1. One of my favorite eco-lodges in the Caribbean is the elegant Bucuti Beach Resort, which sits on a wide expanse of sugary sand on the leeward side of Aruba. Your water is heated with solar panels, and the suites are built from recycled materials with ample, comfortable furniture made of sustainably farmed wood and recycled plastic. A local conservation NGO works with the resort to preserve turtle nesting habitat and help guide guests through the extraordinary experience of watching nesting mothers and ensuring that their hatchlings find their way to the sea.
www.bucuti.com/

2. The Chumbe Island Coral Park is Tanzania’s first reef sanctuary. The park manages seven self-sustaining eco-bungalows built using local mangrove poles, with palm-thatched roofs, each with its own rainwater catchment and composting toilets. Shower water is recycled through plant beds to prevent seepage into the reef. The sanctuary supports 90 percent of all species recorded in the region. With almost 400 species of fish, every day of snorkeling is a good day!
www.yourtravelchoice.org/2010/03/chumbe-island-marine-ecotourism-at-its-best/

3. If you stay at the Baghvan Pench Jungle Lodge in the heart of India, you will help fund sustainable agriculture in the area and also experience rare beasts such as the magnificent Bengal tiger. Set in the Pench National Park at the foothills of the Satpura Range in Madhya Pradesh, you will be immersed in the sights and sounds of the Indian jungle, including four-horned antelope, leopards, sloth bears, and striped hyenas. The &Beyond Foundation, owners of the lodge, use organic gardens and gray water systems to supply the lodge.
www.andbeyondindia.com/

4. For an entire country that is an ecotourism destination, try Bhutan. Instituted in the 1970s, the Gross National Happiness (GNH) index makes it the only country in the world to measure progress through happiness. GNH and sustainability guide Bhutan’s tourism industry. One of the least visited places on earth and the only Vajrayana Buddist country, this Last Shangri-La is one of the top biodiversity hotspots on the planet.
www.bridgetobhutan.com

5. You may encounter a mantled howler monkey or a keel-billed toucan when you venture out from the Selva Verde Lodge & Rainforest Reserve in Costa Rica. Of the country’s many eco-lodges promoting sustainable tourism, this one stands out. The lodge works with the Sarapiqui Conservation Learning Center to promote conservation and environmental education. Birders, naturalists and zipliners will love the 500 acre preserve. www.selvaverde.com/lang/en/

6. Tassia Lodge is part of the Lekurruki Community Conservation Ranch in the northern frontier lands of Kenya. The rooms are built not on, but into the edge of an escarpment overlooking a vast, open African plain. Walking safaris are a welcome change. On the drive from the small airstrip of Lewa, you’re likely to see giraffes, gazelles, zebras, and maybe a troop of baboons. Visitors describe the place as magical and the owners as eco warriors obsessed helping local communities, such as the Maasi. www.tassiasafaris.com/page2/page2.html

7. A waterfall, a lush, tropical rainforest, and the wild, rugged shoreline of Dominica, W.I., are a few of the amazing attractions at Jungle Bay Resort & Spa. The spacious wooden cottages, elevated on stilts, are nestled into the undisturbed forest along footpaths and stone stairways. Local farmers provide fresh ingredients for the Caribbean cuisine. The owners helped found a local NGO, the South East Tourism Development Committee, to preserve the rainforest while providing economic development.
www.junglebaydominica.com/

8. From the Cotton Tree Lodge in Belize you can get up close and personal with the artisans who make Cotton Tree Fair Trade Chocolate, or you can scuba dive in a protected caye of the Mesoamerican barrier reef, the second largest reef system in the world. You can also take a canopied Mexican skiff down the Moho River and experience the mangrove ecosystems that line the river’s banks. When you get there, snorkel the shallow, crystal clear waters and see corals, fish, turtles, and lobsters. www.cottontreelodge.com/community/cotton-tree-chocolate.html

9. Sarinbuana Eco Lodge is located on the slopes of Mount Batukaru in central Bali. Take a tour of the lodge’s edible gardens, walk along the edges of rice patties to the nearest temple, or trek along mountain paths through the rainforest where you might encounter monkeys, black eagles, armored anteaters and much more. You’ll share the lodge with only 15 other guests, but you won’t find a television.
www.baliecolodge.com/

10. If you want to experience the unhurried life of indigenous villagers you can stay up to five days with the Embera Puru along the banks of the Rio San Juan de Pequeni in Panama. Your guide will pick you up in Panama City and travel upriver from Chagres National Park through the jungle in a dugout canoe. The traditional housing does not offer showers or flush toilets, but you can learn how to weave a basket, and villagers will share their rituals, music, and meals of fried plantains, fish, and chicken.
panamaboutique.com/content/embera-village-tours

Five Fordham University faculty members have won 2007 National Jesuit Book Awards given out by Alpha Sigma Nu and the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities.

Receiving the awards were Robin Andersen, Ph.D., professor of communication and media studies, for A Century of Media, A Century of War (Peter Lang, 2006); Jane Bolgatz, Ph.D., assistant professor of social studies education, for Talking Race in the Classroom (Teachers College Press, 2005); and Albert N. Greco, Ed.D., professor of marketing, Clara Rodríguez, professor of sociology, and Robert M. Wharton, Ph.D., area chair of management systems, for The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21st Century (Stanford Business Books, 2007).

