What does desire truly look like? Science hasn’t come up with an answer, because most of us won’t let curious researchers watch us tumbling between the sheets, and surveys aren’t necessarily reliable. Are you willing to jot down answers to questions like “Have you ever felt attracted to your pet schnauzer?”—even if the unshaven young grad student quizzing you insists, “Trust me—your answers are completely anonymous”?

Only one scientist managed to survey a large number of people on a broad range of sexual interests: Alfred Kinsey. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Kinsey and his team interviewed thousands of subjects, asking questions about a tremendous variety of turn-ons, including bondage, bestiality, and silk stockings. But the Kinsey reports are now more than a half century old, and the findings were limited: The subjects were primarily educated, middle-class Caucasians; they were not selected randomly or systematically; and the data consisted of only recollections the subjects chose to share.

Today, a wide variety of scientists—neuroscientists, psych­ologists, anthropologists, biologists, pharmacologists—study desire, and one of their most basic questions remains: Why do we like the things we like? To answer that, we must first determine what people like, and stealing a look at men and women’s true interests has been far from easy.

Until the arrival of the Internet.

In 1991, the year the World Wide Web went online, there were fewer than 90 different adult magazines published in America. Just six years later, there were about 900 pornography sites on the web. Today, there are 2.5 million adult websites. It’s hard to imagine a more revolutionary development in the history of human sexuality. With a visit to an adult video site like PornHub, you can see more naked bodies in a single minute than the most promiscuous Victorian would have seen in an entire lifetime.

By examining raw search data, we can finally view an unfiltered snapshot of human desire. Take a look at the following list. Each phrase is an actual search entered into Dogpile (a popular “meta-engine” combining results from sources like Google and Bing) in May 2010: shemales in prom dresses, Twilight slash Edward and Jacob, black meat on white street, wives caught cheating on cam, best romance novels with alpha heroes, kendra wilkinson sex tape, spanking stories, free gay video tube, Jake Gyllenhaal without shirt, girls gone wild orgies. What immediately jumps out is the remarkable diversity of people’s sexual interests.

In 2010 we conducted the world’s largest experiment: We sifted through a billion different web searches, including a half million personal histories. We analyzed hundreds of thousands of online erotic stories and thousands of romance e-novels. We looked at the 40,000 most trafficked adult websites. We examined more than 5 million sexual solicitations posted on online classifieds. We listened to thousands of people discussing their desires on message boards.

The goal? To understand the specific cues that trigger human desire.

Wolfgang likes to look at images of female derrieres. He prefers certain poses: bent over, legs splayed, leaning on her knuckles. He likes these images so much that he is willing to pay for them—sometimes several times a day. This might seem excessive, though not exactly remarkable, except for one fact: Wolfgang is a monkey.

Rhesus macaques studied at Duke University are able to trade fruit juice for peeks at photos of female perinea. Researchers have consistently found that males are willing to trade juice to view these images and will trade more juice to look at monkey erotica than any other image.

Men aren’t the only primates willing to spend money just to look at females, but they’re the only ones to develop it into an industry. The most popular paysites featuring adult videos typically attract an audience that is around 75 percent men, and when it comes to actually paying for porn, the gender gap widens into an abyss. On the web, women prefer stories and men prefer images. So what exactly are all these men so driven to look at?

The most influential male cue is age, which dominates sexual searches, adult website content, and pornographic videos. On Dogpile, terms describing age—such as teen, young, and mature—are the most frequent type of adjective in sexual searches, appearing in one out of every six.

While the data show that youth dominates male desire, and there is a rather shocking number of searches for underage women, there is significant interest in older women as well. More than a quarter of all men report that their first sexual fantasy was triggered by a sexy older person. And what is the single most popular word users enter into the PornHub search engine? Mom. MILFs (Mothers I’d Like to Fuck) are one of the most profitable genres of male-targeted pornography.

Men’s interest in women’s bodies is well known, but the next visual cue may come as a surprise. Men are more interested in penises than women are. An eye-tracking study found that, when viewing nonerotic images, men consistently direct their gaze to the male crotch, through women rarely do. In porn, the penis is always under the spotlight. On the adult website Fantasti.cc, the predominantly male users rate more than
1 million images and videos. Out of the 100 top-rated images, 21 feature close-up shots of a penis. And on all of the major adult video sites, “Big Dick” is a popular porn category.

