Food Not Bombs

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense

than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." Martin Luther King, Jr.

According to the recent message from the San Francisco Bay Area Food Not Bombs and the World Hunger Education Service, as many as one in 7 households in the United States experiences hunger each day. Hunger, in this case, is referred to as food insecure: the uneasy or painful sensation caused by want of food and the exhausted condition that goes with it.

In 1997 The Department of Agriculture estimated that 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food produced in the United States went uneaten. Since then the rate has climbed, most of it is burned or put into landfills.

The call from the global Food Not Bombs movement holds that we can totally eradicate hunger in the United States by redirecting this food from the trash into hungry mouths. Food Not Bombs shares free vegan and vegetarian meals with the hungry in over 1,000 cities around the world to help end poverty and violence against people and nature.

The San Francisco Bay Area Food Not Bombs reminds us that an impoverished person is a person in crisis and a humanitarian society should take care of people in crisis, regardless of how that crisis came about. We have an obligation to nourish our impoverished citizens and we can feed them at no cost if we pass laws that mandate edible food be donated to share with the hungry. This is recycling at it's best and leads to a better, more fair and sustainable world.

Here is Shel Silverstein's poem Sharing

I'll share your toys, I'll share your money,

I'll share your toast, I'll share you honey,

I'll share your milk and your cookies too– –

The hard part's sharing mine with you.

유영훈Leader of the Paldang Farmers in 두물머리 is running for Green Party election!

My good friend Mr. Young-Hun Yu (유영훈), the leader of the Paldang Organic farmers and activists in Dulmulmoeri (두물머리), is running for the election for the launch of the Green Party in South Korea.  - Word on the street in Seoul is that people are strongly supporting him. He is a strong activist for Organic farmers and says he vows to spread sustainable organic agriculture in South Korea.  

Mr. Young-Hun Yu (유영훈) talking about fighting the Korean Government in Support of Organic farmers.

Mr. Young-Hun Yu (유영훈) protesting in Dulmulmoeri (두물머리) to save the Organic farmers of Paldang. 

Thanks are due to both the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) and the Korean Federation of Sustainable Agriculture (KFSA) for supporting the Paldang farmers throughout the planning of the IFOAM GA and OWC. - This cost the KFSA its budget this year and for a while it was looking like it might cost IFOAM the Korean Government support.   

It looks like things are turning around in South Korea. - We can all look forward to visiting an Organic South Korea soon. 

Deep Ecology and Conservation

Deep ecology is another mechanism for conservation Stephanie Caza explains that Gary Snyder and his poetry following Han Shan 'Cold Mountain' and the ancient mountain poetry of China and Japan lead to Deep Ecology as a domain of the Environmental Movement.

Deep Ecology (like many indigenous groups, Engaged Buddhism and the Permaculture movement) does not see humans as separate from nature, it holds that there is a need and instinct to be compassionate to all living beings and looks to the health of the natural world as it relates to the health of the self and the health of community. In a way, it is about healing the relationship of humans and nature through a dialogue.

Caza says we must learn to speak, or at least respect the language of nature, a language that mycologist Paul Stamets has said we cannot understand and therefore we disregard. Caza calls for a look to Joanna R. Macy and the idea of the ecological self, which she says is similar to what HH Dalai Lama calls the universal self. It is also similar to EO Wilson's Eco Philia (i.e. nature helps people stay healthy and to heal, they get better in hospitals when the have plants and when they see plants, also true in prisons).

A Poem by Han Shan translated by Gary Snyder

Clambering up the Cold Mountain path,
The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on:
The long gorge choked with scree and boulders,
The wide creek, the mist-blurred grass.
The moss is slippery, though there's been no rain
The pine sings, but there's no wind.

Who can leap the world's ties
And sit with me among the white clouds?

