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So last week I said we would offer some reflections on the headline: how do we begin to live through and beyond the era that is ending? We spend a lot of time here talking about the disastrous consequences of that era, of this human period of fierce exploitation of the earth, of ecosystems, of human labor, that has left our world and our spirits so damaged.

Are we no better as a species than this? Is this innate to us? I don’t think so. I think it is an errant path taken by marauders and barbarians long ago who conquered other peoples, villages, nations, because they had bigger and better weapons and gods who empowered them to do so – you know, those male warrior gods, or the punishing god of so much of the Christian West, the one that blessed monarchs as they conquered territories across the globe, and Crusaders as they pillaged the Muslim world.

Maybe the era that is coming to an end, or that is at least in the beginning of a steep and permanent decline, is bigger than we realize,  bigger than the mere belief that capitalism, or the often very unenlightened Age of Enlightenment, is coming to an end. Some pretty major gods are being knocked off their pillars, or out of the clouds, where they have reigned over us.

Source: NASA

All over the world, we see signs of a rebirth – a rebirth of who we really are, a species that emerged out of the earth, is part of the earth, and whose fate is completely aligned with it. As the planet goes, so do our prospects. When we damage the earth, we damage those prospects. The earth is resilient, has created, killed off, created again, killed off again, created again, millions upon millions of species.

We as conscious beings get to decide whether or not we want to continue to be a part of the planet’s evolution. Evolution will go on with or without us, and its path will be altered by whether or not it is with us or without us; but that the unfolding will continue is certain – until the sun comes to its last days, or an asteroid crashes into us. Some things we can’t control – a lot of things, actually. The only thing we can control is our decision about what we as a species want to do and to be within that story.

So this is a role that implies a profound humbling of the species, an acceptance of our true place here. We knock ourselves off the pillar at the top of creation, its ultimate meaning and purpose, the  singular pathway of its unfolding. That can make us feel small, more insignificant than we have felt previously. It can fill us with dread as we come to terms with how temporary we are. Or it can do something else…

It can fill us with gratitude that we are here and alive now to learn all this, to ‘see’ the cosmos in many ways for the first time in human evolution, and to embrace a mystery that is far beyond our comprehension – why we are here at all and how this amazing universe has come to be. We will never know these things no matter how many gods or religions we create, but we can live in the wonder of it all. Why is that not enough for us?

The cosmos and the earth within it, indeed even these bodies of ours, are made up of such wondrous complexity that we come to realize that inclusivity is built into the very structure of the universe. Diversity, chaos, unending processes of change, unity, things coming together and then falling apart – this is what holds the universe together, what knits is dynamic creative forces. Black holes suck all the energy, all light, into themselves; the reverberations of the Big Bang drive energy apart in a continuous expansion of the universe. Opposing forces within one dynamic creation.

And still we create separate nations, separate gods, separate ethnic and racial groups – one of the great lies of human civilization. We drive apart into seemingly separate compartments for various groups, some feeling superior to others, as if this is possible. But we cannot separate ourselves from anything. We only exist in actual physical, biological, energetic community bursting with diversity and chaos and relationships that are sometimes destructive and sometimes creative and both of those things all at once.

We only exist in relationship, or we don’t exist at all. Trying to exist as if this is not true has led to great suffering, violence, and fear. Think Israel and Palestine, for example. Or think Milwaukee, reported once again to be the nation’s most racially segregated – with the logical consequences.

The spirituality we strive to articulate here is rooted in this discovery of our profound connectedness with all things. If, as we wrote last week, an iPhone contains all the rare earth mineral mining and the water used in manufacturing and the toxic chemicals and the exploited human labor, well, how much more so can we speak of the human body which contains within it our parents and their ancestors, the water, air, soil, we consume each day to stay alive, the breath we put back into the atmosphere, the energy of the sun and the rain that refreshes the earth, the experience of beauty as we gaze out at the stars at night – our children, our blood relatives, our friends, all that we care about – it’s all here in this body.

We need to take care of all those relationships that keep us alive, because without them we do not exist at all. Damaged, they suffer. Damaged, they cannot provide the health and joy and beauty that makes life worth living.

And that’s one of the primary ways we begin to live beyond the techno-industrial era – by beginning to take much better care of these relationships.

There is a reason so many people around the world are looking again at indigenous spiritualities, with their deeper roots in the immediacy of our relationships with earth, fire, water, and air, the four elements at the heart of  everything here. But this is not a return to another era as if we can go back to some idyllic age when we got it right. At least I hope that is not the case for most people. Rather, it is turning to roots to help us find a new wisdom, a new language, a new sense of the human within the nest of creation bringing all that we know now of the cosmos and the science that tells us both the danger we are in and the magnificence of what we are a part of.

So a first step in this new way of life is getting out of the techno-industrial era and the values that support it as much as possible, to replace the mediating technologies with a renewal of our intimate personal relationships with one another and the habitats in which we live, to get out of the consumer world as much as we can, to form community bonds that will sustain us as our culture goes through shock after shock – a pattern we are getting used to in the past couple of decades.

And then we have to use our best creative ingenuity to consider how work becomes real human labor again, to think about how work can provide ways to make a living without basing that labor in damaging industries. Right now a corporate dominated world and politics is telling us that only by gouging out more earth, only by sending more oil and gas through pipelines, only by building more Walmarts and highways for cars can we create jobs so that people can live a good life. Part of our task is to put the lie to that.

The new way of life only awaits our creating it.

[This post is longer than usual but stuff I've been thinking about a lot lately. I hope you will take time to read it, comment, and share it with others. And then please consider a donation to keep this project moving along.]

