What’s the Word? Honors

National American Indian and Alaska-Native Heritage Month

To celebrate National American Indian and Alaska-Native Heritage Month (November 2009), What’s the Word?, the smart, engaging, and highly produced series from the Modern Language Association, presents two half-hour programs:

Voices from the Ojibwe Nation

• Anton Treuer talks about the Ojibwe oral tradition and his work to preserve the Ojibwe language;

• Kimberly Blaeser discusses poetry’s role in Ojibwe life and culture;
• Gordon Henry traces the roots of Ojibwe fiction and speaks about the work of Louise Erdrich.

American Indian and Alaska-Native Tribal Traditions

How do tribal traditions influence the writing and teaching of contemporary American Indians?

• Jeane Breinig discusses works from her Alaskan tribe, the Haida;
• Robert Warrior tells us about the history of the Osage and their 1881 constitution;

• Ofelia Zepeda reads her poetry, written in both English and her tribal language, O’odham.

  
  

The Sudan Radio Project, a monthly program that explores historic political, economic, and social issues in Sudan, begins its third season of broadcasts this month. Using Skype phones and contacts around the globe, the Sudan Radio Project provides the kind of in-depth coverage of the region and stories not covered by main-stream media.

Formerly known as the Darfur Radio Project, the program, produced by students of Swarthmore College, focuses on insightful and thought-provoking issues surrounding but not confined to the conflict in Darfur.  With the renaming, the project broadens its scope to include the spillover effects of the conflict to other regions, as well as analysis of the relationship between North and South Sudan and other Sudanese cultural issues. The shows seek to provide balanced coverage of events in Sudan through an examination of their various facets and the voices of a wide range of people, including analysts, activists, and Sudanese nationals.

The first program, “Speaking Out,” includes a feature on a Sudanese woman who was arrested for wearing pants in public, a look at the Sudanese community in Philadelphia, and an interview with Emmanual Jal, a musician and former child solider now based in the U.K.

The half-hour program is broadcast over WSRN Radio in Philadelphia.  Present and past programs as well as individual feature segments can be heard at www.sudanradioproject.org.  They’re also available at the Public Radio Exchange , and podcast through iTunes and other aggregators.  The Sudan Radio Project can be followed on Facebook and Twitter as well.

The Sudan Radio Project is supported by Project Pericles and the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility at Swarthmore College.

For more information on The Sudan Radio Project, go to www.sudanradioproject.org, or email Chelsea@sudanradioproject.org.

Heat Of The Moment: Inside Out is a one-hour, news-friendly special report from WBUR’s award-winning Inside Out Documentaries. It comes just as the world prepares for the most important meeting on climate change in a decade, starting on December 7th, in Copenhagen.

This thorough, sound-rich program gives listeners a firsthand sense of the human costs of global warming right now, and a look at the future from the perspective of the world’s leading climate-change experts. The listeners’ experience will be enhanced by the program’s website, http://www.insideout.org, and an accompanying website on climate change produced by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, http://www.turninguptheheat.net.

Most people think of climate change as a gradual warming of Earth’s atmosphere. They are wrong in two respects. First, it is not “gradual.” Scientists see Earth’s warming as startlingly rapid in the context of geologic time. Second, there’s much more to climate change than warming. There’s sea level rise, disruptive changes in weather patterns, and intensification of existing weather extremes. To millions of people around the world, these impacts of global warming have already begun, and are becoming increasingly severe.

In Heat Of The Moment: Inside Out, science journalist Daniel Grossman takes us to places where the effects of climate change are acutely felt:

• Paris: The August 2003 heat wave killed 40,000 people across Europe. Why did Parisians suffer disproportionately, and what measures are being taken to protect the population in the heat waves to come?

• India & Bangladesh: These low-lying coastlines, home to hundreds of millions, are threatened not only by rising sea levels, but also by more intense storms, flooding, erosion. How can these relatively poor but fast-growing nations cope with loss of habitat and arable land, and confront issues of food security and environmental migration?

• South Africa: Global warming is intensifying drought in this already dry country. What will become of the large number of subsistence farmers as water supplies dwindle? Is there a scientific solution in crops genetically engineered to withstand drought?

Daniel Grossman’s previous Inside Out Documentary, “Meltdown: Inside Out,” received the 2008 Science Journalism award from the American Academy for the Advancement of Science.

[Grossman did] an outstanding job of reporting the science of global warming in ice sheets, mountain glaciers and sea ice. — Mary Knudson, The Johns Hopkins University.

AVAILABLE:  PRX, Content Depot, and CD

“Heat of The Moment” is a new WBUR documentary that reports from the front lines of global warming ; in “Heat Of The Moment: Inside Out,” science journalist Daniel Grossman takes us to places where the effects of climate change are acutely felt.

The first product of the “Heat of the Moment” project on the human impacts of climate change will be broadcast on the radio program The World today. The story is a feature about efforts to help Bangladesh adapt to higher sea level by capturing sediment flowing through the Bangal Delta.

You can hear the segment sometime after 20 minutes past the hour; wherever The World is broadcast (it is broadcast on several hundred stations around the country, often but not always at 4:00 PM). The feature will also be available on the website of The World (http://www.theworld.org/2009/10/06/raising-bangladesh/)