Category: Stewardship

Categories
Japan: Living Journal Life In Nature Stewardship

Water Angels

I’ve been really busy for the last few weeks and so haven’t had time to update my blog, but I thought I’d post this link because it leads to one small practical way that we can do something about the environment. I was watching a documentary on the TV Asahi program “Spaceship Earth” about cleaning up the Ara River in northern Tokyo, when they highlighted a domestic water purification solution that is very easy and cheap to make. It is a mixture of natto (fermented soy beans), yoghurt, dry yeast, sugar (white or brown), and tap water, called Ehime AI-2. It works much like the microorganisms in our stomachs and can be used in toilets, bathrooms, kitchen sinks, and compost containers to break down the harmful bacteria that pollute water.

I’ve always wondered why letting the water run in our homes is such a terrible environmental no-no if all it does is allow unpolluted water to flow back into the world outside. Of course the use of pumps and dams uses lots of electricity and oil, lots of chemicals are dissolved into the reservoirs, and our bills go up, but other than that untouched water is probably better for the environment, not worse. I think the rivers and lakes could do very well without all our fecal matter making a debut in their volumes.

Anyway, on top of looking for a way to keep a small compost bucket on my balcony I want to do what I can to clean the water that leaves my home, too. Take a look and see if maybe it’s something you might want to do, too.

I’ll try to get my next installment of photos up soon!

Categories
Japan: Living Journal Life In Nature Stewardship

There Were Giants

Humpback whale lips
Muzzle of a humpback whale that sidled up to the boat I was on in the Stellwagon Banks off the coast of Boston, 1991. Three whales spent about two hours lounging around the boat, one of them lifting her snout up to the gunwhale and letting people stroke her chin, while her son did cartwheels among the waves just off the bow of the boat. The skin felt like wetsuit rubber and the breath, especially when she sneezed globs of fish and krill slobber all over my brother, was, let's just say, "overwhelming".

Humpback whale lips
Muzzle of a humpback whale that sidled up to the boat I was on in the Stellwagon Banks off the coast of Boston, 1991. Three whales spent about two hours lounging around the boat, one of them lifting her snout up to the gunwhale and letting people stroke her chin, while her son did cartwheels among the waves just off the bow of the boat. The skin felt like wetsuit rubber and the breath, especially when she sneezed globs of fish and krill slobber all over my brother, was, let’s just say, “overwhelming”.

I came across this article last night, about Japan’s big victory in securing a huge portion of the votes in the International Whaling Commission (IWC) the other day. I’m not going to go into the petty details of how the organization works or what exactly happened. Suffice it to say that this is such an unnecessary development. Absolutely no good can come of such foolishness. What is at stake is not anachronistic Japanese cultural traditions (the argument that eating whale meat is part of Japanese tradition is simply not true. Japanese did not eat meat until very recently in their history, and whale meat only made it into people’s homes at the end of the Meiji era, when food shortages forced the government to seek alternative food sources), but the existence of fellow creatures.

What does it take for people to care about something other than themselves? The planet is our common home, irreplaceable and absolutely vital to our own existence. If for nothing else we ought to protect the planet, together, just for our own survival. We cannot exist without other life around us.

Categories
Japan: Living Journal Life In Nature Stewardship

Passing of Trees

Zelkovas through the window

Zelkovas through the window

In the depths of winter the desire comes to you to plant a seed and shepherd a life. You break the soil and drop in the kernel, then cover it up and wait for the world to shiver and wake. The months go by, bringing the Spring rains, the breath of the South, and the beaming face of the Sun, incubating the loam till veins stir to life. And then one day in June, while absently sticking your face out of the window, the green shoots greet you with their luminous green light, little children out to give the world a try.

