Thinkingaboutsurvival

watch this and save the planet

2012-02-21T20:17:00.001-08:00

XL pipeline = human extinction

2012-02-14T12:23:00.000-08:00

If we don't stop Climate Change, we'll break the sky and humans will go extinct. That is what the science says. Runaway Climate Change means planet death. If one hasn't had a terrifying vision of human extinction from runaway Climate Change, one doesn't understand the science.

Climate activists have been reluctant to motivate people with grim visions of planet death, lest they get too depressed to get involved. Climate scientists tend to talk in sleep-inducing language that doesn't convey the emergency. We've been under-scaring the children. I understand not wanting to infect people with terribly sad visions of everything you love and care about dying. It's wicked sad that Humanity is on a doom course. Staring at these grim realities should make you weep occasionally like a little child. I understand folks wanting to live the culture of Make Believe and pretend it's the 1950's and America will still be awesome if we only stick with what's worked, so "Somebody put on a Kingston Trio record and let's get this party re-started!" But that's the past. Today is 2012 and we live in the Era of Climate Crisis and Vermont has no snow and last summer we had a hurricane!

The Keystone XL pipeline is a product of this ahistorical fantasy culture. Un-constrained by history, science or common sense, the radical oily corporationists want to build the biggest industrial project on the planet to painfully extract oil that we need to leave in the ground to survive as a species! Fossil fuel company executives should be seen as backwards, radical, extreme energy fundamentalist terrorists. If Exxon Mobil executives had beards, turbans and an unpopular religion, our society wouldn't have given them 9.4 billion dollars last quarter, but rather, we'd be ordering drone strikes in Dallas! These same oily terrorists are plotting to ruin America's water supply in the next decade with hydro-fracking.

Tar Sands oil requires 4 barrels of water to produce on barrel of oil. Native peoples of Alberta report that their lakes are dropping and people are getting cancer from contaminated ground water. People get run over by the massive industrial trucks clogging their country roads. Alberta is like a real life version of Pandora from the movie Avatar. The human costs is so high, and yet these sociopathic corporations put all these costs down as 'externalities' while winning all the poker chips for themselves. There is a touch of evil on the Tars Sands XL pipeline project, a heartless diabolic cruelty to the Earth and poor people.

Our society is spiraling towards a new morality and Law based on the truth of the Climate Crisis. Tim DeChristopher, Bidder 70.org, in jail now for disrupting an oil lease auction, should be seen as a hero for pushing on the Law to catch up to Climate science. There are growing calls for an International Climate Justice Tribunal, modeled after Bertrand Russell's International War Crimes Tribunal. These citizen processes prepare the way for full legal proceedings, and hopefully someday we'll see the Koch brothers at the Hague's International Criminal Court.

Soon, when humanity finally realizes how serious a pickle we're in, there will be a demand for justice and a call for heads on a plate. In 10 years, a history of advocacy on Climate will make you look like Nostradamus. And in 20 years, obstructionism in dealing with Climate will be a crime worthy of retro-active punishment. Government people who take money from the American Petroleum Institute in 2012 will someday have to answer for it in court. I look forward to the day when TransCanada's executives are afraid to go to Spain for fear of arrest.

Media people called Tar Sands protesters "environmental radicals" which got Bill McKibben asking "who are the radicals here?" The people who came to the protests were the kind of radicals who talk about Gandhi, eat organic and sing "This Little Light of Mine". The real radicals are the oil companies who are changing the chemical composition of the planet in a real time experiment on all of us, like nazi planet doctors. Que the Nazi accent: "Ya, ve have seen what happens when we break a bone 15 times in the same spot on gypsy prisoners. Now, the Reich will use it's technological prowess to make sky warmer so that the Homeland has climate as pleasant as Jamaica."

The Keystone XL pipeline and the Tar Sands are an immoral, ahistorical, radical experiment in Extreme Energy. Tar Sands mining is the ugliest, earth-hating kind of industrialism. They want to scrape off the skin of Mother Earth on an area the size of the Britain. Then they want to build nuclear power plants to heat the oil out of the sand. Then they want to ship it across the continent over the Agualla Aquifer, then sell it to China. Pure unhinged sociopathic Wall Street boardroom madness without a whiff of ecological literacy.

Please help get the US government off the teet of Big Oil. Please help advance laws that reflect the reality of the Climate Crisis. Please stand against the XL pipeline and the Tar Sands.

Stop "Smartmeters" for health and privacy

2012-02-06T11:55:00.000-08:00

In this era of Climate Crisis, I loathe to argue against anything that might cut carbon, but the "Smartmeter" project is such a stinker on so many levels that I'm obliged. To summarize the problems: electro-smog pollution, corporate surveillance, propping up for Utility-based electrical distribution, (which by design don't really want to cut usage and therefore profits), undemocratic corporate pushiness, privacy and security for homeowners, and more.

Smartmeters have already been installed in California, creating so many problems that 40 towns to pass resolutions banning them. In Vermont, Central Vermont Power Service (CVPS) is rolling out a project to replace electric meters with so-called "Smartmeters" that essentially have a cellphone inside them communicating to cell-towers and creating an electric + information grid. CVPS says this will cut usage, create the infrastructure to support electric cars, and give the utility tools to manage the grid. The Federal Gov't set aside $69 million in Stimulus money for VT's smartmeter project, if they spend it before April 2013. I love that the government is trying to do big things for the environment and investing in technologies to cut carbon. But... with this project, the devil is in the details.

Smartmeters create security and privacy issues for the homeowner. It will be an easy system for computer hackers to get into, and then have detailed information about when you are home or not. And it will create a data trove that companies can "data mine".

This sounds sci-fi, but this is actually in the primary design of the system. Each electrical appliance emits a unique electronic signature, and the Utilities (+ whoever hacks it eventually) will know if/when you turn on your dishwasher, baby monitor, vibrator, and so forth. This electrical signature surveillance is currently being used against marijuana growers, so this isn't hypothetical. One could argue that Smartmeters are unconstitutional because the Bill of Rights says we have a right to privacy in our homes and in our papers. Why the heck should Utility companies have nearly omniscient knowledge about our private lives?

You may be familiar with the debate about Facebook and data mining. The same issues arise here. Will CVPS sell my data and I'll get ads for blenders or worse? Who will own the information after it's collected, me or CVPS? Will the husband paying the electric bill own the data, or will ex-wife be able to subpoena the electro-data-log into divorce court to prove the husband wasn't really watching football that night in question because the TV clearly wasn't on? Will parents of teenagers be able to surveil their daughters, and be able to say, "your lights turned on at 2 a.m. briefly, did you sneak out and see Johnny?" These are creepy scenarios of Too-Much-Information that will be created by this system.

The Wikileaks case showed that no data is eternally free from being hacked. If the US State Department can't keep emails secure, how is CVPS going to keep records secure? They can't. They'll collect five years of data, some hacker will bust open the file, sell it to criminal elements or dump it on the web and then everybody will know you are always out of the house on Sunday mornings for church and that's the time to steal the silverware. Cybersecurity is now in the Post-Wikileaks Era. Deeply secure data is nearly impossible. One of the best strategies is to NOT gather tons of data will be damaging WHEN it gets out. This has to be the State Department's new cybersecurity strategy: no paper trails people! (Telepathy only.)

Another scenario: hackers will crack the code on the EMF signal coming off the meter, sit outside your house for an hour and know that nobody is home and come in. (There's an App for that! It's called Smartmeter Criminal's X-ray Vision). CVPS says, "oh, well, we'll encrypt the signal." Good luck with that, they're trying to create a 'mesh network' of cellphones that talk to each other, and the last thing that system design wants is an encryption code of hundreds of 1's and 0's bouncing back and forth. But even if they did encrypt it, hackers are resolute. It only takes a day after Apple's new smartphone comes out that computer geeks ripe it apart, crack the codes and brag online about it.

Finally, the biggest concern is cancer from Electro-Magnetic Radiation (EMR). Radio-frequency pollution has been identified as a carcinogen since US servicemen in WW2 got cancer while working the radar stations. The European Union is leading the way in regulating cellphones because this technology is also unsafe. The science is a heavy mix of bio-medical information and physics, and it's hard to get across quickly. I encourage people to visit EMFpolicy.org for detailed scientific reports. I'll summarize some of the studies here. Cellphones cause brain cancer, so use sparingly. Pregnant women should not sleep near the Wi-Fi antenna or risk having an autistic child. Leukemia cases rise when living near cellphone towers, as with high-voltage electric lines and the Vatican's high-powered radio station. The brain's extremely complex, low-voltage electro-chemistry doesn't benefit from lots of additional random electricity. Smartmeters will be adding an intense electro-smog system into a world already going mad with unhealthy wireless devices. CVPS says the Smartmeters could be hard-wired with fiber-optic internet cables to eliminate the radio-frequency pollution, but then it would be too expensive to roll out. They'd rather ignore the health issues and pass the health costs onto the public.

The Government regulators are asleep at the switch, brow-beaten into ineffectiveness by corporate propaganda against regulation and so the public is unprotected. Further, the FCC makes money for the gov't selling off slices of the electromagnetic spectrum, and so it's a conflicted party that shouldn't really be in charge of setting the standards of safety. Smartmeter advocates say "they meet FCC standards" as if that should end the discussion of safety. But the FCC standards were created 30 years ago, based only on measuring thermal (heating) ionizing radiation on a 200 pound adult male. Kids have thinner skulls and cellphones cause their brain tissue to heat up much faster. Further, non-ionizing radiation at lower levels is increasingly linked to biological impacts. The neural-nets of the brain, that vast web of wiring where little charges of biochemical electricity jump from synapse to synapse are designed to work in an absence or vacuum of electricity, and increased ambient electricity from these devices is linked to creating blockages that cause cancer. The government is grossly negligent in protecting us against electro-smog pollution, and it's time for the citizenry to stand up and say, "enough already!"

Some Vermonters are opposing the Smartmeter system. A group called STOPSMETERS.ORG has gotten the issue on the agenda at two Town Meetings in March, when we'll ask our towns to "opt-out." We demand the Utilities wait on installation until the citizens have been able to vote on the issue. We encourage lawmakers to create legislation to insist that the Utilities address our concerns about safety, health and security. Indeed, Vermont Senator Bob Hartwell's bill S214 is doing just that! We encourage our national politicians to re-direct that lovely stimulus money that was earmarked for smartmeters, (that $69 million, thanks Rep. Peter Welch, but, how 'bout we put it towards solar panels?) Our efforts to stop the Wi-Fi-ification of our planet feels like being a little Dutch boy with his finger in a dyke, but we have to start somewhere. Let's start with blocking an Orwellian corporate technology that will surveil us and make us sick in our own homes. Join us in opposing Smartmeters, and more broadly, the invisible 21st century plague of electro-smog.

a film I made in DC this fall

2012-02-01T10:01:00.000-08:00

Invitation to the Climate Party

2011-11-05T16:46:00.000-07:00

Dear Climate Allies,

We are creating a Climate Party to OCCUPY OUR GOVERNMENT to get solutions to the Climate Crisis. We've registered CLIMATEPARTY.ORG to host our activities on-line. As Tim DeChristopher said recently "Our challenge is not a technical one or an economic one: it's a political one."

The Climate Party's first General Assembly is this Sunday Nov. 6th, starting 10 minutes after the end of the upcoming Tar Sands Action, estimated to be 5:40pm. We're meeting to the middle-left side of Lafayette Park, if you were turning away from the White House. We'll reconvene for a 9 pm evening session over pints at Harry's Restaurant (436 11th St NW, http://www.harryssaloon.com/).

From this humble beginning, we'll create a political movement that swears eternal opposition to Tar Sands Oil. Since the Climate Crisis will be with us for the rest of our lives, we can afford to spend time building political infrastructure to help us Win Our Victories. Let us begin the discussion about creating a Political WIng of the Climate Movement.

The Climate Party will take a multi-tracked approach to pushing the political system. We will create a national third party, support candidates in other parties who are Climate Champions, create a Climate Policy data base to push doable Climate Legislation, host Climate Culture events in DC to bring the truth to the political elite, create support networks for Climate Champions, create a DC Climate Activist Hostel to bring more climate voices to the Capitol, create a Congressional Climate Caucus, fundraise and more.

First, we'll create a Climate Citizen & Politician Alliance to be a support network for Climate Champion Politicians, like Rep. Paul Pinsky of Maryland who was arrested at the Tar Sands Action in August. You may never have heard of Paul and that's part of the problem. We need to support our Climate Allies by volunteering for their campaigns, supporting them financially and amplifying their message. The young people who went to Powershift need jobs supporting the campaigns of Climate Champions. We'll create a support network that brings together Climate Politicians and Volunteers.

Second, we'll support you when you run for office. If you were willing to get arrested in front of the White House, you are brave enough to be in the US Senate. We will "storm the bastille" of our oily government and elect 10,000 Climate Champions. Please be one of them. We will encourage a new generation to run for office by DOING POLITICS DIFFERENTLY. We ONE PENNY from FOSSIL FUEL CORPORATIONS. Many people refuse to enter politics because they think it will require them to become corrupt, phony liars. We will not require you to wear a tie or wear your hair slicked back. We will create a party of authentic, down-to-earth, big-hearted humans. We will do politics in a way that doesn't sell our souls, but rather, makes our souls shine.

Third, the Climate Party will be creative to put the Climate Crisis at the forefront of the national political conversation. We must break the unholy silence on the Climate Crisis in DC. We must stop letting the Political Class get away with "shuffling the deck chairs of the Titanic" with their delusional arguments about budgets while the sky is being broken. First and foremost, DC politicians will take the Climate Crisis seriously when we start winning 50 seats in Congress. Additionally, the Climate Party aspires to host a series of awesome Climate Culture events in DC, such as Grizzly Bear rock show with Dr. James Hansen speaking at the set break. We'll give away tickets to congressional staffers until everybody on Capitol Hill understands the dire seriousness of Runaway Climate Change.

Fourth, the Climate Party will stake out advanced positions on Climate, far ahead of what is "conventional wisdom" in DC. We will push serious, realistic Climate Public Policy. We will compile a database of doable Climate Policy options to give good politicians something to work with, like "Complete Street" legislation, carbon taxes, enforcing existing EPA standards, writing new standards commensurate to the problem, signing the Kyoto Protocol, banning Tar Sands oil like the E.U., and ending fossil fuel subsidies. We will advocate for Public Policy based on Ecological Intelligence and the Precautionary Principle, and so we'll oppose "green-washing" non-solutions like the so-called "Smart-meters" based on radio-frequency pollution.

The author Terry Tempest Williams was debating war with a conservative senator. He asked her "which of your beliefs would you be willing to die for?" and the question caused her a lot of contemplation. Eventually she decided that the real question was "what would I live for?" Going to jail in protest is like a minor dying. But what can we dedicate our lives to that will make even more change? We can occupy our government with good people who know about the Climate Crisis so we can get human civilization on track to survival.

Please join us. Support this new action by donating online, helping us compile a library of articles on Climate&Politics and on Climate Policy, running for office, signing our email list and offering your service to the Climate Party. The Climate Party starts out as a shoe-string, ragtag crew, but we are right to obsessively focus on the Climate Crisis, and in ten years, our Climate-centric approach will seem prescient, and we'll be a force in national politics. We have a long row to hoe. We invite good allies to join us as we go the distance. We join together in this endeavor not knowing how it will go, but knowing that it needs to be done.

We invite the Divine Source to bless our endeavors with success, fun and victory. May we be the human species coming into Ecological Balance with Mother Earth so Humanity continues gracefully into the future.

Onward and upward!

My Public Comment to State Dept. on the XL Pipeline

2011-10-07T07:42:00.000-07:00

The Keystone XL project is wicked for many reasons: an ecological gash across North America, a commitment to dirty carbon energy for 100 years, displacing Indigenous peoples, allowing ahistorical industrial madness by dissociative corporations, and insuring the destruction of Mother Earth and human civilization by a Runaway Climate Crisis.

I accuse the XL Pipeline project of being "AHISTORICAL". It is outside the sweep of history, it is disconnected from the ecological realities of 2011, it is disconnected from current science, history and rationality. The XL Pipeline would go thru the Ogalla Aquifer, at a time when fresh water is becoming scarce. We are living during a Climate Apocolpyse, when the newspaper everyday reports evidence of the rapid change of our planetary ecosystem due to carbon pollution, and yet the XL Pipeline would produce 3 times more CO2 than regular crude oil.

I accuse the State Department and the US Government more broadly of negligence of duty to protect the citizenry from Climate Collapse.

I bear witness to the "revolving door" between government and business, and encourage the State Department to stop allowing former employees to be employed by Big Business in endeavors that undermine our country's safety and sovereignty. The State Department should investigate the corrupt relationship documented here at Democracy Now:

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/10/6/naomi_klein_keystone_xl_oil_pipeline .

The XL Pipeline is like a mad fantasy of 19th century industrialists, with 21st century technology, but without the 21st century's understanding of Ecology, Climate Science, and Indigenous History.

The XL Pipeline will endanger our country by being a terrorist target atop our largest aquifer. It will endanger our country by creating a strip of ecological damage down the center of the North American continent.

There are Indigenous People's living amidst the Tar Sands project. They get run over by big trucks, get cancer from poisoned water, watch their lives erode amidst ecological devastation. The First Peoples have suffered so much. Our Planet's very survival depends on learning their wisdom about respecting Mother Earth. During the Tar Sands Action this summer, I made this short film that brings forward their voices:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOYU9IF-mVE

If the XL Pipeline is approved, we will mobilize to support a candidate for President that is a true Climate Champion. The Obama Administration's lack of action on the Climate Crisis is unacceptable. We don't have four more years to wait for action. If the Obama Administration is at all serious about addressing the Climate Crisis, the XL Pipelines should be cancelled right away.

I was arrested at the White House protesting the XL Pipeline because I understand the Climate Science. If we don't mobilize to stop this problem, we are NO PLACE. Everything valuable and beautiful in this small planet will be ruined because we will have ruined our sky. If you feel I'm being poetic or rash, I encourage you to study the climate science much more closely. The Climate Science is very clear: more carbon, more heat = disrupting a tightly wound atmospheric system = floods, hurricanes, ecocide.

Please, people, get on board. Provide some leadership and help save the planet before it's too late.

sincerely,

Theo Talcott

Manchester, Vermont

Last day for public comment is Oct 7th: at http://www.keystonepipeline-xl.state.gov/clientsite/keystonexl.nsf/CommentFset?OpenFrameSet

Advancing VT Climate Legislation and Climate Leaders

2011-10-01T08:40:00.000-07:00

Vermont has a historic opportunity to lead America in responding to the Climate Crisis. Governor Peter Shumlin spoke as a true Climate Champion during the 350.org's Moving Planet rally in Montpellier on Sept. 24th. How can Vermont's vibrant Climate Movement support legislators in creating aggressive and effective Climate legislation?

We need to start playing "The Inside Game". Climate activists have gotten used to being "voices in the wilderness" and lonely Cassandras. That was before "The Wakeup Call" of Hurricane Irene swept away covered bridges and excuses for inaction. Our political leaders are agreeing with us now, and so the Climate Movement enters a new phase. We can make ourselves useful and help 'getter dun' in the legislatures.

After Shumlin's speech, I found myself asking "by what miracle did we wind up with a Climate Champion governor?" And then I asked, "what does the governor do again? How much power does he actually have? What could the Vermont state legislature really do?"

This are the right questions because State Government is smaller and has less tricks it could pull off. Like Washington DC, Montpellier is a place where people talk about budgets and we shouldn't delude ourselves with magical thinking that somehow our elected leaders can flip a switch and Solve the Climate Crisis. The problem is REALLY BIG. Probably bigger than the Federal Government could deal with, even if it wasn't being run by oil companies. Bigger than the United Nations, whose best effort so far, the Kyoto Protocol, hasn't even caused the overall levels of Carbon going into the atmosphere to decrease.

Still... State Governments are useful as "Labratories of Democracy". We can work up solutions in the tiny state lab, and then scale them up for the nation and planet. So let's imagine Vermont passing aggressive climate legislation that helps governments of the world begin to effectively and legitimately respond to the Climate Crisis.

Like...

1. Developing methods for collecting Carbon Taxes. We need to put a price on Carbon. Taxes on Carbon should drive down the amount emitted. Think of it as Sin Taxes for the 21st Century. The political climate in Washington is so knee-jerk anti-tax in rhetoric that leadership on Carbon Taxes needs to come from the states. We could do a real service to the nation by getting the ball rolling and figuring out how to do it. We don't' have to reinvent the wheel. Other countries are already experimenting with carbon taxes, especially those smart northern european ones. Carbon Taxes might replace income taxes. How about a penny per gallon gasoline tax and the money raised buys solar panels to go on the schools?

2. Vermont should "sign the Kyoto Protocol." The United States has not signed the only meaningful international treaty on Climate created by the United Nations. Instead, every year the US goes to the 'Conference of Parties" (who actually have signed the treaty), and roadblock progress. In Copenhagen and then Cancun, the US has a track record of self-absorbed obstructionism. The Climate Movement should force the US to sign the Kyoto Protocol, and take up a LEGALLY-BINDING commitment to cut national levels of Carbon.

This isn't to say that Kyoto is perfect. (Overall, carbon levels have continued to go up since it was begun.) But it's the start. We need even stronger, fiercer globally concerted laws and action to avert the worst that the Climate Crisis could bring us. The US should at least get on-board with the relatively weak Kyoto "Commitments to reduce carbon levels."

Vermont could symbolically sign Kyoto (it's really a treaty that the US has to sign) and agree to take on the Commitments to reduce carbon levels. Vermont can start abiding by the Kyoto Protocol and hopefully US will someday do the same. Vermont can befriend the international Climate Negotiations and introduce our country to this useful ally. Vermont should send delegates to next round of international negotiations, in Decemeber, in Durbin, South Africa, with the intention to getting Vermont to abide by the Kyoto Protocol.

3. Vermont could get serious about creating 'complete streets' and promote bike lanes and public transportation. "Green Island" in Bellows Falls could get start support. And so on.

What Climate Legislation do you want to see?

I'd like to propose a few actions to help the Climate Movement to get political.

A) Let's have forum/symposium soon that brings together legislators and Climate Activists to discuss what is possible. Let's host a "Forum on Potential Climate Legislation for Vermont" will chew on our real options.

B) Let's create a Citizen & Politician Climate Alliance. Citizens and Public Servants can work together for Climate Justice. Citizens offer: work on campaigns, funding, advice, education to politicians, etc. Politicians get dedicated volunteers, some street cred, and help promoting legislation to the general public. "Cooperation and reciprocal good will are necessary for any important work" said spiritual teacher Mirra Alfassa. How can we cooperate with good will with the Climate Champions who are in power? We don't want to be "precious" about our outsider activism. Perhaps hipper to be in the streets with signs and slogans, but more truly useful to engage with the political process and really affect meaningful change.

C) Encourage Climate Activists to run for public office. We try to move from beseeching those in power to BEING THOSE IN POWER. We need to elect 10,o00 Climate Champions. Will you run for Senator?

The goal of the Climate Movement is to save the planet from Runaway Climate Change. We need to start using the tool of Government for this purpose. The Political Class is waking up to the Climate Crisis, at least the smart ones, like Clinton, Bloomberg, and Shumlin. Let us find ways to be in support of our elected allies who understand the "fierce urgency of now" of the Climate Crisis.

Climate of Private Obsession

2011-04-10T03:57:00.000-07:00

I spent much of the winter thinking and writing about the Climate Crisis. I organized with climate activists who all agreed it was a major problem. Then Spring came like flicking on a light switch and I dropped back into my body to work like a horse on a friend's farm. Suddenly, I'm back in a world where people don't know or aren't concerned about the Climate Crisis.

It's a relief. Who wants to always be thinking about 'The End of the World'? Not me. I want to think about Girlwalk videos, Further shows at SPAC and growing garlic. Caring about Climate feels like a private madness, a pet peeve, a dark private vision of planet death, especially when surround by people who are blithely unconcerned.

On April 7th, I attended a meeting for the State of Vermont's effort to create a Comprehensive Energy Plan. I was surprised to find very little talk of the Climate Crisis. It was an energy conversation that could have happened in another era on another planet. And these were smart gov't people.

So, clearly, the Climate Movement is still in the movement-building phase of "raising awareness" and "creating mass consciousness" and "making sure the public knows there is a problem".

The Climate Movement hasn't achieved mass consciousness because the science is so complicated that it's easy to refute. Like 5th graders, Climate Deniers have just said "Nah-uunuhh" and Climate Scientists are forced to mumble back "No really, arctic ice samples gives us a very clear record of the relationship between carbon in the atmosphere and temperature. More carbon, more temperature." Climate Deniers say "Oh, yeah?!!" And around it goes, a stuck debate between PhDs and tweens about the proper atmospheric composition if we want to preserve life on earth as we know it.

