healing, creation, and surrender

Man is born broken.
He lives by mending.
The grace of God is glue.
~ Eugene O'Neill
http://amazinggracemovie.com
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http://amphibiaweb.org
http://amphibianark.org
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From:A Timeline of CIA Atrocities
by Steve Kangas http://thewall.civiblog.org/rsf/pa_earth.html#II.1_BRIEF_OVERVIEW_INTEL_ABUSE
http://thewall.civiblog.org/rsf/#LINKS
Epilogue...
...common apologetic is that "the world is filled with unsavory characters, and we must deal with them if we are to protect American interests at all." There are two things wrong with this. First, it ignores the fact that the CIA has regularly spurned alliances with defenders of democracy, free speech and human rights, preferring the company of military dictators and tyrants. The CIA had moral options available to them, but did not take them.
Second, this argument begs several questions. The first is: "Which American interests?" The CIA has courted right-wing dictators because they allow wealthy Americans to exploit the country’s cheap labor and resources. But poor and middle-class Americans pay the price whenever they fight the wars that stem from CIA actions, from Vietnam to the Gulf War to Panama. The second begged question is: "Why should American interests come at the expense of other peoples’ human rights?"...
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Center for Environmental Health
http://cehca.org
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http://greenroofs.com
http://gaiusdemocracyinamerica.blogspot.com
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Environmental Justice Weekend 3/30-4/1/ 7
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/99-521/index.html
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http://www.myspace.com/walmartsucks

Food production in a time of change

Farming has always been a tough job. Now global warming and it's interactions with other human-caused changes is making nurturing the plants and animals we have use for increasingly complex. Temperature variability is increasing and even the growing season has changed. According to the National Arbor Day Foundation, which advocates growing many more trees, we in Western Pennsylvania are now in a new hardiness zone. They have an update at http://arborday.org/media/zones.cfm
and an explanation at
http://arborday.org/media/zonechanges2006.cfm.

Some of the larger more complex varieties of life are at a disadvantage in this time of increasing unpredictability of weather. Some larger species are dying off from human competition, hunting, and stress from climate change. And some smaller living things such as molds are increasing due to their having shorter life spans and so faster reproduction and mutation rates. We can help each other get through some of these developing difficulties by:

not using chemical fertilizers;

encouraging edible "weeds" which survive with or without our help;

allowing, as much as possible, a natural variety of plants and animals to grow in our gardens and farms;

encouraging soil fertility by recycling organic waste and increasing microbial biodiversity;

allowing trees and other life forms to grow wherever they want whenever possible.

And we can head towards converting to vegetarianism - increasingly getting our food more directly from plants rather than feeding plants to animals and then eating the animals.

The fact that the growing season is longer now is an advantage, of course. But the increasing temperature variation means at least some plants will be stressed by changing day to day weather. My response is to rely more on those food plants which provide food all during their growth period – such as greens which can be harvested at any time and may grow back after a frost or other damage - rather than something like tomatoes which only provide their fruit later in the season.

We humans’ quest for our daily bread is beset by many other changes at this time which make it necessary to grow more of our food locally and rely more on our own homegrown plant food – organic matter. Overfishing, pollution, ozone layer thinning, and the effects of manufacturing and use of synthetic fertilizers – all are leading us to emphasize our economies toward more small, flexible food production operations, geared toward more local distribution, and growing smaller easier to grow species such as the many variaties of microbes grown for food and for nutritional factors to be added to food.

It’s time to discuss drastic changes in how we do things, both at home and at work. The ideal of a neat well-mowed lawn has to go. An overgrown lot is no less safe than a mowed lawn, in my opinion. We need all the plants we can, including those “invasives” we define as enemies. If you can manage a gorgeous plot of food and/or flowers that are native to our part of the world, fine; if you can’t, don’t declare war on the spot because species you didn’t choose chose to grow there. The expense of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and labor hours to “civilize” a plot of land by putting in a monoculture of grass causes more problems than any safety fears from high weeds, in my opinion. Yes, we do have, ticks, flies, rats, cockroaches, and other undesirables in our cities, but they will never be put under control by chemical warfare and habitat destruction. Let biodiversity take care of disease control. Each living thing is food for another and must be given it’s due respect as a part of the web of life. Cats, hawks, snakes, and other animals eat bugs and rats. The Allegheny County Health Department provides wise ecosystem management by inoculating animals and wet areas with bugs to ward off mosquitoes and disease – increasing biodiversity rather than treating nature as an enemy to be totally eradicated. We can clean our air and put healthier food in our bellies by letting nature alone and growing food locally.

economic development - making money rather than fighting over it

We the people of Allegheny County are facing a quality of life crisis. The proposed transit cuts will affect everyone. Those who are transit dependent will have to make hard and expensive go or no decisions about everyday life. The drivers will suffer increased travel time and greater fuel costs due to traffic congestion. The cutbacks will put thousands more cars on the roads due to the loss of an estimated 25,000 daily Port Authority riders. The politically less poweful poor who can't afford cars are being triaged by our elected officials in favor of other spending priorities like pay raises, stadiums, expressways and of course studies and audits. Over the past decade the Port Authority has been underfunded by tens of millions of dollars by the same legislators in Harrisburg who enacted loopholes for the utility companies to avoid paying their mandated share (PURTA). The county has left millions of dollars in match money on the table while offering visions of property tax relief, etc. The Port Authority has to come up with a balanced budget no matter what our elected "representatives" claim is a higher calling for our tax dollars.