And that’s what I did four years ago a year after moving into this apartment. I planted two zelkova seeds and watched them grow along the edge of the tiny garden I have. They grew quickly, almost a meter a year, last year about three meters in just three months. This year they were destined to push above the roof of the apartment building, and spread out in a great canopy of sighing leaves. The two trees shielded my window from the prying eyes of neighbors, blocked the searing summer sun to cool my studio, and entertained me with their Bali shadow puppets upon the curtain. In the midst of this Tokyo grey they were two little arms of hope and joy for me. Just the sound of the leaves rustling when I opened my window would elicit a deep sense of relief.

Zelkovas in the garden

Then, yesterday morning, my doorbell rang. It was my landlord. He’s actually quite an amiable old man, albeit with a hand-wringing, leering-about-money sense of greed about him that never lets me quite trust him. He held his hat in his hands and, bowing profusely, announced that the gardeners would be coming today and removing my trees. “You see, the leaves get stuck in the rain gutters. But don’t worry,” he amended, “They’ll just cut the trees down to their bases, leaving the stumps intact. We won’t remove the trees entirely.”

After experiencing all forms of garden outrage, this was the last straw. In sputtering Japanese (my tongue gets all clay-like when I get emotional in Japanese) I declared, “You’re cutting the trees to their stumps? Just like that? Hokaaay! I don’t know why the hell I picked this apartment with the garden if I can’t use the garden the way I’d like to. I mean if you’re just going to come stamping in here every time you feel like it and rearrange my garden any way you like, then why should I even bother making an effort to take care of the damn thing? Well, why don’t I just make it easy for you? This weekend I’ll get my shears and chop down everything in the garden. Make it totally bare. That way you won’t have to worry about anything clogging up your gutters or attracting any kind of life whatsoever. Okay?”

Needless to say this gesticulating, cross-eyed foreigner losing his cool just rendered my landlord a bit dazed. The smile was gone. “There’s no need to do that! Please don’t misunderstand, you can use the garden any way you like. It’s only the trees that we want to cut down.”

“Ah,” I replied. “Only the trees. Well, I guess cutting them down just to the stumps doesn’t really make sense, does it? I think you’d find it in your interests to get rid of the trees right down to their roots. Otherwise, next thing you know you’ll have them crawling all over the garden again.”

His eyes lit up. “Would you really go for that? To pull the trees out by their roots? That would be most helpful. I’d really appreciate it if we could go ahead and remove the trees entirely. I’ll have the gardeners drop by some time around 10:00 tomorrow morning, okay?”

Zelkova cutters

I know they’re just trees. I’m not supposed to feel anything serious about them, and most certainly not get attached to them. Dogs and cats and horses have their places in our hearts, but trees and cockroaches don’t have souls you see, and therefore their lives are forfeit to casual swiping into oblivion. That they come alive, struggle to continue, and carry out all the same purposes in their lives as you and me means nothing. In the movies people will holler bloody murder if a cat or a dog is mistreated, but no one squeaks a murmur when showing pro wrestlers chewing on worms or heroes’ boots crushing the life out of a cockroach. The same goes for trees.

But for some reason it hurts to see my beloved trees hacked to bits and hauled away. Something in myself feels the chop of the blades. And an emptiness remains.

To make matters worse, the landlord has been marching around the neighborhood chopping down all the annoying trees on his lands. Just up the street a magnificent zelkova stood next to another apartment building, already tall and splendid when I first moved here five years ago. Two years ago the landlord decided, in that typical, Draconian Japanese way with gardens, to lop off all the zelkova’s branches, leaving the poor creature standing naked throughout the years. The only concession was a tuft of sprouts capping the trunk, just enough to allow the tree to scrabble for doses of sunlight. It was but a large stick standing in a parking lot, not really a tree at all.

And after all that, yesterday the landlord ordered the tree to be chopped down and removed.

Doomed Zelkova

Five years I walked by this tree every day and not once did I fail to stop and admire it, even if only for a second. Now it is gone and no one will ever lament its passing. What a waste of a life.

