nature's language of plants

seeds are words, really,
the speech of nature as plants.
and they have big ideas far beyond the melodramas of men,
and are not in any way supporters of purity or spiritual petrification.

-Martin Prechtel

I highly, highly, suggest reading the book this quote has been extracted,
"The unlikely peace at Cuchumaquic"

There was a study with three groups.

one group had consistent supplies of food.
one group had fluctuating difficulty finding food.
one group had consistent difficulty finding food.

Stress levels were significantly higher in the middle group, that is the unpredictable experience.
I find this interesting, because I would have assumed the group that worked harder all the time would be more stressed.

Close to 80 % of Canadians now live in cities and suburbs.

" Close to 80 % of Canadians now live in cities and suburbs. As a consequence, how we manage our growing urban footprint will largely determine whether we can effectively reduce the GHGs that cause global warming, protect critically important agricultural areas close to home, sustain and restore wildlife habitat, as well as ensure that our communities (especially young people) continue to have access to nature for recreational, health and spiritual benefit.

Unfortunately cash-strapped local governments carry much of the burden of managing their community’s natural capital –fields, forests, wetlands, and parks that not only provide homes and habitat for wildlife but also the critical ecological services that clean the air, provide clean drinking water and other benefits. 

The David Suzuki Foundation is releasing a major report today that provides guidance on cost-effective ways that local governments can protect and restore natural capital in cities. Our report also offers various case studies of where these types of policies are working and identifies an abundance of promising tools and approaches that local governments can adopt. 

You can obtain the report here : Natural Capital Policy Review

We also encourage you to watch an accompanying video documentary series, Making Policy Live, that presents a number of innovative local projects in the communities of Maple Ridge, North Vancouver, Squamish and Vancouver. The videos reveal how locally driven initiatives are bringing new life to derelict or underutilized sites and enhancing the ability of nature to provide essential services like filtering drinking water and flood control. "

"love is when the self expands"

full screen version HERE

pulling connections

jobs vs. ecology
a false dichotomy

I highly recommend listening to this well spoken leader speak for 10 minutes.
click here for a better view

repeal the indian act

Robert Animikii Horton writes a powerfilled piece on Rabble.ca contextualizing the contemporary 'police state', as identified by the G20 police brutality in Toronto to the Indian act (that began in 1876 and continues today)...


"Before chemical-mace and tear gas blinded countless in crowds at urban intersections, millions of tears fell from blurred eyes onto the lands upon which (under the Indian Act) we could not legally hold ceremony, could not argue land expropriation, as it was illegal for our communities to hire lawyers, ..."


find the whole article here.

Empathic Neurons

Wait a minute
wired to relate?
Jeremy Rifkin
studied primates with
brain MRI's hooked up
and understands the
'human condition'
isn't so competitive.

so nice to hear scientists speak to social phenomena, revealing societal power structures that aren't in fact based on how our brains actually work. He's a little fuzzy on pre civilization communication between hunter/gatherers, but hey, he's drawing some broad strokes to situate where we are right now.

ICELAND!

The full article is here

"
Five years of a pure neo-liberal regime had made Iceland, (population 320 thousand, no army), one of the richest countries in the world. In 2003 all the country’s banks were privatized, and in an effort to attract foreign investors, they offered on-line banking whose minimal costs allowed them to offer relatively high rates of return. The accounts, called IceSave, attracted many English and Dutch small investors. But as investments grew, so did the banks’ foreign debt. In 2003 Iceland’s debt was equal to 200 times its GNP, but in 2007, it was 900 percent."

A stronger word for love...

more free music from Cobin Murdoch HERE

except to try

" There is no true failure when attempts to build a different world do not reach the lofty goals of those who plan them; there is only true failure if pursuit of those plans entails the abandonment of respect, or reliance upon control and domination, or an attempt to build harmful absolutes. Ultimately, to do nothing is itself failure; to risk oneself and become unsettled is a success in and of itself. There is no one way to be an ally, just as there is no one way to be colonial. There is not one single struggle against imperialism, and so there is  no one single solution to these struggles. No one solution, that is, except to try."

Adam Barke, as published in Lynne Davis' Book Alliances Re/Envisioning Indigenous-non-Indigenous Relationships.

feminism isn't...

a woman in class with me said

Feminism isn't about women
Feminism is a way to look at power through a gendered lens.

a way to look at power.

He stares at the door for a while, hoping. It's his door. He cleans the years of sweat and spit and piss and crushed bugs out of its grain, twists the bolts from its flesh, tears out the locks. He returns the wood to the mill, un-saws it, heaves it back a great distance along plunging mud tracks, asks the elephants to drag it back up the steep hillsides. And then, among the profusion of thick grasses and liana and the calls of wild monkeys and birds, he sets the wood upright and it becomes a tree again, one of the trees in the last great golden teak forests on earth, the jungles of northern Burma.


p.22
The Lizard Cage
by Karen Connelly

He said
freedom isn't the ability to decide
freedom is being able to create choices

follow this link, or send an email question@electiondebate2011.ca to CTV if you want to exercise your freedom (?) by helping decide what is discussed in the televised debate.

Take someone who doesn't keep score,
who's not looking to be richer, or afraid of losing,
who has not the slightest interest even
in his own personality: He's free
-Rumi (Open Secret)

Declaration of Interdependence

- written for the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. 

This we know

We are the earth, through the plants and animals that nourish us.
We are the rains and the oceans that flow through our veins.
We are the breath of the forests of the land, and the plants of the sea.
We are human animals, related to all other life as descendants of the firstborn cell.
We share with these kin a common history, written in our genes.
We share a common present, filled with uncertainty.
And we share a common future, as yet untold.
We humans are but one of thirty million species weaving the thin layer of life enveloping the world.
The stability of communities of living things depends upon this diversity.
Linked in that web, we are interconnected — using, cleansing, sharing and replenishing the fundamental elements of life.
Our home, planet Earth, is finite; all life shares its resources and the energy from the sun, and therefore has limits to growth.
For the first time, we have touched those limits.
When we compromise the air, the water, the soil and the variety of life, we steal from the endless future to serve the fleeting present.

This we believe

Humans have become so numerous and our tools so powerful that we have driven fellow creatures to extinction, dammed the great rivers, torn down ancient forests, poisoned the earth, rain and wind, and ripped holes in the sky.
Our science has brought pain as well as joy; our comfort is paid for by the suffering of millions.
We are learning from our mistakes, we are mourning our vanished kin, and we now build a new politics of hope.
We respect and uphold the absolute need for clean air, water and soil.
We see that economic activities that benefit the few while shrinking the inheritance of many are wrong.
And since environmental degradation erodes biological capital forever, full ecological and social cost must enter all equations of development.
We are one brief generation in the long march of time; the future is not ours to erase.
So where knowledge is limited, we will remember all those who will walk after us, and err on the side of caution.

This we resolve

All this that we know and believe must now become the foundation of the way we live.
At this turning point in our relationship with Earth, we work for an evolution: from dominance to partnership; from fragmentation to connection; from insecurity, to interdependence.

"Humility is not necessarily considering ourselves less important or valuable than other people. It is not a lack of self-esteem; nor is it a form of modest behavior, and it is not the result of humiliation.

Humility is the right attitude of the finite to the Infinite, the conditioned to the Unconditioned, the part to the Whole. Humility is our awareness of our dependence on something greater than ourselves, and our interdependence with our fellow human beings and all of life."

--Kabir Helminski, The Knowing Heart: A Sufi Path of Transformation