The recent viral video aimed at drawing attention to African war criminal Joseph Kony has drawn acclaim, but also harsh criticism. The video attempts to sum up, in half an hour, a 26-year conflict in Uganda and the surrounding regions of Africa – particularly the plight of child soldiers. None of this is a bad thing – it’s an issue that needs to be addressed. Whatever criticisms one might level against Invisible Children’s administrative policies or approach, the hearts of the founders are clearly in the right place.

Watching the video initially, I was moved by its message – but uncomfortable with what appeared to be a blatant merchandizing effort near the end, when Invisible Children promotes its $30 “action kits,” a collection of posters, stickers and bracelets meant to raise awareness about Joseph Kony, in the hopes that increased attention would pressure US lawmakers to support Kony’s capture. Is wearing a Kony 2012 t-shirt really going to do anything to help end a war in Africa? Turns out, that’s only the tip of the increasingly problematic iceberg.

Accusations that the video is inaccurate

First of all, as Joshua Keating of Foreign Policy points out, Joseph Kony is not actually in Uganda. In fact, he hasn’t been active in the country for 6 years. Not only that, but the Lord’s Resistance Army is not the huge fighting force portrayed in the video: their numbers are in the hundreds at most. This is not to say that the LRA is not continuing to cause trouble in Africa, or that Kony shouldn’t be brought to justice – but it’s not right for Invisible Children to misinform people about the nature of the conflict in Uganda.

This is a sentiment echoed by Adam Branch, a Senior Research Fellow at the Makerere Institute of Social Research – an expert, on the ground in Uganda. He describes the issues he’s had with Invisible Children’s videos and campaigns over the years, and questions Invisible Children’s promotion of US military presence as the answer to conflict in Uganda.

Some say the campaign ignores African voices

Rosebell Kagumire, a Ugandan journalist and blogger, even posted a video response to Kony 2012, in which she describes her frustration with the simplistic way the video portrayed the conflict in Uganda and her feelings on the stories of actual Ugandans being ignored and glossed over by Invisible Children:

An article by Semhar Araia in the Christian Science Monitor also took Invisible Children to task for not using the stories and voices of actual Africans involved in the conflict, and for imposing the idea that Americans are more suited to solving Uganda’s problems than the citizens of the country themselves are. The Atlantic also addressed this issue, even going so far as to say the campaign does more harm than good.

Mike Pflanz, a Telegraph correspondent in Nairobi, traveled to Uganda to get the feedback of locals who’d seen Invisible Children’s video. What he found was frustration and anger over the mischaracterizations of Kony’s current activities in the video. Those he interviewed argued that increased attention might simply spur Kony to go on the offensive, kidnapping more children and harming more people. Some were frustrated at the suggestion that US military action was the answer to the problem. A Ugandan government official even advanced the cynical suggestion that the video was made simply to further Invisible Children’s own agenda and raise money, rather than actually helping capture Kony.

Questions about Invisible Children’s financial practices

That’s not all – Invisible Children has also been accused of having shady accounting practices, with less than 1/3 of their income actually going toward helping children in Africa. Interestingly enough, in their response to the criticism, IC hasn’t disputed this, instead emphasizing that their campaign involves a three-pronged approach, and that the other 2/3 of the money they raise goes to advocacy campaigns and awareness efforts. There’s not anything necessarily wrong with how they’re allocating funds – it’s not illegal, but it may be disappointing to potential donors to realize how little of their money is actually going to programs in Africa.

Other charity efforts to help child soldiers in Uganda

Overall, it seems that the Kony 2012 campaign is well-intentioned, and IC is passionate about bringing a war criminal to justice. The fact that they’re targeting their efforts toward Americans, rather than working with Africans who are actually affected by the issue is problematic. The fact that they spend so much of the money they raise on producing videos and spreading the word, rather than funding programs in Uganda, bothers me. The response of Ugandans to a video they consider patronizing, simplistic and misleading doesn’t exactly bolster my willingness to financially support the organization.

If you’re still moved by the video and want to help efforts to help former and present child soldiers, capture Kony and improve conditions in Uganda, but have been turned off by all the negative publicity surrounding Invisible Children, the Huffington Post has a great article detailing seven other charities dedicated to the cause.

Your opinions?

What do Care2 readers make of the controversy surrounding Kony 2012? Are you going to participate in the April 20^th campaign to spread awareness? Are you going to lobby your representatives and senators on the issue? I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts.

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“If the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water — unless we change our approach to managing this precious and vital resource.” Ismael Serageldin first gave this warning in 1995, a year before he helped found the Global Water Partnership. As the regional effects of climate change continue to ramp up, we’re seeing this prediction come true in many parts of the world.

Now a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science calculates humanity’s “water footprint.” Much like the carbon footprint used to determine an individual’s contribution to global warming through the burning of greenhouse gases, the concept of the water footprint is being used to measure and compare water usage by nations, industry and individuals.

The paper notes that “[t]he Earth’s freshwater resources are subject to increasing pressure in the form of consumptive water use and pollution. Until recently, issues of freshwater availability, use, and management have been addressed at a local, national, and river basin scale. The recognition that freshwater resources are subject to global changes and globalization has led a number of researchers to argue for the importance of putting freshwater issues in a global context.”

The authors cite some interesting, if not terribly surprising figures. The water footprint of the average American is 2,842 m³/y (i.e., cubic metres per year, where one cubic metre is equal to one thousand litres, or several hundred gallons). This is more than twice the global average of 1,385 m³/y, and close to three times the use of most Chinese or Indian consumers (1,071 and 1,089 m³/y, respectively).

