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Our website has had 47 million visits!
Site last updated on 12 December 2008
Visit the Journey to Forever Online Libraries:
Small Farms Library
Biofuels Library
What people are saying about us
StudyWeb Academic Excellence Award -- "selected as a featured site in Lightspan's StudyWeb as one of the best educational resources on the Web", 11 April 2001
EDITOR'S CHOICE AWARD
Awesome Library: top 5% of K-12 education sites
Listed at Education World -- "Where educators go to learn" |
The Project
 Journey to Forever is a pioneering expedition by a small, mobile NGO (Non-Government Organization) involved in environment and rural development work, starting from Hong Kong and travelling 40,000 kilometres through 26 countries in Asia and Africa to Cape Town, South Africa.
Our route will take us away from the cities and populated districts to remote and inaccessible areas (usually also the least developed and poorest areas), where we'll be studying and reporting on environmental conditions and working for local NGOs on rural development projects in local communities.
The focus will be on trees, soil and water, sustainable farming, sustainable technology, and family nutrition.
The aim is to help people fight poverty and hunger, and to help sustain the environment we all must share.
Seats for everyone
This is a participatory project. It's both a real journey and a virtual one via a high-speed satellite link with the vehicles and interactive forums online at our Website, where participants -- expert consultants or anyone with a PC and a modem, and especially schoolchildren -- can take an active part in the project as it unfolds.
Participation will be real, not just a token: the project team will organize the expedition, undertake the journey and do the work, but we'll be looking to our online participants to help give the project its shape as the journey unfolds.
Whoever you are and wherever you are, you can make a real difference! Everybody's welcome -- it's free, and open to all.
Schools
Schoolchildren are a special part of Journey to Forever -- this is a wonderful opportunity for students to learn about the issues that are so vital to the world they'll inherit.
At the same time they'll learn how to use the new information technology in innovative and creative ways, linking and collaborating with other children in other lands, learning together, and contributing to real issues.
It's open to schools everywhere -- via satellite link, we'll take participating schoolchildren into classrooms in villages very far from anywhere.
Good news
Environment and development issues are usually bad news: millions of children starve, tropical forests are destroyed, pollution spreads everywhere, there's even a hole in the sky.
But that's only one side of the story. Journey to Forever will cross a huge expanse of the globe, and we expect to find plenty of good news and cause for optimism -- and to help demonstrate that ordinary people, even children, can make a positive contribution to the health and future of this most beautiful planet.
First stop
Japan! -- not indeed a poor Third World country. Our stay here is the final part of project preparation before starting the journey.
We're living in a 100-year-old traditional farmhouse in a rural village up in the mountains near Kyoto, with farming land and workshops, we're much involved in on-the-ground sustainabe farming, Appropriate Technology and biofuels projects here and elsewhere in Japan. We're giving all our technology and resources a final, real-world test-run, finding and filling in the gaps, adapting what needs adapting, developing what's missing. When we're ready, the Journey-proper will begin.
More news soon!
IMF and World Bank: Out of Control -- THE International Monetary Fund and World Bank are institutions out of control. For evidence, consider the institutions' feeble and fatally flawed debt relief program. Under their Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) initiative, the world's poorest countries can receive reduction of approximately one third of their current payments to overseas creditors -- if they endure six years of closely monitored, extremely intrusive "structural adjustment." ... HIPC is the institutions' most important fig-leaf, a program designed to obscure the view of the harm they are doing to poor countries.
Greenwash + 10 -- The UN's "Global Compact" with global corporations associates with notorious violators of UN values -- Global Compact companies have already violated the Principles of the Compact, without censure -- or even acknowledgement -- from UN officials. The Global Compact represents a smuggling of a business agenda into the United Nations. It should not be considered a contribution to or framework for the Johannesburg Summit. Here's the evidence.
Technology and the poor -- The United Nations Development Programme's "Human Development Report 2001 -- Making new technologies work for human development" attempts to address a key question for the 21st century: will technology entrench millions in even greater poverty -- or can it be used to eradicate poverty and suffering? But the key issue is not "making new technologies work for human development" but enabling poor people to make technologies work for them.
Philip Morris Sees the Light -- After decades of denial about the hazards of tobacco, Philip Morris has been promoting the benefits to society of premature deaths from smoking, in a study that found the early deaths of smokers have "positive effects" for society that more than counteract the medical costs of treating smoking induced cancer and other diseases.
The Enemies of Democracy -- Report of a chilling, documented history of ongoing corporate efforts to use propaganda and "public relations" to distort science, manipulate public opinion, discredit democracy, and consolidate political power in the hands of a wealthy few.
Murder that is a threat to survival -- When indigenous peoples lose their languages, unique ecological knowledge also disappears. Languages are being murdered faster than ever before.
Seed patents threaten world food resources -- The threat to the future availability of the seeds used to feed the world.
The wreckers who trade in misery -- There is a real danger that dedicated and well-organised groups will cause the rules-based trading system to collapse, destroying efforts to reduce poverty and global inequality.
BP -- Beyond Preposterous -- BP spent more on its new eco-friendly logo in 1999 than on renewable energy. BP's second Greenwash award in 18 months.
Shell wins Greenwash Award -- Shell claims it is at the forefront of reducing harmful greenhouse gases, but the company is full of hot air.
Talking pure manure -- Agribusiness mouth Denis T. Avery is a liar, and he knows it. Here's the proof., and the truth of the matter.
Hi-tech crops are bad for the brain -- "Miracle" crops, hailed as the answer to global famine, are contributing to widespread brain impairment in the developing world, a new report concludes.
The WTO: "These guys just don't get it!" -- "This was supposed to be a seminar on how to rebuild public confidence in the WTO, not transform the agency into the former Soviet KBG."
Countering myth with facts -- "Agriculture [read: "agribusiness"] needs to educate the general public and government officials to counter myth with facts". But which is which?
Rape of a rainforest -- Malaysian timber companies have become notorious for their systematic destruction of the world's remaining rainforests: report on an ecological and social crime.
Do pesticides cause cancer? -- The answer, from chemical corporation Monsanto's "Fact Sheet On Pesticide Use": "Number of active ingredients in pesticides found to cause cancer in animals or humans: 107." Read on!
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