"What
is the use of a house if you don’t have a decent planet to put it on?"
- Henry David Thoreau
"On spaceship earth there are no passengers, we are all crew." Buckminster Fuller
This page will be a work in progress for a while. My intention is to figure out how I can contribute to the Great Work.
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The Tomales Bay Institute has reorganized and merged operations with Common Assets. Inquiries should be directed to our new headquarters: Common Assets and Tomales Bay Institute, PO Box 14967, Minneapolis MN 55114 or contact tbicoordinator@earthlink.net. A new organization website will be coming soon. In the meantime, please join our commons conversation at http://onthecommons.org |
Greenland is the world’s largest island, containing the second largest ice sheet on Earth, with a surface extent of approximately 1.75 million square kilometers and an average thickness of 2.3 kilometers (1.6 miles). Greenland’s ice sheet is the Northern Hemisphere’s largest remaining relic of the last ice age. The ice sheet is so massive it holds about 7 percent of all freshwater on Earth, enough water to elevate global sea level by 5 meters (16 feet) if it melted completely. Scientists estimate it would take several centuries of global warming to melt all the ice on Greenland. Although scientists are not forecasting a disastrous sudden loss of Greenland’s ice, they do observe considerable melting around the fringes of the sheet. This melting is only partly offset by the observed increase in the ice sheet’s thickness within the island’s highland interior. A 2006 study revealed that Greenland’s ice mass decreased about 101 billion tons per year from 2003-2005 (see Greenland Ice Sheet Losing Mass). Will this trend continue? Today, thanks to modern satellite technology, the quickest and easiest way for scientists to survey the polar regions on a daily basis is from the unique vantage point of space. The image above was made using data collected by the Defense Meteorological Satellites Program (DMSP-F13) Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) from April 1 to September 1, 2006. It shows the number of days snow was melting during that 5-month period. The SSM/I sensor measures microwave radiation emitted naturally from Earth’s surface. Dry snow and liquid water behave differently in the microwave region of the spectrum, a fact that allows scientists to distinguish melting snow from dry snow with SSM/I data. Marco Tedesco, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, was able to determine the number of days on which there was melting on the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet by comparing SSM/I measurements taken both during the day and at night through most of the spring and summer of 2006. Specifically, by taking a difference of those measurements at frequencies of 19.35 gigahertz and 37 gigahertz each day, Tedesco was able to use the SSM/I data to map where melt water occurred—even melt water below the surface. Darker blue shades show where there were more days of melting (up to 60 days or more), and lighter blue shades show fewer melting days (down to zero). The topographic shading along the coastlines is based on data collected by NASA’s ICESat satellite.
Such data are particularly relevant now that the Fourth International Polar Year (IPY) is underway. March 1, 2007, marked the beginning of the IPY. The IPY actually spans two full years (March 2007 through March 2009) and includes more than 200 science research projects involving more than 10,000 scientists from 63 nations. The goal of IPY is to increase international cooperation in polar exploration while advancing scientific understanding of these regions. One objective is to observe and measure the ways in which the polar regions affect, and are affected by, the global climate system. NASA is participating in the IPY Program, and Greenland is a major focal point of its research effort.
This posted from the Earth Observatory on April 12, 2007. |
| December December 30th, 2006 9:26PM
41 97%H 30%I 40windchill 4mph bar, steep
fall
Discovered today that I have gotten myself removed from the roles of fellowshipped clergy in the UUA. I didn't act by December 15th. The ironic piece is that I'd just decided I wanted to stay. Still, in relation to this whole project it may be just as well. Here I am now, a freelance pagan. My vocation for ministry remains, an indelible mark on my soul. Ministry will now have to emerge from the work itself rather than from an institutional affiliation. Harder, but cleaner. We'll see where it goes. |
| Wednesday August 23 2006
9:32AM 65 94%H 51I dewpoint 63
falling bar 0mph New Moon
"We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent
on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety
to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care,
the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft." - Adlai
Ewing Stevenson
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| Wednesday July 19th, 2006 69 93%H
46I dewpoint 67 0mph steady bar
Waning Crescent of the Thunder Moon
Part of this page will focus on regional information about issues relevant to the Anoka Sand Plain. Later, it will also include information about our watershed. The Anoka Sand Plain Aquifer in east central Minnesota (Figure 1) is a
large surficial aquifer consisting predominantly of outwash sands and
gravel. Most of the approximately half-million people living on the Anoka
Sand Plain derive their drinking water from the Anoka Sand Plain Aquifer.
