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GAIA wishes everyone a happy and safe end of 2011. It has been a year of remarkable struggles and successes in our collective efforts to challenge waste and pollution, and to promote healthy, sustainable solutions. We're pleased to share some of the most recent successes—including victories in Brazil and the United States, and zero waste events in Italy. We're also pleased to profile Alliance for a Clean Environment (ACE) in Western Australia, and share their recent victories.
In "Birthing Justice: Women Creating Economic and Social Alternatives," 12 women from movements around the world invite us into their lives, sharing their vision of what the world can and must become, and showing us what they and their community are doing to build that world. From Idla Martines de Souza organizing with the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, to Emem Okon building peace in middle of a resource war in Nigeria, to Juana Ferrer and Via Campesina turning towards food sovereignty to end gender violence, each of these women have important wisdom and vision to share with us all.
Other Worlds allies at
As organizations return home and recover from the mobilizations at the recent climate talks, it's hard not to see the meeting as a loss for developing nations, indigenous peoples, and planet Earth. Civil society organizations got their first sense that the meeting was not going to address real solutions to climate change when the negotiating document for the conference was released at the end of November. After the Copenhagen talks ended last year, many grassroots organizations felt that their voices had been excluded from the negotiations. In response, they organized a 
Two new stories out this week highlight the ways indigenous peoples are protecting their land from environmentally destructive mining and energy projects, while leading the way towards sustainable and renewable power. On October 21st, organizers in the municipality of Santa Cruz del Quiché, Guatemala undertook a massive task: at 93 voting centers across the municipality, they consulted 98% of the adult residents about whether or not they supported mining, dams, and other destructive mega-projects in their communities. 
The 
When we think of electrical engineers installing complex community solar systems, we rarely picture rural illiterate women, but that is exactly who have been at the forefront of bringing solar power to some of the poorest communities in Africa and Asia. These "barefoot solar engineers" are chosen democratically by their communities to study at the
In part II of an interview, Chavannes Jean-Baptiste discusses the role that agriculture can play in Haiti in addressing both the environmental and food crises. (See 
Many of the problems that face our planet seem overwhelming and unsolvable, until suddenly one day they aren't. Whether through community organizing, legislation, or scientific innovation, problems as pervasive as polio, child labor, or access to voting rights can go from being seen as unchangeable problems to a thing of the past from one generation to the next.