This is the twenty-sixth issue of my free newsletter. Your feedback is most welcome!
Beltane
Greetings of the spring from Southern Appalachia! Fuzzy ducklings dart their beaks into the shallow water near the edge of Beaver Dam Lake, while their parents swim a short distance away. The dogwoods are blooming, white and red trilliums grace the shady areas; foam flower adds its frothy white to the pink of wild phlox. Golden ragworts tower over tiny purple irises. “Spring beauty” looks like fallen pink and white stars covering the forest floor. To quote the Asheville Botanical Garden: “Grow natives. Diverse in number, design, and color, native plants are a key part of our rich, natural heritage, like a patchwork quilt passed down for generations.” Some of my favorite wild edibles, chickweed, lambs-quarter, and violets, are proliferating everywhere. (Did you know that violet leaves are rich in vitamins A, C, and D, plus potassium, calcium, and iron?) A talented and devoted herbalist with dreadlocks and bare feet, Frank Cook has walked the length of North Carolina and teaches about edible and medicinal plants. Frank likes to say, “When I look at a hillside like this, I can scarcely believe that 60 million people are starving, while many more die from lack of access to medicines.”
Beltane is the cross-quarter holiday between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice. It is the time when the abundance of flowers and greens is a welcome relief from winter’s drabness; it was traditionally a day for leaping the Beltane fires, which were lit to honor the sun god, and for celebrating fertility. Beltane was the wedding of the goddess and the god, Mother Earth and Father Sun. Young men and women, bedecked with flower garlands, would wander into the woods on Beltane Eve. As Samhain (All Hallows’ Eve, another cross-quarter holiday) honors death, Beltane honors life. Both are times when the “veil” between the worlds is thought to be thinnest, and therefore magic can happen: in the spring, visits from faeries or similar other-worldly occurrences. The traditional Maypole, besides being a phallic symbol, was seen as the connector of the worlds. This is a good time for invoking our spirit guides to help us through the tempest of relationships. A blessed Beltane to you!
Beyond Earth Day
Last week there were many celebrations of Earth Day, including wild plant walks, river clean-ups, a day of Permaculture teachings at a local college, and a downtown Asheville festival with music and environmental booths. Earth Day: we acknowledge the Earth, just for a day or so, and then on with business as usual?
NOT! Last week I heard an impassioned environmental educator, Derrick Jensen. He is the author of several substantial books, among them A Language Older than Words and Walk on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution. But he teased the bookstore audience, telling us he only wanted to talk about his next book, not yet finished, about how to take down civilization. He spoke briefly but dramatically about the landscape of loss and despair: clear-cuts, streams empty of salmon, the collapse of fisheries, the die-off of phyto-plankton. “The environmental movement is a failure,” he declared. He then proposed a rewrite of the last scene of “Star Wars” from an environmental perspective. The environmentalists would be sending letters to Darth Vader, selling hemp wallets and hackysacks, maybe even etching slogans on the wall of the death star, and generally feeling good about fighting the good fight.
Then he asked, “What if aliens from space were to invade, and vacuum all the fish out of the oceans, place dioxin in the breast milk of every woman, clear-cut all the forests—would anybody fight back?” Of course he refers to things that are already occurring.
He then presented a series of premises (my apologies for missing 3 or 4 of them):
1) Industrial civilization (life in cities) is not and will never be sustainable.
2) We can’t keep using nonrenewable resources.
3) A city is a collection of people in numbers requiring importation of resources; an ever larger area is denuded, violently, of its natural wealth to support the city people’s needs and desires.
4) Civilization is based on clearly defined hierarchies, violence from the top down (4-6 Americans die daily at the hands of police).
5) The property of those above is considered worth more than the lives of those below. This is called “justice.”
6) Civilization is not redeemable. It will inevitably degrade and collapse. Both humans and non-humans will suffer its consequences for a long time to come. Remember that Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Israel, Greece, and North Africa were once densely forested. The dominant culture has a strong death urge, and even hates itself. How about a resistance movement? Remember that Jews who participated in the Warsaw ghetto uprising had a higher rate of survival than those who “went along” and did not resist out of fear. We must take appropriate action to defend our beloved.
7) Hope is longing for a future condition over which you have no agency. Instead of “I hope Coho salmon survive,” say “I’ll do whatever it takes to stop their extinction.” The dams built for cheap electricity to make aluminum beer cans are in large part responsible for the destruction of salmon.
8) The needs of the natural world are more important than those of the economic system. “Any social/ economic system which doesn’t benefit the natural system it’s based on is really stupid.”
9) Our culture and most members of it are insane. More people care about the Detroit Tigers than real tigers. Consumerism is an addictive pattern cloaked in deep denial. As in a dysfunctional family, “the violence isn’t happening, and you can’t talk about the violence that isn’t happening.” 19 million Europeans died in last year’s heat wave, yet no one mentioned global warming.
10) Civilization has been a culture of occupation since the beginning.
11) There are no “rich” and no “poor,” just some people who have more pieces of paper than others. The “rich” pretend to own the land, the water, the air.
12) Those in power rule by force.
13) Love is not pacifism; think of a mother grizzly bear, or even a mother mouse. That fierce mama mouse can sometimes fight off an enemy many times her own size.
14) A major problem is the belief that any human life is more important than another life form.
Jensen added that our brittle, computer-dependent civilization will come down sooner or later, and that it would be messy for folks with pacemakers, life-support machines in hospitals, and so forth. He advocates preparing by starting gardens everywhere, including rooftops, planting medicinal herbs, taking out dams, getting rid of cell phones, learning how to purify water and build ecovillages. We need to learn to listen to the water, learn what the rivers want and need. It’s better to bring civilization down now, he argued, while the Earth still has a chance to regenerate, than after all its crucial systems have been destroyed. “Dismantle globally, renew locally” is his new slogan. Jensen believes that just a dozen hackers could take down civilization.
The Shift
I’ve been reading a book called The Shift by John English, who states that he was given no rest by his inner guides until he wrote it. (His reluctance was reasonable, given his poor writing skills!) The basic plot is that the Earth was about to attract a giant asteroid in order to wipe out 80% of the human race, when a group of Americans had an awakening that led them to form a third party with an environmental agenda. It sounds so wildly optimistic, that a group of people would hear voices telling them what to do and that their actions could lead to such a dramatic turnaround. It’s a far tamer scenario, assuredly, than Jensen’s. Which will we choose?
If you have a chance to vote for Dennis Kucinich in any of the Democratic primaries, please consider doing so. Votes for Kucinich can still influence the Democratic party platform. This courageous man stands for withdrawal from Iraq, full health care for all, stopping the WTO and FTAA, environmental protection, support for family farmers, reparations to Native Americans and African-Americans, and full civil rights for all including a woman’s right to choose and gay-lesbian rights. I’m fantasizing about a bumper sticker that would read: “Shift to Kucinich, he’s greener than spinach!” Visit his website. Listen to one of his speeches and decide for yourself.
Cathy Holt
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