Five Earths and the Goldilocks Planet

and remembering the Wombles of Wimbledon

The Wombles were seen over-ground
recently, wombling freely in
Leicester Square Gardens
to help launch the national
anti-litter and fly-tipping campaign
"Stop the Drop"

I have become a bit of a bandit environmentalist.  No, you won’t find me cleaning up field, factory and forest like some sort of American Womble, but I have been known to stick plastic bottles I find in parking lots on people's cars.  I mail back empty, postage-paid envelopes to credit card companies in order to waste the time and money of big banks.  And I break socially accepted comfort levels by doing things like admitting, without apology, that the winter jacket of mine that someone just admired was purchased at the local thrift store.  I’m not really proud of this behavior.  I know it’s unfairly provocative and, what’s more, it’s not like I don’t buy new clothing, use a credit card or purchase beverages in plastic bottlesI .  But some days I get so discouraged and freaked out that I can’t help myself.

I think it all started the first time I tried to follow Colin Beavan’s No Impact Week, a week-long program designed to use daily awareness and practices to decrease or eliminate chemical and oil-based consumption thus decreasing my “carbon footprint.”  So that includes gaining awareness and reducing consumption of plastics, energy, gasoline, cleaning products, food, clothing, toothpaste, candy, toilet paper and on and on and on.  Then again, maybe it started before that.  Maybe it started during those long walks on the plastic-littered beaches.  Or maybe, when I first learned about the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” a mass of floating plastic in the Pacific Ocean the size of Texas.
In case you haven’t heard, because of the circular flow of currents in this particular part of the Pacific, discarded plastics collect and stay there floating around like some enormous plastic stew.  Some if it breaks down to pieces tiny enough to be eaten by marine life.  Those little fishes that don’t die from this diet are eaten by other fish, that are eaten by other fish, that are eaten by humans.  So, when I look at a plastic bottle or a plastic grocery bag these days, I can’t help but think that someday I may be eating it.  And the thought of eating dead, decayed dinosaur food, which is what the oil in those plastics really is, sort of turns my stomach.

Once my mind starts going off in these sorts of directions I start feeling really trapped.  Admittedly, it is obsessive thinking, and maybe I should, as they say to the kids in martial arts, “turn around, sit down and meditate.” But when I do that it becomes clear to me that, all alone, I can change very little.  That’s when I attempt to force my consciousness on other people with a sort of naïve notion that maybe together, as a human system, we can change things.  And sometimes, after that, I get to feeling all optimistic and start humming Lennon’s “Imagine,” while faithfully reducing, reusing and recycling.  And that works.  For a day or two.

The truth that I can’t seem to avoid, that haunts even my meditative efforts, is that this is one serious mess we’re in.  And there are huge, profit-making industries that are happy enough to pay lip service to the 3Rs mentioned above while steadfastly circumventing efforts as benign as ending the use of plastic bags.  An even more mind-blowing fact is that we Americans are consuming the Earth’s resources so voraciously that if everyone on the planet were to assume our lifestyle we would need five Earths to meet that demand.  Five Earths? Five?  So that means that any movement toward social justice being worked on by well-meaning humanitarians cannot be underpinned by the notion that ending hunger and relieving poverty involves encouraging and helping suffering communities to move closer to our way of life.

  A basic precept of the Awakening the Dreamer Symposium, is that those of us living in a paradigm entirely reliant on consumerism and an endless growth economy are functioning under mistaken assumptions.  I find myself feeling really grateful for that powerful statement because (when I remember it) it allows me to bypass any instincts toward judgment, blame or remorse and encourages me, instead, to expend my energy on attempting to reveal what those mistaken assumptions might be.

In a TED talk titled “Addicted to Risk,” Naomi Klein, author of “The Shock Doctrine,”  states, “As a culture, we have become far to willing to gamble with things that are precious and irreplaceable.”  When thinking about global warming, she says, we tend to assess risk through an economic spyglass, and we come up with some pretty crazy ideas in order to delay any action that might threaten our economy.  Among those, are questions we ask ourselves, like, “What is the latest possible moment we can wait?" Or, "How much hotter can we let the planet get and still survive?”  Klein addresses a lot of difficult truths in her talk, but it is this statement of hers that I find the most compelling: “[we have an] assumption that we can safely control the Earth’s awesomely complex climate system as if it had a thermostat, making it not too hot, not to cold, but just right, sort of Goldilocks style.”

