Note correction to lead: The introduction to this story as broadcast stated that China is not a signatory of the Kyoto Protocol.  China did ratify the treaty, but like other developing countries was not required to make specific reductions in greenhouse gases.

LEAD: Negotiations on a new global climate change treaty continue to inch forward.  There’s supposed to be a draft ready by December. That’s when representatives from nearly 200 countries will meet in Copenhagen in hopes of finalizing a successor to the Kyoto protocol. That landmark treaty was supposed to begin the arduous process of turning the world’s economy away from climate-altering fossil fuels. But the US… which was the world’s major polluter at the time… never ratified the treaty. And Kyoto didn’t require China… which is now the the largest emitter of greenhouse gases… to cut its pollution.

Both of those countries are back at the negotiating table, but time is running out.  And talks last week in Bonn, Germany produced what a top UN official called only “limited progress.”

Meanwhile, people around the world continue to cope with the effects of climate change. And the news isn’t unremittingly gloomy.   In the arid Sahel region of West Africa, for instance, journalist Mark Hertsgaard recently found something of a small green miracle.  He was there researching a book on living with climate change.  And he sent us this reporter’s notebook from the tiny country of Burkina Faso.

HERTSGAARD: The paved road heading north from Burkina Faso’s capital ends in the hot, dusty town of Ouahigouya. Most locals here are farmers, scratching out a living in the savannah that stretches to the horizon on all sides. I’d come here hoping to get a glimpse of how Africa might feed itself under a hotter, more volatile climate. Africa already has the highest proportion of malnourished people on earth. And scientists say climate change will hit this continent hard.

I hadn’t meant to do any radio reporting here, but I met a local radio producer and hired him to record some interviews. I felt the story I was finding shouldn’t wait for the book.

The sound he recorded isn’t great, I’m afraid. His equipment was quite basic. Or maybe it was the ferocious heat. Across the border in Mali, it was 114 degrees in Timboctou, making it the hottest city in the world that day.

But the air felt noticeably cooler at the farm of Yacouba Sawadogo.

Sawadogo wears a brown cotton gown beneath his gray beard. He can’t read or write. But he’s pioneering a simple yet ingenious response to the rising temperatures and withering droughts plaguing his homeland.

Amidst his fields of millet and sorghum, Sawadogo is also growing trees. And the trees, he says, work wonders.

The temperature here is very different than in town, Sawadogo says. The forest acts like a pump. The air comes in hot. The shade cools it. So when the air leaves, it’s cooler.

That shade provides relief from the brutal heat. The trees’ roots also help the earth retain rainfall and their fallen leaves boost soil fertility, so crop yields have gone up. Branches provide vital firewood.

Sawadogo, I should emphasize, is not planting these trees, like Nobel Prize winner Wangari Matthai has been promoting in Kenya. Sawadogo is growing them. Planting trees is too expensive, and most of them die anyway. But young trees sprout naturally every year. What farmers are doing is nurturing those sprouts, often by digging a shallow pit that concentrates scarce rainfall onto the roots.

The trees have helped my family get through good years and bad, Sawadogo says. And he says he’s shared this information with many others. He’s used his motorbike to visit about 100 villages. Others have visited his farm to learn from him.

Mixing trees and cropland is an ancient practice in West Africa, but it fell out of favor when colonial and corrupt African governments seized trees for their own purposes. Recent reforms have reduced such thefts. Now the mixing of trees and cropland is again spreading from farmer to farmer across vast areas of Burkina Faso, Mali and neighboring Niger.

Chris Reij, a Dutch geographer who’s been working in the region for thirty years, says farmers in Niger alone have grown an estimated 200 million trees.

“This is probably the largest environmental transformation in the Sahel, if not in Africa. There are fifteen to twenty times more trees than there were in 1975, which is completely opposite of what most people tend to believe.”

Reij says this form of agro-forestry requires little outside funding… and that makes it a more sustainable response to climate change than most western aid programs.

“In the end, what will happen in Africa depends on what farmers will be able to achieve, and they should be the owners of the process, and not outsiders.”

The quiet greening of the western Sahel shows that Africans are not surrendering in the face of mounting climate change. But all forms of adaptation have their limits. If the outside world does not do its part—by dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions—even the most resilient African farmers will find it hard to manage. Meanwhile Yacuba Sawadogo is putting his faith in trees.

Trees are like lungs, he says. If we do not protect them and increase their numbers, the earth will fall apart.

For The World, this is Mark Hertsgaard, Ouahigouya, Burkina Faso.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

LISA MULLINS: This is The World. I’m Lisa Mullins. Negotiations on a new global climate change treaty continued to inch forward. There’s supposed to a draft ready by December. That’s when representatives from nearly 200 countries will meet in Copenhagen in hopes of finalizing a successor to the Kyoto protocol. That landmark treaty was supposed to kick start an arduous process turning the world’s economy away from climate-altering fossil fuels. But major polluters such as the United States and China never signed on to Kyoto. Both of those countries are back at the negotiating table but time is running out and last week in Bonn, Germany produced what a top UN official called only “limited progress.” Meanwhile people around the world continue to cope with the effects of climate change and the news is not unremittingly gloomy. In the arid Sahel region of West Africa for instance journalist Mark Hertsgaard recently found something of a small green miracle. He was there researching a book on living with climate change. He sent us this reporter’s notebook from the tiny country of Burkina Faso.

