Susan Feathers

When I was 18-21 I studied American Literature and Poetry at East Tennessee State University. Poems like Chicago, The People, Yes and others still reverberate in my memory for their raw American soulfulness.

PBS has aired a wonderful, insightful biography about his life and work and how each reflected American history. He created out of the clay of the common people and the earthiness of American landscapes poetry that has more dimensions than any I have encountered since.

Sandburg’s people and places show how we came to be who we are, how we shape the land, and it shapes us; how we love, work and struggle. Here is a site with many of his works in audio.

Turn off the Tube. Enjoy a Sandburg feast! It will do your soul good. I did mine.

For those of you who are Ann Patchett fans, I highly recommend her new book of published essays: The Story of a Happy Marriage. First, for writers she gives invaluable advice by showing readers her own path and the teachers along the way. The essays themselves are small masterworks from which writers can learn much about voice and economy of word. Some are just plain fun (Winnebago) and others heart warming (Rose, a love story about Ann and her dog).

The Ann Patchett universe – the writer and her works – is new to me although I have read State of Wonder and The Patron Saint of Liars. Perhaps the way to know her best is to read This is the Story of a Happy Marriage because it describes many important times and relationships in her life as a person, friend and writer. The second way to know Ann is to visit Parnassus Books in Nashville. The quality of books, the gestalt of the place with all its fans, friends, staff, and occasionally Ann, speaks volumes about what is important to Ann.

Last summer I spent my birthday in Parnassus, loading up on Patchett books and other authors. The store is in a shopping district so be sure to take your GPS or cell phone to find it. Afterward I went downtown town to the Vanderbilt neighborhood and found a lovely restaurant, and later found a gelato shop where I enjoyed a double scoop of Pistachio to celebrate my 68th year on this fine planet. Writers like Ann Patchett make your Earth Walk a soulful journey. Try her new book of essays!

P.S. I highly recommend the audio book read by the author. Well done.

The National Science Foundation announced a current research initiative to study the West Pacific ocean’s “chimney.”  This article describes how heating in the  ocean interplays with atmosphere to cause havoc in weather and climate. Its known as the global chimney:

Next week, scientists will head to the region to better understand its influence on the atmosphere–including how that influence may change in coming decades if storms over the Pacific become more powerful with rising global temperatures.

Read article here.

The Department of Labor Secretary addressed the importance to extending long term unemployment benefits at this point in the recovery of the national economy. Read below:

What’s New

Reaffirming the Importance of Long-Term Unemployment Benefits

In a Dec. 24 interview with the Baltimore Sun, and on a conference call three days later with two-dozen reporters from across the country, Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez said “it would be literally unprecedented” if Congress fails to renew the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program that provides benefits to long-term jobless Americans. Perez said that Congress approved the program with broad bipartisan support in 2008, when the U.S. unemployment rate was 5.6 percent. The current unemployment rate is 7 percent. He added, “The hole that this Administration inherited in the Great Recession was a deep one. And when you’re in a hole, you stop digging. We must maintain these emergency benefits in order to continue climbing our way back to a fully healthy economy.” Perez also noted that when Congress reconvenes on Jan. 6, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will bring up legislation to extend unemployment insurance and move it toward a vote. “Congress can do the right thing in the new year and renew this program,” said Perez. “It will help people who want to be employed. It will help families keep going. It will help create economic growth for the nation.”

• Read the Interview
• Listen to the Press Conference Call
• Read the Blog Post

To subscribe to the official blog of the U.S. Department of Labor Click Here.

The most favorite Blog from 2013 on the official U.S. Department of Labor Blog (Work in Progress) was Raising the minimum wage: the right thing to do, the smart thing to do. The following history of the Minimum Wage legislation is worth studying. Click on the image to enlarge.

The following audio taped presentation is from the Point Reyes Book Store’s biannual Geography of Hope Conference.

