Sacred Ground with Starhawk

Sacred Ground with Starhawk

Rooting for the Trees
When nature gets sick, appreciation can heal.

I'm spending a lot of time lately rooting for the trees, cheering for their health and their continuity. I live in a forest in recovery. If you were to come and visit me, you would probably be struck by the beauty of this land--the envelope of green that surrounds my cabin, the jeweled dance of sunlight glinting off wet needles after a rain, the quiet. redwoods towering a hundred feet above my skylights, the great oaks dotting the hillsides. All seems well.

Yet this is deeply damaged land. At least three times in the last 100 years, this land has been logged. The tall redwoods are juveniles; there are no elders left, except as giant stumps here and there on the creek beds. Streams that once ran year-round are now dry in summer; gravel beds where salmon and steelhead once spawned are buried in silt. We see the beauty of what is left, but the earth's unspoken pain is in what is missing: the old growth, the salmon, spotted owl, marbled murrelet, and bears. A whole, hidden world of lichen, fungi, and insects live only in the branches of redwoods that are over 150 years old. None are left to seed new colonies in these redwoods, even if they should survive to that age.

Could it be that the oaks were dying because we don't gather from them, talk to them, care about them?

Land is resilient, and every ecosystem includes its healers. Here in this California coastal forest, the healing tree is the tan oak. A tree at the edge of an old growth forest, it grows sparsely, covering small wounds, providing acorns and nourishment for animals and birds. Tan oak is tough: Cut it down and it resprouts from its roots, part of its adaptation to the fires that were once a characteristic of this land. An old, mature tan oak is a beautiful sight, with spreading branches and large acorns hanging beneath creased, leathery evergreen leaves. The Pomo call the tan oak "Chiskale"--"beautiful tree"--and prize its acorns as the heaviest and sweetest.

Where the land has been clear-cut, the tan oaks move in and cover the devastation with a thick blanket of bushy, multi-trunked growth that in turn becomes a deadly fire hazard. Because of its ubiquity, and because we who live on this land today do not eat acorns, the tan oaks are often not valued.

Mabel McKay, a Pomo healer and elder, once said, "When people don't use the plants, they get scarce. You must use them so they will come up again. All plants are like that. If they're not gathered from, or talked to and cared about, they'll die."

Today, our tan oaks are in danger of dying. A new disease has appeared, a blight that threatens tan oak, live oaks, and black oaks and strikes so quickly and completely it has been named Sudden Oak Death. When I first became aware of this disease, the news struck me with a deep, despairing panic, much like I felt when we finally realized the AIDS epidemic was real and would affect many of our dearest friends. I know that blights have wiped out whole species of trees before: The elms that once graced so many yards and streets, the chestnuts that once were the major forest tree in the Eastern woodlands. The thought of our woods without tan oak, our hillsides without the wide and powerful black oaks and valley oaks, made me sick with fear.

From BeliefNet

Target Global Warming, Target Exxon by Paul Rogat Loeb

 

TARGET GLOBAL WARMING, TARGET EXXON

By Paul Rogat Loeb

 

With over 1400 local events, the April 14 National Day of Climate Action, www.StepItUp07.org, offered a national wakeup call, with citizens in every state raising their voice. But even as we build on this powerful day to move forward, we need to talk about why it's been so hard for Americans to recognize the climate issue's urgency.

 

As recently as July 2006, the acknowledgement of the crisis by ordinary Americans lagged behind not only our counterparts in Great Britain, Germany and Japan, but also behind those polled in China, India, Argentina, Nigeria and Indonesia. U.S. citizen awareness has increased significantly in the wake of this past winter's massive storms (even before the latest East Coast disaster) and coverage of the international scientific reports. But though between 77% and 83% of Americans now acknowledge that global warming poses a serious problem, only 55% in a January Pew poll say the issue requires immediate government action, and only 47% in the same Pew poll say that they believe it's human caused. This means there's still serious denial. And to dismantle its architecture means taking on the key role of ExxonMobil.

 

Those who dismiss global warming's threat have embraced a series of arguments, retreating from one to the next as they're trumped by reality. The planet isn't really warming, they say. If it is, it's due to random fluctuations or sunspots, not human-created greenhouse gases. And even if global warming is real, it will bring more benefits than problems. Wherever I go, people offer up the same rationales. Some even rattle off the names of dissenting scientists, websites, or journal articles. They dismiss the 99% unanimity of international climate scientists and scientific associations by saying those sounding the warning are all on the take and probably also personal hypocrites.

