User:Paxuscalta/Wam Kat



Wam Kat (born 1956) is a Dutch political activist and author who now lives in Germany and serves in the city government of Belzig.

Biography
Kat 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. Kat founded the European youth environmental network EYFA (European Youth Forest Action) in 1986 to address the affect of acid rain on the regional forests. Kat 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 Sittard NL and moved every subsequent year to a different country. Kat 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.

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

Kat is best know for his work during the war in former Yugoslavia 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. Kat was instrumental in securing funding for the Sunflower refugee camps in Croatia which were the only large scale non-governmental efforts to deal with the massive war driven refugee problem.

Kat later went on to found the Pakrats reconstruction project in the Slovonian 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.

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

After leaving Croatia Kat moved to ZEGG intentional community outside of Berlin in the Belzig area where he lived and worked for a number of years. Currently Kat is serving as the vice major of the Belzig area and is the only foriegn national serving in the provincial government.

Family
Kat was married to Ulla Trademark and had two children with her Rik and Pjort.

References and external links

 * Wam Kat's Personal Website
 * Wired Article on Balkan Sunflowers refugee camp