Wangari Maathai, Founder of The Greenbelt Movement Nobel Peace Laureate The challenge is to restore the home of the tadpoles and give back to our children a world of beauty and wonder. Today, over 50 years later, the stream has dried up, women walk long distances for water, which is not always clean, and children will never know what they have lost. This will happen if we see the need to revive our sense of belonging to a larger family of life, with which we have shared our evolutionary process. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own – indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder. Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system. This is that common attitude that everything on this Earth was put here for use. The biggest enemy we face is anthropocentrism.
The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all, our most pleasing responsibility The binding virtue between these two stances, these two darings, these two activisms is Justice – and its moral and existential imperatives.īut as I have said above, I have not come to praise Nnimmo Bassey, but to show how his conscientiousness seeks to redeem our world, how his words and declarations strive to sustain our sanity how his Pen protects our Planet. That man who stood up for Democracy is the same one who keeps standing for the preservation of the Earth, our Home. When Bassey calls Earth our ‘Home’, he does so as an architect who thinks like a poet, and a poet with the intricate figurations of the architect.ĭear listeners, I have come neither to praise Nnimmo Bassey nor to sell him to the world.I just thought you should know the artist whose risky fight for democracy and human dignity during those years of Nigeria’s murderous military dictatorship produced a collection titled Poems on the Run at the time when the poet himself was the one in hiding when General Abacha’s hitmen were out to thrust the bayonet in the mouth of the Human Rights activist, and that unpaid, unprotected warrior who enlisted himself in the Salvation Army of this Earth, Our Earth. A remarkable artistic impulse serves as the organizing principle in Bassey’s multiple thinkings and doings. For, in the last analysis, what is an architect if not that thinker-doer who lives in a house before it is built? What is the visionary artist if not that curious imaginer who dreams up and fore-sees the future and its yet unborn possibilities?. And what makes him such an ‘equal opportunity’ landlord is his possession of that sympathetic imagination and boundless conscientiousness that derive from their sense and essence from intellectual polyvalence enhanced by visionary versatility.
A common thread there is to all these engagements, for Bassey the architect has designed and built for them all one large house with rooms whose doors open to one another, and whose walls are transparent on vital planes. And they would be right in thinking so for this warrior has deployed virtually every literary genre (poetry, prose fiction, faction, polemics, satire, travelogue, and journalism), all in a passionate effort at waking up slumbering Humanity to the reality of the ecological Apocalypse that is sure to result from our present environmental nonchalance and denialarising most times from power blindness and unenlightened self-interest.īut Nnimmo Bassey is so many things at one and the same time: architect by training and profession, Humanist by deep persuasion, socio-political thinker-critic by conviction, ecological warrior-activist by inclination. Those with no adequate knowledge of the depth and range of Nnimmo Bassey’s commitments in the past three decades would think that his sole preoccupation is ecological activism and the defence, protection, and preservation of the Earth.
In this keynote address presented at the 10th anniversary of Health of Mother Earth Foundation, PROFESSOR NIYI OSUNDARE notes how its founder, Nnimmo Bassey, has deployed every literary genre poetry, prose fiction, faction, polemics, satire, travelogue, and journalism to make people aware of the ecological Apocalypse that will result from our present environmental nonchalance and denial.įIRST and foremost, my resounding congratulations to Nnimmo Bassey, founder and nurturer of Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), whose ageless organization is one busy decade old this season, thus occasioning a commemoration that provides a much-needed platform for a sober consideration of the plight of this Earth, Our Earth.
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