News of the Earth

"Since the establishment of the Group of 100 in 1985, Homero Aridjis has been an inspiration to fellow environmentalists all over the world. That combination of lyrical intensity, unwavering personal commitment, and deep moral principles has made him a most formidable advocate for change both in Mexico itself and internationally"
---Jonathon Porritt
Founder Director
Forum for the Future
Co-Director of the Prince of Wales's Business & Sustainability Programme
Chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission between 2000 and 2009.

"No one in Mexico has made a more important contribution to protecting that country's environment, an effort that has had ripple effects throughout the world," says
---Lester Brown, the US environmentalist and founder of both the Worldwatch and Earth Policy institutes.

"The American writer Pete Hamill, Aridjis's longtime friend, says: 'Homero has not felt, as Vaclav Havel has in the Czech Republic, that you either have a commitment to civil society or to art. He's been able to continue to do both. In Mexico in particular, there's a constant conflict between the issues of environment and the realities of the way business is done. Homero brings an amazing decency – and great effectiveness – to a subject that can make people absolutely cynical...Yet,' adds Hamill, 'Aridjis also manages to find the time and quiet necessary for writing...His poetry has what I would call an innocent eye, the kind of talent that makes me think of Wordsworth. He's not afraid to look at a landscape as if he's the first person ever to see it, with an eye that's not jaded – a direct encounter with what's being observed. Reading Octavio Paz's poetry, I get the sense there's a professor leaning over his shoulder. Reading Homero, there's a bird leaning over his shoulder."
---Pete Hamill in "Poetry in Motion," Dick Russell, The Amicus Journal.

Jacob Scherr, an NRDC staff attorney who has worked closely with Aridjis, describes him as "extraordinarily courageous, willing to speak out in circumstances where he's really put his own well-being on the line. This is someone who doesn't have to do this. Homero is one of the planet's great environmental heroes."
---Jacob Scherr, Director, Global Strategy & Advocacy, Natural Resources Defense Council, Washington, DC, The Amicus Journal.

The Group of 100 is a movement of conscience that strives to change our relationship with nature. Thanks to this group, presided over by the saintly poet Homero Aridjis, in our world we can still enjoy the magic of monarch butterflies, sea turtles and gray whales.
---Alejandro Jodorowsky, Chilean-French filmmaker, playwright, actor, author, comics writer and spiritual guru.

The great strength of Aridjis's work is the faith it transmits in a creative virtue of the world, pessimism notwithstanding, and in the possibility of saving it thanks to environmentalism. Aridjis's writings are not gratuitous, they are militant. Their source is the reality of the natural world.

---J.M.G. Le Clézio, Nobel Prize in Literature 2008, in Le Nouvel Observateur.

"Our journey together to visit those great gentle creatures [the grey whales] was one I will live with forever."
---Pierce Brosnan, actor and environmental activist.

Homero Aridjis, one of Latin America’s foremost literary figures, was born in Contepec, Michoacan. Many of his forty-five books of poetry and prose have been translated into fifteen languages, and his writing has been recognized with important literary prizes in Mexico, Italy, France, the United States, and Serbia. Formerly Mexican Ambassador to Switzerland, The Netherlands, and, most recently, UNESCO, during six years he was international president of PEN International and is now president emeritus. As founder (in 1985) and president of the Group of 100, an environmentalist association of writers, artists, and scientists, he has received awards from the United Nations (Global 500 Award), the Orion Society, Mikhail Gorbachev and Global Green USA and the Natural Resources Defense Council. He has been a visiting professor at Indiana, New York, and Columbia universities and the University of California, (Irvine). His most recent books are the novel Esmirna en llamas (Fondo de Cultura Economica), Noticias de la Tierra, (with Betty Ferber), a collection of his writings and pioneering work on the environment (Random House Mondadori), Tiempo de ángeles/A Time of Angels (Fondo de Cultura Económica and City Lights) and Del cielo y sus maravillas, de la tierra y sus miserias (Fondo de Cultura Económica). Eyes to See Otherwise (New Directions), Solar Poems (City Lights) and 1492 The Life and Times of Juan Cabezon of Castile (University of New Mexico Press) are among other books available in English.

Betty Ferber (Aridjis) born in New York and a graduate of Bryn Mawr College has served as the International Coordinator of the Grupo de los Cien (Group of 100) since its founding in 1985. She established and maintained contacts with individuals and organizations outside of Mexico and devised strategies for working together on issues as diverse as NAFTA, sea turtle protection, saving the gray whale birthing grounds at Laguna San Ignacio, monarch butterfly protection, opposition to dams on the Usumacinta River, the fate of tropical forests in Amazonia and Lacandonia, air pollution and climate change. Along with her husband, Homero Aridjis, she was honored by Mikhail Gorbachev and Global Green USA with the Green Cross Millennium Award for International Environmental Leadership. She has translated three novels by Homero Aridjis into English: 1492 The Life and Times of Juan Cabezon of Castile, The Lord of the Last Days: Visions of the Year 1000 and Persephone. With Canadian/Irish poet George McWhirter she coedited Eyes to See Otherwise, Selected Poetry of Homero Aridjis. With Homero Aridjis she organized three acclaimed international poetry festivals held in Mexico (Morelia, 1981, Mexico City, 1982 and 1987).