The Climate Movement must get better at explaining the science. It's not enough that Bill McKibben and James Hansen understand the mechanics of the problem. We need 8th graders who can explain the carbon/temperature connection to their Senators. Someday I’d like to make videos of citizens explaining the Climate Crisis to legislators.

It took me about two years to eat, digest and understand the Climate Science. In total, it's complicated: planetary chemistry, geological records. But in summary, it's not too complicated: more soot in the sky, more heat held in by the greenhouse effect. We need to get millions more people understanding the Climate Science so that creating a Zero-Carbon society becomes a priority.

The Climate Crisis has a time-lag. The Biggest Effects are still far-off in the future. The planet is taking some time to adjust to the new atmospheric composition of (currently) 390 PPM (parts per million) carbon. Already we are experiencing big changes, but the changes haven't deeply settled in. If it was 390 PPM for 100 years, we'd probably have no ice-caps. In Cancun, the last time it was two degrees warmer, the sea level was two feet higher. The changes are happening now in miniature, but in a few years, they'll flesh out. Already we are seeing big changes: hottest year on record, record snowfalls and rainfalls, Pakistani floods and Russian fires. I mean, damn, we're in the middle of it now.

So, why the indolent indifference, people? What is it going to take to get on with the business end of creating a carbon-neutral society?

Probably more folks like Tim.

The story of Tim DeChristopher is encouraging because he has challenged the prevailing societal indolence with Gandhi-like ethical sturdiness. He punked an illegal Bush-era sell-off of public land to oil companies and effectively blocked the auction. Follow the story of this brave prankster Earth Protector at bidder70.org. We need more people able to act on what their heart's know to be true.

May humanity bravely face the Truth and save the sky, the Earth and ourselves.

Vermonters Asked to Help Remake State’s Energy Plan

2011-03-31T11:13:00.000-07:00

Got ideas about Vermont’s future? The State wants your input on the revision of the Comprehensive Energy Plan. This public process is an excellent opportunity to

environmentalists to ‘speak truth to power’ and help Vermont get on-track to a sustainable zero-carbon economy.

The State of Vermont’s Department of Public Service has begun a yearlong public engagement process to ask “what do you want?” This listening process is designed to find good ideas and policy. Next year, the Legislature will create actual laws based on the findings.

Like the excellent Farm-to-Plate process, this is government at it’s best: starting in low-gear by listening to people and crowd-sourcing best practices.

The second stake holder meeting on April 7th will focus on Transportation and Land-use, giving environmental advocates the chance to ask for bike lanes, carbon taxes, sustainable farming, legal hemp, and so forth.

Or you can also submit your comments on line to: ed.delhagen@state.vt.us

Both meetings will happen at Union University on a hilltop above Montpellier. The first stake holder meeting on March 23rd focused on Energy Supply and Renewable Energy. The crowd was a mix of energy company lobbyists, environmentalists and gov’t people. The discussion had a strong ‘hive-mind’ feeling, created by smart people talking a mutual language of energy and environment. And humanity’s energy plan will decide the fate of our collective survival, so there’s an electrostatic charge that comes from discussing the Most Important Thing.

The meeting was well-organized. Speakers gave brief presentations to introduce the subjects. A Green Mountain Power guy spoke from industry perspective. Joanna Miller from Vermont Natural Resource Council (VNRC) brought the environmental perspective.

Then we broke out into some fairly dynamic small-group discussion. The topic was interesting and there were a lot of smart people in the room. The discussion went well, partly because meeting organizers took time to present a powerpoint slide on “Working Agreements for the Day”: mutual respect, keep it brief, stay on topic. Good conversational council doesn’t happen automatically, it needs to be coaxed into existence by ‘rules of engagement.” Organizers need to tell people, “we invite all voices, but keep it brief!”

I encourage more environmentally minded folks come to the next meeting on April 7th. Joan Knight and I were the lone voices talking about the Climate Crisis. The day’s discussion reminded me that most people haven’t understood the seriousness of Climate Crisis. The conversation could have happened on different planet that wasn’t amidst a traumatic disturbance of planetary equilibrium. There was little talk of cutting carbon and of aiming for a zero-carbon society.

I was shocked to hear people talk politely about “natural gas from Shale.” To properly describe “natural gas”, we need dusty Old Testament language, so we can say “HYDRO-FRACKING IS AN ABOMINATION.” Hydro-fracking is deeply decadent, immoral, sinful and a crime against Creation. Hydrofracking makes oil companies rich and externalizes the costs on poor people in Pennsylvania whose water supply gets ruined. Hydrofracking is amoral Nazi-like technological prowess in service to the inhuman dissociative demon-logic of sociopathic corporations.

Hydro-fracking is a great environmental crime against the Earth and people. Hydro-fracking works by the explosion of the earth’s inner layers to release gas. The details are ugly and polluted. They pump water and chemicals into wells at great pressure. This cracks the rock and releases gas that gets siphoned off. Afterwards, the water rises up again after the pressure is released and brings up water filled with chemicals and radioactivity. Bad news. I hope Vermont passes laws that make “natural Shale gas” illegal. I intend to say this at the next meeting on April 7th.

Speaking of radioactivity, another thing I like about this process is that Governor Shumlin has made clear that the process will not include yes/no discussion of Vermont Yankee because the legislature has already decided to shut it down.

On April 7th, you come too and let’s get Vermont on the right track for energy. Or send your comments to: ed.delhagen@state.vt.us

Eat seaweed for iodine for today's nuke fallout (and other facts and rants)

2011-03-23T11:54:00.000-07:00

Eat seaweed for iodine for today's nuke fallout (and other facts and rants)

As low-level radioactive fallout from Japan’s nuclear accident drifts thru our skies, let's review about eating iodine as antidote to radioactive exposure. This essay gathers useful knowledge on the entwined topics of iodine, radiation, seaweed, the thyroid, corporate sociopaths and Solartopia.

Taking iodine can help limit the ill effects of exposure to nuclear radiation. Short version: Eat lots of seaweed and iodised salt, maybe get iodine supplements. Definitely, 2011 is the year of seaweed-miso soup for the whole planet. Seaweed has iodine, and draws out toxins to boot. It won’t hurt anyone to go the health food store and buy Iodine Supplements and Iodized salt and seaweed and enjoy a few months of an intentionally salty seaweed diet. The more the body is filled up with regular iodine, the less inclined the thyroid is to uptake radioactive iodine isotopes created by nuclear fission.

An herbalist friend tells me of a Japanese clinic in '45 that fed everybody miso/seaweed soup. The staff who ate it every day didn’t get cancer and most patients too. But this isn’t just hippie wisdom. (Praise be to the Hippies!) Potassium Iodine (whose initials are: KI) was widely given out after Cherynobyl and it worked great to stop thyroid cancer. In Poland, they gave Potassium Iodine (KI) to 1o.7 million kids, and they didn't get thyroid cancer. In the Ukraine and right around Cherynobyl, people got cancer who didn't get the medicine because supplies ran out (and/or nobody wanted to drive into the nuke’s secondhand smoke with it.)

So the evidence is very strong for encouraging taking the KI pills, especially if you are within 500 km from the radioactive plume. Thyroid cancer was pretty much the only cancer that people got 10 years after Cherynobyl. People who got the KI medicine didn’t get increased rates of cancer. This suggests that Potassium Iodine is super helpful, especially right after initial exposure.

The thyroid concentrates “various radioactive isotopes of iodine produced by nuclear fission. The uptake of radioactive iodine can, in theory, be blocked by saturating the uptake mechanism with a large surplus of non-radioactive iodine, taken in the form of potassium iodine pills” according to Wikipedia. “So what is the thyroid again?” we both ask of Wikipedia. “The thyroid controls how quickly the body uses energy, makes proteins, and controls how sensitive the body should be to other hormones.”

The thyroid system is made of glands including and around the Adam’s apple. If you rub your fingers around your neck to the sides of your Adam’s apple, you’ll be massaging your parasympathetic thyroid, sort of backup glands to the thyroid. Recently I was exposed to some strong industrial chemicals and I noticed my thyroids were enlarged and irritated, as if they were processing toxins.

Taking the KI pills are no piece of cake, so everybody probably doesn’t want to race to Rite Aid for it. Wikipedia suggests that there are some tough "adverse reactions" to the KI medication. More mildly, upset stomach and acne! More seriously and call the doc, skin rash, vomiting, irregular heartbeat. Who should take Potassium Iodine (KI) because of the Japanese nuke explosions? Probably every Japanese person under 18 should take it right away. Young people in nearby Asia, maybe. For those beyond 500 km, it’ probably not worth the unpleasant side effects like nausea, acne, etc.

The World Health Organization recommends the treatment for young people up to 18 in particular, presumably because the thyroid is still growing and thus is more susceptible to some radioactive flyby by some bit of nuke soot. People over 40 shouldn’t bother taking the Potassium Iodine, because they probably wouldn't get the thyroid cancer anyway as compared to the unpleasant side effects from taking it.

The WHO report says there is some disagreement on the dosage amount to take. The WHO recommends 1/10th the dosage that is recommended by the ”International basic safety standards.” On the question of who should take the KI, Wikipedia says that up to 500 miles around Cherynobyl people got thyroid cancer, so, I guess it follows that you'd have to be 500 km from Japan's reactors to get it.

Here are some quotes from Wikipedia on the topic: “The US Food and Drug Administration recommends 150 micrograms of iodine per day for both men and women.

“Iodine is a micro nutrient that is naturally present in the food supply of many regions. However, where natural levels of iodine are in the soil are low and the iodine is not taken up by vegetables, iodine added to salt provides the small but essential amount needed by humans.

“Iodized salt is table salt mixed with a minute amount of various iodine-containing salts. Worldwide, iodine deficiency affects about two billion people and is the leading preventable cause of mental retardation. The use of iodised salt is an efficient way to add iodine to the diet. Iodide-treated table salt slowly loses it’s iodine content by process of oxidation. When table salt comes into contact with the oxygen in the air (oxidation), it releases iodine.” (So open a fresh container of iodised salt and treat the whole dang family to the Salty Food Diet.)

A sailor friend tells of being on a sailboat somewhat near Chernobyl at the time. The gov't's official weather reports suddenly stopped reporting the accurate movements of the winds. The sailors knew the winds because they were watching closely and gathering weather news from other sources. If they had listened to official weather reports they would have sailed to France and gone into the plume. (Cue Bob Dylan: “Don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”) And the wind matters, Chernobyl poisoned the fruit trees in Greece and Turkey, and rain deer in Finland, sheep in Scotland, all depending on the wind drift of the plume.

For years, calm and smart people have been working to get Vermont to shut down the Nuclear Reactor that just like the one that exploded in Japan. Democracy Now reports both were built near the same time, by the same company GE, and with the same crapp-o design, with crap engineering on the too-small containment cooling part. Good thing that Vermont’s Governor Shumlin is committed to shutting down VT’s doppleganger nuke and creating a post-Yankee Comprehensive Energy Plan, complete with citizen input!

Usually I picture Homer Simpson when thinking about nuclear power plant employees. And so it happens, an earthquake and suddenly, “Doe-!Uh!” the cooling system doesn't work cause the power is off, and suddenly this incredibly complicated nuclear fission cooking process is overheating above 2200 degrees and water molecules rip apart and the hydrogen gathers out of the water (H20!) and KA-BOOM! Damn this is a complicated chemical process to be left in the hands of the Homer Simpsons, and worse, the Montgomery Burns of the world. There are reports that the Japanese plant owners waited too long before flooding the plant with salt water because it ruined their investment. Wow, a new low. Oh greedy people, please throttle back and live within the reality of our biologically-based world.

In terms of the Climate Crisis, humanity's excessive burning of fossil fuels may break the sky, and thus expose our soft skin to the radiation coming from our great nuclear Sun. The sky is so precious as our blast shield/sunglasses in cutting the sun’s nuclear glare. There may come a time in the future when people are taking potassium iodine as a daily dietary supplement to counteract the increased radioactivity of the world because of climate collapse. Boy, that’s a dire scenario instead of just early-adopting a green Solartopia future of clean Carbon-Neutral energy.

May the better angels of Humanity’s Nature lead us into a living future.

Eating to protect ourselves from the nuke soot

2011-03-15T12:46:00.000-07:00

Here's some good wisdom on what to eat for antidote the nuclear fall-out from Japan.

This healing protocol for exposure to radiation came to me from a west coast healer via local healer Sandra Lory. Take this opportunity to review the protocol and incorporate some of these suggestions into your diet over the next weeks and months. Feel free to pass this along to friends and family.

Best, Annie McCleary, Director, Wisdom of the Herbs School

From Dori Midnight:

As you've probably heard, there may be some radiation moving across the pacific in the next weeks heading towards the west coast from Japan. To keep going, be alive, and not shut down, we need courage, nourishment, and support - make a pot of soup!

1. SEAWEED: eat nori, put wakame, kombu, and hijiki in your soups and stews. The iodine in kelp helps draw out the radiation and protect your thyroid from radioactive uptake.

2. MISO: good medicine full of live cultures, amino acids, minerals, and protein. I'd recommend making a big pot this week, having a bowl everyday and feeding it to all your friends- recipe follows.

3. MUSHROOMS: strengthen your immune system with some shitake mushrooms, sauteed or in soups.

4. Eat vegetables, especially DAIKON radishes and BURDOCK root- stick them in your soup too or make a shredded salad (recipe below). Daikon has been used for drawing out radiation, post nuclear fall out- it's cooling and detoxifying.

5. BATHS in epsom salt and baking soda (1 lb of salt, with a bit of baking soda 2x week)

6. DRINK lots of WATER

7. IMMUNE support: do the things you know boost your immune system- sleep well, eat garlic and Vitamin C rich foods, and go easy on the sugar.

8. LOVE: send prayers, love, healing thoughts for those who need it most. Instead of freaking out or shutting down, let your anger, fear, and grief flow- it's what makes us human and feel connected to what's going on in the world right now. Crying is a potent way to detox, friends.

9. HERBS: if you want to get herbal, some great allies are nettle tea, cilantro (eat a lot of it or take a tincture- it helps draw heavy metals out ), and milk thistle (helps your liver process toxins). Also Yarrow Environmental Essence from FES is a beautiful formula to support the body in environmental disasters.

RECIPES:
Magical Medicinal Miso Soup
Saute one onion, sliced thin, til translucent. Add water, seaweed of choice (I like Kombu and Wakame), shitake mushrooms (dried or fresh), burdock root, carrots, and any other hearty roots you like. Simmer for 25 minutes.
I like to add shredded or sliced ginger near the end, so it's strong, and some garlic, which I like really strong. You can also add greens, like kale or spinach. Simmer another 5 minutes.
Because you don't want to boil your miso, I usually put a large dollop of miso paste in my bowl and then pour the broth on top to dissolve it.
Drink and offer bowls to all your loved ones and neighbors, kiddos and pets, family and friends.

Get your Daikon
Easy Shredded Salad
Shred carrot and daikon radish (2-3 roots)
Mix with sesame oil and a little umeboshi vinegar (also a great medicine!), sesame seeds, whatever fresh herbs you've got on hand (I love mint or cilantro), and a little tamari. Eat and feel alive and well thanks to the plants, the sun, the water and the farmers.

Dori Midnight
community folk healing + magic + apothecary
www.dorilandia.com

http://midnightapothecary.blogspot.com

Annie McCleary, director

Wisdom of the Herbs School

1005 County Road

East Calais, Vermont 05650

802-456-8122

www.wisdomoftheherbsschool.com

2011-03-07T18:28:00.000-08:00

in solidarity with Tim De Christopher

2011-02-27T18:48:00.000-08:00

funny story about the trial that starts tomorrow:

here it at: http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/47368

This guy goes to protest the auction of federal land to oil companies, walks into the event not really knowing what's next, they say "Are you here to be a bidder?" he thinks "ahhhh....whoa... " says... "why yes." Gets paddle number #BIDDER 7O. Watches auction for 30 minutes and settles down, gets up his nerve and starts bidding. Wins 7 rounds at the auction, out bidding Exxon Mobil and Chambers of Commerce at every turn. Eventually, they pull him into the back room, say "what!??! Good-cop/bad cop, the jig is up!" He says, "I don't actually have any of your requisite hedge-fund-paperwork to pay for this precious portion of Mother Earth."

(I mean people, we're talking about land right near MOAB, UTAH!!! One of America's most beautiful and weird natural lands, some of the most frickin' crazy beautiful land i've ever had the priviledge to stumble around (trying to be careful not to step on the plants, such delicate desert ecology, plants struggling so hard to get water from thin thin thin rains, so hurt by steps and dumb wheeled machines. But I digress... )

Tomorrow, there are SOLIDARITY actions all over Gaia for Tim De Cristopher. Please go to one. If you are you are near Burlington, come to in front of city hall to here me tell this story in real time.

Jai Ganesh!

Inspiration for the Climate Movement from the Vermont 350.org Road Trip

2011-01-27T08:23:00.000-08:00

Vermont 350.org organizers went on a road trip around the state for a Listening Tour on MLK weekend 2011. Organizers visited 8 towns and talked with people about how we can build Vermont’s Climate Movement. I participated in a few stops and here are some of the ideas that inspired me.

1. The Climate Movement is happenin’. Lots of people are working on Climate in diverse ways. Here are some upcoming actions.

The Vermont Climate Day of Action on February 3rd is an important day for Vermont’ Climate Movement. A big turnout of voters will impress legislators. Please organize a carpool with your friends!

The Vermont Chapter of the Citizen’s Climate Lobby is meeting on Feb 26 to learn how to influence politicians.

2. Vermont is ready to lead the US in solving the Climate Crisis. Vermont should “go on the offensive” and take active leadership position that guides the US by positive example. We have a progressive environmental community. Vermont can lead the nation by taking the first steps, showing the way and getting off our butts first.

We should support Vermont’s new governor. Governor Peter Shumlin said he wanted to see solar panels on the top of every Vermont roof. He dreamed big dreams in the 2010 speech to the VECAN conference. He spoke passionately that Vermont should take the lead on climate! After Vermont pulls off a decade of great climate leadership, Shumlin could be the climate movement’s national leader. We should encourage him, aid and uplift him in working on our shared goal of a carbon-free society. Let’s support our allies who are working within the system!

I like the idea of a “Citizen’s Climate Cabinet” to support Shumlin in making positive steps on climate. We would offer ideas and solutions and help where stuff isn’t legislate-able, like lifestyle choices.

Still, Climate Activists need to push gov’t to do the right things that sometimes aren’t politically popular. For example, we want Carbon Taxes! Let’s start small with a penny at Vermont’s gas pump. We want taxes on the things that hurt us, like cigarettes or fossil fuel. The Climate Movement needs to openly endorse and publicly pressure for carbon taxes. Check out the Carbon Tax Center for more info.

3. The Climate Movement should make “the Big Ask”: we want a Carbon-Neutral Great Society. We want our gov’t and society to respond to the Climate Crisis at the scale of the problem.

We need Carbon-Neutral Great Society, where the government and civil society work together to keep humanity alive by aggressively creating a post-carbon world. Let’s not shuffle the deck chairs on the Titanic, let’s steer around the iceberg!

Activists should understand our function. Activists are advocates, the advanced guard. We are the ones who get to ask for big things and dream the “impossible” dream. We push the boundary of what’s possible by our vision.

And so, we ask for carbon taxes. We demand carbon-neutral public transport. We insist Exxon Mobil to pay through the nose when they pollute our sky. We absolutely will save the planet. We solve the climate crisis! We make bike lanes in every town! We encourage the Vermont state gov’t to pass no idling laws, make hemp legal and pass a gasoline tax! Yes!

4. “Solutions to the scale of the problem”. This powerful phrase tells what is actually required. The scale of the Climate Crisis is huge, and requires huge solutions. We need a massive public effort to create a carbon neutral world.

And so we need to work with government. All our small scale private actions are great, but we need government too. The Climate Crisis is really falls under the government’s job description: gov’t job is the stuff too big for individual citizens.

5. The Climate Movement has not told the truth that runaway climate change will cause “The End of The World.” And so people are naturally unwilling to make the difficult changes needed to the scale of the problem. We need to show them the scale of the problem: humanity’s extinction.

People are naturally resistant to make big inconvenient changes to “the inconvenient truth.” They need to see that the Climate Crisis is Really Big, a Total Game Changer, a Planetary Extinction Spasm, the Death of Everything We Know and Love. Runaway Climate Change means the death of Everything. We have been under scaring the children, insufficiently describing the Catastrophic. Bill McKibben politely demurs when describing the future of runaway climate change saying “the future will be unworkable” or “difficult beyond imagination”. Dr. James Hansen is accurate saying “If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that one which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that C02 will need to be reduced from it’s current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.”

That’s true. Yet it understates the case by the calm politeness of the language. Runaway climate change means humanity’s extinction, and we need to fight against The Stupid Future with all the strength we can muster. We have a right to live in a world that will live into the future. We need a Climate Revolution to save the planet.

6. The Climate Movement needs to get better at networking on the web.

We need a web-platform to help us work together across the distances of the Green Mountains. For example, did you know about the incredibly beautiful and visionary effort to create Green Island in Bellow’s Falls? They want to turn the industrial wasteland of an island on the Connecticut River into hub for creating a sustainable world. (Cue the applause!) I didn’t know of this effort until meeting those folks on the road trip, and now I want to help them anyway I can.

We need an internet platform that links Vermont’s many climate action groups and helps us work and think together.

7. Climate activists should gather more because it is useful and encouraging. It is worth-the-carbon to drive to get together. Why? Climate activists are islands in a societal sea of ignorance or denial. Our extreme concern about the Climate Crisis is sane, not our own private madness. Our resolve strengthens when we experience that we’re not alone. So it’s important to get together and preach to the choir! And we sing louder when surrounded by a choir.

Further, here is a specialized language for all in-depth topics. The language of climate change includes ice sheets, carbon, 4% temperature increase, sea level, Cancun, etc. We need to meet and speak our climate language.

In summary, Vermont’s Climate Movement is diverse and diffused but alive and kicking. We need to weave ourselves together to win this. As our hero MLK said, “We are tied together in a single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” May it be so.

The Climate Crisis Fulfills Bible Prophecy of End Times

2010-12-31T07:44:00.000-08:00

The Climate Crisis has made the prophecy in the Bible's Book of Revelations true.

Mysteriously, the Bible's prophecy fits the Climate Crisis like Cinderella's slipper, a prophetic perfect fit. And that's sort of fascinating, right?

Humanity is destabilizing the delicate sky and we are on-track to causing the End of the World. It's not over yet. If we stop burning oil and coal, we can save the world. But we must be honest about the SCALE of how much we have to win or lose. The Climate Crisis is an Armageddon battle royale', an epic struggle of good and evil, of planet life versus planet death. So far, the public and our politicians haven't faced up honestly to the SCALE of the problem because CLIMATE ACTIVISTS HAVE BEEN UNDER-SCARING THE CHILDREN by avoiding talk of planet death. Well, kids, let's dig into the Book of Revelation for some spooky talk about the End of the World.

Let me summarize the Book of Revelation, if that's even possible.

Bob Marley introduced me to The Book of Revelation. As a young person, I listened to Bob Marley incessantly. I was fascinated by his rebellious spirituality. Bob's last two records, Exodus and Uprising, were made after he was diagnosed with cancer. The albums were filled with Bible and spirit. As the Immaterial world promises to consume the Material world, wise people settle up with the Eternal. Bob was studying the Book of Revelation closely, and included hundreds of references into his songs.

The Bible's last chapter is John's vision of the End of the World, a wild dark spiritual vision, filled with strange prophecy and epic struggle between good and evil. It's a long, mysterious prophecy about the end of the world, the return of Christ, a battle of good and evil. There are dark metaphors about wine presses of blood. There are cosmic visions of a door opening from Heaven onto the Earth plane and a Supramental energy flowing into the world from the Godhead.

I read the Revelation many times. I was fascinated by it's snap, strange characters, prophetic possibility. The Revelation is a mash-up of images, possibilities and outcomes. It's not clear how it will go.

It's not necessarily the End of the World via Planetary Ecocide Death, but like R.E.M sang "It's the End of the World as We know it, and I feel Fine." Likewise, the 2012 Mayan prophecies predict the beginning of a new Cosmic Age rather than a sudden stop.

The Bible predicts a good outcome after the Armageddon struggle: the 100o year reign of Christ, an Age of Aquarius, a epoch of planetary enlightenment.

Try that trick from the movie "When Harry Met Sally", where Harry always reads a book's last page first, in case he dies before he finishes, then he knows how the story ends. The last page of the Bible's got it all, in cliff-note summary of a really groovy scene of a Christ-lit Age of Aquarius.

Anyway, if we don't stop climate change, we are all going to die. Humanity is in the closed garage with the car running, our shared air slowly poisoned by carbon monoxide. Death, destruction, abomination. It will be the End of the World, as we know it, and we won't feel fine. We'll be among the souls that the Universe views as wimpy, lazy, slacker douschebags because we didn't figure out away to save our beautiful blue green marble.

