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The issue of deforestation as presented by the Hambacher Forst conflict “My biggest interest lies within environmental preservation and education” The Hambacher Forst is a 12.000 year old forest of high ecological significance originally comprising 5.500 hectares of land. It is located in Germany, in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, between the cities of Cologne and Aachen. The forest plays an important role for biodiversity, offering habitat to no less than 142 endangered species, such as the Bechstein bat, the middle spotted woodpecker or the Natterjack toad. Since 1977, the woodland has been gradually cleared down to 1.000 hectares because of the extensive brown coal mining conducted by the giant power company RWE. It is the largest electricity provider in Germany, strictly opposed to leaving the coal mining sector and equipped with an operating license issued by the government that lasts until 2045. The annual yield of the Hambach area, together with Garzweiler and Inden, amounts to 100 million tons which makes it the most important coal mining site in Europe. A conflict is going on between the company and eco activists, whose motivations range from immediate wishes to preserve the forest and use renewable energies, to a more political criticism of structural exploitation. The activist groups have responded to the destruction of natural habitat with various forms of protest. Apart from long-term occupations, which have been taking place since 2012 and can be considered as the core element of the resistance, they include creative action camps aimed at the inclusion of a broader public, sit-in and tunnel blockades, bicycle demonstrations, on-worksite concerts and gardening, video documentaries, and more. The activists are confronted with police raids, physical injury, arrests and lawsuits, which cost individual and institutional actors a fortune. Some of the protesters live in purpose- built tree houses all year round, facing the cold of winter along with general precarity. The media play a polarizing role too, the coverage ranges from supportive, sometimes downright glorifying contributions, to negligence and defamation. The protesters cooperate with locals, some of which have been forced to relocate because their villages were torn down. Researchers join the camps to share information about the area’s abundance in flora and fauna. Solidarity movements formed between Hambacher Forst and similarly affected areas in France, Spain, and Greece. These movements draw attention to the scope of deforestation, reminding us that it is not only a struggle in the global South. They call out the destabilizing practice of forced relocation of local populations and denounce lobbyism. By that they raise fundamental questions about the ethics of power, the issue of communication, and the realism behind alternative visions of society. To exit the coal mining business for good is one of the prerequisites to end deforestation and slow down climate change. In order to achieve it, we need to raise awareness through education and promote a best practice implementation of alternative energy concepts. Written By Sara Borgioni, CB Volunteer from Luxemburg

The second meeting of Alternative B took place in the city of Smolyan, Bulgaria. During a week, young entrepreneurs got together to discuss ideas about how to bring about meaningful social change and share the necessary skills to allow them to carry them through.

  Or maybe you have. But there are so many other places to see. Romania is my home-country, is that country where “Charles bought a house in 2005. And Harry has never been photographed naked once” as a campaign stated, is that country whose capital city is often confused to our neighbor’s and whose well known personalities vary from a world-famous gymnast (Nadia Comaneci) to a tennis player (Ilie Nastase) and up to a vampire. Not to mention that Snoop Dog checked-in in one of our villages. Curious enough now? Romania offers you everything you want. You name it. You want to see signs of 21st century development? We have it. Or maybe you’d like to see reminisces of the communist era – we have a huge one in Bucharest. Urban or rural, mountains or sea, international recognized sites for their natural beauty. And also 3rd city in an international Internet speed ranking. If I made my point and the idea of organizing your next holiday in Romania started sparkling in your mind, I prepared top 5 sites I think you shouldn’t miss. Of course, they represent my personal opinion and Romania has many more places that are worth seeing, photographing and falling in love with. Sibiu One of my favorite cities in Romania is Sibiu, a charming old town with a story-like atmosphere. I love it for its calmness, for its people’s kindness, for the beautiful houses – did you know that houses here have eyes? Literally. If you go to Sibiu for one or two days, you can have a walk through the city’s Big Square, on the Liars’ Bridge, you can climb in the Tower of the Council for an amazing view. You can visit Brukenthal Museum or ASTRA Museum – a museum situated in an open space, that will give you an interesting image of Romanian past. Transfagarasan We say it and also our friends from Top Gear say it. This is one spectacular road! Transfagarasan is a 152km driveway that passes through Fagaras Mountains. Get ready for close and challenging turns and also for great views. Buckle up! Make sure that the road is open when you want to go there, as authorities don’t allow access all year long.   Viscri This is it. Our royal spot. Viscri has that je ne sais pas quoi that attracted the above-mentioned Prince. And it will also make you fall for it, as it is pitoresque, it has hundred of years old churches and efforts are being made in order to maintain the traditional air of the village. Bucharest Our capital city is intense. It might strike you with contrasts, but if you come here, I recommend you not to miss a walk in Herastrau Park, visiting the House of the Parliament, The National Museum of Art, The Romanian Athenaeum, and for a full view over the city, take a trip with the double decker. At night, you shouldn’t miss a taste of our partying renown skills – Old City center is the perfect spot. The Merry Cemetery Remember how I told you, at the begging of the article, that we have them all? Well, in Sapanta, we have a Merry Cemetery. What makes it so merry is that there are colorful tombstones with comic lyrics on them regarding the person that is buried there. The idea is that death is not something to be cried on, but a celebration as it leads the way to something better.   Romania is truly a treasure. Of course there are things that aren’t in place yet, sure, we have a lot to work on and we have so much to learn. But it is worth visiting for everything I wrote and not only that. Our traditions and our people, our food, our way of enjoying life, of working hard and achieve excellence in so many domains, all of these give an intense vibe to the country and make it unique. Lovely trip ahead!   Oana Cristiana Groza, Romania

