blueprints

About River of Words | 97
handbook for river activists in Africa. The English-language term for watershed
in Africa is catchment. Lori was working on a guidebook to catchments.
The focus of a campaign in China was investigating the financing of Three
Gorges Dam. The China campaigner would stop me to quiz me about what
Berkeley faculty I knew in the business school and the economics department
who might sit on the boards of investment banks. (Poets who teach in
universities tend not to know their colleagues in the business school, and I
was no exception.) Another campaign involved support for the grassroots
movement to stop the Narmada Damin India—or at least to see that the
million people it would displace would be adequately compensated. Arundhati
Roy, the Indian novelist, had written an eloquent and scathing polemic
against the Narmada and the hydropower development policies that had
displaced millions of Indians; the office was in touch with her and monitoring
the response to acts of civil disobedience by villagers along the river.
Pamela, meanwhile, was using the nascent Internet to contact schools,
teachers, state parks, natural history museums. She and volunteers in the
office had called the arts councils of every state in the Union to tell them
about the contest. They had contacted an extensive list of grassroots environmental
organizations and sent them posters, contest materials, and invitations
to participate. She had also contacted the Academy of American
Poets, which, under director Bill Wadsworth, was in the midst of launching
another program to heighten awareness of the country’s literary heritage
and lively literary culture. The Academy had agreed to put a letter about
River of Words in the packet that every governor’s office in the country
was sending out to its local arts organizations and schools announcing the
first National Poetry Month.
it was fascinating to me to see people who actually
do things in the world doing things.
It was fascinating to me to see people who actually do things in the
world doing things. Pam—with the help of the International Rivers staff
and a committee that included Joyce Jenkins, the editor of Poetry Flash;
Mark Baldridge, who ran a public relations firm in town; Malcolm Margolin,
the publisher of Heyday Books, a house specializing in environmental
and regional writing; Amy Thomas, the owner of local bookstores; and Aleta