The public transportation ridership is much larger than the number of people attending sports events. If we have to decide between sports and necessities like public transportation, the choice is obvious. But we shouldn't have to choose. We should be talking about making our county wealthier with investment in developing sustainable technologies, not assuming that we have a smaller amount of money to work with and so can't afford one or the other.

It's a quality of life issue for all of us.

energy alternatives

" . . . human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves."
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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All humanity is one undivided and indivisible family, and each one of us is responsible for the misdeeds of all the others. I cannot detach myself from the wickedest soul.
~ Gandhi
http://www.truthinjustice.org/links.htm
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From:
The Disclosure Project...a nonprofit research project working to fully disclose the facts about UFOs, extraterrestrial intelligence, and classified advanced energy and propulsion systems...the cover-up that keeps this information secret...
Disclosure and 9/11 - An Analysis
by Steven M. Greer, M.D., Director 9/27/1
http://www.disclosureproject.org/Update-092701.htm
....Clandestine projects, largely privatized in the contracting sector of shadowy corporate/government operations, are withholding from the public the definitive cure for the underlying illness: Oil...
...UFOs exist...some of them are made by humans using extraordinary breakthroughs in physics, energy generation and propulsion...the technologies needed to replace the internal combustion engine and fossil fuels already exist in these clandestine projects - projects that we the people have paid for...We have not needed oil...for decades...the conventional government, diplomats, Congressional leaders and so forth are completely unaware of the existence of these new energy and propulsion systems. So they blindly pursue policies to ensure the continued safe supply of that noxious stuff that runs the entire western economy. Unaware of these clandestine projects - projects that hide behind a bogus claim of national security - our leaders do the best they can, with both hands tied behind their backs and a blindfold over both eyes...
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=62955347
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http://transitionculture.org
http://oceana.org
http://brothaashproductions.com/BPEP.htm
http://www.myspace.com/onehoodorg
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Energy Forum of Western Pennsylvania
http://www.relocalize.net/groups/energyforwesternpennsylvania
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The Steinbrenner Institute for Environmental Education and Research at Carnegie Mellon University invites you to attend an in-depth weekend program that will be devoted to the complex issues of environmental justice...3/30/7 to 4/1 /7
http://andrew.cmu.edu/course/99-521/index.html
Adamson Wing, Baker Hall
Carnegie Mellon University
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Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute
http://crmpi.org
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http://desmogblog.com
http://urbanyouthaction.org
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From:
The Big Fix 2004 by Daniel Hopsicker 11/5/4 http://www.madcowprod.com/mc6912004.html...Investigating the ownership of the two companies that together dominate the American elections industry reveals evidence of routine and systemic bribery of public officials, not just here but overseas (the recent Prime Minister of Ireland, to give just one example.)
It is a world filled—not with guys in lab coats and pocket protectors—but with guys with links to the Mob, or international money launderers, Zurich currency manipulators, telecom scandals, off-shore Channel Islands accounts in the names of fictitious people, "untraceable shareholders," Bahamian resort owners, and supra-national financiers...
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http://sourcewatch.org

feedbacks

Global warming is only one part of extremely complex and interconnected changes.
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global dimming
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1027879546389218797&hl=en
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http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/articles/856
…changes in the times of flowering, migrations, nest building, and egg laying. Because every species would respond to climate change at its own rate, ecological communities would start to “disassemble,” as mismatches occurred between, say, caterpillars and the availability of the plants they eat.
Lovejoy said that most prominent system change to date was the increasing acidity of the oceans as they absorbed some of the excess carbon dioxide. The oceans are now 30% more acidic than they were in pre-industrial times. “Two-thirds of the earth’s surface is changing its chemistry,” Lovejoy said. “This has been a bit of a surprise to the scientific community, you didn’t even hear about it two or three years ago.”
Vast numbers of ocean species build skeletons and shells from calcium carbonate. “At a certain point, many [of the species building shells] will have trouble constructing their shells, or their shells could go into solution,” Lovejoy explained. The increasing warmth of the oceans was a grave threat to coral reefs, which are based on an animal/algae partnership. A small increase in temperature can cause coral to expel the algae, producing coral bleaching. Repeated bleaching can cause the reef to die.
Lovejoy noted that a doubling of carbon dioxide would be disastrous for the natural world. Even stabilizing CO2 at 450 parts per million, which some environmental groups have labeled as “safe,” we would be creating a world in which the ecological impacts would be “pretty messy.”
In other testimony, witnesses described how warmer winters and warmer nights were unleashing a variety of insect pests, like the woolly adelgid that has decimated forests in the Virginia mountains, or the pine bark beetle that has destroyed huge swathes of timber in the Pacific Northwest. Warming temperatures in the Chesapeake Bay were creating an ever-larger “dead” zone at the bottom of the bay in the summer, an area with too little oxygen for fish or other animals to survive. And warmer weather increased the number of striped bass, one of the Bay’s prime sports fish, infected with bacteria that produce large red lesions on the fish.
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http://reverenceforlife.org
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Oil from algae
by David Zaks and Chad Monfreda
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/006025.html
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http://alternative-energy-bloggers.com
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Audobon Society of Western Pennsylvania
http://aswp.org/conservation.html
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Pittsburgh area environmental organizations
http://carnegielibrary.org/subject/environment/orgs.html
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Rachel Carson Institute
http://chatham.edu/RCI/g_horizons.html
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http://growpittsburgh.org/
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