Algerian administration: Find a needle in a haystack One bleak winter morning last year, with the sky black and beckoning heavy rainfall, nothing could have helped me leave my warm bed. I tried to leave it many times but the sleeping became a dear thing in such gloomy weather. I could not resist the sweetness of sleep on my warm pillow amid the bitter cold. However, I had no choice, and my resistance was useless, I had to get up and go to renew my passport, which was due to expire. It was compulsory, without doing so; I would be denied many opportunities in the future I arrived to the department in charge of renewing passports holding the complete file in my hand, I gave it to the concerned employee and said “ delivered the summary of my birth certificate with the file of my First passport in 2011”.  Then, he sent me to another office on the first floor in order to get this decomposed paper among hundreds of thousands of papers and accumulated archives. The papers were sprawled between numbers of iron shelves in an organizational chaos. In my country Algeria, these crowded archives are still valid. Despite being the sixteenth year in the second millennium, with all the technological advances achieved, there is no sight of this in such department. The Algerians companies are still stuck in an older era, with only their pens and papers. I had no other choice than coming to this office to finish the work I came for. I arrived and I found an old woman there for the same purpose and she with an employee going through an exploration process for it. I said in a small sentence, “I came for the same thing”. She took my passport without any word and started a new exploration process between hundreds of thousands of papers. All of this time wasted could be easily avoided by simply pressing some buttons on a computer, which is done by almost everyone and everywhere. This abandoned office has become a safe haven for those spiders with long feet to weave their homes as they pleases. Black covers the place and the atmosphere is extremely dreary.  The woman began the manual research with her colleague, returning back in time to last century, sifting through crowded files and yellow sheets in disarray. At this point, the colleague raised their white flag after a long search and said “my eyes pain, find it yourself”, and he left the office never to return. This poor woman continued the search from one rack to another and from one closet to another in an atmosphere of nervousness and stuttering with herself hating this work imposed on her. In the meantime, another colleague entered to this office and said, “Oh, you still looking for her paper, it is too much for you” then, she looked at me and she wondered nervously “perhaps, you dropped the paper with the file of ID card not the first passport?” I replied with a big smile “No, madam, I renewed my ID card just the last year, and the paper you are looking for was with my file in 2011”. She did not reply to my smile, she just looked at me in a strange way and left. This manner in treating me would be quite different if I had a relative there. After all this time, the poor employee still looking for my Birth certificate in an atmosphere filled with hatred, another employee entered this forsaken office after noticing the long time his colleague took with searching.  He joined her and they searched together until finding the file that must have contained this damn Birth certificate. The woman went through my file papers, lowercase for the search underway in full swing among yellow sheets dating back to 2011. It was a big disappointment that paper was not there. At that time, the assistant transferred me to another office. The case is big, and the paper is not extracted only once in a lifetime, and they were responsible to keep and preserve it. The second office was more organized and clean, the search was not hard for the employee in this office. She took my number and got my file and said, “We moved your birth certificate to this office last year”. I pulled the damn paper and went out of the department to make many copies of it. The law had changed this year, the department responsible of renewing the passport only took a copy of it, and we keep the original at home. I returned to the department in order to complete the reason I came this morning, and I faced a new problem. The passport costs must be paid in the taxes department south of the city I lived in, my disappointment was bitter at the time. After all what I went through from this morning I had to now go to another department to fix this problem, otherwise, my file would not be accepted. I arrived there very tired, and to my horror I saw; many people were waiting their turn to pay their taxes. I stood there waiting my turn, and the atmosphere was disgusting; employees treated people as if they were cattle waiting for water and food. Moreover, even these people did not respect the turn of each other, I asked an assistant there and he showed me where to go because what I came for was not the same. For the third time, I returned to the passport department wishing that no other thing will be demanded, but of course, without counting the two month of processes to get my new passport.  Finally, I completed what I came for that morning furious from the poor service and the recklessness of fellow citizens.   Rim Hayat Chaif, Algerian Journalist and Blogger, CB social media manager.

