A few weeks back I thought I’d hit a lottery: the local paper was filled with news of eco-friendly projects despite the state of the economy. This week an article mentioned that the Pennsylvania state consitution was amended in 1971 to say

The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of natural, scenic and esthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustees of these resources the commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all people.

Yet over and over again profit of a few stands against these constitutional rights. Read the rest of this entry »

Last summer I saw the movie Battle in Seattle and came away with quite a brew of emotions. I started this article back then but never finished it. With the economic mess of 2009, we are on the cusp of change. We are balanced on a fulcrum–we can tip towards economic justice for the masses, or towards the same old system of wealth amassed at the top and corporations creating and driving policy. So the movie is as relevant as ever. It attempts to capture the 1999 unprecedented nonviolent street action that brought attention to globalization and corporate power over governments and over the interests of people and the planet as epitomized by the World Trade Organization (WTO). The protest brought together a vast array of constituencies (environmentalists, human rights activists, labor unions, religious groups, anarchists, and many others) to bring public attention to the wrongs of the WTO.

My review of the movie? The text that ran on the screen at the beginning and the end of the movie were the most poignant and I would have liked for the issues to have more presence in the movie itself. The text gave us information about globalization and corporate wealthfare. And about the hammer of debt that the WTO uses to bludgeon developing nations into the perfect places for corporations to make money. Filmmaker Stuart Townsend tried to put a human face to the events by focusing on fictional characters from various factions including the police and a news reporter. I did not feel he gave as full or sympathetic a story to his fictional activists until the very end of the film.

So what does this have to do with land conservation? Much! The WTO and other arms of corporate policymaking and globalization clearly place the rights of corporations to make profit above the rights of people for a clean, healthy and safe community. Did you know that corporations have been granted 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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Equinox is the time of year when day and night are of the same length. The Earth is at its midpoint along the long side of its elliptical orbit around the sun, putting us closest to that fiery orb. This is the balance point of the season–the time of year when it is said that an egg will balance on its point.

What is balance? When we look at the world as 2-sided, bilateral, one-way-or-the-other-way (like right or wrong, good or bad, black or white, conservative or liberal) you might picture a scale with each side coming to balance in a static and stable way. Equal and balanced. You might picture a tug of war where two sides pull and create tension to keep each side in check. But the world doesn’t work that way. Options, ways of thinking, personalities, political systems, economic structures are as diverse and plentiful as the species in the Amazon Rainforest. All options are in constant motion. The world is in constant motion. Balance becomes a complex dance.

If there are many options, there are also Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Is it time to go wild to sustain the wild? I’m writing this the week that Lehman Brothers imploded; AIG was baled out by our public dollars; the Iraq war continues to drain dollars, lives and good will; a friend wrote to let me know she had been “downsized;” many friends do not know how they will buy heating oil this winter; and I continue to wonder when the general public will realize that water is the new oil.

I continually read and hear news with the filter: what effect will this have on wild and natural lands? Think: arctic drilling, no more protection of endangered species, oil and gas exploration on public and private lands. As I see the larger and largest consequences to current policy, I get sad, angry, frustrated. I wonder what to do, knowing that I have to do something.

A letter attributed to author Vicki Noble is circulating that calls for women to be as the Maenads and go wild. She recalls the time of the second women’s liberation movement of the late 60’s and into the 70’s:

Sisters, don’t you remember? We went wild. Like the ancient Greek Maenads (or the Indian Yoginis and Tibetan Dakinis, for that matter), we cut loose. We left our husbands, threw off our repressive jobs, our bogus traditional values and conditioned knee-jerk responses. We left the churches and synagogues in droves, we left behind the corporate tracking system and the academic elitism that supported it. We opted out in favor of freedom, liberation, and authenticity. It was a magical, thrilling, and transformative revolution in which, collectively, we took back the night, owned our own bodies, and awakened to our unique human potential.

Recall the play Lysistrata, where women barricade the public funds building and withhold sex from their husbands to end the Peloponnesian War and secure peace. By doing this, Lysistrata engages the support of women from other city-states, including those at odds with the Athens. They are successful. This play by Aristophanes has such a universal appeal that it appears over and over in modern form in theatres around the globe.

While these examples are of women taking power, stories about Maenads and Lysistrata call forth those who have historically been the underclass to make a big noise. It is time for women and men who are not part of the dominant power structure to step up in a big way.

This will look different for each of us. Here are 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 »

Wouldn’t it be nice to travel down your local highway and instead of seeing concrete, signs and strip malls, seeing green and trees with occasion signs? And instead of seeing residential developments and huge lawns, seeing meadow and trees with just a small lawn carved out around a home? Years back I spoke with a developer about this and he told me that clients don’t usually ask to leave the trees. Plus it’s easier for contractors to just start building on cleared ground. But he’d be happy to do it differently if people asked.

So . . . ask! I picture setting up signs on area roads that say Developers: Leave The Trees! Read the rest of this entry »