Heartbreaking Earthweek

Once again the media circus has focused on three rings of diversion, rather than the salient issues of the day. After a week of coverage about the Boston Marathon Bombing and the limited coverage of the Fertilizer “Plant” Explosion in Texas, we are told that by simply picking up trash we can somehow atone for the ecological destruction that is unleashed throughout the year. 24/7/365 corporate outlaws are fed a steady diet of regulators looking the other way, doctors and hospitals silent in their complicity, drug companies poisoning our waterways with the tainted urine of their “customers” and corporate welfare in the form of our lives for their profitability. Rather than wallowing in this heartbreak and internalizing the morbid defeatism that can be engendered by this fiasco, I want to give voice to the infinite forgiveness and staying power of Mother Nature, her systems and the great gifts that await those who make living in harmony with her a priority.

Mother Nature has, without fail, nurtured life on this planet. She will continue to do so until the sun explodes into supernova. The track record for humans has not been so good or as long, but we have the opportunity to reassert our abiding love for the planet which many “primitive” cultures have done throughout our time on the planet. The earliest records that we can find point to civilizations who knew the value and sanctity of balance. Only since the oppressive influence of conquerors and exploiters have we seen the inhumanity which has led to our ecologic demise. I remember questioning my own mother about the origin of the word humanity. Why, if we call our species human, do we act so inhumanely? Wrestling with this question for nearly fifty years, I have come to one conclusion. We have told ourselves that human nature is to be violent, inhumane and coarse. This week, to honor the Earth, I am here to say that this but an illusion. This illusion has been cultivated by those who benefit from a divide and conquer strategy.

Humans are tender, abiding, helpful and compassionate. As I have said before, scientific research has proven that the only way to train us to be otherwise is to subject us to abuse and neglect. That is why I am here to say I love you and so too does the Mother Nature, Father Sun,  Grandfather Sky and Grandma Moon. The deeper truth that lasts forever has been covered up by generations of rich and powerful men, but their time is coming to a close. Criminal elements have been allowed access to the public discourse and we have every right to call them out on the basic assumptions that underlie their perverse rhetoric. A favorite term being used in the United States of America recently has been “job creators”. This is code for corporate welfare whores. The stodgy well-heeled elites that exploit “human resources” for the agglomeration of capital prefer to be seen as job creators because they do not want to be understood as part of the problem. They have a vested interest in being seen as knights on white horses riding in to save the day. My experience over the past half century has been quite the opposite. These elites are only interested in their own quality of life and they are always able to move away from the disasters that they leave in their wake.

A favorite sailing motto of mine is that fair weather sailors miss ninety percent of the fun. So too, at this time in the history of our species, great storm clouds not only dot the horizon, but rear up in nearly every direction. Ten thousand children die each and every day because their water sources are tainted. We have the technology to stop this terrible loss of life, but we lack the will to do so. The profit-makers would rather trademark clean water and charge folks for the opportunity to drink safely. Many thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands die daily from complications brought on by highly subsidized, non-food items being passed off as food. Billions of dollars are shunted to a few hundred people worldwide while the vast majority of the human population are asked to survive on less and less. This is not by accident, it is by design. The ruling classes have always been enamored with the pyramid. Billions at the bottom, one at the top and emulating this has become a deadly mantra for natural systems worldwide. The monetary pyramid is inverted, with the wealth floating to the top and the billions of exploited people fighting over the few scraps that the wealthy have not yet taken from us.

Luckily, there are more and more people who understand this mess, know how it came about and are committed to building a new society based on giving back, sharing the near-infinite resources of the planet and who have seen the writing on the wall that the current economic collapse reflects. The call went out with the first Earthday for people to reconsider the natural systems that make our lives here on planet Earth tenable. We may not have known as much then as we do today, but it was not so much about intellect back then, but about our hearts. The average person could look into the waters, choked by fish kills, or the teeming stacks of the industrial age and know that something was wrong. Two more generations have come since then and the changes that have occurred have been fought vehemently by the powerful people whop remain in control of the means of production. In fact, there is far more hazard to the invisible toxic pollution that we breathe, drink and eat daily than the gross and wanton destruction of fifty years ago.