But men aren’t satisfied by checking out other men’s penises. They also like to flaunt their own. Chat Roulette is a website that allows users to randomly connect to other people around the world. Once you enter Chat Roulette, you see whatever other people have chosen to place in front of their webcams—a party, a cute kitten, an old man with a beard. One blogger recorded what he saw on 1,276 consecutive sessions: 298 webcams (about one in four) were aimed at a penis. Perhaps men are tapping into an ancient display mechanism we share with other primates.

While straight men have a deep-rooted fascination with penises, gay men are positively obsessed with them. Feet, butts, and chests are also highly popular in both gay and straight porn, as are domination, submission, group sex, amateurs, and numerous other interests. With so many parallels, Internet porn suggests that gay men share the same visual cues as straight men.

Forbidden acts have a very special power to arouse. Unlike anatomical cues, transgression is a psychological stimulus. Both sexes can get wildly turned on by situations that are immoral or dangerous, because of their immorality or dangerousness.

Consider the enormous popularity of cuckold porn—in which a man’s wife has sex with another man. Cuckold porn is the second most popular heterosexual interest on English-language search engines. Only youth is more popular. On PornHub, men who search for “cheating wife” view the greatest number of videos.

In cuckold porn, the boyfriend or husband almost always watches from the sidelines, usually with a look of frustration and dismay. Frequently, the wife calls out to her husband as she’s being serviced, touting the superior skills or better equipment of the bull—a common term for the cuckolder. Why would a straight man get turned on by watching a dominant, masculine man have sex with his wife? What makes a man’s sexual desire overcome his sexual jealousy? The science of biology offers one intriguing answer to these questions. Sperm competition.

Sperm competition refers to a variety of physiological and behavioral adaptations that enable a male’s sperm to compete with other males’ sperm to impregnate a female’s egg. If a man believes that his sexual partner may have been with a rival, he is driven to have sex with her as quickly and as vigorously as possible. In many species, the more dominant the potential rival, the stronger the sperm competition cue and the more intense the arousal.

Female pleasure is also one of the most potent psychological cues for male arousal. On Fantasti.cc, we analyzed 10,000 comments on 100 top-rated videos. The third most common type of comment is acknowledgment of the woman’s pleasure. For example, “She loves it!” and “Look at how excited she is!” Why are men so interested in a woman’s sexual pleasure? Perhaps for the same reason that the male brain is designed for sexual jealousy: to ensure a woman’s fidelity. The more pleasure a man provides a woman, the more likely she’ll want to have sex with him again.

Cravability is the food industry’s term for dishes that dupe the mind in order to make diners want more and more. The manufactured cravability of Chili’s Texas Cheese Fries brings together combinations of tastes that never existed before. When they hit our tongue, our brain swoons with a pleasure more intense and thrilling than when we bite into a mere fried potato.

Certain kinds of sexual stimuli combine cues in a similar way—a kind of trickery we call erotical illusions. With modern technology and human creativity, ancient sexual cues are spliced together in ways that can hyperstimulate our sexual perception, giving rise to curious new erotic cravings.

When men search for porn on the Internet, they seek out the perfect combination of cues. They hope to find a body that maximizes their desire by activating as many cues as possible. Many thumbnail sites make it easy, displaying rows of photographs featuring a wide variety of female bodies. But once in a while, a different kind of body pops out.

“I call it the ‘trannie peek,’” explains one industry veteran. “Adult webmasters figured out that straight guys will click on shemales out of curiosity and take a look. It grabs about 5 percent of the clicks on straight thumbnail galleries.”

The terms trannie, shemale, and T-girl are frequently used as slang within the adult industry for a transsexual woman who has been treated with hormones so that she possesses breasts and a female figure but still has a penis. The main audience for T-girl porn, which has exploded in popularity over the past decade, is heterosexual men.

What drives straight men’s interest in T-girls? The T-girl is an erotical illusion that juxtaposes two kinds of male visual cues. First is a set of cues for femininity: breasts, butts, curvy figures, and feminine facial features and mannerisms. But there is another vivid cue: the penis. As we’ve learned, the penis has a special power to activate the male sexual brain. When you superimpose these two cues, the result is powerful.