 

"They're just giving the government funding agencies what they want," a student in Colorado Springs told me two weeks ago. "If they don't, they won't get their grants." It's an odd concept of pandering, given the massive challenges faced by any elected leader who takes the scientific message seriously. But the deniers insist that a handful of contrarians whose views are refuted by every major scientific study are somehow more credible than the collective judgment of practically every climate scientist in the world.

 

These arguments emerge from the standard echo chamber of Hannity, Rush, and Fox News. But the spokespeople who articulate them in these venues and others more mainstream have been overwhelmingly sponsored by Exxon. As the Union of concerned Scientists explores in their meticulously detailed report, Smoke, Mirrors and Hot Air, and as George Monbiot examines in his powerful global warming book Heat, Exxon's strategy of using a handful of industry-funded  dissenters to cast doubt on an overwhelming scientific consensus was borrowed from the fight over tobacco regulation. In 1992, a major EPA report warned of the medical harm from second hand smoke. In response, Philip Morris hired the PR firm APCO to create a supposedly independent group, The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), to promote scientists who'd dispute this harm. Enlisting enough other corporate supporters so the effort didn't seem just a tobacco industry creation, TASSC's mission echoed the phrase from a memo of fellow tobacco company Brown and Williamson, "Doubt is our product."

 

As part of creating that doubt, APCO's Steven Milloy founded JunkScience.com, which would later become a key website for global warming denial. Milloy also became associated with other key climate change denial organizations, like the Competitive Enterprise Institute (which has called the Kyoto accords "a power grab based on deception and fear"), and later become a columnist for Fox. Major climate denial activist Frederick Seitz also had strong tobacco industry ties, drawing $585,000 from RJ Reynolds between 1979 and 1987 before going on to the George Marshall Institute.  Exxon jumped in to support these efforts early on, as part of a more general assault on government regulation and action. As the scientific consensus around global warming began to solidify, they began funding a series of studies and spokespeople to insist that mainstream scientific opinion was sharply divided. Between 1998 and 2005 the company has invested over $16 million in challenging the overwhelming consensus among climatologists, spreading the resources among at least 43 different institutions to give the appearance of a broad chorus of dissent.  Whether the Heartland Institute, Alliance for Climate Strategies, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, or the Competitive Enterprise Institute and George Marshall Institute, they all got major Exxon support for their role in arguing that no global warming crisis existed.  Until recently, the efforts to sow doubt have worked, with the help of a compliant media and the Bush presidency.  And though a number of other energy companies also participated, ExxonMobil was the critical initiator, and remained firmly denying the crisis even as other oil companies, like BP Amoco and Shell, acknowledged the gravity of the threat.

 

Many of us know Exxon's role in climate change denial, and have avoided buying their gas for that reason. Others have avoided the company because of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. But we need more than individual actions. In July 2005, major environmental groups launched an international boycott. The coordinating organization, www.exposeexxon.org, has played an important role in getting the word out about the company's role. Their petition campaign for Exxon to cease funding global warming deniers and join other oil companies in making significant investments in renewable energy has generated over a half million signatures. But their effort has mostly been a media campaign, as opposed to one focusing on grassroots organizing.

 

Even with this initial pressure, though, the company seemingly begun to backtrack. This January, new CEO Rex Tillerson claimed followed strong criticism of Exxon's actions by the British Royal Society, US Senators Snowe and Rockefeller, and in the Union of Concerned Scientists report, by announcing that they'd stopped funding "five or six" of the groups that promoted climate change skepticism. But except for the Competitive Enterprise Institute Tillerson refused to name all the individuals and groups Exxon has given money to or specify those they've cut off. And he gave no reason for the shift, although an Exxon spokesman did say the adverse publicity was a distraction.

Meanwhile, the company is still paying a handsome salary to former American Petroleum Institute lobbyist and Bush Council on Environmental Quality chief of staff Philip Cooney, who Exxon hired after he resigned following media reports of how he edited the reports of climate scientists to render them innocuous. They even sponsor a website aimed at British primary school children, featuring a cute climate skeptic robot that claims the cause of global warming remains uncertain. And ExxonMobil continues to be rated lower environmentally than every other major multinational oil company. While the company's stated shift may be hopeful, it's by no means certain that it's anything but greenwashing.