Those who are creating a new society based on feeding people, protecting the planet and reducing our impact on the planet while allowing higher quality of life are to be commended. There are those who are making a living by installing what used to be called alternative energy systems. As these sources become our primary source of energy, a huge segment of ecological destruction will be squeezed out of existence. Many more people in the USA went into farming during the past three years than have ever gone into it before. The vast majority of these people are looking to sustainability and organic or bio-dynamic production methods that have the power to transform vast acreages from leaving a toxic legacy to healing damage done through generations of misuse, abuse and neglect. Is it odd to think that the same reality that guides human development can be extrapolated to the Earth herself? I think not. Abuse and neglect have gotten us into this dangerous and untenable position, maybe all we need to do to heal the damage is to begin to love and pay attention to the needs of the planet.

I offer my own experiences as a guide…the sanctity of all life needs expression though actions, for they speak louder than words. Reducing the world around us to parables or the bumper sticker slogans of modern life has caveats, but I would like to end with a certain truth that I saw expressed in the form of a bumper sticker. It said:”If you are not depressed sometimes, you are not paying attention.” However, letting this depression linger and shutting yourself off to the infinite possibility that surrounds us is exactly what the oppressors are counting on. If you need encouragement,just plant a single seed and watch it grow. Nurture life and you may be surprised at what grows from that love, commitment and attention to another living thing. The majority agrees with one another and it is time for the ultra-wealthy to change their behavior. Build a community based on what really matters and you will find things can change in a heart beat.

“P” triple “A”, “R”, “K”!

PAAARK, an acronym to help describe what we do here at ECO-Tours of Wisconsin Inc.

Permaculture responds to needs in the environment in much the same way as a tree falling to the forest floor can. We set the buffet. What wonders come, are largely a reflection of how hospitable we make it for what comes after. Our resources reverberate through time, changing forever the possible futures that await, erring on the side of community, continuity and co-operation, we can begin to spin the wheel in the direction of abundance. The triple “A” in the middle is more than just a trinity, it is shorthand for the infinite number of “A”s that could be associated with that letter. Abundance, amoeba, awareness, articulation, actualization, etc. The letters stand for Permaculture, Awareness Articulated through Action, Revealed in Kind.

I’m a bio-regional Boy! Some have called me a bioneer.

I cannot know how many will be influenced by my associations, the resources I offer, or the time that I spend cultivating life on all fronts, but with luck, these words will have the desired impact on many to arrest the development of what one of my mentors called Servoglobe. The technocrats keep shoving things down our throats that reek of business as usual, exploitation, oppression and subjugation. Permaculture is about redistribution of the vast wealth that the oligarchy wields dominion over, forsaking the destructive and toxic ways that things have been done in the past, and re-thinking the three core values of our existence. Can we produce food? Can we produce profit? Can we equitably distribute our abundance? The waste of the ultra rich alone, has sowed the seeds of their own demise, casting off more than enough for the transition to sustainability to take place. My garden has seen two bumper crop years with virtually no tending save a few meditative forays.
Two years ago I had my first three harvest garden bed, and now that I have discovered this technique I will never go back to single row cropping, and last year I broke the height limits that I had set by limiting my own imagination. I planted gourds and they went over twenty feet tall! Now, I’m thinking living architecture, much like hops. As you can see, redistribution of such an abundance as a planting of just six seeds that in turn yields biomass the size of a two car garage, and you begin to understand the need for these principles to be adopted, to gain converts, transform the landscape and enrich the soils of our many and varied nations.

ECO-Tours

ECO-Tours of Wisconsin Inc. is adding another prong to our strategy for reclaiming forests. In light of the fact that downstream areas always fall victim to conditions, “development” and mis-use in headwaters, that feed down to them, we are creating a land trust. This legal status for land both exempts it from taxation, and protects it from development in perpetuity. Instead of just recovering lands that have been denuded and in many cases no longer support an integrated forest system, we will be branching out into protecting relatively pristine areas as well. As I have written about before, much of my adult life presented to me a subtle but pervasive quandary. The issue of ecological triage…

Welcome Home!

In my youth, I was violently opposed to this concept. Think, for a moment about saying straight out and forever, “We will cede this land, (or that,) to the dust bin of history.” This is what is being done far below the surface of the Earth to liberate “natural gas” through fracking. It is what has been done in many Superfund sites and is being done in hundreds of thousands of areas that have been toxified beyond recovery. Just like finding someone more dead than alive, occasions arise that we have to turn our attention to places that could potentially recover, if we carefully and strategically allocate our resources. As a young man, who realized that Mother Earth is sacred, each of her elemental forces and each of her creatures and plants are sacred as well, I could not accept writing off a single acre, perhaps not even a single square foot, (.09 square m) to mistreatment by humans. Sadly, we do not have that choice. Certain areas have been despoiled to the point that no life can inhabit them, only poisonous plants can grow in them and for centuries, they will continue to blossom with fruits of taint. Just as many of our brothers and sisters find, on the field of war, some will always be lost, with no hope of recovery. Mother Earth and her landscape share this eternal truth. Even though the proud young man that has strong ideas about ecological triage still lives within my aging skin, his views have been tempered by half a century of seeing blatant destruction across the face of the Earth.