So open your Third Eye of Vision, the mark of the living God on the Forehead, and wake up to Climate Change and to your own soul's availability to feed you mojo from the Divine realms. All the angels surround you in your ability to do what's required at this magic moment of possibility, when the future pivots on our actions today when we work like horses and dogs to change our society's reckless profligate carbon-based lifestyles.

May the will of the Divine be achieved.

Avoid Arguments to Maximize Healing

2010-12-30T13:54:00.000-08:00

When we have arguments, our healing is set back.

Science has proven this to be so, documented in one place here: http://www.thrivingnow.com/arguments-dramatically-slow-wound-healing/

Today I was reminded of this after a stupid and habitual argument with a family "member". Afterwards I felt old wounds and sickness grimly brooding in my mind and flesh.

My family argues: deep grooves of old BS habitual conflict, high octane jousting and old fault line wound-finding. Not pleasant. It's a sad thing to be an adult and recognize in oneself all the dumb habits one perfected as a teenager while pitting mom against dad to get the car keys, I said "OK, then, I'll just hitchhike." Ahh, the perfect schism!

So friends, we are all wounded. We all love our side of an argument. We all are trained to be rational, brain-centered beings who want to argue our way to success. But really, we are emotional, heart-centered beings who are more swayed by emotion than logic. Fierce argument hurts us, and makes us go out of heart-resonance with our friends and allies.

I honor conflict as truth's snowplow, forcing motion to clear the way. Sometimes a rumble is necessary to rearrange the landscape. Sometimes there should be strong and clear and direct words to say what we need or don't want.

But often fights sit in our stomach and gnaw at our bones long afterwards. So let us resolve to not fight, especially about the dumb things, and to dehabitualize ourselves from tasty masochistic arguing.

Let our family relations sit on a foundation of peace coexistence and calm discussion.

May our healing be swift and unhindered by arguments.

Waking Up During Earth Crisis.dv

2010-12-23T20:33:00.000-08:00

Re-Inventing Christmas to save it

2010-12-20T17:37:00.000-08:00

We adults are free to re-imagine Christmas in a way that pleases us. We are allowed to not buy anything. We may go to church or not, go to the in-laws or not, get a tree or not.

When you are a kid, you live amidst the rituals of your family and society, and there's little wiggle room. But as adults, it's completely pleasing to accept and reject the traditions that we love or hate.

I am agonized by the gluttonous consumption. Much of my distaste for Christmas comes from the TV ads, who snort all the beautiful holy and true and cough out tinsel to hang on their products. So I reject the consumerism and the buy-buy-buy. I saw a study that said people rarely had stuff they bought a year later, and Christmas gifts were even less likely to be retained. It's a small planet, people, we can't afford to be whole-hogging the resources that we don't need.

But as much as I hate the the corporate consumerist Christmas, and I groan at that season's arrival every year, so too, every year I am seduced by Christmas and it's ability to expose a deeper humanity.

Christmas is the one seasonal holiday in America that's really still observed society wide, everything closes, things slow down, people are nicer to each other because it would be dickish to be so douschy so near Christmas.

This year I've been going to Dorset's congregational church. It's a beautiful marble building, made in 1784, filled with tastefully psychedelic stain-glass windows. Further, the Holy Spirit is in the room there, one can feel it, a pulsing current, a deep hum. Last week they did a sweet Christmas pagent, with twenty kids playing the parts: sheep, wisemen, Mary, everybody. I like singing the hymns that somehow automatically catapult your consciousness into relationship with the Divine.

There are few young people in church these days. Perhaps if they felt more freedom to reinvent the traditions in a way that worked for them, they'd be more into it.

Spring Him: The Gospels According to Ocean's 13

2010-12-14T12:50:00.001-08:00

Peter had the idea at first but it was Thomas who really ran with it. Peter was sort of daydreaming and said “What if we bribed the Roman guards?” And Thomas snapped out of his morose mood and was into a military planning mood in about two seconds flat.

“Holy One, God of the angels, look after your children in the here and now and please, please bless this endeavor” Thomas said, with a quick and sincere Inward turned invocation to the Divine. You know, first things first.

Then he turned to Peter, and said, “Good idea, brother. We are absolutely going to pull this off. God willing.”

The mood in the room changed pretty fast after that. We’d been a morose bunch since the Garden of Gesemany when the Romans had yanked Our Brother, with dogs barking and people crying. The religious elites and the Romans and the Banksters had conspired to put on that shady show trial. He was jail right then and set to be executed tomorrow. We had been feeling more than a little blue. But in an instant all that changed. A disciplined energy came over the team. We had been through some tight scenes before, and had pulled through, and that spirit had returned suddenly.

Everyone pulled up to the table, and started talking at once for about five seconds until Thomas yelled “shut up!”

Then we made the plan, and debated tactics and strategy as swift and orderly as we could.
“My sister grows the herbs that we can us to stop the bleeding on his hands. Comfrey, calendula flowers, rosemary. She probably knows a few others” I said.

“Good, Simon” said Thomas, “Get the herbs, but be cool about it. Don’t let her know what they are for. We can’t have the whole town knowing that this is going down, or the Romans will get tipped off.”

“How am I supposed to ask her which herbs to give us without telling her, Thomas? ‘Ah sis, so just hypothetically speakin, if I wanted to stop the bleeding gushing out of big holes in the center of somebodies hands, what herbs might be good for that?’” I said.

“Is she trustworthy?” asked Thomas.

“Yes” I said.

“OK, tell her but swear her to secrecy and she’s not to come tomorrow. The less people who know what we’re up to at the event, the better” said Thomas. He continued, “Bribing the Romans. Not an impossible task” hands in prayer position, beneath his lips, but eyes far-off in thought, thinking aloud, “A lot of those guys got stolen from their families by the Emperor’s army, and don’t give a damn about anything but wine and women, and maybe going home someday.”

“But, the officers, not so much” said John. “They can be a disciplined bunch. They have stuff to lose. Mostly they’re literate.”

We debated it for a while. In the end, we decided to bribe the soldiers and work around the officers. It seemed a better plan. The officers might not go for it or might demand more money than we could pull together. Besides, the trial was big news all over Judea, the elite were watching close. The money swine were still grumbling about the way Jesus turned over the tables at the temple. But we figured the soldiers would be more pliant. (As a backup plan, we decided to keep a big bag of gold in case we need to bribe the officer.)

We decided to offer them all gold coins worth 3 months of their pay upfront, to be followed by 20 gallons of wine and another 3 months pay if it went off. It was Peter, the fisherman, who had bribed a few Romans before, he worked up the deal. He was a hard-living guy before he got spiritualized. But you know how it is, the Lord turns your talents towards His purposes as He sees fit.

Luckily Our Brother had made some rich friends as he walked around healing everybody. Lazarus’s uncle had offered him a 10 acre fig plantation, but he had said just laughed and said “Thanks, but I’m into different fruit.” He made poor friends too, he just was a sort of a charming walking love factory. One of his main disciplines was a rich merchant, and he also had a cave outside of Jerusalem, that we agreed would be the perfect place to get Him well again afterwards.

We were a psyched and happy bunch that night. It seemed possible that we could get away with it. The Romans were notoriously easy to bribe. We could just get them to turn the other way at the last minute, and then boom, whisk him down, off we go, let him rest up for a few days, and then disappear back to India, where he could live out his days until he was a happy, old man with a big grey beard and some wrinkles but that same big smile. Maybe a few children running around, who knows?

A lot of it fell into place pretty quickly and with general agreement. Who to get the loot from, where to get the herbs, where to get the opium to knock him out with.

There was only disagreement about whether to tell Mary or not. Peter said “we just can’t tell her. She’s sweet. She won’t be able to fake it.

“It will break her heart if we don’t. We have to tell her.

“No! She’ll blow it. She’s an innocent, she’s not actor, she won’t put it off.

The debate got fierce.

Peter won in the debate in the end. Mary shouldn’t know, if she got super emotional at the event, it would help the show. Besides, she’d understand later.

We also decided to keep it under raps even from some of the other disciples. We were not the most trusting bunch after what happened with Judas. It’s true, he’d always been a bit of an outsider. Yashua had let him hang around because he wanted us to stretch our hearts. He said that if God wanted to redeem this guy, then who were we to say no.

Peter had never liked Judas and had given a lengthy discourse on how he was going to gut him like a fish and disembowel him. But by then, it wasn’t necessary. Sad, that whole thing. Betrayal. A backbiter. Bad ally etiquette. You gotta be a good ally to your friends. Stick with ‘em. Stick together. It’ s hard enough to get things done in this world, without the egomaniacs who don’t know how to work together.

So we decided to try and tell as few people as possible. The people who were at the first meeting were the one’s who know. It was about half. The others we’d let act as decoys.

There was debate about whether to tell Yeshua himself. We all knew the story of Socrates. That great teacher was condemned to death by hemlock and for the sake of truthfulness had taken it!

We decide to tell him. We figured that if he thought he was really dying he might hold out, but if he knew he was faking, he could just go into deep prayer and meditation and make the body like a corpse. He had learned some really super tricks in India. He could make his heartbeat slow way down. He could turn inward so deeply that you could poke him with a stick and he’d gaze at you with peaceful eyes. He’d be soon entranced in union with the Divine that the body was like toy boat on the surface of a deep, deep ocean, and he was identified with the ocean.

When to tell him, though? We decided to try and get him the message as soon as possible. We didn’t want to risk passing
information along through the jail. We’d figured we’d try to get him the message when he was carrying the cross through Jerusalem. If not, we’d say something at the hill when we fed him the opium drink.

Peter agreed to arrange from a doctor friend for a hefty dose of opium, a big pain killer, mixed with some kava kava root from the spice traders. That should keep him peaced out hopefully stop the trauma and shock from settling into his flesh. But also hopefully conscious enough so that he could meditate and do his super-samadhi trick.

We ended our meeting with one of the most intense prayer sessions of my life. Everybody was filled with sincerity, in part because we wanted it so bad and perhaps in part because we remembered Yashua telling us “A Sufi teacher named Ibrahim once told me ‘God hears all sincere prayers.’ And in my experience that has been true.”

The next day everybody reconvened over a working lunch of bread, olives, oil.

Peter said “It’s funny, when I first got the idea to spring him, it came in a sort of daydream. The idea was fully formed, complete and perfect, all filled in, nothing missing. I feel it was a kind of Divinely guided dream. In this vision, Yashua came to me and said, ‘what about pulling a sly one on the day? I’ll do my deep meditation yogic sleep technique and appear dead. You can convince the guards to pull me down early. The bigwig rabbis will race off for shabbat because of sunset, and then you’ll have a reason to pull me down. We can drag out the walk though town, making it a late arrival so sunset is closer. Down I go, and back to India. We have gotta win our victories.”

“But what if it’s God’s will?” said John.

“What do you mean?” said Thomas.

“What if it’s God’s will that he be sacrificed? You know, like say, as some kind of sacrificial lamb, a perfect sacrifice to atone for the sins of all mankind” said John.

“Our Brother is not a sacrifice animal. Besides, if God’s will that he dies, then we won’t get away with it tomorrow. And anyway, “I and the Father are One”, right?” said Thomas. “ Humanity and Divinity can reach union where they are of united will. Thy Will be done. We are surrendered fully, fully in service to God, and we want this, so why wouldn’t Our Father want it for us?”

The next day, John had gotten the herbs from his sister. The rich disciple with the cave had come up with the loot.

The Romans had Him walk through town with his cross. Peter approached him, slipped him the medicine, whispered “it’s all set up, just drag out the walk, deep meditate on the cross, and we’ll pull you down.” Yashua said “A fine plan. Thanks for listening” and winked.

When the first nail went in, He said “oh, that’s going to leave a mark!”

By the time he was on the cross the sun was setting. The crooked rabbis were there to see their dirty work was done, but as soon as the first nail went in, they turned and left for the shabbat meals and rituals. Perfect.

The Roman guards happily took our money. We pulled him down shortly after.

Putting the limp body into the wagon, and rolling away, when we were out of site of the Romans, Thomas whispered, “Are you with us brother?” Yashua smiled a little opened one eye and said “Is God good?” We shared a moment of intense happiness that was contained in a tight box of our acting sad still.

We took him up to the cave. He rested and got feed great food for 2 days. His hands were as big as melons, wrapped in bandages made of comfrey leaves.

Then Mary cut his hair and beard and we took him north to Galilee semi-hidden in the back of a wagon.

The funny thing was, the other disciples saw him on his way out of town, it was a dusty road, twilight, but they didn’t recognize him until afterwards. And then the tomb was empty, and there was a little bit of a stir about that. But nobody really thought much about it.

He was around for a few weeks, making a pass to say goodbye to a few beloveds.

He left town in a horse drawn cart, partying in the back with couple of us. I was playing the drum, Thomas the lute, He was chanting the holy names. When we got to the last knoll where you could see Jerusalem, He stood up on the back of the rolling cart and said “Goodbye Jerusalem, I love you. And you Romans and religious phonies, I got one word for you... Suckerfish!” We all laughed.

Some of the disciples followed him to India, to beautiful mountains and lakes of Kashmir, where He lived a long and happy life.

Cancun climate talks off to beautiful start on-line. Have a Watch Party!

2010-11-30T13:23:00.000-08:00

Check out great video on-line from the U.N. climate negotiations in Cancun, Mexico. The UNFCC.int event website has live streaming from the event, and yesterday’s events available on demand.

Watching climate negotiations in Cancun online can be pretty inspiring, like a TED Conference video binge meets planetary survival think-tank/diplomat theater.

On-line you’ll find the Climate Action Network gave a good summary of what’s on-the-table at negotiations. “Cancun can be be the calm after Copenhagen’s political storm, a calm where we can get some real progress made for poor people” said Tim Gore of Oxfam, who notes that the UN process allows poor countries to be heard.

Look for the inspirational nature video, (about 46:30 minutes into the very interesting Opening Plenary/ Welcoming Ceremony.)

So why not play five hours of this content while you clean your kitchen. Or better yet, invite friends over for a watch party!

To spice it up, play the Cancun Watch Party Drinking Game. Suggested rules: gather friends and favored beverages. Watch the event on-line and drink when you hear the word “mitigate” “transparency” or “350 parts per million.” Drink every time you feel patriotic. Drink if you have lovin' feelings for the U.N.. Make a toast to Mother Earth every time you hear “Rights for Mother Earth.” And so forth.

Seriously, though, people should watch the Cancun process, because the more public attention that is on this process, the more our political leaders will want to do something. Like it or not, these UN proceedings is the most serious forum for dealing with the climate crisis at the moment. We need an educated citizenry on the Climate issue, so please gather and tune in!

Here are some of the topics being negotiated. UN climate chief Christiana Figueres talked about four places to make a deal: climate adaptation measures, clean technology transfer to poor countries, forestry protection, and creation of an international climate fund.

Cancun is a U.N. meeting of countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol to assess what can be done to make it work better. Or according to the official website jargon, “COP16/CMP6 is the 16th edition of the Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP) and the 6th Conference of Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties of the Kyoto Protocol (CMP). “Parties” refers to all the national states that signed and ratified both the international treaties...”

The meeting is being held at a big resort in Cancun, on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. Delegates and media are meeting at the Moon Resort, while other events happen around the city. Civil society will be given space to get their ya-ya’s out, in a 5000 person auditorium billed as an Expression Zone. That’s an improvement to many international meetings where the public and NGOs are kept away by barricades and tear gas.

Still, it’s a private party compared to Cochabamba. The Cochabamba Summit was far more vital and interesting than Copenhagen. Held in April 2010 as a response to Copenhagen, the World People’s Summit on Climate Change and Rights for Mother Earth was a model of inclusive participatory democracy and open process.

Cochabamba created the vast, intelligent and radical Cochabamba Accords that Bolivia is trying to include into the negotiations this year in Cancun. The Cochabamba Accords call for a goal of temperature increase as 1 or 1.5 degrees, rather than 2 degrees, as industrialized nations favor. (We have 1 degree increase already and have seen lots of change. So I agree, let’s aim low, 1%!!!!)

The Cochabamba Accords also passed the Resolution on the Rights of Mother Earth. Bolivian President Evo Morales is the world’s first indigenous president. He is a sturdy voice in climate leadership and in bringing indigenous thinking into the political sphere. It may seem dreamy to talk about granting Rights to Mother Earth, but some view this as a central idea to healing humanity’s relationship with the Earth. We must see the Earth as alive, worthy of respect and protection. Follow this discussion on the lively blog at pwccc.wordpress.com.

I hope for positive movement of the Rights for Mother Earth in Cancun. I hope the US delegation supports this language. It would not cost anything and would be a place to compromise in a culturally respectful manner.

I hope some good progress comes from Cancun. Yet it’s hard not to feel dissatisfied by that this is the best government can do. Humanity’s survival hangs in the balance, and they struggle to agree on un-ambitious actions that won’t stop the problem. Politicians don’t deal with the approaching climate Tsunami, because it’s terrifying effects are in the future, while economic concerns nip at the heels this moment. US politicians are particularly irresponsible, especially since the US is the number one carbon polluter in historical terms. Unfortunately, the US congress has yet to pass Climate Legislation, and so the US remains “all talk and no walk” in terms of having legal obligations to cut carbon emissions. Time for the US to get on it!

The annual climate negotiation’s most useful function may be the annual focusing of the world’s scattered ADHD attention on the Climate Crisis. Earthlings take an annual moment to thinking about the Big Problem That May End Us All. Last year at this time, the world’s media was abuzz about a summit in Copenhagen. That gathering disappointed many, and made association with the process a political liability. Who knows, maybe they’ll get more done this year with calmness and less political hubbub.

We must stop the Climate Crisis, or everything we love is destroyed. The Sermon on the Mount will go into nonexistence! So does Glee! Runaway climate change means the end of the world as we know it and probably human extinction! So let's get on it, people!

People of the world want action on the Climate Crisis. Check out incredible aerial art made by 350.org and thousands of people as evidence. May we witness solutions to Climate Crisis in Cancun and in our own lives.

Reading into the Signs at the Rally to Restore Sanity

2010-11-02T08:20:00.000-07:00

Many people carried funny protest signs at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear on Washington DC’s National Mall. On a sunny late October Saturday, thousands of silly signs bobbed in the massive crowd called to Washington by comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. .

Some signs were insightful into the political landscape, like cloud watching for signs of approaching weather.

On Obama: “Sanity: Knowing that it takes longer than 2 years to fix an eight year disaster!”

“Yes we can- but it’s not going to happen overnight.”

“I see you went half-black and are deciding whether or not to go back.”

Many signs spoke to the rally’s main theme: “Take it down a notch, America.” The American body politic has been getting riled up in a dangerous way that historically has led to violence. Recently, a zombie-like volunteer for Rand Paul assaulted MoveOn’s Lauren Valle. The Nazis started by finger pointing at the different: Jews/Roma/gays etc. America has a proto-fascist movements afoot, so this comedy serves a serious healing function at a serious time.

“Radicals for moderate discourse”

“Endless outrage is a form of mental illness, not a form of gov’t.”

“You are mad as Shell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

A highbrow statement from Thomas Jefferson was given more snap by being held by a very cute young woman, “Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life are but dreary things.” Imagine! Jefferson predicted the theme of the rally over two hundred years ago!

Jefferson, an early adopter of interracial babymaking, would have appreciated the healthy modern views on sexuality on display:

On Christine O’Donnell: A sign said “I’m You* (*but I masturbate.)” On another sign was a picture of a sheep saying “I’m not a witch. I ewe.”

Some signs were against all extremism, like this war cry from a Unitarian Sunday school:

“If you aren’t with us, well, you may have an equally valid worldview to consider.”

and:

“The center: getting stuff done since 1776.”

Some signs winked at the act of carrying signs.

“I have a sign”

“I have a really big sign”

“I like this sign”

“This sign doesn’t say anything.”

“My political views cannot be summarized on a pithy sign.”

“Americans for... OH LOOK! A puppy!”

“Who farted?”

The doctors were more straightforward.

“Young doctor for universal health care.”

“More doctors, less jails.”

Some signs called for civility:

“Beat your pitchforks into sporks”

Some signs called to evolution:

“Men: Liberate! Ditch the tie!”

“Fear high-speed trains! They save energy.”

Something about the cultural superiority trip and masturbatory Reaganism of Sarah Palin really sets this crowd on edge.

One sign had a picture of Palin and “Keep fear alive.”

and: “You don’t have to hunt a moose to be a real American.”

“I can see America from my house!”

“Pray for secular gov’t”

Redheads gathered to get a picture with a sign that read: “Redheads for reason: we’re on fire for sanity”

On moderation:

“I’m moderate as hell.”

“I’m with sensible.”

“Death to nobody!”

“Nonviolence by any means necessary!”

On interfaith religious tolerance for Muslims:

“Muslims are nice people.”

“Beards are evil” carried by a bearded man.

The rally had a healthy, Muslim-friendly atmosphere that is a beautiful, godly improvement on the Vibe of recent days. America is stronger and wiser because of our interfaith tolerance. Hyper-partisan religiousness is almost always a tool of secular people to bad trip sincere religious people.

I love Sufi poetry, the poems of Rumi and Hafiz, and the ugliness of a decade of Islamophobia was put in perspective when suddenly, Islam was included in the circle of the cool. I want to live in the Jon Stewart’s America: tolerant, multi-ethic, and islam-friendly, so Kareem Abdul-Jabber can stop by.

For me, the rally’s most heartwarming moment was when Cat Stevens came on stage. This man suffered greatly for following his spiritual path where It lead. When Ozzie came out, it was grotesque counterpoint, but dynamic theater. But, hey, that’s America: the sublimely spiritual and Loud People must share one big stage.

The phenomenon of a self-selecting crowd is always interesting to observe. The crowd for the rally seemed like educated, politically aware, liberal people with a sense of humor. A quarter million people who like jokes! Yes, 250,000 is the semiofficial estimate on numbers, reported by Politico.com, based on 50 people’s estimates. To compare, Glenn Beck’s rally was 87,000, from the same source.

One new friend said he “just felt they should come, an inner call to stand up for something, albeit vague.”

One sign expressed why so many came:

“Thanks, guys, for keeping me sane during the Bush years”

The Daily Show has kept people sane while enduring the deceitful Bushite political theater. The rally felt healing to the national mind of America. Clear thinking and being grounded in reality is healthy. Tolerance, justice, and goodness are healing. Dark thoughts of anger and racism make us sick. The American media is creating a dark, propagandized mindscape.

The media isn’t helping us think together and act rationally. We haven’t yet gotten political will to solve the Climate Crisis because oil-companies are out propagandizing Dr. James Hansen. So we are destabilizing the structure of our sky! This situation threatens humanity’s survival, but try to get that heard through the punk band racket of the Fox Noise Machine.
This allows Climate Denial to be nearly prerequisite for Republican Senate candidates.

Humanity must learn to think straight on the science of the composition of our atmosphere in this delicate, thin terrarium, or we are no place. But that’s my private soapbox. Note: I did not see one sign about the Climate Crisis, nor hear one comment from the stage. We need a climate movement, and we don’t have one sign.

In closing, the day felt like it might be DC’s best day ever. DC is town of spooky impressive stage set theater buildings. It needs the good vibes off the American people. Americans need to be in DC more, that our tolerant goodness can rub off. At the very least, we should gather annually so that the Mythbuster guys can lead is in a progressively sillier group antics, like when they got everybody to jump and measured for an earthquake.

On Oct 30, 2010, the lonely, unheard masses gathered, this underrepresented american majority: liberal, tolerant, with a sense of humor.

They came, they laughed, maybe they voted.

I dare you to praise Obama for something!

2010-10-29T17:56:00.000-07:00

This is a test of your ideological flexibility!

Can you praise President Obama for a success in the last two years?

Progressives probably can't and conservatives probably won't.

Therefore, the progressive blogging community is partially responsible for the 'Enthusiasm Gap' in the Democratic base that may lower voter turn-out and may throw the Congress to the GOP. Meanwhile, the GOP's inability to see the good is creating a delusional, hysterical, traitorous Disloyal Opposition.

Try this exercise that illustrates my point: I dare you to praise Obama for something.

I will take my own challenge to demonstrate.

I appreciate Obama getting the military into reverse on both of Bush's stupid wars. The new Bob Woodward book "Obama's Wars" shows Obama and Biden wisely recognizing Afghanistan as another Vietnam, and creating the conditions for ending the war. The book shows Obama standing up to the generals, demanding a six page letter of terms, after the military kept trying to roll him on things they'd already decided. Now this is pretty "Inside Baseball" talk, but it provides reassurance to anti-war base voters. After the Afghanistan decision to escalate, there was a widespread deflating in the base. Obama is on the way to fulfilling the promise to get us out of these wars and he deserves credit for that work in process. May these movements towards peace be successful.

I think we naturally don't want to be cheerleaders for power, and this is a healthy instinct. And also we live in a time of national madness, when the group thinking machine of the media is completely delusional. We are suffering under a Fox propaganda culture that's winning over Reality (where facts about carbon-dioxide exist!) So it's up to us people, to tell the truth as we see it!