In Japanese anime, transsexual characters are known as futanari. Futanari porn reveals exactly what appeals to straight men about T-girls. Typical futanari features schoolgirls with giant protrusions beneath their plaid skirts, teenage girls with pink hair and a bulge in their jeans, ballerinas in tutus sporting erections as long as their slender legs.

If Japanese anime offers the greatest creative freedom for erotical illusions that titillate the male brain, then the paranormal romance is its match for the female brain.

Women respond to a truly astonishing range of cues across many domains. The physical appearance of a man, his social status, personality, commitment level, confidence, authenticity of emotions, family, attitude toward children, kindness, height, and smell are all important. Unlike men, women need to experience enough simultaneous emotional and psychological cues to cross an ever-varying threshold.

Over the past decade, sexy vampires and lusty werewolves have replaced mortals as the most popular romance heroes for women. Stephenie Meyer leads the pack of paranormal authors with her Twilight series of novels.

The rapid rise of the paranormal romance is largely due to an extraordinary variety of erotical illusions. The paranormal takes the psychological cues inherent to the genre and twists them into variations that satisfy women in deliciously new ways.

Supernatural males are alphas among alphas, turbocharging cues of masculinity. They know how to fight and are willing to annihilate the competition. They are fully capable of protecting the ones they love from a range of mundane and otherworldly dangers. But the erotical illusions are complete only when these invincible heroes are brought to their knees by the irresistibility of an ordinary woman.

Erotical illusions—including T-girl porn and paranormal romance—reveal a hidden fact about all erotic experiences: What ultimately binds sexual cues together into a single experience is our imagination.

Many believe that by reducing our desires into a set of narrow biological cues, we eliminate the magic of sex. Instead, by identifying those cues, we can see the magic more clearly. A penis and a female body combine within the sorcery of the male sexual imagination to produce an entirely new creation. Dominant men and irresistible women are magnified by the erotic artistry of the female sexual imagination to produce thrilling tales of vampires and demons.

By investigating the software of our sexual brain, we can finally appreciate the true nature of human desire. There is no such thing as an absolute “male sexuality” or “female sexuality,” but instead a number of gender-specific components, subject to the vagaries of biology and experience. Cues can flip, change, or transform, resulting in endless variations of sexual identity that defy easy labeling. But it is our sexual cues—our finite, identifiable, biological cues—that grant us all the pleasures of sex.

Our cues release us, even as they bind us.

Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam hold PhDs from the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University. Excerpted from A Billion Wicked Thoughts by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam (Dutton/Penguin Group, 2011). www.us.penguingroup.com

This article was reposted from UTNE READER.

 More than six decades of human rights failures by governments have been exacerbated by the world economic crisis, which brought the problems of poverty and inequality to the fore, according to Amnesty International’s Secretary General.“It’s not just the economy, it’s a human rights crisis: the world is sitting on a social, political and economic time bomb,” said Irene Kahn as she launched Amnesty International’s annual report on the state of the world’s human rights.Billions of people are suffering from insecurity, injustice and indignity around the world. In many cases, the economic crisis made matters worse, with millions more sliding into poverty.

Increased poverty and deprivation have led to denial of economic and social rights – including food shortages and the use of food as a political weapon; forced evictions; abuse of rights of indigenous peoples. Yet human rights problems have been relegated to the backseat as political and business leaders grapple with the economic crisis.

2008 saw massive rises in the price of the most basic of necessities – food – which had the effect of making the poorest people in the world even poorer. People took to the streets across the world and, in many countries, were faced with violent repression.

In Zimbabwe, more than five million people were in need of food aid by the end of 2008, according to the UN. The government has used food as a weapon against its political opponents. Across the country, political opponents, human rights activists and trade union representatives were attacked, abducted, arrested and killed with impunity.

Hundreds of activists protesting against economic decline and social conditions were arrested and detained without charge.

Across Africa, people demonstrated against desperate social and economic situations and sharp rises in living costs. In a taste of what could lie ahead, some demonstrations turned violent; the authorities often repressed protests with excessive force.

Social tensions and economic disparities led to thousands of protests throughout China. In the Americas, social protest at economic conditions increased in Peru; in Chile there were demonstrations throughout 2008 on Indigenous People’s rights and rising living costs.