However, just like one’s carbon footprint is determined by more than just how much gas one personally burns (i.e., the consumer products one buys may have high carbon costs due to both shipping and manufacturing, one’s electrical use may be tied into a carbon-producing grid through coal plants), one’s water footprint can’t simply be counted by a meter on one’s tap.

Water is required to produce many different kinds of food. Grain is particularly greedy for water, followed closely by meat. Dairy is surprisingly low.

Non-food consumer products also require water in the manufacturing process. Sometimes enormous amounts. Everything from production of construction materials to basic household goods use water. And when we say water is “used up” in the production of something, that can be, at times, literally true. Wastewater produced from some manufacturing processes is too polluted to be simply returned to water systems and used again. Water usage in the oilsands, for example, is intense, and essentially lost to additional use afterwards. Thus a nation’s water and carbon footprints are sometimes linked.

One of the important conclusions of the study is that national water conservation policies are incomplete, since they don’t take into account the movement of “virtual water” around the world. In a global economy, the people of one country are actually consuming water resources across the world (for example, Americans are consuming Chinese water) because of water consumption/pollution as a direct result of manufactured imports into the country.

The authors also note that rainwater is not always considered in water policy, yet rainwater is related through the water cycle to other sources both above and underground. And it is thus equally vulnerable to pollution, over-consumption and climate-related drought.

The data and tools described in this study could be of great use in informing water management across the world. Besides using (and renewing) our freshwater more carefully, there are some individuals and groups who are being creative in dealing with their water shortages. In Guatemala, which has been experiencing a drought, indigenous communities have begun using a technique called “fog-harvesting” to make up for rain shortfalls.

At Penn State, researchers have turned to the miracle tree, Moringa oleifera, as an easy and affordable way of purifying bacterial and sedimented water for human use. Hey, it’s cheaper than a water treatment plant. Expect to hear more and more about these kinds of technologies as time goes on and water scarcity becomes a more significant issue.

Unfortunately, expect militaries the world over to take a keener interest in “securing” water resources, as well. As time goes on, it will become ever more apparent that our cavalier water usage cannot be sustained.

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The Future of Eating

Written by Richard Schiffman

When they woke up in the morning, my mom used to ask my dad what the weather was going to be like that day. “Stick your fool head out the window,” he would reply. I say the same thing to the Republican presidential candidates. If you want to know if climate change is for real, stick your fool heads out the window. You might notice– what the rest of us already have– that the weather has been changing. A lot.

Take New York City, where I live. Nobody remembers a winter this warm. Daffodils are already coming up in a community garden on my block– over a month early. In January, a cherry tree was in full bloom, fooled perhaps by the “spring rains” we’ve been having all winter. In the fall, a freak October storm took down thousands of still leafing trees in Central Park with the weight of wet snow. And a year earlier, the five boroughs were raked by several tornadoes, an almost unprecedented event.

New York is hardly alone. Last year over a thousand tornadoes ripped across the Midwest killing 500 people, the Mississippi river flooded inundating millions of acres, Texas had its driest summer in memory, an estimated 15,000 people died in a Russian heat wave, there was a major drought in China and famine in Somalia. 2010 was the hottest year on earth since record keeping began, with 2011 not far behind. Last year saw 14 separate billion dollar weather disasters, almost double any other year to date. And there was far more extreme weather– over half the country experienced either flood or drought.

So what’s going on? No single storm or spell of unseasonable weather can be laid categorically at the feet of climate change. But the growing consensus amongst scientists is that the rise we’ve been seeing in catastrophic weather events worldwide is no coincidence, but the inevitable result of a warming trend which produces more water vapor in the atmosphere and an increase in severe wind events like hurricanes, monster thunderstorms and tornadoes.

Yet as the scientific evidence mounts with every passing year, the deniers become more vocal in their rejection of climate change. Even Mitt Romney, the ostensible moderate amongst the Republican presidential hopefuls, asserts that, “We don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us.” Never mind that in his 2010 book, No Apology, Romney wrote, “I believe that climate change is occurring. … I also believe that human activity is a contributing factor.”

Others like Santorum, Gingrich and Paul flat out assert that climate change is a liberal hoax. But, while these ideologues evince little faith in what science is saying, they do have a habit of listening to the big corporations. So they would do well to heed the warnings of the insurance industry, a group with no political axes to grind on the question of global warming, and billions of dollars riding on their ability to accurately prognosticate future risks. On March 1st, senators Bernie Sanders and Sheldon Whitehouse met with insurance industry officials on Capital Hill to discuss their concerns about climate change and the escalating costs of damage from extreme weather.

The worldwide insurance industry is huge, three-times bigger than the oil industry. And right now these companies are running scared. Some are threatening to cancel coverage for homeowners within 200 miles of the coast, where destructive hurricanes are on the increase, and in drying areas of the West, where wildfires have wreaked havoc in recent years.

Marsh & McLennan (MMC), one of the world’s largest insurance brokers, called climate change “one of the most significant emerging risks facing the world today,” while the insurance giant AIG has established an Office of Environment and Climate Change to review and assess the risks to insurers in the years ahead.

2011 was a bad year for insurance companies due to the steep rise in catastrophe-related losses. And the industry’s own scientists are predicting that things could get a lot worse in the years ahead.

The Republicans say that we can’t afford to pay for cutting the carbon emissions which climatologists assert are largely responsible for rising global temperatures and the spike in violent weather. What we truly cannot afford, according to our nation’s leading insurers, is to continue to deny a problem whose price tag is slated to go through the roof if we don’t act quickly.

Richard Schiffman is the author of two books and is a poet based in New York City, as well as a freelance journalist. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Salon.com, The Christian Science Monitor, NPR and leading literary journals. His “Spiritual Poetry Portal” can be found here.

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