Or how will the public know what has gone well?

The Obama Administration is up to some cool stuff, but you'd never know it. They just haven't telling their story that well. Www.Whitehouse.gov is pretty cool as blogs go, but it is like a museum: quiet, scholarly, under utilized, careful. Obama's new media hasn't gone very deep into the Net-roots or youth Facebook culture. Then add the noise: Fox is a GOP mouthpiece and only talks smack. Then add the silence: progressives are alienated or very quietly supportive. Suddenly Obama is the Invisible Man, an Unsymbolizing Symbol.

So let us celebrate the victories of the Obama Administration so far and help them out.

I say: Overall, I believe Obama is a good guy in a very hard job, and he has done a pretty good job so far.

I liked the 42 nation summit on Non-Proliferation of nuclear weapons.

I liked that the Attorney General allowed Medical Marijuana to advance in California.

I like the organic garden and the anti-obesity/whole foods campaign of Mrs. Obama.

I like that they are putting solar panels up on the White House!

I liked that the international banking system didn't do a 1929 meltdown. (That was good, right GOP?)

I like the anti-bullying GLTB work they've done lately.

I like that they are moving on 54 high-speed rail projects in 23 states that will get $2.4 billion dollars.

I like that they haven't pushed "free trade" deals.

I appreciated the Cairo speech's outreach to the Muslim world.

I liked that Credit Card companies can't jack your rates without telling you.

And so on.

Try this exercise. I double-dog dare you. It pushes some buttons in the psyche but please stretch yourself.

Because the Republican Climate-Denying Zombies are at the door of Congress and if they get in, we'll never get the Climate Legislation necessary for planetary survival!

On the November 2nd election, I stand with the President Obama and the Democrats and I hope you will too.

May truthful words build a sustainable world.

Sane Suggestions for Traveling to DC for the Stewart/Cobert Rally

2010-10-27T10:00:00.000-07:00

My friend Anna said "I think the Rally is going to be a generational event, like MLK speaking or something, something that we'll remember." It does feel like it's going to be huge. A mass gathering of sane Americans arising as antidote to Fox mania! And then a crazy Halloween party weekend in the capital. So come! Here are some suggestions on how to get here and stuff to do.

Washington D.C. is a beautiful, great and strange town. Everybody talks smack about Washington, but that's just because the politics are lame and entrenched while the world burns. But DC is a brilliant town to ramble around in. Internationalism, intelligence and prosperity mix to create seemingly endless novelty, as if we were riding the cresting waves of Terrence McKenna's Novelty Wave towards the Eschaton.

To get to DC, Amtrak trains travel to DC's Union Station. From there it's a short metro or long walk to the event. Drivers can drive until outside city and then catch the Metro in. Several bus companies are organizing trips to the event, with links on the Rally To Restore Sanity's website. The event is in front of Congress's building on the Mall, so take Metro stations Smithsonian or Capitol South.

DC's public transport is the best in the country. The Metro is fast and, more importantly, clean. Public transport is more pleasant when not grimy. (NYC, I'm lookin' at you!) Buses go everywhere the subway doesn't. Be careful, though, sometimes two different color train lines can arrive on the same platform.

DC is a town that can be feel tough to navigate until you get it. Here's the city's design. DC is arranged into quarters around a city center, so streets have a quadrant designation. This allows for the numbers to stay low, counting up from the center. Remember to check this NW/SW/NE/SE designation or you might be aiming for the other side of town, though in practice it doesn't factor in that much. Street names go up alphabetically from the center. Shorter syllable words are closer to the city center than longer syllable words.

During the day, the National Mall has dozens incredible museums to amble about. And they are all free! Literally, miles of hallways, so wear comfortable shoes. The cops are chill, though their metal detectors won't like corkscrews or swiss army knives at the museum door. The Smithsonian's Freer Gallery has some incredible Asian art. National Air and Space Museum's got a 3D movie about the Hubbell Telescope that looks cosmic. The new Native American Museum looks like the Anasazi cliff dwellings of the American Southwest. Integrating natural themes like water and sky, it celebrates native sensibility brought into architecture, as with the Mohegan Sun Casino in CT. This museum has the best food on the Mall, from buffalo stew to veggie chili, arranged in a food court based by different geographic food sheds. The Mall is a bit of "food desert", where it can be easy to be hungry even with money in your pocket. In theory the Smithsonian has a cafe, if you consider a $3 Coca Cola digestible.

For evening adventures, DC is has a lively bar culture, embodied at the Tune Inn (331 Pennsylvania SE). In the Du Pont Circle area, Afterwards Cafe serves good food inside a terrific bookstore. The best dive bar I've ever been was the Raven, gritty and brilliantly human-scale, with rock star pictures on the wall and a surly bartender who will serve you well, (from DuPont Circle metro, bus 42, 3125 Mt Pleasant Ave NW). For dinner in DuPont Circle, a great salad factory is Sweetgreens. Nearby is the nation's first certified organic restaurant, Nora, pricey but wholesome.

For accommodation, there are many youth hostels online, though most seemed booked for the weekend. (Try the William Penn House, $40 a night.) Hotels available by Metro are plentiful. DC is a fairly easy place to just sneak off into the greenery with a sleeping bag. Rock Creek Park is home to a beautiful river with miles of biking trails.

DC is filled with brilliant architecture. For two hundred years people have sought to increase the prestige of their organization by having a really impressive building in the Big Town. The embassies near Du Pont Circle are so beautiful, though they seem to have witnessed unhappiness. The city is stuffed with public space treasures, like the beautiful little park on Embassy Row dedicated to Khalil Gibran, at 3100 Massachusetts Ave NW.

DC feels pretty safe. It's a prosperous town, so perhaps government doesn't suffer recession. In the words of Brother Cornell West, DC is an chocolate city. There are half-a-million Ethiopians here, the most outside of Ethiopia. Due to the international schools and embassies, there are people from all over the world, creating a great gumbo of ethnicity, and America's most international city.

DC is a also a place where the military/industrial complex takes out ad campaigns for their new tank, with full page ads in Post, and subway billboards. The metro stop before the mega-mall at Pentagon City is always good for unintentionally funny ads. Check out the billboards at Capital South metro, where cleanskies.org has the most egregious green-washing campaign ever: using climate change facts to justify getting "natural" gas by hydrofracking the shale beds of NYC's water-supply. Please take a moment to publicly mock these ads.

Capital South metro station is the stop to take to go to the Democratic National Committee building, 430 South Capital Street, an orange building near some sort of factory, where you can stop by after the rally and make some phone calls for the upcoming election. And afterwards, check out the nearby Tortilla Coast mexi-cafe and see where Capital Hill staffers eat chips after a day of difficult legislation.

For Friday night, at the Rock n Roll Hotel, there's a Masquerade Party with 3 bands, (5$ or free with Mask!) at 1353 H St. NE. On Saturday, there's a costume rally afterparty the Eighteenth Street Lounge at 1212 18th NW Street.

DC, our capital, let's restore it's sanity with a one big sane weekend.

Signs of Climate Change in the Northeast

2010-09-21T06:32:00.000-07:00

Vermont’s fall colors may arrive two weeks early this year. Vermont’s strange spring was hot and therefore compressed. All the flowers bloomed at once instead of the usual leisurely parade. By the reckoning of many gardeners, the spring was two weeks ahead. And through the summer, several biological arrivals have been early. So perhaps the leaves will turn color two weeks early this fall and all the leafpeeper tourists will be too late!

Saratoga Apple’s crop will be 40% of normal this year because of the weird Climate Changed weather this spring. A long hot spell in the spring tricked the trees into blossoming ten days to two weeks early. Then came a fairly normal cold patch that froze the forming fruit.

The lilacs bloomed two weeks ahead of the Lilac Festival in Rochester, NY, to organizer’s dismay.

These are just more data points allowing us to ”solve for pattern” that we are already living on an Earth experiencing the Climate Crisis. These are relatively harmless examples compared to Pakistan’s floods and Russia’s fires, but perhaps more persuasive because they are local.

Author Bill McKibben said on Democracy Now recently, “The planet that we live on now is different, and in fundamental ways, from the one we were born onto. The atmosphere holds about five percent more water vapor that it did forty years ago. That’s an incredible change in one of the basic physical parameters of the planet, and it explains all those deluges and downpours. The ocean is 30 percent more acidic, as it absorbs all that carbon from the atmosphere. NASA said yesterday that we’ve just come through the warmest January, February, March on record, that 2010 is going to be the warmest year that we’ve ever scene.”

The “debate” about “Is Climate Change happening?” should be over. McKibben’s new book Eaarth gives dozens of examples of how our world is already experiencing a Climate Catastrophe. He says that we live on an Earth so changed we might as well call it a new name, like Eaarth. But the debate isn’t over because it’s not a debate. “The Debate” is a well-documented public relations stalling tactic by fossil fuel companies to confuse the public while grubbing every last fossil fuel dollar. Wall Street will be under water before Exxon Mobil stops funding “The Debate.” Mother Jones magazine reports that Exxon Mobil spent 55 million dollars to fund think tanks to contradict mainstream science. The Debate Stalling Tactic has worked because the sky looks so big, the science is complicated, and consequences seem far off.

I guess it’s Human Nature “to need to see it to believe it.” Seeing this out-of-phase spring unfolding was my wake-up call. Now I’m sure that the Climate Crisis is actually happening and I’m a little freaked out because that means humanity is in a very dire situation indeed.

Skies are air oceans, limited, able to be polluted, changeable in their make-up. Carbon may invisibly disappear out of our tailpipes but it doesn’t drop out of the atmospheric mash-up for a thousand years! Carbon in the atmosphere takes a long time to be sequestered, or gathered back by plants. Carbon is more like a cathedral than a fart. Every flippant car trip causes pollution that will be in the atmosphere for 1000 years. As in, “Oh my god, do you really have to drive to return that movie?”

So we need to leave the coal in the hole and leave the oil in the ground. We need to stop burning stuff. We need to make burning oil and coal ILLEGAL! We need electric cars powered by an electrical grid that’s charged by solar and wind. We would already have these technologies if those selfish oil companies hadn’t been blocking and stalling and ‘debating’ for 40 years.

The BP Gulf Coast Oil Catastrophe was a national wake up call (though we seem to have hit the snooze button. Again.) We need to get off the oil. We should start the process by banning offshore drilling. Oil companies are sociopathic non-human entities that don’t care who lives or dies. The oil companies are forcing humanity onto a Trail of Tears towards runaway climate change and Planet Death. We must stop them, stop burning oil, and protect the ecosystem stability that allows us to grow apples.

On 10/10/10, (10 October 2010), there is a Global Work Party for the Climate Crisis being organized by 350.org. Join your community members in responding to the Climate Crisis and then we’ll tell our politicians, “hey, we’re getting to work on the problem, how about you?” And who knows, maybe working together will help you transition your town into a community that’s more resilient and pleasant to live in. Check out the Transition Town movement to see how some communities are trying to prepare for post-oil.

The Smartest Conversation Yet on Climate Crisis

2010-06-07T04:39:00.001-07:00

Last night four authors talked about the Climate Crisis. All had written books on the subject. When people have a shared language and knowledge base, the conversation can go much deeper. It was the smartest conversation yet on the climate crisis that I've heard.

Listening to the conversation felt theraputic, healing, affirming, because it made me feel not alone in my head with these terrifying visions of climate apocalpyse. I think about the climate crisis a lot and I sometimes wonder if I'm not just getting myself hot and bothered. (It would be pleasant to become a Climate Denier and hit the snooze button and shake of the nightmares.) So it felt good to know that smart people who write books are also freaked out, that I'm not the only one shuddering with visions of the death of the Biosphere, that the basic contours of my understanding of the climate crisis are correct.

The Northshire Bookstore brought together Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Kolbert and two others. Someday soon I will post a link to the audio of the event.

I want to be having a conversation on this subject, with people this smart, four nights a week. Can some TV producer please manifest a Climate Crisis Roundtable?

Sociopathic Oil Companies and Runaway GMO algea

2010-06-03T06:21:00.000-07:00

What do the BP oil spill and the recent announcement of a scientist creating a living cell have in common?

A dangerous threat to the Commons, our shared life here on earth.

Just as BP throws up it hands and says, 'we don't know how to fix it', someday the GMO algea may get loose in the ocean and out compete normal algea, creating a disrupted oceanic ecosystem.

A scientist is pulling the most productive algea components out the algea DNA, and creating a super algea that would be useful in producing fuel. Now, I'm not a super scientist or anything, but it doesn't take alot to see where this one would go into the dickey weeds. It gets loose, it out-competes, disrupts the ecosystem, spreads a mad red tide across the planet, and so on...

our Commons, our shared earth, is a shared valueable treasure, and individuals and corporations don't have the right to disrupt it just for their own greed or desire for scientific fame.

Corporations aren't people, they don't die or feel empathetic pain of others, and one of humanity's great challenges is figuring out how to put humans in the driver's seat instead of faceless corporations. The other great challenge is to learn to handle our super scientific powers and place them in the context of a breakable ecology and a useful morality.

Apple Crops in Northeast Sabotaged by Big Oil’s Changing the Climate

2010-05-25T04:42:00.001-07:00

Saratoga Apple’s Nate Darrow says his apple crop will be 1/4 of normal this year because of the weird Climate Changed weather this spring. A long hot spell in the spring tricked the trees into blossoming ten days to two weeks early. Then came a fairly normal cold patch that froze the forming fruit.

Looking over his boxes of Delicious, Galas, and Sun Crisp apples at the Dorset Farmers Market, Nate said, “This time next year we won’t have all these apples still in stock.” He estimates that his harvest will be 20-25% of normal, maybe as low as 10%. “It depends on how well the trees do at the top of the orchard, the trees that are above the pocket of cold air that settles in the valley.”

A few weeks ago, I freaked out when I saw snow covered blossoms arriving before the bees were out. Yet my pear trees seem to be setting some fruit. Perhaps my fruit survived because it wasn’t too cold. Nate said that the young fruit won’t handle 29 degrees or under. A little snow on the blossoms is OK. Some growers will actually spray water on orchards because the conversion of water to ice actually releases some heat that will keep the temperature above 29. Minor temperature changes at certain periods mean the difference between a successful or difficult year.

This is the Climate Crisis. A hardworking fruit grower has his livelihood made unpredictable by an ecosystem swinging out of rhythm. (Perhaps he should sue BP for lost income.) This is just another data point allowing us to ‘”solve for pattern” that says we are already living on an Earth experiencing a Climate Crisis.

Bill McKibben said on Democracy Now recently, “The planet that we live on now is different, and in fundamental ways, from the one we were born onto. The atmosphere holds about five percent more water vapor that it did forty years ago. That’s an incredible change in one of the basic physical parameters of the planet, and it explains all those deluges and downpours. The ocean is 30 percent more acidic, as it absorbs all that carbon from the atmosphere. NASA said yesterday that we’ve just come through the warmest January, February, March on record, that 2010 is going to be the warmest year that we’ve ever scene.”

The “debate” about “Is Climate Change happening?” should be over. McKibben’s new book Eaarth gives dozens of examples of how our world is already experiencing a Climate Catastrophe. He says that we live on an Earth so changed we might as well call it a new name, like Eaarth. But the debate isn’t over because it’s not a debate. “The Debate” is a well-documented public relations stalling tactic by fossil fuel companies to confuse the public while grubbing every last fossil fuel dollar. Wall Street will be under water before Exxon Mobil stops funding “The Debate.” Mother Jones magazine reports that Exxon Mobil spent 55 million dollars to fund think tanks to contradict mainstream science. The Debate Stalling Tactic has worked because the sky looks so big, the science is complicated, and consequences seem far off.

I guess it’s Human Nature “to need to see it to believe it.” Seeing this out-of-phase spring unfolding was my wake-up call. Now I’m sure that the Climate Crisis is actually happening and I’m a little freaked out because that means humanity is in a very dire situation indeed.

Skies are air oceans, limited, able to be polluted, changeable in their make-up. Carbon may invisibly disappear out of our tailpipes but it doesn’t drop out of the atmospheric mash-up for a thousand years! Carbon in the atmosphere takes a long time to be sequestered, or gathered back by plants. Carbon is more like a cathedral than a fart. Every flippant car trip causes pollution that will be in the atmosphere for 1000 years. As in, “Oh my god, do you really have to drive to return that movie?”

So we need to leave the coal in the hole and leave the oil in the ground. We need to stop burning stuff. We need to make burning oil and coal ILLEGAL! We need electric cars powered by an electrical grid that’s charged by solar and wind. We would already have these technologies if those selfish oil companies hadn’t been blocking and stalling and ‘debating’ for 40 years.

The BP Gulf Coast Oil Catastrophe is our national wake up call. We need to get off the oil. Oil companies are sociopathic non-human entities that don’t care who lives or dies. The oil companies are forcing humanity onto a Trail of Tears towards runaway climate change and Planet Death. We must stop them, stop burning oil, and protect the ecosystem stability that allow us to grow apples.

Take Bush out of post-abuse Memory Hole

2010-05-13T20:16:00.000-07:00

George W. Bush has disappeared from the national stage and national mind because neither the Left or the Right wants to think about him. Republicans want to disappear Bush to remove scarlet letter W from around their mid-term election necks. Democrats are so sick of this guy that mentioning his name makes the room unhappy and reaching for the Paxil. But we must remember George W. Bush because voters are blaming Obama for Bush-caused problems.

Americans are like people healing from abuse by blocking bad memories. The mention of the Bush name calls forth dozens of unpleasant memories and association, from war, lies, deceit, and to simply incompetant coasting aristocratic governence. So nobody speaks of him. He is down the memory hole.

In George Orwell's book 1984, in a big bureocratic government building, workers had nicknamed the garbage shoots placed throughout the building "memory holes'. Scraps of paper were shoved there to disappear. The state felt free to re-write history, and old propaganda that countered the new propaganda was put down the memory hole.

So it is with Bush. He goes down the memory hole and the Republicans re-brand as libertarian populists.

We live in the United States of Amnesia, as writer Gore Vidal put it. Like a spiritual teacher with an obssessive focus on "The Now", our nation is disconnected to the flow of events that brought us here. Other countries aren't always this way. Some of the South American countries maintain a fierce historical narrative that puts American in the colonialist villian role. Democrats could use a little bit of that radical historical memory to remember who the villians in this story are.

President Obama has been doing a good job with a bad situation. The Bush Team handed him an exploding situation and he defused it. But elections aren't about the truth, they are about national mood, about the strange tidal flows of shaped opinion. With a mid-term coming up that could hand Congress to the Republicans, it's a tight time for Obama.

Somehow, the Right has gelled around being anti-Obama, and the Left has lost the sense that Obama is 'our guy'.
Obama has been governing with a sort of post-partisan elite bureocratic pragmatism, not as a Democrat particularly. And so the Democratic Base is confused, like "'do we have a dog in this fight?"

Luckily, we still remember that we dislike Bush. When we remember...

Climate Leadership Goes South

2010-05-09T16:12:00.000-07:00

The South American nations have now taken leadership role in the Climate Crisis.

From siding with good science to democracy in format, the recent Cochabamba people's summit was a startling revelation in the possibility of a people-centered process to address Our Biggest Problem.

For somebody freaked out about climate change, I'm really psyched to hear a president talk about making 1% temperature increase as the lowest possible goal. Bolivia's Evo Morales is way way out ahead of the herd, like Al Gore in being one of the few global leaders to get it. Al Gore has a great new article, by the way, in The New Republic connecting the dots on the oil spill and the oil industry everyday screw-the-planet. Sure the oil spill sucks, but so does another day of L.A. freeways.

It seems there is a near complete American media silence on the recent events in Bolivia. Goggle: World People's Conference on Climate Crisis and Rights for Mother Earth, and sign up for their e-mail list and you'll suddenly be privy to a social movement with the snap and attitude to be worthy of addressing the Climate Crisis.

Snowy Apple Blossoms? Evidence at the Climate Justice Tribunal

2010-04-28T18:26:00.000-07:00

Today snow gathers in the apple blossoms. This means no apples in the fall. The apples bloomed two weeks early, and the bees didn’t get to chance to pollinate them. Now the snow ends the blossom’s fertility. This is Climate Change spoiling Vermont’s apple harvest.

Abnormally warm weather made the plants wake up too soon. The season is two weeks ahead. A month of abnormally warm weather tricked almost every plant into blooming early. Now it has snowed for a day, in typical late-April fashion. The fruit tree blossoms didn’t get pollinated because the honeybees weren’t out yet. So this fall there will be less fruit.

The apple harvest is always variable. If we get a wet patch when the trees bloom, much less fruit in the fall. If the weather is sunny and the bees can work, a big crop. Bees navigate by the sun.

But this spring has been weird. It started with a banging weekend of 80 degree weather and then it was warm for a month. Most plants begin spring growth based on temperature, though some a daylight/day-length sensitive. So most of the ecosystem is going for it. And today, snow. Many of the flowers will decay quickly after today’s rough weather.

I watched the early blossoms without seeing any honeybee pollinators and so I asked a beekeeper about it. Author of The Natural Beekeeper Ross Conrad wrote, “I suspect that you are not seeing the bees you expect because the mild winter and unusually warm weather during the past couple months has fooled the plants into blossoming much sooner than usual (everything seems to be about 2 weeks ahead of schedule). Now that the temperatures have returned to what is considered seasonably "normal" it is often too cold for the bees to fly.”

The snow on the apple blossoms is proof of the Climate Crisis. For too long, action on the Climate Crisis has been stagnated by this idiotic debate “does climate change exist?” In a well-documented plot, the Fossil Fuel industry has conspired to obscure the overwhelming scientific evidence. These dark conspiratorial propagandists should be put on trial at the upcoming International Climate Justice Tribunal.

Today’s ruined apple blossoms are just a mild beginning of a world wobbling off it’s axis. Imagine the major cities of Bolivia not having drinking water because glaciers have melted. Imagine runaway Climate Change turning our planet into Mars. This is really where we are headed, and unfortunately, most people don’t have the imaginative fortitude to bear witness to science-based projections of our shared future.

The Climate Crisis isn’t a mild disruption of our Earth, but rather an Apocalyptic Trail-of-Tears Death March into a Science Fiction-ish unraveled Ecosystem Planet Death. Mild ecosystem disruptions like today’s apple trees are just the tip of the melting iceberg.

We need a revolution against planet death, for a living healthy future. We need a citizen’s movement to push a government movement to solve the Climate Crisis.

Fortunately, there is indeed an emerging world citizen’s movement for Climate Justice. Last week in Cochabamba, Bolivia, there was the People’s World Summit on Climate Crisis and the Rights of Mother Earth. Democracy Now had exciting coverage last week. Naomi Klein writes, “When Morales invited “social movements and Mother Earth’s defenders... scientists, academics, lawyers and governments” to come to Cochabamba for a new kind of climate summit, it was a revolt against this experience of helplessness, an attempt to build a base of power behind the right to survive.”

The wisdom of Indigenous people’s entered the global discussion with passage of a Declaration of Rights of Mother Earth. In 2011, on the next Earth Day, there will be a Global Referendum on the Climate Crisis. Who knows what any of that will mean for saving the planet from fossil fuels, but it’s thrilling language that calls us in the right direction.

We have a right to survive on an Earth where the bees buzz in the apple blossoms at the right time to make fruit. And Mother Earth has the right for Her Spring Song to be in rhythm.

Bee Author Comments On Blossoms without Bees

2010-04-28T17:19:00.000-07:00

To beekeeper and author of the book "The Natural Beekeeper", Ross Conrad, I asked “Are bees light sensitive in their emergence behavoir, and thus missing the right time to wake up? I thought they were warmth sensitive, and woke up based on hive temperatures. If so, why are the blossums here but not the bees?

Conrad said “Bees require both adequate light and warmth in order to forage. It is widely held that they utilize the sun for navigational purposes, and they require warmth in order to maintain a high enough body temperature so that their flight muscles will work and not become immobilized. When temperatures fall to around 57 degrees F, the bees will tend to cluster around the brood and queen in order to keep them warm, and this will restrict the colonies flight activity (the exact temperature varies among bee hives depending on race, genetics, etc.) I suspect that you are not seeing the bees you expect because the mild winter and unusually warm weather during the past couple months has fooled the plants into blossoming muchsooner than usual (everything seems to be about 2 weeks ahead of schedule). Now that the temperatures have returned to what is considered seasonably "normal" it is often too cold for the bees to fly. This especially true for hives that are kept in shaded areas and do not get a lot of direct sunlight inhibiting their ability to warm up enough to send out a lot of foragers during the day. Other factors come into play as well...as the plants have to have the right soil, light, and moisture conditions (among others) to be able to produce the nectar they need to bribe the pollinators into visiting their blossoms. It does not matter how big and beautiful a flower is, if there is no reward for a visiting bee, the bee will go elsewhere.

Of course in your particular area, it may be that the bees have simply died off during the winter and that is why you are not seeing them. Given the critical role that pollinators have come to play in maintaining the biosphere which supports all life on Earth, and the fact that pollinators across the board are in serious decline world-wide, your concern is certainly understandable and warranted.

