Forests in Kenya, Indonesia and Hawaii have a chance at better US policy because of who, and what an Obama forest is. His worldly upbringing means he knows what some of the world’s most beautiful landscapes once looked like. Obama lived six (much more forested that today) years of his childhood in Jakarta, Indonesia! He also attended school in Hawaii where he’d of likely noticed the rapid paving over of that island paradise. And perhaps in his time in office he’ll return to Jakarta and speak for the forest he once knew that are now gone? And imagine Obama and Kenya’s Nobel prize winner Mathaai talking about what they remember of Kenya’s forest when his father was still alive?

Perhaps too, Obama is smarter than being a fooled accomplice in the falsity / duplicity of industrial forestry? Perhaps he will choose to defend trees alive today rather than defend trees that businessman promise to grow tomorrow? Point is, the most challenging part of saving the world’s forest is the people’s awarness of what that means! What does saving the forest looks like? How does it feel? How can industry deception no longer fool us? As the articles below best illustrate: Obama has the potential / character that it takes to support big dreams and big plans for citizen-based forest preservation that’s free of industry friendly shenanigans! And if this really does happen it’ll be because of the hard of work of people all over the world who say enough is enough! –Editor, Forest Policy Research.org

Every morning at 5, his mother would wake him to take correspondence classes for fear he would forget his English. It was in Indonesia, Obama said, where he first became aware of abject poverty and despair “It left a very strong mark on me living there because you got a real sense of just how poor folks can get,” he said. “You’d have some army general with 24 cars and if he drove one once then eight servants would come around and wash it right away. But on the next block, you’d have children with distended bellies who just couldn’t eat.”

After six years in Indonesia, Obama was sent back to the United States to live with his maternal grandparents in Hawaii in preparation for college. It was then that he began to correspond with his father, a senior economist for the Kenyan finance ministry who recounted intriguing tales of an African heritage that Obama knew little about. Obama treasured his father’s tales of walking miles to school, using a machete to hack a path through the elephant grass – the legends and traditions of the Luo tribe, a proud people who inhabited the shores of Lake Victoria.

He still carries a passbook that belonged to his grandfather, an herbalist who was the first family member to leave the small Kenyan village of Alego, move to the city and don Western clothes. “He was a cook and he used to have to carry this passbook to work for the English,” Obama recalls. “At the age of 46, it had this description of him that said, `He’s a coloured boy, he’s responsible and he’s a good cook.'” Two generations later, at the most widely respected legal journal in the country, the grandson of the cook is giving the orders. At Occidental College in Los Angeles, Obama studied international relations and spent much of his time helping to organize anti-apartheid protests.

In his junior year, he transferred to Columbia University, “more for what (New York City) had to offer than for the education,” he said. After graduating, Obama landed a job writing manuals for a New York-based international trade publication. Once his college loans were paid off, he took a $13,000-a-year job as director for the Developing Communities Project, a church-based social action group in Chicago. There, he and a coalition of ministers set out to improve living conditions in poor neighbourhoods plagued by crime and high unemployment. Obama helped form a tenants’ rights group in the housing projects and established a job-training program. “I took a chance and it paid off,” he said. “It was probably the best education that I’ve ever had.” http://www.thestar.com/news/uselection/article/572960

———

Thousands of ordinary Americans lined the tracks yesterday to see Barack Obama travel the final stretch of his journey to the White House by train, cheering him on with fluttering flags, waves, and handmade signs offering prayers. Bundled against bitter cold, they stood on overpasses, huddled in clearings and backyards, abandoned their cars on the side of the road, lifted children on their shoulders, and took cell-phone pictures from rooftops and ladders.At a rally in Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station at the beginning of the 137-mile trip, Obama vowed to dedicate his term as the 44th president to “perfecting our union,” repeating themes of renewal and hope there and at stops in Wilmington and Baltimore before chilly yet exuberant crowds. The journey was meant to evoke Abraham Lincoln’s travel by train to his inaugural in 1861, and Obama, as he did throughout his campaign, paid tribute yesterday to his political hero by echoing his words. But just as much, he summoned the resilient fighting spirit of the nation’s founders.

“While our problems may be new, what is required to overcome them is not,” Obama said in Philadelphia. “What is required is the same perseverance and idealism our founders displayed. What is required is a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation but in our own lives, from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry – an appeal not to our easy instincts but to our better angels.” http://www.philly.com/inquirer/front_page/20090118_On_to_History.html