David Loy (Essay entitled Transcendence or Immanence, May, 2013) (http://www.davidloy.org) points: “There is no individual solution to the ecological and social crises that challenge us collectively today.” It’s a good essay, you should read it. After describing his reasons for thinking so, based mostly in logic and his Buddhist tradition, he concludes that: “ . . . the ecological and social crises are just as much spiritual crises, because they challenge each of us to wake up and realize that our own well-being cannot be separated from the well-being of others, or from the well-being of the whole earth.” David Loy is a professor, writer and Zen teacher.

Dr. David Suzuki, (http://www.davidsuzuki.org) a scientist, environmentalist and broadcaster. He makes a similar point from his viewpoint that is based mostly in logic and scientific fact. First he describes our history of fighting over issues that surround the use of our biosystem resources and our attitude toward the biosystem, and then he suggests that fighting is not a useful way to address these issues, because in every fight there is always a loser, and we can’t afford losers at this time. Rather than fighting with each oher, he says:

“Can we begin from a position of agreement. Let’s agree on the fundamental things on which we will build our platforms of politics or economics. So let’s start by setting a bottom line that is dictated by the laws of nature. We live in a world that is defined and shaped by laws of nature. Physicists tell us the speed of light puts a limit on how fast we can fly a space rocket. We can’t fly faster than the speed of light. Nobody objects to that. We live within that. We know that the law of gravity means we can’t have an anti-gravity machine, and we know that the first and second laws of thermodynamics tell us that you can’t build a perpetual motion machine. We all understand that. That’s the real world that we live in.

“In biology it’s the same thing. We know that there are carrying capacities of ecosystems. That ecosystems can flourish as long as predators living within those ecosystems do not undermine the ability of those ecosystems to sustain themselves over time. Human beings are the most powerful predators on the planet and we live at the very top of the ecological food chain, so we must pay attention to what are the carrying capacities of the various ecosystems that we occupy around the world.

“And the most important thing we must remember and agree on is that we are biological creatures, and our biological nature dictates what our fundamental needs are. What delivers clean air, clean water, clean soil clean food and clean energy, from the sun, is the web of living things around the world, what biologists call biodiversity. It’s life itself that cleanses, replenishes, or creates our most fundamental needs.

“Any corporate leader, politician, even the T party I’m sure, would have to agree, that as biological beings, air, water, soil, photosynthesis and biodiversity have got to be in our best interests, our most fundamental needs that we must protect and nourish. That’s how we begin to define our system of needs, upon which we then can ask how do we create an economy.” Complete audio available from me or from Making_Contact, http://www.radioproject.org/sound/2013/MakingCon_130605_Ax.mp3.

This is Bare Bones Biology 156. The podcast is available at:

http://BareBonesBiology.com

David Loy (Essay entitled Transcendence or Immanence, May, 2013) (http://www.davidloy.org)
David Suzuki http://www.davidsuzuki.org

No.

Not if we use hope as an instrument of our cowardice.

Not if we use hope as a tool to deprive others of information, therefore the freedom to make wise life choices.

Not if we use hope as an excuse to avoid the hard work and responsibility of survival.

Shall we hope that God will change the way the body of the earth functions? And for the silliest of reasons – just because we don’t like it? After He spent a few billion years growing it up to work the way it does work? Why are we hoping for magic and miracles, when we know what the problem is and how to solve it all by ourselves? If God did miraculously change the processes that maintain life, then Earth could no longer function in our universe, because the miracle is that it functions at all. Shall we hope for a miracle that will destroy it? We can do that, all by ourselves, and we are.

No, we cannot hope for a miracle, and I’m really sorry God. I know you spelled out the rules from the very beginning, and it’s not very hard to understand — neither Your rules nor the functions of your Earth — but it’s not my fault. If I could, I would have stopped the destruction 50 years ago. I’m not a coward; I’m not depriving anyone of necessary information; and I’m not afraid of hard work or responsibility. But I can’t do it by myself, and I can’t control what other people do. They like what they are doing. They chose it. I suppose that is a part of how Your law functions. I don’t like it much, but is is the miracle we’ve got.

