10. Coming Home to Budleigh: Jeff Conant's 2016 visit to his old village home (1) - About Jeff

Jeff contemplates the Conant millstone outside the Church Hall in East Budleigh. It's all that's left of the village mill that his family owned more than four hundred years ago. 

Following on from from the article by David Daniel about Jeff Conant's visit to East Budleigh in 2016 at 
https://conant400.blogspot.com/2019/11/why-did-jeff-conant-fly-5286-miles-from.html
you can read more about about Jeff below. 

I reckon that we'll be seeing many more descendants of Roger Conant in East Devon as we approach the 400th anniversary of the city that he founded in 1626. 

Just a glance at the title of this 640-page book published in 1887 is enough to tell you that there are many of them, both across the Atlantic and here in Britain. The author was Frederick Odell Conant MA  of Portland, Maine, and the full title is 'A History and Genealogy of the Conant Family in England and America, Thirteen Generations, 1520-1887, containing also some genealogical notes on the Connet, Connett and Connit Families'. You can read it online at https://archive.org/details/historygenealogy00cona/page/n4



It was the Conant Family Association which approved sculptor Henry Kitson's design for the bronze statue of their famous ancestor.  It stands outside the Witch Museum in Salem MA, giving the unfortunate impression that Roger Conant dabbled in the black arts. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Image credit: Rick Parrott II





Back to his descendant Jeff. In a future post you can see more photos of his time in the East Budleigh area, and read his own beautifully written account of his visit, including his 'meeting' with the Salem statue:  

Jeff Conant is a writer, educator, and social justice activist with a focus on international development and ecology. 

He graduated with a BA in Anthropology and American Literature from Boston University, Massachusetts, in 1989, later gaining an MA in Writing and Poetics from New College of California in 1995.  

Jeff directs the international forests program with Friends of the Earth US, which protects forests and the rights of forest-dependent peoples. He manages a team of campaigners working to pressure the world's largest banks, investment firms, and companies to go deforestation-free.

Previously Jeff worked with Global Justice Ecology Project where he advocated for climate justice at the U.N. and other global arenas.

As a researcher and independent journalist he has published articles and contributed to reports on water privatization, resource colonization, food sovereignty, ecological sanitation, environmental injustice, and related issues. 

With International Accountability Project he co-authored a Community Guide to the Environmental and Social Safeguards of the Asian Development Bank; and with Hesperian Health Guides he co-authored A Community Guide to Environmental Health (2008), a grassroots manual published in over a dozen languages.

Jeff is also author of A Poetics of Resistance: the Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista Insurgency (AK Press, 2010), which examines the cultural politics of the Zapatista movement of Chiapas, Mexico. It focuses on the Zapatistas' persuasive use of symbolic language and colourful imagery to bring their struggle to the world's attention. 

The book grew out of the three years from 1995-1998 that he spent as co-founder and organiser of an independent collective in Chiapas, developing potable drinking water systems, supporting autonomous agricultural development, and monitoring human rights violations in rural villages.

His translation of Wind in the Blood: Mayan Healing and Chinese Medicine (1999) is a manual for health workers in Mayan areas to bridge the gulf between Western medical technique and Mayan medical knowledge. 

His volume of poetry, The Evacuated Forest Papers, was published by Buck Downs Books in 1996.

In his spare time he writes, raises bees, chickens and vegetables, and enjoys biking, cooking, and art of all sorts.

Continued at 
https://conant400.blogspot.com/2019/11/coming-home-to-budleigh-jeff-conants.html

You can access other posts on this blog by going to the Blog Archive (under the ‘About Me’ section), and clicking on the appropriate heading.