I have lived, for moons on end within the concrete and steel gorges of NYC (New York City) I have breathed my fair share of petroleum distillates and carcinogenic substances. I know that my own body, more than likely, will fall victim to them some day. The value of triage is allocation of finite resources. Our efforts can be shifted to places where they do the most good.

In addition to planting trees, as we will continue to do, we are adding to our mission. We will purchase and protect relatively pristine areas, converting them to land trust status. We are targeting headwaters that have significant impact on downstream riparian (Stream-bank) ecology and will help, as all of the acres that we reclaim do, by protection and improvement of water quality. We ask everyone who reads this to share a link with others, because we spend no money on advertizing and none on administrative costs. All of our efforts are through volunteer time spent by those who are committed to our mission. Many of the ECO-Tourists who plant trees with us are paying to cover their own expenses and meals, as well as a bit extra to help our organization to buy more trees. Our Paypal account link is in the sidebar or you can use our street address and send checks snail mail to: 1445 Porlier street Green Bay, WI 54301-3334 USA. We have three distinct projects so let us know if you want your donations to go to trees, land or our capital program. This will be used creating our school of sustainability. Our visioning for the school this year is to create a place that is a hybrid between a summer camp and a spa, a resort that encompasses both retreat center and an eco-tourism destination. We will use several modalities to address the need for an integration between ourselves and nature. To find out more about our structure and process, it helps to read about The Natural Step, No Trace Camping, Transition Towns etc. We do encourage all of our guests to read both, How To Shit In The Woods and a little known book called Thinking Like A Mountain. Although they are not prerequisite for taking ECO-Tours with us, they will go a long way toward helping you understand where we are coming from. We are gardeners, cooks, healers, herbalists, fortune tellers, shamen, foresters and guides.  We work to unleash the magic in others by sharing the magic that we have found all around us.

It has taken nearly fifty generations to estrange the vast majority of us (humanity) from our true nature, but we have far less time to get things right. In the process of learning how to build sustainability into every aspect of our lives, massive dislocation and trauma will be felt all around the planet, but those who know how to plant and harvest a garden, heal the sick or care for a whole community will have the best chances for building the new culture. Saving as much land as possible, protecting it from the dangers of exploitation, oppression and desecration, is the only way to stem the tide of destruction and begin the recovery that we need to undertake. For the first time this year, we will be planting in the headwaters of Lake Superior and Lake Michigan. We ask for donations to plant as many trees as possible. Appreciatively, Tony, Director ECO-Tours of Wisconsin Inc.

 

Change Is Gonna Come

I sat on this post for nearly two moons. Each time I prepare to present it, something supremely dramatic takes place and my point momentarily seems to have no merit because of it. Each time, I stretch my imagination, thinking of possibilities that are beyond imagination, scenarios that eclipse our experience occur. More and more, the daily news outstrips imagination with what are at once, horrible tragedies and mundanely boring “events”. As we all see, each crazy event deserves more attention than we could ever give…after all, tomorrow or at least by next week, that tragedy will seem tame.

“Your town lost twenty people to the flu? What of it? Our town had a  a nightclub burn down and 700 died…”

“Give me a break, over 100 Ex-pat Tibetans have set themselves afire in the past year.”

“Are you kidding? We had shit fall out of the sky and that sent hundreds to the hospital.”

“Half our forest burned down man…” but ” Whatever, Our houses washed away one day and we’ve been living in our aunt’s basement for three months (or ten years)!”

The keen urge to do anything about any of it has been either dulled or surgically removed by the media. Blistering through so many catastrophes, in a 24-hour news cycle, demands attention, but only ’til the next wave breaks. If you believe what you are seeing, chaos is the tail, wagging a great dog.

Far less sexy, and almost never on tee vee, are the vast majority, who have known for years, that ecological destruction cannot stand. We, who walk to work, bicycle, volunteer, have planted trees or gardens, or at least a few plants, shoppers of the local farmer’s market, or who have only enjoyed them while on vacation, make pretty lame television, certainly not news. I get pretty worked up over a really nice beet or spear of Swiss chard, but getting that into the digital realm is not gonna sell insurance, anti-depressants, pecker pills or beer. Those who have already welcomed the transition would not sit still for a how-to about the easy steps that we all need to take. Nor would most of us want some sexy woman in a bikini prancing around trying to sell NASCAR fanatics on the lifestyle of ECO-Awareness.