The remark is so awesomely ironic that it made me laugh.  But I stopped laughing when the scientific community announced the discovery of a “possibly earthlike planet affectionately nicknamed Goldilocks,” because that busy, often overly-creative mind of mine started to wonder if we were being fed subliminal messages that if we trash this planet we can always move on to the next. But really what matters is not whether or not there is subliminal messaging of that sort going on.  What matters is, how do we really feel about trashing this planet?  And what measures are we willing to take to protect it?  

        This evening, my husband and I are going with some new friends to hear Bill McKibben speak in nearby Essex, NH.  McKibben, author of Eaarth, founder of 350.org and active with Tar Sands Action, has become a powerful leader in the environmental movement. I’ve come to think of attending events like this as large, group meditation.  I even entertain fantasies that after McKibben talks we’ll all put our hands together, throw them in the air like a cross-country team before the big meet, and shout out “Yop!”  These days, Tar Sands Action is heading up efforts "to blow the whistle" on oil-backed politicians.  I’m considering joining them in more local efforts.  There's a picture of them below, all dressed up like referees in Washington, DC. Yikes!  Maybe I am becoming a Womble afterall.

On Tuesday, January 24, Tar Sands Action "assembled the
largest crowd of referees Capitol Hill has ever seen
to blow the whistle on the routine corruption that
passes as business as usual in Congress"

Links of Interest

The Wombling Song

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ2mJPSccvo

Naomi Klein's "Addicted to Risk"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZhL7P7w3as

No Impact Man

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9Ctt7FGFBo

Oh, and you can connect with 350.org and Tar Sands Action on Facebook

Let's Face It: All Alone, I'm Not That Interesting.

Photo courtesy of Mike Sanborn

     In the Community Resilience Circle I have been meeting with, an outgrowth of the Transition Newburyport initiative in my city, we have been talking about the effects of profit-driven societies on human relationships.  It turns out there's a lot to think about there, but one of the points I walked away with is best expressed by Charles Eisenstein in his article. "To Build Community, an Economy of Gifts," published by Yes! Magazine. (http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/to-build-community-an-economy-of-gifts)                                                                                               

       "... community is nearly impossible in a highly monetized society like our own," Eisenstein writes.  "That is because community is woven from gifts, which is ultimately why poor people often have stronger communities than rich people.  If you are financially independent, then you really don't depend on your neighbors -- or indeed on any specific person -- for anything.  You can just pay someone to do it, or pay someone else to do it." 

      I don't know about you, but I realized recently, during the heat of on an hour-and-a-half long session of Bikram Yoga, that I'm feeling pretty isolated by the way I live.  Yes, we live in a close neighborhood and, with my children, there is a bit of a swinging gate existence with neighborhood kids coming and going.  But I have found that if I do so much as give a tomato from my garden to a friend, the immediate urge is to repay me - to even the score.  
      I find Eisenstein's idea of the "economy of gifts"compelling because it reminds me that we all have both gifts and needs, and when we share those freely we can open up countless possibilities in the ways we live together. It is my belief that if we accept and allow both our gifts and an honest expression of our needs to flow more freely between us, we might be able to glimpse and move toward a more connected way of living.  In fact, I suppose that is what motivated me to start this blog, 

      The piece below is written by a friend of mine, Martha McManamy, whom I deeply admire for the way she tends to step over boundaries and into new realities freely and often.  In this instance, she is writing about her work with the Alternatives to Violence Program, through which she manages to shed light on the consequences of a throw-away society (in this case the throwing away of people) and demonstrates the beautiful outcomes possible when we marry gifts with needs.  I am fortunate to have many friends like Martha, who are working in the greater community diligently and from the heart.  (If you are reading this, you're probably one of them.) I am really grateful to Martha for being willing to share her writing here, because, let's face it: all alone, I'm not that interesting.

      So, this from Martha...

  

      I am lucky – and I used the term advisably – not to be a member of a group whose incarceration rate is one out of every nine people, that is, black men between the ages of 20 and 34. Rather, I am a white, middle-class, middle-aged woman. My involvement in prisons began with a seed of discomfort I have held for some time. Who ARE the people we as a society have caged away, some for the rest of their lives? And so I took the first small step, by participating in a training program created by Quakers in the 1970s in New York State, which has since spread around the world. It is called the Alternatives to Violence Program (AVP). I am now a trainer in the program and am looking forward to offering the training in Spanish next week to a group of men who are more comfortable with the Spanish language. 

Alternatives to Violence Program (AVP) Experience “On the Inside”, MCI Concord 

     “Nancy, I’d like to do that Light and Lively exercise after lunch...” 