Categories
Journal Musings Nature Stewardship

The End of Our World

This article spells out exactly what I have been strongly feeling these last few years, especially with all the recent mad weather around the world and the accumulated news of such things as the melting of the Arctic icecap, the Antarctic icecap, the permafrost in the Arctic, and of glaciers all around the world; the sudden failure of millions of seabirds in the North Sea to lay eggs, of sardines to arrive at their spawning grounds in the Pacific, of the mass plague of wood bore beetles in the Arctic, destroying entire regions of forests; the record snows falling just here in Japan, the monster storms hitting the coasts everywhere, the huge mudslides in rainy climes, enormous flooding, deserts expanding, rain forests falling, islands disappearing under the waves…

You see all this… if you take the time to gather it together in your arms… and you wonder, “What exactly is wrong with us?” It’s like we’re mesmerized by the lights of Vegas, unable to pull away from the slot machine, even though we’re about to find ourselves destitute. Does it take the vast hand-swipe of God to bring us to our senses? The awful part of it is that we seem to deny the reality of the natural world like some peevish teenager; it still never occurs to us that we are not the center of the universe, that the world will erase us as casually as we step on cockroaches or spray mosquitoes. Our absence will be missed by no one and nothing. Only we make so much of ourselves that we would risk our own existence and the stability of the planet to hawk our wares. The utter callousness and stupidity…

I have written about this often enough to know that a great many people will pooh-pooh me for being too alarmist and pessimistic. But I think it is that so few people want to open their eyes and see just how bad things really are. Or, if they do, they will vigorously shake their heads, clap their hands over their ears, and shout, “No! No! No! No! No! No! No!“. They say, “Miguel, why do you have to be so depressing all the time? Life is hard enough without worrying about things we can’t do anything about.” We have the symptoms of terminal cancer, but by God, we’re going to defeat that notion out of sheer optimism and to hell with the doctor!

I have diabetes. It is incurable. I will most likely die from complications that it causes. And I know what it is to deny an awful truth in yourself. People who love me tell me, “You have to be more positive about the disease, Miguel. Fight it!” Of course I fight it. What else can I do? And yet the kernel of truth resides within me and there is no denying it. It is a hard, impersonal truth, with no feeling this way or that whether I live or die. God, nor any other god, is not going to step in and save me.

I think that’s what the world’s populace is waiting for, some deus ex machina to come floating down from the clouds to grant us absolution and sprinkle fairy dust over the land, curing all wrongs. But volcanoes and earthquakes and floods and hurricanes and tsunamis act like the gods… supremely indifferent to our existence. And like the gods, when the mortals deem to insult them, the retribution is terrible. The Elders of our tribe long ago understood this intrinsically. We make fun of them today, calling them ignorant and backward.

Perhaps it’s, as Lovelock pronounces, too late. If so, our entire civilization is about to end. Can we even grasp that? And if the reality hits home, what can we do about it? Or more importantly, what can we do about ourselves? Is there dignity in extinction?

Categories
Climate Change Global Systems Failure Journal Musings Nature Society Stewardship

A Moth Wing of Devastation

I think I am slowly losing my mind. It has been building that way ever since the awful events of the New York tragedy. Something snipped on that day and as time has given me perspective I realize more and more that the waywardness of my heart and soul centers around an invisible despair, rather than on anger or righteousness. As the inevitable drums roll and boots keep marching past something lurking behind it all tethers itself to my voice and prevents the proper words from forming. For three and a half years now it is as if I have been screaming in silence. And no matter how many tears well up or doors I strike or cries of agony escape my lips as I watch the unwrapping of terrible things on the TV or printed pages or on the computer screen, the silence absorbs it all in utter indifference. My heart is breaking. I can’t take much more of this awful truth. Part of me needs to believe that we are still decent, but every day it seems to get worse. And the helplessness and impotent fury are stealing away the center. On the one side it is this utter madness speaking words through cruelty and violence, on the other it is the breaking of our beloved Earth.

I don’t know exactly what it is, but something deeply disturbing has unraveled the string that has always connected me to making sense of my life and to living every day. If I look inside I can sense the wildness of emotions and the animal panic. Something isn’t right with the world or with myself. The vertigo of teetering on an icy edge never goes away.