Shall we hope for a Singularity? Fun game to play, but the whole idea is based on the theory that humans are intelligent – in fact that the human brain can function better than the biology of which it is a fairly minor subunit.

No, we cannot hope for a “singularity” that will save us from experiencing the physiological (karmic, cause and effect, physical) results of our own behaviors.  We chose our karma; it is our creation and our responsibility. If we don’t even understand that – then there is no way we can rationally hope to survive into the future.

And if the A.I. singularity DOES occur, then it will: a) not be able to invent a world that functions better than the one we already have because, while it may be immensely more intelligent than humans, it cannot be nearly as intelligent as the entire billions of years of evolved wisdom of the universe of which it is a part, and b) if it is more intelligent than we are, it will immediately recognize that the easiest quickest and least painful way to save the Earth would be to dispose of the humans. We don’t need a singularity to do that; we not only are doing it, but we also know that we are — and we know how we are.  We have probably already done it. Probably that IS the singularity. The nearly certain occurrence of Homo sapiens’ genomic bottleneck – or decease – during the first half of this century.

Only one rational hope remains conceivable, because it arises out of the only rationally conceivable way that we could resolve our physical plight.  We can hope that humans will wake up and decide that we don’t like the future we have built for our grandchildren, and that we will sit down together to learn what the biosystem requires for its well being – not what we believe it should require, and not what we hope will fix it, but what it/she really does physically need to balance the millions of organisms and billions of processes of which her body is composed – so that we can begin to work together to give the mother Earth what she needs to survive.

I can wish — but I have no real hope that this will happen. Mostly because most people would rather hope and pray than work to understand what is needed. And partly because I have finally come to understand that the miracle of Life, and the beauty of how it functions to exist as a vital (formerly) green rock in space, is more significant, elegant, beautiful and desirable than the human enterprise.

There is no other viable reason for hope.

There can be no Life without death.

It is done.

And so be it.

Hey everyone! My name is Justin and I am walking with Compassionate Earth! I’m really excited about it for a bunch of reasons. I guess a lot of the time, I just kind of flow from one place to another taking in life as I go with very little direction. When walking you always have a direction– I believe I need this direction, and right now so do we all! A compassionate and sustainable direction. I have always hoped that in my life the direction I would end up walking in would be one that brought peace and compassion to those around me and to myself… and so here I am.

Now I just want to talk a bit about why I am walking, and also a little about some things that I believe and some things I want to learn.

I am walking to see the earth, to hear it. To feel what is happening, and to understand. This way I can know what I believe, and believe what I know. I am walking to share my love with the earth!! I am walking so that I will grow, because If I grow the earth grows.

I believe that the walk will generate compassionate energy for the entire earth, and that we earthlings (plants, animals, people and everything in between) are as much a part of the earth as the rocks and the oceans. I am happy to have the opportunity to participate in something like this and just want all of you to know that you can too!

I believe that the money system is intrinsically flawed and is depriving us of direct interaction with our survival needs, even making it unclear to some as to what our “needs” really are. (Food, love, peace, shelter, water, for a start. Not oil, not green paper, not decimal points.)

I believe the the corporate system is blinded by numbers, greed and profit. I think it has grown out of control concentrating the world’s resources in the hands of a few. This is increasing the suffering felt by many people, and by the Earth. This is being done with little regard for anything other than Old Might Dollar and The decimal point. Thus we end up with things like the KXL and the Tarsands.

I believe the path that our world’s majority culture is traveling down will end in disaster for us if it doesn’t change, but more importantly I believe that there is Hope!!

I don’t really KNOW any of these things, but I do believe them. As a friend recently reminded me, there is a difference between knowing in your heart and having information at your fingers, and I’d add even in your head. So I am walking compassionately, because I need to know, I want to know the earth, and the people and the problems we’re all facing.

I’ve had it drilled into my mind for most of my life, by our world culture, that the world is in fact Ours. That our industrial culture is the world. That this culture is humanity. And this is the way it was meant to be. The way it has to be. I do not believe that. I do know there have been other ways. There ARE other ways. Other peoples. Other cultures. Some of them right here in the U.S.

Many of our brothers and sisters in our earth family don’t know this– they know that this isn’t the way but think there are no other options– so am I’m walking for the people who don’t know, Myself included. I am walking hoping that after the walk there will be a little more light and that one of Us (earthlings) can illuminate another way and find another direction. (one day <3)

I Know that when this walk is over I won’t be the same as when it started and when I change the world changes just a little bit. So I’m going to put one foot in front of the other and I’m not going to stop! I am really blessed to be in a place in my life where I can do this, and I realize that not everyone can but there are lots of other things you can. You can come and walk for a little while– a day or a week even! We would love to have you along. We’re also asking for donations, which will primarily go toward feeding us walkers, so anything helps!
To contribute to our Start Some Good campaign, visit: startsomegood.com/compassionateearthwalk
To mail a check or food/supplies, address to:
The Compassionate Earth Walk
c/o The Harvest Collective
1518 Menlee Rd.
Silver Spring, MD 20904
To gift via Pay Pal, address to: davidrogner@gmail.com

Coming home to the airport at the end of a long day fighting the fires. Surrounded by clouds and smoke from the burning, drought-stricken hills around Santa Fe.

We arrived a bit early at the end of the rail line in Santa Fe, because we like watching trains come in, and so chose the opportunity for a bit of restful meditation while waiting for the event. Or at least I meditated. She watched and waited for something more interesting to happen. Which it surely did. What fun to meet my cousin Nancy, whom I have not seen since I was more or less about 6 or 8 years old. We had at least two lifetimes to talk about, while Bitsy flirted with every passing dog lover, and finally tried to make friends with the entire trainload of people heading back to Albuquerque.

Now here I am sitting up late at night, feeling quite hyper, making pictures while Bitsy snores.

Renowned Canadian scientist Dr. David Suzuki has referred to the Tar Sands development as a great wound upon the face of the Earth.

Shodo Spring, founder of The Compassonate Earth Walk http://www.compassionateearthwalk.org/, explained that our “intention,” through walking, is to face that great injury in the earth (the tar sands) as an expression of a brokenness in our collective human spirit – and to heal and transform that brokenness through the power of love and awareness. That is one reason for walking, but the reality is that every person on earth has spiritual and physical reasons to walk the path that leads toward the welfare of planet Earth.

Jessica is one who is walking with Shodo. Here is a a portion of her reason for walking the route of the Keystone XL Pipeline that begins at the Tar Sands development and splits the heart of North America.

“We are using the Keystone XL Pipeline as a symbol of the pain that we’ve been facing as a society, literally sucking ourselves dry in an effort to fuel our future. In my study of energy as natural medicine, there’s a principle that I return to with almost all of my clients, and that is putting their feet on the earth. The Earth has such a powerful grounding polar charge, and in our bodies and in our lives has so much of this grounding polar charge in our bodies and in our lives, and holds so much of this high-powered rajasic, this outward movement of energy, driving us forward, driving us toward our goals and destinations, and oftentimes we can forget that there is a moment of stillness that we can find within us. A very good way of connecting with that stillness is by just placing our feet on the earth. After I finish a treatment session with any of my clients I’ll normally have them take their shoes off. We’ll walk downstairs and we’ll walk outside and put our feet on the earth, just for a few moments. I’m always so surprised by the response. I’ve had people be very uncomfortable with that. “You expect me to walk without shoes downstairs? You expect me to stand on the dirt?” But then after a moment of feeling that connection to the earth, underneath their feet, there’s always a noticeable difference in the energy of the body. They take a moment; they take a breath; they are able to release the tension and the stress; able to release the pain in their body, or in their heart, or in their spirit. Just finding this connection with the earth is such a powerful healing transformative practice.