Are we really coming to the end of an era? Have some thoughts to share as we go into the weekend, some inspired by the NY Times’ lengthy exposure this week of the industrial/production practices of Apple (the last one yesterday continues to reveal the human, moral, and ecological scandal of it all), some inspired by passage yesterday of a new mining bill in our corporate-bought state assembly which will roll back environmental protections and allow an outside coal-mining company to rip open 4 miles of the North Woods for an iron ore strip mine, some inspired by last night’s reading from the Morris Berman book, Why America Failed: The Roots Of Imperial Decline.

I’m reading Berman’s chapter, “The Rebuke of History,” in which he does a deconstruction of the argument that the Civil War, the War Between the States, was about the morally righteous cause of abolishing slavery. Many historians, of course, have written about this (he cites numerous sources), that if slavery had been the only issue, the war would not have been fought and slavery would have disappeared in any case, since it had fallen into global disrepute. Slavery was an issue in the sense that it was a central aspect of the traditional, hierarchical, agrarian southern economy which the North was bent on destroying in order to give the Union over to the new age of industrial/economic expansion. That expansion, the origins of the American Dream, depended on ‘free labor’ and the spread of the northern economy into the new western territories.

Well, I don’t want to use more space for a summary of this chapter, but it had me thinking a lot about the trajectory of that economic dynamic through the building of industrial America, the need to wipe out American Indian tribes at its service, the violent or devious annexations of various portions of what is now our 48 contiguous states, then to various international wars and foreign annexations, right up to Apple’s move into China and the giant industrial operations that make their clever inventions such attractive, affordable, addictive consumer items.

There is a direct line here from that northern victory over the South to globalization dominated by multinational corporations and built still and seemingly forever on exploiting human labor and ‘natural resources’ (meaning nature and ecosystems) at the service of industrial expansion.

Our part in it is just this – that our lives have come to depend upon this, that industrial expansion has fed population growth which means we need even more of it to meet human needs, which feeds population growth which means we need more of it to meet the needs of this burgeoning population of consumers with demands for food, water, housing, jobs, and consumer items. Jobs and income depend on it. Our very lives have come to depend on it. None of us exists outside of it, and those few populations that still do are being destroyed, bought off,  or co-opted.

You get the picture. The global economy is built upon our consumption of these ‘resources.’ When we buy an iPhone, for example, we are consuming the rare earth mineral mining, the building of the factories, the vast amounts of water involved in production, the industrial pollution and e-waste that results, the fossil fuels used to ship materials to factories and products to the store, and the labor of Chinese workers.

All of that is contained in each of these products.

Now Apple has made it easy to single them out because the changes in their production process have been recent, a challenge to their image of the past, and because their products are so widely lauded as ‘beautiful.’ In other words, they are wildly successful. The company is making huge profits (according to MSNBC, some $400,000 per worker – I mean, you cannot get a better definition of injustice than that single figure).

But of course every consumer item we purchase contains social and ecological content. And one of the reasons we are running into such serious ecological crises (climate change, species extinction, water stresses, toxic contamination of everything, including our bodies, etc.) is because of this economic model. Basically, what the North did to the South this nation has done to the world – ravaged it to obtain what it needs to feed ‘growth’. And of course other nations have followed our lead since World War II. What is going on in the Foxconn industrial complex is ‘scorched earth’ economics with a very, very few at the top of the Apple world – CEOs and investors – making out like bandits while 13-year-olds work 12 hours per day at a daily wage of $17.

In my old work, labor rights and fair trade became central to our mission as we continued our commitment to human rights in the Central America region following the devastation of US-supported wars there and generations of military dictatorship. For many years I had the privilege of serving on the board of the US Labor Education in the Americas Project where I received an intensive immersion into the reality of how the global economy works. I emerged from those years aware that we cannot have a world in which human rights, social justice, and ecological wholeness are values we cherish and seek to make real within the paradigm of this voracious global industrial economic model.

And the irony is not lost on me that so many people in my old circles fell in love with Apple products, even as we worked on issues of sweatshop exploitation in the apparel industry, or defending worker rights on banana or coffee plantations. I don’t mean this as judgment but as way to exemplify just how interwoven we are in this system that is built upon principles and moral values that we also find abhorrent.

I have yet to hear a clamor from Apple users that we are willing to pay more and purchase far fewer of these products in exchange for an end to these labor practices in China, or for students on campuses across the country to demand that universities boycott these products or demand changes in how they are ‘sourced,’ as once so many did around sweatshop apparel. Perhaps that day will come soon. I hope so. Consumers have some power here, and we need to use it.

But mostly what this says to me is that we really are  interwoven with, absorbed into, mesmerized by what this economy, built upon the industrial expansion of the Union from the mid-1800s on, has provided for us. What I question – fiercely – is that this was the only way that we could meet human needs and create a quality of life worth living (which a life of meaningless consumerism is not, something all our anxiety and depression symptoms and psycho-drug prescriptions ought to be making abundantly clear by now). That we can’t stop ourselves even in the face of vast human suffering and ecological threats to our habitats all around the planet should tell us just how bad this addiction and dependency has become.

What is also becoming clear in our time, in my generation in which the expansion occurred at a pace never seen before in human history (one fact alone being breathtaking, that in my lifetime our global population has exploded from 2.5 billion to 7 billion), is that this techno-industrial capitalist model of economy is causing us to approach the limits of the earth’s biocapacity very rapidly – a runaway train headed towards a precipice, or multiple precipices. It is also moving into more rapid cycles of financial wealth generation and collapse, of recovery and recession, as well as into a stage in which financial speculation produces a larger share of financial wealth than does production and consumption. All of these things are heralds of an era coming to some sort of end not too long from now. Next generation? the one after? during my old age? We do see many more signs at regional levels, of course, indicated by stories like yesterday’s reporting that a Hawaiian legislator just introduced a bill that would require the state and counties to consider an expected one-foot rise in sea level by 2050 when considering future development plans.