Beth, over at Cassandra Pages refers to the interview of Seymour Hersh. What he speaks about is nothing new, but the affirmation of an insidious doom that he creates by bringing all the jigsaw pieces together left the hair standing on my back because of how true it all rang. Then I glance left and right at the increasingly alarming reports recently about the coming global systems failure, the chaos of humankind facing mass extinction, and the mind just lets go. It is so huge. Beyond my ability to comprehend or emotionally envelope.

What am I to do? Recently I’ve been trying the only thing I can do… start small. Go out into my garden or onto the street, wade through the oceans of pain, and press my fingertip against the surface of tree bark or taste a snowflake on my tongue. I know it doesn’t make an iota of difference in the fate of this world we’ve so badly mismanaged, and most likely the tiny administrations will be swept away in the flood of destruction, but if I must go then I want it to be on my terms, holding dear those things which do still make sense.

As I jogged along the river bank near my house a few days ago I little girl riding her bicycle ahead of her mother, called back, “Mama. If only I could take a trip to another country! If only I could travel to those faraway places right now!”

Her voice still rings in my ear. A heart yearning for engagement. I wish her all the best and cling to the tiny hope that her request might come true, and that the winds of change bring scents of relenting. Of hands stayed. Of a missed beat and a resumption of real reality.

Categories
Nature Stewardship

Here We Go Again

Philippine Eagle

This is what it takes to get people’s attention: virtual total destruction of your habitat…

Over 80% of the forest that covered almost the entire archipelago of the Philippines has been decimated. I remember as a boy in 1971 visiting the Pagsanjan river south of Manila and being overwhelmed by the heavy lushness of the rain forest overhanging the banks of the river, the trees filled the calls of birds and monkeys, and then visiting again in 1992 and finding the water flushed brown with mud, floating with garbage so thick that you could barely see the river water, carcasses of pigs and dogs in various states of decomposition bobbing past the dugout canoes being punted upriver while the river guides, in between demanding “Pipty dollars, you hab?, and with banks bare and dusty from clear-cut forest cover and the silence of birds and monkeys long gone. This has happened throughout the Philippines and the soft, volcanic mountainsides have given way to treacherous erosion that now contribute to the disaster of the four ferocious typhoons this week.

Flowering dogwood getting ready for winter

People can complain that they are helpless to do anything; that the problem of environmental destruction is beyond our individual abilities to change, but that is merely an excuse to continue with the way of life we are all so used to. As long as we don’t seriously act the world will continue its gathering momentum of decline until we will truly be helpless in the throes of planetary reaction: worldwide monster storms, coastal lands drowned by huge seas, massive starvation, wars and mass migration that make Iraq look like mites at play. Exactly what will it take for the whole world to finally take heed?

Ten years ago I saw a tiny article at the back of the Japan Times announcing the death of the last wild Philippine Eagle (Pithecophaga jefferyi).
It was such an uncaring side note to such a magnificent bird (a full grown Philippine Eagle stands about 1 meter (3 ft) tall, with a wingspan of about 2 meters (almost eight feet) ) that I broke down weeping alone in my apartment. And the sad thing was that it was something I could not share and find solace with anyone I knew who would truly comprehending why I was crying. I mentioned the article to one colleague I was working with and his reaction was, “So, it’s just a bird. There are a lot of poor people in the Philippines.”

That’s just it… we think of ourselves as more important than anything else. We are “above” nature and woe to anyone who would seriously suggest that we are anything but. Constantly we seek confirmation of our superiority; the television stations airing animal shows are constantly revealing “amazement” at the intelligence and versatility of other fellow creatures, as if it is merely an aberration that an animal might exhibit the same characteristics that we humans seem to consider our moral claim. Yes, there are a lot of poor people in the Philippines. I’ve met them, eaten with them, even stayed in some of their homes. But if we cannot empathize with and feel the desolation of the disappearance of our living home and the fellow creatures in it, we can feel nothing.