In the Middle East and North Africa, the economic and social insecurity was highlighted by strikes and protests in several countries, including Egypt. In Tunisia, strikes and protests were put down with force, causing two deaths, many injuries and more than 2,000 prosecutions of alleged organizers, some culminating in long prison sentences.

“The events we’ve seen in 2008, with the world economic crisis at the top, demand a new kind of leadership from world leaders,” said Irene Khan. “They must take real action, centred on human rights, to tackle growing poverty around the world, and they must invest in human rights as purposefully as they invest in economic growth.”  

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Amnesty International Report 2009

New Haven, Conn.-Organizations in the United States that are at the highest risk of sustaining damage from climate change are not adapting enough to the dangers posed by rising temperatures, according to a Yale report.

“Despite a half century of climate change that has already significantly affected temperature and precipitation patterns and has already had widespread ecological and hydrological impacts, and despite a near certainty that the United States will experience at least as much climate change in the coming decades just as a result of current atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, little adaptation has occurred,” says Robert Repetto, author of “The Climate Crisis and the Adaptation Myth” and a senior fellow of the United Nations Foundation.

Repetto says that private- and public-sector organizations face significant obstacles to adaptation because of uncertainties over the occurrence of climate change at the regional and local levels, over the future frequency of extreme weather events, and over the ecological, economic and other impacts of climate change.

In addition, organizations lack relevant data for planning and forecasting, and the data that are available are typically outdated and unrepresentative of future conditions. Other institutional barriers to adaptation are overcoming or revising codes, rules and regulations that impede change; the lack of clear directions and mandates to take action; political or ideological resistance to the need for responsiveness to climate change; the preoccupation with near-term challenges and priorities and the lingering perception that climate change is a concern only for sometime in the future; and the inertia created by a business-as-usual assumption that future conditions will be like those of the past.

“Those organizations in the public and private sectors that are most at risk, that are making long-term investments and commitments and that have the planning, forecasting and institutional capacity to adapt, have not yet done so,” says Repetto, who until recently was a professor in the practice of economics and sustainable development at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. “There have been very few changes in forecasts, plans, investment decisions, budgets or staffing patterns in response to climate risks.”

The report cites:

• New York City’s 40-year-old building codes that require structures to withstand only 110 mph winds, when climate change is causing more intense hurricanes that could bring speeds of up to 135 mph, and its flood maps that are based on historical data and not on climate change modeling data. Increases in sea levels and surges associated with severe storms would likely inundate Kennedy Airport and lower Manhattan, including the subway entrances and tunnels into Manhattan.
• Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas, where water supply is critical and climate change is not factored into state agencies’ current water management plans.
• A 2007 GAO report that land and resource managers for the Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service have ignored a directive by the Interior Department to consider climate change in their management plans.
• Federal planning guidelines that states and municipalities must follow to receive funding for transportation investments that do not require consideration of climate change in the design and siting of highways and rail lines.
• Municipal public health agencies in Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia, among others, that have not factored climate change into plans for confronting public health risks, despite the belief that climate change will increase the incidence and severity of vector-borne diseases and respiratory illnesses.

“To say that the United States has the technological, economic and human capacity to adapt to climate change does not imply that the United States will adapt,” said Repetto. “Without national leadership and concerted efforts to remove these barriers and obstacles, adaptation to climate change is likely to continue to lag.”

###

The report, “The Climate Crisis and the Adaptation Myth,” is published by the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and is available at www.environment.yale.edu/publication-series/climate_change/.

(Dallas, August 20, 2008) – More than 200,000 US public school students were punished by beatings during the 2006-2007 school year, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union said in a joint report released today. In the 13 states that corporally punished more than 1,000 students per year, African-American girls were twice as likely to be beaten as their white counterparts.

In the 125-page report, “A Violent Education: Corporal Punishment of Children in US Public Schools,” the ACLU and Human Rights Watch found that in Texas and Mississippi children ranging in age from 3 to 19 years old are routinely physically punished for minor infractions such as chewing gum, talking back to a teacher, or violating the dress code, as well as for more serious transgressions such as fighting. Corporal punishment, legal in 21 states, typically takes the form of “paddling,” during which an administrator or teacher hits a child repeatedly on the buttocks with a long wooden board. The report shows that, as a result of paddling, many children are left injured, degraded, and disengaged from school.  
 