 

Solving global warming will be hard enough, even without orchestrated opposition. And off course we need to focus on where we need to go, like StepItUp's call for an 80% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050. But if we only do that and ignore the counterattacks, our efforts will continue to get Swift Boated, and it will be far harder to build the necessary political will for them to succeed. Targeting Exxon pressures them and other corporations to stop trying to undermine the scientific consensus and to stop blocking attempts to rein in greenhouse gas emissions—as in a recent Competitive Enterprise Institute ad that proclaimed about CO2, "they call it pollution, we call it life." It also highlights the roots of why so many Americans have resisted the reality of the crisis—how what many of us think this is just our personal skepticism is product of a deliberate disinformation campaign.

 

Some questionable companies are hard to boycott—where do you start with Haliburton? But ExxonMobil has a presence in every city in this country. Their gas stations are accessible for rallies and picketing. Every dollar that their stations lose and every bit of adverse press coverage will create further pressure.

 

Imagine if enough organized effort was focused so that Exxon had to sell or close some of their stations. Or if enough Americans understood their manipulative role so that both the company and the groups they'd supported lost all media and political credibility. Think about how INFACT (now the Corporate Accountability Campaign) ran their largely successful campaigns against Nestle and GE. Or how the United Farm Workers conducted their grape boycotts. Or the successful recent campaign of Florida's Coalition of Immokalee Workers to get Taco Bell and McDonalds to require their subcontractors to pay higher wages to tomato pickers. These efforts didn't just call on individuals not to buy specific products from the problematic companies. They actively organized, in communities, in congregations, and on campuses. They convinced their fellow citizens to withhold their dollars in a way that created the maximum public attention. 

 

Global warming solutions exist, and we need to forge the political will to enact them, building on existing programs like California's "million solar roof" legislation and the climate change initiatives of the European nations. But even as public attitudes begin to shift, and major corporations like GE, Dupont and BP Amoco are at least talking about taking the issue seriously, Exxon continues to impede political progress. To prevent a future of endless climate-driven disasters, we're going to have to keep talking about their role.

 

 

Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org   To receive his monthly articles email sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles 

A New [Old, Very Old] Consciousness of Nature by Kirkpatrick Sale

A New [Old, Very Old] Consciousness of Nature

Kirkpatrick Sale

It has been argued that by the 21st century Western civilization's opposition to all that is not civilized and domesticated  has been so successful that, in one sense, as critic Frederic Jameson has said, "nature is gone for good."  By which he means that the instruments of advanced capitalism, including industrialism, commercialism,  financial markets, agribusiness, tourism, trade, media, advertising, all on an encompassing global scale, have caused, at least on the effective conceptual level, "a radical eclipse of Nature itself." 

But the fact is that nature is not gone from our souls, no matter how much capitalist civilization has distorted and dismantled it or driven it from our daily sensibilities. It is there deep in our primal selves: we are indeed genetically encoded to understand and appreciate nature as did Homo erectus, which is what humans were for 95 per cent of our time on earth.  We evolved in a wilderness of extraordinary diversity where we lived in daily intimacy with animal life and plant variety, upon which we depended completely and unbrokenly for survival, and that has only been reinforced by natural selection through 72,000 generations over the long millennia.

Hence under our modern veneer, and in spite of the multiple obfuscations of capitalist culture, we still have an innate need for connections to nature, we have an ineradicable appreciation of its flora and fauna, and we have the capacity and somewhere the felt ability to achieve a communion with beings other than ourselves and settings other than those we create. Edward Wilson, the Harvard biologist, has named this "biophilia," and he says that it is "the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms…[that is] hereditary and hence part of ultimate human nature."
     It is upon this that a modern Erectus consciousness of nature can be built.

