Republished with permission from the author. September 17, 2024
John O’Donohue and the Inner Landscape of Beauty
Return to our Earthwalk
“John O’Donohue was born in 1956, into a native Gaelic speaking family, on the farm inhabited by previous generations in the Burren Region of County Clare, Ireland. As the oldest of four children, he learned to work alongside his parents and uncle, developing a close kinship with the wild landscape, framed by an ethereal view of a limestone valley and the beckoning waters of Galway Bay. This valley was the shell of John’s soul, forging a deep and powerful connection with the elements shaping him. He was educated at the local primary school, alternating his studies with the farm chores of tending livestock, raising crops and carving peat for fuel, in his youth. John later described the profound influence of his childhood home as, “A huge wild invitation to extend your imagination…an ancient conversation between the land and sea.”
John O’Donohue Website
At Vanderbilt University … a model for civil discourse
David Axelrod Interviewed by Nicole Hemmer, Director, Rogers Center for the American Presidency
In a related video, listen to a brief video by youth in Utah who have heard their case for their rights to a liveable climate and future. Youth leaders are making headway in bringing our country to recognize the watershed moment when there are many things we can do now to secure the health and wellbeing of all life on Earth.
Kamala Harris: On Climate and the Environment
Living on Earth Podcast featured a program last week reviewing Harris’s record on Climate and the Environment. Marianne Lavelle from Inside Climate News is interviewed by hosts Steve Curwood and Aynsley O’Neill.
I found this illuminating. There is much that Harris has accomplished during her service as Attorney General in California and as Vice President with the Biden Administration.
Check out Inside Climate News, a nonpartisn climate media nonprofit, for the latest on how voters view Kamala Harris’ environmental record on climate related issues.
See Trend with Youth Voters from the Environmental Voter Project Survey:
Check out the latest on climate change from NOAA. Use the table below to stay safe during the next week of record high temps. Its all about the humidity.
All things come ’round to the Truth, eventually.
Last night at the Democratic National Convention, I saw Americans from all “walks of life” coming together for one purpose: saving democracy as our form of governance.
It once was true that political conventions were showcases of different ideas on how to improve our democracy. Now, because of a mutant form of the Republican party, our task is about saving all that Americans have built together for nearly 250 years of striving for a more perfect union.
Liberals, conservatives, independents and all —over two and a half centuries of blood, sweat and tears — are coalescing around Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to repair and strengthen our ship of state. Joe Biden’s team saved us from the brink of disaster. Now, we must come together for Harris and Walz.
Think of our nation as a grand sailing vessel, sails full and straining for the horizon. We are all on that ship together, but there is rot in the hull below the waterline. Joe Biden and freedom-loving congresswomen and men, are reaming out the rotten planks and replacing them with solid oak, rebuilding what has been torn down. We are coming together to be more weatherly!
Weatherly!
Let’s elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to be the next Captains and fill our crew with strong sailers who know what it means to work together. We have a destiny. We have a map, and, the winds are in our favor!
VOTE.GOV
Republicans for Harris – some prominent Repubicans are encouraging Republicans who can’t vote for Trump to vote for Harris whether you agree with the platform or not. This is to bring a ground swell that pushes back on lies and threats and a wrong direction for people living in a democracy.
Vote Forward: Get out the vote! I like this group because they don’t tell people who to vote for, just to vote as part of your responsibility in a democracy.
Let’s bring our Ship of State round about and sail closed hauled into the sunrise of destiny on the American Democratic Adventure!
Photo by Susan Feathers, Gulf Islands National Seashore
Patterns in Nature, in Social Thought
An extraordinary book series, penned in the early 19th Century came into the world in nine volumes: Cosmos written by Alexander von Humboldt.
Humboldt, a polymath, explored the Americas from the Amazon to Mexico as a young man. Imagine it is the 18th century, being in only your second decade of life, and striking off to explore the Amazon rainforest, climb 22,000 foot volcanoes, all with no specialized survival gear, prey to huge, voracious mosquitos, being the prey of jaguars and pythons! Later meeting with Thomas Jefferson – the then American President – at the end of his exploration to show the President what he had learned. Jefferson had just aquired a huge territory (Mexico including California and most of what we know as the West tody) which Humboldt meticulously mapped and accurately measured. He showed the relevance of his discoveries to Jefferson in terms of understanding the limits and possibilities of settlement and economic activities for the young America.
