Susan Feathers

In 1981 I was invited to help my church develop a fundraiser for hunger relief. My family and I belonged to the United Methodist church. I really did not know much about the root causes of hunger when I proposed a run against hunger to my close women friends with whom I ran cross-country around Croton-on–Hudson, N.Y. Naturally these women thought a run to raise money to relieve hunger and to raise awareness was perfect for our community.

Asbury Methodist Church in Croton-on-Hudson has now sponsored the Harry Chapin Memorial Run Against Hunger for the last 33 years! A generation has come and gone but the race continues.

Back then I read many of the classic texts illuminating the root causes of hunger (Diet for a Small Planet, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, World Hunger: Ten Myths and Small is Beautiful). These four books opened my eyes to what creates hunger and poverty: unequal access to land and means of production through industrialization of agriculture.  I also began to connect environmental degradation to the problems created by large scale operations. (Living on Earth)

I realized that my personal life was part of the problem or at least hitched to it. My husband and I lived a cushy life in a suburb of NYC. The money that supported our lifestyle emanated from a corporate world that keeps these inequities in place by concentrating power from wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

This caused a moral crisis in my life and set my life’s journey to discover the truth about my country’s incongruities between its ideals and actions.

The authors of these four books blew open the prejudicial beliefs about the “poor” – who are mostly working adults and white. Yet, now, just decades later, a small but vocal minority of citizens and legislators have paralyzed America into thinking there is something wrong about righting inequities and “floating everyone’s boat”. More kids are hungry, more families have no access to health care, and the middle class is poorer by $4,000 than in 1997. For all our wealth what good are we if we lose confidence in each other and a basic trust in the good acts of a democratic government on behalf of all its people?

Even the word entitlement has been corrupted, making seniors like me, who have worked hard all their lives, feel guilty about Social Security! The Baby Boomers are portrayed as a bolus of individuals born after WWII who are sucking the system of its wealth. These same Baby Boomers were the dreamers who moved the social justice agenda ahead during their 20’s and 30’s, and who gave their lives in Vietnam and who helped establish the environmental protection laws that now guard the last vestiges of our natural wealth.

These advances in the social experiment of democracy – the right of all persons to the equal opportunities to pursue happiness – these are now under assault by a contracted version of America which returns to survival of the fittest as its credo. If we sit back, it might become the law of the land.

The Government shut down will happen on October 1 if nothing stops it.

If you want to read what this means for thousands of employees and for the programs funded by these important programs, I suggest you read the details. You will realize how serious this is, and to me, how shameful that our nation’s people are of less concern to many legislators than proving their point to the opposing side. They should be removed by their respective communities who elected them.

The US Department of Education issued its plans:

US Dept of ED Contingency Plans

NSF Shutdown Plans: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2013/shutdown13001/shutdown13001.pdf. 

Health and Human Services:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/2011shutdown/nih.html .

Search the agency name:  agency name 2013 shutdown plans.

Ocean warming dominates the increase in energy stored in the climate system, accounting for more than 90% of the energy accumulated between 1971 and 2010 (high confidence). It is virtually certain that the upper ocean (0−700 m) warmed from 1971 to 2010 (see Figure SPM.3), and it likely warmed between the 1870s and 1971. {3.2, Box 3.1}. Read the pdf of the policy makers summary:

WGIAR5-SPM_Approved27Sep2013

The David Suzuki Foundation published a new blog post this month addressing the anticipated release of the IPCC report (released September 26.)  It is an interesting review of the major newspapers and publications that published denier articles as well as a version of the IPCC report by a climate change denier group. There are links to articles and the alternative report.

**The IPCC report outlines the transfer of heat from the atmosphere to the ocean surface. The Ocean Conservancy is tracing another phenomenon: acidification of the ocean at the interface with the atmosphere where increased carbon dioxide reacts with water and becomes a weak acid. Over time and with increasing concentration of CO2 in the air, acidification is increasing and wreaking havoc in the Pacific Ocean.

 The New York Times Article on Release of the 5th IPCC Report.

Guernica: With theses new risks and forms of engagement, how would you describe this time in history?

Terry Tempest Williams: I think we will look back at this time in history as a time of great transition. I think about a particular bridge in the Penobscot area of Maine. When we would drive from Bucksport to Belfast, we had to cross this bridge. For years, we would cross this rickety, rusted green bridge, and every time we crossed it, we would hold our breath and think, “I hope we make it across.” You’d see these large cables that were holding the bridge up, splitting, sagging, and the car would start rocking. And then, whew! Thank god, you’d be on the other side. We’d all sigh with relief.

And then, some time down the line, we noticed a new bridge was being built. We were still driving on the old bridge, but I was mindful each time we crossed the old bridge, of the beauty and the design, and at times, the precariousness of this new bridge that was under construction. I kept thinking, “I hope we make it to the new bridge before the old bridge falls down.” And then, one miraculous day, the new bridge was built and we were driving across it. The old bridge was no longer in use.

I feel like that’s where we are now. I feel like we are building this new bridge. I hope we can finish it in time. There are these two parallel realities that we’re facing: the old consciousness and the new consciousness. What will bring us together? Disasters? Economic crisis? Our awareness?

