The environment is on people’s lips these days like never before, and next week, Elizabeth May, the head of the federal Green Party, will be in Montreal to discuss this country’s environmental policies and practices. Co-organized by Concordia’s Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy, the Urban Ecology Centre and the Council of Canadians, the talk is open to the public, and the hosts expect a fair deal of public participation.

“Obviously it’s a very hot topic,” says co-organizer Kari Polanyi-Levitt, the Institute’s founder and the namesake’s daughter. Referring to the Alberta tar sands, she says, “I’m very concerned about Stephen Harper’s attempt to replace U.S. reliance on Saudi Arabia with a reliance on Canada . It’s problematic environmentally, and by integrating so closely with the U.S. , we also risk losing our sovereignty.”

Polanyi-Levitt thinks May’s presence on the federal political scene is an unmitigated good. “ Elizabeth May has established her credentials as the director of the Sierra Club,” she says. “She can raise the bar and set the agenda.”
 
“Everyone is Talking Green!” takes place at the St. James United Church (1435 City Councillors) on Wednesday, Jan. 31 at 6 p.m. Voluntary donation.

-Patrick Lejtenyi

I
Black and write

As organizers recall it, the 1968 Congress of Black Writers attracted about 10,000 attendants who lined up for blocks to hear the luminaries of the black liberation and anti-racist movements of the day speak at McGill.

On the roster were names like Stokely Carmichael, head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and one-time prime minister of the Black Panthers, C.L.R. James, the Trinidadian Marxist and playwright who counted among his protégés Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian revolutionary and first president of the independent Ghana

Among the organizers were Raymond Watts and Rosie Douglas, who led the computer centre occupation in 1969 and were arrested and deported after it ended with the ninth floor of Concordia’s Hall building in flames. Douglas went on to become the Prime Minister of Dominica, and Watts became an author living in Trinidad .

Watts will speak about the Congress at McGill on Thursday, Jan. 25 (Leacock 26, 6 p.m.). “What we did was bring a lot of people together,” he says. His work, he believes is unfinished. “Racism has restructured. It has mutated, and in some ways become more acceptable.”
 

-Samer Elatrash

Art vs. Poverty

Next Saturday, Feb. 3, Real Art Gaining Strength [R.A.G.S], “an alternative art gallery” dedicated to promoting the work of Montreal-based artists, will be presenting its first annual Community Winter-Fest at the Boys and Girls Club of Lasalle, located at 8600 Hardy.

“The idea was to get together with the artists we’d worked with from last year’s Let’s Make Poverty History campaign and do something to help local children,” says Nichols. “So in August, we started giving art workshops at community centres in some of Montreal ’s most marginalized neighbourhoods. And from that, we now have a collection of works from the children that we’ll be showing, and hopefully selling, with all the money going back to these children’s community centres and Oxfam.”
 

For more information about the R.A.G.S. Community Winter-Fest, go to www.bgclasalle.com.

—Chris Barry

As the political currents of Latin America continue to shift left, the grassroots political organizing involved in the process are often left out of the headlines. Often overshadowed by bombastic leaders like Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Brazilian President Lula da Silva are social movements such as the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) of Brazil , boasting hundreds of thousands of members.
 

Established in 1985, the MST has developed into a fighting force in Brazil . Using direct action tactics, the MST has re-appropriated large segments of countryside land on which they have established schools, cooperative farms, health clinics for Brazil ’s poorest, while also promoting the indigenous cultures of the region.
 

Janaina Oliveira, a Brazilian involved with the MST, currently studying in Montreal, will be giving a presentation on the role of the movement in Brazil and Latin America on Thursday, Jan. 25 at Café l’Utopik (552 Ste-Catherine E., 5 p.m.).
 

“President Lula da Silva in Brazil is not doing enough to push forward the land reforms he promised, which would benefit the poorest in the country,” says conference organizer Ricardo Astudillo of the Bolivarian Society of Quebec. According to the UN, 46 million of Brazil ’s 170 million people live on less than a dollar a day.

—Stefan Christoff

On the cover: Director Costa-Gavras, who discusses his latest film, Music Box, about WWII-era war criminals living in North America . He says the point of the film isn’t about revenge—“It’s too late to punish these men”—but about memory. “It is more important… to remind the young generations of what happened. But then we see Ronald Reagan visit a Nazi cemetery and lay a wreath.”
 

• Guy Corneau discusses his non-sexist men’s group. Men’s identities have been twisted since the industrial revolution, he says. “We have lost our souls and our bodies as well as our forests…. But we’re trying something new now. It’s called intimacy.”
 

• The subject matter of Allen Ginsberg’s poetry disc The Lion for Real “hardly seems inflammable today (lines like ‘hot Apollo humps my back’ bring more of a smile to our faces),” but remains “the work of a great artist, brimming with wonder and scented with spirits having flown.”

• Two letters criticize the Mirror’s “repulsive” sexist ads that make one reader feel “like puking.”

Insect >> Meddlesome foreigners Canada is an unimportant country, and as such is regularly overlooked by its arrogant and/or paranoid friends. But not this week. On Monday, Ségolène Royal, the French Socialist presidential candidate, stuck her big Gallic nose into Canadian domestic affairs by saying she supported Quebec sovereignty, thus deftly causing a diplomatic flap; and on Tuesday, Canadian air travellers had to start presenting their passports when flying into the U.S. thanks to new security regulations there. The new passport regulations are likely to hurt tourism and business, result in a flood of new applications and generally increase the levels of inconvenience and unpleasantness when crossing the border.