Your exact errors make a music

Listening to the San Francisco Zen Center podcast I heard Ryushin Paul Haller read this poem today by William Stafford. It has inspired me to get away from Masters Thesis writing and go for a good long run.

Your exact errors make a music

that nobody hears.

Your straying feet find the great dance,

walking alone.

And you live on a world where stumbling

always leads home.

Year after year fits over your face—

when there was youth, your talent

was youth;

later, you find your way by touch

where moss redeems the stone;

and you discover where music begins

before it makes any sound,

far in the mountains where canyons go

still as the always-falling, ever-new flakes of snow.

—William Stafford, from You Must Revise Your Life

Feeding the world without destroying it.

The University of Minnesota just put out a new video on one of the greatest ecological issues of our times: Agriculture.

In the video 'Big Question: Feast or famine?' the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment talks about rising populations, growing land area for agricultural production and gives a generally rousing call to action for agronomists, policy makers and farmers.

We are currently experiencing the 6th great extinction of the world and agriculture is playing a central role. It is important to make sure that agriculture is on the table in talks about how to solve the climate crises and the crises of ecological destruction. However, I'd like to point out a mistake they making in this question: You might remember from statistics class that correlation does not imply causation. This conversation points out a correlation between population growth and ecological decline as a central part of the argument. This correlation does not mean that population growth causes the ecological decline. If you look at the Gapminder Graph of countries with the highest GHG emissions you will see that the rate of population growth of these places is decreasing while the ecological impacts of those populations is increasing. The problems that we need to address are hidden behind this veil of misinterpreted data.

Armed with this knowledge we might start looking for real solutions to the problem. We need radical transformations of the way we interact with the natural world. Rather than looking at the staggering numbers of people being born every day into poverty and despair as the problem we should spread the resources equitably to all those people as a solution. We should also find a way to include the rest of the species in our equitable distribution.

We need radical shifts of economic paradigms e.g. ecological debt reparations where wealthy nations and multinational corporations have to pay for the damage they have caused.

If you are not familiar with Gapminder organization recommend checking them out and watching Prof. Hans Roslings talks on TED.com. See FAO STAT for the populations and Our écological footprint: reducing human impact on the earth By Mathis Wackernagel, William E. Rees for the rest.

Check out 350.org to help come up with real solutions.

The Right To Choose Healthy Food In the US

These are sad and difficult times for small-scale farmers and local food in the US. - Senate bill S 510 was passed last week, with support from agricultural giants, making it illegal to save seeds, give produce to neighbors or sell at farmer's markets without meeting stringent criteria. Now another bill S3767 will expand FDA regulations on all persons who manufacture, process, pack, distribute, receive, hold or import food to the US. This bill puts new enforcement provisions into FDA law, offenders could be fined or imprisoned for up to 10 years. It gives FDA expansive rule-making capability over the way food is produced and creates compliance burdens for small farmers; it will govern how farmers can grow and harvest their crops and make safety controls for all farms and facilities that process foods. 

What can we do? We can Vote Track S 510 to see who voted where and send them a letter accordingly.

Vote track S3767 and make sure that your representatives are voting for small-scale local food. We can contact our representatives and contact our senators. We can read the Agriculture Society and take part in Action Alerts. Finally we can get inspired to take action by watching the Farmageddon trailer on the Richmond Food Collective Blog.  

Radical Raw Milk

Back in Germany now in the darkest shortest days of the year. I am trying not to get too distracted from writing my thesis. - In between bouts of writing I find myself in the kitchen and in the pantry looking at ways to make more fermentation and preservation experiments. Food has certainly become the center of my daily life.

I just read this article about raw milk politics in the US. The author, Ryan Parker, is an old House of Representatives guy. Now he has a 'beyond organic'  small family farm in Newport, Maine.

The article Milking the Corporate Cow can be read in the Bangor Daily News.

Outward Bound - Off to See the Tiaga and Tundra

I will not be blogging for a while now as I am off to do ethnobotanical research in the Taiga and Tundra subarctic regions of the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland on my way back to Maine.

Meanwhile here is a quote from Walt Whitman

"This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."

The Generous Man by Tor Nørretranders

While I was in the Klimaforum in Copenhagen this winter I heard the Danish Mathematician Tor Nørretranders give a speech about sociology and evolution.

I have just finished reading his new book 'The Generous Man' wherein he debunks the popularly accepted idea of a selfish homo economicus. He draws upon the sciences to introduce the idea that instead we are homo reciprocans and are naturally inclined to cooperate. I am inspired to go on reading about links between sociology, biology and philosophy.

My follow up books are 'The Nature Of Design' by David Orr and Environmental Sociology by Scottish Sociologist Phillip W. Sutton.


Read more about Tor Nørretranders on Edge

Beyond Edge:Tor Nørretranders' Blog

BP and Haliburton Chose Profit Over People and Nature

I am feeling a bit angry and radical this morning.

Reading the latest from the BBC 'BP was told of oil safety fault 'weeks before blast' I have been saddened but not at all shocked to find that profit was valued over people and nature in the lead up to the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster. Haliburton and BP have worked together to make a load of money and get out of there quick with the already impoverished and disaster ridden people, flora and fauna of the Gulf of Mexico left to pay the real costs.

Oil as a mechanism for human suffering and ecological collapse is not new. The people of many nations such as Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Afghanistan have been paying with their lives and natural resources for generations to feed the hungry industrialized nations oil needs. Poor communities around the world have been paying the price for industrialization and the wealth of the 'developed' nations. With the 1989 Exxon spill and this BP spill some of the high costs of industrialization are being felt at home.

Here is a poem for the lost communities of sea life that have suffered, perished and will continue to do so in the Gulf of Mexico and the oceans of the world as long as we allow companies like BP and Haliburton to choose profit over people and nature.

The World Below the Brine by Walt Whitman

The world below the brine, Forests at the bottom of the sea, the branches and leaves,
Sea-lettuce, vast lichens, strange flowers and seeds, the thick tangle, openings, and pink turf,
Different colors, pale gray and green, purple, white, and gold, the play of light through the water,
Dumb swimmers there among the rocks, coral, gluten, grass, rushes, and the aliment of the swimmers,
Sluggish existences grazing there suspended, or slowly crawling close to the bottom,
The sperm-whale at the surface blowing air and spray, or disporting with his flukes,
The leaden-eyed shark, the walrus, the turtle, the hairy sea-leopard, and the sting-ray,
Passions there, wars, pursuits, tribes, sight in those ocean-depths, breathing that thick-breathing air, as so many do,
The change thence to the sight here, and to the subtle air breathed by beings like us who walk this sphere,
The change onward from ours to that of beings who walk other spheres.