Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
I’ve found the Colorado equivalent of Minnesota’s Scientific and Natural Areas (SNA’s). Here they’re called Colorado Designated Natural Areas. “Designated Natural Areas contain a wide representation of Colorado’s rare plants and animals, unique plant communities, rich fossil locations, and geological features.” I enjoyed visiting these areas in Minnesota. Sounds like they’re a little more diverse here. Road trip!
Spring New (Rushing Waters) Moon
Today I’m making chicken noodle soup and Kate’s making Vietnamese pho. We’ll serve this at a Beth Evergreen leadership dinner for Rabbi David Jaffe, author of Changing the World from the Inside Out, a Jewish Approach to Social Change. Along with our friend Marilyn Saltzman, chair of the adult education committee, who is making a vegetarian squash soup, we’ll provide the soups for a soup and salad meal. I really like this low key involvement. It feels manageable.
Although. I am hoping that Rabbi Jaffe’s time here at Beth Evergreen, tomorrow through Saturday as a visiting scholar, will spur the creation of an activist group focused on some form of response to the Trump/oligarch era. In that instance I’m willing to move into a more upfront role, though I would prefer to remain a follower.
Then, there’s the Sierra Club. I wrote here about my excitement with Organizing for Action, Conifer. That was back in January, I think. Lots of people, lots of energy. Good analysis. I thought, wow. Here’s my group. Then, I never heard from them again, my e-mails went unanswered. Weird, but true. Weird and disqualifying for a group that’s organizing political work.
So I renewed my effort to connect with the Mt. Evans’ local group of the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Sierra Club. Colorado seems to work more through these regional clusters than as a whole. There are nine of them, covering the entire state. The Mt. Evans’ group includes our part of Jefferson County, Clear Creek County and a northern portion of Park County. It’s titular feature, Mt. Evans, is a fourteener (over fourteen thousand feet high) which has the highest paved road in North America leading to its summit. According to locals here it’s also the weathermaker for our part of Conifer.
I finally made it to a meeting a couple of weeks ago. When I came back, Kate said, “You seem energized.” I did. And, I hadn’t noticed. Something about that small group plugged me back into my reigning political passion of the last six or seven years: climate change. Oh, yeah. With OFA I’d tried to head back toward economic justice, my long standing motivation for political work, dating back to the UAW influences I picked up as a teenager in Alexandria. Guess the universe understood me better than I understood myself. Not much of a surprise there.
My mind began ticking over, running through organizing scenarios, figuring out how we could (note the we) raise the visibility of the Mt. Evans group, gain more members, influence local policy. This is my brain on politics. I might be willing to play a more upfront role here, too, though I want to explore other ways of being helpful first.
Anyhow, between these two, I’m sure I’ll get my political mojo working in some way. And that feels good. Want some soup?
Imbolc Valentine Moon
Don’t know why it took me so long, but I know how to make America great again. It will not require red baseball hats or xenophobic bluster. No, it only requires listening to the ideas of a Passionate priest, Thomas Berry. Berry wrote a small book, The Great Work. It influenced a turn in my political activity from economic justice to environmental concerns.
This 258 page book is a quick read and it introduces The Great Work. Civilizations, according to Berry, have a quintessential role that only they can perform. The one he identifies for our civilization is this: Creating a sustainable existence for humans on this earth. That is our Great Work. It is the way to make America Great again.
The phrase, the Great Work, comes from medieval alchemy. The primary, original material of the universe, the prima materia, in the alchemist’s lab can create the philosopher’s stone. The philosopher’s stone could turn base metals into gold or silver and extend the alchemist’s life.
We can take the prima materia of the U.S., its citizens and its land, put them in the alembic created by our need for survival and our need for economic justice, and turn up the heat until we have our philosopher’s stone. When we have it, we can use it to heal the earth and create good-paying jobs for all.
Then, then America will be great. Not only again, but still and not only still but into the future as well. May it be so.
Fall New (Hunter) Moon also, a black moon
Not everyone will like this. But I know Bill and Tom will.
Samhain Moon of the First Snow
Keystone rejected. Booyah! Bill McKibben wrote a while back that the amount of oil slated to pass through the Keystone pipeline would be enough to push us well over the 2 degree centigrade warming some folks still see as the maximum allowable. (My understanding is that 2 degrees is baked in and the key moves now are to keep us from going very far over that mark.)
Jeff Mirkley (D-Or) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) have introduced Keep It In the Ground legislation. I like the phrase. It’s short and to the point. Fossil fuels not mined or fracked or pumped cannot add to the carbon load of our beleaguered atmosphere.
Momentum seems to be shifting, at least so it seems to me. Big coal is on the defensive. Keep It In the Ground shifts the conversation. 350.org has organized a new mass movement for climate change. The Great Work has begun to capture more and more attention. The rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline signals, I hope, a willingness to challenge big energy in specific instances, not just in rhetoric.
On the homefront Kate and I shifted our money out of energy stocks earlier this year. We’re installing solar panels. If each of us align our lives as we can, to the Great Work-creating a sustainable human presence on earth, then those larger societal trends will have a strong base of political support. No action by any one of us will stop global warming; but, no action by all of us will cook our grandchildren.