The aquifer is considered sensitive to contamination from chemicals that
may leach through the vadose zone (Minnesota Department of Natural
Resources 1998). Areas overlying the Anoka Sand Plain have among the
fastest growing populations in Minnesota, with 1990s growth rates ranging
from 10% to 50%, compared to the statewide average of 6% (Figure... |
| Sunday July 16th, 2006 91
63%H 42I 2mph dewpoint 77 heat
index 104 falling bar Last Quarter Moon
Finished reading Berry's Great Work. Not a complete, careful read, but, as they said in the early 70's, psyching out the megacepts. Each time I re-encounter this book, Berry's sheer breadth and depth of knowledge amazes me. A profoundly educated man. The big picture, the total earth science scale picture, and transforming university, corporate, legal, and economic life into earth embracing activities feel beyond my personal reach, though I can act politically and during speaking opportunities to further them. Still, what does not seem beyond me is a combination of intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual activities focused on the Great Anoka Sand Plain, the Oak Savannah, and the Mississippi--local features which deserve, need, demand greater public appreciation for their vitality and longevity. That's the local. At the regional level I can renew my focus on Lake Superior. Tell stories, write articles, do research. On the level of faith journeys I can investigate the roots of individualism, liberty, freedom, and the right to private property. I can place these in the context of alienation, isolation, distantiation from the Earth. I can also continue my Great Wheel work and begin work on Rituals for the Earth, with an initial chapter on the Great Anoka Sand Plain. I can also work on a liberal faith tradition curriculum and workshops on these topics. At the art institute I can develop tours that help museum goers understand the critical, primary role of nature to the artist and to culture. I can also choose illustrations for my works that reflect and reinforce these ideas. On a personal level I can continue to raise books like the Great Work to consciousness and help others grapple with the implications of these issues in their lives. |
| Friday
May 5th, 2006 4:32PM
Karl Marx is a contemporary of Ralph Waldo Emerson. |
| Thursday May 4th, 2006
8:26AM
Realized Ricoeur's notion of second naiveté fits here, too. Nature has become so familiar to many of us that it has faded into the background of our lives. We see grass, trees, flowers as backdrops, the stage setting to our more important human lives, or as decorations for our homes. Ricoeur's contended that for people of faith, the Christian faith in his examples, who educated themselves in higher criticism of their sacred texts, had to learn how to return to those same texts with a second naiveté, that is, read them as if what they learned existed only in the background, instead, again, read the texts with the affection and awe of one whose naive belief gives them sacred power. In the same sense most of us have learned a bit about the natural world: the order of the planets, the rotation of the earth, plants come from seeds, that sort of thing, but in our day to day life we find it difficult to walk out the door and look at the grass. See the bumblebee flit from flower to flower, mathematically unable to fly. Find the bird's nest nearby and listening to the chirping of chicks. We see flowers as the purpose of a plant's life when in fact it serves only passing moment in a plant's yearly cycle of intense activity. We need to go outside, not far outside, perhaps just to the front steps, or over to a park area, or into the backyard, and stop. Stop. Listen. Smell. Look. Get down on your hands and knees and feel the wet earth. See the earthworms driven above ground by the rain. Drops of dew on a nodding daffodil. Still rolled leaves of hosta striking out for sunshine, not free yet from mother earth, reluctant to give up her children to the element of air. |
| Wednesday May 3rd, 2006 The Beltane
festival continues
"Every man's (sic) condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put." Emerson, Introduction to Nature. In my ongoing attempt to understand this strange and wonderful and dangerous country I love, two Teaching Company courses have helped: American Character and American Identity. Today, in the course on the American identity, the professor used 30 minutes to focus on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Transcendentalism, Henry David Thoreau, and the place of Transcendentalism and Emerson in forming the American identity. As I listened to the material about Emerson I heard my own story being told, yet being told in the life of another, a famous other, yet... As I listened, it stimulated a sudden aha. I have often seen the liberal faith tradition as one focused on method, rather than dogma or doctrine, but how to articulate that method? When I transferred my ordination to the UU communion, the process required a sermon