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Earth Day 
Wed Apr 22, 2009 at 05:12:54 PDT
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It is Earth Day.
Another strange confluence of random events, generated by random people on this planet has me vibrating with unsettled energy. Even my use of the word "random" is incomplete to my meaning, for my circle is proof positive that kindreds usually connect one way or another.
I spent the better part of the week thinking about Class War, humans degenerating to our basest natures and what it would take to awaken us to how to be in this world as part of the whole of it.
My mind buzzes around trying to work the layers of the personal/ego expectations with the geopolitical/economic and the humanity/morality aspects of everything that is going on. All at once. The intuitive flashes that are the knowing/unknowing swirl through my soul at unpredictable intervals.
I say things like "the center cannot hold" in my admittedly cryptic way. For someone who talks a lot, writes a lot, I apparently am very cryptic. Heh. To those who know me, or perhaps just know more, I always assume they dig the deeper part of this.
The big, bad scary isn't just the shadow government, human abuses or economic failure.
Its simple, really. Human existence itself is no longer sustainable on a planetary level.
The rest is just mental masturbation trying to either make ourselves as comfortable as possible during these end times, or delude ourselves into thinking we can reverse the irreversible. More, it may be only the attempt to lie to ourselves and think we, as the enlightened will somehow survive this and create a better world.
Mathematically, scientifically, the odds are greatly against that.
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Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 14:37:09 PDT
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(10 am - promoted by ek hornbeck)
I drive home from having been with the Earth Mother for any length of time and feel clarity about our artificial environment. The longer I've been with her, the more profound the clarity is. I stare straight in the face of "progress" as phone lines, gas stations, and eventually the hazy horizon over the city appears.
I can't help the feeling of wrongness I feel, though I can see some progress is useful, schools are for example. Still, I can't help the feeling of wrongness. This isn't meant to be a judgment of the wrongness of civilization, but by the time I describe this feeling; it probably will be.
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Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 13:23:35 PDT
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( - promoted by buhdydharma )
Cross-posted from THE ENVIRONMENTALIST
Golf and the Environment
Golf courses can be breathtaking in their beauty. Environmentally? Not as much... Includes an interesting survey of golf professionals about climate change and sustainable use.
NASA rolls out the 'Green Carpet' for Earth Day
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is commemorating Earth Day with a 'Green Carpet' campaign of press conferences, features on NASA TV, links and new photos of the earth taken from the latest shuttle missions.
U.S. Identifies Tainted Heparin in 11 Countries
Contamination in the blood thinner Heparin that was produced in China has been discovered in eleven countries, accounting for 81 deaths in the United States, so far.
More new articles at THE ENVIRONMENTALIST
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Discuss
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Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 08:49:26 PDT
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( - promoted by buhdydharma )
Happy Earth Day.
Maybe we should start with a disclosure that I am Gaylord Nelson's biographer, which may give me a somewhat different perspective on Earth Day, founded by Senator Nelson (pictured), than some others.
That said, do take time to read Meteor Blade's commentary and Q-A with Denis Hayes, who has been associated with Earth Day since Gaylord Nelson hired him to coordinate the first one in 1970.
Earth Day, it is true, has not solved all of the world's environmental problems. But it has had, and continues to have, a profound impact on how people think about and relate to the environment.
Gaylord Nelson's primary goal in launching Earth Day was to get environmental issues a prominent place on this country's political agenda, and it certainly accomplished that long ago. On the first Earth Day, seven months after Nelson announced plans for what he envisioned as a campus environmental teach-in, 20 million people -- 10 per cent of the US population at the time -- participated in some way.
Earth Day introduced the Environmental Decade, an unparalleled period of legislative and grassroots activity to protect the nation's environment. More significant environmental legislation was signed into law during the eleven-year "decade" (1970-1980) than during the 170-year period prior to Earth Day. Congress passed twenty-eight major environmental laws, and hundreds of other public lands bills to protect and conserve natural resources.
Philip Shabecoff, a noted environmental writer, described it this way:
After Earth Day, nothing was the same. Earth Day brought revolutionary change and touched off a great burst of activism that profoundly affected the nation's laws, its economy, its corporations, its farms, its politics, science, education, religion, and journalism... Most important, the social forces unleashed after Earth Day changed, probably forever, the way Americans think about the environment.
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Mon Apr 21, 2008 at 22:30:38 PDT
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( - promoted by buhdydharma )
In a few paragraphs, I'll get to the promised interview, but first a few words of my own. (If you're short on time, scroll to the interview box).
 Every year, I greet Earth Day with mixed feelings because the first one came at a time of tremendous upheaval in another realm.
Although that first Earth Day in 1970 - which Denis Hayes coordinated - focused needed attention on the world's environmental troubles, it was also a diversion. Just a week after Earth Day, on April 29, the U.S. sent troops into Cambodia and, within three weeks, six students had been killed during protests at Kent State and Jackson State universities. Then, too, while millions joined in Earth Day activities, the event was peppered with corporate sponsors, many of whom were more interested in making a public relations coup than anything substantively ecological.
Indeed, some corporate participants took a downright hostile tone when it was pointed out that something engaged in by them might be environmentally destructive.
Nonetheless, for a time, in part because Richard Nixon needed something positive to balance his administration's disastrous continuation of the war in Southeast Asia and because he was pressured by Democrats like Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson and members of his own party, quite a number of successful environmental initiatives were undertaken, including the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and legislation on clean water and clean air.
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Reform Immigration -
March for America
Sunday, March 21
March on Washington
Saturday, March 20
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