Susan Feathers

Lisa Wyatt Knowlton’s blog, Tinker, is one that I highly value. Here is today’s blog about an entrepreuer who created a prize so generous as might turn the head of a leader bent on dictatorship or corruption toward higher ground.

See also The Ibrahim Prize, Mo Ibrahim Foundation.

 

See local currency working in the Berkshire region of Massachusetts using BerkShare

Go to NASA’s Vital Signs of the Planet for Key Indicators of the Planet’s health and function.

Go to Coyote Clan, Terry Tempest Williams’ personal website, to understand the planet’s soul and our relationship with land, water, sky, and wilderness.

Go to Living on Earth to learn how to bridge Faith and Reason.

Go to Moyers and Company for the words and wisdom, poetry of Wendell Berry.

Through these portals you will understand the Pulse of the Planet in 2013. We never hear these voices on daily radio and TV shows; rather we hear or watch the avarice in our halls of leadership. I just wanted to bring you this menu of thinkers, lovers, and human beings who truly have the pulse of our planet. Through them and others thinking and working in similar ways we can take heart that there is hope for democracy, for life on earth, and for our children. Perhaps you have knowledge of other similar “tribes”. Please share them here for other readers and for me! Namaste.

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