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It’s been a busy week since the cover went up on Monday – plans are afoot to secure distribution of the comic in Honduras, but more on that once it -finally- goes to print. After the success of the interactive cover vote last week, I’m launching more ways to get you, dear readers, to voice you own vitriol down the archcomix megaphone. The main way for now is through the forum I’ve set up on the Archcomix fan page here – go and post comments or share links/info that you want to see included in an upcoming piece that I’m working on about the Jewish lobby in the US. Any suggestions for a wordpress-friendly forum widget would also be good.
The hard copy of the Independent World Report also arrived this week, featuring my Chagos comic, as well as a moving photo journalism piece on African immigrants who are permanently stranded in Malta after abortive efforts to get to europe and have adopted a WW2 hangar as their home. Speaking of Chagos, for those of you from glorious Britannia who contacted your MPs about the Early Day Motion I mentioned last week, here’s to hoping the response you got was more successful (not to mention vague) than mine: “whilst I cannot commit to signing EDM 960 at this point in time, I will certainly give the issue my consideration”. Any chance the said point in time is after the elections have been and gone? The Chagossians’ plight has recently been added to with the introduction of a plan to turn the surrounding nature area around the base on Diego Garcia into Britain’s ‘Great Barrier Reef’. A big coup for conservation, but unfortunately Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s conservation focus lies on flora and fauna, and not the thousand or so remaining displaced inhabitants who were evicted or born in exile since the 1960s. Worse still is the fact that many people were duped into signing a petition for the creation of the said area, with no idea that the organizers had been forced into denying the Chagossians’ their rights in its establishment. More on this from the Guardian UK here. Speaking of marine conservation, here’s a great example of animation being used for edutainment – though is it informative enough to inspire/engage with someone with no background knowledge of the issue? Leave a comment and let me know.
There’s a lot of misinformation flying around about the Marine Protected Area and what it will mean for the Chagossians, and many of the things Fred Pearce said in the Guardian article you link to are simply untrue.
See responses from the Chagos Environment Network here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Protect-Chagos/258425446058?v=box_3&ref=nf#!/note.php?note_id=336947201319
and here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Protect-Chagos/258425446058?v=box_3&ref=nf#!/note.php?note_id=338946851319
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