Too, individual actions like owning an electric car, supporting President Obama’s climate initiatives, adding solar panels, taking money away from big oil and big coal, can have a ripple effect. As others know what you’ve done, they will consider what they might do. And, even if they do nothing more than change a vote, support candidates with strong environmental policies, then you’ve begun to create the kind of math that can change things.
Fall Falling Leaves Moon
Cultural immersion today at Spyhouse Coffee at the intersection of Broadway and Central in Minneapolis. I suggested it for a meeting because it was a coffee house. Quiet, right? Farthest thing from. Every table and most of the nooks and crannies were filled with twenty and thirty somethings, laptops up, heads over keyboards or deep in conversation with someone, hands gripping smartphones. Loud rock played from the timbered rafters. The password code for today, jackiebrown, scrawled on a chalkboard by the register.
This was today, Friday, at 11:00 a.m. When Michelle came in, I was a bit sheepish, “I didn’t realize this place was so. Popular.” She laughed. “It’s fine.” And it was. We got down to work. And, guess what. Michelle had her laptop open and we gazed at its screen. Occasionally I would check some material on my cell phone.
Full disclosure. I didn’t bring my laptop only because I couldn’t remember the password. Which I could reset it said. But only if I was on the internet. Which was where? Behind my password. Which I couldn’t remember. Ouroboros.
Lughnasa College Moon
Cool nights. I’m enjoying these. A great advantage of mountain living is that most nights are cool nights. Looking forward to that. Also, realized that after we move Coming Down the Mountain will take on a new meaning in our life.
The push this week is getting things ready to make efficient use of the SortTossPack folks. A major emphasis will be sorting art, objet d’arts, souvenirs, all that stuff that hangs around because it got set down long ago and never moved. This is the love it or leave it sort.
Which reminds me of a conversation with Tom Crane at the War Memorial during the Woolly Meeting last week. Pondering the weirdness around patriotism, the notion that the only patriots were veterans and flag wavers. I said, yes, and recalled the 60’s when the love it or leave it bumper stickers pretended to sort out the patriotic, worthy of citizenship folks from those of us with long hair and in opposition to the Vietnam War.
Love of country does not equate to love of government and pride in all its decisions. Nor does it equate to love of the economic system that sorts folks into the 1% and the 99%. Love of country has many roots and more than one flower.
With a son in the military I appreciate the dedication and sacrifice those who serve in the armed forces make, even in peace time. That some in the country want to remember and honor those who serve seems like a natural impulse to me. Most nations have needed warriors over the millennia and they are often the difference between freedom and servitude.
But, the warriors in our country serve at the discretion and for the policies of our elected officials. This means that the work they do passes through the sausage works of politics before it comes to marching orders. Not all wars (most wars?) are just. Thus, it is not reasonable to conflate opposition to war, or to a particular war, with opposition to the military per se.
The love I feel for my nation has three main sources: the people as a collective, the nobility of our experiment and the vast diversity of the land itself. Though we become separated by distance, by values, by history, by future potential each person in our nation is my fellow citizen, a person whose rights and responsibilities I respect.
This great experiment, whether a people with roots in other lands can flourish as one country, is a noble one because it represents in microcosm the world. The fact that our history has many regional, ethnic, even religious conflicts does not take away from the experiment, rather it underwrites it. Can we live with and grow together in spite of the depth of our differences? That a nation can persist, can become great under such circumstances is hopeful.
Finally, this land that is our land. The oceans and their shores. The rivers and lakes. Old mountains like the Appalachians and young vibrant mountains like the Rockies. Vast areas of level fertile soil in a humid climate. Even vaster areas of thin, rocky soil in arid climates. The forests and the wildlife, the farms and the ranches. The wild places and the domesticated. It is a wonder and a full lifetime, even two full lifetimes would not be enough to explore it.
It is this combination of people, political purpose and powerful geography that makes me love where I was born and where I will die. The good old U.S.A.
Lughnasa College Moon
The Northrup King building in Northeast Minneapolis houses artists, floors and floors and floors of studios: potters, painters, metal workers, collage artists, sculptors, print makers. 5 years ago a docent group did an event there during Art-a-whirl. The room in which the event was held had remnants of the building’s original purpose. Slick concrete columns fat as oil drums flowered toward the top, supporting the weight of feed grains that would come into the top floor of the building, then get separated below through the chutes still visible in the large open area.
While the band played, memories of another time, in the late 1970’s swirled around. Back then Northrup King was still an independent seed company, selling seed to farmers. But in the mid-1970’s a specter stalked the seed industry. Large pharmaceutical companies had become aware of the great concentration of power available for those who controlled patents on seeds, on their genetic makeup. A huge buyup of seed companies was underway.
A group attempted to stop the buyout of Northrup King by Switzerland’s Sandoz corporation, but failed. Northrup King, or NK, became a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical company and was later sold to Sygenta, an agrochemical and seed company.