It seems that each atrocity needs to be forgotten before we can attend to next natural disaster and that each is purged from our awareness by the next mass shooting. We are immediately distracted from that by a peculiar love triangle between three separate species and by the afternoon, there has been another bridge collapse. Meanwhile, critical ongoing crises are ignored, like 10,000 children who die each and every day from drinking foetid water. We are so distracted from real life that is going on all around us, that we are not aware of the toxic soup that is spewed from coal-fired electric generating stations or our tailpipes. If the daily fare is prurient enough, we can be guided away from looking at the growing trend toward fracking or the energy wasting, ecological catastrophe that is “tar sands” or the holes in the existing sections of the XL Pipeline. This is all by design.

What is real is that the current trajectory is wholly and undeniably un-sustainable. All issues and crises revolve around a single point and this is how we begin to develop stability amidst a rapidly changing world… As far as I have seen, there are precious few who are willing to share this information and even fewer who are willing to let you know for free, but I’m going to tell you…It is Love.

A shaman, Dr. Malidoma Patrice Some’, in the documentary “With One Voice” http://www.withonevoicedocumentary.org/said…”Go hike in nature. Stand in front of a very tall tree and listen to the deep noisy silence held together in that entity and wonder, why can’t I be like that? Stand still in the same place for, we don’t know how long and find one self growing taller and taller and taller, both upward and downward. There is something about that which defines greatness as the most obvious depth of quiet inside of which the deepest song can be heard.”
Later in the film, he asks,”Is it possible for one human race to open their eyes and look at each other and see gifts everywhere? Let’s start with the gift of love. It has no market value right now…but what if it does? What will the world look like once we converge our frustration into compassion, converge our hatred into salvos of love, fired at one another, randomly? What if we invade or entertain the spirit of invading each other with peace? What would the world look like, changing our discourse, our language so that the very word that we use as explosive words to support reason why we should harm one another are subdued and turned into words of love? When you hate someone, send that someone a love poem and see how that person reacts. Is it possible for us to conceive of victory at national level, victory of one nation against another using the yardstick of love and compassion? If this is conceivable then we have reached the same spirit, the same religion and we are all heading toward the final stage of beautifying this globe we call our village.

Love as if it may be your last breath…Love with vengeance. Love with the energy and fierce intensity that the oppressors, the exploiters, the rapers of Mother Earth have had for stealing from our collective wealth and with which they were willing to lay waste to anything that stands in their way. Become a Peace Warrior! Namaste’.

Aldo Leopold Was On To Something

Anyone who has read Fahrenheit 451, or who has seen the movie, has had the idea about each of us becoming a “book”, resorting back to the oral tradition cross their mind. Although nearly everyone has at least one book in them, we no longer sit around a communal hearth, sharing into the night parts and pieces of our collective knowledge. The long oral tradition and the sort of brain development that humans have evolved for over millennea to use, coding and decoding through language, the deep truths that guided tribal society for most of human history has been lopped off, like a foreskin, severed unceremoniously by mass media. Before I light out for parts unknown, let me get back to my title. Aldo Leopold has been credited with elucidating The Land Ethic. In his day, there was quite a bit of talking going on around this idea. The language of the oppressors had not yet allowed such entanglements to slow progress or undermine profitability. Before Aldo made the existence of a land ethic tenable in the western mind through coining of the phrase for it, there could only be veiled and tangential discussion of the idea. Remarkably, there were native populations who lived immersed in a land ethic at the time, but the folks writing history were discovering it as “new”. for their part, using a term like land ethic would still have remained deeply enigmatic to them, because the land is just one subset of the realms that they recognized. My own language attempts to describe something that I hope, takes Aldo’s idea one step further. Somewhere, buried in the text of my own book, I attempt to add to the idea. I try to bring light into darkness, perhaps my candle in the wind will only partially illuminate the sensibility that my curiosity keeps driving me toward, but in the face of ignorance, I do my best to describe it. Land is not the only the ethic that we need.

What I am trying to describe is an ECO-Ethic Those who have read and understood the nature and substance of having a land ethic are perhaps on the way to understanding the word I have picked for this spirit of creation, the infinite responsibility and total freedom which has been granted us, but in the language of others there is little said about what I believe to be our birthright. Oral tradition and the hearth have been supplanted with other stand-ins, but in my mind, the conversation, that was reserved for around the fires of history will return, or be preserved, much like in was in F451, the first science fiction that I ever “liked”. I’m sure that Ray Bradbury felt an intimate connection with books and writing, that is why above all else books would be preserved by those who did not want them to vanish forever from the face of the Earth.

