Dear GNHRE members,

I am delighted to announce that Valmaine Toki and Catherine Iorns will
soon be joining the core group of the GNHRE with specialist roles in
relation to indigenous groups and scholarship.  The website will
shortly be updated to cover their new roles, and we look forward to
some significant future development of the work of the GNHRE in
partnership with indigenous scholars and activist groups under the
energetic guidance of Valmaine and Catherine.

Secondly, to clarify the earlier email correspondence, I am reposting
the great news from Burns Weston concerning his new book, co-written
with David Bollier, just below my signature here - just in case anyone
got confused by the earlier correspondence on this! :)

Please also remember the call for abstracts for the GNHRE meeting in
Costa Rica. We are very keen that the event should be highly
stimulating, critical and move the debate forward.  Please also
consider, if you are not already, attending the GEIG event just before
the GNHRE symposium. It is a great chance to get a lot of committed
scholars into the same space for some really fabulous (and hopefully
productive) engagement.  Our GEIG colleagues have a great agenda and
the two events will complement each other exceedingly well.  Please
send me your abstracts as soon as you can!

Warm regards,

Anna


THE MESSAGE FROM BURNS:


Dear Anna,

I'm eager to share with you my good news.  As evidenced by the
attached promotional flyer, my new book (with commons scholar David
Bollier) has been just recently published/released from Cambridge
University Press: Green Governance: Ecological Survival, Human Rights,
and the Law of the Commons.  It also has been posted on Amazon.com,
complete with seven early "reviews":
http://www.amazon.com/Green-Governance-Ecological-Survival-Commons/dp/1107034361/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358267294&sr=1-8&keywords=burns+weston--including
an endorsement from James Hansen, Director of NASA's Goddard Institute
for Space Studies in New York City who, as you know, early sounded the
alarm about global warming and climate change some 30 years ago.
Judging from these early "reviews," we like to think that we may have
produced a policy game-changer of sorts.  At least we hope so.

That's the good news.  The unhappy news is that, because the book is
published as an academic treatise whose primary purchasers are college
and university libraries, the price is distressingly steep.  However,
we were able to persuade Cambridge to release a less costly Kindle
edition via Amazon.com, now online, and they are now discounting the
cost of the book itself by 20% (see
http://www.cambridge.org/us/knowledge/discountpromotion/?site_locale=en_US&code=WESTON13).
 Also they will publish an even less expensive paperback edition next
year.  Perhaps you can use your organizational affiliations to acquire
a copy for yourself; but in any case we hope you will be able to
spread the word about our book to relevant policy-makers, colleagues,
libraries, bookstores, and friends.  In our humble opinion, we think
it worthy of widespread responsible attention.

Allow me, please, to explain this blunt talk: David Bollier's and my
book is not your ordinary academic book.  Scholarly though it be, it
is also, even fundamentally, a call to (peaceful) arms to get
serious--humanly, in contrast to technologically--about the
environmental degradation that is all around us from local to global
and including, of course, global warming and climate change which, as
you well know, is the greatest threat facing humankind today excepting
perhaps nuclear proliferation.   Embedded in our book's Appendix,
indeed, is a Universal Covenant Affirming A Human Right to Commons-
and Rights-based Governance of Earth's Natural Wealth and Resources
that we prepared which calls upon "all citizens, organizations, and
governments of the world to commit themselves to recovering the Earth
and humanity's shared inheritance and future creations"--and to do so
with a keen sense of urgency about "taking decisive, collective action
to transform existing systems and structures of ecological governance
so as to reduce climate change, loss of biodiversity, and other severe
threats to Earth's life-giving and life-sustaining capacity."  Our
Covenant, based on and built from our book, will soon be going viral
over the Internet, especially after it has been launched,
internationally, as the basis for an extended engagement and campaign
in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Human Rights and the
Environment, specifically to excite scholarly engagement with the
Covenant as the basis for future reflection, action and hopefully,
transformation.  We hope, thus to make waves as well as news
worldwide.

Kind and hopeful greetings,


Burns Weston (and David Bollier)

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