preached to a small committee of fellow clergy and lay people, then a question and answer period. This was the Ministerial Fellowship Committee. The text I used for that sermon struck me as important the first time I read it, now I realize it gives voice to the method at the heart of my approach to the liberal faith. It is the first paragraph of the introduction to Emerson's essay, Nature: "Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship." This forces us into the spiritual trenches right now, today. It does not allow reliance on the insight and experience of others; this method requires an authentic spirituality based on your own experience and your own "...poetry and philosophy of insight...a religion of revelation to (you), and not the history of theirs." Emerson would not want his texts read as sacred texts, quite the opposite, but this passage allows us a glimpse into the power of a man pulling away from the European scholar, away from the Enlightenment, and toward a Romantic view of nature. Existentialism shares this posture with Emerson, though it differs from him in many other particulars. Both ways of being human, Emerson's and the Existentialist's, insist on honesty, authenticity, on the ancient Greek, Know thyself. I, too, stand here, not as an Emersonian, or a Sartrean or Kierkegaardian, but as myself, as, in the end, each of us must do whether we want to or not. There is no escaping the responsibility of understanding spirit and soul, even the vastness of the cosmos from within your own skin. |
| Tuesday May 2nd, 2006 still during the
Beltane festival 12:30AM
Ideas flowing, cramming their way in, feeling delicious and tempting. Sleep didn't come, so I've come downstairs to add some material I jotted down today while Sheila lectured on contemporary art. A priori: Epistemology and hermeneutics i. scientific method ii. intuition iii. humanistic scholarship A. Texts and images of the sacred: Poetry: including song The written literature of the world's religions Literature: especially the classical texts Painting, sculpture, ceramics, glass-blowing, architecture Traditions of music Movies Note: this implies a hermeneutics. I'm not yet ready to comment on hermeneutics. iv. liberal faith as an exercise in method, a spirituality of the still small voices.
Three foundations for a liberal faith: I. An American Shinto (cosmology and localology--a metaphysics of the spirits) Buttress: Process thought, Native American religion, the geography of place, The Great Wheel. Creation stories. Many. II. Existentialist Anthropology A. Soteriology i. Buber, I-Thou ii. Being human III. Communitarian: i. politics ii. economics
Ethical implications i live authentically ii live simple iii live light iv. be with and for others Eschatology i. the cyclical rhythms of the Great Wheel: birth, youth, maturity, old age, death, repeat ii. Life among the stars
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| Monday
Beltane May 1, 2006
After receiving the responses below and heading off to the MIA for a lecture on contemporary art, I began to get more and more pieces together in this puzzle. I'm feeling a deep need to articulate the foundations for a liberal faith, and to extend that thought by discussing hermeneutics, epistemology, ethics, perhaps even ecclesiology and soteriology. I also want to identify texts of the sacred (not sacred texts.) So many projects. So little discipline. We'll see. I've made a commitment to finish the Pilgrimage work. This one might follow it. Then, one on establishing your own liturgical year. |
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Monday Beltane May 1, 2006 11:20PM This
all sounds quaintly archaic, but consider a year without a corn crop, or a
wheat crop. Imagine a year, as happened not long ago in
The
fact is the start of the growing season still matters, and it matters for
the same reasons as did in the times when the Greenman died, only to be
reborn.
It
may be that reinstituting the ritual sacrifice of a young king makes no
sense, but we need now, as much as our Celtic ancestors did, a
reverence for the natural processes that sustain our life. What kind
of sacrifice can we make, are we willing to make, that all may be fed?
These
festivals and the Great Wheel itself provide a metaphor for a faith with
its root deep in the topsoil of the great plains, a faith as clear as the
sky on a May day after rain, a faith whose spirit blows through our hearts
like a gentle wind, and a faith whose heart beats to the rhythm of day and
night, cold and warm.
How
can we teach ourselves this faith? How can we spread a reverence for
the earth which sustains us?
Who
among us would put on Robin Hood’s feathered cap? Who among us
would dance with the May Queen?
This
may seem a side bar to the great religions of the world, but I have come
to believe that it is one of the three foundational elements of a liberal
faith, and one essential to our survival as a species.
A couple of responses to the above: Hi,
Jennifer. Thanks for the note.