“We are very honored,” said Rodríguez, whose book analyzes the sometimes conflicting cultural and commercial themes that influence all segments of the $54 billion book industry in the United States. “This book began as a follow-up to an earlier classic work by Lewis A. Coser, Charles Kadushin and William Powell. … It then evolved into something a little different.”

Greco said the book is unique because he and his co-authors studied the cultural and commercial forces of the book industry, something few academics have done.

“I assume our empirical data and analysis and our comprehensive understanding of the industry might have interested the reviewers,” he said.

Bolgatz, who taught language and social studies for five years at an Iowa high school while working on her doctoral degree, said her book is geared at helping teachers develop the knowledge, skill and confidence to successfully address racial controversies in their classrooms.

“I was frustrated with not being able to have conversations with my students, or my fellow teachers, about racism,” she said. “They treated it as if it was a thing of the past. There were no books to refer to so I decided to write my own. And the title really says it all—it’s about talking race in the classroom.”

Andersen’s book, which has been lauded in reviews for being “cogently written” and “uncompromising in its ethical stance,” evaluates the long history of press coverage and media representations of American wars in the 20th century.

“I am absolutely thrilled to have received [the award],” Andersen said.

Alpha Sigma Nu and the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities award four book prizes each year in a specific category in a range of disciplines from the humanities to science. The category for the 2007 awards was professional studies, which encompasses everything from business to law. There were 60 entries this year from 16 Jesuit colleges and universities. The award carries a $1,000 prize.

The book awards are open to all faculty and administrators who have published a book in the past three years. The books are judged by scholars on the basis of scholarship, significance of topic to professors across several disciplines, authority in interpretation, objectivity, presentation and style.

The digital age has fostered a dangerous merger between the military, the entertainment industry, and mass media, said Robin Andersen, Ph.D., associate professor of communication and media studies at Fordham. Andersen read from and discussed her latest book, A Century of Media, A Century of War(Peter Lang, 2006), on Sept. 27 in Lowenstein Center on the Lincoln Center campus.

“The entire sensibility of language and the graphic style of today’s television war reporting really makes the coverage look like a video game,” said Andersen, who is the director of Fordham’s Peace and Justice Studies and served as chair of the Department of Communication and Media Studies from 1995 to 1998. “The two industries—gaming and high-tech weaponry—even share technology, and it’s a frightening merger. We have turned war into entertainment, and that has huge consequences.”

Her book takes a critical look at a century of war reporting, beginning with World War I and culminating with the ongoing conflict in Iraq. She explores the development of war propaganda, the loss of journalists’ First Amendment rights following the Vietnam War, and the development of what she refers to as the “hyperreal” war in the digital age.

Andersen cites a tendency by the current television media to exclude any footage of war casualties—including the images of flag-draped coffins—resulting in a “loss of moral engagement” between the viewer and the true victims of war. In its place, she says, comes image-making and stagecraft. Andersen said President Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” and President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” are branding: demonizing phrases that tend to further blur the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. In her book, she also points to the media’s frequent use of animation footage to recreate military maneuvers, and to reporters’ descriptions of the night bombing of Baghdad with expressions like “fantastic” and “riveting visuals.”

“What is missing in the frame of today’s media coverage,” she said, “is compassion for the people on the receiving end of American weapons, the innocent victims of war.” Andersen told the audience she felt compelled to write the book to try and find how this type of coverage has evolved. “It hasn’t just happened overnight,” she said. “It has been a steady progression.”

In her book, Andersen looks back at how 1960s war news coverage created the “Vietnam Syndrome,” a situation in which Americans soured on the war after seeing disturbing images in the media. This said, she says, to severe restrictions on journalists’ access to the front lines. By the time Reagan launched “Operation Urgent Fury” in Granada in 1983, journalists were barred from covering it for five days. The recent embedding of reporters in Iraq, Andersen said, gave them access only to one side.

“Any reporter knows they can’t get too close. The [true]object is to try and tell a broader picture,” she said. “Embedded reporters were telling the military’s story, not the story.”

Andersen read several excerpts from her book, including, “Transforming The Imagery of War,” that evoked laughter from the audience. She described one image-building Thanksgiving media event in Iraq, at which Bush’s apparent offer of “golden-brown turkey generously garnished with grapes and all the trimmings” to soldiers was actually an inedible decoration.

The event was hosted by the Peace and Justice Studies Program; Brennan O’Donnell, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill; Robert R. Grimes, S.J., dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center; and Peter Lang Publishing.

“Robin has been a very active director of the Peace and Justice Studies program and this book is one that I am sure she feels passionate about,” said Father Grimes, who introduced Andersen. “It certainly speaks to a topic that is most important in today’s world.”

“The media today normalize what is ethically abnormal,” said peace activist and guest speaker Daniel Berrigan, S.J. “If we are in a classroom and are not even mentioning the killing of innocent people, we are failing utterly. Our responsibility to our young people has a moral clarity to say, this is not normal.”

Andersen reminded the audience that it is not only soldiers who die in wars, and dedicates her book to “the many journalists who have died trying to bear witness to the costs of war.

– Janet Sassi

A Century of Media, A Century of War (Peter Lang, 2006) is about the history of struggle between war and its representation, and how that struggle has changed the way war is fought and the way war is portrayed. The event is hosted by the Peace and Justice Studies Program; Brennan O’Donnell, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill; Robert Grimes, S.J., dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center; and Peter Lang Publishing.