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To Be An Earth Pilgrim
Satish Kumar, Resurgence blog
I was recently invited to give the First Richard Sandbrook Memorial Lecture in Wimbledon. Here is a summary of what I said:
It is a great pleasure to give the inaugural Richard Sandbrook lecture. I knew Richard well and we would often share the sleeper train down to the South-West, he travelling to his beloved Eden Project, and me home from London to Hartland on the north coast of Devon. Richard had a supreme sense of optimism, and in this time of mounting concern about climate change and other environmental ills, I believe we need to transform our attitude to Nature from one of fear to one of love. For many environmentalists, global warming has become the new Hell that is brandished to terrify people into action. But if we are to make the changes that are needed to bring our relationship with the planet back into balance, then a new relationship with Nature is required, one founded on the power of love rather than the force of fear.
For me, this relationship of love has its roots in my birth-place, Rajasthan. There my mother taught me to treat Nature with reverence. “Nature is the greatest teacher”, she said, “even greater than the Buddha, for even he learned his philosophy of ‘interdependent arising’ from sitting under a tree”. All of Nature is sacred for me. It is a place of divinity, where I can gather a sense of the sacred. I go to nature to pray and to meditate, recognising that God is present in every blade of grass, in every bee, and in every drop of water. Perhaps the reason that we do not get enough enlightenment these days is because we do not take the time to sit under a tree.
To be an Earth Pilgrim is to revere Nature as our sacred home, and see all our life as a sacred journey to become at one with ourselves, with others and with Nature. The starting point for being an Earth Pilgrim is humility in the face of Nature’s immense generosity and unconditional love. Take the apple tree. We eat the fruit that has been freely given – and finding a bitter pip, we spit it out. Here the pip immediately starts to cooperate with Nature. The soil provides hospitality for the seed, which is nourished by the rain and the sunshine. Soon the pip has literally grounded itself and realised itself as another tree bearing innumerable apples and countless pips. When people ask me about reincarnation, I point to the apple tree. And when offering its fruit, the apple tree does not discriminate between human and animal, educated and uneducated, between black or white, man and woman, young and old. All are equal, and all receive…
(29 August 2008)
Miraculous survivors: Why they live while others die
John Blake, CNN
… What do these survivors share in common? That’s the question that the author Laurence Gonzales has long tried to answer. Whenever a disaster hits — a cyclone in Myanmar; an earthquake in China; a climbing accident in Alaska — Gonzales scans the headlines for the stories of those survivors who made it out alive when all others perished.
… Gonzales explains what makes these survivors special in “Deep Survival,” a book that dissects the psychological and spiritual transformation that takes place within people who survive against all odds.
Most of these survivors share the same traits, Gonzales says.
“These are people who tend to have a view of the world that does not paint them as a victim,” he says. “They’re not whiners who are always complaining about the bad things that are happening to them and expecting to get rescued.”
Gonzales says at least 75 percent of people caught in a catastrophe either freeze or simply wander in a daze.
“The first thing people do when something bad happens is to be in denial,” Gonzales says. “People who make good survivors tend to get through that phase quickly. They accept the evidence of their senses.”
Gonzales says many of the disaster survivors he studied weren’t the most skilled, the strongest or the most experienced in their group.
Those who seemed best suited for survival — the strongest or most skilled — were often the first to die off in life-or-death struggles, he says. Experience and physical strength can lead to carelessness. The Rambo types, a Navy SEAL tells Gonzales, are often the first to go.
Small children and inexperienced climbers, for example, often survive emergencies in the wilderness far better than their stronger or adult counterparts, he says.
They survive because they’re humble, Gonzales says. They know when to rest, when they shouldn’t try something beyond their capabilities, when it’s wise to be afraid.
… Survivors tend to be independent thinkers as well.
… Survivors also shared another trait — strong family bonds. Many reported they were motivated to endure hardships by a desire to see a loved one, Gonzales says.