Llewellyn Vaughan -Lee addresses a workshop audience about Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth – a new book in which he invited contemporary thinkers and writers who affirm a lost legacy of a once Earth-aware culture.  Vaughan-Lee describes how we lost a great heritage at the end of the Roman Empire, when the last of “pagan” rites and sites were banned and destroyed. He asserts that we have been taught the wrong story – that the wholeness of the world must be recovered by dispelling the belief that we are separate from the “environment” by reaffirming we are inter-beings with it.

This is a very rich sharing during which the author reads from many of the world’s most articulate spiritual, ecological, and humanities leaders. Take time to listen in a quiet space.

MP3 Audio of the Talk

Our present ecological crisis is undeniably the greatest man-made disaster this planet has ever faced—its accelerating climate change, species depletion, pollution and acidification of the oceans. A central but rarely addressed aspect of this crisis is our forgetfulness of the sacred nature of creation, and how this affects our relationship to the environment.

Only when we remember what is sacred can we bring true understanding to our present predicament. This talk will explore this most pressing need of our time: how we are facing not just a physical ecological crisis but also a spiritual crisis, one that demands a spiritual response from each of us.

We often overlook a key indicator of our cultural values about Nature: how we treat each other. Wangari Maathai’s recognition of this came clearly to her when she battled a male-dominated governmental and societal structure in her home country of Kenya. Wangari had earned a doctoral degree in ecology and became the first woman elected to a high governmental office. At the time in Kenya, women were considered the property of men with few rights and often subjugated by violence and sexual abuse. At the same time the government had assaulted the landscape for resources, denuding the land of its aboriginal forests. WIthout trees, streams dried up and drought ravaged once fertile areas where women grew food for their families. Hunger became a big problem among common people. Wangari began a movement among women, The Green Belt Movement, in which women were taught how to raise tree seedlings and plant them. In return they received a small payment, enough to help them develop some economic freedom and personal empowerment.*Kinking an environmental problem and social problems through an economic incentive turned out to be a brilliant strategy for which she earned the Nobel Peace Prize.  The Green Belt Movement has reestablished forests, recovered streams, and improved food security. Women are empowered to take restorative action. From the Green Belt Website:

“Shortly after beginning this work, Professor Maathai saw that behind the everyday hardships of the poor—environmental degradation, deforestation, and food insecurity—were deeper issues of disempowerment, disenfranchisement, and a loss of the traditional values that had previously enabled communities to protect their environment, work together for mutual benefit, and to do both selflessly and honestly.”

During the American feminist movement, Susan Griffin published Woman and Nature (Sierra Club Books, 1978). She provided the basis for women and environmental leaders to understand the relationship between the subjugation of women by Western political culture and the subjugation of land for resource use.

Over the last fifty years, many thinkers, activists and writers have drawn similar relationships that illuminate an important truth: the way we treat each other is the way we treat wildlife, land, and nature as a whole. Aldo Leopold, in his development of The Land Ethic (Sand County Almanac, Oxford University Press, 1949, 1987) describes the evolution of an ecological conscience when culture extends rights from humans to the rights of animals and plants, to land, water and air – when humans are seen as one part of a whole of interdependent parts.

While advances in human rights have been achieved in the U.S. and around the world, there is still much work to be done. Locally in Pensacola we have arrested development in multicultural equanimity. None the less there are many people here who embrace the complexity of the relationship between human society and living communities we call nature.

For a an excellent example of this relationship, read Paul Giorno’s The Man Who Planted Trees. It is a wonderful short story  illustrative of how people are linked to land and to each other, not in theory, but viscerally.

Listen to scholars, including Baird Callicott, Environmental Ethicist, author and Professor of Philosophy at University of Wisconsin. Susan Flader, Leopold scholar, introduces Callicott and describes how she became a Leopold scholar. Flader and Callicott co-edited The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold (1991 University of Wisconsin Press). Callicott has a new book about to be released: Thinking Like a Planet: The Land Ethic and The Earth Ethic which addresses global climate change in light of values-ethics.

The Earth sleeps in high limbs,

Swaying in tropical breezes,

Her cradle a nest of branches.

She slumbers coiled like a cat.

Her breast rises and falls

In the moon’s bright light.

She sleeps just outside

The door and waits.