Lightfoot,Sting and The Amazon

[charlene]

Elizabeth May, leader of Canada's GREEN party:@ her website http://elizabethmay.ca/ she says:
Slide 13: The Amazon
That same week as the 1988 climate change conference in Toronto, I resigned with great sadness from the Minister’s staff, due to the approval of two dams in Saskatchewan without environmental assessment.

Once I was suddenly out of work (resignation on principle is like that), I was offered contract work with Canada’s leading academic honorific academy, the Royal Society of Canada. In that period Tara Cullis phoned to say her husband David Suzuki had just phoned her in tears from the Amazon. She said we needed to raise money for a brave indigenous leader, Paiakan of the Kyapo people, who was attempting to stop a major dam on the Xingu River. He would be making a tour of Canada in October 1988 and we needed to drop everything to organize a fundraising tour. I threw myself into it, as did many others. We raised $80,000 with concerts in Vancouver, Ottawa and Toronto. We raised the money without any organizational structure, although many groups (like WWF and Nature Canada) helped. The primary reason for our success was that the concerts featured Gordon Lightfoot. These photos were taken in February 1989 with Gordon Lightfoot in the indigenous village. We met Sting in that village, although the photo with Sting was taken later in Toronto. With Sting is my friend Peter Dalglish, founder of Street Kids International, currently working for the UN in Afghanistan.
ty:

[lighthead2toe]

Wow, this is great stuff Char.

When I moved to Vancouver in 1997 I was very disillusioned with the way our country's political system was going and I wasn't sure where to turn.

One of the friends who I met in the building I lived invited me to a Green Party meeting and I went along and met some of the most wonderfully dedicated people ever.

Adrienne Carr was the chairperson and when she opened the meeting she asked who in the audience were new to the Party. Several of us put up our hands and she went on to speak about how the Green Party was formed and to my surprise she announced that the Party was formed by a group of "ship jumpers."
In other words, the Green Party is made up of members who were with other political parties and became disillusioned with the lack of concern those other parties had for the environment.

Boy, was I ever sold on that one. Talk about the light turning green!

I signed a Green Party card that night and carry it with me to this day in my wallet.

RJ.

[niffer]

This must be the trip that Gordon references in the introduction to "The No Hotel."