In honor of Women's History Month, I have been interviewing women who are leading the way in creative travel -- back road, off-the-map and Slow Adventures. The best part of seeking out women to interview is that I haven't had to look very far to find inspired women traveling the world, breaking ground, and feeding our sense of adventure. After some great conversations, I devote this blog to honoring one of the women that I encountered this month.

As a leader in travel and conservation, Susan Hannah is one of those women who, you get the feeling, has always been at the front of the trail. In graduate school she studied with the legendary Margaret Mead and since then she has worked with the Wildlife Conservation Society, CARE USA, and the Intrepid Museum Foundation where she has spearheaded programs across the globe. Travel, undoubtedly, is among the catalysts for the work that she does. While addressing a global health initiative in a speech entitled Impatient Optimist, Bill and Melinda Gates got close to the heart of it. They said, "one of the big reasons for inequities is that the people who see the worst of it don't have the resources to defeat it. And the people who have the resources don't often see the worst of it." Like many of us in the field, Hannah looks to tourism as way to personify that "it," to connect resources and perspectives, and to reach in from both sides and hopefully meet somewhere in the middle. As she describes, Sustainable Tourism, at its best, "provides hard currency, jobs, and connects people to really understand the needs of a community."

More...

If we are going to empower women and girls around the world, we have to find new and better roles for men. Last week I led a State Department-sponsored delegation of women tech leaders to Liberia and Sierra Leone to meet with government officials, entrepreneurs, activists, telecommunication and banking executives, and university administrators to explore ways that technology, particularly mobile technology, can help improve the health, education, and livelihoods of women and girls in both countries. Women are doing amazing things in both countries, from President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia to First Lady Sia Koroma in Sierra Leone to countless local women and women returning from the diaspora that fled during horrific civil wars in both countries. But as a successful businesswoman was telling me that "women do all the farming" in Sierra Leone, as well as most of the market trading, and as I watched the groups of unemployed young men on every street corner, I kept wondering what men were supposed to be doing. It finally dawned on me that farming was women's work because it was domestic work -- tending family crops. Men were the hunters and the warriors, essential providers of protein and protection. Yet neither of those roles exist today, beyond the option of serving in small national military forces.

When I used to teach civil procedure as a law professor, I would begin the year by telling my students that "civil procedure is the etiquette of ritualized battle." The phrase, which did not originate with me, captured the point that peaceful, developed societies resolve disputes by law rather than by force. Litigation thus becomes "ritualized battle." It is not hard to imagine many litigators as modern warriors, just as it is not hard to imagine many investment bankers as competitive hunters -- of deals rather than game. But in societies that have just recently emerged from actual battle, where men fought each other and raped and captured women and that have only rudimentary legal and finance professions, what's the professional alternative to hunting and fighting?

More...

I've been shamed. I recently received an email from a reader who complimented me on my reading of authors from around the world. But then she admonished me for not recognizing just who made it possible for me to read all those wonderful books and get to know all those great writers: the literary translators. "We labor in obscurity," she wrote, being a translator herself, and she is right. Rare is the book cover that acknowledges a translator (their names are reserved for the title page and for copyright information) and I myself, a voracious reader who could name hundreds of writers, could reel off the names of only a few translators and only if pressed to do so.

But now I am here to make things right. I will go back through all my hundreds of reviews of the past three-plus years and make sure that the translators of each foreign tome are acknowledged for their hard -- and largely hidden -- work. Just in the past few weeks I read Parasite Eve by Hideaki Sena, translated from Japanese to English by Tyran Grillo; My Berlin Child by Anne Wiazemsky, translated from French to English by Alison Anderson (who has translated -- and in doing so allowed me to read and enjoy -- so many great books, including The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, The Palestinian Lover by Selim Nassib, and A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cossé); and The Shadow of What We Were by Luis Sepulveda, translated from the Spanish to English by Howard Curtis.

More...

We face two questions. First, does the United States have a compelling interest in the removal of Gaddafi? Second, if we do, what are the most appropriate means? I believe that the answer as to interests is "yes." The public statements of President Obama, repeated daily by Secretary Clinton, that Gaddafi "must go," have staked America's credibility on the opposition's success -- a credibility made fragile by our letting expedient considerations trump our supposed commitment to democracy in the past. Great powers don't have the privilege of declaring a situation intolerable and then doing nothing to rectify it when they in fact have the power to do so. In addition, as others have pointed out, if our failure to act were to lead to a resurgent Gaddafi exacting a heavy toll in blood, it would send a chilling message to peoples across the region who are putting themselves at risk for the sake of dignity and a measure of freedom. Already, the Bahrain opposition has expressed its bitterness about Washington's siding with the Khalifa monarchy for the sake of its security ties with the Gulf states. Our current position in Bahrain is a close facsimile to that of the British from 1926 until their departure in the 1960s. They feared an Iranian challenge to their dominant political position, moved in to suppress a Shi'ite uprising, and did so due to strategic and economic interests in the Gulf region that it deemed of critical importance. The British installed Lord Belgrave as pro consul who ran the place for 30 years. A similar option does not appear to be open to us.

As to the legitimacy of an intervention, it would have to be approved by the United Nations Security Council under Chapter VII of the Charter. That means dealing with Russia and China, who have no enthusiasm for these ventures. A regional collective security body like the African Union may have some derivative authority to sanction an intervention. Unfortunately, its members right now are having a tough enough time holding onto downtown Mogadishu. Egypt is the exception in terms of military capabilities, but they are otherwise occupied.

More...