In northern Wisconsin and within our corporate-right-controlled state government we see how the last throes of the techno-industrial age are likely to unfold – with more super-exploitation of the planet as corporations try to wrest what they can from the earth to feed this global economic dynamo. In his State of the Union message, President Obama also made this clear – in terms of natural gas and oil drilling, we are ‘all-in’ to extract every bit of energy we can from our territory to feed the monster. Whatever he says about also committing to clean energy, that is not what is on the agenda for the corporate campaign donors who have put people like Scott Walker in state government or created secrete SuperPACs, or that create and finance groups like Americans for Prosperity and Club for Growth.

We are living in these last throes of the techno-industrial era. How do we begin to prepare for what comes next? What do we want to put in its place? What kind of human community can be wrested from the shallowness and moral debilitation of this long era, one that shows a far greater sense of the meaning of the human and of all sentient and non-sentient beings than this one?

Yesterday a small group of us began reflecting on this enormous question. We acknowledged that many small communities have already begun to create this new path, this new way of life. But we all felt that in order to commit to a future that re-treasures who we are and the place in which we exist, we need to turn off the noise at times and pull within, to a silent space, a safe space, where we can listen to what is in our hearts and the hearts of those around us.

More on that next week. Stay tuned.

As we wrote last time, changing a culture ain’t easy, but it needs to be done. While political leaders (or anti-leaders) continue pushing the agenda of economic growth to get us back on track to making the American Dream available to everyone – if they just work hard enough and if  “job creators” are freed up from government regulations and taxes to invest in workers, and blah, blah, blah – the world presents us with a different reality. The global economy has changed, and the sources of wealth generation have changed. And most of us are being left out of that picture, human detritus dumped on the margins of the economy.

At an Occupy Milwaukee rally. Photo: Margaret Swedish

The debate around Mitt Romney’s source of wealth is relevant – most of it comes from investment, not from real work. It’s money making money. And investment income faces low tax rates, thanks in large part to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, just 15% on capital gains. This puts an enormous driver of unfairness into our entire economic system as only the wealthy even have the money to invest at the scale that generates true wealth, the kind that makes millionaires and billionaires.

I want to cite a couple of articles to offer another picture of what is happening to our world of wealth and employment. I have written previously that our unemployment problem is not just a result of the Sept. ’08 financial crash and the Great Recession (which had actually begun before the crash), but result of a structural shift in the global economy, a permanent one.

The labor market available to corporations has grown exponentially in recent decades, a result of population growth, of China’s giant economy entering global markets, of free trade agreements that have moved capital around the world freely but kept labor in place, adding to a downward pressure on wages and working conditions because of a growing cheap labor pool, and rising expectations for standards of living (i.e., material consumption) around the world. For decades, with the globalization of the labor market, US workers whose wages and benefits had lifted them into a massive middle class following World War II were now competing with workers from Latin America to Asia and beyond. How does a worker making $25-$35 an hour for assembly line work compete with a worker making 50 cents an hour in Thailand or El Salvador? They don’t, especially in the era in which fuel costs for global transport were relatively cheap compared with today.

Inexorably, over the course of 2-3 decades, corporations have succeeded in using the pressure of this wage competition to bust private sector union contracts in the US, to erode labor rights, and to drive wages and benefits down the toilet in return for keeping some jobs here.

Check out this article from last November’s NY Times:  The Age of the Superfluous Worker

Occupy Milwaukee Rally. Photo: Margaret Swedish

This is a pretty bleak picture of the future, and the ideas proffered in the end for addressing that picture are, let’s be real, impossible to even talk about in the current politics of this country.  So expect the “unbelievably angry country, with intense and continuing conflict between the have-jobs and have-nones” to be our future – unless we can do something else “from below,” and fast. [For another great example of how the global labor market has shifted and the impact on the US middle class, check out this brilliant deconstruction of Apple and where and how it now manufactures its iPhones, iPads, etc.]

Yet even more is going on. As manufacturing has gone more and more high tech, as robotics do more and more manufacturing, eliminating or replacing actual workers, and as the remaining low-skilled work ends up in enormous factory complexes with young underpaid exploited workers in China and elsewhere, the kinds of manufacturing jobs that once created the US middle class are simply disappearing.

We don’t need all these workers anymore. They are becoming surplus. And this is not only about things like assembling an iPhone. A lot of high-tech computer work is ending up in big shops in India, for example, where making $10,000 a year is a great salary.

Of course, the poor are always those hit first and worst at a time of economic collapse or upheaval. In my local paper today, we have a stunningly stark and depressing exposé of the impact the loss of manufacturing has had on African-American workers in my city of Milwaukee, a situation aided and abetted by the local culture’s long and still deeply entrenched history of racism.

Employment of black men drops drastically

Part of Milwaukee's industrial wasteland. Photo: Margaret Swedish

We have a local crisis here of huge proportions. I really hope you will read this article for what it reveals about the impacts of this great economic shift on the other soci0-economic-cultural challenges of this community. Abandonment of human beings of this proportion impacts everything else – quality of life in neighborhoods, family health and well-being, care of the environment, prospects for addressing the enormous challenges posed by our mounting ecological threats.

And yet all of these outcomes are direct consequences of the cultures rockbed values. Sadly, those values include a focus on individual gain and competition, resentment towards those who fall through the cracks of the competition and need public services, the ‘hustler’ mentality described in Morris Berman’s book cited the other day (Why America Failed), a nation of hustlers and often outright swindlers trying to make a buck often at the expense of someone else – like Apple competing for your business with lower production costs to make their toys more affordable, sending assembly jobs to Foxconn where labor is cheap, available 12 hours a day at a wage of $17 per day, and workers can be counted on to be submissive.

We don’t intend as a political culture right now to provide a decent education and opportunity for the African-American men of Milwaukee. Why would we want to invest in their future when the economy holds no place for them to pursue their dreams? For them we have hopelessness and a prison bed.