The Nouabale-Ndoki National Park Congo

Great News! The Republic of Congo (ROC) has just expanded the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park to include the Goualougo Triangle, expanding deeper into the rainforest to protect great apes. The expansion is a demonstration of an increasingly positive relationship between conservation organizations, Congolese Industry and the ROC government.

The Goualougo is a very dense, swampy forest that is home to a nearly pristine and untouched great ape population that was first discovered in 1989 by Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) scientists. The inspiration for the expansion came from studies of the area's chimpanzee and great ape populations, conducted by WCS as part of the Goualougo Triangle Great Ape Project. An effective buffer zone was created surrounding the park for which concessions were made by Congolais Industrielle des Bois which gave up its legal right to harvest timber from the Goualougo Triangle. www.enn.com/top_stories/article/44029

Skillful means of activism - Sacred Earth

I just heard Dekila Chungyalpa's very inspiring presentation to H. H. Dalai Lama on Skillful Means of Activism. She spoke about her work with the Sacred Earth program, a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) project to develop partnerships with faith leaders and institutions in order to protect biodiversity, natural resources and environmental services. The program works with religious leaders and faith communities to address ethical and spiritual ideals around the sacred value of earth and its diversity. It supports partnerships with local faith communities, and religious leaders to address conservation issues and look for ways to enrich and transform societal values and aspirations towards a sustainable future. The Sacred Earth program holds that working with faiths is not only an important and critical strategy for conservation but also a way to bring about genuine sustainable development. Most people in the world follow a spiritual faith and the faith leaders can help articulate ethical and spiritual ideals around the sacred value of Earth and its diversity.

It all sarted in1986 when WWF and HRH Prince Philip, then President of WWF, invited leaders of major world religions to discuss the relationship of faith and nature. The resulting Alliance of Religion and Conservation (ARC) and WWF started Sacred Gifts for a Living Planet in Kathmandu made a declaration with a commitment to clean protected Baghmati River in Nepal. Then in 2005, WWF and ARC wrote Beyond Belief, which lists over a hundred sacred places that are rich in biodiversity and can be considered potential "sacred sites", now an internationally recognized term of protection of biodiversity and culture.

Slash-and-burn 'improves tropical forest biodiversity'

According to the Science and Development Network slash-and-burn a practice common among indigenous and small scale farmers and foresters, actually improves tropical forest biodiversity.
Slash-and-burn agricultural practices have been banned by many governments because of the risk of uncontrolled fires. However, it turns out that they provide better growing conditions for valuable new trees than more modern methods of forest clearance.

Testing three diferent methods: clear-felling, bulldozing, and slash-and-burn: researchers cleared 24 half-hectare areas of tropical forest in Quintana Roo state, in southern Mexico. Mahogany seeds and seedlings were then planted and after 11 years, the researchers compared the sites and found that slash-and-burn techniques had provided the best growing conditions for mahogany. Many other valuable species also thrived in the slash-and-burn plots, whereas in clear-felled areas more than half of each area contained tree species of no commercial value. In areas cleared by slash-and-burn 60 per cent of species were commercially valuable. Additionally, the largest trees in slash-and-burn areas were 10 percent bigger than those in bulldozed areas.

Results were presented at the annual conference of the International Society of Tropical Foresters at Yale University www.enn.com/top_stories/article/43972

Less than one week to reach one million

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is preparing to approve genetically engineered salmon, which would be the first genetically engineered animal on supermarket shelves in the United States. The salmon is engineered to produce hormones year-round that cause the fish to grow at twice its natural rate - without labels, people in the US will never know if they are eating it or not.

There is less than one week left until the FDA responds to a petition calling for labeling of genetically engineered foods -- and we need to make sure the FDA knows how Americans feel about this issue before that deadline.

That's why I submitted a comment to the FDA through Justlabelit.org demanding that genetically engineered foods be labeled. Please visit the petition page at Justlabelit.org and tell the FDA that you support mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods: http://www.JustLabelIt.org/take-action?track=sotaf