Carting large instruments up volcanoes and down ravines, recording plants in all these different environments, von Humboldt meticuously mapped what we now know as biomes and launched the field of biogeography. He demonstrated that across similar landscapes, certain plants appear in similar environments forecasting today’s understanding of the world’s ecosystems and how they form. With meticulous mapping and measurements, he mapped bioregions.
Today we understand that in each region there is a keystone species signifying a particular biome. He showed how this phenomenon is similar across the world (later mapping in Asia). But, this is a relatively recent understanding. By including an aesthetic understanding, being inspired by the magnificense of the Creation he presaged James’s Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis which understands the Earth’s living systems as self-regulating.
Why is Humboldt important and how does it relate to the Return to Nature and Beauty?
A major theme in Cosmos is the unity of science and human esthetic appreciation of the Creation: science, interrelatedness of life and geology, art and wonder. Later historians categorized this perspective on nature as a romantic conception of science. Today we know it as ecology.
Actually, Humboldt was the first person to present an early understanding of ecology: the extraordinary webs of life that occur all across the globe in similar environments and which are governed by a dynamic process. Below is a Smithsonian short animation of Humboldt’s life and accomplishments.
Andrea Wulf and The Invention of Nature
An extraordinary biography of von Humboldt, The Invention of Nature, was published to great exclaim in 2015. Andrea Wulf, its author, is a talented biographer and writer on nature, science (in particular geology) and the men and women who created or recorded the world’s greatest beauty, design in great botanical gardens of the world, and the men and women who brought these aesthetic experiences and deeper understanding of natural science to the world community. There are three presentations below which explore Alexander von Humbolt’s life and his amazing accomplishments and contributions to our insight into nature.
Return to Nature and Beauty
Voting is the most important thing we can do to protect our children’s future.
I’ve been following the Guardian’s State of Emergency newletter. Today, the Guardian reports that hundreds of scientists who are involved in the IPCC’s tracking of climate change responded to a query about the most important thing people can do to help curb a warming planet.
“The science is there, but the lack of will of politicians worldwide is retarding climate change [action],” said Prof Alexander Milner, at the University of Birmingham in the UK. ~ The Guardian
When I started this blog back in 2009, it was focused on nature and writing. I want to return to that practice now, knowing that how I vote is essential to protecting what I love most: my family, the sanctuary of woods and shoreline, the adventure of writing and reading.
During these fraught days of political warfare in America and violence and hunger in many parts of the world, I have sought that “quiet wood” through the authors who have influenced my life and offer sanity and a good way to live. I turned to Aldo Leopold last week, picking up A Sand County Almanac for another read.
As political rhetoric dominates the airways, I instead have been walking with Leopold through the months of his hunting, observing and reflection. Long ago, when his family was young and Leopold worked at the University of Wisconsin, developing their Arboretum, he bought an 80-acre, “worn-out” farm in the sand counties. Surprising his family one morning with the news, he invited his wife, daughter and sons to join him to restore it to its natural state.
Thus began the now famous experiment that literally millions of people around the world have read about, been inspired to do the same and visited the farm where the chicken coop was transformed into the now famous “shack.” Below is a photo from my own pilgrimage in 2014. You see the restored prairie grassland and maturing forest around it.
Aldo Leopold Foundation, Baraboo, Wisconsin: “The Shack” and Restored Landscape. Photo by Susan L Feathers
Here is a little of the quiet peace I found in the Almanac which sustains me through this raucous period in history. Leopold extols the virtue of early rising.
Like many another treaty of restraint, the pre-dawn pact lasts only as long as darkness humbles the arrogant.
To my fellow Americans, please go vote for the leaders who recognize climate change and propose to continue climate safe policies. Go here for voting information. There is still time to register!
If not, Leopold’s great work may be more a eulogy to a once wondrous Earth.
