Gulf Oil Spill: A Symbol of What Fossil Fuels Do to the Earth Every Day, Say Environmentalists

Oil blobs and oil sheen are seen in the waters of Chandeleur Sound, La.,

Tuesday, May 4, 2010. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

by Dan Froomkin
Published on Friday, May 7, 2010 by The Huffington Post

The leading edge of a vast oil slick started to come ashore in Louisiana on Thursday night, a shroud of devastation falling on America's coastline even as the blown-out BP oil well that produced it continues to belch millions of gallons of thick crude into the Gulf of Mexico for a third straight week.

At moments like this, it's hard to see any silver lining here at all. But it's possible there is one. Many environmentalists say that the wrenching and omnipresent images of filth and death are at last providing Americans with visible, visceral and possibly mobilizing evidence of the effects that fossil fuels are having on our environment every day.

More: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/05/07

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If the earth does grow inhospitable toward human presence, it is primarily because we have lost our sense of courtesy toward the earth and its inhabitants. ~ Thomas Berry

John O'Donohue: Matins II (an excerpt)

Matins

II

(excerpt)

I arise today

Blessed by all things,

Wings of breath,

Delight of eyes,

Wonder of whisper,

Intimacy of touch,

Eternity of soul,

Urgency of thought,

Miracle of health,

Embrace of God.

May I live this day.

~ John O'Donohue ~

(Eternal Echoes)


Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/Matins_O'Donohue.html

Thom Hartmann: Is European socialism bleeding like a stuck PIG?

From Thom's blog:
Is European socialism bleeding like a stuck PIG? The conservatives are yelling from the rooftops that we are witnessing the slow death of European Socialism due to massive spending on social programs. They say the countries bleeding the most red ink are Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain or the P.I.G.S. of Europe as they are known in financial circles. Greece has run out of money and is now using German money to prevent total collapse. Portugal may be next followed very closely by Spain. Yet the European countries with some of the most socialist - that is, strong social safety networks - are Germany and Denmark, two countries where things are going just fine. In Germany, for example, every corporation in the country is required to have half of the members of their board of directors appointed by the union representing the workers of the company - the most corporate-intrusive system in all of Europe. In Denmark, not only are healthcare and education free, but they even pay students a monthly stipend to cover food, housing, and books - all the time they're in school all the way up to PhD or MD degrees. So what differentiates Germany and Denmark from Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain? Germany and Denmark never fully drank the so-called "free trade" kool-aid, and thus both have strong manufacturing sectors. Across America you'll find German cars and Danish wind turbines, as well as across those nations themselves. But walk into any store in Spain, Greece, Ireland, or Portugal and you'll find row after row of Chinese-made goods. Twenty years of insane flat-earth free-trade policies have disemboweled the economies of the United States and numerous European countries. The US, for example, has gone from 20% GDP in manufacturing before the election of Reagan to just 11% now. Countries that don't make things don't create real wealth, and thus must turn to Goldman Sachs to help them borrow money. And Goldman hasn't treated Greece - or the US - all that well. The reason why China is not having this problem - and neither are South Korea or Taiwan or Singapore, all countries with strong social safety nets - is because they're strongly protecting their own manufacturing sectors. The way we used to do before Reagan's presidency and then Bill Clinton's throwing us to the tender mercies of transnational corporations by turning US trade policy over to NAFTA and the WTO. Time to reconsider protectionism.

http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2010/05/european-socialism-bleeding-stuck-pig

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Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. ~ Robert F. Kennedy

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens. ~ Carl Jung

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Life in the Age of "Much Worse Than We Thought It Would Be"

Arianna Huffington

What was just a troubling oil spill a week ago is now,according to Interior Secretary Salazar, "a very grave scenario," and "potentially... very catastrophic."

In other words, it's much worse that we thought it would be. Has there been a crisis in the last decade that turned out to be better than we thought it was going to be? We are still fighting two wars that were going to be cakewalks, but have now lasted nine years and seven years -- much worse than we thought it would be.

Katrina looked like it could be bad but -- even though there were plenty of people warning about a Category 5 storm breaching the levees -- the devastation ultimately was much worse than we thought it would be.

Same with the housing bubble that was fueled by the Wall Street casino. Even though we now know that people in the Fed were warning of big trouble ahead as early as 2004, the warnings were ignored -- and when the bubble burst in 2008, it was much worse than we thought it would be.

The foreclosure crisis hit hard in 2009. But the government promised to protect homeowners... so when the first quarter of 2010 brought the highest number of foreclosures since they began keeping records, the scope of the calamity was much worse than we thought it would be.

In October 2009, the unemployment rate hit 10.2 percent, a 26-year high. But the $787 billion stimulus package was going to bring that down. It has, but not by much. Turns out, the unemployment crisis is also much worse than we thought it would be.