Spirituality and ecology – that’s what this project is about. What I want to say today is this: there has been too wide a gap between the environmental movement and economic injustice, between seeking ecological wholeness and the growing misery of millions upon millions of human beings because of the logic of our corporate economy. I no longer even believe we can save the precious ecosystems of the earth if we don’t address things like racism, ethnic resentment, and other forms of cultural discrimination. And we sure can’t do it with a culture formed by the values and meaning frameworks of this global economy.

A small portion of Alice's Garden. Photo: Margaret Swedish

Fortunately the gap between environmentalism and social justice has been closing in recent years. Much of that is happening at the local level. Here in Milwaukee, groups like Growing Power, which is trying to bring healthy food into the food deserts of the inner city, or Alice’s Garden, or Urban Ecology Center, have made the link and they are doing brilliant work.

And so I go back to the headline: in order to change the culture, we have to shift values at the most fundamental level, and then begin to live them.

We have to witness the new principles of our lives by becoming them – unselfish, less self-seeking, less worried about our own security by binding our sense of safety and well-being to the safety and well-being of others, renouncing the values of a consumer culture by returning to lives of greater simplicity, more  human contact and intimacy (not mediated through hi-tech toys), and spiritualities not mediated by hierarchies, dogma, and big institutions, but rooted, rested, within the web of creation itself.

When we nest there, we come to realize what actually supports us, what gives us life, and what gives life meaning. Those are the things that are being threatened, that are being unraveled, shredded, by a culture of exploitation, greed, and selfish competition.

To change the culture, we start right where we are, in our relationships, our daily choices, in where we put our energy and our priorities. If the culture is going to continue to unravel, what do we want in its place? What do we want to create so that when it falls apart, there is something there from which to create life anew – a better life than this one? When it falls apart, what then will hold us, and what will that look like? That’s the work of New Creation – and it has become essential.

I’m reading Morris Berman’s, Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline. It’s a catchy title meant to entice readers to open the book. Part of what strikes me is the past tense. I would more likely write, Why America Is Failing, since we certainly have had our fling at the peak of global power – some 60-70 years of economic domination undergirded by the growth of corporate power. Ironically, that corporate power, now grown multinational and no longer beholden to the nation for its growth and dominance, is one of the reasons for the demise of the era of US imperial ambitions.

But what is also striking is how he describes the economic-cultural roots of the nation – and how true it rings. From our beginnings, we have been a nation of ‘hustlers;’ the striving for economic gain and profit, for land and possessions, is what formed us and remains a driving force within the culture.

And despite many movements and cultural voices over two centuries trying to articulate a vision of communitarian values, railing against aggressive wealth-seeking and individualism, they never amounted to a social force that could challenge this basic character of the nation’s socio-economic reality – this fiercely class-based society that refuses to admit that class warfare has ever been at the heart and soul of our identity.

“America was from the outset a business civilization…The commercial orientation effectively became our trademark. The principal goal of North American civilization, and of its inhabitants, is and always has been an ever-expanding economy – affluence – and endless technological innovation – ‘progress.’ A nation of hustlers…a people relentlessly on the make.”

And those who most succeed in this game have not only grabbed most of the wealth (this is nothing new, just particularly egregious at this moment) but have also rigged the rules in their favor. Government only marginally exists to protect the interests of the people; as we discovered after the 2008 financial crash, government is there first and foremost to protect the interests of the wealthy, the financial system, and the corporations.

So on Wednesday I was drawn to this Opinion piece in the NY Times, For God So Loved The 1 Percent…, by Kevin M. Kruse, a historian at Princeton. He writes about the historical origins of this devil’s pact among the corporate elites and Christian pastors that has come to dominate right-wing politics in this country. Those roots go back to a time when, following the Great Depression and the ill-repute into which many businesses fell because of their role in bringing about the crash, corporate leaders were seeking a way back into the good graces of the American people whom they had betrayed out of greed – as has happened many times since, and most dramatically in the years leading up to the recent collapse. So where did they turn? To religion and the Christian culture that also undergirds the culture since its founding days. Unfortunately, they found pastors willing to sell out the gospel to the capitalist idols.

Realizing that they needed to rely on others, these businessmen took a new tack: using generous financing to enlist sympathetic clergymen as their champions. After all, according to one tycoon, polls showed that, “of all the groups in America, ministers had more to do with molding public opinion” than any other.

The Rev. James W. Fifield, pastor of the elite First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, led the way in championing a new union of faith and free enterprise. “The blessings of capitalism come from God,” he wrote. “A system that provides so much for the common good and happiness must flourish under the favor of the Almighty.”

Sounds current, doesn’t it? The roots of our contemporary marriage between corporate capital and the religious right go back eight decades – they are sunk pretty deep in our cultural soil. And so does the evolution of the slogan, “One nation under God,” end up being a oneness that cements in place one of the most inequitable societies on the planet. And so can the multimillionaire Mitt Romney claim that any criticism about his enormous wealth, how he achieved that wealth, and his disdainful attitudes towards the rest of us becomes ‘class warfare.’ It has always been the rich that use that term as an accusation against the unemployed, wage workers, public employees, the urban poor, and on and on.

I write about this because we need to understand what we are up against if we are looking to create a culture of ecological wholeness in which economic and social justice are at the heart of the culture, not the necessary basis for movements on the margins of the society. These movements are formed and fed by the lack of these values, not because we embody them. If civil rights and women’s suffrage were finally written into law as a result of decades of activism, the same will be true of our efforts to halt the devastation of the planet’s ecosystems, or to alter these destructive tendencies to treat the earth as a set of resources to be exploited for economic gain for the few, or to change a financial system that is based on abstract wealth and financial instruments that have given a smaller and smaller percentage of the population power over the rest of us, power to determine our quality of life within this beautiful planet.

