• March, 2008: The dispatches are now host to some astounding performances of traditional gypsy music from Rajasthan. Take a listen to them here.

• February 28, 2008: We've just heard from Marylise Lefèvre,one of our far flung interns, who is volunteering at a chimp sanctuary in Cameroun. In the summer she will resume her study of the movements of returning salmon in eastern Quebec. Here is a photo of her with three chimps, orphaned by poachers, that she is taking care of.

• February, 2008: Bob Dylan airs an old blues song about the death of FDR and Shoumatoff's grandmother, Elizabeth Shoumatoff, and talks about her afterwards on his radio show. Click here to listen to the broadcast and here to read about Alex's grandmother.

• Fantastic news ! the Shoumatoff's hairstreak lives ! The following e-mail was received on February 9, 2008 Click here.

• January, 2008: Two new Dispatches are up and the music section is coming to life. You can now see and hear bushmen in the Kalahari desert and four Botswanan women singing ‘One morning soon’ on our YouTube video feed 'DFTVW.'

• January, 2008: Dispatch #38 was re-printed by Vanity Fair in a booklet called "A Guide to Green Living" and in an anthology for English 101, the college composition course, called The Reader, edited by Judy Sieg

• January, 2008: Dispatch #41 has been submitted by Walrus Magazine for two Canadian National Magazine Awards.

• October, 2007: A new Dispatch, and this month a record 9,631 readers from 93 countries dipped into the Dispatches.

• October 20, 2006:  The Bulletins have become a resource to be reckoned with! Four interns from McGill Universityhave redacted and catalogued 50 more pages of them. There are still boxesof clips waiting to be processed. Anyone who wants to get into them, please get in touch with AlexShoumatoff@Shoumatopia.com. It is very interesting, harrowingly educational work.  Each bulletin is like a piece of the enormous puzzle of what it happening to the world,and it is not a pretty picture. But one that has to be made available to everybody. Which is what the Bulletins, and the more detailed Dispatches,are all about.   Click here tocheck out the Bulletins...

Dispatches

July, 2008 : Student Dispatches: Dispach #48: A Primer on Cambodia, by Hajnal Kiss. Hajnal is a 32-year-old woman from Budapest, Hungary, who was an exchange student for the winter term at the McGill School of Business. She heard the talk I gave to Karl Moore's class see the link above "how can I become involved." Her primer on Cambodia, written with a warmth and compassion that reminds me of the late Ryszard Kapuscinski, is the first of what will hopefully be many Dispatches by McGill students who have been doing fantastic work at DFVW. Hajnal has returned to Budapest and has promised to send us more Dispatches on the Roma (gypsies) and other cultural and environmental subjects in Hungary. Click to read the Dispatch. Click here to read the Dispatch

May, 2008 : Dispatch #47 : The scramble for the Arctic. There have been many expeditions to the North Pole, but it was Russia's, last summer, that touched off a furor over who owns the Arctic--and the oil that is becoming more and more accessible as the ice disappears. From the halls of Moscow's scientific institutes, where global warming is not part of the official story, to Siberia's permafrost tundra, where reindeer are dying and a powerful greenhouse gas is bubbling from the ooze, Alex Shoumatoff probes the secrets of Yakut shamans, woolly-mammoth skeletons, and a new Great Game: energy exploration. (As it appeared originally in Vanity Fair’s May Green issue.) Click here to read the Dispatch

May, 2008 : Dispatch #46 : The thistle and the bee. Donald Trump wants to put a luxury golf resort on a gloriously unspoiled swath of Scottish seacoast. His plan has come under fire by environmental activists and led to a battle that has reached the highest levels of government. Plus, he's up against another character: local fisherman Michael Forbes. (As it appeared originally in Vanity Fair’s May Green issue.) Click here to read the Dispatch

April, 2008 : Dispatch #45 : Tracing the interconnected origins of world music—from flamenco to the blues—Alex Shoumatoff travels to India in search of the Gypsy music of Rajasthan. Originally published in Travel + Leisure's April, 2008 issue. Click here to read the Dispatch

January 20, 2008 : Dispatch #44 : Traveling Light. This is not just a matter of reducing your baggage to a small backpack, but reducing your carbon, ecological, and cultural footprints. Originally published in Travel + Leisure's November, 2007 green issue.Click here to read the Dispatch

January 20, 2008 : Dispatch # 43 : The Rats Are Back. Every 48 eight years a certain species of bamboo flowers in a remote tribal state in India, triggering an explosion in the rat population. What happens to the rats could be a ghastly parable for us. Originally published in the December, 2007 issue of Vanity Fair under the title, "The Coming Plague." "The Rats Are Back" was suggested my good buddy John Nichols, the Taos Novelist.With a postscript on a huge new species of palm discovered in Madagascar that flowers every 100 years and then self-destructs.Click here to read the Dispatch

November 9, 2007: Dispatch #42:  (Product) RED provides life saving drugs to Africans with AIDS. Could the future of philanthropy be consumer driven? Originally published in Vanity Fair's July, 2007 Africa issue as "The Lazarus Effect." Click here to read the Dispatch

November 1, 2007: Dispatch #41:  Dead Villages: Russia's Rural Exodus, Demographic and Health Crises.   Originally published in the June issue of Walrus Magazine as "A Russian Tragedy." In fact, I was just in Russia for three weeks in September, 2007, and despite the very real and unresolved issues in this Dispatch, the people are happier and nicer than I've ever seen them in the 25 years I've been visiting my erstwhile motherland. The country is normalizing. Click here to read the Dispatch

October 29, 2007:   A powerful new version of "One Morning Soon" from Botswana, captured in this slideshow by David Hampton. Listen to the deep richness and beauty of the singing of Patricia Kamasena and Olefile Sefofu and their two friends. Click here to watch and listen

August 9, 2007: Dispatch #40:  Brazil's Mata Atlantica:The Critically Endangered Coastal Rainforest of Brazil, With a Postscripton the Musicality of Birdsong.  Clickhere to read the Dispatch

August 9, 2007: Dispatch #39: "The Dehydration of the Amazon Rainforest,"originally published in Vanity Fair's May, 2007 green issue as "The GaspingForest."  Click to read the Dispatch: Part1 and Part 2