Perhaps we should start calling this the Age of "Much Worse Than We Thought It Would Be."
Our shortsighted thinking is still on full display in the Gulf of Mexico, even as the enormity of the crisis becomes undeniable. In a speech on Sunday in Louisiana, President Obama called it a "potentially unprecedented environmental disaster," and said the spill "is unique and unprecedented." And in downplaying BP's responsibility for the spill, a spokesman for the company also called it "unprecedented," saying "it's something that we have not experienced before."

That's the nature of unprecedented things -- they've never happened -- until they happen. But just because something is unprecedented doesn't mean it's unpredictable or that we're unable to plan for it. We can't see the future, but we can prepare for it.

More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/life-in-the-age-of-much-w_b_561691.html

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The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. ~ Abraham Lincoln

The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn. ~ Gloria Steinhem

Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. ~ Margaret Mead

The Playground Jail

by Marian Wright Edelman

Topics: Race in the Media

Marian Wright Edelman, President of the Children's Defense Fund,

is part of Change.org's Changemakers network, comprised

of leading voices for social change.

Adults often start conversations with children by asking them what they want to be when they grow up. We tell them to dream big, and encourage them by giving them pretend doctor's kits, fancy dress-up clothes and other toys that let them imitate adult life.

Now, imagine you're a parent. In the middle of your neighborhood, there is a playground. Of course you'd want that playground to be a joyful, creative space. If your neighborhood were a crowded public housing development in the middle of a city, the chance to bring your children to a small outdoor sanctuary where they could stretch their bodies and imaginations would be even more precious. You might hope the jungle gym would include a pretend steering wheel, storefront, or spaceship, like the equipment in thousands of playgrounds across the country. Imagine, then, if instead the "sanctuary" the city provided for your children featured a pretend jail.

That's just what happened in New York City, where for years toddlers living in a violence-racked neighborhood in Brooklyn were encouraged to dream they were in jail at a city-funded playground. When the Reverend Dr. Emma Jordan-Simpson, the executive director of the Children's Defense Fund's New York office, first heard about the design of the playground at the Tompkins Houses in Bedford Stuyvesant this spring, she had to visit and see it for herself. The photographs she took show the shameful truth: sure enough, the center of the play structure featured a bright orange square with the word "JAIL" in bold capital letters, cutout bars on a pretend window, and the image of an exaggerated lock on a child-sized door. She immediately called a local reporter to add her voice to the parents and community advocates demanding to have the playground jail removed. As soon as the story began receiving media attention, workers quickly arrived to try to paint over the words and images. But the damage had already been done.

More: http://race.change.org/blog/view/the_playground_jail

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Someday, maybe there will exist a well-informed, well considered and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child's spirit.

~ Eric Erickson

If you as parents cut corners, your children will too. If you lie, they will too. If you spend all your money on yourselves and tithe no portion of it for charities, colleges, churches, synagogues, and civic causes, your children won't either. And if parents snicker at racial and gender jokes, another generation will pass on the poison adults still have not had the courage to snuff out..... If we don't stand up for children, then we don't stand for much.

~ Marian Wright Edelman

Robert Bly: On the Oregon Coast

Face Rock State Park, Bandon, Oregon

On the Oregon Coast

For William Stafford

The waves come - the large fourth wave

Looming up, thinking, crashing down - all

Roll in so prominently that I become small

And write this in a cramped script, hard to read.

Well, all this fury, prominent or not

Is also hard to read, and the ducks don't help,

Settling down in furry water, shaking

Themselves, and then forgetting it within a minute.

Remembering the fury, it is up to us, even

Though we feel small compared to the loose

Ocean, to keep sailing and not land,

And figure out what to say to our children.

~ Robert Bly ~

(Meditations on the Insatiable Soul)


Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/On_the_Oregon_Coast.html

Fears for crops as shock figures from America show scale of bee catastrophe

Alison Benjamin

The Observer, Sunday 2 May 2010

The world may be on the brink of biological disaster after news that a third of US bee colonies did not survive the winter.

Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter.

The decline of the country's estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.

The number of managed honeybee colonies in the US fell by 33.8% last winter, according to the annual survey by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the US government's Agricultural Research Service (ARS).

The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy.

Potential causes range from parasites, such as the bloodsucking varroa mite, to viral and bacterial infections, pesticides and poor nutrition stemming from intensive farming methods. The disappearance of so many colonies has also been dubbed "Mary Celeste syndrome" due to the absence of dead bees in many of the empty hives.

US scientists have found 121 different pesticides in samples of bees, wax and pollen, lending credence to the notion that pesticides are a key problem. "We believe that some subtle interactions between nutrition, pesticide exposure and other stressors are converging to kill colonies," said Jeffery Pettis, of the ARS's bee research laboratory.

