Green Counsel

Silence . . . and The End of Self-Sustaining Existence

Two Items from today's NY Times editorials:

The Times had an editorial today relating to yesterday's fascinating page 1 story about nearly 80 members of the Nukak hunter-gatherer tribe who walked out the jungle and "renounced their ancestral ways." It's unclear why they left -- perhaps the jungle had become less habitable because of coca farmers or marxist guerrillas. As the Times editorilized: "In one sense there has never been a better time for a people like the Nukak to leave the wild. They'll find medical care, sustenance and a genuine attempt at cultural respect that would have been impossible years ago. Yet the fact that they're leaving suggest how much their world -- and ours - has been impaired. . . .The Nukak have every right to make this decision for themselves. But it's hard to escape the feeling that their self sustaining existence -- which went almost entirely unnoticed by the rest of the world -- was holding something open for us, something that has now been lost." (See also a multi-media presentation of the story here.)

A separate editorial concerning former Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal who died this week quoted him: "When something is going on, silence is a lie."

"Reality has a well-known Liberal bias"

Take a look at Stephen Colbert's roast of our President at the White House Correspondent's Dinner:

www.thankyoustephencolbert.org

Pattern Languages of Sustainablity

How do we turn visions of sustainability into reality-- a change perhaps more radical than the agricultural and industrial revolutions? A very exciting model using "pattern languages" is being developed by Ecotrust here.

Dreaming of the Hudson

"Tell me a story, a story that will be my story as well as the story of everyone and everything about me, the story that brings us together in a valley community, a story that brings together the human community with every living being in the valley, a story that brings us together under the arc of the great blue sky in the day and the starry heavens at night, a story that will drench us with rain and dry us in the wind, a story told by humans to one another that will also be the story the wood thrush sings in the thicket, the story that the river recites in its downward journey, the story that Storm King Mountain images forth in the fullness of its grandeur."

Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth, p 171-2.

Turtle Island

Turtle Island -- the old/new name for the continent, based on many creation myths of the people who have been living here for millennia, and reapplied by some of them to "North America" in recent years. Also, an idea found world-wide, of the earth, or cosmos even, sustained by a great turtle or serpent-of-eternity.

A name: that we may see ourselves more accurately on this continent of watersheds and life-communities -- plant zones, physiographic provinces, culture areas: following natural boundaries. The "U.S.A." and its states and counties are arbitrary and inaccurate impositions on what is really here.

The poems speak of place, and the energy-pathways that sustain life. Each living being is a swirl in the flow, a formal turbulence, a "song." The land, the planet itself, is also a living being -- at another pace. Anglos, Black people, Chicanos, and others beached upon these shores all share such views at the deepest levels of their old cultural traditions -- African, Asian, or European. Hark again to those roots, to see our ancient solidarity, and then to the work of being together on Turtle Island.

--Gary Snyder, from Turtle Island