Read the whole interview with Terry Tempest Williams at Guernica Magazine:  Ground Truthing, interview by Devon Fredericksen (August 1, 2013)

Naked, muscles rippling, sweat shining, he heaves the flaming spear into the black of night igniting life on some fortuitous star.

We have been told that a meteor carrying life molecules may have seeded life on this blue planet eons ago. Think of it. God, the Johnny Appleseed of the galaxies, casting life particles upon the Heavens…

The Earth a woman, womb lay in waiting, enveloping to nourish the first forms of life. The whole pageant of living plants and animals, microscopic to elephantine, began that day when a meteor streaked into the fair winds and plummeted to earth. How I would have loved to be there, to watch the fiery descent and crash!

One time I wrote about the place I lived – Tucson, Arizona -the Place of Black Stones, tracing its geologic and natural history to the present day saguaro forests. Here it is below. I challenge readers to try a similar exploration,  learn how your homeland came to be what it is. I guarantee it will change the way you relate to the landscape because in the long-view, we are just a flash in the pan, a part of the enormity. It’s humbling and for some reason I found it comforting.

From Paean to the Earth (Williams, 2008, Four Feathers Press)

Changeling

Playing off Ken Burn’s title for his award-winning film about the National Parks (America’s Best Idea), I look at fracking as its polar opposite. The fact that it is in our repertoire of extraction technologies at all is another indication that we are still willing to let expedient methodologies lure us from harder decisions that truly turn us toward the cleanest forms of oil extraction.

Hydraulic fracking threatens watersheds and releases carbon monoxide gas (three times more heat-trapping than CO2). Below is a report from Cornell University demonstrating the increased threats to global ecosystems from fracking as compared to mining coal.

Howarth-EtAl-2011

We let this business opportunity drive another stampede to economic development and individual profit. Its true that new jobs at drill sites pay well. Desperate Americans and their families follow the gravy train to pull themselves out of poverty. They are not to blame.Shame on us that we provide opportunities that imperil workers, their families, and communities from the worst impacts of a highly polluting form of extraction. The National Academies Press just released a report on the health impacts of fracking on workers. Once again the technologies are in front of safety for workers; after they begin showing signs of health problems, then we begin to investigate.

Yes, going to natural gas as we make our way to alternative fuels that are not harmful to the environment is a strategy we have to use. But HOW we get there and HOW SOON we get there are once again subverted to benefit oil companies at the expense of everyone on the planet.

Human beings possess not only reasoning but the ability to realize when we have misunderstood something; gosh, maybe we could be wrong. The ability to recognize our mistakes and take a new path is commendable. There is too much staid language about energy independence at all costs that drives public opinion. Endangering our precious water sources, human- and wild- life while adding more heat-trapping gases into our atmosphere is not increasing national security. Don’t buy the rhetoric. Think for yourself.

In the last few days our local paper as well as the Huffington Post carried related articles that point to rapidly changing environmental conditions while we realize human health is changing in tandem. In Pensacola we have a black bear problem. These Florida natives are running out of habitat. Little vestiges of habitat (parks that once offered solace from the noise of the marketplace) shrink further in the name of progress. Since moving here in 2008 I’ve watched the horizon fill in with high rises, and any little stretch of forest planed for another enterprise.

Ariana Huffington published a long article yesterday from an international women’s conference in the UK focused on the redefining “success” which in its present definition is making us miserable. A parallel focus from the conference focused on the benefits of meditation. Health statistics for the UK are dramatic: 8 million people suffer from anxiety. The incidence of depression worldwide has risen to as many as 350 million according to the World Health Organization. In the U.S. antidepressants are commonly prescribed. After my father died I felt depressed.  My doctor recommended, you guessed, an antidepressant. I responded, “No thank you, I’d rather walk it off on the beach.”

So how are black bears, shrinking parks, depression and anxiety related? Turns out that humans need nature, open space, silence, and beauty to thrive. We are busily doing away with each of them and other species are in the wake.

Evidence of the vital connections between intact natural areas and human mental and physical health could fill this blog entry but its intuitive. No healthy human can deny they need some daily exposure to natural beauty to feel well. A life confined to an office and computer is a horrible life. Admit it. Even if you are playing a sport, like golf for instance, its the rolling green, the scent of warm earth under your cleats, the shade of trees and gurgling water that drop your heart rate, encourage you. Huffington suggests we redefine the meaning of success. She is palpating the Western cultural and Puritanical roots of our present day work ethic. It has planed forests, rerouted rivers, asphalted over Paradise with Pink Hotels to recall the old Joni Mitchell lyrics. We cannot continue to diminish nature without diminishing ourselves. Let’s mediate on that.

David Suzuki is a key environmental leader whom I trust and look to for clarity in these days of muddy commentary. The David Suzuki Foundation is Canada’s most effective environmental education and action center. The essay today poses a critical question relevant to these United States. We share the contiguous natural land, waters, and air that prevail on our shared continent and border.

More than 13 per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product depends on healthy ecosystems, according to Environment Canada briefing notes obtained by Postmedia News. By contrast, the Harper government’s pet economic project, the Alberta oil sands, represents a mere two per cent. But is 13 per cent a reasonable estimate of the “value” of nature? With the current perspective that elevates the economy above all else, it’s important to find ways to include nature’s value in our calculations so it doesn’t get ignored in decision-making. At the same time, it seems absurd to try to assign worth to something so vital we can’t survive without it.

Read the full essay