One note: We would not usually refer to the bees as "waking up" in spring since they don't actually sleep through the winter, but cluster and become dormant or inactive for a brief period during the winter season when the queen stops laying eggs. This is different from hibernation in which the organism's metabolism drops significantly and they go into what is described as a deep sleep. Healthy bees maintain their metabolism throughout the year and keep the temperature within the hive's cluster well above freezing during the entire winter.

Vermont's Spring Three Weeks Early, Blossums without Bees, I'm Freaking Out!

2010-04-25T17:14:00.000-07:00

Spring has come 2-3 weeks early this year to southern Vermont. We are witnessing Climate Change. The seasons are out of rhythm because humans are heating our thin, limited skies.

Today I talked some experienced landscapers and gardeners. Everyone agreed it was 2-3 weeks early. Spring's parade of flowers is also compressed, because all the plants and trees have suddenly blossomed all at once.

It's only April 25th. Traditional “last frost date” is June 1st, five weeks away. What if we get a normal frost? Plants, interrupted.

And the Honeybees aren’t out, so I guess they didn’t get the memo about Global Warming Early Spring. Bees generally stay in the hive until warmer days come. I've seen a few wild Bumblebees dumbledorfing around, but the hardworking Honeybees aren't out in full force yet. This is so incredibly not good. The bees pollinate everybody, and without their flower-visiting tours, no fruit. The Climate Crisis is disturbing mind-bogglingly integrated and complex biological systems.

As Bill McKibben’s new book Eaarth says, we don’t need to argue anymore whether Climate Change is real. We are already living on a changed planet where the atmosphere holds 5% more water than it used to and so the storms are so much bigger.

This spring in Vermont is a tragedy like the Titanic, though quiet and easy to gloss over and return to the socially acceptable cultural trance. I am allowing myself to get upset over it because I think it may catalyze fierce commitment to work and fight for a carbon-neutral planet for the rest of my days. (Starting here with fierce blog posts! Tomorrow, the Revolution.)

Our world, our delicate, impossibly beautiful Pandora is unraveling, coming apart at the seams, sprouting at the wrong time, blooming in the middle of nowhere.

So I say to you and myself, snap out of cultural trance! It's OK to be upset by this.

I'm reminded of a poem that asked....

"What did you do when the seasons started to fail? What did you do, once you knew?”

Go to Copenhagen-in-Cochabamba with these web-links!!!

2010-04-21T20:10:00.000-07:00

Today, in Bolivia, there was another day of the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. I think this conference is tremendously exciting. I love to hear people talking about Mother Earth and defending here rights! Yes! Mother Earth has rights!

The following post is a list of web-links to see what's going on.

Check out the past two days of Democracy Now and catch up on their amazing coverage of this event.

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/21/evo_morales_opens_climate_change_conference

Home page for the conference:

http://envivo.cmpcc.org.bo/?lang=en

to sign in to the virtual conference:

http://envivo.cmpcc.org.bo/spip.php?page=inscribirse&lang=en

Letter from the great author of Memory of Fire, Eduardo Galeano

http://envivo.cmpcc.org.bo/Message-to-CMPCC-from-Author

DN actress Q' orianka Kilcher extremely articulate rap:

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/20/three

Hey! Mother Earth has Rights!

http://envivo.cmpcc.org.bo/D%C2%B4ESCOTTO-Y-BOFF-PIDEN-DEJAR-EL

webcasting link:

http://envivo.cmpcc.org.bo/-Difusion-en-vivo-?lang=en

Bolivian President Evo Morales says "Coca-Cola is "poison and sewage water." (YES!)

http://envivo.cmpcc.org.bo/Evo-Morales-message-to-grassroots

Maybe helpful tech note: On the top toolbar of the webpage, you can click to get the pages translated always into English so you wouldn't have to click the "translate' button each time you moved thru the Conference website.

People's Climate Crisis summit

2010-04-20T07:43:00.000-07:00

Today something very cool is happening in Bolivia... the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth

It is designed to be an open people's summit, rather than a government meeting. It's also being organized as a voice-giver to the other parts of the world that sometimes get left out. Climate Change has a social justice component because it affects the poor more painfully. Developing Countries (ie. the 2/3rds world etc) will feel the affects of climate change more than rich white northern countries that burned all the damn coal. The Conference seems expressly designed to be more "Climate Justice" orientated than Copenhagen.

The news program Democracy Now (www.democracynow.org) is covering the People's Summit from Cochabamaba. Monday's show was powerful and I expect them to throw it down all week. DN's coverage of Copenhagen was so smart and on-point.

Info on the event is on-line here at: http://pwccc.wordpress.com/

Event organizers are trying to create some live-web features so us far-away people can participate in the conference.

Hurray! Gov't Goes After Goldman Sachs paper-hustlers!

2010-04-17T20:36:00.001-07:00

On Friday April 16, the gov't went after crookedest crooked thieves at the center of the financial crisis. Indictments and beginning of public legal process involving the dasterdly mathamatical swindle factory of Wall Street, Goldman Sachs.

Apparently, Goldman Sachs was selling clients investments that were design by some big trader betting large that the housing industry was going to collapse. So, selling crap, designed by somebody who was betting it the other way, essentially, fraudulent dealings with the client designed to take their money.

Following the Financial Crisis scandel, reading Matt Taibbi's stuff has been great to keep abreast of the complicated crookednes involving Goldman Sachs and others.

Bearing witness to the financial crisis takes some high-number abstraction math skills and an ability to wade into some truly boring material, but the basic plot isn't so hard to work out. Some rich kids grown big enough (but not morally enough) to figure out how to move a lot of numbers around so that the golden crumbs land on them. And sometimes even better, mega-swindles where millions enter a UBS Swiss Bank with your password on the Euro pile.

To which I say, hurray for good governance. We need the cop on the beat to regulate and police Wall Street. Because when their are billions to make by somehow, oppsy, misreporting something on a piece of paper somewhere, people are going to do it.

Wall Street spent years and millions to dismantle the regulatory function of government in oversight of the banking industry. And now, the unwatched inmates have run amuck,surprise surprise. Here's hoping financial reform happens in a way that protects real wealth (planet, family, food, etc) from the mis-valueing of everything by people who are too cheap to save Mother Earth.

May we someday have a Wall Street sized according to it's function.

The Parade of Flowers marching to the beat of Climate Crisis

2010-04-12T07:02:00.000-07:00

It is bittersweet to get gorgeous June days in the first days of April. Yes, we love it. No, we can’t enjoy it guilt-free. Vermont’s spring came too early this year. And 2010 is aiming to be the warmest on record. This is a changing atmospheric climate.

I love to watch the swift return of Life to the landscape. In a few weeks, Vermont goes from frozen-under-snow to summer time’s Green Everywhere. Biologist classify Vermont’s ecology as “Temperate Rainforest.”

Plants decide when to awake because of temperature. Warm spring temperature’s bring a parade of flowers, a sequential revealing of different plants making the beautiful mad dash to reproduction. In early spring, the small plants race ahead before big plants fill the space with big leaves: the Snowdrops, the Crocuses, the Daffodils. In late May, the whole plant kingdom makes a mad dash towards growth and seed-making. The parade of flowers is more purple early on, and more orange and red later in the season.

Unusually warm days in the spring risks “tricking” the plants too early. These delicate ecosystems adapted to centuries of stable temperatures. Climate Change risks upsetting this delicate timing sequence. What if spring comes in February in a few years, and then the snow returns, but all the trees have broken bud?

We live in a tightly wound ecosystem. Spring’s delicate unfolding is seriously in jeopardy because of climate change. Humans need to live in the reality of our biological life-web ecosystem, the ground floor of our existence. We need to stop burning coal and oil, and start moving at full speed to a post-carbon world. Otherwise, someday, spring may spring in January, then backtrack, leaving a confused parade.

Many gardeners are observing a two week drift towards earliness in plants. In England, the arrival of the Lilacs is two weeks ahead. All things being equal, that’s fine. But an ecosystem is complex. What about the birds who are arriving from South America too early or late for the awakening bugs?

The world’s ecosystem’s are being thrown out of rhythm. Nature is supposed to be a joyous, well-organized symphony but burning coal is turning Nature into a arrhythmic Free Jazz cacophony.

So come on, people, let’s get on it.

How humans think together?

2010-03-11T19:38:00.000-08:00

muddy the waters enough and nobody can see thru the murk

human society trying to think together thru the media get sidetracked by street clatter

how do we learn to think together as one Gaian Mind?

how do we debate amongst the dedicated and depreciate the voices of the decietful?

modern media mavens of magic covens of distributive 2.0 function

give humanity voice with elaborate tools of good groupthinking

(please hold the wireless technology that radiates the modernhome)

welcome to the accidental future.

what i meant to say was this:

we need to learn to think clearly together to solve issues like climate change. when

Exxon can shout into the dialogue nursery rhyme facts, it gets hard to think together.

How do we create a fact base without propganda hustlers?

The Revival of the Grateful Dead

2010-02-17T07:21:00.000-08:00

Music is mysterious stuff.

The morphogenetic fields of Jerry Garcia are being reactivated.

Check out Rupert Sheldrake's theory of Morphogenetic fields, a way information is stored, in non-local fields like electrical fields, charged particles of information. These theories work to explain 'morphogenesis' or how-things-grow...

John of Dark Star Orchestra has studied the guitar playing of Jerry so deeply that he's created a new hybrid information-form that activates charges contributes the original morphic fields of the Grateful Dead.

www.rupertsheldrake.com has more info on the original idea.

The fierce “Storms of My Grandchildren”

2010-01-11T13:15:00.000-08:00

James Hansen, the leading climate scientist, has an excellent new book for understanding the Climate Crisis.

The book’s poetic title “Storms of My Grandchildren” distills the crisis to it’s essence: our society’s failure to address the Climate Crisis creates a situation of “intergenerational remote tyranny” that force upon our descendents a terrible fate, while we blithely doze in a self-absorbed stupor from the intoxicating fumes of the oil age.

Hansen writes movingly about his grandchildren motivating him to make clear his ideas and step up to the fight. He has dropped his scientific autism and has drawn some agreeably radical conclusions: complete stop to burning coal, calling out greenwashing politicians, advocating for nonviolent resistance.

Hansen analyzes the Climate Crisis from the vantage point of scientist, policy advocate, Washington bureaucrat, activist, and the concerned grandfather. Hanson was the guy that Bill McKibben bugged to get the actual number (350 carbon parts per million) for humanity to shoot at, an interesting story for climate activists interested in a little bit of movement history of 350.org.

It is fascinating to follow in the wake of a great mind working at the top of their game with the motivation to save his grandchildren and life on Earth. This creates an energized tone to the writing: caring grandfather going over-the-Rubicon with a now-or-never attitude to speak truth to power.

The Climate Crisis issue is stuck mostly for politics, rather than the science, and so Hansen offers a very useful analysis of the political climate around climate change.

Hansen says that politicians pretend to be green but don’t really put out. ”Most politicians advertised themselves as being “green” but what I learned was that, invariably, it amounted to greenwash, demonstrating token environmental support while kowtowing to fossil fuel special interests.”

Hansen gives us an insider’s view of the underworld of Worshington’s Bushite climate denial. Like touring Dante’s inferno, we get to sit in at the Bush’s Climate Task Force, where he was given a whole 20 minutes and it turns out all the decisions had already been made to totally ignore the science and whore for the oil companies.

The book transmits to us a deeper understanding of the climate system mechanisms: oceans, gases, sunlight, and the carbon cycle. For example, Hansen explains that carbon stays in the air for a very long time. It doesn’t dissipate like a fart, but lingers, silent but deadly, for centuries as a near-permanent new addition to the thin, delicate sky.

Therefore, as one graph shows, though China emits more carbon annually than the US, the cumulative output is more important, because the carbon is still around, and the US is still #1 in this, at 27% of the cumulative carbon pumped into the atmosphere 1795-2008. USA! USA!

And so, energy efficiency is not really a solution, because it stands in the place of getting off fossil fuels entirely, which is what is really required. Hansen writes, “The problem is that the act of slowing down emissions, by itself, does almost no good. The reason is that the lifetime of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere-ocean system is millennia. So it doesn’t matter much whether the fossil fuel is burned this year or next year. Energy efficiency is certainly an essential part of the solution to global warming, but it must be part of a strategic approach that leaves most of the fossil fuels in the round. Yes, most of the fossil fuels must be left in the ground. That is the explicit message that the science provides.”

It is beautiful to get new ideas that allow our mind’s eye to see centuries of sky patterns, to see how clouds work, to see what our delicate sky is made of.

The sky seems tall and way up there, but it’s really the surface of an apple compared to the earth, a thin film of unusual gases that press against the planet amidst a vast airless space. It is beautiful to contemplate the tremendous complexity of this arrangement of sunlight, funny gases, and human life interacting with it all! Hansen deserves credit for making understandable the complexity of Climate science. May we have a world citizenry that arises in shared knowledge of how our sky works and how we can protect it.

Understanding the Climate Crisis is like walking into a dark room, hands in-front as we look for the light switch. Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron talks of the wisdom of not knowing, of acceptance of the borders of our knowing and not getting uptight at our ignorance. This book is a good place to humbly not-know everything and be willing to learn, and travel behind this dedicated activist as he tries to turn on the lights for us.

Eating Garlic to cure a cold

2009-11-24T09:05:00.000-08:00

Eating lots of garlic can stop or shorten a cold.

Sometimes we hear the body whine, “oh no, I’m getting a cold.” At that very first moment, go eat a lot of garlic. The garlic will boost our immune system and stop the cold from settling in.

Garlic contains 30 antiviral and antibacterial compounds. Garlic is a bulb, like a daffodil, that lives underground. When the bulb gets nicked or cut by a bug, it creates strong chemicals that resists unhelpful bacteria so the plant survives. Also, living underground, the plant needs to have strong anti-decaying properties so it doesn’t rot.

Garlic has different properties cooked and raw. Garlic is more powerful when raw, but it’s harder on the stomach. It’s good to a few cloves raw, and then a few full heads of garlic cooked. (The individual garlic bulbs are called cloves and the clusters of a dozen or so cloves are called heads of garlic.) If I’m trying to block a on-setting cold, I’ll eat two cloves raw, and two or three heads of garlic cooked, which is about 30-40 cloves. If I’ve got an established cold, I’ll eat this regiment everyday.

Here are a few ways to prepare garlic.

When cold fighting, I like to eat one or two cloves chopped fine and mixed with a spoonful of raw honey.

The easiest way to eat a bunch of garlic is to chop it and put it atop toast in the toaster over. As the bread toasts, it usually cooks the garlic enough to take the acidic burn off the garlic. After toasting, add some olive oil, sea salt, and nutritional yeast atop the “garlic bread” sweetens the deal.

Another way to cook voluminous garlic is to bake it covered in olive oil. Peal a couple heads of garlic, put it in over-safe bowl, cover it in cheaper olive oil. Try 300 degrees for 20 or so minutes until spreadable by fork. Add sea salt. The leftover oil can be reused for cooking and bread dipping.

Another easy way to eat your medicine is cooking garlic amidst fried eggs. In the sauté pan, add some olive oil and the garlic. Crack the eggs into the pan atop the garlic. Throw in some sea salt and herbs. Flip it overeasy. Done.

The easiest way to peel garlic is to squash the garlic glove with the tail of a big knife until the peal loosens. Another method is chopping off the knobby root end of the garlic and then pealing back the paper. The knobby bottoms are worth the effort to cut off if they are big and unpalatable.

Interestingly, garlic doesn’t respond to human breeding attempts, and so the plant we see are similar to what our Italian caveman ancestors ate.

Garlic is easy to grow. Stick single cloves in the ground, six inches apart. Plant four-to-six weeks before the ground freezes hard in the fall. Garlic likes hay mulch, as the delicate roots benefit from lack of weed-pressure competition. Harvest in the beginning of August when the leaves go brown.

Throw out moldy garlic and be sure to cut away any imperfections from the white flesh of the garlic where decay has started. Any mold that grows on antibacterial garlic is strong and we certainly don’t want to eat it or even breathe it too much.

It’s probably best not to eat tons of garlic all the time, though. As a medicine, we want to let our body reset. Though our body does appreciate antiviral and antibacterial boosts when needed, in general we are trying to cultivate in the body a garden of good bacteria. Kombucha, probiotic supplements, yogurt, fermented foods all create digester allies that that help our body. When a lot of garlic hits the digester gullet of the large intestine, our natural microherd of intestinal flora will notice.

Some people say garlic makes us smell, but I think it just makes us smell of garlic, and I like that smell. Perhaps garlic’s odorous reputation has been amplified by Big Pharma to keep people buying cold medicine that works less well than garlic.

Garlic is a helpful ally in stopping a cold, but it should be used along with other practices too. Other helpful cold-defeating habits include Echinacea tea with raw honey, rest, water. Vitamin C in large quantities can help. I like the fizzy Emergence-C packets. And it’s good to keep warm, and ideally, raise the body’s heat up, as some viruses live at lower temperatures. A good hot shower,or a sauna, or even being bundled up beneath ten blankets, can hot box our bodies to encourage the baddies move out.

Good luck and be well!

A Statewide Conversation on Building Vermont’s Food System

2009-11-06T10:39:00.000-08:00

How can we build Vermont’s food system in the next ten years?

That’s the central topic of a well-organized conversation that’s happening in 8 places across Vermont in the next month.

The Farm to Plate Initiative and the Sustainable Agriculture Council are organizing local food summits. Farmers, food businesses and other stakeholders are being invited to say their piece. In the end, the state will spend some loot to make it happen. It sounds like government at it's best: trying to do good stuff by listening to the people doing the work.

An email from organizers says the events purpose is “to gather input from regional stakeholders as part of the Farm to Plate (F2P) strategic planning process whose goal is to enhance Vermont’s food system over the next 10 years. Not only will these events help in determining the contents of the strategic plan for Vermont’s farm and food sector, but it will also provide an opportunity for participants to learn more about what is happening in their region related to farms and food production.”

Distilled findings will be presented the VT legislature and the governor later this year. The eight events are designed to gather good ideas about where we want to go, what we need, what needs to increase, etc.

The conversation for southwestern Vermont is happening in Bennington, on Saturday Nov 14th, at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, at 200 Pleasant St., from 5:30- 8:30. There will be a nice dinner, prepared with food from local farmers. Info is on the web at http://www.vsjf.org/sustainable_agriculture/farm2plate.shtml. Farm to Plate Local Food Summits contact person is Heather Pipino, 828-1121, heather@vsjf.org

Here’s what I think we need to improve Vermont’s food system over the long haul. We need better winter storage capacity. We could use a carbon tax on vegetables grown over a thousand miles away (regardless of whether this violates the WTO’s “rules.”) We should have inexpensive tractor rentals for young/poor farmers to use during the spring. We should increase the flow of local food to schools by having portions of the school lunch budget set aside for local food. We should have a food co-op in every town.

Some of these goals could overlap. Today, in early November in Vermont, I found an apple from Chile in my kitchen. This is prime Vermont apple season, but somehow, this carbon-drenched apple appeared, looking agreeably crunchy. It got me grumbling about the meagerness of our food system and the hidden carbon costs in the industrial food economy.

Let Vermont start by being self-sufficient in apples. There should be large apple storage sheds, with the pumped in CO2 for preservation, and every Vermont student should have access to handfuls of fresh, local apples everyday.

The development of a healthy food system will mean challenging one of the main philosophies of modern economics: free-market fundamentalism. Let’s drop the free market economy doctrinaire rhetoric that everything functions better when we slut ourselves out to big corporations, economies of scale and the profit motive. Not every system works best purely with the profit motive as the driving force.

Take those apples for example. Say we wanted to provide every Vermont student one Vermont apple everyday, all school year long. We could do that, with some math, some storage sheds and some public/private organization. Free-market fundamentalism would say, if Chilean apples were cheaper, buy those. Further, the government shouldn’t be involved in apple storage, because all things function better under the benevolent gaze of businessmen. This is nonsense. To save the planet, we need to do a million things that can’t be coaxed into existence by the profit motive.

Last night I read “Now or Never: Why we must act now to end climate change and create a sustainable future” by Tim Flannery. This excellent little book reminded me that the stakes are very, very high. Humanity may totally wreck our delicate terrerium. We really need to get it together, and create systems that meet our needs without blowing so much smoke into the sky. A thriving local food system puts less carbon into the air, and so it’s a key to the living future.

Let us build a local food system that brings together farmers, government people and eaters. Come to these discussions in your part of the state and daydream with us about the food system that saves the future.

Getting the Generals to Leave Afghanistan to the Afghans

2009-10-22T07:27:00.000-07:00

It is time to give Afghanistan back to the Afghan people and let them sort it out.

This means letting the Taliban “win”, an unpleasant prospect for a propagandized America, just like “losing” to the Viet Cong.

Afghanistan and Vietnam run so grimly parallel that we are fools not to remember our lessons.

Lesson #1: Don’t drag out a losing war indefinitely just because we can’t stomach the political pain of acknowledging a lost war.

Lesson #2: The native people support the insurgency because the Taliban/Viet Cong represent the people’s struggle for national independence, they speak the same language, and they are sick of Americans bombing their wedding parties.

Let us set down our doctrinaire US/Them propaganda and see who the Taliban are. The Taliban are the armed nationalist indigenous resistance movement against foreign occupation. They have set up a shadow government that issues passports, that calls itself the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Truck drivers who bring supplies to NATO bases must carry an IEA passport, and also pay a stiff tax to the Taliban. (See Patrick Cockburn’s excellent reporting at Counterpunch.org.) When Quadaffi spoke at the UN, he advocated for the Taliban’s right to set up the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. The Taliban (aka the I.E.A.) have a website, where the war is sold from their point of view. It is an Orwellian experience to read celebratory comments about blowing up American conveys.

(Here’s a good place as a disclaimer as any: All things being equal, I’d like America to “win” in Afghanistan and establish equal rights for women, but since that’s not going to happen, screw it, let’s go.)

We can’t eliminate the social movement called the Taliban, because the Taliban are Afghans, largely comprised of Afghan’s largest ethnic group, the Pashtun, who are 42% of the population. The Taliban are Afghans acting as the legitimate indigenous nationalist military force resisting the foreign occupation. It is also clear, that the US has lost the opportunity to “win” in Afghanistan. What is winning? Defeating the Taliban? Oh really. Good luck with that. The Taliban are the Afghan people. Further, the Taliban movement is very resilient, surviving a crushing defeat in 2001, by just heading up into those endless, freezing mountains to regroup and eat their goat yogurt. Or maybe they ate Belgian chocolate airlifted in by the ISI paid for by wayward US tax dollars.

American money created the Taliban when they were America’s proxy army in fighting the Soviets partners. Once they were our allies, and perhaps they can be again. Surely, the Orwellian demonization of the Taliban can wear off after a few washes in the news cycle.

Americans live inside a bubble of propaganda that only extended living abroad can make clear. When one leaves the US, suddenly one decompresses from the Groupthink atmospheric pressure. The debate in the media about Afghanistan has been so strange. People pontificating like armchair 19th century English imperialists, twirling their handlebar mustaches while loaded on gin & tonics, talking about “our responsibility to the Afghan people” like it was our “white man’s burden.” Americans live behind enemy lines in a Thought War. PR firms catalog grumpy anti-war tracts like this one because they have Information War contracts to monitor and shape US public opinion.

The Afghan war is based on wrong foundational ideas: that America is the global cop, that America should be an occupying force, that America is the backbone of a global economic order that props up pliant crooks like Karzai. All this is wrong. Let us move towards a multi-polar world where the problems of the Age are settled by diplomacy and international organizations. Let’s start by handing Afghanistan to the UN.

Of course, the Taliban have many backward ideas about women, homosexuality, modernity, and music. I wouldn’t want to live next door to them. I’m just saying, let’s make peace with the Afghans and their armed advocates, the Taliban, and let Time and the awesomeness of Internet and pop music (and international aid and reparations) drag Afghanistan into the 21st century.

All this seems logical to me, a civilian who makes no money off the military, who wants peace, who generally likes Islam, and who is generally sympathetic with other countries that don’t want the US military stationed there.

Unfortunately, the Taliban are only half the problem in the Afghanistan war. The other half is the American military’s general.

The career militarists at the Pentagon want to extend the war in Afghanistan. The military-industrial complex wants to wring a few more years of billions out of the Afghan. Like Vietnam, a long war is a good paycheck. One military talking head said that winning would cost 5 billion a month for 10 years! I disagree that we can spend our way to victory there, though I agree that Halliburton would be willing to try.

Robert Drefeus has a smart article in the new Rolling Stone, where he writes of the difficulty Obama is having with the Generals.

Obama is smart, and living the world of Realpolitik, not in the Ideal world of the Leftist blogosphere, and so knows some history. Civilian presidents who resist the power of our military and our secret police (CIA) have often faced internal sabotage. Jimmy Carter was harpooned by the CIA spooks because they thought he was naïve for wanting to do the right thing, the Christian thing, even at the expense of short term loses in the field. Who knows about JFK, but the CIA certainly has been reluctant to release their files about Oswald.

