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–the coming of the “sky people,” the Kurgans, into Old Europe began the change from original societies that were peaceful and in balance with the Earth. This is our true story–our legacy. Not only for those of Indoeuropean descent, but for all peoples who have been affected by the European common culture. Gimbutas tells of the vestiges of the old ways in Europe: in Lithuania people still go outside and kiss the Earth as their first activity of the morning. Indigenous peoples all around the planet practiced life in balance with the Earth. They treated the Earth as sacred and listened to Her messages. In how many ways and in how many places have modern human culture decimated the indigenous ways. When people tell you it is human nature to dominant one another and nature, please beg to differ.
Encourage people to read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. The book is a classic that should be required school reading. In an inventive and thought-provoking method it demonstrates that humans are not dominating and hording by nature–it tells how the shift came to be from tribal and more balanced cultures to the organization of society that is now all around us and all-consuming.
By all means, urge people to see Avatar. And when they say, eh, not much to the story, please beg to differ.
Happy Holidays!!
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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. For instance, the area power company wants to add a new substation in a rural area. While expert testimony and support of municipal and county governments ask that the utility use the existing rights of way of a highway or a train corridor for the power line connections, they pursue a path through rural and natural lands for the high tension wires. A judge recently granted their request, putting aside all environmental testimony. Given the Environmental Rights Amendment I quoted above, wouldn’t you think that using corridors already developed would be a no-brainer? Why do those of us who care about these rights need to over and over again fight for these rights? Wouldn’t the brain power, personal and cultural energies, and the money be better used for developing innovation and creating (green) economies? Please let your state and local legislators know how you feel. Attend local policymaking meetings and stay informed.
]]>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 the same rights as individuals over the decades? This has enabled corporations, through the (private and anonymous) court of the WTO, to sue local governments (and often win) when public policy to protect land, water and air resources interferes with the “rights” of corporations to make profit. California’s more strict environmental policies have been neutered by the WTO, for instance.
The events in Seattle were a pinnacle moment in the history of social action–many groups came together to voice their concerns over globalization and corporate control of trade. This was the first protest primarily organized through cell phones and the internet, giving activists an unprecedented ability to organize on the streets. It took months for organizers to plan the protests, and it is now widely held as the most successful “mass action” to date.
One of the advantages of the 2009 economic collapse is that more people will understand the actions of corporations and how they contributed towards the collapse: how corporate greed and the right to profit undermine economic justice. I await a movie that documents not only what led to the collapse (see my Raging For the Wild, Part 2 article) but also documents the social and economic justice that resulted and the distribution of wealth across many, many more people. Hey, I can dream! Please join me!
]]>And in all of the panic about economic collapse, let us keep a clear head about wild and natural lands. Once developed (including mined for oil or gas), these lands are no longer available as our legacy of biodiverse and healthy ecosystems that support all life, including ours. Once polluted (”we can’t afford clean technology right now”) our health is compromised and it will cost a lot more money to tend our illnesses. So continue to rage for the wild and natural as well as for economic justice.
]]>Death is a gateway not only for the one who has crossed through, but also for those of us left behind. Through gateways sometimes come pleasant surprises. One such for me: through a series of events that led her to the website I set up to honor my mother, a high school friend contacted me. It turns out that Diana is also an artist (as was my mother) and someone who loves the Earth. See her post on our Forum entitled Forest Cathedral. Won’t you join our community and post on our Forum? Click the Register link at the top to join us. In the meantime I will get back to all the draft articles I began but never finished. Please check back.
]]>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.
]]>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 many ways to balance a system. Earth is a system. And there are many systems on Earth–political, economic, cultural, natural–each entwined with the other. What does it mean to live in balance on the Earth? What would a world in balance look and feel like? Certainly not what we have now!
A balanced, sustainable, replenishing and healthy system is not one where all parts constantly thrive with ease. While a healthy amount of challenge or grit is imperative for a system to thrive, the parts of the system ultimately need to cooperate and co-create in order to be sustaining. This is nature. This is also the way of balance. Wouldn’t it be lovely for the systems of Earth, including the political-economic systems, to work well in this way?
Hazel Henderson wrote in a 2006 article 21st Century Strategies for Sustainability that global market economics is based nearly exclusively on the notion that competition and self-interest are rooted in human nature. Yet, she says:
research by scientists from many fields . . . have invalidated the core assumptions underlying economic models – which dominate public and private decision-making in most countries, multi-lateral agencies, including the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organization . . . Yet today, as privatization and technological evolution speeds change and globalization, economists and their general equilibrium models still drive these processes. While competition remains a key driver in evolution and all human affairs, cooperation and co-evolutionary processes are equally important.
I leave you with the thought that balance is not, at it’s greatest, a 2-sided equation of equal and static parts. Balance is complex and it is through much cooperation that systems continually come to balance. More than a system constantly in balance: a system constantly rebalancing.
Dance the dance of balance with me on this 2008 Equinox.
]]>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.
Might this be one part of a solution towards a green and sustainable world? Might this equalize power? Might this assure a higher quality of life for all? Might this move us away from war and slavery? How might we create this and any other needed–radical–change very quickly? (And that’s the big question!)
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I continually read and hear news with the filter:
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 some questions to help you shape your role and your voice (I include myself in this, of course). How often do you opt for being polite and accepting rather than strong and courageous? How often do you sit back down and say, “Oh, well, ok then” when you are thanked politely for speaking, but those in power do not act on your words? Does fear of being called pushy or worse hold you back? Fear of retribution from those who hold more power and money? Do you think you don’t have the answers or solutions? Do you really think our policymakers have better answers than you? Do you think you do not have the time to do much?
Now is the time to let loose your energy and your passion to create change. How many of us–men and women–hold back from jumping into the fray and really creating the change we want? Let us all wildly, freely demand in all venues that our voices be heard and respected and that we become equal players in creating policy that affects us. What will you do now–what action will you commit to? Let it be small or large, but let it begin now!
]]>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? An alternate system? Might there be a more balanced system of government and economy? Are there some resources, commodities and services that would be best to be provided without profit?
I don’t have the answer. But when private companies buy up water rights (springs, watersheds, reservoirs) I get nervous. Please notice the extent to which this is happening: try googling water privatization. Water may well be the next oil. Something that will be scarce, yet essential. Something for which people will wage war. It has already happened.
I am a land owner. I benefit from private land ownership. Yet I am also drawn to a system where no one owns land outright. Rather, they become stewards of a parcel, using its resources in a balanced way. Might we have more wild and natural lands in such a system? Might we need fewer resources to make our livings if we did not need hundreds of thousands of dollars for the right of ownership–or the right of tenantship?
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