Archive

from Photographers Blog:

Quiet work amidst the reeds

By Herwig Prammer

The light is soft and warm, yet I am astonished at how cold it is. The thermometer says minus 15 degrees Celsius, but it feels far lower. In the car I did not recognize how strong the wind was blowing from the north.

Ernst Nekowitsch makes thatched roofs from reeds that grow along the shore of Lake Neusiedl, some 80 kilometers (50 miles) east of Vienna, Austria. He tells me to have a look around. I will find his workers out in the reeds, he says.

So I climb up on the roof of my Land Rover and try to position myself in reeds higher than my vehicle. When I see the harvesters with their machines on the expanse of frozen water, I wonder why I cannot hear them. It is so quiet here. There is just a swoosh of reeds swaying in the wind. I take my cameras and walk along the grooved lanes the harvesting machines cut through the reeds. It is more difficult than I expected. The ground I cover is a 15-centimeter-thick layer of ice as smooth as glass. Sometimes you can even see the lake bed.

A young woman stops her small tractor with balloon tires and welcomes me. Julia, the daughter of Ernst Nekowitsch, explains that she is actually a beautician, but in the winter she helps with the harvesting and in the summer she joins her father roofing. Her father has leased more than eight square kilometers (3.1 square miles) of reeds at the lake, and usually they harvest two to three square kilometers (1 square mile) each year – assuming it is cold enough and the ice on the lake is thick enough to bring on the harvesting machines. Nearly all of the reeds are exported, most of it to the Netherlands. Here on Neusiedlersee we have the largest reed belt in Europe besides the Danube delta – always enough work, she laughs, as she starts her tractor again.

from The Great Debate:

The UNESCO meltdown

By Alan Elsner The opinions expressed are his own.

On Monday, unless the Palestinians can be persuaded to back down, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) will vote to accept Palestine as a full member state, triggering an automatic cutoff of U.S. funding and wreaking havoc with many of the agency’s programs.

Under legislation adopted by Congress over 15 years ago, the United States is mandated to withdraw from any U.N. agency that accepts Palestine as a full member state in the absence of a peace treaty with Israel.

The U.S.'s withdrawal means that it would no longer fund about 22 percent of the UNESCO budget – around $70 million a year. According to the website of the U.S. mission to UNESCO, some of the programs it funds that presumably will be affected include:

• Systems to provide early warning on tsunamis including special coastal hazards affecting Haiti.
• The study of earthquake threats in the Eastern Mediterranean, including Turkey, which was hit by a major deadly quake last weekend.
• Literacy training throughout the world.
• Vocational schools in Afghanistan.
• General support for World Heritage sites, including the Borobudur Buddhist Temple in Indonesia.
• Programs to study and preserve the health of the world’s oceans … And the list goes on.

A senior U.S. official says Washington has mounted a massive diplomatic effort to try to get friendly countries to put pressure on the Palestinians not to move forward with a vote. This official says there is widespread international dismay at the prospect of the United States being forced to pull out of an agency that does so much valuable work around the world.

“Within a few short months, without discussion at the White House or debate in Congress, the U.S. could find itself shut out of a great many international decisions that have a direct impact on American jobs, lives, safety and security,” former U.S. Senator Timothy Wirth, now President of the United Nations Foundation, wrote in the Los Angeles Times this week.

from FaithWorld:

Vatican launches public dialogue with atheists in Paris

(UNESCO headquarters in Paris, 7 Sept 2005/Matthias Ripp)

The Vatican has launched a series of public dialogues with non-believers, choosing leading intellectual institutions in Paris to present its belief that modern societies must speak more openly about God.

The decision to start the series in France, where strong secularism has pushed faith to the fringes of the public sphere, reflected Pope Benedict's goal of bringing religious questions back into the mainstream of civic debates.

The dialogues, called "Courtyard of the Gentiles" after the part of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem where Jews and non-Jews met, will continue in at least 16 cities in Europe and North America over the next two years.

Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican's culture minister, told the opening session on Thursday at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) that the dialogue was meant not to confront believers and atheists but to seek common ground.

Rather it was "an invitation to non-believers ... to start a voyage with believers through the desert," he said.

from Environment Forum:

Heavy rains wash away 1000-year-old “fingers” in Peru

By Dana Ford

In the bone-dry desert of Peru's southern coast, time seems to stand still.

For more than a thousand years, the famous Nazca lines, giant geometric shapes and animal figures etched in the desert, have survived -- virtually unchanged -- delighting and baffling both researchers and tourists alike.

But people say nothing lasts. And maybe it's true. Recently, a tiny part of the impressive lines -- fingers on a pair of hands -- were washed over by runoff from the pounding of unusually heavy rain.

Though the damage was slight, and can easily be fixed, it worries archeologists who say they cannot remember a time when rains ran over the UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Mario Olaechea, an archeologist with Peru's National Culture Institute, has long preached on the need to do a better job of protecting the Nazca Lines.