During the last five years, the struggles of Bolivia’s
indigenous community against government corruption and
globalization have garnered unprecedented visibility for the
nation around the world. As an aid worker living in Bolivia,
Powers did not just witness the change; he was immersed in the
action, forced to juggle the country’s internal conflict with
his environmental organization’s mission of saving the rain
forest. By “thinking locally and acting globally,” he forges a
delicate partnership with Indians and multinational energy
corporations to designate a swath of the Amazon forest for
absorbing greenhouse gases. While matters of politics and the
environment provide the framework for the book, much of the
story is focused on the friendships he builds through genuine
curiosity and emotion as he attempts to truly understand the
needs of the people around him. What results is a deeply
personal and informative chronicle of Powers’s ambitions, the
Indians’ ambitions and perhaps most importantly in a country
as physically diverse and dramatic as Bolivia, nature’s
ambitions. Although more background on Bolivia would have been
helpful, the book succeeds in using the country’s recent
history to reveal how the worldwide battle for increased
economic equality and environmental conservation operates
locally.
—Publishers Weekly
Powers wrote about his experiences helping manage sustainable
development projects in Liberia in
Blue Clay People (2005) and now presents a piquant
and provocative report on his work with Bolivia’s largest
conservation organization. Writing with self-deprecating humor
and fluid understanding of the complex dynamics at work in
this persistently poor land, Powers exposes the environmental
and cultural destruction wrought by multinationals and the
corresponding–and quite remarkable–uprisings of Bolivia’s
indigenous peoples in defense of the rain forests, their
physical and spiritual home and the habitat for endangered
species. Bolivia is the site of the world’s largest Kyoto
Protocol rain-forest experiment and pioneering debt-for-nature
and carbon-credit projects, and Powers is keenly sensitive to
the realities, possibilities, and paradoxes inherent in
Bolivia’s revolutionary politics and environmental
innovations. By profiling a courageous and pragmatic Indian
activist, tracking complicated disputes over land ownership
and use, and detailing such green endeavors as “eco-wood”
production, Powers chronicles Bolivia’s success, against all
odds, in leading the way toward creation of
biosphere-sustaining and socially just societies.
—Booklist
“Powers new book, “Whispering in the Giant’s Ear” is a
rip-roaring chronicle of the struggles and compromises, doubts
and determination needed to implement the Kyoto accords—an
international agreement setting targets for industrialized
countries to cut their greenhouse-gas emissions—in
Bolivia.”
— Newsweek