Gulf Storms

Afternoon ReverieThe coastal lands along the Gulf of Mexico are refreshed by violent storms much like certain kinds of forests are renewed by fire. To human inhabitants neither storms nor fires are welcome. Our human habitation can be likened to Tinsel Town—fragile infrastructures in the wake of Earth’s movements and transformations of land, bodies of water, climate and living communities.

Natural storms are “bad enough” from our perspective, yet we fail to realize that we’ve created far greater storms in oil spills, ecological disturbances, and overheating the biosphere. Equally disruptive is the steady depletion of top soil through industrialization of our food supply. One spoonful of topsoil contains millions of creatures and constellations of minerals that in concert allow seeds to germinate. Comparatively gigantic invertebrates move silently through this groundwork under our feet, transforming it, aerating and loosening soil so that probing rootlets can plumb its treasure, drawing life.

Animate Earth…this is the seat of renewal. Under our feet, under roads, under massive buildings and bridges, miles and miles of houses, businesses, playgrounds, and landfills, the earthworks carry on their life-generating web. We build over them, they disappear and we forget the source of life. Small farmers know it; migrants who hand harvest know it; backyard gardeners rediscover it, and food banks appreciate it. Yet governments and chambers of commerce exclude earthworks from their ledgers and blueprints and planning. The ground under our feet – no longer felt between our toes – recedes from our awareness.

Until a storm.

Harbinger of awareness, storms literally tear us from our beds, exposing us to the very smell of earth, the touch of wind and rain – violently thrust upon us like a smack to the cheek: Wake up, Man!

Surely there are gentler ways to learn how to live. But, alas, we require evermore fury to capture our attention in the virtual realities of modernity.

Assignment: I dare you to take off your shoes, go outside and plant them in soil. Introduce or reintroduce your feet to the planet—whichever may be the case. I guarantee it will be amazing. Some of us still remember that day school got out for a long, summer’s vacation (about two and a half months of roaming, lounging, and Bazooka bubble-gum popping) when we ceremoniously removed our shoes to go barefoot for months at a time. That experience for kids in the U.S. A. disappeared about three decades ago. A new generation has never felt soil between their toes. Will they be thinking of mining other planets, interstellar travel, and other-worldly scenarios? Are we on the brink of floating off the planet itself in a cloud of twitter. Well, if we are going to have our “heads in a cloud” we’d better keep our feet on the ground!

 

DC Reflections

During a recent business conference that concerned the impending Sequestration and its impact on university funding, my hope for a decent future found purchase in the basic human quality of resilience or even rightly applied pugnaciousness.  The meeting – American Association for State Colleges and Universities Grant Resource Center Funding Forecast – draws university grants professionals and faculty to an annual heads together on how to win funding to educate the nation’s youth. This year in particular could be termed “Reading the Tea Leaves.” As the Legislative Branch stampedes toward the fiscal cliff chased by a frantic Executive Branch, the rest of us are left to wonder whether we’ll have a job, schools can operate, students continue on in higher education, or the transportation and financial infrastructure upon which our nation has thrived will remain in tact. Many threatening scenarios are spiraling around communication networks AD NAUSEUM, so much so I predict record viewing of the Academy Awards for sheer relief from the worry. At least the year’s films are somewhat predictable! Funding for education will surely take a hit right when we are trying to graduate more students from college in technical fields, put Veterans to work, make sure preschool kids get a decent start, keep us safe from cyber threats, and figure out how to mitigate climate change.

My hope stems from meeting or reconnecting with friends and colleagues from across our county who are devoted to their institutions and communities. There is no loss of hope among us; in fact we are made more savvy by contemplating the loss of funding and termination of funding sources we’ve depended upon. There are many ways to peel a banana. So if a bunch of grants professionals respond so, why not the rest of the country? We are by long tradition the kind of people who “dig in” when times are tough. Maybe we can do a lot with little on a local basis – with the exception of  the federal programs that work at scales that address widespread problems beyond the community’s abilities.