“On the compassionate earth walk I’m hoping to bring that powerful healing and transformative energy. We are going to be building a community consciousness along the way. That’s really what this is about. It’s about connecting with nature through connecting with our community, or connecting to community through connecting with nature.”

In other words, we are it. Even though Jessica’s story sounds so foreign to me that I can barely imagine it – because I was brought up most of my early life running the earth in my bare feet – nevertheless that last sentence speaks for everyone. And so does the Compassionate Earth Walk http://factfictionfancy.wordpress.com/2013/05/22/ bare-bones-bio…ate-earth-walk/.

Again, from another source in another culture, here is a story told by Jack Kornfield: “I remember asking BuddhaDassa, a wonderful teacher in the southern forests of Thailand, I said, you have been teaching westerners for 25 years now, and I’m sure you’ve noticed, as I have, how many of us come to meditate with a lot of grief and wounds and trauma and unworthiness. What do you do? What’s the best way to work with that? He said, what I see for those who are wounded, most importantly, is to bring them into the forest. To bring them out into the world of the trees and the rocks, of the clouds and the streams, and let them live in this world of nature until they feel held by it, made of it, until they know themselves to be connected with it.” (DVD, Meditation for Beginners)
The Compassionate Earth Walk is a spiritual pilgrimage toward our true home in the community of life.

This is Bare Bones Biology, a production of FactFictionFancy.wordpress.com and KEOS Radio, 89.1 FM, Bryan, Texas. The podcast of this episode can be downloaded at:

ALL burning consumes oxygen to release energy by breaking down various substances that burn. They all give off carbon dioxide and water. That’s a climate change story – about the health of the biosystem more than the health of me. And burning also gives off various kinds of tars, right? We know that. And nicotine, if it’s tobacco burning. And all sorts of other toxic substances, like candles, diesel fuel, have their own tars and other byproducts. That’s about the health of me. Combustion products make me (and actually most people, just wait, think Alzheimers, asthma, allergies, pneumonia, obesity, depression) sick. You’ll find out soon enough, just wait.

I don’t want to wait. The Brazos Valley is now full of combustion products and other toxic compounds such as pesticides, herbicides, perfume, cleaning substances, diesel, oil wells, fracking, coal fired power plants, and much more. It’s in the air, in the summertime especially. The only way to avoid them would be to stop breathing. I don’t want to do that, or to be sick, so
last week we left the Brazos Valley, heading for the pristine Rocky Mountains.

Getting dark, we stopped at the Pipeliner Hotel in some little town in Texas where the room had so much perfume we could not sleep. Tried the face mask, doesn’t work with perfume, and so we ended up, the two of us twisted up in the front seat of the pickup across the
alley from the motel where the air was not so bad.

Did I say this was supposed to be a shortcut to Chama? And then we drove and drove and drove and after a while we came to Amarillo and got lost. And then we drove and drove, Texas is pretty big, until we got to Dumas. And from Dumas to Dalhart we drove through a dust storm worthy of the 30’s. And there was a very strange person out plowing his dusty field as the wind was blowing his soil away into the air and into my pickup. Out with the face mask again, until we got to Dalhart, where we spent the night in a much cleaner motel, but we still had the fan in the bathroom running full blast and the door cracked open just a little bit to clear the cleaning products from the air.

The next day was bright and wonderfully clear. We stepped outside and breathed. And breathed. And got in the car and drove up and up and up until, at about 8000 feet, the bends struck, also known as altitude sickness from changing too fast, and so we stopped first at the roadside rest that is complete with a corral to rest the horses, and then a fine breakfast just up the hill in Perico, where the real cowboys eat, and featuring some very nice pictures by a local artist. This part of the “shortcut” was quite worth all the driving.

Across the high plains, finally we left Texas behind, in to New Mexico, and moving up into the National Forest, winding around on route 63, and down again into Taos and about 80 miles of desert shrub with more and better dirt devils. Slap on that old mask again. And, here we are in our new back yard. Look at that enormous rock that probably fell all the way down from the cliff.