MARK HERTSGAARD: The paved road heading north from Burkina Faso’s capital ends here – in the hot dusty town of Ouahigouya. Most locals are farmers scratching out a living in the savannah that stretches to the horizon on all sides. I come here hoping to get a glimpse of how Africa might feed itself under a hotter more volatile climate. Africa already has the highest proportion of malnourished people on earth and climate change, scientists say, will hit this continent hard. I hadn’t meant to do any radio reporting here but I met a local radio producer and hired him to record some interviews. The sound he recorded isn’t great I’m afraid. His equipment was quite basic. Or maybe it was the ferocious heat. Across the border in Mali it was 114 Degrees in Timbuktu making it the hottest city in the world that day. But the air felt noticeably cooler at the farm of Yacuba Sawadogo.

YACUBA SAWADOGO: [SPEAKING MOORE]

HERTSGAARD: Sawadogo wears a brown cotton gown beneath his grey beard. He cannot read or write but he’s pioneering a simple yet ingenious response to the rising temperatures and withering draughts plaguing his homeland. Amidst his fields of millet and sorghum Sawadogo is also growing trees and the trees he says work wonders.

SAWADOGO: [SPEAKING MOORE]

HERTSGAARD: The temperature here is very different from than in town, Sawadogo says. The forest acts like a pump. The air comes in hot. The shade cools it. So when the air leaves it’s cooler. That shade provides relief from the brutal heat. The trees roots help the earth retain rainfall and their fallen leaves boost soil fertility so crop yields have gone up. Branches provide vital firewood. Sawadogo I should emphasize is not planting these trees like Nobel Prize winner Wangari Matthai has been promoting in Kenya. Sawadogo is growing them. Planting trees is too expensive and most of them die anyway. But young trees sprout naturally every year. What farmers are doing is nurturing those sprouts – often by digging a shallow pit that concentrates scarce rainfall onto the roots.

SAWADOGO: [SPEAKING MOORE]

HERTSGAARD: The trees have helped my family get through good years and bad Sawadogo says and he shared this information with many others. He’s used his motorbike to visit about 100 villages. Others have visited his farm to learn.

SAWADOGO: [SPEAKING MOORE]

HERTSGAARD: Mixing trees and cropland is an ancient practice in West Africa but it fell out of favor when colonial and corrupt African governments began seizing trees for their own purposes. Recent reforms have reduced such thefts. Now the mixing of trees and cropland is again spreading from farmer to farmer across vast areas of Burkina Faso, Mali, and neighboring Niger where farmers have grown an estimated 200 million trees.

CHRIS REIJ: This is probably the largest positive environmental transformation in the Sahel in not in Africa. There are now 15 to 20 times more trees then there were in 1975 which is completely opposite of what most people tend to believe.

HERTSGAARD: Chris Reij, a Dutch geographer who’s been working in the western Sahel since the 1970s, says this form of agro-forestry requires little outside funding and that makes it a more sustainable response to climate change then most western aid programs.

REIJ: In the end, what will happen in Africa depends on what farmers will be able to achieve and they should be the owners of the process and not outsiders.

HERTSGAARD: The quiet greening of the western Sahel shows that Africans are not surrendering in the face of mounting climate change. But all forms of adaptation have their limits. If the outside world does not do its part by dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions, even the most resilient African farmers will find it hard to manage. Meanwhile Yacuba Sawadogo is trusting in trees.

SAWADOGO: [SPEAKING MOORE]

HERTSGAARD: Trees are like lungs, he says. If we do not protect them and increase their numbers the earth will fall apart. For The World this Mark Hertsgaard, Ouahigouya, Burkina Faso.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Armitage Gone! Dance’s US tour

Concord Academy performances

This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

LISA MULLINS: Dance and music are key ingredients in the life of another American, choreographer Karole Armitage. She is well known in Europe too, having spent a lot of her life and career there. Armitage takes her choreography in unexpected directions. Cason point, her signature punk ballets. Her group, Armitage Gone Dance is now beginning a tour of the United States and Europe. Karole Armitage came to our studios to talk about her work, and the kind of music that she’s is attracted to. And that includes the work of late Hungarian composer Gyorg Ligeti. Karole Armitage used his music to create a dance called Ligeti Essays.

[MUSIC CLIP]

KAROLE ARMITAGE: What Ligeti did in this music, was he took a lot of folk traditions from Hungary, and he combined them with influences from Asia. And this made this very peculiar world of sound and feeling, that is very subtle and dreamy. And in this particular case, the dancers are carrying lanterns. You know, it’s kind of like moonlit, and it’s just about the beautiful feeling of nature and culture coming together.