     “I’ve been thinking about that all weekend, and I think…” 

      The conversations swirl around me as the AVP workshop at MCI Concord, “on the inside”, begins. Our group consists of 14 prisoners, mostly African American, of whom 3 are trained facilitators, and 4 white middle-class women from the outside. It’s not hard to tell who is a prisoner here by race, class or gender. But when I look closely, I see a different story. When I look beneath all these differences between “us” and “them” in my mind and heart, I feel that I have entered a monastery of sorts, where the inmates are focused on learning about themselves and improving their interactions with the world. True, this is a self-selected group. Unlike in some other programs, prisoners do not win a reduction in their sentence for attending AVP, so their presence is entirely voluntary and offers a contrast to most of the rest of their schedule. 

      Right from the beginning, I notice a deep level of sharing that would be unusual in most groups on the outside. On my first experience inside a prison, I expected to be surrounded by a group of “hardened criminals” who were unwilling to share much, people who were mired in shame and fear of each other and themselves. I was surprised when we did an exercise early on asking us to name, in front of the entire group, positive and negative influences on our lives, as well as the resulting effects on us. Absent fathers and racist societies were mentioned, but also loving relatives, success in school and at sports, good marriages, and children who continue to love their fathers in prison. Many comments were accompanied by deep feelings, verging on tears. 

     Later in the week, we reviewed “The Anatomy of an Apology” and then were given some time in silence to write a letter of apology to someone. The silence in the room was profound, even worshipful. Afterwards, one of the younger men said with much happiness and relief in his voice: “I feel so much lighter now! I can’t believe it! How would it be if I wrote letters to ALL the people I need to apologize to?” I noticed all the prisoners carefully tucked their letters away, one sliding his inside his sock. I wondered how many of these letters were delivered, and if so, how much healing could result? 

      I brought my own assumptions to this workshop. I had been cautioned during the orientation that they might try to “set me up” so that I would compromise myself by bringing in some contraband they could use. I also came with a package of emotions ranging from anger and disgust at these men’s crimes to anger at a society that is willing to make humans pawns in this vast prison industry, which wastes lives and talents at enormous cost to us all. However, I learned that many of these people are not throwing away their lives, even though some of them have life sentences with no opportunity of parole. They are reading, thinking, praying and meeting together to do what they can in their limited situations. They are gaining the wisdom to see others with compassion and love, and to avoid violence next time, inside as well as outside prison. They are willing to trust each other and name their truths aloud.  Watching them take these risks, I found it easier than I would have thought to lay aside my preconceptions and to share some of my inner truth. For the days that I was inside, I truly joined this little monastery and it became a journey of exploration for me as well. 

      So if you are considering going to a weekend retreat to gain wisdom and understanding of your own life, and to open your heart, why not spend it learning those things with the people in prison? 

Please!  If you have some thoughts on this topic, feel free to post your comments below.  And, if you have some of your own writing on environmental sustainability, social justice and spirituality,  email it to me at jblooker@comcast.net and I'll see what I can do to get it posted.

"That Pain You Might Be Feeling? That's Love."

     If you follow the Occupy Movement on Facebook at all you may have discovered, as I have, that postings about the earlier, massive encampments, marches and police actions nearly always degenerated into proclamations of love.  Hundreds of comments dripped down from the main posting, like charms on a bracelet, and next to each of those tiny profile portraits that simple word - love.
   
      I'll admit, I lost patience with it after a while.  Love?  LOVE?  L.O.V.E.?  Um? What?  Did you say love?  This is an action!  This is a movement, for goodness sake!  This is a revolution!  And all you people have to say is love?!?

      On Saturday, I went to a symposium titled "Awakening the Dreamer: Changing the Dream," here in Amesbury, MA.  The program is designed by The Pachamama Alliance, which I hadn't realized in advance, though I had heard of Pachamama and have read co-founder Lynn Twist's book The Soul of Money.  It was there that I learned that these great outcries of love are indeed entirely appropriate and reach to the core of what motivates those of us who are in mourning for our planet.

      While I appreciate that Occupy is not necessarily an environmental movement, I believe that the movement's aim to address issues of social justice are intrinsically connected to concerns about the future of the planet.  It turns out I'm not alone in that belief.  The purpose of the Awakening the Dreamer Symposium, which, in their own words, is "galvanizing people around the world to wake up to the trance they are living in," is to bring about a human presence on Earth that is environmentally sustainable, socially just, and spiritually fulfilling.  That's a tall order.