(8 September 2008)
Required reading for anyone concerned about survival, peak oil or otherwise. -BA
Evil: It’s the New Good!
Mark Morford, San Francisco Chronicle
Shut up and drink your high fructose corn syrup, sucker
—
The devil isn’t evil, he just has lousy PR.
Examples? They are legion. Here’s one the Powers That Be desperately hope you’ll swallow, a nasty piece of marketing gall meant to stab at your intelligence and bitch-slap your intuition, but which is nevertheless being force-fed to you as happy environmental manna, a viciously deformed version of something called “progress.”
Here is “clean coal.” Isn’t it beautiful? Truly, the hell-bound ad agency that coughed up that one even had the nerve to film a commercial featuring Kool and the Gang’s “Celebrate” playing over perky scenes of manic Americans sucking down electricity like John McCain sucks down extra oxygen, claiming that coal is America’s namesake resource and we should therefore kneel before it and worship it like apple pie and horrible sex-ed and Lindsay Lohan’s nipples. Did I mention the coal industry’s PR people are going to hell for this? Count on it.
There is, of course, no such thing as “clean coal.” It’s as impossible as a humanitarian Republican, as insulting as Homeland Security. Even Obama gets it wrong in his support of this lethal oxymoron. There are only two options: Brutally pollutive coal extraction and burning techniques, rapacious strip mining and millions of acres of destroyed forest and contaminated water tables and toxified air and one of the most environmentally destructive energy sources on the planet; or new and slightly less horribly pollutive coal extraction/burn techniques that attempt to rein in a few of the more toxic pollutants, but not including carbon dioxide or, you know, cancer and death. That’s about it.
Translation: “clean coal” is not only one of the most insidious, repugnant oxymorons — right up there with “friendly fire” and “conservative think tank” and “Alaskan teen virgin” — it’s also one of the deadliest.
Not good enough? Don’t you worry.
Here is high-fructose corn syrup. It appears the corporate whiners down at the Corn Refiners Association, unhappy with the billions they’ve already made on the staggering rise of their dreadful product and apparently tired of their gunk getting such a bad rap from every doctor and health mag from here to the Mayo Clinic, have launched a sweet little counter-offensive aimed at proving their goop is, well, slightly less evil than you thought.
Here is their cute little commercial: …
(10 September 2008)
Gauging 21st Century Environmentalism
Simon Donner, WorldChanging
… The Sabah museum has been on my mind since the debate about oil drilling on the outer continental shelf of the U.S. began this summer. No mistaking: the debate is pure politics. It is a grand distraction from the real issues facing the U.S. — and the world. The amount of recoverable oil on the outer shelf is far too small to have a meaningful impact on U.S. oil imports let alone provide the political Holy Grail of energy independence. The chorus of “drill, drill, drill” threatens to short circuit the badly needed conversation about fuel efficiency, alternative energy, and reorienting the transportation.
The debate also presents a great opportunity to shift the environmental movement into the 21st century.
… Drilling on the outer continental shelf may be a poor idea because of the low amount of recoverable oil, and because it distracts from the real issues facing Americans. Drilling in select environmentally-sensitive regions, like the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, is certainly a bad idea. But those of us in the most consumptive of continents need to face the reality of the 21st century. Bans on oil exploration on our continental shelves (absent a radical reduction in oil demand), or, for that matter, bans on logging in our boreal forests (absent a radical reduction in pulp and paper use), or, increase in corn use for ethanol (without decreasing other corn demand), only exports the local environmental effects of resource extraction.
This silly debate may be a watershed moment. We could sit on the sidelines and despair the lack of rational political discourse on energy. Or we could get out there and talk about the global nature of the challenges we face.
Let’s use this lemon of a debate about offshore drilling to talk about protecting coastlines around the world, not just at home.
(10 September 2008)
Although Simon may be theoretically correct about the need to think globally, the reality is that we humans are intensely local creatures and political movements must recognize that fact. -BA
