Thousands of citizens have gathered on the mall in DC today to ask President Obama to move forward on climate and energy policy. The activists involved represent different campaigns and strategies to protect the Earth and restore ecological balance. Today they all march as one.
For several months, First Nations citizens of Canada, Native American Nations and many non-Indigenous allies have worked to reaffirm unity of the human family and love for Mother Earth. Check out the video and other links below to explore the growing movement.
In an interesting analysis of the Romney-Ryan Energy Plan, Bill Chameides used the "word cloud" app. Word clouds can be a very revealing way to look at ideas.
Read the rest of Bill's analysis (which includes a link to a pdf of the Plan) at www.huffingtonpost.com
Before today, I was only familiar with the symbolism of the Sankofa bird through Cassandra Wilson's music. Before I heard Pandora Thomas and Zakiya Harris of Earthseed Consulting, I had not thought of it in terms of my interest in environmental justice. But they helped me connect the dots and it made total sense that resonated with my own discoveries. How does this apply to environmental justice work?
You can't start with An Inconvenient Truth to get people interested in climate change, for example, if people in the community have trouble securing basic life needs. But if you ask people if they know someone dealing with asthma, high blood pressure, diabetes, inadequate housing, poverty, or limited access to healthy food, says Zakiya, everybody in the room will raise their hand. Then you can help them connect the dots between those more familiar day to day challenges in one's own community and dirty coal plants, climate change, toxic chemicals and other stressors and conditions of the environment.
If the African-American, Latino and other communities of color seem to be underrepresented in the mainstream environmental movement, it's not because they are not interested in environmental issues. All of these communities have their own stories, their own culture's way of relating to Earth, their own expertise to do what's needed where they live.
Too often, says Zakiya, environmentalists wanting to help don't ask the right questions to reconnect communities with the expertise they already have. We don't start off by meeting them where they are before we try to help them move forward. What we need to do is listen to their stories and then frame things in a way that allows them to share and bring their own expertise back into the light.
According to Pandora and Zakiya, education and training is a key to their successful work with people, because when people learn new things, that naturally sparks interest to become involved in something. Among the projects that Pandora and Zakiya talked about were The Green Life program at San Quentin, and the City Slickers Farms project in West Oakland.
At the end of the discussion, Zakiya and Pandora each had a final thought to share (I was typing fast to get this, but I think this is close to what each one said with minimal paraphrasing):
Zakiya: We are witnessing the greatest paradigm shift any of us have ever seen in our lifetimes. We will need to be more inclusive and recognize that their [communities of color that have largely been excluded from the environmental movement in the past] expertise might look different. Drop the guilt, start with your own inner work...we're not here to heal the Earth, we are healing ourselves so we can stay on the planet.
Pandora: Get outside. There are so many aspects of the movement that have actually disconnected us from life. Immerse yourself in the outdoors no matter where you are and just listen.
You can listen to the discussion by registering at the Spring of Sustainability program page, however I think there is a time-limited replay window.
Here's a video of a TedEX talk -- The Vision of Sankofa -- by Pandora and Zakiya:
American Reclamation, Inc. (AMR) is a family owned corporation with over 50 years of experience in the recycling and sold waste industry and a Waste Haulers & Recycling business in the Los Angeles area.
American Reclamation, Inc. is an independently owned company which prides itself in Safety,Customer Satisfaction, Quality Service, Clean Equipment, and a good work place for their employees.
This would seem to be yet one more example of a company putting a pretty face forward but hiding its dark side under...well...the garbage.
Check out the website for Don't Waste LA for some good info and other articles.
I totally love this ad from Chipotle that aired during the Grammy's. It speaks most directly to the tragedies of factory farming and our unsustainable food systems, but the idea of getting back to the start -- relating to Earth and each other from heart space, and co-creating our world from there -- is one we need to bring into everything we do on this planet. Enjoy this reflection from Willy and Chipotle...
Great article from Jeff Biggers and awesome video from Magnolia Mountain:
As millions of pounds of explosives from mountaintop removal strip mining operations continue to devastate historic mountain communities in central Appalachia, a powerful new music video released this week by the beloved American Roots band Magnolia Mountain captures the haunting grief and stories of stricken families in America's cradle of roots and country music.
Driven by Mark Utley's banjo licks and Magnolia Mountain's effortlessly haunting and plaintive harmonies, "The Hand of Man" joins the pantheon of classic mountain ballads and mining tunes, including Kentucky legend Jean Ritchie's "Black Waters" and John Prine's timeless paean to his family's demise in western Kentucky to Peabody coal, "Paradise," and 2/3 Goat's recent metrobilly hit, "Stream of Conscience."
Makayla Urias, 8, from Pike County, Kentucky holds contaminated water samples taken from her home which is surrounded by mountaintop removal coal mining.
Over the past few years, several health studies on the interrelationship of human health and mountaintop removal coal mining have added to the urgency -- an urgency understood by citizens of Appalachia for many years -- to keep the mountains intact. Scientific evidence that this destructive mining practice hurts people and nature is piling up just about as fast now as surface mine operators can blow up the mountains and pile mining waste into Appalachian waters!
The interactive map will allow you to explore the relationship of mountaintop removal coal mining to poverty, changes in life expectancy, birth defect rates, or deaths from cancer, heart or respiratory diseases. The map allows you to view the data at various scales, from regional to state to county-level correlations.
After you play with the map, please visit the iLoveMountains action page. It lists several things anyone can do to make sure Makayla Urias and every other child in Appalachia has a fair chance for a long, happy and healthy life.
Please stand with me and thousands of others today to stop destruction of Ison Rock Ridge in southwestern Virginia. If a mountaintop removing mining permit is approved there, the mountain communities of Inman, Andover, Derby, and Callahan Avenue and Ridge Street in the town of Appalachia would be at risk for more damage to the health of people and nature.
The permit area is huge: over 1200 acres of this awesome mountain ecosystem would be deforested and blown apart, disrupting the natural processes that must be kept intact to support human beings and other species who know this place as home.
I Love Mountains has a page that will help you ask President Obama, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, Nancy Sutley of the White House Council on Environmental Quality and EPA Regional Administrator Shawn Garvin to deny the permit. If another mine is permitted here, it will only compound the destruction by mountaintop removal coal mining that Wise County's land, air, water, wildlife and people have already suffered.
Here's a great video that will let you hear from folks in Wise County, in their own words:
