ISKCON's Eco-Valley Project At The Copenhagen Climate Summitt

ISKCON’s Eco-Valley Project at the Copenhagen Climate Summit

By Krishna-lila devi dasi (Krisztina Danka, PhD.) on 16 Jan 2010

Image: ISKCON Hungary

Radha Krishna Dasa, as director of the Eco-Valley Foundation, was invited to the big climate summit, aiming to influence and offer “windows of hope” to the political leaders.

From ISKCON News

Recently, ISKCON News reported that about nine devotees were arrested while chanting Hare Krishna outside the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. However, it should also be remembered that ISKCON had another type of presence at the Conference—with a much more fortunate outcome. While his fellow devotees were waiting for their fate to be decided at the police station, Radha Krishna Dasa (Zoltan Hosszu) from Hungary, oblivious of the events going on outside, was giving one of his five official presentations about ISKCON’s Eco-Valley project at the Climate Bottom Meeting: this time to dozens of curious Chinese environmental specialists.

The international meeting of civil activists and spiritual and religious leaders to which Radha Krishna Dasa, as director of the Eco-Valley Foundation, was invited, was held parallel to the big climate summit, aiming to influence and offer “windows of hope” to the political leaders. In fact, the decision-makers gathered in Copenhagen frequently attended the Bottom Meeting’s events, lectures, exhibitions and films where they learned about a number of sustainable cities and eco-village initiatives, as well as other fresh ideas to overcome the world’s ecological, social, spiritual and economic challenges. Many of them heard Radha Krishna’s presentation about the Eco-Valley farm community in Hungary, an internationally known and appreciated eco-village project that is based on the spiritual principles of sustainability established by the ancient Indian scriptures, the Vedas.

Following the instructions of Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Eco-Valley (or Krishna-valley) was established in 1993 by ISKCON leader Sivarama Swami and a handful of dedicated devotees. Their aim was to create a community where members of each household can lead a sustainable, environment-friendly and God-centered life. Sixteen years later, there are 150 devotees living on 550 acres of beautifully cultivated land. They have built sixty-three buildings including a new temple, family homes, cow stables, a school, an art studio, a bakery, a guesthouse and several new roads. They grow their own grain, fruits, herbs and vegetables, and have planted 250,000 trees, which give shade to tens of thousand of tourists visiting and learning from them each year. The Eco-Valley community is 100% self-sufficient when it comes to food, producing ten times more grain and seven times more honey than its residents actually need. Their biggest challenge for the next couple of years will be to increase their energy sufficiency by planting more windmills and solar panels and taking advantage of the geothermic energy sources.

Although the Hungarian Eco-Valley project is considered to be one of the world’s most successful self-sustaining communities, Radha Krishna Dasa says that there are many similar eco-villages around the globe. ISKCON itself has several dozen, but unfortunately, it appears, there is not enough communication and cooperation between them.

“The Copenhagen Climate Conference was a great venue to meet similar-minded, dedicated people,” Radha Krishna says. “It inspired me even more to reach out and exchange ideas with all those who are willing to work together for a better future.”

Then, the question naturally arises: with all the good intentions, valuable presentations, yearlong negotiations and enormous efforts by thousands of people from all over the world, why did the Copenhagen Climate Summit ultimately fail?

Radha Krishna Dasa explains that as long as the main considerations of the politicians remain closely connected to economic gain or loss, there will be no breakthroughs in solving the critical environmental problems. “Unfortunately, the leaders of society are very reluctant to inspire people to change their habits and live more responsibly, get out of their cars and consume less. What to speak of asking them to become vegetarians and shutting down the slaughterhouses, which are responsible for 51% of the world’s greenhouse gas emission, and are even more polluting than cars.”

According to Radha Krishna, there are no shortcuts or easy ways out. The only solution is a substantial change of consciousness on the individual level: each and every person`s commitment resulting in actions towards a more sustainable life. “We should all pull our heads out of the sand, for one is not only responsible for what he does, but for what he does not do.”

Visit the Krishna-valley’s official website at http://ecovalley.hu/

Watch a 3-minute excerpt from the Krishna-valley documentary screened at the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen.

Natural Gas Royalties To Improve Hare Krishna Community

By Keri Brown for West Virginia Public Broadcasting on 2 Feb 2010

Image: Keri Brown

Marshall County residents review drilling leases at "lease signing party."

From ISKCON News

On Sunday, dozens of people including members of the Hare Krishna community got together in Marshall County to sign over their natural gas rights. They see it as a way to invest in their community.

More residents in the Northern Panhandle area are being approached by natural gas companies to drill on their properties because of rich Marcellus shale reserves in the Appalachian Basin.

More than 50 people gathered at the Limestone Fire Hall in MarshallCounty for a “lease signing party” to seal the deal with Ohio-based AB Resources.

The area includes around 8,000 acres in MarshallCounty, with about 2,000 acres in the Hare Krishna Community, New Vrindaban.

Ralph Seward is one of the landowners who agreed to the deal.

“The most awesome thing is there are two different types of leases a drill lease and a non-drill lease, but here since we negotiated as a block everybody gets the same amount of money and that is great. I have a non-drill lease and I’m pleased, my wife is pleased we get the money same amount as if they were drilling on our property,” said Seward.

For the past several years, the Hare Krishna community near Moundsville has been struggling to find ways to refurbish its treasures like the Palace of Gold and its worshipping temple. The Palace of Gold has some crumbling concrete and metal fixtures that need replaced. The temple needs a new roof and doors.

Krishna member Gabriel Fried said the money received from the lease agreement will help rebuild the Krishna community.

“We want very much to refurbish temple area, the housing but more than that we want to do it in an environmentally friendly way. We have plans on doing bulk purchases of solar hot water heaters; we were just discussing that here in the building and solar panels, wind generation.

"We are very excited about doing this and using this money to help stimulate the economy on an ecological level and to be able to make us self-sustaining as possible,” said Fried.

The lease agreement includes $2,500 an acre and 18 3/4 percent of the gas royalties. The money also will be used to improve the community’s organic garden. Terry Sheldon manages the Krishna’s small farm training center.

“Some of these monies will be used to promote apprentice programs and the presence of cows in a farm community means guaranteed fertility in a community and when you have fertile soil you have social security so the money will be used to create housing and infrastructure enhance our cow protection program,” said Sheldon.

Fried said the Krishna’s plan to plant hundreds of nut trees on their property. Future plans even include building a holistic health clinic with the royalties. The Krishna agreement also includes drilling 400-feet below where the community pulls its water from.

In the mid 1980’s, there were more than 600 Hare Krishna members living in the New Vrindaban community. Today, that number is about 200.

AB Resources Vice President, Mark Van Tyne said his company tailored the 19-page agreement to meet the needs of the Krishna’s and surrounding community.

“We agreed not run trucks when school buses run. Also, will be putting in a water and fluid line to bring frack water to locations instead by truck piping it in and water that is produced from well will be moved through those same lines to an area to avoid truck traffic,” said Van Tyne.

AB Resources said it has also agreed not to run its trucks during busy tourism holidays for the Krishna’s including Mother’s Day weekend, Labor Day and the Fourth of July. The agreement also includes more financial protections or “shut-in fees” for lease signers when oil and gas companies close a well.

For the past three years, the West Virginia Surface Owner's Rights Organization, headed by Charleston attorney David McMahon has introduced bills to protect property rights. The bill has failed to pass, but McMahon said he is getting ready to introduce a new, scaled down version to lawmakers.

“Before they file their permit and before they come on to the land we want to let us know they are coming on to the land and provide us with statutes and the Surface Damage Compensation Act and the Reclamation manual, so surface owners know what they are doing.”

“This year, we will take out the requirement that the companies sell us gas from the well, the companies were adamantly against that and they were also against increasing damages from market value to current use value and so we are probably going to take that out and give it one more try to get a surface bill passed,” said McMahon.

McMahon is also pushing for oil and gas companies to use more horizontal drilling techniques to reduce the number of vertical wells placed on people’s property.

As for the Hare Krishnas, they plan to start renovations in the New Vrindaban community this summer.

The Climate Killers

Meet the 17 polluters and deniers who are derailing efforts to curb global warming

Click here to read the full article at Rolling Stone.