During 5 days in Palermo, Italy, Crossing Borders met with the rest of the international partners of the Erasmus+ project BOEMI. Musicians from Denmark, Italy, Spain, and Ghana got together near the beach to jam together, discuss strategies, and present to the public the result of their hard work.

Next to the Copenhagen city centre, Vesterbro is a trendy neighbourhood in the city. Due to the proximity to CPH Central Station, streets are full of Hotels, cafes, restaurants, tourists.. and prostitution. Within those streets, two posters are recurrents: “Real men don’t buy women” and “Happy hookers only live in your imagination”. I will deal with each issue in turn. Relations between prostitution and feminism is longstanding. On one hand, many feminists have seen prostitutes as victims, working within a wild and worthless context, being enslaved. On the other hand, prostitutes felt marginalized and judged, being members of the most marginalized groups in society. What is it  we don’t like about them? It would seem that is more than the act of sex, we also don’t accept them receiving money for it money for it. It is not tolerated that the reward is openly economic, even more when the reward is not a favour by men, but something fixed in advance by the prostitute: “If you want a sexual relation, pay”. In my opinion, that “Real men don’t buy women” couldn’t be more wrong. First of all, women are not being purchased: they are being paid for a service, most of the time have mafias behind the curtains and here there is real human trafficking: no one should never trade with lives and hopes of others. Also many times the situation is elected by the woman because of their personal circumstances, like all the things that we choose in life. I don’t have enough knowledge on the matter to judge the benefits or disadvantages of prostitution, but at this point I know that, when we criminalize this job, we are criminalizing the people who execute it, and they don’t deserve to be one step behind society.  Moreover, the adjective of “real men” impinges on the male chauvinist conception of society: real men access to prostitution; real men punch; real men kill. But yes, all of them men, not monsters. Monsters don’t exist. “When we criminalize this job, we are criminalizing the people who offer it, and they don’t deserve to be one step behind society” So it seems difficult for many people to imagine that a woman working for herself autonomously, making her own decisions and the most important, being happy: “Happy hookers only live in your imagination”. It looks like we prefer them to live hidden, marginalized, with nobody to defend their rights than to live together, in equal conditions as citizens who are trying to progress in life. Letting them to be as free as they can, because like us, they are not 100% free. How free are all those married men and women who have been together for decades and who unites them not with love but debts, children and mortgages? We don’t have to make policies to open prostitution into commodification of sexuality, but to give them rights as humans, because that is what we are talking about: Human beings, being this only a tiny step to reach equality within the patriarchal society that we live in. Because a poster is not the solution. Alberto Coves, Crossing Borders volunteer and Freelance journalist from Spain.  