High Crimes and Misdemeaners
The Constitutional Legacy of Watergate
Today’s publication of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from An American (on Substack) takes readers back to when President Richard Nixon engages in a cover up of crimes and abuse of his power. It begins when a break in at the Democratic Party offices occurs in June of 1972. As the investigation moves forward, the nation learns that officials in Nixon’s leadership and operations staff were the perpetrators. Richardson describes the subtrefuge and lies perpetrated by Nixon and the subsequent deliberations in Congress during a House Impeachment investigation.
At the time, two articles of impeachment were brought forth by the House of Representatives : 1: the cover up, and 2) the abuse of power. Both are relevant in our time: former President Trump and crimes in office and a subsequent interference with the peaceful transfer of power.
The recent attemps by President Trump to alter election results and his actions while in office that spurred citizens to an insurrection at the Capitol have not been adjudicated because Republicans no longer have the ability to think beyond political affliliation. A partisan Supreme Court has recently ruled that the President has almost complete immunity for acts commited while in office and to some extent afterwards. It is an outlier. It changes us from a democracy to an autocracy and it is very dangerous.
Below is a link to a new podcast from the National Consitution Center in which legal scholars and historians discuss Watergate and the House and Senate investigations in light of the current discussion about abuse of power. At that time in the early 1970s, the President was held responsible for his acts while in office. Even the President is not above the law our representatives declared. That was a time when many Americans and legislators on each side of the aisle were clear about our Constitutional principles.
We the People Podcast on August 8 from the National Constitution Center.
Protecting the Union. Photo by Susan L Feathers
History in the Making
Just when you think the sky is falling…
Biden stepped away from running for a second term, nominates Kamala Harris. Harris gains unprecedented support from youth, from communities of color, from Republican lawmakers worried the MAGA extremists could destroy the democracy each generation has striven to keep. Netanyahu visits and delivers an unapologetic address about the war in GAZA promising not to stop or turn back. Harris comes forward strongly in defense of Gazans in the line of fire while asserting support for Israel as long as it abides by human rights principles. She wants to see a two state solution.
Women from all sectors of the nation are galvanizing behind Harris as the clearest defender of women’s rights in her time in politics (Women for Harris). We have a wave of democratic actions happening and consequent outpouring of funds in record time. Men have galvanized to support her as evidenced by White Dudes for Kamala! Many institutions and nonprofits and civic leaders have voiced their support for the current Vice President.
The nation has awakended and perhaps the clouds, spewing misinformation and nasty digs from the throats of Rump and Rants, will soon part to let in some truth. I’ve been shocked and pleasantly surprised and again recall the edict: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Well, our eyes are open wide.
Biden has set in motion efforts that will address the extreme rulings and unethical acts of justices on the current polarized Supreme Court. His bill would set standards for justices to hold them accountable for their actions like the rest of us; overturn the presidential immunity ruling just passed that grants immunity to a president for almost any action made while in office and to some extent afterward. Biden calls for shortening the term of justices from life to 18 years. The recommendation dovetails with Constitutional scholars and historians who recently discussed how to reform the Supreme Court to avoid what has become jerrymandering of the Court.
Watch the discussion among scholars invited by the National Constitution Center to review the 2024 Supreme Court.
Listen to two constitutional scholars discuss President Biden’s new proposal for Supreme Court reforms on We the People Podcast at the National Consitution Center.
Civic Virtues and the Founders
I highly recommend readers take time to listen to this session of We the People podcast from the National Constitution Center and how the founders read from Cicero’s The Tusculan Disputations in their quest for personal virtue – which none achieved but strived toward, followed by historians and writers reflecting on civic virtue in maintaining a democracy.
Think for yourself and the ability to reason – these must be resurrected.
Panelists include Jeffrey Rosen, Director of the National Constitution Center, and University of Chicago Professor Eric Slauter, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George Will; and Melody Barnes, executive director of UVA’s Karsh Institute of Democracy.
The Founders and the Pursuit of Happiness, and the Virtuous Life
Cicero’s The Tusculan Disputations
Who was Cicero? Link to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Susan Feathers 