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Life Onboard |
LAST UPDATE
July 12, 2005
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| site design imagesparkle.com |
| January 13, 2005 |
Slow Earth Love – Anja Light |
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| Anja Light |
Since 1986 Anja Light has been working to protect some of the world’s most sacred ecological sites – the rainforests. Born in Sweden and raised in Australia, she has visited over 20 countries to give and attend conferences, workshops and concerts on indigenous peoples rights, sustainable development and ecology preservation. She has been imprisoned for her non-violent environmental activism and has managed to move hundreds of people onto the streets of Japan to protest against Japan’s heavy consumption of tropical timber. She joined Peace Boat with her two beautiful children and mother from Auckland to Sydney to share her impassioned message, music and wealth of experience. |
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While backpacking at the age of 18 she came across the one of the first tropical rainforest conferences in Malaysia and decided to go back home to Australia to join the Rainforest Information Center (RIC). RIC is a rather unconventional NGO in which all members are volunteers and of equal footing. It was set up when the last remaining rainforest of New South Wales, Australia, was threatened with logging and local people rallied together to stand in front of the bulldozers. Anja explains however that at the same time forests of immeasurable wealth, age and beauty were being massacred in countries where people did not have the same freedom of speech as Australia. “In some countries, standing in front of a bulldozer can get you killed or imprisoned”.
It is for this reason that she decided to take her activism to an international level and has become notorious in her hometown of the Gold Coast for her protesting pursuits and exploits overseas. She was jailed for two months in Malaysia for taking direct action against their uncontrolled logging system and was arrested in the UK for her involvement in Trident Ploughshares 2000, seeking to dismantle nuclear-armed weapons in the UK. However it is not all negative, as she recorded a music CD in Japan whose sales contribute to the RIC’s international projects and initiated a national network of Rainforest Action Groups in Japan to lower the consumption of tropical timber. She is also one of the founding members of the Sloth Club, an NGO which promotes slow life and harmony between man and nature. As a Project Manager of the RIC she has also helped to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for ecological projects in Papua New Guinea, Ecuador and India.
She has recently spent a great deal of time in the rainforests of Ecuador, trying to bring the indigenous people back to working with nature, not exploiting it to the advantage of multinational corporations. In studying traditional agri-forestation methods, her aims are to use the natural resources of the rainforest’s eco-system to benefit agricultural projects, such as coffee and tea plantations as opposed to mass deforestation like in countries such as Brazil. She plays an active role in gathering together people from around the world once a year in Ecuador to discuss indigenous people and the use of their ecological treasures.
Anja Light has a very unique way of reaching people and of conveying her very simple message of “deep ecology” in a non-threatening way. Her performances consist of a mixture of folk songs and guitar solos with poignant messages of deepening connections between man and nature, interspersed with stories and discourse on environmental awareness. Anja’s philosophy is that we are simply the most recent part of evolution since Big Bang in a long chain of unbroken events. Our understanding needs to be that we are not protecting the environment, we are protecting our selves as we are a part of the Earth and are linked to everything that has ever been. “There is no difference between a tree, a flower, a forest or myself. So I am not sacrificing myself to work for the environment, as I am the environment. I am protecting myself”. Her graceful approach and fun-loving children brought a new, refreshing energy on to the ship. |
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