OK Thanks Lambada et al...
I need to have a little rethink occasionally.
I got used to the UN being the guys driving round in tanks, organising corrupt elections, pointing machine guns and occasionally shooting people in order to keep people like me "safe".
Obviously this is only part of what they do.
I forgot about all the good stuff - child nutrition, poverty etc.
One thought.
Blue Circle have a quarry and cement production facility near where I was brought up in the UK.
The abandoned section was used for camping, mountain biking and had an outdoor sports center. To some, the huge open cast scar on the landscape was a terrible thing. I thought it was one of the most spectacular things I ever saw. It is where I learned, as a youth, woodsman skills and the perils of drinking too much Newcastle Brown Ale and how to woo the local Girl Guides...
My mum lives in the Lake District in the UK and over the last 20 years I have seen what damage to a community conservation / preservation can do.
This community has developed and reacted to change over the last 4000 years. Suddenly in the latter half of the 20th century the National Trust has decided that it must develop no more. This has had a serious affect on the ability of the locals to do business, develop their community and progress. The young are leaving and most of the area is a ghetto for well meaning, anachronistic middle class retirees. It is dying as a community.
I am not saying this is what is happening in the D.R. but one has to be careful when deciding that the current paradigm is the only way to be.
Pollution is a terrible thing, but I do not beleive that preserving landscapes as they are now is the only way. This happens when conservationists hijack the ecological agenda largely to preserve their own sense of well being at the expense of the folk who actually live in the area.
Again, I am probably on the side of the protesters, but I think it is important to look at motives and potential outcomes from all sides.
Off topic - sorry.