This year, these same corporate interests will have billions of dollars to spend on campaign ads and events, enough to influence election outcomes. Money has been given ‘free speech’ rights thanks to the Supreme Court, which is no longer the guarantor of our rights under the Constitution but the highest level of protection for corporate interests before the government.

This should alarm us far more than it appears to do at this point. It has spawned popular protests like the Occupy movement and Tar Sands Action, which just had a temporary success with Obama’s decision to not approve the TransCanada oil pipeline – yet. And it has certainly changed the national discourse, evidenced by the questions around Romney’s wealth and taxes. It has reignited democratic fervor in my State of Wisconsin as we have seen our governor and rightwing state legislators make attempt after attempt to hand our state over to dirty industries and corporate campaign donors. We are beginning to realize what is endangered here, and it is more fundamental than people realized, even among those who voted for Scott Walker. Why else would more than a million people vote to recall him, almost as many as voted him into office in 2010?

But what Berman reminds us about is crucial. We can make changes around the edges of things – that is mostly what popular movements do, and this is not insignificant. But what is needed is a change far more fundamental, a change at the heart of the culture. We have to shift from a culture of hustlers working our brains out trying to get ahead, to make money for ourselves, and become a culture rooted in values like compassion, community, and a commitment to the common good and the good of the commons.

Is this possible? I guess I am wondering these days if what we are witnessing in the political culture right now has become so offensive to more and more people that when we look in the mirror and see what we have become as a nation we get disgusted enough to want something else, something more human and humane, something that can make us proud of ourselves for other reasons than selfish and self-oriented economic gain.

Do we have it in us? That’s a serious question. Comments welcome!

This article caught my eye at the end of the year, from Common Dreams:

Corporate Monopolies ‘May Dominate Green Economy’

Stuff like this really terrifies me. The question of who will control our future more and more rests on the question of global corporate power. Economic globalization, which took off more than 4 decades ago, has fed the growth of mega-corporations whose global reach and economic clout are often greater than whole nations. They even have their own global organizations, like the World Trade Organization (WTO), that set rules for how the global economy functions with authority and enforcement regimens that squelch the power of nations to make decisions over their own future well-being.

It has been clear to me for sometime that one of the reasons progress on a sustainable renewable energy economy has been held up is because the oil, coal, and gas industries have not yet figured out how to rein it in, to make it into commodities that can be bought and sold and by which they can make huge profits. Once they are able to do that, nothing will stop them, short of revolts against the power of institutions like the WTO.

Solar power, geothermal wells, wind turbines – these renewables source energy back to the local and regional level. You can charge oil by the barrel, but how do you do that with solar? After panels are installed, many people and communities are able to churn up enough electricity to send some of it back onto the grid – and get a rebate for doing so. That’s a different industry altogether.

So when you read this article you understand why so much of the search for alternative fuels in the US turns to environmentally destructive sources such as corn ethanol and biomass fuels. These sources make fuel like oil that can be sold by the gallon. It fits the model of our global commodity markets.

It also deepens our dependency on these markets and on the mega-corporations for what we need for life. It keeps us all feeding at the market trough.

And when you read this article, you also realize that these industries threaten ecosystems, food security, water accessibility, and all of this on a vast scale.

Then we have this election year in which unlimited corporate money can be spent on ads that will play a huge role in who gets elected and what interests they represent.

We should be worried, deeply worried, over the deepening control of these energy corporations over the future of our nation and world. How we get the energy we need to carry out our lives is one of the crucial questions of our times. This alone is reason to be engaged in democracy this year. So many of these issues around corporate power are coming to a head now and over the next few years. Who do we want making these crucial decisions for us?

Here’s an interesting little factoid that I found in last Sunday’s Arts & Leisure section of the NY Times:  “There are said to be at least 105 million and maybe as many as 2 billion parking spaces in the United States….Absent hard numbers Mr. Ben-Joseph settles on a compromise of 500 million parking spaces in the country, occupying some 3,590 square miles, or an area larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. If the correct number is 2 billion, we’re talking about four times that: Connecticut and Vermont.”

I wonder what was on that land before all the parking spaces: woods? farms? wetlands? What species might have lived in those areas, birds’ nests and fox dens?

Really, you wonder if we have any sense of the amount of damage we have done – because of the culture of the automobile, of shopping, of the ease of life that comes from our mobility and our ability to put our car a few steps away from wherever is our destination.

I suppose, just like our subdivisions, most of us would rather not know what was there before, what of life and nature was sacrificed for our convenience, our 21st century way of life.

Just like we would rather not know that the slaughter or intentional deaths of millions of American Indians and the labor of slaves are the real foundations of the spread of this nation across the continent.

It is so much easier to prescind within the present, act as if all responsibility begins from this point on.

I want to share some thoughts here about fracking. These articles will tell you more than you ever want to know about why fracking is becoming one of the most destructive technologies ever imposed upon the natural world, right up there with mountaintop removal coal-mining.

Ohio Earthquake Likely Caused by Fracking Waste-Water, from Scientific American
And this one on the same topic from Huffington Post
How things are even worse in Canada, home also of the biggest oil tar sands industrial site in the world
And then how the fracking industry buys its way into avoiding regulations
While it also buys off your members of Congress

Meanwhile, I wonder how much land has been covered over by shopping malls, how many trees cut down in the service of retail, how many wetlands paved over.  When it floods, we get mad at nature. We don’t even think about all those parking lots and shopping malls and business developments that have paved over the land that once took in the water and absorbed it down into aquifers and groundwater tables. Did you know that one of the contributors towards future water shortages, drying up of wells, etc. in the suburban and exurban world is because we have built over natural flood control systems established by the planet over tens of thousands of years? Water can’t go into the ground anymore. It just gets washed into rivers and flows out to sea.

Ask a developer if he or she cares.

Once we have the parking space and the mall and the house in the burbs, we don’t think about these things much anymore. And then all that energy is required to keep it all fueled, thus fracking for oil and gas, and blowing up mountaintops for our electric power.

