Wam Kat

Wam Kat (born in the mid 1950s) is a Dutch political activist and author who now lives in Germany and serves in the city government of Belzig.

Biography

Wam was told by a doctor when he was 18 that he had a year to live and made a conscious choice to live a whole life in a single year, when he did not die, he did not slow down. Wam co-founded the European youth environmental network EYFA (European Youth Forest Action) in 1986 to address the affect of acid rain on the regional forests. Wam was instrumental in the rapid growth of the organization and was the principal organizer of the summer festival/university called Ecotopia which was first held in Cologne, Germany in 1989 and moved every subsequent year to a different country. Wam also developed the "Eco Rate" system which EYFA and other progressive organizations used to equalize access to events and goods by. The Eco rates used a non-market currency conversation system, so that participants from poorer countries would have more favorable rates of exchange than participants from rich countries.

Wam was also one of the founders of the Dutch mobile vegetarian kitchen, "Rampenplan" which supports political activists at extended actions by providing food and other services (1981).

Wam is best know for his work during the Yugoslav wars, co-founder of Za Mir Network (For Peace) and the "Zagreb Diaries" which he penned at the time, initially as the equivalent of a blog, but ultimately they came out in book form and were translated into several languages. Wam was instrumental in securing funding for the Suncokret (Sunflower) refugee camps in Croatia which were the only large scale non-governmental efforts to deal with the influx of refugees from the war.

Wam later went on to found the Pakrac reconstruction project in the Slavonian border region of Croatia and Serbia. This project used local people from both sides of the regional conflict and international (principally youth) volunteers to rebuild housing which had been destroyed.

Wam has been arrested for crimes of conscious in multiple countries.

After leaving Croatia, Wam moved end 1995 to ZEGG intentional community outside of Berlin in Belzig in the Fläming region where he lived and worked for a number of years. Between 1999 and 2001 he shortly moved back to the Balkan, there he was co-founder of Balkan Sunflowers, which still works in Albania, Kosovo and the Republic of Macedonia.

Currently Wam is serving also serving as chairman of the "Die Linke" (PDS) fraction in the local towncouncil of Belzig.

Family

Kat was married to Ulla Traedmark Jensen and had two children with her, Rik and Pjort. His older daughter Tyche has a different mother.

References and external links

* [http://www.wamweb.net/ Wam Kat's Personal Website]
* [http://eyfa.org/node_64 Description of EcoRate System]
* [http://eyfa.org/ecotopia Ecotopia]
* [http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.11/zamir.html?pg=2&topic= Wired Article on Balkan Sunflowers refugee camp]