More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/02/food-fear-mystery-beehives-collapse

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If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. ~ Henry David Thoreau

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child -- our own two eyes. All is a miracle. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

If the earth does grow inhospitable toward human presence, it is primarily because we have lost our sense of courtesy toward the earth and its inhabitants. ~ Thomas Berry

These Images

Pyramid Lake, Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada

These Images

Thus like swans,

wings wide open in the air,

when spring splashes lakes onto shores,

where in the woods,

wild ducks wheeling in pairs

for a love nest, and snakes

after spring's first thunders,

slide forth from winter's fields,

when raccoons lose their minds

mating among maple leaves

in Quaker cemeteries,

and golden smoke rises

above cypress trees, their needles

aquiver with too much pollen,

when songs flow from their lips

and bare feet welcome the embrace of sand,

where, under the tent of a white sheet,

eyes fall on the sea-drenched forehead

of the beloved,

when the church bells rings,

children dash through the lunchroom,

their jackets of tropical fruit and birds of paradise

against the concrete ground of P.S. 19,

where words are at stake,

and thoughts are immobilized,

where life shouts with joy

and being is beauty and love

no longer clings,

where senses quicken their steps

to enter hearts of things...

So simple, these images,

their recognition

is in our nature,

yet too often neglected,

our eyes already elsewhere.

It is beyond the gods

why we hold onto our sorrows

so long, and so stubborn.

~ Wang Ping ~

(of flesh & spirit: poems)


Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/These_Images.html

April 30th & May 1st: Michael Meade in Portland

With Michael Meade at the wedding of friends

Carl Hay and Olivia Oso

Please come join author, mythologist, and storyteller

Michael Meade

for an evening of story and commentary on

Tales of the Divine

Friday, April 30th ~ 7:00 pm

First Unitarian Church, 1011 SW 12th Ave., Portland, OR

AND

for an intensive workshop on

Creative Mentoring

Saturday, May 1st ~ 9:30am to 5:30pm

Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark St, Portland, OR

For more information about these and other events,

about books, CD's, and other available materials,

and about Mosaic Multicultural Foundation,

please visit the website at http://www.mosaicvoices.org/.

Peace ~ Molly

* * *

"Join us for an evening that considers how to become a "disciple" in one's own life and how to find one's true worth in the world. This dynamic and surprising array of stories, poems, and commentary offers tools for negotiating the troubles of the modern world while finding paths of purpose, meaning, and destiny."

~ Michael Meade

Anna Lappe & Frances Moore Lappe: Every Choice We Make Can Be a Celebration of the World We Want

Two amazing women! ~

Anna Lappe and her mother Frances Moore Lappe

I recently had the honor and gift of seeing Anna Lappe speak here in Portland. I had already seen her mother speak twice in the past, and the last time I asked Frances Moore Lappe to autograph her Diet For a Small Planet, which I had purchased nearly four decades ago.

Now Anna Lappe is standing in her own power and acting to make a difference in the world. Please check out their website The Small Planet Institute and the invaluable books that both of these amazing women have written. Also important is to view the video of the "Real Story of the Boston Tea Party" and more. It is exciting that there is so much to learn! And while it might seen as negative, I experience it as very empowering to know that what we eat has a huge impact on ourselves, our children, the planet. We have choices! Knowledge is empowering!

Tag, we are all it! Peace ~ Molly

* * *

Thoughts from the Lappe's:

Every choice we make can be a celebration of the world we want.

Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but by a scarcity of democracy.

An MRI study of people competing vs. cooperating found that cooperating stimulates the same parts of our brain as does eating chocolate.

Ninety percent of Americans make less in real dollars than they did in 1973 – on average $4,000 less. The wealthiest 400 Americans now control more wealth than half the world’s people.

Worldwide, more people are members of cooperatives than own shares in publicly traded companies; cooperatives provide a fifth more jobs than do global corporations.

Democracy is not what we have, it is what we do.

More than a third of both the world’s grain and fish catch now go to feed livestock, which return to us only a fraction of the nutrients.

If the whole world adopted sustainable farming practices, production could increase by over 50 percent.

In three decades agricultural output per person has climbed by one fifth worldwide, but in just the last two years over 100 million more people suffer from hunger—reaching a total of nearly a billion.

America emits twice the carbon per person that Europe does. But think what’s possible: California emits 20 percent less carbon per dollar GDP than Germany; and it gets a quarter of its electricity from renewables!

Can we truly believe ‘the world’ can change if we don’t experience ourselves changing? And there’s only one way to change ourselves – that’s by taking risks.

Even the fear of death is nothing compared to the fear of not having lived authentically and fully.

In Washington DC, more than two dozen lobbyists push mainly corporate interests for every one representative American citizens have elected to protect our interests.

Every time we act, even with our fear, we make room for others to do the same. Courage is contagious.

It’s not possible to know what’s possible. So we are free to go for the world we really want.

Hope is not something we seek in evidence, it is what we become in action.