So let’s have some patience with Obama, that in the first year, he hasn’t dismantled the entire apparatus of military conquest. We want Obama to go the distance and have a product 8 years, not throw a rod early and get coup de ta’d by the Raytheon heathens.

And of course, the good people in the military may honestly believe that we could still “win” in Afghanistan. The problem with military people can be caught in the proverb: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” However, there is no military solution to hammer the situation in Afghanistan with.

Politically, there will be a high cost if America is still in this new Vietnam in four years. The progressives are already getting grumble. We are starting to feel like we got played during the election, and a great disappointed watchfulness has set in. People voted for Obama as the anti-war candidate. Now, we’re still in all these wars! Recently I was at a gathering of progressives, and when people said Obama’s name, there was a new hesitancy has replaced the unbridled enthusiasm. Obama and the Democrats should know that extending the war in Afghanistan would hurt their chances in the long haul.

Most people don’t care about the nuances of world domination/geo-politics, they just want out. Here, the Americans and the Afghan people are in agreement: US out of Afghanistan.

And I’m with them. Out!

Learning to see Nature so we Awake

2009-10-19T19:22:00.000-07:00

When we learn to look really closely at Nature, secret doors open to knowledge, biology, art, and mystery.

When our awareness steadies in focused observation, colors deepen, shapes define, strange relationships develop, and patterns emerge.

It takes bravery to receptively witness the beauty of the world. It takes a refined, disciplined, masocism to endure the pleasures of percieving the gorgeousness of our burning world.

We must willfully shake off our everyday daze and be voluntarily tazed by the miracles blooming and swooping all around.

A long, thorough, multi-seasonal contemplation of Nature in Her many forms brings ever deepening revelation.

Humans need these skills for appreciating Nature, so we’ll turn less Nature into parking lots, so we’ll be content with non-consumptive pleasures like looking at the subtle colors of sunset.

We take the right posture when we adopt a reverent appreciation for the great beauty that surrounds us in the Web of Life.

The skill of deep appreciation of Nature offers necessary skills that humans need in our effort to create planetary survival.

When we see Nature, when we learn to really open up to Nature’s beauty in her delicate and useful shapes/colors/forms, we are gifted with appreciation for the Lifeweb that supports us. And we need that gratitude for Life, in all her stunning complexity, because it strengthens our connection to the Earth that we need to work fiercely to protect.

Some Gratitude for Teddy Kennedy

2009-08-26T20:25:00.001-07:00

I was named for Teddy Kennedy and so this man has been in my awareness since I was very young. My legal name is Edward Talcott, nicknamed Teddy when I was growing up, (though I go by Theo today). I've spent a lifetime in quiet respect for this guy, and today I feel like offering up some thanksgiving for this good guy from this good family.

When one watches politics habitually, one needs loadstars or points of reference. Teddy Kennedy was like that, a dependable "long-distance runner for justice' as Cornell West would say, someone you could count on to be aligned to the Good.

I appreciated Teddy as somebody willing to slog along for Team Good, one of us in there during the long, ugly trench warfare of American Politics, a liberal icon throughout the Ice Age of Reagan and the Dark Ages of Bush.

Teddy Kennedy fought for health care and for the poor, even when he and his family had their own. He was not a member of the cold-hearted, classist, sociopathic, privileged elite. Instead, he engaged in a life-long struggle on behalf of a vision of America where everybody deserves a piece of the action and equal rights and access to the good life.

I heard that at one time in Washington, there was a conference about his brother Bobby, entitled "Politics: A Profession Not Without Honor", to help political people remember that high-minded values are accessible in the political sphere, and that politicians don't have to be scoundrels. True, the profession does encourage people who can lie. And this makes the people who can bear the ugliness and yet keep pointed towards the Good all the more essential. Because politics is important as a way to have very serious arguments about life and death issues like who will get health care and who will go bankrupt and have their lives ruined.

There are many kinds of lives that a young person could aspire to in this world. Teddy is a good role model of a life well spent, somebody who lived to be an old man, working for good causes for decades and decades, siding with the Good and relentlessly wading into the struggles of our times.

The harps and Angels are certainly welcoming in this ally of the Good even now, this hard-working warrior of the public sphere, who spent so much of his life advocating 'for the least of these' among us. Onward and upward, brother...

Recommendations for That Big Trip to Mother India

2009-06-29T08:54:00.000-07:00

Trips to India are awesome. Anyone with the slightest inclination should go. Last winter I had another great great trip their, deeply spiritual, and I really encourage anyone with spiritual leanings to do it. This winter I'm going back because this winter is the Kumba Mela, the closest one to 2012! So maybe I'll see you in the rainbow camp in Hardiwar in March!

Here's something I wrote up on the details of going to India.

India is magic and wise. India is difficult and monstrous. India is the delta of history and the holder of humanity’s highest wisdom. Everyone should visit. Yoga and meditation students will totally benefit from the perspective gained by visiting where these practices originate from.

Here’s some tips for the trip.

It’s great, have fun, walkabout, it’s relatively safe and inexpensive.

Don’t get sick. It’s harder to have spiritual thoughts when one is crabby and ill in the hotel room. An aggressive, pro-active approach towards health is recommended. Eating right, get good sleep, do the yoga.
A healthy body is more resistant.
Don’t drink the water, unless it’s boiled and purified. Ask for no ice cubes, which are unpurified water. Suck it up and buy the bottled water. It took me three weeks to realize that was my blockage: I’d never bought plastic bottles of water and I had a thing against it.
I got some nasty skin-fungul infection about three weeks in. I bought medicine like a spendthrift hypocondriac. Eventually the disease went away (after I took a friend's advice and lathered myself head to toe with Prell Anti-lice shampoo and let it dry on me like a mudman!) I think it was my body getting inoculated to India’s compost pile. Then I was pretty healthy for two months. Then, just as I was approaching the ETD, I got a nasty food poisoning case, from a food stall at festival, that drove me onto the plane. India is a hard place to be sick. I have so much compassion for all the people living there without health care. Auroville had a dank health clinic offered free to local villagers.
During the trip, I took droppers of “colloidal silver”, basically super small pieces of silver, almost just the vibration and frequency of silver, which apparently has a purifying quality. Hence, silver was used for spoons. Hard to find, perhaps, but available at Auroville.
I traveled with food, vitamins and medicine. I ate a garlic clove or two a day to boost the immune system with garlic’s antiviral antibacterial properties.

Bring your favorite health care products. The organic movement hasn’t hit India.

I didn’t get the shots, because apparently all the diseases have resistent strains anyway, and I worry about the mercury-based thimeresol used in vaccines. That said, I had alot of those shots in my 20s.

India has an unbelievably excellent train system. One can get anywhere on these trains. I recommend getting the 2nd class AC births, a bit more pricey, but totally worth it. The steerage class is like the tightpack method on the slave ships: all night, no seat, people talking about you in Hindi. Very difficult, but also very human. AC2 gets you sheets, privacy, class insulation, no beggars. India is easy enough once you are settled in someplace, but can be pretty challenging on the move.

I quizzed several American yogi travelers deeply before I went.
The best peace of advice I got was this: Don’t get all worked up if the taxi guy is trying to get an extra ten cents out of you. Don’t let it ruin your day. You can bargain till your stress level is shot up and your adrenals are maxed out, and you’ll have saved 50 cents. Keep it in perspective. They may be overcharging you, but it’s still cheap. Due to the rigged economic system’s exchange rates, our 1 dollar is worth about $5 dollars. A great meal will be $2. So it’s cheap. The taxi driver will spend an hour of his life and you’ll give him $2.
With that said, traveling on a budget does require some skillful bargaining. Generally, try and knock off 1/3 of the proposition price.
Appear willing to walk away without the sale. Remember Indians would probably pay 1/4 what you pay. If you know a few words in the local language, the price drops, such as “too much” in Tamil.
Decide how much you’d be willing to pay. Go to the next guy in line.
Fix a price before you consume the service, or they ask their price.( ie whadda-I-owe-ya to the taxi driver at the destination)

If somebody is walking beside you trying to sell you something, I found that changing direction was a good way to shake them loose. I’d walk 10 steps in the wrong direction, and they’d get the hint.

India is a great place to practice being assertive. “No, we definitely said 60 rupees for the cab ride” and
”no, I definitely don’t want your peacock feather fan, however beautiful it is, because I don’t want to support the cruelty to those animals.” There are varying degrees of “no.” “No” with tone, urgency, anger, firmness. Part of the trick is deciding clearly in your own mind. If you may want the offered thing, the sellers can sense that. Saying the word “Jao!” with varying degrees of firmness is helpful. Jao means, I think “go you fool!” or “Beat it!” The combo of the native language and tone is pretty effective.

And sometimes the answer is Yes. “Why yes, Mr. Pushy cab driver, Thank you for your gumption to walk down to the railway station platform and for leading me to the awaiting chariot.”
The cabbies are so dishonest. I got lied to a thousand times. I was lied to more in India than I’ve ever been lied to. It seems like it’s just part of it. Like in Vindivan, buying a lifetimes supply of Nag Champa incense, $40 worth, the incense shop owner said the price he was offering me was the wholesale price, that he was only making a penny or two on each box. I thought, “Hhhmmmnnn, no wonder India is so poor, because they have such a poor understanding of capitalism, that stores are supposed to sell items for more-than-it-cost-them, or as we say, profit.”
The dishonesty is tiring, and it takes some skill to recognize it. Once in Delhi, this taxi driver son of a bitch took me to a travel agent across the street from the Delhi train station. There, I was told that no tickets were for sale today across the street, and I could only get rail tickets from them, at, surprise surprise, a very very “low.” Good scam, almost got $20US out of me, but I politely said, “well, I’ll just walk over an see, and then I’ll come back.” Shysters!
But once again, don’t let it ruin your day. They are real poor, an extra dollar makes they’re day a huge success, and they are happy, so why not be generous when one can.

The second great piece of advice my friend gave me was “It’s OK to spend a little extra and get a nice hotel room when you need it. Don’t feel you have to camp out with the hippies all the time.” For an extra two dollars a day you can often step it up significantly. Safer, cleaner, less riffraff. Insulation.
In Delhi, they ask for American style prices, $60 a night. That’s unusually high. Usually, a good hotel is 200-500 rupees, or 4 to 10$.
I recommend learning exchange rate functionally pretty early. Learn get a rough estimate, or travel with a little hand held calculator. 1=42. or easier 1=40. 100R equals 2.50$
The most I spent was 65$ a night at the super swank hotel at Osho’s Club Meditation in Poona. That place was a nice respite, interlude, intermission during my trip, a submersion in a clean uplifted world.
In summary, a nice hotel room is totally worth it.

In summary, have a great spiritual time. Live healthy and try not to get sick. Don’t sweat the 20 cent scam.

As far as places to visit, I really loved meeting the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Aquarian experiment happening at Auroville, near Pondicherry. So beautiful. His teachings were the most profound spiritual thing I learned in India.
Second, Bodhgaya, where Buddha got Enlightened, is extremely sacred, and the Buddhafields of saint energy vibrates super super high there.
Third, Rishikesh is a sweet, spiritual yoga town, way up in the hills, where the Beatles hung with the Maharishi.
Fourth, Osho’s Club Meditation, in Poona, is expensive and decadent, but spiritual and a nice break from the poverty. Probably not really necessary or wholesome, but interesting. Everynight they have ‘white robe”, where 1000 people dress in white in a giant pyramid temple and dance wildy to rock and roll, do some meditations, and listen to a recorded Osho talk. It’s like being in California-style cult for a little while.
Delhi had a few nice museums, and the Gandhi Samatri, his final footsteps museum ahd a cool gandhi museum.

I had difficulties with money a few times. The ATM card isn’t as helpful as one would like. In Thailand, an ATM machine stole my card on the first day! One wrong pin attempt and gone! Trying to get somebody to speak English over the phone. I had fifty bucks, and I was jetlagged on Casong road. Luckily a CD street vendor was cranking Jack Johnson’s Brushfire Fairytales and i sat down and meditated in front of a 7/11 and made it all better.
In short, I used Western Union. A little expensive, 50-80 dollars, but the money shows up right away, but then you’ve got to carry lots of loot on you, which is stressful. Maybe travellers checks would be good next time. I may try that next time.

I noticed a funny phenomenon. If I didn’t see the beggars, they didn’t see me. If I kept my focus tight, my eye gaze close, I was much less hassled while walking through crowds. Rupert Sheldrake has a book out explaining the phenomenon of the sense of being stared at. Anyway, it works partially as a cloak of invisibility.
Also, a total blank, non-engagement allows one to float past situations. If one start talking or looking or even saying no, one has upped the ante of the interaction.

At these ancient and wise spiritual sites, pray like you mean it, crank open to the spirit, and you’ll find well worn pathways. India is a spiritually advanced nation.

For cheap tickets, I got a great cheap tickets following my friends advice to fly to Thailand first and get an India ticket there.
I got a one-way to Bangcock for $620. From there I hopped a regional airways, maybe Air India, for $280. Flying back from Dehli to NYC was about $700. By contrast, one way NYC to Dehli was $1400. Thailand was pretty sweet too, and a good ‘get-yer-feet-wet’ before India.

Good luck and safe travels, soul brethren

Living Within a Living System

2009-05-25T18:21:00.000-07:00

We live within a living system. Our Earth is alive. We are inside a Life-process that's bigger than us.

Direct perception of nature through our senses, through our bodies working the land, through our food creates a deep, strange flow of information and knowledge directly from Earth. When we press against the glass through gardening, we peer into a world that surrounds us, but that we don't see. They say fish don't see the the water they're in. Humans don't see the living system we live within. But we are in something! We are part of, immeshed in, inside the terrarium of life on Earth.

Paul Hawkin gave a beautiful commencement address to the University of Portland that was on Commondreams.org.

He said 'All the living systems of the planet are in decline and the rate of decline is increasing. and there is no peer-reviewed article in 30 years that would contradict this fact.' i have been chewing this over, this bitter truth, this reality that's perhaps to grim and big to stuff into the soundbite consensus reality.

All the living systems are declining.

Why is there so little discussion of the actual state of the Earth? The house is on fire and we seem hypnotized in our beds, in the 'cultural trance' that the Pachamama Alliance talked about.

Humanity must drop the adolescent renter mentality to the delicate bio-fabric of Creation that birthed our species. Corporate chemists dump pollution into the bio-soup of LIfe. Next thing, our elders have Alzehimer's and Parkinson's because the delicate chemistry of the brain gets all screwy. Opps. Probably shouldn't have operated an entire civilization using a harsh slash-and-burn chemistry. Instead, we want a green chemistry.

Recently I read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. It was so good and useful. The main point is that industrial chemicals don't stop at the borders between things. Pesticides to leaf to seed to babyfood to baby brain to Alzehimers. Our society has yet to act upon Carson's insight. I recommend "A Sense of Wonder", the play about Rachel Carson's life, and the interview with Bill Moyers by the actress Kaulani Lee. Rachel Carson was a great American heroine and her message is essential if humanity is to make into the livable, fun, non-sucko future.

The science of the heart and Sri Ramana Maharshi

2009-03-28T00:24:00.000-07:00

The modern science about the heart and the teachings of Indian sage Sri Ramana Maharshi have much in common. The similarity suggests Ramana experienced truths that science has caught up with 50 years later. Ramana used personal experience and the yogic sciences to map these inner realities. Modern scientific methods maps the heart’s biological and neurological structures. And surprise surprise, they are talking about the same things.

For years I’ve been studying science about the heart via the Heartmath Institute. Recently I discovered Sri Ramana’s teachings and saw how they directly align to the current heart science. This overlap is what I will attempt to bring forward here.

I’ve been traveling in south India, where I’m staying at the foot of the sacred mountain of Arunachala. This mountain is home of Sri Ramana Maharishi’s Ashram, in town of Tiruvannamalai (a.k.a. “Tiru”). Ramana lived here for over 50 years. He loved the mountain and considered it to be his teacher. Arunachala is said to be Shiva himself. The mountain is many caves where saints have meditated down through the ages.

Ramana was part of the Hindu yoga tradition. The yogic sciences map the human physiology thoroughly within a worldview that includes the Divine. The search for truth in pre-modern times was often done by scientists who wore monks robes instead of lab coats.

The Heartmath Institute has been at the front of an emerging field called ‘neurocardiology’, or how the brain wires to the heart. They say the heart functions as an organ of perception, picking up and processing the vibrations of the world and sending intuitively felt synopsis to the brain that we register as feelings.

The universe is electromagnetic and everything gives of waves of energy. The heart sends off waves of energy into the world around that can be measured by a ‘magnetometer.’ These waves carry information as a holonomic imprint of the content of a person’s consciousness.

Our experiences that somebody has a ‘good vibe’ or ‘bad vibe’ are literally, scientifically verifiably true. The Heartmath Institute has used a ‘magnetometer’ to measure the subtle electrical impulses that come off people. The heart is the most powerful electrical generator in the human body, creating 5000 times more charge than our brain. The squeezing and pumping the four quadrants of the heart creates a spiraling, vortex effect.

People with good vibes give off coherent waves, repeating waves with the same steady peaks and valleys of energy. People can get into synch, or biological entrainment, with others who are giving off this coherent pattern. Feeling love or gratitude gets our heart to start emanating coherent waves. People feeling anger give off incoherent and disordered waves.

If we start to listen to our hearts, or tune into the intuitive impressions, we can start to process actual information that our bodies are receiving. We do it all the time, anyway, but this process can be made conscious.

This information is spelled out further in the books The Heartmath Solution by Doc Childers, and The Biology of Transcendence, by Joe Pearce. There are web resources at www.heartmath.com. If you have a heart, or knows someone who does, this info will helpful.

In the ashram bookstore, I got a little book called Spiritual Heart by A.R. Natarajan, that gathers Ramana’s thoughts about the heart. The following quotes come from this book.

Ramana identified a spiritual heart located on the right side of our chests, two fingers pointed upward to the right of the mid-line. Ramana says “This heart is different from the physical heart; beating is the function of the latter. The former is the seat of spiritual experience.”

“Heart is usually understood to be the muscular organ lying on the left of the chest. The Bible says that a fool’s heart is on the left and a wise man’s on the right. Yoga Vasishta says that there are two hearts; one is the samvit; the other the blood vessel.

Disciple: “What is Heart?”
Master: “It is the center of the Self. The Self is the center of centers. The Heart represents the psychic center and not the physical center.”

Ramana says that “The yogi is engaged in cleansing the nadis. Then Kundalini, the primal power is awakened which is said to rise up from the coccyx to the head. The yogi is later advised to come down to the Heart as a final step.”

“The yogic chakras counting form the bottom to the top are various centers in the nervous system. They represent various steps manifesting different kinds of power of knowledge leading to the Sahasrara, the thousand petaled lotus, where is seated the supreme Shakti. But the Self that supports the whole movement of Shakti is not placed there, but supports it from the Heart center.”

“The Heart in the Upanishads is construed as “Hridayam” meaning: this is the center. That is, it is where the mind rises and subsides. That is the seat of Realisation.”

This is important to know that the Heart is the proper seat of our consciousness and after Kundalini rises, it should settle back downward into the Hridyam. Ramana says “By yogic practice one goes down, then rises up, wanders all through until the goal is reached; by jnana abhyas (cultivation of spiritual wisdom) one settles down directly in the center.” And also “(Some) yogis say that the current rising up the sahasrara ends there. That experience is not complete. For jnana, (knowledge of the Absolute), they must come to the Heart. Hridaya (heart) is the alpha and the omega.

It is important to note that Ramana’s ‘hridyam’ heart center isn’t the same as the anahata heart chakra. Ramana says
“Anahata is the chakra lying behind the heart. It is not samvit (the full energy of knowledge).”

Disciple: “What is the difference between the bound man and the one liberated?”
Maharshi: “Self-aware is one who lives in the Heart. When he moves about and deals with men and things, he knows that what he sees is not separate from the one Supreme Reality, the Brahman, which he realized in the Heart as his own Self, the Real.”

Ramana introduces us to a useful word in “sphurana” to describe the rustling, vibratory pleasure that comes when the heart center ‘scintillates with consciousness.” The following exchange talks of sphurana and a central Ramana technique for finding the self, repeatedly asking yourself “who am I?”

Disciple: “Does the inquiry ‘who am I?” lead to any spot on the body?”
Maharshi: Evidently, self-consciousness is in relation to the individual himself and therefore has to be experienced in his being, with a center in the body as the center of the experience. It resembles the dynamo of a machine, which gives rise to all sorts of electrical works. Not only does it maintain the life of the body and the activities of all it’s parts and organs, conscious and unconscious, but also the relation between the physical and the subtler planes on which the individual functions. Also, like the dynamo, it vibrates and can be felt by the calm mind that pays attention to it. It is known to the yogis and sadhakas by the name ‘sphurana’ which in ‘samadhi’ scintillates with consciousness.

Disciple: How to reach that Center, where what you call the Ultimate Consciousness- the I-I- arises? It it simply by thinking “Who am I?”
Maharshi: Yes, it will take you there. You must do it with a calm mind- mental calmness is essential.

Disciple: How does that consciousness manifest itself when the center- the Heart- is reached? Will I recognize it?
Maharshi: Certainly, as pure consciousness, free from all thought. It is pure, unbroken awareness of your Self, rather of Being- there is no mistaking it when it’s pure.

Disciple: Is the vibratory movement of the Center felt simultaneously with the experience of Pure Consciousness or before, ore after it?
M: The are both one and the same. But sphurana can be felt in a subtle way even when meditation has sufficiently stabilized and deepened, and the Ultimate Consciousness is very near, or during a great fright or shock, where the mind comes to a standstill. It draws attention to itself, so that the meditator’s mind, rendered sensitive by calmness, may become aware of it, gravitate towards it, and finally plunge into it, the Self.”

“This self is the eternal, immutable Self that ever throbs as ‘I’, ‘I’. It is not touched by birth and death; it is eternal. It is not confined to the physical body in which it stations itself; it is universal in its spread” writes MK Pandit, scholar sage of the highest order, in the book "Mighty Impersonality."
“Where is this Self to be found, is the next natural question. In the heart, is the answer. But it is made unambiguously clear that it is not the physiological heart on the left side of the body that is meant. The Heart that Maharshi speaks of is not the usual heart muscle. It is the spiritual heart which is two digits to the right of the center of the chest. it is not physical. It is in the subtle body and lends itself to be felt and experienced to the earnest inquirer in the course of his quest.

Is it the anahata of the science of the Tantra? No, says Bhagavan. The anahata center is not this spiritual heart. Is this spiritual heart a special concept of Maharshi or is there any scriptural support or evidence for it? Yes, there is, says the Mararshi. It is mentioned as the ojasthana in an old Ayurvedic text “Ashtanga Hridayam.” It is also referred to as ullam (meaning Lord, the same as Heart) in one of the verses of Saint Appar’s Thevaram.

In Sri Aurobindo’s Purna Yoga, for instance, the anahata is described as the emotional center; behind it, behind the cardiac center, there is the psychic center, the seat of the antaratman. It is the locus of the divine entity in man.”

Sri Ramana talked a lot about residing in the Self, the great being, the divine consciousness, God, the larger I. He called this the Heart. And now we find that the physical heart in the body is related to a uniting point in the body where different realms of consciousness come together in a holonomic intersection.

The highest Vedantic vision of the Divine is a ‘field’. Krishna says in the Gita “I am the field and the knower of the field.” Quantum physics says that beneath matter is a sub-manifest realm where the information and energy and and consciousness and potential exists in a unified field. This appears to be where Ramana spent a lot of his time, fully plugged into the Unified Field that he called the Heart, the Self, God. Deepak Chopra spoke eloquently on this subject at 2005 conference of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. That talk called “Deepak Chopra on Action for the Future” is on-line from IONS “Shift-in-Action” program.

This vision of a unified field of consciousness as Self perfectly lines up to the best models physics can come up with. So Ramana got that to. So we might want to just look at his vision, his other ideas and say, since he got the heart right, what else was he saying?

Ramana’s life also demonstrated the positive effects of being heart centered. He was nice to everybody: the monkeys, the dogs, the poor people who came to see him. He went out of his way to be compassionate and kind to everybody. He had an open door policy, and people came to see him at all hours for decades. There are lovely stories about his relationship with animals. He mediated disputes between warring tribes of monkeys. He bandaged up a young monkey who was getting harassed by the other monkeys, and conceived the other monkeys to play nice. Clearly, Ramana’s heart worked in a big way.

May our hearts be as big as Ramana so that we’re strong enough to heal our planet.

With “no condoms” stance, Pope molests Africa

2009-03-24T08:15:00.001-07:00

The Catholic Church should just stop offering sex tips or edicts for a century or two. Really, all credibility on sexual issues is gone, and their reactionary ignorant public policy endangers humanity’s long-term survival.