It would begin with a basic understanding that nature is good, just as the Mbuti in the Congo forest and many other original tribes know.  That seems simple enough a concept, but it is not one that our culture has fostered: we are taught to know that we have been expelled from the good world of the garden of Eden into the bad and fierce and wild one of nature—"cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life"—and we are told that it is our task to subdue it.  It is true that in some societies at some times there have been some few who express appreciation for nature, but that is not the same thing as a society-wide deep understanding of nature as a benevolent force and the earth as a living, giving source of all life. Nor does it embody the Mbuti sense of daily life as a rich, full, easy, bountiful endowment of nature, rather than something that must be wrested from the world by human effort in a never-ending battle of drudgery and challenge and competition.
    Then it might seek a thoroughgoing reintegration with nature, a conscious
 identity with it and its species, something very like the feeling of loss of self and ego, an at-one-with-the-world sensation, that comes when the right temporal  lobe of the brain takes control during deep meditation, or when in Zen Buddhism the initiate is lost in the immediate moment and perceives, non-verbally, the law of interdependence.  Psychologist Hans Loewald, like Carl Jung himself, has suggested that the "quest for boundary loss, for the merger of Self and Other," is a fundamental human search, and it may be so because that is the "interpenetration with the non-human world" the Erectus psyche seems to have known.   .
One more aspect of the Erectus understanding of nature available to us is the essential wisdom of biocentrism, a way of coming to regard the human, as the ecotheologian Thomas Berry has put it, "on the species level," as one more creature on the earth in essence no grander and greater than the rest, and at heart ultimately dependent upon them and their continuing healthy interactions for our very lives. We are so cocooned in our human-centeredness in most of our existence that this sort of  humility seems well-nigh degrading, or juvenile, but it is of course the crucial element of a worldview that knows domination to be wrong and integration to be right.  As Berry has phrased it:
Our secular, rational, industrial society, with its amazing scientific insight and technological skills, has established the first radically anthropocentric society and has thereby broken the primary law of the universe, the law of the integrity of the universe, the law that every component member of the universe should be integral with every other member of the universe and that the primary norm of reality  and of value is the universe community itself in its various forms of expression, especially as realized on the planet Earth.

All life is sacred, say the Indians, including the stones and waters and clouds and the earth itself,  and there is no hierarchy determining that humans are supreme and can dominate and direct the others. We have lived as if there were one, and now we must live another way. The Erectus way.

 

It's Just Our Turn To Help The World

It's Just Our Turn To Help The World
Forward to Living System: Making Sense of Globalisation by Bruce Nixon
Margaret J. Wheatley, Ed.D.

Several years ago, I read of a Buddhist teacher who offered his encouragement to a group that was filled with despair over the state of the world.  His advice was simple, profound and placed things in historical context: "It's just our turn to help the world."  What I love about this statement is that it reminds us of other times and other people who stepped forward to help create the changes that were necessary.  We do live in an extraordinary era when, for the first time, humans have altered the planet's ecology and created consequences which are just beginning to materialize in frightening ways.  But throughout human existence, there have always been people willing to step forward to struggle valiantly in the hope that they might reverse the downward course of events.  Some succeeded, some did not.  But as we face our own time, we need to remember that we stand on very firm and solid shoulders.

In my own work with local communities around the planet, I've learned to define leadership quite differently than the norm.  A leader is anyone willing to help, anyone who sees something that needs to change and takes the first steps to influence that situation.  It might be a parent who intervenes in her child's school; or a group in a rural village in Africa who decides to put in a well for fresh water; or a worker who refuses to allow mistreatment of others in his workplace; or an individual who rallies his or her neighbors to stop local polluters.  Everywhere in the world, no matter the economic or social circumstances, I see people stepping forward to make a small difference.  They are impelled to act in spite of themselves; they often describe their actions as "I couldn't not do it."  Others see what they do and label them as courageous, but those who step forward never feel courageous.  They just did what felt like the right thing to do.

Because a leader is anyone willing to help, we can celebrate the fact that the world has an abundance of leaders.  Some people ask, "where have all the good leaders gone?"  But when we worry that there's a deficit of leaders, we're just looking in the wrong place.  We need to look locally.  And we need to look at ourselves.  Where have we been willing to step forward for the issues that we care about?

Every great change initiative in the world begins with the actions of just a few people.  Even those that win the Nobel Peace Prize. I've looked at the history of several of these prize-winning efforts, and one phrase always pops up as the founders describe how they began.  Their laudable efforts began not with plans and official permissioin, but when "some friends and I started talking."  I recently listened to Wangari Matai, winner of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize for her work in planting over 30 million trees in Kenya and east Africa.  Her first efforts were with a few local women, and they planted seven trees, five of which died.  But they learned from that experience, spread the learning to their villages, then to other networks, and ten years later, 30 million trees flourish.  Villages now have clean water and local firewood, creating improved health and community vitality.  And it all began "when some friends and I started talking."

