Environment
Eco-Spirituality
Earth Democracy and the Rights of Mother Earth
The ecological and economic problems we face are rooted in a series of reductionist steps, which have shrunk our imagination and our identity, our purpose on the earth, and the instruments we use to meet our needs. We are first and foremost earth citizens.
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Environment
The Loss and Recovery of Relatives
The headwaters of both the Mississippi and Red River watersheds emerge from our territory, here at Anishinaabe Akiing, and from these same waters come our sturgeon. The most majestic of fish lived well with our people, and sustained us through many of the coldest winter months. It was, however, not to last.
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Environment
We Are All Facing Extinction
We live in a society that pits the needs of human beings against nature. Over and over again, through advertisements and public pronouncements, we’re urged to sacrifice forests, mountaintops, rivers, wholes species, or even the quality of the air we breathe so we can have energy, jobs, economic well-being. But the conflict that is conjured by corporate interests between what we need and the needs of the earth should not be confused with the human condition.
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Environment
Transforming the Economy: Linking Hands Across the Social and Environmental Divide
Climate change and extinction are both too narrow. We need to move beyond ecological concerns to reach out to the ever-larger proportion of society focused on eradicating injustice and poverty. We need to reach out to those who now live in fear of losing their livelihoods and homes.
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Environment
A Community Perspective on the Rights of Nature
Although we live two continents and nearly 11,000 miles apart, as community organizers, Desmond D’sa and I look at climate change from similar perspectives — with our eyes on the ground in the places where we work. From these places, we see the results of the market-based global economic system as it transforms our communities and ecosystems into sacrifice zones for corporate profit.
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Environment
Why Extinction Matters at Least as Much as Climate Change
The center of the ecological crisis is not the weather but the ongoing and wholesale destruction of life. We are in the midst of Earth’s sixth mass extinction spasm, accompanied by unfathomable figures such as three to ten species, many of them millions of years old, being extinguished daily.
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Food/Hunger
Obama’s Deregulation of GMO Crops
Early this spring, while the world was distracted by Egypt’s uprising, President Barack Obama pushed the Secretary of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to deregulate genetically engineered alfalfa and sugar beets in the United States. The USDA came through as he directed, totally deregulating these Monsanto-patented genes in early February.
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Environmental Activism
Shasta and Goliath: Bringing Down Corporate Rule
Mt. Shasta, a small northern California town of 3,500 residents nestled in the foothills of magnificent Mount Shasta, is taking on corporate power through an unusual process — democracy.
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Eco-Spirituality
A Shared Cosmology Could Transform the World
Long before science, every tribe shared a “cosmology,” that is, a big picture. If we construct a shared cosmology today, based on our best scientific understanding combined with a deep appreciation that in human brains the sense of reality is created by metaphor, it could transform our minds and thus our world.
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Food/Hunger
Tikkun of the Fertile Soil
As a result of our current practices of industrialized agriculture, food chains and ecosystems are collapsing and extinction rates are soaring; human food systems — involving food production, processing, transport, and distribution — are strained, fragile, or broken; and hunger is again on the rise.
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Toxic Environments
The Age of Super Crises
Consider the latest toxic spill in Hungary. To put it in terms that anyone can grasp, it is as though we filled up the entire Empire State Building with some of the worst stuff imaginable, tipped the building completely on its side, and then spilled the full contents on the ground. The resulting mess would have filled an area of approximately seventeen square blocks, or slightly over a half-mile in any direction.
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Eco-Spirituality
The Relational Worldview
Our hypermodern selves are pretty much at a kindergarten level now regarding the understanding of how dynamically interrelated the world is (not to be confused with the sort of connectedness the Internet affords, useful though that may be).
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Eco-Spirituality
Reaffirming Beauty: A Step Toward Sustainability
We know the earth is beautiful. We equate the livingness of it with beauty. When we mourn the loss of life, we also know that we mourn the loss of beauty. And we look to beauty as a marker of life, even life that has been badly mutilated.
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Food/Hunger
Fighting to Prevent Global Hunger
Despite its obscurity as a federal government regulatory body, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is making decisions now that could determine whether hundreds of millions of people experience malnutrition, hunger, and perhaps even starvation in the coming years.
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Climate Change
Climate Stability First
And we will inflict damage as long as we burn fossil fuel, and we will burn fossil fuel as long as we keep allowing the oil and coal companies to pour their waste into the atmosphere for free. And we’ll keep doing that as long as we don’t stand up politically to the power of that industry.
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