My thoughts are not random here. If the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center where I participated in the moon ceremony the other night did not exist, there would be million dollar homes all over those 120-some acres of pristine lake shore forests and beaches. I know this because that is what lines the very borders of the park. Not only would nature there be destroyed, but its access would be reserved to those who could afford to be in that 1%.

Our capitalist system tells us that the market decides these things, and that is the essence of democracy. Our capitalist system puts a price on nature and decides its value for those who would destroy it with economic development. And so we are the more impoverished – day after day after day.

The contradictions between this economic system and any hopes we have of preserving our real way of life, which is the human living in a way that reflects our true reality as beings embedded within nature, are irreconcilable. If we really believe that we are more economic beings within a system like this one, rather than natural beings within nature, we will continue this sad tale of moral and ecological impoverishment. If we believe that we are more truly ecological beings, dependent in every way on the water we drink, the food that comes from the earth, the air that fills our lungs, and the beauty that gives rise to art and religion, then our world will look radically different from the one we live in now.

Parking lots would be torn up and the land allowed to renew itself. Developers would suddenly be faced with severe restrictions on what they could do and where. Protecting sentient beings and intact ecosystems would become the highest of priorities of our human endeavors. What we value would shift radically from retail to living deeply within ourselves and our relationships.

Fracking would stop immediately. Actually, we would stop most of our economic activity immediately – to give ourselves time to ponder what in the world we are doing and why. It would be a terrifying time, a time in which we might encounter, finally, the ramifications of what our techno-industrial society has done to the planet and to the human community.

It would be a stark view, a difficult view, one full of the potential for conversion, insight, and a rediscovery of the meaning of the human.

Yes, all those things and more…this is what it means to be alive in Milwaukee right now.

Last night I attended/participated in a ceremony for Grandmother Moon at the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center north of the city. It was part of the Center’s series, ‘Spiritual World,’ and the program included Moon Time Teachings with Dennis Hawk (Mesqwaki/Cherokee) and his wife Cyndi Miller-Hawk (Stockbridge/Munsee Mohican), who co-led the ceremony.

Now I know why we have been graced with these magnificent warm clear January nights to indulge in the winter moonlight. Hawk said they had been praying for 6 months, since being invited to do the program, for a beautiful clear night for the ceremony. It could have been 5 below zero or a major snowstorm. Instead, it was in the low 40s and crystal clear.

Part of the ceremony happened indoors. Drumming and chanting called in the spirits of the four directions, the animal spirits, our own, and then tobacco was passed for us to take into our hands, to place our prayers and intentions, and then the tobacco was put into a sea shell to be taken down to the lake.

We walked out into this amazing night, the lake glistening in the moonlight. We walked down to the beach where Miller-Hawk lit the pipe and offered prayers to the four directions. Then Dennis Hawk walked to the water’s edge to place the tobacco offerings into the lake. He then offered a chant to Grandmother Moon that put a chill down my spine.

Today it will be 50 degrees in Milwaukee, 25 degrees above normal. Overnight, the snow begins and tomorrow into Friday our first winter storm – and it’s going to be a good one! 5-10 inches of snow, ending in blowing and drifting. I can hardly wait.

What do I want to say about it all, on this amazing sun-drenched January day? That this is what we are a part of, this is who we are, what we are, what creation is, and is what really matters.

And we as a culture, from our Age of Enlightenment certainty that the mind matters most of all and makes us so blessed superior to everything else, that so much of that Judeao-Christian overlay that puts the human at the high end of evolution and meaning and significance (made in God’s image, after all – which one might question if one had been on the beach in the moonlight last night, that we are unique in that sense), our capitalist economy that sees nature as resources to be exploited for economic ends, or our belief that any part of us can exist outside nature – we as a culture have lost this meaning.

This is one reason why it is so easy to continue fracking, opening up iron ore mines in pristine woods, or putting oil and gas pipelines across our lands, or taking advantage of Canada’s ravaging of Alberta’s boreal forest for tar sands oil, or damning more rivers for electricity, and on and on…

We have lost the meaning of who we are because we believe we are somehow outside history and nature, a superior being that need not pay attention to what is at work in the very earth and solar system that is our nature and home.

We came to this land and started ripping up everything that keeps us in touch with that nature and home.

Part of our healing must come from the recovery of this sense of who we really are. I want to say something bold here – that standing on the beach last night offering prayers to Grandmother Moon was more important than what was going on in the New Hampshire primary. In fact, the latter cannot even come close to the significance of that ceremony.

When we as a culture relearn this, we will be on our way to re-knitting the ripped up fabric of our world, to learning again how to live, and to live meaningfully. When we are prepared to offer up to the moon and stars, the sun and skies, the animals and other sentient beings, and to one another the offerings of gratitude, compassion, reverence, and humility that this sacred world deserves – because of what it has given us, after all, things like ‘life’ – we will find ourselves on the path that can heal our world and save our people from a terrible future.

So, to continue the thought…

We focused last time on the interconnections surfaced between the growing organic farming industry and harm being done to Mexican farmers and others who are seeing their water taps run dry. Then I was going through a pile of saved newspaper articles (which I do now and then when the piles get out of hand and I forget what’s in them) and came upon this AP article printed in my local paper on December 4:

North Mexico Wilts Under Worst Drought On Record

How precious water has become on our planet! And for your meditation, look at what is happening to the US-Mexico border region – Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and  more than half of Mexico!

North American Drought Monitor - Nov. 11, 2011

Now ponder again what we read in that NY Times article from New Years Eve about the intensive irrigation that is being used to provide organic produce in the middle of winter here in the US and all the way to Dubai.

Not sustainable. Oh, that word sounds so non-alarmist  in the context of  our ecological crisis. This is more than not sustainable. This is putting a huge straw into the earth to suck out water desperately needed for daily survival in Mexico in order to feed our healthy food markets in affluent countries.

