UNDO IT!

courtesy of an email postcard from fdtate, a petition-signing campaign from Environmental Defense:  a petition to be sent to the (P)resident, your senators and representatives, requesting action be taken to undo Global Warming.  it's a small thing, filling in your info and sending it on, but as we all know, small actions on the Internet have a way of snowballing.  so, here's the site, take a minute and make a small stand against the corporate interests who are indifferent to the fate of the planet, caring only about the fate of their bottom lines.

SACRED THINGS - Introduction (Part 1)

If you visit with any regularity, you know i've been focusing on Things Environmental in this journal.  this is a busy week, no time for a long entry...but yesterday i bought a book called Sisters of the Earth, Women's Prose & Poetry About Nature.  when i'm too busy to research and write my own entries, i'm going to quote bits and pieces from it here.  we need information, but we also need spiritual encouragement  (i found a quote a while back that goes like this:  "I believe in God, but I spell it Nature."  i can't remember whose this is; i think it was Frank Lloyd Wright....anyone else know? it perfectly expresses my belief.).  so today i pass along to you the opening passage from Starhawk's 1993 novel, The Fifth Sacred Thing. 

as close to a "Credo" as i can get.  it's in the next entry.

 

SACRED THINGS - The quote (Part 2)

     The earth is a living, conscious being. In company with cultures of many different times and places, we name these things as sacred:  air, fire, water, and earth.
      Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and body of the Mother, or as the blessed gifts of a Creator, or as symbols of the interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them.
      To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves become the standards by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged.  No one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy.
      All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred.  No one of us stands higher or lower than any other.  Only justice can assure balance:  only ecological balance can sustain freedom.  Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity.
      To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom, and beauty can thrive.  To honor the sacred is to make love possible.
      To this we dedicate our curiosity, our will, our courage, our silences, and our voices.  To this we dedicate our lives.
                                Starhawk, 1993

ROLLING UP YOUR SLEEVES??

 

("Dump Bush" Icon by Phil Marden)

DAMAGE DONE - Part 1 of 3

The International Club's trip to Baltimore on Saturday was a huge success.  the weather was perfect for such an excursion, everyone was in high spirits on the bus trip up, sound asleep with their mouths hanging open on the trip back.  in between there was ice skating at an outdoor rink - for most of these students it was their first time on ice.  i couldn't get on the ice because of a painful bonespur on my ankle (a boot would have been torture), but, as one guy said, i was the "coach."  only a few sat out the humiliation of falling and sprawling, the rest were great sports. then over to Harbor Place for lunch (a crabcake dinner for me, Chinese buffet for most of the students) and on to the National Aquarium.  i love the Aquarium, any aquarium, but this one is spectacular.  however.  there were a gazillion people in there appreciating it that day.  the heat was intolerable, the crowds literally breathtaking. after an hour without air claustrophobia overwhelmed me, and i split for Barnes & Noble, an iced latte and the huge magazine rack. 

and then the huge magazine rack overwhelmed me.  my choices doomed me to despair:  The Nation and Mother Jones.  i'd been wanting to read the RFK, Jr. article "Junk Science" in The Nation, and i did.  it's on alternet now, so you can go check it out for yourself. it's kind of a followup to his Rolling Stone article i referenced in a series of earlier posts.  it's about this administration's campaign to "suppress science... that threatens the profits of its corporate paymasters or challenges the ideological underpinnings of their radical anti-environmental agenda." and it's another terrifying read.  some quotes from the conclusion of the RFK article in............Part 2

DAMAGE DONE - Part 2 of 3

From "Junk Science:"  

   ...Science, like theology, reveals transcendent truths about a changing world.  At their best, scientists are moral individuals whose business is to seek the truth.  Over the past two decades industry and conservative think tanks have invested millions of dollars to corrupt science.  They distort the truth about tobacco, pesticides, ozone depletion, dioxin, acid rain and global warming.  In their attempt to undermine the credible basis for public action (by positing that all opinions are politically driven and therefore any one is as true as any other), they also undermine belief in the integrity of the scientific process."
        ... The Bush Administration has so violated and corrupted the institutional culture of government agencies charged with scientific research that it could take a generation for them to recover their integrity even if Bush is defeated this fall.  Says Princeton University scientist Michael Oppenheimer, "If you believe in a rational universe, in enlightenment, in knowledge and in a search for the truth, this White House is an absolute disaster."

RFK, Jr. is becoming an ever-more-important voice in environmental politics today.  if our wildest dreams come true and a Democrat wins the November election, i hope there's a spot in the highest levels of government reserved for this Kennedy.  head of the EPA?  Secretary of the Interior? it's time that  undoing the damage of the past two decades of environmental evils assumes an importance on a level with Homeland Security, or perhaps even higher.

Continued in Part 3

DAMAGE DONE - Part 3 of 3

so, that was The Nation.  then i moved on to Mother Jones.  and opened it to a photoessay called "The Damage Done, America's Wounded Come Home."  this  is also online, on Mother Jones' site.   read the accompanying text too, after you look at the photos of these young men.  it's a powerful piece of journalism.  beyond heartbreaking.  from the article this quote: 
        ...many of these soldiers, like their counterparts in every war, can give us an incisive glimpse into a bleaker America than most of us have ever known.  For them, the military was a refuge as well as an adventure or an obligation.  The soldiers I mean come from a nation in social disrepair, rife with poverty and plagued with a lack of opportunity and expectations.  For some of these men, fighting for their country was also a way of fighting against it - against a future without possiblities, where the poor and uneducated, in keeping with this administration's pitiless version of Christianity, are simply left to get by somehow on their own.

i was physically exhausted by the trip, but when i went to bed Saturday night my spiritual exhaustion from the truths told by these two articles overshadowed the physical.  nonetheless i am deeply grateful that we still have media voices that dare to speak out in this fashion.  i would be spiritually far poorer without them.