Its clear to me that communities and institutions will be required to collaborate and coordinate projects in order to win funding.  That is not a bad thing. The fact that there is less money will have impacts that we should work to prevent: early preschool funding; Pell grants; community grants that target very low income and high health disparity neighborhoods; innovation grants that support entrepreneurs, creators, scientists and students to try novel ideas for solving common problems. This is what agencies are trying to puzzle through right now, to use what funding they will have to make as big an impact in the right direction as possible.

All of us can make a call, write, blog, show up or support advocacy groups for education, health and welfare, and new policies and technologies for a sustaining environment.  The colleagues I had the privilege of sharing ideas among inspire me. From every region of our country there are caring, intelligent individuals working to make the best out of the mud pie this Congress continues to deliver.

Winters

Winter Trees_Heather Williams Hufton Artist

Artist, Heather Williams Hufton, “Winter Trees”

I have not been in a winter environment in over 25 years. Vail, Colorado ski trip at Christmas with my family. Tom 14, Heather 13. It was crowded on the lifts, long lines; the latest equipment complex, the clothing expensive and elegant, the crowd rich. Slope fees were about $50 per day per person. I wonder what they are today.

The mountains were overtaken with human activity by then.

Twenty-five years prior I whizzed down the nearly vacant slopes of White Face Mountain, Adirondack chain near the Canadian border. A 13-year old girl myself, dressed in jeans, heavy sweater, and corduroy coat that flapped in the wind…on Monarch skis—polished oak with spring bindings similar to what we use for cross-country skiing today…

At the lift only a handful of skiers stood in line. Riding the gondola the white mountains soared in panoramic splendor, the air freshened by millions of conifers resplendent in winter garb. Up there, suspended, no planes cutting the sky and few buildings in site below (the Olympics had yet to be held there and change the village into a metropolis) I shared the mountain’s life. And, standing at the crest of a slope, listening to the wind playing on the needles of each tree, I breathed with that mountain and felt one with it. Silent except an occasional swish of a lone skier plunging by or a joyful shout of one exalting in the force of the mountain on his body…hugged, enveloped by the mountain spirit.

The days when a storm brought steady snowfall that muffled even those few sounds, I felt alone in a universe of wonder and power of such indescribable grandeur I thought I would burst wide open. And at the storm’s end the sun sparkled on icicles and frosted panes and everyone’s cheeks grew rosy and eyes clear as gemstones, and every warm-blooded mammal blew clouds of smoke from its nostrils like a herd of wild horses in winter…

                        High on the Canadian ridge that sweeps along the Champlain Valley, I stand alone at the top of a long, snow-covered slope.  The tall blue pines lining this skier’s trail are whispering long tales.  Into my nostrils floats a heavy wet scent – harbinger of a storm.  The trees are still. I hear the drawing in and letting out of paper breath, the squeak of wax on snow as I shift my weight, peering over the forest fringe to cloud encircled peaks.   If I were not thirteen I would linger here.  But alas, I jump into the whipping wind as it reaches my temple of silence, plunge headlong into the mountain’s challenge – a marauding horde of snowflakes in pursuit. – from Canned Peaches and White Flour©, A Memoir by Susan Lee Feathers

The Green Fire We Must Ignite

Aldo Leopold has long been a guide to me. He is one of the great conservationists of our time. Below is a new film about him and about the Land Ethic he developed over his career as a forester in the U.S. Forest Service. Leopold beautiful essays and scientific papers are nearly 60-80 years old yet many of them still resonate with present day citizens and scientists. He captured in words the wisdom that we need today to respond to climate change—to create a new vision and set of principles to guide our decisions as individuals, communities and nations. Here is the trailer:

Mind and Life Research

IMG_0967About 25 years ago His Holiness, The Dalai Lama, began a collaboration with neurocognitive and social scientists to study the relationships between modern science and religion or spiritual philosophies. As these conversations have been exploring the depths of mind through Buddhists training and principles, with quantum mechanics and neuroscience, the once perceived bodies of knowing and experience begin to merge.  The latest series of sessions taped this time at a monastic order  in Drepung Monastery in Mundgod, Karnataka, India are revealing hidden capacities of the mind to heal and the remarkable plasticity of the adult brain to rewire itself through meditation and the practice of compassion.