It is not only far beyond sustainability; it is also unjust.

At this project, we are very clear about an essential aspect of this crisis. Justice also matters. Land use, water rights, the global market – all of these things have profound moral content, especially in a world dealing more and more with scarcity. We make this point as well: much of that scarcity is driven not by mere demand which rises with population and income growth, but by the profoundly unjust way in which the global economy is organized. If big farmers, and often U.S. farmers buying up land in Mexico, have the ‘legal’ right to suck out all that water for their crops at the expense of the well-being of Mexicans and the eco-communities of the region (other living beings that need water besides humans), then there is something profoundly morally wrong with that economy.

And this is the other thing we believe. Because we are all embedded within these interconnections, because everything we do effects them, effects their overall health and well-being, all of our consumption decisions are also moral choices. We can get enraged about it, resist it, put blinders on, hate the messengers – but it is a fact of reality, simply what is. We cannot step out of the dynamics of all those interrelated elements and energies of life on this planet until we are free to make our individual choices without worrying about these things. There is not ‘outside’ to go to. We are in them, of them, completely dependent upon them.

It would be a very good thing if we could begin engaging our healthy food communities, our local food co-ops, our alternative food networks, all our grocery stores in conversation about these things. I don’t expect Walmart execs to change their minds, but Outpost (for example) might, and ought to. And we could begin promoting a seasonal food culture that might also encourage local industries like aquaponics, winter crops like kale and spinach, etc., that would look forward to those first blueberries each spring or summer because we haven’t tasted them in months – oh, how delicious! something to be savored – not assumed to be available at all times.

We are responsible for our consumer decisions. Especially in this age of global markets, it is important to follow the trail to know where the things we buy come from, what is happening at the source, and where the measure of justice is.

Deep ecology and justice must become so intertwined that we eventually no longer think of them as separate from one another, or different aspects of the work we do, but as part of a whole of how we live sustainably – and abundantly – on the planet, so interrelated that they become the same thing – living justly in ecological wholeness.

Because, in any case, if we don’t stop using land and fossil fuels like this, the possibility of future abundance will slip from our hands. And that’s not a future I like to ponder.

We all know this.  I imagine there are few people who, when questioned, would not acknowledged that everything is somehow connected to everything else. What we do has an impact. What you do has an impact on me and vice versa, always and forever, an inescapable truth about who we are.

We may know this, or intuit it – but we sure don’t live like it.

Happy New Year! If there was one thing I would wish for 2012, given the challenge it will be on so many levels, it would be to find ourselves growing into a world that begins to reflect this truth that we all know. While so many struggle for rights and well-being, and  some for privileges, the world must grapple with the growing consciousness that everything is interconnected so that how we act, the choices we make, will either enhance the human and greater ecological community, or will harm it. When the struggle is for privilege in a world in which available resources (gifts) for life are over-stretched and shrinking, the choice is getting clearer.

Once again, the NY Times had a very important article on the front page of a paper hardly anyone would read because it was published on New Year’s Eve. It gives a sad example of how our choices in this age of growing demand and growing scarcity (driven mostly by injustice, greed, and ignorance, not because scarcity is inevitable) have unforeseen impacts that harm the human+ecological community. It is an example as well of why capitalism and private market economics is a bad model for meeting the basic needs for life – like food and water.

It’s an example of how the best intentions of the privileged can lead unwittingly to some harmful results if those intentions are not done with mindfulness about the interconnections, cause-and-effect, consequences, and repercussions of those choices every step of the way.

I do almost all my grocery shopping at a co-op of which I am a member. I am very  health conscious, extremely conscious of the toxins that are in our food and water and soil, and so I try my best to avoid those toxins in what I take into my body. My co-op sells organic products. It supports  regionally-based farms by selling their products when available. I love the co-op. I try as I can to support an alternative food system here in southeastern Wisconsin.

But I have trouble with the organic blueberries from Chile and the tomatoes from Mexico. I know some members have asked these questions of the board, about the ecological consequences of supporting a global food market that puts enormous amounts of fossil fuels into those berries by way of packaging and long-distance shipping. I want my co-op to survive, and many of its members want to be able to buy blueberries and tomatoes in the dead of winter.

So, this article by Elisabeth Rosenthal: Organic Agriculture May Be Outgrowing Ideals

Turns out those organic tomatoes from Mexico are grown with unsustainable irrigation depleting local water supplies – for things like drinking, or for small Mexican farmers growing food for their local consumption.

…even as more Americans buy foods with the organic label, the products are increasingly removed from the traditional organic ideal: produce that is not only free of chemicals and pesticides but also grown locally on small farms in a way that protects the environment.

The explosive growth in the commercial cultivation of organic tomatoes here, for example, is putting stress on the water table. In some areas, wells have run dry this year, meaning that small subsistence farmers cannot grow crops. And the organic tomatoes end up in an energy-intensive global distribution chain that takes them as far as New York and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, producing significant emissions that contribute to global warming.

Making matters even more interesting is that some of these large organic growers hail from the US because land and production in Mexico is cheaper, especially cheaper than California.

So of course right now a booming industry in organic farming in the southern hemisphere is providing all sorts of food for our healthy meals, and now, once again, we are forced to confront questions about all those interconnections.

It is hard to live justly. It really is. But we must.

What do we take away from local communities when their land is used to provide crops for export to the US market, whether or not they are organic? Now when I look at that little plastic container full of organic plum tomatoes from Mexico, I am forced to address that question. What about the water tables? What about the well-being of local farmers? How much CO2 is contained in each container of tomatoes? What are workers being paid? Who is making the profit? Where does the money go?

A thousand years ago we didn’t need to ask these questions because the technology did not exist to ask them. Other questions mattered then; these matter now.

