to this group, presided over by the saintly poet Homero Aridjis, in our world we can still enjoy the magic of monarch butterflies, sea turtles and gray whales.
---Alejandro Jodorowsky, Chilean-French filmmaker, playwright, actor, author, comics writer and spiritual guru. The great strength of Aridjis's work is the faith it transmits in a creative virtue of the world, pessimism notwithstanding, and in the possibility of saving it thanks to environmentalism. Aridjis's writings are not gratuitous, they are militant. Their source is the reality of the natural world. ---J.M.G. Le Clézio, Nobel Prize in Literature 2008, in Le Nouvel Observateur. "Our journey together to visit those great gentle creatures [the grey whales] was one I will live with forever."
---Pierce Brosnan, actor and environmental activist.