Why should you watch this? Top Western scientists give what constitutes a primer on the latest understanding of how the brain works, the history of how science came to be influenced by Decarte’s view which separated matter from spirit or mind.  These conversations illustrate how these two ways of knowing are coming together with new understanding of how the brain processes information and forms thought, quantum theory, and the experiences of monastics through years of meditation.

I will listen to these sessions continuing to mine new meaning and understanding. To watch one session you need to devote a couple of hours and be willing to patiently listen. As they stop often to clarify concepts for the Dalai Lama, your own questions are answered or concepts refined and confirmed. For example, I now have a beginner’s understanding of what quantum physics means in terms of interconnectedness. And this is just rudimentary because the laws of nature at subatomic levels are not the same as we experience in our daily lives, or perhaps better said, with our Newtonian understanding of how things work.

Dear President Obama

January 29, 2013

Dear President Obama,

Because you are committed to leading the world and our nation to respond to the realities of climate change, I encourage you to explore the example of the Rocky Mountain Institute. The RMI has been at work for the last 30 years gathering the creative minds and resources of business leaders in America who have created the path to energy independence and non-polluting technologies. Most important, however, are the RMI principles that are at the heart of the entrepreneurial spirit. I recommend that whatever you and your cabinet and staff put into action to turn toward a sustaining energy policy will follow similar rules of engagement. As you will see RMI leaders did not wait for the government to make changes but rather turned to creative minds and business leaders. As a result, the RMI has fostered incredible breakthroughs in new technologies. The solutions are already here. What you can help do is to bring it to scale.

The Eight Guiding Principles of Rocky Mountain Institute[1]

I highly recommend that Secretary Chu read Reinventing Fire[2].

Respectfully,

Susan Feathers

Pensacola, Florida

Cc: Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Barbara Boxer (D-CA) Senator David Vitter (R-LA), Fred Upton (R-MI), Henry Waxman (D-CA), Representative Doc Hastings (R-WA), Ed Markey (D-MA)

[1] Rocky Mountain Institute: http://www.rmi.org/Guiding%20Principles, Retrieved January 29, 2013.

[2] Reinventing Fire: http://www.rmi.org/reinventingfire, Retrieved January 29, 2013.

How to shape the future

Florida HammockOne of my personal occupations now is figuring out how to make a living doing what I believe is most important to do and to find joy in that process. Right now I am giving most of my time to worker-bee matters at a local university where I spend my day searching for funding for faculty research. I am wasting my creative energy, my intent in living, at something that brings me a paycheck, a medical plan, and a retirement account. So, I am trying to reinvent myself to continue “working” at home so that as I age, my mind and spirit can continue to contribute to the culture that I believe we are capable of creating together—a culture that values the ground under our feet, and that while we are in our virtual lives together, we  thoughtfully breathe the sweet air, notice the plants and animals that enrich our lives, and sink our feet deeper into the Earth, and DEFEND IT. What are we creating with the fantastic tools that the Internet and hand-held devices now make possible? Everywhere I see the creative energy that EVERYONE of us has inside of us wasted on low-level and spurious sound bytes on social marketing sites where very few people are sharing their best ideas and heart-felt thoughts. Here is a very thoughtful interview with Seth Godin who has devoted his life to exploring these ideas and has contributed to society by creating tools like Kickstarter, a crowd-sourcing site for artists to raise funds for their creative ideas. His point is that we are reaching too low when the tools everyone has access to (we are our own publisher, marketer, etc.) make the potential to draw people to an idea or take action, or use something we create that promotes the social good, a reality. Godin points out that we still think in hierarchical patterns, the industrial pecking order, rather than the reality that the net has created – anyone can create now, not just the people on the New York Times best seller list, or the Fortune 500 companies, etc. Yet, most of us have not noticed. In regards to creating a nation that leads on climate change and retools its very foundation to utilize non-carbon based energy sources, this realization is critical. Our leaders and citizens are locked into the belief that this is not feasible. The reason for our lack of vision is that our system is fundamentally set up to bring huge profits to a few individuals for something that is a part of the human commons – access to energy. So its up to us to create the new economy and new sources of energy and free ourselves from the system that is an energytocracy. Many people have been working on this for a long time but they have drawn few people to their ideas. How can we each help market these ideas so they become more widely embraced?