As James Joyce argues “in the nineteenth century in, the full tide of rationalistic positivism and equal democratic rights for everyone, it (the Catholic Church) proclaims the dogma of the infallibility of the head of the church and also that of the Immaculate Conception. Consequently it is reasonable to think that the long standing isolation of Roman Catholicism could hold out for such a long time and also that many, no longer socially bound to obedience, turned their backs to the church. In the 20th century no one any longer admitted with St. Augustine that “we here below are travelers longing for death”. The 19th century revolutions together with the events that sparked uninterrupted mass-movements revealed that it was on terrestrial grounds that all action and energy were to take place. However, the great conflicts and confusion that resulted from the unfortunate use of exhibiting religion belief, precisely on terrestrial grounds, had determined people to retreat into a solitary world and commit themselves to religious thought only from an individualistic perspective. It is a fair speculation that this phenomenon led to a decline in religious belief in the sense of a diminishing of the institutional model or the establishment and replacement of it in the form of individual belief and confidence. Few thinkers have accepted this theory that the essential core of religion, true religiosity, is a product of the individual intimacy. Kant holds that religion has for its sole basis the idea of immortality. The anthropologists claim it is the belief in spiritual beings (Taylor); or mere sensations of fear, the recognition that there are other beings more powerful than man (Lubbock). Spencer defines religion as something which passes the sphere of experience, and, therefore, belongs to the unknowable. To Freud, the psychoanalyst, religion is “an obsessional neurosis of humanity” which originated in the Oedipus complex (The Future of an Illusion, by Sigmund Freud, 1928). In the eyes of the mystics and metaphysicians (Santayana), religion is poetry making itself for reality, whereas Albert Einstein defines it as follows: “To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms,- this knowledge, this feeling, is the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men”. (Living Philosophies, 1931, p.6) The idea of an embodiment of sentiments and affections, a combined force of emotions that rests within the individual himself marks a new phase in the human development. It is a derivation without derivative, a replacement from the sphere of authority and legitimacy towards the individual level. An important element in the Christian realm, particularly Catholic and Orthodox, holds on the willingness and respect of such congregations not to break away definitively with the church, but, as I mentioned above, to transport that energy from inside the walls unto themselves wherever they happen to be. It is a break within recognition, a rupture that involves attachment. As again in the words of James Joyce, when confronted with a similar problem of representation and reception: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile, and cunning.” (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) The passage resembles Stephen Dedalus’s unwillingness to pay homage to something which he no longer believes as he confesses. Albeit his refusal, non serviam, Stephen Dedalus, through the the voice of the author, continues throughout his dealings to gravitate around the religious orbit and thought. It is the figure of the modernist individual to remain elusive against the blurring contours that formed and shaped our recent society. One may even talk about a new consciousness which was rendered by this new environment. Religion in its essence has nothing to lose since it remains intrinsically entwined with our chemistry. Whether a new form of religious sentiment in the new society will flourish, or whether it will be absorbed by science or reappear under a different name, it gradually belongs to the uncertainty of future events to predict such conclusive assumptions.   Bibliography: Badulescu, Dana – Early 20th century British Fiction, ed. Demiurg, Iasi Chugerman, Samuel – Lester F. Ward – The American Aristotle, A Summary and Interpretation of His Sociology, Duke University Press, Durham, N.C. Jouco C. Bleeker and Geo Widengren – Historia Religionum II, Religious of the Present Martin, David – A Sociology of English Religion. Ionut-Andrei Manea  

The decline of religious belief in the 20th century  “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”. James Joyce   Immense and often unexpected shifts of events were the most obvious characteristics of the period (1890-1940). These were accompanied not only by intense physical and emotional pain but also by a breakdown of assumptions about stability, certainty, continuity and tradition. These shifts caused confusion about the center and the periphery, about whether there were still such centers, and if there were where these could be located, and about the relation between centers and margins. All these questions failed to turn into positive answers precisely because shifts of power were shattering centers to pieces and made the relation between center and periphery hard to pin down. The fact that the Victorian age had been long and relatively stable, still attached to the principles and values of continuity and tradition, made this sense of crisis feel, sound and look even more rampant in the early 20th century, especially in the aftermath of Queen Victoria’s death in 1901, followed by King Edward’s death at an interval of only nine years, in 1910, when King George V came to the throne. Britain was not alone to experience this: in the rest of the Continent and even in US previous societies had tended to have a visible center and to produce centrally located cultures on a model provided by God as the supreme authority, and by extrapolation, the