In
my opinion the second is an existentialist view of the human individual.
This suggests humanism, but I find that movement tired and over identified
with a positivistic orientation toward science. Existentialism lifts
up individual responsibility, the often lonely road we humans have to
tread, and the inescapable fact: we all die alone. It also
emphasizes the ways in which we are alike, rather than the ways in which
we are different.
Third is a communitarian politics. This is the yin to the existentialist yang. It defines our shared responsibility, when we recognize, as Albert Camus suggested, that we all share in the “great brotherhood (sic) of death.” Or, as Jesus said, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Here we can also define the political implications of shared humanity with, say, Iranians, Iraqis, Chinese, even Hamas. From:
Matt and Jen Vacek [mailto:vacek@acegroup.cc] "This
may seem a side bar to the great religions of the world, but I have come
to believe that it is one of the three foundational elements of a
liberal faith, and one essential to our survival as a species. "
I look forward to your e-mails - thank you! (we met at the LaCrosse UU...) So, to my question; in your opinion, what are the other two foundations of a liberal faith?
Happy
May Day. And this one from Jim Johnson: We from the Great Plains who have great reverence for
our top soil and our new animals: the Black Augus calfs , the Mixed breed
Lambs, the chicks - Sliver Laced Wyandottes - Barred Rocks - Buff
Orpingtons, the Toulouse Goslings, the Rio Grande Wild Turkeys, and the
mixed breed kittens say - - - well said Charlie !!!
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One Pilgrim's Progress: A liberal way
A hermeneutic
An anthropology
Soteriology
A pan-theology Atheology
A practical theology:
congregational and pastoral care
social justice
A history of ideas
A postmodern liberalism, oxymoron?
"Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking." - Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983
My current notion is to do a series of essay/sermons with the conceit of presentations for Groveland. Groveland: A Liberal's Faith
In these essay/sermons I would research a topic as I do now for Groveland, one or two weeks worth, then sit down and write 2,500-5,000 words. The first topics would include an anthropology, a liberal faith, love, justice, beauty, truth, the supernatural, Romanticism...continue on until I get done. These essays would assume an audience like Groveland: a doctor, a lawyer, a clergy, a cellist, a painter, a 6th grade teacher, a writer, an editor, a tennis player, an engineer, staff person for a non-profit, a new teacher, a college professor or two. They include activists, pacifists, former Marines, and volunteers in art museums, planned parenthood, neighborhood organizations, and political parties. They mostly come from caucasian backgrounds, many from the East Coast, a few are lifetime Minnesotans, others from the Midwest.
They represent an educated, engaged group of Americans, largely part of the New Class, the intelligentsia, and have self-interests in line with membership in that class.
The first piece for Groveland will be on anthropology.
A note of context for all this work: I'm feeling a need to take a stand, a stand as distinct as the one I shared with so many others in the 60's, yet perhaps one now shared by few. The competing pressures of contemporary life, alternating between personal freedom and reach with no parallel in human history and a sense of powerlessness before the large market, military, and governmental forces malling our globe or, is it mauling, have left me confused. My need, and my direction, have geographical context, living on the exurban edge, far from my political allies and friends, yet snugged into a natural world of subtle, yet great beauty.
The monastic wants to come out and work, and pray. To focus on the aesthetic and the spiritual and the garden and family. The scholar needs even more time for the student life which has dominated and defined great chunks of my life, a focus which quiets, expands, and which demands expression so it does not become an unseemly hoarding, but rather a source for reflection and constructive thought. The poet must get to work, too. Writing, working on art, reading great literature, seeing fine movies and listening to the music he loves.
The stand is this: the time between now and death has already been counted, its days are a known quantity, though concealed. The space between home and the cities requires care in the use of travel, travel I choose to devote mainly to art and presentation of religious essays/sermons. Therefore, I will, even more than I have in the past, frame my work projects as matters for the student, the scholar and devote time to them in the measured and consistent way I know well. At some point I will turn that work over to the poet for creation of manuscripts: essays, poems, books. The monk's role will be to keep my spirit steady and refreshed, in contact always with the geist as it interacts my Self.
In the overall I place family first and the scholar's labor second, the monks rhythm will define my days, and the poets sensibility my creations.
Notes on the afterlife: