Sorry for the long silence. On Friday the 13th I spent the day at Hidden Villa with an environmental leadership program called "Be the Change." It was SO what I've been hungry for- to spend time literally staring at a tree and listening to birds. Ever since I started reading Thomas Berry, it became clear how important it is for each of us to know our own place, for me to know the seasons and plants and birds of my own neighborhood, my own eco-system. It's also good to get to know my political eco-system as well. Did you know that there was a comprehensive trolley system in the Bay area in the 1920s that was bought up by private interests and ripped out to promote the car and highway system? We live in such a highly mobile society, that it's easy to loose site of the fact that each place is different, follows different patterns, offers particular gifts. We risk doing damage if we are not paying attention to our particular community, and we risk missing out on the beauty that is uniquely ours.
Then last weekend I went up to Bioneers. It was my second year, so of course I'm all jaded and harder to amaze. Okay, I was amazed by Paul Stamets and the crazy creepy world of mushrooms. Apparently during the first major extinction on the planet (we're in the 6th right now) some asteroid hit the planet and the earth was covered by a dust cloud for about 10 years. The plants could not survive and the fungi ruled. Or how about that 2,400 acre mycelium mass in Oregon? I'm not even going to describe how a mushroom can kill an ant- it will give the little ones nightmares.
And of course Lois Gibbs is amazing- to hear what they went through trying to get officials to pay any attention to the residents of Love Canal was really disturbing.
But for some reason what really got inside me was hearing Tzeporah Berman from Forest Ethics talk about the loss of forests on the planet. Only 3 countries in the world have forests left that are big enough to maintain full bio-diversity. She has been fighting for the "Great Bear Rain Forest" which runs along the North West up into Canada. They re-named the forest because it is the last habitat left for the Great Bear. It is known to the government as "Mid Coast Timber Supply." It's this clash of worlds that made me grouchy with my family all day Sunday when I came home. It's not just that beautiful balanced habitats and communities are being destroyed for short-term financial gain, it's that the people who are making 1,000 year old trees into Victoria's Secret catalogues don't even see living beings- they see "timber supply."
And what can I even do from so far away? It's not much, but I can call the companies who send me catalogues and ask them to desist. I can try to remind my church why they really do want to spend the extra few dollars to use post-consumer paper. And I can vote yes on Santa Clara County Proposition "A" and save the little bits of "open" space left in my own community. I suppose the Buddhist Teacher and Deep Ecologist Joanna Macy would remind me that it's not about avoiding despair, but hoping that this heart break will give me the courage to do something real to save what matters.
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There was an article in the "Atencion" magazine of San Miguel de Allende last Friday by Joseph Dispenza, who is a speaker at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in San Miguel "Death in the cradle of civilization" it's a really a kind of positive article, actually, speaking to the idea that as we grow up as a human species, we 'shed our nest' i.e. our environments. He says, any 'spritual places' especially in the middle east are turning to dust. In the places where civilization was born, there's a lot of bombing and the most violent forms of pollution. (In other places there are milder forms of pollution.) Joseph says, "pretend for a moment that we are martian anthropologists observing what is happening on Earth..." 'It could be a possibility that either human beings are 'mad' or that they are sane and going about, literally, the eradication of all evidence of themselves. Or it could mean that human beings appear to be ready to leave their long period of infancy and are destroying the nest.'
Anyway Ginger Root I thought about your topics and wanted to comment on this. Thanks!
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