      A few nights earlier, I had had a slightly heated online discussion with some old college friends about the notion of "waking up."  I have taken on, wholeheartedly, the idea that "Americans need to wake up" and had posted something to that affect.  I learned from my friends (and later from my husband) that the words "wake up" are perceived of as patronizing and insulting in the same way that the word 'love" has somehow become hollow and childish.  I suppose because both tap at and reach into our innermost vulnerabilities and, for the most part, we've got that all cordoned off behind warning signs and strips of yellow tape.  So, if you really want to freak someone out, you can start talking to them about love and how they need to wake up.  And if you want to push them entirely over the edge, you can press them on the topic of spirituality.

      So, how is it that I left that symposium entirely convinced that love is not only the answer but also the question when addressing our most pressing problems?  At the symposium, they gave us lots of disturbing facts and figures about poverty and resource depletion and species extinction.  Facts that are well worth knowing and maybe I'll go into them someday.  But if you're like me, your televisions and email programs and computer screens are awash in terribly sad images of all those things and, like me, you have probably developed an immunity to them.  So, let me try to explain it like this.

      Last night, I was sitting with my daughter and that 7-year-old son I mentioned earlier and his friend.  We were admiring pictures of the teacup pig.  If you haven't seen one you should Google it.  They really are quite cute. All three children, their eyes bright with adoration and excitement, were jumping up and down and giggling and laughing at the little teacup pigs.  Then my son, his whole body pleading and yearning, turned to me and declared, "Oh Mom, if I could have another pet, I would really love to have him!"  And he pointed to a little pig, a diminutive Wilbur with soft white hair and a pink nose and a sort of smile.  What if, in that moment, I had to say to him, "I'm sorry, he is really cute, but those pigs are extinct, um, well, I mean, they're all dead."

      If you're feeling a little pang right now, it's okay, because that pain you might be feeling, that's love.  And when we live from that place -- connected to the people we love, on the Earth that we love -- we know that we don't want to lose it.


      You can find out more about The Pachamama Alliance and Awakening the Dreamer at www.pachamama.org or www.awakeningthedreamer.org.
   

   








      

We Are Here! We Are Here! We Are Here! We Are Here!

     





      This photo is as nonsensical as the world seems to me these days.  Except that the frogs, looking up the way they do, express something of the naiveté I feel I have been living within when it comes to my expectation of the unwavering persistence of the planet.


        My 7-year-old son and his friend made the frog house and took the picture last year.  A year ago - when I was just beginning to come to terms with the facts and the figures and the devastating reality of what humans are doing to the planet.  Don't get me wrong, my entire life has been informed by the understanding that human pollution, in its many forms, is causing damage to our waterways, our air and our ozone.  And I have, since I was in my teens, been aware of subtle shifts in weather patterns.  When I say "coming to terms," I mean that I finally realized, as many of us have, that we must change the way we live and that we cannot count on governments or elected officials to work toward the systemic changes that are imperative in owning up to and acting upon the drastic transformation necessary to protect life on our planet.  Not only because governments and elected officials won't enact change but because they are strongly motivated to deny that change is necessary.  
      
       So that means it is up to us, me and you, to formulate and enact transformation within the context of a system and a culture that has a great deal invested in resisting that change.  The US government, wrapped up as it is within the cocoons of power and profit, stands in the way of change and pursues a perilous denial of climate change that it inflicts upon us.  So, we can simply wait for more devastating learning opportunities to be delivered to us by the planet itself  - in the forms of drought, hurricanes and tsunamis - or we can get to work.  This is not a joke.  This is not a nonsensical illusion of terror, though being terrified is surely an important part of it.  This is real.  This is a final call to action, before it's too late.


      So, yes, "Yop!"


      Except that to call out "Yop!" like Dr. Seuss's Jojo implies that if I were to do so, there is some chance that someone out there might hear.  And perhaps I do entertain that thought.  To be honest, I do, yes, I entertain the notion and court the hope that if enough people start "Yopping!" the insanity of business-as-usual politics and business-as-usual lifestyles will cease and desist and we will all get to work - together - on reversing what may already be irrevocable.  It is my intention to try anyway, because if extreme weather patterns and drastic austerity measures are all that is in store for us in the coming years, we're going to need each other.  I'm thinking we're going to find something within ourselves, within our humanity, that has been lost in the quest for material comfort and individual triumph.


      The truth is, I've got a lot of skin in the game.  I've got three beautiful children whose futures I care about deeply.  And, with them, I expect to live fully and joyfully and purposefully while grappling with the truth of our present reality.  So, I'm going to be expressing my journey here -- my thoughts, my worries, my fears, my questions.  And, with any luck, some answers to the challenges we face.


      I hope you'll join me.