Govardhana Hill Finds A New Heritage

From Express Buzz

MATHURA: American landscape experts, who are drawing up a conservation plan for Mount Govardhan -- significant in Hindu mythology -- feel the hill deserves to be recognised as a world heritage site."Goverdhan hill is unique in the world, visited by more than ten million people annually. However, its ecosystem is in a shambles, the water bodies have been destroyed and the green cover almost disappeared,"

Amita Sinha of the Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, US, told IANS.Sinha and her team have completed a weeklong study of Goverdhan hill, which Lord Krishna is believed to have lifted on his little finger to protect residents from the wrath of Indra the god of rain.The study is to be presented to the university and the Braj Foundation, which is currently engaged in the restoration of ancient heritage sites in the entire Braj Mandal area in and around Vrindavan, Mathura and Agra, filled with references to Lord Krishna.

The team will prepare a watershed map of the hill. They have identified vegetation patterns, surveyed historic and other structures, observed pilgrimage rites and conducted interviews with pilgrims and resident devotees.A member of the team told IANS: "The experience was truly amazing. The information we gathered through intensive interaction with pilgrims, priests and the ordinary people helped us work on a holistic project keeping the spiritual and cultural features of the area in mind."

The team will come out with a detailed report in August.The report will be useful in putting together a conservation plan for Mount Govardhan that will be taken forward by The Braj Foundation in association with the Uttar Pradesh government for getting Govardhan Hill world heritage site status, said Raghav Mittal, project director at Vrindavan.

Meat Makes The Rich Ill And The Poor Hungry

Click here to check out the whole Viva! guide to meat-eating and global hunger

by Jeremy Rifkin

When representatives meet at the World Food Summit they supposedly focus on how to get food into the mouths of nearly one billion people who are currently undernourished. However, at all the dinners they attend you can expect to see the consumption of large quantities of meat. And herein lies the contradiction.

People go hungry because much of arable land is used to grow feed grain for animals rather than people. In the US, 157 million tons of cereals, legumes and vegetable protein – all suitable for human consumption – is fed to livestock to produce just 28 million tons of animal protein in the form of meat.

In developing countries, using land to create an artificial food chain has resulted in misery for hundreds of millions of people. An acre of cereal produces five times more protein than an acre used for meat production; legumes such as beans, peas and lentils can produce 10 times more protein and, in the case of soya, 30 times more.

Global corporations which supply the seeds, chemicals and cattle and which control the slaughterhouses, marketing and distribution of beef, eagerly promote grain-fed livestock. They equate it with a country’s prestige and climbing the “protein ladder” becomes the mark of success.

Enlarging their meat supply is the first step for all developing countries. They start with chicken and egg production and, as their economies grow, climb the protein ladder to pork, milk, and dairy products, then to grass-fed beef and finally to grain-fed beef. Encouraging this process advances the interests of agribusinesses and two-thirds of the grain exported from the USA goes to feed livestock. The process really got underway when “green revolution” technology produced grain surpluses in the 1970s. The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation encouraged it and the USA government linked its food aid programme to the producing of feed grain and gave low-interest loans to establish grain-fed poultry operations. Many nations have attempted to remain high on the protein ladder long after the grain surpluses disappeared.

Human consequences of the shift from food to feed were dramatically illustrated during the Ethiopian famine in 1984. While people starved, Ethiopia was growing linseed cake, cottonseed cake and rapeseed meal for European livestock. Millions of acres of land in the developing world are used for this purpose. Tragically, 80 per cent of the world’s hungry children live in countries with food surpluses which are fed to animals for consumption by the affluent.

The irony is that millions of consumers in the first world are dying from diseases of affluence such as heart attacks, strokes, diabetes and cancer, brought on by eating animal products, while the world’s poor are dying from diseases of poverty. We are long overdue for a global discussion on how to promote a diversified, high-protein, vegetarian diet for the human race.

Jeremy Rifkin is the author of Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (Plume, 1992), and The Biotech Century (Victor Gollancz,1998). He is also the president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington DC, USA.

Food For Life Heads Into Center Of Haiti "Disaster Zone"

By Madhava Smullen on 7 Feb 2010

Image: ffl.org

FFL volunteers distribute meals at the Dr. Dario Contreras Hospital in Santo Domingo.