On a recent tour in Africa, Pope Benedict says that condoms were not the answer to Africa’s AIDS problem, and could make the problem worse. This is a sinful lie that will cause death to poor people.

Every time there is a big international conference on world population, the Catholic Church has been there and blocked birth control. If the Earth ends up an overpopulated hell, the Infallible Popes will be partially to blame.

An Inuit village in Alaska recently sued the church for sending a known pedophile priest to “serve” their community.

See, it’s a theme. The Catholic Church is unhealthy about sexual issues and needs to stop screwing up public policy.

The Church should either shut up, or get help and become healthy. The Catholic Church could hire a consulting team of modern experts in healthy sexual human behavoir and just adopt their recommendations. Seriously. We’ll forgive you. Just apologize and rebrand and join the 21st century. And pay the pedophile lawsuits by selling some of that land and billion dollars worth of silverware.

The Catholic Church has been unhealthy about sexual issues since they demanded priests couldn’t marry so that the church would inherit the property of the aristocratic brethren. This gambit worked, and the church is the world’s largest landowner. But it’s left an organization befouled by scandal.

As arcane as this history sounds, it affect real people’s lives. Just a few weeks ago, a friend went looking for condoms in Calcutta and couldn’t find them! She was trying to help a young India woman acquire them to protect her and her lover. She had to search high and low. They were very, very difficult to find and the pharmacist was reluctant to sell them to her because she was a woman. This is madness. Calcutta needs free condoms to be as common as cows in the street. All our environmental problems are made much more difficult by the surging growing of world population.

Calcutta is where Mother Teresa did such saintly work all the while supporting the Church’s sexual rules. Mother Teresa did great work helping the poor after they were already born and poor, but didn’t act to turn off the flood at the spigot. And that was immoral of Mother Teresa. It is immoral to force the world’s poor people to have babies they can’t support properly.
But hey, thanks for helping with the problem that you helped create.

The Pope insists on prudish lectures to the world about the ins and outs of doing it. As a monastic Catholic, the Pope probably gave up having sex with women many years ago, and so probably doesn’t have much experience with condoms. That’s OK. But don’t teach about what you don’t know. I wouldn’t never lecture people on the proper way to fix a car’s engine.

The Christian community has long been plagued by a false morality on sexual issues. By taking easy, high-horse stances on difficult issues, Christians side with the past, society and the powerful. But complex moral issues have two sides, and sometimes we need to pick the lesser of two evils. Premarital sex with condoms is better than unplanned pregnancy any day.

It is a false morality that stops contraception. It claims the moral high ground, but hurts the poor. The “stop condoms” approach seeks to prevent sex, but mostly harms the vulnerable. Stopping abortion may protect a living fetus, but robs women of reproductive rights that give them self-determination. Forcing young women to bear babies they don’t want is more immoral than abortion. In all these issues, the minor moral benefit of the prudish approach is outweighed by the harm caused to the innocent.

And when did ignorance of the human reproductive pipes become a sacred value? An unscientific willful ignorance is the enemy of a sustainable world civilization. We have fifty odd years of scientific research into sexuality to help us with these murky topics. No need to listen to the Pope on this issue.

Fundamentalists Christians have long postured as protectors of a prudish heterosexual hegemony. Jesus said “Don’t worry about the speck of sawdust in your neighbors eye when you have a log in your own eye.” We’ve got bigger fish to fry than people making love before marriage: planetary survival, global warming, overpopulation, AIDS, endless wars, outdated authoritarian secret societies.

I always marvel that Christians dig in on sexual issues as the outrages that they’ll get worked up about. Really, sex you don’t approve of. Not Guantanamo, or modern-day slavery, or famine caused by export crops, or the broken sky. Really, that’s the issue. I think they choose sex issues to jump on because it seems an easy to explain cultural issue and it doesn’t rock the pro-corporate boat.

Dear Catholic friends, I apologize for mocking things you hold sacred. I do it because you need it and we need you to regain your moral clarity for the healing of the world.

Planetary survival depends on family planning. That makes it moral. It is immoral for Catholic Church to kill the planet from overpopulation because of failure to adopt modern approaches to family planning. Maybe Catholic ‘family non-planning methods’ worked to refill the pews, but today, those methods are a danger to everyone.

Condoms should be a sacrament, as they honor life, health, responsibility, intelligence and care for the poor.

Maybe in a few years the Pope will be blessing cargo planes of condoms heading for Africa.

Eco-lessons from “The City that the Earth Needs

2009-03-15T08:55:00.000-07:00

Two million trees planted to transform a desert. Gift economy restaurants serving lunch. A method for sun-baked bricks that’s rebuilding Afghanistan. These are just some of the amazing things achieved by Auroville.

Auroville is an experimental city in south India that just had its 41st birthday on February 28th. Auroville is a living role model for planetary sustainability. Aurovilians seem reluctant to testify of their accomplishments, lest they draw even more lookie-loo tourists. However, I feel that the world need to be inspired by Auroville’s example of vision and design, and so I intend to spill the beans about this truly amazing, real life ecological city.

Auroville has the benefit that it already exists. As the eco-proverb says “it’s not impossible if it already exists.” Auroville role models a good example and a scout forward into the New World that we should seek to build.

Auroville began with the vision and will power of a French spiritual teacher called the Mother. She was the head of spiritual community centered around the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, in south India, in the former French colony of Pondicherry. The Mother was Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual collaborator and successor after he left his body in 1950. The long story of these great teachers can be started at Wikipedia and deepened with the book Beyond Man, (or Beyond The Human Species, in gender-neutral American editions) by Georges Van Vrekhem, an Aurovilian resident.

The Mother envisioned creating “the city that the Earth needs” to model human unity and right relationship to the Divine Consciousness. To live as an Aurovilian, no special religion or creed is required, only that people agree to be “Willing Servitors of the Divine Consciousness” as they perceive it. “It’s important to be ‘willing’. We are all servitors whether we know it or not, but getting to understand that and then surrender to It, and being willing to align to It, that is what is required for the New World” comments Bhavana Dee, an American who came to Auroville in 1973, one of Auroville’s 2000 full-fledged community members.

Perhaps Auroville’s most useful lesson is in the power of a vision to manifest. Auroville probably seemed unlikely to succeed at the beginning. Yet, 41 years later, here it is. So I offer the Auroville Equation for success of a vision: Strong vision, plus time, plus dedicated workers, plus Divine Support, equals fulfillment.

Auroville’s clearest victory has been the marvelous job at reforestation. Two million trees have been planted, restoring the forests clear cut by the British and French Imperialists. When Auroville began, the landscape was a desert. Erosion caused huge gullies. Auroville sits on a plateau that tilts slightly towards nearby sea, and all the topsoil had long ago washed into the Bay of Bengal. Today Auroville is a green oasis in the India subcontinent still plagued by desertification. The trees keep Auroville a little cooler than neighboring areas, though it still tropically hot most of the year.

During my first trip to India, I stayed in Auroville for a month. I assumed that all India was blessed with trees and Nature. Later, traveling throughout India, I was repeatedly shocked by denuded landscapes, dusty and rocky ground, the trees gone, the landscapes picked clean by goat herds and impoverished humans. Goats nibble down to the root, killing off the plants with an toxin in their saliva. Only pricker bushes make it, creating a dry, un-diverse, thorny ecosystem.

Aurovilians planted many trees and gardens in the beginning only to see the goats pass through and chew up two months work. So they developed methods for dealing with this problem, such as capturing a goat and charging a fee to release it to the owner, hiring local people as watchmen and fencing properties with thorny bushes. They even tried weaving baskets around each baby tree! Auroville’s successful reforestation and ecological restoration offers a role model to the world, showing that humanity can stop and reverse the planetary trend to desertification.

Aurovilians invented a new kind of brick that doesn’t need firing to harden. Instead, to the mud 5% cement is added and then the bricks are compressed at high pressure and then left to sun-bake until rock hard. This low-carbon technology has been exported widely, particularly into Afghanistan.

Auroville is experimenting with different economic models like gift economies and collectivism. The Mother said that Auroville should have no money. Aurovillians have struggled to embody this vision, and have obeyed the spirit of the law, though perhaps not yet the letter. To run a complex economy, to allow outsiders to visit, money is needed. There is an Auroville account system which acts as a debit card. For example, I paid in $80 dollars, got an account number and a card, and then was able to pay for events, guest house bills, yoga classes, and espresso at Solar Kitchen’s cafe from that account.

A gift economy is a really delightful idea whose time has come. Here’s an concrete example of a gift economy. I ate lunch at the Indus Valley Restaurant. There was a donation box and people gave what they could or felt was the right amount. There was no waitstaff or menus or checks. Workers put the food was put out buffet style, and I served myself a delicious meal of spicy Gujerati Indian vegetarian food. I gave a 100 rupee note, about 2$. A similar meal cost me 30 rupees days earlier at another restaurant. This made me a profitable guest. Leaving I saw a hungry looking Indian young man eating who I imagine gave much less. But we balanced out, and the restaurant has been running successfully for four years.

Another example of the gift economy is the Tsunamika project. After the 2004 tsunami, an Aurovilian design unit created an economic project to help traumatized women from the local villages. They trained the women to make little dolls call Tsunamika, which they gave away, gift economy style. They’ve made over 2 million dolls and given these women financial stability and purpose in their lives. Tsunamika founder tells of a Paris fashion company who wanted a large quantity to put one Tsunamika with every garment they sold that year. In aggressive emails, he wrote trying to barter for a good price. She responded, you don’t understand, you can have as many as you want, for whatever you want to pay. Eventually, the fashionista got clear on the concept, they agreed he would pay for shipping, and he got thousands of dolls. Months later he showed up, with awe, a changed heart and a big check in his hand and said to the founder “I’ve negotiated all my life, but you really took the rug out from under me.”

Auroville also offers a solution to the eco-problem of energy inefficient McMansions. Here the houses are modest, yet beautiful. Yet people have a vibrant community life, and so can live well outside their private home. The private house doesn’t need to be as big if the public space is inviting.

Some of Auroville’s innovations are less material though no less useful. Auroville was created with the idea of actualizing Human Unity. Today Auroville is populated by people from around the world. There are hundreds of Europeans and Americans. There are lots of Koreans both living here and coming as guests. 45 nationalities are represented. Founded at the height of the Cold War, Auroville forged a brave path outside the divisive framework of nationalism and geopolitics. Today, progress toward world unity has been made because of the Internet and global trade and issues of planetary survival. But long before the Internet, Auroville was saying “We are One Big Human Family.”

Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual ideas were Earth-positive. Many religions view the Earth as a second rate stopover on the way to the big Pie-in-the-Sky. Some Hindu philosophy says all this Earth is illusion, only Brahman is real. Sri Aurobindo said that the Earth is Brahman too, that Matter is also part of the Oneness. There is no running away. The job of humanity was to make the Earth and ourselves reflect and become the Divine. We are to bring Heaven onto Earth. This philosophy empowered hundreds of industrious spiritual people to work for 40 years in south India to create heavenly Auroville.

To look at the pictures of the early days, one gets a sense of dedicated spiritual hippies beautifully in-shape from working hard in the sun. Handsome bearded men construct palm-roofed buildings and women carry babies in slings. An Aurovilian challenges my use of the word hippie, saying “Not everyone was a hippie by any means. The Indian devotees and businessmen, the engineers and architects. Many were ‘straight’ and the hippies became straight quickly as they worked to settle the land.” Still, there is an Aquarian vibe that’s part of Auroville’s DNA. Auroville is on a visionary adventure to build a New World based on Love, Consciousness and World Unity. Sounds good, I say! Bring it on!

So if you want to join the Auroville community and be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness, you can. Check out Auroville.org. Or visit as a guest in the Dec-Feb when the weather is best, though also busy, so book reservations. Or visit in Sept-Dec, when it’s quite wet with monsoon rains, but still interesting. Or visit in July-Sept when it’s hot and humid, but there is a distinct sense of actual community. One can participate in the ecological restoration by volunteering to plant trees at Sadhana Forest. College students can visit and earn credit with the Living Routes program. Auroville does have a problem of Indian tour buses unloading on weekends swarming the Visitors Center. So while guests are welcome as an integral part of the Aurovilian economy, there is ambivalence to living in a fishbowl. Hence Aurovilian’s desire to “lay-low” and not testify to the planet of their achievements. I encourage guests to come if they can promise to be polite to the locals and be receptive to their higher spiritual selves

Perhaps Auroville’s greatest attribute is an activist willingness to step boldly forward into the task of creating a New World. We need this spirit of creative innovation of design and intention. Auroville is an living example of the ‘bright green environmentalism, advocated for by Worldchanging.com and described in the following article from What Is Enlightenment magazine.

“Bright green environmentalism is less about the problems and limitations we need to overcome than “the tools, models and ideas” that already exist for overcoming them. It forgoes the bleakness of protest and dissent for the energizing confidence of constructive solutions. As Bruce Sterling said in his first Viridian design speech, “The future is already here, it’s just not well distributed yet.”

Indeed, the future is already partially built in Auroville.

I will close with an Auroville-style prayer. May Auroville’s good example inspire planetary transformation. May the Divine Consciousness swiftly and easily manifest a New Age of sustainability, truth and beauty.

Photos from Auroville and Pondcherry

2009-03-09T23:34:00.000-07:00

Auroville's Birthday is February 28th, and that morning they had a meditation in the amphitheater near the Matramandir temple. Dawn came up blue and quiet as a several hundred people meditated. For a few minutes they played a recording of the Mother reading the Auroville Charter in many languages. Auroville is to have no dogmas, but to be an Aurovillian one must be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.

This is the roof of my guesthouse Verite. Here you see the solar panels, and the roof of Verite's main hall, site of events and mystical kirtan and so forth.

This is Verite's windmill. The rudder of the windmill is decorated with Sri Aurobindo's symbol, which like the Star of David, united triangles, only here it's elongated in the middle into a square, with a lotus to symbolize the enlightened consciousness that arises out of the muddy pond of Creation.

This is a schoolyard garden at the New Creation School. Bamboo has been well-employed as the sides.

In Pondicherry, fishermen head out before dawn, to take advantage of the hours before the sun blares upon the skin like a toaster oven. Their boats are sometimes very primitive, curved logs tied together into canoes, paddled out.

a poem of Sri Aurobindo about "Goethe"

2009-03-01T23:36:00.000-08:00

I found this poem of Sri Aurobindo in his book "Colllected Poems" about the amazing philosopher and naturalist Goethe, who I learned to love through the book by Stephen Buhner called "The Secret Teaching of Plants."

Goethe

A perfect face amid barbarian faces,

A perfect voice of sweet and serious rhyme,

Traveller with calm, inimitable paces,

Critic with judgement absolute to all time,

A complete strength when men were maimed and weak,

German obscured the spirit of a Greek.

GOP Congresss co-conspires with GOP arsonists

2009-01-30T10:37:00.000-08:00

Bush set fire to the country and now the GOP members of Congress seem to let that sucker burn.

All 178 Republican members of Congress voted against the stimulus bill of Obama.

The GOP is trying to repeat the play on Clinton in ‘92, where they cockblocked him on everything, then blamed him for the failure of the health care bill, and were rewarded with retaking control of Congress. This is just how these guys think. As in “Just ignore that our president started two wars and torched the economy. Don’t put those fires! In two years, we can blame Obama from amidst the rubble and smoke damage. Then we’ll gain a few seats in this arcane electoral body.”

Republicans are behaving as a ‘disloyal opposition.’ Wikipedia defines the root term this way: “Loyal opposition is the concept that one can be opposed to the actions of the government or ruling party without being opposed to the constitution of the political system.”

A loyal opposition is loyal to the country first, while still in opposition over ideological reasons. Country first, dogma second. A disloyal opposition seeks to undermine the ruling party with everything they’ve got, whether legal, illegal, moral or immoral.

Rush Limbaugh said he wants Obama to fail and the GOP is acting to make that so. The GOP so lacks vision that it takes marching orders from a cold-hearted sociopath turned mean and bitchy from ongoing opiate addiction. Someone with an opiate addiction once told me that a side-effect of the dope was a grumpy bitchiness snuck into his personality. I hear that bitchiness in Rush, and I wish his mean voice wasn’t polluting our national dialogue.

At the risk of aiding a disloyal opposition, the obvious direction for the redemption of the Republican Party is towards Ron Paul. Otherwise, the GOP will go the way of the Whigs. Which would be good for the planet and fun to watch.

But the stakes are high. The human species could wind up in Mad Max pretty quick here if we don’t play our cards right. Hopefully the GOP won’t burn us all out on the way down.

Letter to Obama on healing the planet and the economy

2009-01-27T13:21:00.000-08:00

Dear President Obama and allies,

I write to offer some ideas for solving the environmental crisis while encouraging economic growth.

Executive summary

1. Scale up existing solutions.
2. Catch up to European laws first.
3. Create a national composting and recycling system.
4. Parlay the whole foods movement into an economic engine.
5. Get pioneering green innovation brought into the mainstream.
6. Encourage eating less meat.
7. Create a long-term human survival plan to encourage economic development.

1. “Scale up” existing solutions.

Solutions already exist. Now we need a massive ‘scaling up’ of existing technologies and practices. Every roof should have a solar hot water system. Every city should have a “Complete Streets” with bike lanes. And so on. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but rather, we need to mass produce the wheel that’s already working fine in small numbers. “Scaling Up” deserves to be an organizing theme in coming years.

2. Catch up to Europe first.

The EU is ahead on environmental issues and the US should start by copying them to catch up. While corporate America stalled, Europe raced ahead.

The US should adopt EU standards on toxic substances in products. For example, European kids are safer than American kids because their laws prevent phthalates in toys. In the last five years, the EU economy has flourished while adopting this strong eco-regulatory framework, according to Mark Shapiro, author of Exposed. We can start by making American products comply with European law so we have access to those markets. Easier still, we can require products to be labeled if they’d be banned in Belgium, as a new California law requires.

The city of Hague in the Netherlands has the best public transport in the world: street-level trams link to subways and trains, plus a bike system of bike lanes and bike racks. On the tram, they have little TV screens that announce each stop! As the green proverb says, “It’s not impossible if it already exists!” Let’s make our cities rebuild and flourish around a 21st century post-car transportation system. We can start by having one aspiring city install and model the Hague’s system as an engine for urban renewal.

3. Let’s create thorough national composting, recycling and E-waste program.

Our responsibility to future generations is to leave a planet that’s not a toxic swamp. Let us become conscious of our society’s digestion processes of our waste. We need national programs to deal with e-waste, recycling and compost. These programs are win-win for creating jobs, educating the public, creating a durable society, forging new technologies, and encouraging good design by manufacturers.

Cities should have composting facilities and curbside pick-up. This would create some industrial jobs creating the compost turning equipment. Lawn waste makes up 1/3 of trash, and so just composting it saves vast dollars and gives us the compost to use. The city of LA has done great work in this area with the help of Andy Lipkis, founder of Tree People.

Most importantly, composting teaches people about the recycling process inherent in matter. From old lettuce to compost pile and then the garden and back to lettuce. People think they can throw things “away”, but there is no “away” in a closed system like the test-tube of the Earth.

E-waste is an opportunity for economic development. We can build electronics so that we can easily reclaim the valuable metals for re-use. Currently, our E-waste is going to China to the planet’s most toxic work sites. People burn bonfires to melt the plastic off the wires, sending plumes of smoke into the sky and pollution into the rivers. This system will cause birth defects for generations around the world. The book High Tech Trash documents this problem in spooky detail.

Green jobs and a green economy ultimately mean creating products and jobs in harmony with Earth’s biological life-support systems. We need clean production processes and safe disposal for a product’s afterlife. We must “make a way out of no way” and create new methods for responding to our criminally disorganized trash system.

Humanity has yet to redesign around Rachel Carson’s central truth that the borders between things are permeable, and toxins in the environment enter the flesh, bioaccumulate and cause disease. One in 150 kids is autistic from toxins disrupting the brain’s delicate biochemistry. In 20 years, that ratio might be 1 in 5. We need to end “laissez-faire” environmental regulation too.

Global pollution is on track to bioaccumulate into “Global Toxicity.” Future generations may all be born with birth defects due to inescapable environmental toxins. Already mother’s milk around the world contains DDT traces.

Therefore, Green Jobs initiatives should focus on areas of municipal recycling and bioremediation. Our universities should invest all out in Biomimicry, Biodegradable Design, and Green Chemistry.

I recommend Professor William McDonough to head the Dept. of Design.

4. Build on the healthy food movement to create an economic boom that also solves root causes of the health care crisis.

During the Bush Dark Ages, many Americans took refuge from politics by retreating to make change in the private sphere of health choices. Many started ‘voting with their dollar’ for earth-friendly products and food. One of America’s most vital social movements surrounds healthy food.

The Obama Administration should amplify and invest in this whole foods movement. A vital web of people are ready to serve as a platform for a great national endeavor of healing the food supply.

Many food advocates support planting a “Climate Crisis Victory Garden” for the White House. Starting that garden would encourage all the right people.

Furthermore, our schools can serve healthy food. We can build school yard gardens. We can create a national network of farmer’ markets. We can insure poor people have access to fresh, clean food. We can make sure our hospitals serve healthy food. We can heal our food supply and that will help solve the health care crisis from the front end.

Next, we can get America’s industrial agriculture system to convert to ecological methods by ‘scaling up’ the best practices coming out of the organic farming movement. The Department of Ag spends 2% on organic Ag and 98 % on chemical Ag. We should flip those numbers. The Dept of Ag should create an Advisory Council headed by Michael Pollan, Alice Waters and Francis Moore Lappe. These are the names that need to be involved in healing American agriculture. These people have been throwing down the truth for decades.

We should assist US farmers in transitioning to organic methods. We should have organic farming development zones to create hubs of new green agribusiness.

5. Encourage into the mainstream green innovations and ecological ideas that have developed at society’s periphery.

America has a strong environmental movement that hasn’t gotten enough government support or cooperation. This entire movement has grown and thrived at the margins. Let’s create an onramp for ideas from the alienated progressive environmental movement. For example, Elliot Colemen is famous among organic growers for pioneering production of salad greens in unheated green houses in New England. This carbon-neutral technology should be massively scaled up.

For decades, many good people have been working steadily on environmental solutions. Remember, hairy post-hippies pioneered the Internet in California. One of America’s great strengths is a counterculture that has been steadily moving in the right direction for decades. Co-housing, organic farming, alternative medicine, vegetarian diets and less-consumptive lifestyles are all innovations from the progressive edge that now need to be scaled up for the mainstream.

Unfortunately, this movement has been largely opposed, discouraged, un-funded, harassed by government during this long Ice Age of Reagan. The Right wing has made cultural war on all things “60’s” for 40 years through various forms of prohibition. I think some Republicans oppose windmills because they don’t want that ethical vegetarian family member to win that long-running cultural argument.

So how does an aspiring to-be-green America access and upload all this waiting wisdom?

I recommend starting with organizing an idea-sharing project with the network surrounding the Bioneers Conference. This conference has been a real hub of dedicated, well-intentioned ecological thinking.

The Post Office can issues stamps of Rachel Carson, Helen and Scott Nearing, and J.I. Rodale to honor American pioneers of a sane relationship to the Earth.

We can install waterless toilets at the rest area’s along the highway system. Vermont Law School has toilets that should be replicated far and wide, with long drops and fans pushing the air downward. Let’s mainstream this ready-to-go technology.

America's indigenous First Peoples have ecological wisdom to offer and would be healed and uplifted in the process of being asked to share.

Humanity faces the challenge to integrate an surging population into the fragile life web of the Biosphere. Luckily, people have been working on it for years. Now let’s get the government to support, fund, and replicate the efforts of America’s grassroots environmental movement.

6. Encourage the reduction of eating meat.

Dealing with the Climate Crisis will require getting people to eat less meat. The crunched Climate Crisis numbers show that meat is a prime villain. While the gov’t can’t dictate private dietary choices, it can stop funding “perverse incentives” that encourage meat consumption. The gov’t should end subsidies for meat production on federal land, cut meat budgets to schools and prisons, make meat priced at true cost, and enforce safety standards in the meat industry. This would help decrease meat consumption and thus promote health and cut carbon emissions.

Make the prisons largely vegetarian. Studies show that vegetarian diets reduce prison violence, and meat production creates a lot of carbon. The motto could be “Can’t do rice & beans all the time, don’t do the crime.” A program could teach people in prison how to grow food and how to prepare healthy food. The link between diet and behavior problems in young people is well established. If America starts eating well, many other problems dissipate.

Additionally, we should raise stiff taxes on antibiotic use in factory farms to discourage the overuse that’s causes antibiotic resistance. Future generations need antibiotics to work.

7. Create long-term strategic plan for survival of the planet. Make this “design assignment” the inspiration and container for economic development.

We need to plot a trajectory towards a healthy human future. In some ways, the Economic Crisis comes at a good time. Better the economy collapsing now than the Biosphere collapsing in a decade or two. We have a real opportunity to start moving towards a 21st century civilization that won’t just eat all the resources and go off the rails in 20 years.