monarch as the supreme authority in human societies. Professor Codrin Liviu Cutitaru from the University of Iassy offers an edifying overview on the matter:   The King represents God on earth (from the teachings of the Old Testament where we learn that God approves at one point on the suggestion that people should be led by kings and no longer by judges and priests) and his unnatural, violent elimination from the top may push the whole order of things into immediate devastating chaos (example of such situations appear in different Shakespearian tragedies, where Kings are killed and substituted by impostors; this happens in Hamlet and Macbeth, where Claudius and Macbeth replace violently their monarchs and eventually bring disaster into the social and political order of their countries). In other words, modernity marked a paradigm shift from the continuity of tradition to the disruption of it and this engulfed status quo could not have remained without repercussions at the level of religious feeling. In the medieval times, modernus was used as an antonym of antiquus. Modernus was anybody whose name descended from a venerable past. Antiquitas stood for the essential uniqueness of tradition, whose continuity had not been broken by the advent of Jesus Christ. This paradigm of continuity could hold only by dint of strong faith, which was faith in divine authority. The challenge of this faith came along with the critical spirit of the Renaissance, and acquired even more force when the Romantic thinkers grew aware that the religious spirit was in dissolution. The myth of God’s death inflamed the spirit of the Romantics long before Nietzsche made it the main point of his prophetic doctrine. In this respect, Nietzsche fathered the profound sense of a crisis brought about by the death of authority voiced with so much zeal by the early 20th century. As Matei Calinescu argues, “the crisis of religion gives birth to a new religion of crisis, in which all the insoluble contradictions of the Judeo-Christian tradition are simultaneously brought to discussion in order to shake any sense of despair and sufferance”. The spirit of the age also affected Catholicism. Politically it was expressed in the separation between state and church which had occurred during the French Revolution. Starting with the second half of the nineteenth century, the church was almost everywhere in fact and in law separated from the state. There were some exceptions the most important being those churches which had been state-churches since the sixteenth century in countries not affected by the revolution, namely England and the Scandinavian countries. This contingency of events caused a confusion of minds which appeared less definitive in the second half of the 20th century. The will of the Catholic clergy towards centralization unto Rome continued. To be continued Ionut Manea

In tracking down the post-communist structure one ought to be aware and reconsider or reflect upon the emergence of communism as such. In “The New Encyclopedia Britannica”, vol.3, communism is described as “a political system or social organization based on common property or upon the equal distribution of wealth. The term is also applied to political programs and movements inspired by Marxist-Leninist principles, that seek to bring about such types of social organization”.  P496 The origins of the idea of communism lie deep in Western thought. The idea of a classless society, in which all the means of production and distribution are owned by the community as a whole and from which any traces of a state have disappeared, has long held a fascination for human beings. Many of the utopias described in literature (e.g. Thomas More’s Utopia ) grasp for the common ownership to some extent. Communism came into developing a new meaning in 1848 with the publication of the “Communist Manifesto” by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. According to the Manifesto, all human history had been a long, protracted struggle between an exploiting class, the capitalists in the present age, and an exploited class, the workers (the wage-slaves), the proletariat. This historical struggle enters its critical stage with the dominance of capitalism backed by the Industrial Revolution. Here it is the point when one ought to dissociate Karl Marx from his early predecessor Friedrich Hegel. For the latter one, things of the Spirit dominated the material world, that is (mind over matter), whereas for the former one, matter stood alone in the struggle with the spiritual world (matter over spirit), or in a postmodern view (infrastructure over suprastructure). As I have mentioned above, the advent of industrialism/industrialization sharpened the class-difference or class-war causing the working classes everywhere to realize their oppression at the hands of the capitalists together with their common interests. “A Spectre is haunting Europe – the Spectre of Communism”. Or, in the final lines: “The Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite”. Extracts from “The Communist Manifesto” However, this most anticipated revolution did not boost overnight causing Karl Mark to reevaluate his thinking. In “The Critique of the Gotha Program” 1875, Marx wrote that “the revolution will not immediately bring about the ideal, classless, communist state. Prolonged birth pangs will accompany its emergence from capitalist society, and a period of adaptation, the dictatorship of the proletariat will be necessary”. The materialization of the program took the form of a political party that sought to implement the above-mentioned articles unto stark, daily life. A detailed examination of the history of the communist regimes under the form of political parties is beyond the scope of my presentation. It suffices to say, nevertheless, that it covered most of the 20th century political life in Eastern Europe causing irremediable mental and physical damages. …to be continued Ionut-Andrei Manea