From ISKCON News

With the Haiti death toll reaching 200,000, Hare Krishna Food For Life Global has just joined a convoy of trucks accompanied by the military, heading into the center of the carnage caused by January 12th’s devastating earthquake.

The ISKCON non-profit organization plans to complement the work of larger relief organizations such as the Red Cross, CARE and OXFAM, helping to feed the 300,000 survivors made homeless and desperate for food and water.

Food For Life will be working in close coordination with local relief workers of the Haitian-Dominican Chamber of Commerce, under its President Rosa Maria Garcia. It will also work in cooperation with the Ministry for Defense, who will provide protection from the frequent assaults on relief agencies that have taken place due to desperation.

“We feel very confident now that we have this military protection in Haiti,” says FFL Project coordinator, Richard Higgins. “This first mission into the disaster zone will give us first hand knowledge of what we are up against.”

To tackle one of the major challenges faced by all aid agencies—sanitation—FFL Global has partnered with New Directions Foundation, which specializes in sanitation solutions. “Haiti is extremely unsanitary at present,” explains Higgins. “There is sewage all over the ground.”

Meanwhile, FFL volunteers are already distributing freshly prepared vegan lunches to earthquake survivors being cared for in Santo Domingo’s Dr. Dario Contreras Hospital.

And more volunteers keep arriving to assist. Flying into FFL’s Santo Domingo base on January 27th, Vaikuntha Krishna Dasa and Robin Laing of England’s Bhaktivedanta Manor joined about 30 other volunteers from the USA, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, the UK and the Dominican Republic.

“I didn’t even think about whether I would go or not—straight away my heart went for it,” says Vaikuntha Krishna, whose first relief mission was in 2004, cooking for 2,000 survivors of the Sri Lankan Tsunami per day. “It is a human instinct to help people, that’s all I thought about.”

Food for Life Global is coordinating yet more volunteers to arrive soon from Slovenia, South Africa, Mexico, USA, and Canada over the next few weeks. “Our goal is to set up kitchens in government controlled and secured camps in Haiti,” explains FFL director Priyavrata Dasa.

Food For Life now has a plane waiting in Florida to fly in bulk organic produce, grains and other supplies such as a mobile water purifying system from partner Water for Life Global. Yet food and transportation costs are high, and FFL are asking for donations to fund their efforts.

“Your donations are still crucial at this stage of the development, and we sincerely thank all who have already come forward to support us,” Priyavrata says. “Please continue to give whatever you can and remember: Food For Life can serve more than 100 meals in a crisis like this for as little as $25. So your dollars will go a long way.”

To donate to Food For Life’s Haiti relief efforts, please visit The Lotus Trust or Food For Life.

Teaching Green, Beyond Recycling

Click here for the full article from the New York Times

Jose Chirino, a 10th grader in Brooklyn with shoulder-length hair and a thin mustache, says flatly that his high school was his last choice.

At the Growing Up Green Charter School, the day’s lesson was how the local environment affects food choices

“They’re experimenting on us,” he said, recalling his first impression of the Green School in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which laces an environmental theme into most of its coursework.

Jennifer Auceda, 17, was similarly wary, given that she wanted to be a singer and never saw herself as a “science person.”

“I thought it was going to be about the inside of trees,” she said.

But the two reluctant recruits, who had both failed to get into the high schools they favored, said they were won over after realizing that the school casts a wide net.

Rather than simply covering predictable topics like recycling and tree planting, they say, it has alerted them to problems like sooty air and negative media representations of their neighborhoods.

“Green is not just the environment,” Jennifer said. “It’s politics, government, social justice.”

“We do a lot of things other schools are not doing,” said Jose, 15. “I feel like we’re doing something important.”

While plenty of city schools, from elementary to secondary, teach students about environmental issues like endangered species or global warming, places like the Green School put an overwhelming emphasis on civic involvement.

The students are encouraged to delve into local issues that may affect them and their families, like contamination in waterways like the Gowanus Canal, water quality or the razing of low-scale housing.

“You can’t have a kid in a violent neighborhood and say, ‘Let’s talk about the polar bear,’ ” said Karali Pitzele, one of the school’s two co-directors.