So to, those who feel the intimate connection to ecology will know in their own way what I mean by the term ECO-Ethics. The land and all forces acting upon it are equal. Just as you can say that a map is a representation of a specific part of the Earth, or a particular neighborhood, Our perception of land is but a representation of what really exists. I could say, in the map analogy, that the air in the room above the map represents the air and that the table and what lie below the map represent the Earth. This adds another dimension to the map, but still it cannot come close to being the thing we are attempting to describe. We can add a dozen layers to our imaginary base map, but no matter how densely we pack data, the whole will remain illusive. air photos could add a bit of texture and lines of equal elevation could delineate taller features and depressions to some extent, but regardless of how accurate you tried to make the map, it would fall short.

This is why I feel that there is a need to take The Land Ethic of Leopold to a new and possibly more descriptive level. Ecology is a scientific way of including all processes of all creatures, the land, water resources and climate to give a full and honest accounting of nature. Long ago scientists understood that so many interdependent things were going on around us that they could not separate a single thing out of the whole without making repercussions reverberate through all that would be left. Whole institutions have developed out of the understanding that this concept brought about. The influence that defining this term had on the last several generations is what has given me hope for the future.

It has been said by greater intellects than mine, that sustainability will not be realized until the term “Green”, meaning environmentally non-destructive, disappears from our lexicon. When we transition into the realm of sustainability, greenwashing (claiming to be environmentally benign, but still doing business as usual to pollute the planet) will disappear as well. There will be just one way and we will not need to define it. So too, having to discuss ECO-Ethics guarantees that we have not yet achieved them. The spirits and energies of each elemental part as well as each inhabitant of an area must be included in our ethics. Perhaps thinking of ECO as an acronym would help. The difficulty here is to pin it down to just one meaning for the three letters. ECO could be Etheric Coherent Organization, playing on the spiritual connectivity of all things, all beings and the body electric of the entire planet. I have spoken of fractile geometry before and this is a good place for an illustration. On an etheric level, we all harmonize with the hum of creation OM. The spirits that enliven rock and tree, water and soil microbes need to be not only considered but understood and intimately related to. On another level of understanding, Elivened Carbon with the O representing infinite cycling of said carbon. On this level, the energy of creator is the placeholder commonly known as “What goes around comes around.” certainly we need to destroy to create, but in the context of ECO-Ethics, we also take this responsibility with a much deeper understanding and more humility than many seem to be capable of. Finally, Every Creature Ordination. This may be one of the hardest to understandings to get across in our current culture. without sanctification of the whole of nature, the entire ecosystem, we become estranged from the whole in irreconcilable ways. ECO-Ehtics are not about a thing or certain imaginary entity, they are about the whole, every bit of what we are surrounded with. Sadly, in this time, we must consider the spirit of toxic compounds that have been spewed onto our land, the quality and disposition of the water and the air. what can be supported and nurtured, as well as the foundational blocks upon which each organism either thrives or dies.

In the future we will need to look to this greater level of understanding rather than just seek to involve “the land” in our decisions. Billions of creatures per square foot lent their energies to stabilizing and ameliorating the climate, moderate the water cycle, break down stone that could later be used to make food, etc. All of these services were provided to us by a myriad of organisms as long as we remained integrated with our surroundings. These partners in evolution are what made our lives possible and healthy. For our lives to remain possible…the one requirement is that we return the favor.

Permaculture

This helps to set the stage for re-thinking conquest, understanding the motivations of those who currently perturb our food systems and ways to help heal the planet as well as her people and ecology.

Blatant Plea for Money

Paypal account #: tnsaladino42@hotmail.com give what you can. ECO-Tours of Wisconsin Inc. is expanding our mission and in addition to planting trees, we are working with legal counsel, gratis of course, to put land in conservation reserve status as a land trust. These lands are dedicated to future generations as sanctuaries for native species and are to be rendered off limits to development perpetually. Give what you can to help this program be successful. We are also expanding our permaculture gardens and educational efforts, to share information about how to turn your own landscape into a sustainable system. Stay tuned for opportunities to join us on ECO-Tours. If you plan to be in Northeast Wisconsin or along the shores of Lake Superior in Wisconsin, let us know and we will plan a special ECO-Tour just for you! send us your itinerary at tnsaladino42@hotmail.com, we will consult with you about what to see and how to get involved.