Walking Our Talk?

David Suzuki Foundation Legislative Action – Might Give US Citizen’s an Approach to Working with Congress. I like their “Let’s put some green in the next federal budget.”

Hogan Lovells Government Relations Report on Energy and the Environment: The courts and Executive Branch are likely to continue to drive the direction of energy policy in 2013. Key Administration priorities for 2013 include: reducing GHG emissions, and other pollutants; cleaning and restoring water resources; addressing climate change and energy production on public lands; reducing imports of crude oil; and, mitigating potential environmental impacts of domestic production. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee is expected to conduct an inquiry into whether the export of liquefied natural gas (LNG) is in the public interest. Hydraulic fracturing will continue to receive attention on the Hill. The Energy and Natural Resources Committee will also consider the development of a clean energy standard and can be expected to increase the number of oversight investigations of the departments and agencies under its jurisdiction. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) is Chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee with Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) remaining as Ranking Member. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) will continue as Chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee and Senator David Vitter (R-LA) is the new Ranking Member. In the House, Fred Upton (R-MI) remains as Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee with Henry Waxman (D-CA) as Ranking Member. Representative Doc Hastings (R-WA) will continue to serve as Chairman of the Natural Resources Committee with Ed Markey (D-MA) as Ranking Member (although a Senate bid may take the Congressman’s attention away from Committee work in early 2013).

Write these Congressional Leaders directly to let them know your thoughts on Tar Sands Oil Mining and the Keystone pipeline, as well as other energy and environmental issues.

View this video from the National Resource Defense Council to educate yourself on the environmental impact of mining tar sands all in the name of national security.  The pipeline will cross the U.S. and move oil from Canada to the Gulf. The Nebraska governor just changed his mind to support the pipeline in Nevada. He had previously opposed it and now believes it is a safe technology. What changed? Not the technology. Pressure for revenue and jobs once again cave resolve against harmful technologies that cause long term impacts on ecosystem and human health – all for short term gains. An old story in America and the cause of environmental regulation. Greed is a powerful force.

Read this report below by the Sierra Club: Tar Sands Pipelines Safety Report

2011-02-safety

On President’s Day Weekend, Sierra Club and 350.org will stand in solidarity to press President Obama to reject the Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline and to live up to his promise to take a leadership role to reduce the U.S. contribution to climate change and develop a national agenda for alternative clean fuel development. Those are the kinds of jobs we need.

Starting Over

BeachedWith the passing of my father last month I realized that I am no longer anyone’s child and that I have entered full adulthood – at 67 and counting. That is remarkable in and of itself but even more startling is the realization that I am starting over with the perspective of both my parents’ lives, beginning to end. The earth shifts. I had not read about this and am taken entirely by surprise.

What does it mean? I think it brings my own life more sharply in focus. Here’s what they inherited and what they did with it in the world they helped create. Now what am I doing, creating? Quite sobering as I approach my seventh decade on Earth.

While I have grieved my father’s passing, I have also experienced an unexpected sense of joy and peace, the deep understanding that I need not worry about anything. This has to be coming from a realm other than this planet because there IS certainly much to worry about. I choose to follow the guidance but to not stop working for a better future for my children and all the children to come. Is the message that we are to do what we can to help but to also find joy and to celebrate the gift of life on Earth?  I think so. Perhaps even it is a direct message from Dad and Mom (the original worry-wart).

Dad’s common refrains were “this too shall pass” and “in all probability things are unfolding just as they should be”.  I remember being frustrated by both when I wanted him to engage in cerebral hand wringing about climate change or poverty  or some other massive, intractable problem. He just refused to go there. I thought then it was a flaw but now I am rethinking that.