“Every public school needs effective methods of discipline, but beating kids teaches violence and it doesn’t stop bad behavior,” said Alice Farmer, Aryeh Neier Fellow at Human Rights Watch and the ACLU, and author of the report. “Corporal punishment discourages learning, fails to deter future misbehavior and at times even provokes it.”  
 
The report found that in the 13 southern states where corporal punishment is most prevalent, African-American students are punished at 1.4 times the rate that would be expected given their numbers in the student population, and African-American girls are 2.1 times more likely to be paddled than might be expected. There is no evidence that these students commit disciplinary infractions at disproportionate rates.  
 
“Minority students in public schools already face barriers to success,” said Farmer. “By exposing these children to disproportionate rates of corporal punishment, schools create a hostile environment in which these students may struggle even more.”  
 

Students with mental and physical disabilities are also punished at disproportionate rates, with potentially serious consequences for their development. In Texas, for instance, 18.4 percent of the total number of students who were physically punished were special education students, even though they make up only 10.7 percent of the student population.  
 
“A Violent Education” is based on four weeks of on-the-ground research in Mississippi and Texas in late 2007 and early 2008, including more than 175 interviews with children, teachers, parents, administrators, superintendents, and school board members.  
 
The report documents several cases in which children were beaten to the point of serious injury. Since educators who beat children have immunity under law from assault proceedings, parents who try to pursue justice for injured children encounter resistance from police, district attorneys, and courts. Parents also face enormous, sometimes insurmountable, obstacles in trying to prevent physical punishment of their children. While some school districts permit parents to sign forms opting out of corporal punishment for their children, the forms are often ignored.  
 
In the report, Human Rights Watch and the ACLU cite experts on best practices in school discipline, who emphasize traditional approaches such as detention, and modern approaches such as positive behavior support systems. Positive behavior support systems, which are school-wide discipline systems that stress a clear structure of rewards and consequences for student behavior, have been effectively implemented in major US school systems. States and school boards that fail to implement best practices allow the status quo, or school beatings, to remain in place.  
 
Human Rights Watch and the ACLU call upon the US government to prohibit corporal punishment in all public schools and urge state governments, school boards, superintendents, and administrators to eliminate physical punishment in their schools.  
 
Selected Witness Accounts:  
 
“He took me into the office and gave me three licks. … He made me hold onto the wall and he paddled me. … It hurt for about two hours, it felt like fire under my butt.”  
- Matthew S., who was paddled in second grade for throwing food in a school cafeteria in the Mississippi Delta.  
 
“The other kids were watching and laughing. It made me want to fight them… When you get a paddling and you see everyone laugh at you, it make you mad and you want to do something about it.”  
- Peter S., a middle school student in the Mississippi Delta.  
 
“What made me so angry: he’s three years old, he was petrified. He didn’t want to go back to school, and he didn’t want to start his new school. I was so worried that this was going to constantly be with him, equating going to school with being paddled.”  
- Rose T., mother of a 3-year-old boy in Texas who was bruised from physical punishment after he refused to stop playing with his shoes in class.  
 
“I went into the principal’s office. … He gave me a chair and said hold onto the chair. The paddle had holes in it. Then he just did three swats. … I was hit on my buttocks. … There were holes in the paddle to make it go faster. … It hurt very much. There were definitely red marks and then swelling… almost welt-like markings. It didn’t last for more than a couple days. … It left me feeling very humiliated. I think there were several levels of emotion. Physical pain, mental humiliation. … And being a female at that age, it was like there was this older man hitting me on the butt. That’s weird… even at that age I knew it was inappropriate.”  
- Allison G., a recent graduate punished as a teenager in Texas for being late to class multiple times.  
 
“I’ve heard this said at my school and at other schools: ‘This child should get less whips, it’ll leave marks.’ Students that are dark-skinned, it takes more to let their skin be bruised. Even with all black students, there is an imbalance: darker-skinned students get worse punishment.”  
- Account of Abrea T., former teacher in rural Mississippi.  
 
“I see corporal punishment as a form of slavery. Beating on the slaves was how the headman got them to do something… we’re focused so much on making kids do what we want. Think about the mental capacity that this kind of treatment leaves our children with. We are telling them we don’t respect them. They leave that principal’s office and they think, ‘they don’t consider me a human being.’ That young person loses self-respect.”  
- Account from Doreen W., school board member in a Mississippi Delta town.