This is how the world changes. Individuals have an idea, or experience a tragedy, or want to resolve an injustice, and they step forward to help.   Instead of being overwhelmed and withdrawing, as many of us do these days, here are people who decided to act locally. They didn't know at the beginning where it would end up.  They didn't spend a great deal of time planning and getting official support.  They began, they learned from their mistakes, they kept going. They followed the energy of yes rather than accepting defeat.  This is how the world always changes.  And this is how we must act now to respond to the frightening issues of these times, to reverse our direction, to restore hope to the future.

I carry with me a vision of what would be possible if more and more of us were willing to help, if we simply said "no" to what disturbs us, if we took a stand, if we refused to be cowed or silenced.  My heroes are the Ukrainians.  They set a standard in their 'Orange Revolution" in late 2004 that has now inspired citizens to protest for what they need in many different countries as dispersed as Ecuador and Nepal.  They refused to give in or to stop protesting until they got what they needed.  Why couldn't we do the same?  What will be our response to the destructive behaviors, the injustices and the suicidal decisions that characterize this time? Are we willing to help?

 

I Want to Be a Ukrainian
Meg Wheatley ©2005

When I come of age,
When I get over being a teen-ager
When I take my life seriously
When I grow up

    I want to be a Ukrainian.

When I come of age
I want to stand happily in the cold
for days beyond number,
no longer numb to what I need.

I want to hear my voice
rise loud and clear above
the icy fog, claiming myself.

    It was day fifteen of the protest, and a woman standing next to her car was being interviewed.  Her car had a rooster sitting on top of it.  She said  "We've woken up and we're not leaving till this rotten government is out." It is not recorded if the rooster crowed.

When I get over being a teen-ager
when I no longer complain or accuse
when I stop blaming everybody else
when I take responsibility

I will have become a Ukrainian

    The Yushchenko supporters carried bright orange banners which they waved vigorously on slim poles. Soon after the protests began, the government sent in thugs hoping to create violence.  They also carried banners, but theirs were hung on heavy clubs that could double as weapons. 

When I take my life seriously
when I look directly at what's going on
when I know that the future doesn't change itself
that I must act

I will be a Ukrainian.

    "Protest that endures," Wendell Berry said, "is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.

When I grow up and am known as a Ukrainian
I will move easily onto the streets
confident, insistent, happy to preserve the qualities
of my own heart and spirit.

In my maturity, l will be glad to teach you
the cost of acquiescence
the price of silence
the peril of retreat.

    "Hope," said Vaclev Havel, "is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out."

I will teach you all that I have learned
the strength of fearlessness
the peace of conviction
the strange source of hope

and I will die well, having been a Ukrainian.

Margaret J. Wheatley, Ed.D. ©2006

EarthSpirit Rising 2007 Conference

We are very excited to know that the 2007 Return to Earth Wisdom Conference is ever closer.  As of this writing the updated website is up and the paper brochure is back from the printer.  The word is spreading and the registration process has began. 

Remember early registration is the best way to insure your first choice for the Saturday afternoon breakout session.

This time around we’d like to share a Valentine’s Day greeting from our special musical guest Issa (formally known as Jane Siberry).  You can read more about Issa on the presenters page or on her own website: www.issalight.com


the best thing about being alive is people
tiny moments that make the trip worthwhile

perhaps most often with STRANGERS
when the soul has no history to distract
an unexpected smile
the laughter at the checkout
the giving of privacy
the bus driver's care of the homeless's fare
the waitress's watch over the lonely
the taxi-driver turns off his meter

a thousand kindnesses
in a thousand ways
by a thousand people
times a thousand days

a stream of goodness
that, like the famous tale
of the turtle and hare
slowly and surely
Love will prevail

and FRIENDS, how precious beyond words
even if their faces change like cars on a train
how each has warmed the cabin
with their unique offerings
one making you laugh, one making you think,
one making you skateboard, another making you goofy
while you set about here and there
on this seeming meander

and FAMILY, bonds beyond words
bringing us to the borders of heaven and hell
the invisible security we don't know until they are gone
the lurch of the boat as they step off

if any of these things are love
I don't know
it seems the things we really know
I mean REALLY know
are the unknown things
words just a placeholder
so it is not too quiet

and another best thing about life is animals
and flowers
oh, and bugs

my Valentine hug to you.

love,
Issa

2007 Conference Scheduled

Earth Spirit Rising Conference 2007 is now in the planning stages. This year's plans include a Pre-Conference session, 10 breakout sessions, and some of the world's most fascinating and dynamic leaders and educators in the field of spirit and the environment. We look forward to reuniting with our ever-expanding community.

In spirit,

Mark