What we eat, how we make our living, what we purchase, what mode of transportation we use, how often we travel, how big the house we live in, for whom we vote, how we entertain ourselves – our values, what we believe and how we live those beliefs – none of this is free of impact on the larger community of living and non-living beings.

That’s a hard way to live in this market-driven consumer society where the message rammed into our brains over and over again is that we must consume more and more in the global market in order to create jobs and have well-being again. Well, if that’s the only way we can think of to organize the human economy, we are headed for real disaster – because right now we are tearing away at those interconnections and doing great harm. When groundwater sources and aquifers are depleted, those US growers can come back home and try somewhere else. What will the Mexican farmers do? What will Mexicans do whose wells and taps run dry?

“Eat Local” is a great slogan. What it translates into in winter is that I cannot always have what I want. It means also eating seasonally. It means supporting where possible the development of local alternative food systems, like sustainable aquaponic gardens (great examples here in Milwaukee are Growing Power and Sweetwater Organics). It means doing this un-American thing of buying what is appropriate and just, not what we want or what is available.

Everything is interconnected. This is a reality of life and the spirit. What this truly means is that we are deeply embedded always and in all circumstances in intimate relationships. And what that means is that we must take care of those relationships. This is part of the rock bed foundation of a spirituality for the 21st century.

Have you seen Venus and the crescent moon of the past 2 nights?! I gasped out loud last evening just after sunset when the clouds parted and revealed these magnificent lanterns in the early night sky following each other to the horizon. Now Jupiter is high in the sky as the sun sets chasing Venus. It will catch up in March promising a great show just in time to  herald in the spring. [Check out more of the season's spectacular planets dance here.]

Wounded Earth - Mary Southard, CSJ

Okay, with that lovely meditation, I do just want to share with you some of the challenging news as this year ends. We know it’s been a rough one for the planet in all sorts of ways, and for many species living within it, including our own.  Lots of hurt and suffering. Lots of political and cultural dysfunction. Lots of religious and ideological closed-minded fundamentalisms rearing their ugly heads seemingly everywhere.

Two ways of looking at it: Everything is moving towards disaster, chaos, end times; or, something new is emerging and the reaction to it is fierce. But that reaction, the chaos, is part of the pronouncement, the herald, of a new era looming, trying to crash through the stubborn, resistant belief systems, power arrangements, human hubris and grandiosity, that have brought us to this brink.

The thin blue line - NASA photo

I prefer, or believe in, or trust the latter. But I believe the former is possible, even part of the latter.  Yet even as many of us believe that new creation will emerge from the chaos and collapses, we also know that a lot of damage has been done and is going to be done before we get to see that emergent creation. We also know that for the chaos to yield to a new era, we need to be harbingers now, to be part of the new creation as it emerges and help it along.

Irreversible climate change looms within five years
The brutal logic of climate change
Three quarters of climate change is man-made

Scary stuff, right? These are not just news stories; they are announcements. We are moving into a new reality in terms of the planet’s climate, a new context for the human species, and all other species that have lived within the relative climate balance of the last 10,000 years, especially since the development of agriculture when the growth spurt of homo sapiens sapiens really took off. We are about to learn how dependent the rise of civilization has been on that balance.

But as a species too lumbering and now too alienated from the direct experience of its own biological context and connections, we have become ill-adapted to responding in a timely fashion to the signals that tell us we are in trouble. And so a certain amount of catastrophic change is already written into our future. How will we do?

Right now we are not doing very well, and the damage continues. Gas and oil fracking is no longer something to be prevented; it is an industry run wild all across huge swaths of North America. TransCanada is planning a vast expansion of oil tar sands mining in Alberta. In North Dakota you would have to be crazy to tell ranchers there that the record US oil play in their state ought not be exploited when a so many people are now becoming millionaires. What, are we crazy?

Titanic leaving port April 10 1912 - looks pretty good just 5 days before the crash

Before the calendar year changes we are hearing all sorts of hype about the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic on April 15, 1912 (also tax day and an election year, so I can already imagine the political ads to come). So let’s go ahead and use it as an example – of hubris, of taking nature for granted, of believing human ingenuity can master the forces of nature, of our penchant to believe that the worst can never happen and that we will always be okay, and that when we soldier on like that, once we are faced with the danger, it is too late to turn the ship around.

Crash. Sink. Some are saved. Some are not. And so it goes.

How do you want to welcome this new year? How shall we go about greeting this new era emerging? How will we describe it? How will we articulate our hopes and dreams for it? How will we begin to realize them even now, knowing what we will have to pass through to get to them?

Could a challenge be more terrifying or exhilarating than that?

Well, that’s where we’re headed here. That’s what we want to talk about as we move ahead with this project. We have our work cut out for us, no?

We hope you will join us on this extraordinary journey. Your comments and reflections are welcome here. And please remember:

This project depends upon the support of people like you. There is still time to make a tax deductible contribution for the current tax year.  We would be incredibly grateful! Of course, next tax year is fine, too.

And remember that you can also support us by making this website and our program visible to your communities – listing our web address and link on your own websites and resource lists, inviting us to give presentations (stipends are also a crucial source of support), or asking us to write something for your publications.

We must create our way into the future. We must make new creation by starting this very day, or this evening as the moon, Venus, and Jupiter again light up the night sky. We can remember that so much of what is damaging this planet and the human community are things that are unnecessary for, or even damaging to, real quality of life, to love and joy, to community and family life. We can give up so much of what is harming this world while recovering what gives life its deepest meaning.

And so, finally, many blessings in this coming year. Keep up your spirits! Don’t follow the political news every day or watch all those campaign ads. Go out and play, sip wine with your friends in the evening, listen to music, go to poetry readings, spend time with the kids, with beauty, take a walk in the woods, or hike up a mountainside. That’s the world we want to live in, and it is still here now. Don’t let it get away from us…