[MUSIC CLIP]

LISA MULLINS: So when we take music like this, how do you match it with movement?

KAROLE ARMITAGE: Well, Juxtaposition position is a huge thing that I’m interested in. Collision, Juxtaposition position, accidents.

LISA MULLINS: This is the punk ballet choreographer?

KAROLE ARMITAGE: That’s right. It’s the punk side. You know, I like extremes, and I like things that are extremely sensuous and romantic, and I like things that are really tough. And so, that’s what makes it interesting because you’re talking about the complexity of being human this way.

[MUSIC CLIP]

KAROLE ARMITAGE: So the dance has its own independent line, but at the same time, it is closely, intimately connected to the music. Because if it’s literal, it’s very dull and boring.

LISA MULLINS: Literal meaning what?

KAROLE ARMITAGE: Literal if you’re like falling pam-pam-pam-pam, like Beethoven. You’re moving your arms, pam-pam-pam-punch, for example. That is boring, but when you do something that is interweaving with it, so there’re two things connecting. Then it becomes this very sensual, very interesting dialogue between the two.

LISA MULLINS: Now interestingly, you also worked with Gyorg Ligeti’s son. This is a man, in fact, that we have had on the show before, his name is Lucas Ligeti. Tell us about your collaboration with him and how you first discovered him.

KAROLE ARMITAGE: Well, I had worked with the father’s music, and he was very, very influenced by African polyrhythms and the thought in African music, which was quite unusual. And his son has sort of taken that another step further. Lucas has spent a great deal of time in Africa, and he actually formed a band that’s called Burkina Electric, he’s one of the co-founders.

LISA MULLINS: From Burkina Faso?

KAROLE ARMITAGE: They’re from Burkina Faso, and they use traditional Burkina Bay music, and they combine it with western techno and electronics.

[MUSIC CLIP]

KAROLE ARMITAGE: So, I was asked by a Sicilian Prince to make a new piece for an outdoor Greek theater.

LISA MULLINS: Oh, him again.

KAROLE ARMITAGE: Yes, him again, exactly. This wonderful man, and he’s run many opera houses in Italy. And he asked me to do a piece based on Dionysus, he wanted something mythic. And I though, you know, there’s something about the way that Burkina Electric sound has, that deep visceral connection to the earth, at the same time that it’s extremely modern and has this technology. And what better way to think about Dionysus, and ritual, and myth, than using something from Africa and combining it with my, sort of, virtuoso ballet.

LISA MULLINS: Can you give us the image?

KAROLE ARMITAGE: Well, for example, the lead singer, Mai, [PH] who’s quite extraordinary. She’s as much a dancer as she is a singer, and she is singing in the center doing a traditional African dance. And with her are two men, and one woman, doing the traditional, and surrounding her in complicated almost pulsing geometry are 10 other dancers going in and out doing this kind of wild ballet. So you see these two worlds coming together with the same rhythm, and some how the same accent. So that even though it’s dense and complex, there’s like order within the disorder.

[MUSIC CLIP]

LISA MULLINS: Do you find that the interpretation on the part of the dancer is different, depending on where they’re from?

KAROLE ARMITAGE: Yes. And this is an interesting thing, and this is part o the reason I like having people from all different parts of the world. I have two Japanese dancers, and there’s doubt that they are particularly good at making movement that is full of curves, because their writing is full of curves. And I think the whole asymmetrical sensibility of Japanese art is very natural to them, and it’s almost got kind of curves and a feeling of nature. And of course, nature is never straight lines. And in nature is much more important in their tradition, than it is in ours. And all of this comes out in how they dance.

LISA MULLINS: I wanna send talking about Watteau duets. Tell us what Watteau duets is all about, and where the name came from.

KAROLE ARMITAGE: Watteau duets is a long, long duet in six section, where a couple does these six different duets, and it is kind of the story of a relationship. The reason it’s called the Watteau duets is because the great painter, Antoine Watteau from France, painted all these scenes of romance, courtship, in the Baroque era. And it’s, much of it is about the delightful side, but then there’s this kind of sly feeling always that this is sort of only the surface.

LISA MULLINS: And the music spans styles and time.

KAROLE ARMITAGE: The music is by composer David Linton. He was a drummer, he had never composed before, but he took, kind of, the whole history of western music and condensed it into these short little seven minute sections. And it starts with kind of Elizabethan sounds, then the next one goes to Baroque, and it goes to Romantic, it goes to Stravinsky, and then into, kind of, Henry Cowell and John Cage influence. So you have this whole encyclopedia of the history of music, which accompanies the history of this couple.

LISA MULLINS: And the band is on stage?

KAROLE ARMITAGE: They are on stage and they are fun. [LAUGHS]

LISA MULLINS: Excellent. Karole, thank you very much.

KAROLE ARMITAGE: My pleasure.

[MUSIC CLIP]

LISA MULLINS: Music from the Watteau Duets, which is gonna be presented tonight at summer stage’s dance, at Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts. There’s more information on the Armitage Gone Dance tour, at theworld.org

[MUSIC CLIP]

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.