Avatar is wonderfully entertaining in all it’s glorious 3D computerized cinemagnificence.  Yet peoples’ responses to the movie are a blow to my gut. Why? Movie critic David Edelstein says “the narrative would be ho-hum without the spectacle.” I have heard people say:  the movie is wildly entertaining but there is nothing to the story.

Nothing to the story???  Avatar tells a very important, timely and compelling story–the most important story of modern times:  how magnificent the biodiverse, healthy natural world–how magnificent our existence when connected and in balance with the sacredness of life all around–and how modern humans destroy life and anything that gets in the way of profit.  It is a tale with a moral and one that is so timely. I urge you to see the movie and do some teaching when you hear the story was meaningless or boring.

Encourage people to see the movie Signs Out of Time about archaeologist Marija Gimbutas who discovered the more complete story of human history Read the rest of this entry »

Since my September entry looking at unleashing our passion in a big way for wild and natural lands, people came out of the woodwork to support a change in the United States. President Barack Obama and family have moved into the White House. The global economy has continued to crash and burn. Policymakers worldwide are trying to figure out what to do about it. Now it is time not only to rage for the wild, but also to rage for economic justice for the masses. I call your attention to a well-researched article by James Lieber describing What Cooked the World Economy. We need to assure that taxpayer dollars are not thrown at the institutions and powerbrokers who are responsible (like AIG) nor used to pay off derivatives and other wildly inventive and destructive and unsustainable investment schemes. In fact, we need to prosecute those dangerous men whose greed took our collective wealth for their own. As Lieber found, even collecting 5 percent of the amount of money that these men stole will fill national coffers and go a long way towards offsetting the amounts of money governments will need to spend to help restore economic systems. Actually, let’s change that language from restore to reinvent our economic systems. Please join me in pushing our policymakers to invest in people (through education) and in a sustainable and regenerating future for us all. See as an example Read the rest of this entry »

That is what is proposed by more than one leading scientist: grow trees to capture carbon, then burn them for fuel and sequester the carbon. Hmmmm….do you trust corporations and governments to do this without deforesting the planet? I certainly don’t!

The life cycle of most trees is way beyond the human life cycle. We do not have a sustainable population on this planet, by most counts: the number of humans vastly outnumbers the regenerative capacity of nature to support them (unless most of the world turns to permaculture and similar solutions). There are areas of the world that are barren today that were once lushly forested–our ancestors of thousands of years past cut the trees and then the soil blew away and then . . .

Even now, the corporations and speculators are buying up South American biofuel capacity–that translates to people cutting rain forests to plant corn and other biofuel crops. Something greatly wrong with that picture. Why would anyone feel that if the planet largely turns to wood burning for fuel that our children will know what a mature tree and mature forests will look like? We’ll end up with mono-cultured tree farms that are called woods.

Will that support life?

By the way, have you noticed more trees down in your area? I have. More and more people are planning to heat their homes with wood this year and I see more and more lots either clear-cut or thinned of large trees. That doesn’t make me happy.

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As I mentioned in my Fifth Sacred Thing entry, buying up water and other essential natural resources in order to turn a profit down the line is counterproductive to life on this planet and at odds with what I hold to be our birthright: access to the sustainable use of the natural (land, water, air, energy) resources that are essential to life. Applying a free market principle to all forms of profit in the global economy contributed to the economic mess that was front and center this week. Should any resource or commodity that could make someone a profit be able to be bought, sold, stockpiled, bet upon on the trading floors?

Val Sigstedt’s column Greenbacks and Equity Script in my regional paper got me thinking. He proposes the creation of a different type of money: equity script:

What if there were two kinds of money, but only equity script could be used to buy and sell the necessities of life? It would be a very simple money agreement, made worldwide and voluntarily to prevent the futures hucksters and the hedge fund hustlers from scooping up the things people depend on like food, shelter, transportation, and petroleum, and releasing them only when they can turn over a huge profit, even if people starve or if they can’t drive their cars because gasoline is unaffordable.

Read the rest of this entry »

I love reading novels. They inspire and inform me. They get me thinking. It’s been awhile since I read Starhawk’s Fifth Sacred Thing. Yet I can still picture the San Francisco she conjures in her book–the one that loosely resembles the city we know, yet is a place where resource use is in balance and people are fed from the land. It is a place where gardens grow and brooks flow. Where wind power creates energy and gondolas run from hill to hill. It’s a walking city and a place to ride electric carts. Starhawk juxtaposes this idyllic setting with a dystopian one where people are at war over scarce resources. Her novel foreshadows a time that many of us can too easily picture, especially now that climate change is much more broadly understood as something that will not only affect our relationship with the natural world but also economic, political and social structures.

In a preamble to the book, Starhawk talks of the sacredness of earth, water, air and fire (energy): these elements are essential to and are the building blocks of life. “They have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves become the standard by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. No one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy.”

What does this have to do with land conservation? Notice the extent to which free market economies make air, water and land commodities to be taken and used for the highest profit. Notice the extent to which you benefit from such a system. Notice the extent to which you are harmed by such a system. Can you picture another way? Read the rest of this entry »

You may have heard of the movement afoot to buy locally, especially food grown or processed locally. There are so many reasons why buying locally makes sense. Your food will be fresher, it will not be shipped long distances by fossil fuel power, you will be supporting local businesses. You will also be supporting local farms, ranches, bakeries, etc. And wouldn’t it be good to know that in a large-scale emergency there are food sources nearby?

You will also be helping to preserve agricultural space. And supporting existing businesses rather than traveling to the bigger “better” store that’s over the next hill. Food Coops and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) projects are appearing even in urban areas so that people pool their resources to bring in fresh regional food as much as possible. I was just reading an article in New York magazine about Star-mers (star farmers) who are becoming known like celebrity chefs as people are more interested in where their food comes from.

However, there are some times when it is important to not support local businesses. Read the rest of this entry »

Living Lightly is a practice of mine. Well, I don’t just practice, I do it! There are so many ways, large and small, to live lightly on the Earth. Reusing, recycling, buying used items, using water and electric sparingly, leaving trees be, acting for sustainable development, donating to land trusts . . . Thank you, Nina, for posting a note in our Forum about one small practice. Check out the art of furoshiki: Read the rest of this entry »

The Earth had a twin that collided with us billions of years ago and created remnants from which the Moon created itself. The Moon is essential for temperature regulation on Earth. Jupiter protects us by pulling meteors that might otherwise collide with our planet. Under the Mediterranean are massive salt caves from the number of times the Mediterranean dried up. Who knew? Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been inspired to work on the Resources page of this website and have a whole list of goodies to add. Please stay tuned. I was nudged to get going with this after co-facilitating a water ecology workshop this weekend. We shared information about local action and resources and there is so much more to add. Read the rest of this entry »

“The Yangtze River dolphin, one of the world’s rarest mammals, is no more,” begins a Time article from 2007. I had the honor of attending ritual theatre this weekend honoring and mourning for the extinction of this species in China. Now victims of overfishing (leaving the dolphins no food), pollution and boat propellers, these rare fresh water dolphins once c0-existed with humans and were honored as the goddesses of the Yangtze. We were asked to bring the story of the dolphins to the world so that they are remembered.

How many more species will live only as human stories? Read the rest of this entry »