A Violent Education: Corporal Punishment of Children in US Public Schools
Report, August 20, 2008

Audio Link

(NaturalNews) The United Nations has issued a report warning that global climate change and other environmental destruction is rapidly pushing the planet’s life support systems past the point of no return. The U.N. Environment Program referred to the fourth Global Environmental Outlook report as “the final wake-up call to the international community.”

The report, prepared by a group of 338 experts, compared current levels of consumption and population with the resources available on the planet. According to the researchers’ calculations, current resource demand requires 22 hectares (54 acres) per person. However, current population levels mean that only 2.02 hectares per person are available. This is estimated to fall to 1.63 hectares per person by 2050 as the population climbs to a projected stabilization point of 8 to 10 billion.

According to Achim Steiner, executive direction of the U.N. Environment Program, the problem is not population per se, but rather per capita impact on the planet.

“To force people to stop having children would be a simplistic answer,” Steiner said. “The more realistic, ethical and practical issue is to accelerate human well-being and make more rational use of the resources we have.”

The report says that the planet is increasingly stressed by factors such as global climate change. Indicators of this ecological stress are the spread of dead zones in oceans and the resurgence of certain diseases.

Steiner warned that the effects of climate change are “accelerating at a pace that goes beyond the scenarios and models we’ve been using.” Certain regions of the planet are expected to reach ecological tipping points in the near future, meaning that the ecology will be so damaged that it can no longer recover. Steiner also warned that if climate change continues to dry out parts of Africa and melt Himalayan glaciers that supply water to vast portions of India and China, tipping points could be passed in those regions soon.

He called for the international community to put the same effort into combating other forms of environmental degradation as has been shown on climate change in recent years.

Reprinted from Natural News.

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WASHINGTON/LONDON/NAIROBI/DELHI – 15^th April 2008. The way the world grows its food will have to change radically to better serve the poor and hungry if the world is to cope with a growing population and climate change while avoiding social breakdown and environmental collapse. That is the message from the report of the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development, a major new report by over 400 scientists which is launched today.

The assessment was considered by 64 governments at an intergovernmental plenary in Johannesburg last week.

The authors’ brief was to examine hunger, poverty, the environment and equity together. Professor Robert Watson Director of IAASTD said those on the margins are ill-served by the present system: “The incentives for science to address the issues that matter to the poor are weak… the poorest developing countries are net losers under most trade liberalization scenarios.”

Modern agriculture has brought significant increases in food production. But the benefits have been spread unevenly and have come at an increasingly intolerable price, paid by small-scale farmers, workers, rural communities and the environment.

It says the willingness of many people to tackle the basics of combining production, social and environmental goals is marred by “contentious political and economic stances”. One of the IAASTD co-chairs, Dr Hans Herren, explains: “Specifically, this refers to the many OECD member countries who are deeply opposed to any changes in trade regimes or subsidy systems. Without reforms here many poorer countries will have a very hard time… ”

The report has assessed that the way to meet the challenges lies in putting in place institutional, economic and legal frameworks that combine productivity with the protection and conservation of natural resources like soils, water, forests, and biodiversity while meeting production needs.

In many countries, it says, food is taken for granted, and farmers and farm workers are in many cases poorly rewarded for acting as stewards of almost a third of the Earth’s land. Investment directed toward securing the public interest in agricultural science, education and training and extension to farmers has decreased at a time when it is most needed.

The authors have assessed evidence across a wide range of knowledge that is rarely brought together. They conclude we have little time to lose if we are to change course. Continuing with current trends would exhaust our resources and put our children’s future in jeopardy.

Professor Bob Watson, Director of IAASTD said: “To argue, as we do, that continuing to focus on production alone will undermine our agricultural capital and leave us with an increasingly degraded and divided planet is to reiterate an old message. But it is a message that has not always had resonance in some parts of the world. If those with power are now willing to hear it, then we may hope for more equitable policies that do take the interests of the poor into account.”

Professor Judi Wakhungu, said “We must cooperate now, because no single institution, no single nation, no single region, can tackle this issue alone. The time is now.”

For more information visit GreenFacts.