Home sweet home. Hear the wind in the pines.

But no, the house is full of the smell of mothballs, that’s not only toxic but also carcinogenic. The rattlesnake on the porch slithered under the house, and Bitsy rolled in something seriously dead. And somehow we simply could not feel at home.

So we drove on down to Santa Fe. Just in time for the forest fires.

I was about to say I can’t imagine why, but in fact I can. People in power know that the real power lies with the people. If they can keep us yelling at each other over things that we basically agree about, that is one less worry for them.

So, boring as it may be, I will spend quite a lot of energy defining words and worldviews. And since I’ve recently been told that the new word for worldview is “frame,” I’ll call them frames.

My first frame is that we all need the same things, and I think the best way to get these things would be to work together to find a way to make them available.

My second frame is the concept introduced by James Lovelock in his several books. That the earth ecosystem is a unit of life — just as you and I are units of life, but a good deal more complicated than we are. The earth biosystem has the same basic life needs as all other units of biological life on earth. There is ample biological evidence to convince me of this, but for not everyone cares about the biology. For you who don’t know the concept of the living earth ecosystem — or if you believe something else might be more important, I’m going to point you to the NASA pictures that were taken of Mars, and ask you to compare that red with the blue marble picture of the living earth that was taken from the moon. That is the difference between life and death on a planetary scale.

So ecosystem is a scientific word, but surely we cannot believe that the ecosystem is a scientific thing. Any more than you are a scientific thing. Biology is a science that studies life, but the ecosystem is the real deal — a real living thing that we require for our own survival.

My third frame is that our living earth exists in and is a part of the universe. If you have been following Bare Bones Biology, you know that I believe there is a basic law of cause and effect in the universe. So if the universe exists, there is a good chance that it was created or is in process of being created. And now we bump into ideas about God and Creation that are way outside of my expertise, and probably quite controversial, so I will quote the experts.

Let’s begin with God. I heard Pastor Jeff Hackleman say that: God is “the one that created the universe.” It was on KBTX, so it must be true, and I don’t have a problem with putting a name to a creator.

That leaves only to define what we mean by creation. To create. That which is created. Doesn’t sound complicated to me, but rather than argue with anyone, I will quote another of our most renowned Christian religious scholars, Huston Smith, who says that the Creation is: “everything, as it is.” That’s also hard to argue about.

Next, we probably can also agree that we human persons did not create The Creation, and we do not understand everything about it.

So what is the problem here, folks? I sincerely believe that we all really need the same thing, and that is the living earth ecosystem that makes our air, water, soil and climate. This human-friendly environment is not available on Mars or on the moon, and if we have any idea that we humans can create any ecosystem anywhere — well in my lexicon that comes under the heading of excuses for not trying to take care of the one we already have.

Lynn Lamoreux

This is Bare Bones Biology, a production of FactFictionFancy.wordpress.com and KEOS Radio, 89.1 FM, Bryan, Texas.
The podcast of this episode can be downloaded at:
http://traffic.libsyn.com/fff/Bare_Bones_Biology_-_006-Frames-Final.mp3

By the time today’s children reach middle age, it is extremely likely that Earth’s life-support systems, critical for human prosperity and existence, will be irretrievably damaged by the magnitude, global extent, and combination of these human-caused environmental stressors, unless we take concrete, immediate actions to ensure a sustainable, high-quality future.!

As members of the scientific community actively involved in assessing the biological and societal impacts of global change, we are bringing this alarm to the world for humanity’s continued health and prosperity, we all — individuals, businesses, political leaders, religious leaders, scientists and people in every walk of life — must work hard to solve these five global problems, starting today:

1.  Climate disruption

2.  Extinctions

3.  Loss of Ecosystem Diversity

4.  Pollution

5.  Human Population Growth and Resource Consumption

http://www.populationmedia.org/2013/02/04/tv-interview-leading-population-expert-bill-ryerson/

http://www.kpbs.org/news/2013/jan/30/leading-expert-talks-overpopulation-sdsu/