You may recall a post here on July 12th of this year that contained this quote: “Today, humans rely on fewer than 150 plants for nourishment, and just three cereal crops—wheat, rice, and corn—make up more than two-thirds of the world’s calories; along with barley, they own three-quarters of the global grain market.” Wired This could be the strategy statement for that buyup, which went unchallenged.
The result has been the concentration and subsequent manipulation of genetic material for many of those 150 plants and an even tighter focus on the big three: wheat, corn and rice. An article in today’s Star-Tribune mentions just one small outcome of this process, but one with big consequences for those of us who raise bees, the use of neonicotinoids. This pesticide-slathered on the seed before it is sold to the farmer for planting-has a role in colony collapse syndrome which has led to hive losses as high as 20% even for professional bee-keepers. It weakens the bee or kills them outright, geometrically increasing the effects of habitat loss (often created by the same agrochemical folks through “round-up ready” crops), mites, bee strains unprepared for the hygienic requirements these changes produce.
More than trouble for bees is exposed in the article Bees on the Brink. Here is the true problem (which is not to trivialize the problems for bees, but to see its place in a much larger and more insidious problem):
“Though they represent just 2 percent of Minnesota’s population, farmers control half its land. And their embrace of the monocultures and pesticides that form the basis of modern industrial agriculture has been implicated in the decline of bees and pollinators.
But as long as farmers sit at the receiving end of an agri-chemical pipeline that fuels the nation’s rural economy, not much is likely to change…“
The centralized control of seed genetics, with its beginnings in the mid-1970’s, has now become the apex of a command and control apparatus that dictates how over 1/2 of Minnesota’s land is used. And that’s just Minnesota. That control is hardly benign. Witness the Minnesota river and its agricultural runoff polluted waters.
The payoff, the ransom for which these lands are held in thrall by big pharma and big agrochem, of course, is higher yields. This however only reinforces a decades long collusion between agriculture scientists at land grant universities like Purdue, University of Minnesota Ag campus and Iowa State. Long before big pharma got involved crops have been manipulated not for better nutrition but for higher yields and crops that are easily harvested, shipped and processed.
The result? A farm sector which pollutes our waters, uses huge amounts of petroleum products in fertilizers and fuels, kills our bees, diminishes genetic diversity and worst of all produces food with less nutritional value. This is criminal and should stop. Now.
Lughnasa Lughnasa Moon
Lunch with Margaret Levin and her year old son, Art, today. Art spent the lunch talking in his way, waiting politely for us to say something, then adding his own thoughts. Of course, his thoughts came out in a language too advanced for adults to understand and I could the occasional wave of frustration cross his brow as he explained and explained.
When not conversing, he engaged the perennial favorite activity of children who can now move, find the electrical outlet. He was very happy to discover a power strip not far from our booth. So happy that when returned to the booth and set down, he promptly found it again.
Margaret’s a working mom, directing the Northstar Chapter of the Sierra Club. She’s a friend and I count myself lucky to know her.
Summer Summer Moon
Bill McKibben’s voice has been raised in anger, in intelligent discourse, in pleading before the public and the government and recently in organizing a mass movement 350.org. He has an article in this week’s New York Review of Books elegaic opening paragraph:
“We may be entering the high-stakes endgame on climate change. The pieces—technological and perhaps political—are finally in place for rapid, powerful action to shift us off of fossil fuel. Unfortunately, the players may well decide instead to simply move pawns back and forth for another couple of decades, which would be fatal. Even more unfortunately, the natural world is daily making it more clear that the clock ticks down faster than we feared. The whole game is very nearly in check.” NY Review of Books, July 10, 2014.
This article reviews a book on changes in Antarctica, Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of a Mysterious Continent, and two reports: What We Know: The Reality, Risks and Response to Climate Change from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Climate Change Impacts in the United States: The Third National Climate Assessment by the US Global Change Research Program. Both of the reports are available in full at the links.
(Ice cores going back 800,000 years, drilled from Antarctic ice show there has never been a time in earth’s history when the carbon load in the atmosphere was more 290 ppm. The current level, updated monthly from a sensor on Mauna Kea, is above.)
The news is the same as the material I wrote about here while taking the Climate Change MOOC last fall. The Supreme Court today upheld the right of the Federal Government to regulate emissions from stationary sources. In yesterday’s paper Henry Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury under George II, and no Earth Firster proclaimed climate change as the problem of our time and proposed a tax on carbon emissions as a solution. All this does indicate climate change may soon become a matter of real, and painful, policy changes. And not just here, but across the globe.
It is the painful part that gives McKibben his dark tone. Changing over from a carbon fuel based economy will not be easy, cheap, or quick. In other words it’s not politically palatable. Just like social security and medicare reform. Policy makers have Pavlovian resistance to votes that may lose them support in their constituency. It will not be a simple matter to overcome that resistance. And yet it must be done. And it must be done now.
A portion of Paulson’s piece I liked a lot was his opening point “...if there’s one thing I’ve learned throughout my work in finance, government and conservation, it is to act before problems become too big to manage.” He echoes Thomas Berry’s much earlier work when he says, “Climate change is the challenge of our time.“
It is our work and one we must do together.
