April 23, 2018
Ibiba DonPedro (2001-02), an award-winning journalist and activist in Nigeria, has just published four books on the country’s Niger Delta region. The books, she writes, “capture the different facets of the region’s tragic narrative, especially the discord and disruptive impact of the production of crude oil on the lives of the people of the region, as well as the environment” — and decry the “deeply flawed federal structure” that allows privileged groups “access to oil wealth and lifestyles of opulence and waste while the people of Niger Delta communities live in squalor and deprivation.”
“In all this despair and misery, however,” Ibiba continues, “is a message of hope that captures the boundless capacity of the human spirit, of youth, men, and women when they stand firm to create the space within which to reclaim their humanity against soul-destroying odds.”
The books are “Oil In Water,” “Out of a Bleak Landscape,” “Scavengers and Real Avengers of the Niger Delta,” and “Contested Grounds.” They’re available at Patabah Books in Lagos and at the Ikeja and Lagos airports.
Erich Hoyt (1985-86) has made Library Journal’s list of best reference titles of 2017 with his 22nd book, “Encyclopedia of Whales, Dolphins, and Porpoises” (Firefly Books). The book grew out of Erich’s 2015 article for Hakai magazine on the revolution in whale and dolphin research since the 1970s.
Erich is founder and co-chair of the IUCN Marine Mammal Protected Areas Task Force, which works with regional groups to identify habitats for the 130 species of marine mammals, including whales, dolphins, pinnipeds, sirenians, otters, and polar bears. (Its e-atlas, along with downloadable papers and reports, can be found at marinemammalhabitat.org.)
And he continues to direct whale research in Kamchatka and the Commander Islands, in Russia, working with 15 Russian collaborators who started as students in a program he co-founded in 2000. Papers on their pioneering work with Russian killer whales, Baird’s beaked whales, and humpback whales are posted at his ResearchGate site.
After his fellowship, Erich taught writing at MIT as visiting lecturer, and met his future wife, Dr. Sarah Wedden, then on a NATO postdoc at Harvard Medical School. They moved to Scotland in 1989, then — with their four children — to the Dorset coast of England in 2013.
In São Paulo, Brazil, Nira Worcman (1988-89) helps lead an active MIT Sloan club, and nowadays she is spreading the word about the school’s Inclusive Innovation Challenge, which awards more than $1 million to global entrepreneurs using technology to drive economic opportunity for workers. (Registration ends on May 1.)
After her Knight year, Nira did her master’s in the Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program at NYU, and continued to write for Brazilian and American publications, including Technology Review, Popular Science, and Super Interessante. She returned to São Paulo and worked in public relations, then became head of communications at Roche in Latin America and later at Bristol-Myers Squibb. She is an associate director at the Brazilian P.R. agency Art Presse and a senior consultant at Sherlock Communications, an agency specializing in international clients in Brazil and Latin America.
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