We can create comprehensive strategy for long-term human survival. We can make economic and strategy decisions within the constraints of good Earth stewardship. Our design assignment is the creation of a sustainable world civilization.

This is a tall order. We are very far from it now. But if we put our best minds on it, if we unleash human potential on the truest of true goals, we can surely do this.

Furthermore, economies flourish on continuity and long-term investment. When we get the parameters set for the next 300 years of human civilization, people will know where to invest. We can create a global renaissance of business, innovation, cooperation and prosperity. When humanity understands the design assignment, we will know how and what to build. When companies know what the environmental laws will be in 20 years, they will know where to invest their efforts. When industry knows there are taxes for creating toxic waste, they’ll reengineer the manufacturing process towards ‘green chemistry.’ Government can provide the vision and direction and the carrot and the stick for the new society’s design parameters.

Now is the time to create a vision and plan for the long-term survival of human civilization.

May humanity get it together and live happily ever after.

Theo Talcott grows certified organic food professionally, writes on environmental issues and studies green issues at the Bioneers Conference. He blogs at thinkingaboutsurvival.blogspot.com

stop mailing dead people!

2009-01-27T11:36:00.000-08:00

Dear Corporate America,

please stop mailing dead people.

I just got a direct mail for my beloved grandmother, who dropped her body 5 years ago, for Gevalia Kaffe, some fancy coffee mailorder thing. I did the ethical thing: I got the no-postage-necessary envelope, and filled out a little note and I'm sending it back to them, saying please take us off your mailing lists.

Think about how many trees it takes to mail dead people.

direct mail has gotta' go.

yours in the trees,

Theo

The Zeitgeist of Obama

2009-01-20T11:28:00.000-08:00

"HAPPY OBAMA NEW YEAR!"

Try yelling that to friends and strangers, it feels good and true. We are transitioning to a new era. The Bush Dark Ages are over! Humanity pivots and races into the Obama Age of Light. Personally, I am gleeful and at regular intervals dancing around the room.

Zeitgeist is an useful German word that means roughly "the spirit of times" or "the taste and outlook characteristic of a period or generation." There is a lovely zeitgeist afoot right now. There is a national mood that's new. I've seen optimistic and idealistic pockets of Americans, but I've never seen gleeful, idealistic national unity as a pervasive pop phenomenon. In the collective emotional body of the nation, there is an exultation and healing and relief! There is a sweet joy and gratitude and hope. America is back, baby!

We are experiencing the literal spiritual Rebirth of America. Everything eternally good and true about America is being brought forward. America stands for some powerful ideas that humanity needs: national unity from ethnic and racial diversity, religious tolerance, progressive inclusion of all for equal rights, the Rule of Law, and a fair legal system to administer Justice. And when a person or country stands for Good ideas, we are aligned to that great moral force that guides the universe. And so America is being plugged into the Divine again.

Obama is also asking us to expand our sense of identity beyond our ego to a greater identity as Americans and as humanity. Transcending ego is essential mechanism of a mystical spiritual experience. That unidentified spirituality lurks beneath pundit commentary. I heard an CNN commentator striving to overcome embarrassment as she said the mood on the DC mall had a flavor of the 'Brotherhood of Man." Go with it, sister, because it's a relief to not have to live inside the tiny prison of the ego, and to be released from the narcissistic self-absorption of the ego. It is joyful to start caring about our larger identities, like the country and the planet and the Brotherhood of Man.

Something died in the America during the Bush years. I, like many, was embarrassed by America's Imperial wars. America was torturing and abandoning the Rule of Law. Democracy became Corprotocracy and Kleptocracy. America became aligned to historical forces that need to opposed. The Bush version of America is not an America I love, but that I loathe! I am against the America that sends a War-Machine to other countries to steal the oil that we shouldn't be burning anyway.

They say that "Patriotism is the last refuge for a scoundrel." The Bushites wrapped themselves in the flag and the name and the symbols of America, and then totally abandoned the deeper meaning and purpose of America. In doing so, they turned the American flag into a phony-baloney fascistic propaganda tool. America isn't great because we have a nice flag. It's great because Jefferson's Bill of Rights guaranteed so many human rights that our political arrangement is an evolutionary leap forward.

America is great because we have traditionally been aligned to a great forward march of history towards greater liberty, dignity, distributed justice, and freedom. Bush has taken us two steps back, but now Obama has realigned the nation's moral compass on that great march. For example, in the inaugural speech, Obama said that we won't sacrifice our sacred ideals for expediency. He has promised to close the gulag prison at Guantanamo Bay. This is Good America returning.

America died and been born again. On Election Night '08, Norman Lear had an epiphany on this subject and eventually created some art about it at www.bornagainamerican.org.

So if we are Born Again Americans, then now what?

Well, first of all, this country is a bit of fixer upper and needs work.

Luckily, Obama and friends seem to have pretty good bead on where to go.

So how do we become allies of Obama?

How do we become Good Americans in a time of a Good America?

I don't know, but I'm willing to learn.

May humanity learn to be cooperative, supportive allies in the effort to heal the planet.

Happy Obama New Year!

Befriending Bacteria: Kombutcha, Candita and the Bottom Floor of Creation

2009-01-19T19:09:00.000-08:00

We should Befriend to the bottom floor of creation, the bacterial microherds. These are the support system of everything we do. Inside our stomach is a million billion trillion creepycrawly little monsters, I mean, hard working digestors. I admit it's a little spooky on first glance, and that explains our naive society's heavy reliance on antibacterial soaps and antibioitics.

I recommend the Synergy Cosmic Cranberry Kombutcha tea as a way to introduce your belly to a new friends in the microbiobial "probiotic' community.

When we keep a healthy microherd, we are impervious to the baddies. Anti-microbial soap clear cuts the probiotic communities on the skin and leaves an open territory that the body must replenish and thus creates opportunity for sickness. Antimicrobial soap is a criminal abuse of consumer ignorance.

Likewise, Candita is a noxious, difficult-to-beat yeast infection that comes when the body is made vulnerable after heavy anti-biotics.

Humanity's lesson for the 21st century: Learn to live within the BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS in which we are embedded.

Obama and the Truth and Rebirth of America

2009-01-18T20:40:00.000-08:00

Today at my chuch they had Jack Healy talk, in honor of MLK day, an organizer who was with Dr. King back in '63. The church was packed and the vibe was high. There is something profound afoot in this country. A rebirth of what it means to be American. For years, the American flag has been polluted with torture and war and waterboarding. But something is happening, and we are returning to that shining dream inside the American Experiment.

Obama says in an article from our Findhorn friends who advocate for visionary leadership

click here to read the article

that when he's talking the truth he can feel a special power in that isn't there if he's just being glib or clever.

i mean, it's an incredibly inspiring moment in our nation, this rebirth of what is possible.

People are pretty jaded about politics because we've been raped by savage heathens using all the sacred language to tie us in knots. And here comes Obama cutting through the clouds of illusion with spiritual clarity because he can actually talk about truth things and true issues without getting caught in a cloud of phoney language and posturing. That's was Obama's secret power in the primaries. All the other candidates felt compelled to speak in the gobbledeegook of triangulated posturing.

In the Hindu tradition, they talk about Satyagraha, or Truth Force, or Firmness in Truth. Gandhi named his movement after this and it explains alot about Obama's success.

link to great way to meet Rachel Carson

2009-01-18T15:36:00.000-08:00

insightful Rachel Carson play on the Bill Moyers show

a picture of solar system

2009-01-16T22:28:00.000-08:00

Here's a picture of the solar system on our house. These 80 evacuated tubes gather solar energy as heat, warming these wavey blue-ish sheets of metal that transfer the heat into proplyn glycal (or anti-freeze, like in your car's radiator), which circulates into the basement where it transfers the heat to a 500 gallon water tank. From here, the heat is then distributed to radiant floor heating. Awesomely warm feet in the winter, and free energy from the sun, though not free to put in the system, but with an expected 10 year payback in saved money on oil bills.

It's very exciting that the Obama administration is keen to help people hook up their homes on an environmental level.

A little insulation goes a long way.

I'm reading a book called "The Hot Topic" on the Climate Crisis and it says that investing in insulation and energy efficiency is by far the most cost effective way to cut carbon. So let's do it! Go Green America!

The Comedy of the Madoff Economy

2009-01-06T11:20:00.000-08:00

The unfolding story of Bernie Madoff has been fun to watch.

Bernie Madoff is, of course, the Wall Street titan busted for running a $50 billion dollar Ponzi scheme. It is fabulously ironic that Bernie Made-off made off with so much investor money. The Universe secretly runs on meaning, and people symbolically represent their true nature without even intending it. Assistant Treasury Secretary is Neel Kashkeri, as in Cash-carry. And Kashkeri certainly has carried out a ton of cash out of the Treasury to get snorted by his Wall Street pals.

It is sad/funny that Bernie Madoff is under house arrest, living large in his mansion still. How many poor black people are in jail for being poor? Ahh, but Bernie isn’t the class of citizen we use to fuel the great slave-machine of the Prison Industrial Complex. It reminds me of the proverb “They only hang the little thieves.”

So it was pleasant to see Bernie busted again for trying to mail $1 million in jewelry to relatives. Prosecutors want him to go to actual jail now, as this jewelry mailing violates his bail conditions. I wonder how they caught his wife at the post office? Was the box suspiciously heavy and jangling?

It is funny how Madoff perfectly symbolically represents the American economy. The US economy is running a giant Ponzi scheme. We have an $800 billion trade deficit annually. We keep borrowing, China keeps buying our bonds, we buy the cheap toxic crap. So, I guess the lesson here is: it’s only a Ponzi scheme if it’s small enough or after it goes belly up.

Another amusing story was the people sneaking into Madoff’s mansion and stealing a 5 foot bronze statue of Madoff! (I mean, it’s funny enough that Madoff has a statue of himself!) The statue was returned later with a note that said “Your days of plenty are numbered.” The note was signed ”the Edukators.” A German movie seems to have been the inspiration for this movie. (And the award for the guerilla marketing for film goes to....”)

It has been a pleasure to see Wall Street taken down a notch. These slick fellows with their suits have been racing an economic engine that’s consuming the world. Big Business has dismissively stonewalled on environmental regulation. Climate Change is breaking the sky and Wall Street blocks solutions. The thinking of paper pusher billionaires is sociopathically dissociative and cold-hearted and alienated from the Earth and the ecosystems that support biological life. It’s good that Wall Street’s blind confidence gets shaken now before we have full-on biosphere collapse in a few years.

Finally, it is joyful to see karma ripening for “The Masters of the Universe.” Wall Street has been dominating the world and the national dialogue for decades. Deal with the Climate Crisis? Nope, not economically feasible. Cutting down the Amazon rain forest? Nope, need the land for McDonald’s hamburgers. A terrible, foolish greedy mentality has run the world for too long. Robert Bly writes about “the greedy soul”, and how humanity is always struggling with an avaricious part of ourselves. The Muslims call these bundles of desires our 'nafs', and we purify them through effort and struggle to be good and generous.

Bernie Madoff suffers from a greedy soul. I feel a little sorry for him because he looks like a nice enough guy who won at the wrong game. He is just like thousands of other soft-handed, educated but amoral Wall Street money movers who have partied like rock stars on other people’s money for decades. And it’s satisfying to see them get what they deserve...

handcuffs.

Check out this great podcast about Rachel Carson

2008-12-30T16:46:00.000-08:00

Rachel Carson!

here's how to listen to this brilliant piece of one-woman theater recreating our heroine...

go to the Bill Moyer's Journal website, go into the podcast section, and track back to...

9/21/07

it's a story of great bravery in sticking up for what one knows to be true...

and for sticking up for the complex natural systems of the Earth against the slash&burn war chemistry of corporate america.

the Bill Moyers Journal has great stuff. The internet is a treasurebox of knowledge. I also loved the talk with Robert Bly on 9/31/08. A great introduction to the mystical sufi poetry of the middle east.

Excitement at the efficiency of Obama

2008-12-10T17:41:00.000-08:00

The Obama Administration has an economic stimulus program that includes a big effort to make all the federal buildings efficient. This is very exciting really, if you find well-insulated buildings exciting, which I do, which I agree, is weird.

But investing in good insulation says "we're staying." Obama is investing like we're gonna live on the planet for a long time.

The Bush years were all about selling the drain pipe's for the scrap metal value of the tin. They were like renters who have just given up on getting the deposit back and didn't like the landlord, anyway.

There is a great economic engine ready to get kick started.

Let's aim the planetary endevor straight onto the mysterious pathway of plantery survival.

Let's try to actually solve the problems instead of leaving the planet a smoldering trashheap in ten years with our children wailing and cursing their fate.

Seriously, we need to dial it in, and it is incredibly exciting that we have leadership that seems poised to do that. To actually deal head on with environmental problems, to actually address the climate crisis, to start facing the ecological truth.

It seems like a good idea. Invest to save the planet and as a by product, the economy will go up. Even if it doesn't, we'll have saved the planet. It seems like a big win-win, no matter what happens. Thank goodness we had an economic crisis when we did to soften up the dogmatism of the freemarket economists.

May the truth and good design win.

How we left a window open thru three Vermont winters (or why you might need a professional home energy audit)

2008-12-09T13:27:00.001-08:00

Getting a home energy audit helps heal the planet, saves money, and makes for a more pleasant home. Everybody wins.

President-elect Obama understands the importance of efficiency, and so part of the economic stimulus package is to insulate all public buildings.

But let me tell you about that window. A few years ago, I decided to make our property as green as possible. First, I wanted to get solar panels. But the solar experts that I talked to said that the place to start is getting an energy audit, because you can save more energy faster and cheaper this way.

So I called in an expert in energy efficiency for a consultation. Bill Calfee, of Peak Energy Solutions, in Dorset, Vermont came by to do the energy audit. We walked through the house. Opening a closet in the guest room, we stood underneath the hole in the ceiling to the attic. There wasn’t a cover over the hole to the attic. “Well, here’s a big thing,” he said. “This is some of that easy-to-fix, low-hanging fruit that I mentioned. The money you’ll save by fixing this will make up for the cost of the audit many times over.”

See, the unheated attic is normally the same temperature as outdoors. Yet because there was no hole cover, the warm air was rising into the attic and cold air was descending. We had the equivalent of an open window to the outside. No wonder the house always felt drafty!

Calfee pointed to the black dust and grit attached to the pink insulation that had accumulated on the side of the hole. He said this was the residue of passing air, signifying lots of air passing through this space. “D’oh!” I said. Apparently, the house builders had only covered the hole with a piece of plywood. Somehow it had been gotten pushed aside and left uncovered. We think it had been that way for years. The closet door was often closed, so it wasn’t quite a wide-open window, or we might have noticed earlier. But that room was always cold. The next day somebody came and built a thick, foam-board insulated cap for the hole, and now it’s tight as a drum up there.

So I tell this story to illustrate why home energy audits are important. Experts can see things other people wouldn’t see. Sometimes you have to call in the pros. Additionally, the pros have a few superhero tools for sussing out a home’s efficiency. They have the blower door and the thermal camera!

Calfee brought a sort-of hand-held video camera that measured heat and cold. Pointing to the plastered over walls, the camera showed where the house builders hadn’t brought the pink roll insulation all the way to the top of the bay between the joists. By leaving just 2 inches uncovered, it was creating a steady heat lose. Pointing to the laundry room, he showed a section that somehow didn’t get insulated at all. The camera showed small cracks in the foundation that were easily filled. Everywhere that cold air was rushing in was made visible and so we could deal with it.

Next Calfee used “the blower door” to measure how airtight the house is. The blower door is a strong fan attached to a laptop computer, with a plastic sheet that fits snug over a door frame. You shut every window, door, and vent in the house. Then you turn on the blower full speed for five minutes. Then you turn it off and the computer measures the fan’ activity. Is it spinning backwards? How fast? By pressurizing the house in this way, we could see how airtight the house was.

Very useful information. It turns out though our house was only ten years old, it was pretty leaky. Recently, they did the blower door again, and now the house is tight. Getting this house to be energy efficient feels like a victory to me. It took almost two years, numerous calls to plumber, carpenters, and insulators, but now the house really is efficient and warm and green.

Here’s a short summary of what we ended up doing. We had a foot of cellulose insulation sprayed into attic to insulate the ceiling thoroughly. Fixed the cracks in the basement foundation. Made holes in the walls and blew in extra cellulose insulation. In the basement, we had a foam sprayed over the concrete walls, because concrete has an “R-value of 1” (or insulating ability of a single pane of glass.) The walls were sprayed with this gooey, soy-based foam, which hardens into a layer of insulation that looks like the surface of lemon meringue pie.

In the big picture, energy efficiency is one of the most important places where our society can start dealing with the environmental crisis. Every watt of energy that we save is one that Vermont Yankee doesn’t have to toxically produce. A tight house burns less oil and thus less carbon. Energy expert Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute says that saving energy should be a huge part of our national energy plan. He calls saved energy “negawatts.”

Eventually we did get a pretty cool solar system. Forty percent of the homes HEAT is generated by the sun. We put in a big solar system that heats water that runs underneath the floors as radiant floor heating. Eighty blue vacuum-tube solar panels gather the sun’s heat, which warms tubes of the antifreeze liquid propylene glycol, and then circulates down into the basement to a 500 gallon water tank that stores the heat, and then it flows through tubes under the floors as radiant floor heating. This is a beautiful way to heat a home. The floors are warm to the feet. The energy is free and burns zero carbon. As we strive to create a zero-carbon world, solar heating systems should have a place of honor. We estimate this solar system will pay for itself with savings on oil bills over 10 years.

A real estate agent told me that everyone says that their home is tight but most houses aren’t. Creating a super insulated house could be a priority if you are building a new home, but it probably won’t be unless you plan for it. Construction workers are often more concerned with getting a job finished than creating a house that has long-term low heating costs. Efficiency and green building techniques should be ”the new normal”, but they aren’t yet.

I strongly encourage everybody get an energy audit and to deep insulate their homes. It saves money and energy. It’s a good investment if you own the house, because you’ll pay lower fuel bills in the long run. Additionally, houses with green credentials are a lone hot spot in the housing market, according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal. And the house is just nicer to live in. After the truck came and blew lots of cellulose insulation all through the walls and the attic, it was like a giant blanket had been placed over the house. Investing in good insulation is smart for the energy bills, the earth, and for our feet.

More info is online at www.efficiencyvermont.com. and www.serg-info.org and www.energy-wise-homes.com.

Transition Town cofounder rallies Vermonters

2008-12-01T07:56:00.000-08:00

“I feel an intense urgency to do this work, and I hear that all over the world” said Naresh Giagrande, one of the founders of the Transition Town movement in the UK. Indeed, on that Nov. 24th evening at Montpellier’s Unitarian Church, one could feel that positive, encouraging, ready-to-go energy. It was an inspiring evening, and an auspicious beginning for Vermont’s Transition Town movement.

The church was packed. Vermont’s crunchy intelligentsia turned out in force. The energy in the room was palpable and refreshing. Climate change can be pretty doom and gloom, and the Transition Town movement nicely short-circuits this by shifting to a positive vision for a low-carbon future. Citizens are encouraged to create committees or councils that “Start creating visions of a positive future.” By “unleashing the collective intelligence of humanity”, the climate change crisis can be addressed by “letting a thousand flowers bloom.” On his powerpoint, Giagrande had written a T.T. slogan, “Action without vision is just busyness. Vision without action is fruitless.”

Giagrande is currently on a worldwide speaking tour to spread the word about this movement to create an “abundant, pleasurable, resilient future.” Resilient is a key word in Transition culture, meaning the ability of a living system to withstand shocks. In this case, a resilient, transitioned community will withstand the shocks of peak oil with grace. One quick way to measure the resilience of a community is looking at the cords of firewood and seeing if they are well-stacked, notes Richard Heinburg, author of Peak Everything.

Transition Town started in Totnes, England. A group of citizens have worked together to create an ‘energy descent plan’ that looks forward into a desirable future. And they are cultivating a pleasant vision: old school, homespun, communitarian, and fun. They are trying to embody that Buckminster Fuller proverb, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.”

The Transition Town has a component called The Great Re-skilling. Giagrande said “We are probably the most useless generation in history. Most people can’t cook their own food, let alone grow it.” The Great Re-Skilling encourages people to meet their own needs rather than employ energy intensive delegation of the task. Or to reframe it, do it like our grandparents did before we paid Chinese slaves to do it. Mend soxs. Fix that bicycle instead of throwing it away and getting a new one. Grow and store food.

The Transition Town model is hugely hopeful. There are abundant web resources at www.transitiontowns.org. Vermont has it’s own Transition website transitionvermont.ning.com. And also, on Dec 6th, at Vermont Technical College, there will be a conference on this subject, called “Community-based Approaches to Energy and Climate Change.”

Onward and upward, Transition Vermont!

link to brilliant video on Global Warming

2008-11-21T19:41:00.000-08:00

http://www.noe21.org/solutions/

a very sharp presentation of the facts, laid out in some fab graphics.

Fetus Origami, Endocrine Disruptors and You...

2008-11-19T08:23:00.000-08:00

a Report from VPIRG Environmental Action Conference

I enjoy going conferences. It’s like an intense college immersion experience, minus the binge drinking and the tests. At the Vermont Technical College on Nov. 15th, VPIRG held their annual Environmental Action Conference. This Vermont’s biggest and best environmental conference, a sort of bio-regional Bioneers Conference. I came away with a head full of ideas of ideas that I’d like to share.

The highlight for me was learning from keynote speaker Sandra Steingraber, author of the book Living Downstream: An Ecologists look at Cancer and the Environment. She said so many interesting things and here are some.

- The human fetus is folded together as with origami, flat sheets of tissue folding into the emerging body. The fetus starts growing head first, then downward, and center first and then outward. So if the baby has webbed feet, the toxic exposure was likely in the 11th week, when the outer stuff had started.

- The worst time to get hit with toxins is when you are really, really, really small. “Exposure during the opera of embryonic development can multiply exposure effect,” Steingraber said. After implantation on the womb wall, the egg is very vulnerable and after conception too.

- We should be thinking about pollution from the human rights perspective, Steingraber said. We have a right to live in a world without getting cancer. We have a right to be fertile and have children if we want them. We have a right to not get poisoned by Roundup’s Atrazine, no matter how much it would impact the economy to take it off the market. Lawyers from the Vermont Law School are pursuing this, and articulate this view in an article (available on-line) called “Law for An Ecological Age.”

- There is a massive movement to protect people from chemicals. Here are some resources in that movement. A blog called Nontoxic kids. A ‘Safe Cosmetics Campaign”. An European Union program called REACH, which will document all the chemicals that are on the market. Also, check out Rivernetwork.org, the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, and the Alliance for Clean and Healthy Vermont.

- Canned food is a major source of exposure to Bisphenol-A (pronounced: biss-fee-n’all-A). The cans are lined with a plastic that contains the Bisphenol-A and it leeches into the food. I always knew canned vegetables were nasty! Now I know they contain a “endocrine disruptor.”
Endocrine disruptors happen because the body mistakes certain chemicals for natural hormones and then everything gets out of wack. The body uses hormones to get jobs done, in minute amounts, parts per trillion. When we take in tiny microscopic chemicals from the canned pineapple or the old Nalgene bottle, our bodies get confused.
In an issue related to endocrine disruptors, girls are getting their breasts about 3 years earlier than they used to, at 10 years old instead of 13. The menstruation start times are about the same, only a month ahead of where they were in 1970. This long window between breasts budding and menstruation is not good. Girls are at risk for breast cancer later in life because the body has a long window of increased estrogen levels connected to the breast development, but without progestrerone, a menstrual hormone that balances out the effects of the estrogen.

- Steingraber compared the economy and the environment as twin ecosystems with many parallels. Both were global and integrated. “Only there are no bailouts for the environment if we hit a major tipping point.” She said her 7 year old child ran into the room saying “the Dow dropped 500 points” not knowing what that meant. Perhaps we don’t mourn the ecosystem’s decline as much because we don’t have metrics to count it. We need numbers that document the rise in carbon parts per million, so that TV anchors can grimace and say “the Carbon Index rose today to a new high of 388 parts carbon per million today, making our air the most carbonated since the Age of the Dinosaurs.”

- In an exciting note from the activist perspective, the California environmentalists have found a delicious, elegant leverage point upon industry. California legislators passed a law that says companies must say on the label if there is something in the product that is illegal in Belgium. Companies have to identify everything that doesn’t meet the higher standards of the EU. Thus, they will probably just start importing products safe for the European market rather than relabel. They might just do the switch all across the country, thus bringing America into de facto harmonization with the E.U.’s more sensible and stringent laws! Brilliant!

This will be a place to contemplate the rejuvenation of the world

2008-11-15T18:33:00.000-08:00

Hi all

i have the high minded intention to think about survival, in a semi=public form, ruminating and chewing the public sphere, selfpublishing into the mists.

much love

and

respect!