Clearcut Philippines

Philippine EagleThis blind disdain will be our undoing. No creature that thinks of itself beyond dependence on its habitat can long survive. As long as we think of ourselves as independent of the natural world… call it the mother of all egos… the imbalance will continue to grow, until one day it all comes crashing down.

But there is hope. Some of us are waking and taking the first steps toward re-harmonizing. In April this year, Kabayan (“countryman”) became the first captive bred Philippine Eagle to be released into the wild. All indications (the Philippine Eagle Foundation) say that Kabayan is doing quite well. These are the kind of efforts that we, as individuals, can definitely do. Bring us all together and we have a worldwide turnaround.

This is our home. All of us.

Categories
Journal Living Things Nature Stewardship

Ebb Tide

Fulmar Cuddle

Shetlands Seabird Nursery
Sea bird nurseries in Orkney and the Shetlands. Fulmars with chicks. The Orkneys and the Shetlands, Great Britain, 1995.

This will not make world headlines and most likely will not trigger most people around the world into a mass hysteria, but when I read the news in the Independant yesterday about the massive drop in sea bird populations in the North Sea, I couldn’t help but feel a great chill sweep through me akin to the shock I felt when first hearing the news of the New York tragedy. In fact, as I sat contemplating the repercussions of what is happening in the Orkneys and the Shetlands, and broadened my perspective by connecting the dots between what is happening there to all the interconnected ecosystemic failures around the world, a slowly dawning horror spread through me like a pool of blood. Global warming is no longer just conjecture. It is no longer the day after tomorrow. It is happening right here, right now. And the consequences to us are truly terrifying; they make the New York tragedy look like a garden party in comparison.

And of course, there will be lots of debating whether there really is any danger at all, whether the data is slanted, whether the loss of the seabirds will have any bearing on us financially or in disrupting our merry lives. The focus will remain on Iraq and the American election and our global habitat be damned. It’s always about just us, and always we disassociate ourselves with any relationship to the respiration of the planet. We like to think of ourselves as astronauts within our own homes.

Fulmar CuddleI traveled to both the Shetlands and the Orkneys in 1995. I sat on the cliffs for hours gazing at the teeming millions of Fulmars, Guillimots, Black Guillimots, Razorbills, Gannets, Cormorants, Puffins, Kittiwakes, Arctic Skuas, Great Skuas, Arctic Terns, Great Black-Backed Gulls, Glaucous Gulls, Common Gulls, Herring Gulls, and Shags and feeling utterly overwhelmed by the sheer clouds of wings and metropolis-like vertical cities on the cliff sides. To think that by next year this will have vanished, like a great hand sweeping across a clock face, defies belief. It is like my heart has been raked over and my own existence and culpability questioned.

Here in Japan, a supposedly temperate climate, this summer the days are troubled by daily tropical storms, exactly how the Philippines, a tropical country, receives its summer costume. Mornings beamed into by a beating sun, followed by afternoons of thunderous showers. This is not Japan at all. The gods must be playing the wrong game up there among the clouds. Could it be a shift in values? Are the regions playing musical chairs and roles reversed? Am I going to have to learn to grow bananas and papayas now? Or will the Great Ocean decide to clean house and inundate the lowlands with an angry bath that will have us running for the hilltops in our shoving, thoughtless billions?

How much longer will the pastoral last? If the structure of the world we know falls into chaos, how long, for instance, will I survive without the medical elixir of insulin to keep my diabetic blood from consuming me? (a few days, perhaps? A month, as my body slowly eats itself to death and I crash into a coma?). Will we be left alone among the heat waves, to contemplate our mass stupidity and finally, but too late, take the blame for our irresponsibility?

Or can we learn now, before our brothers and sisters who sustain us vanish, that there is no hierarchy and that our ape-like motivations coupled to immense power makes for a time bomb that we must learn to deactivate now, or we all perish?

People want soft words and comforting scenarios. They cringe at the the idea of the romance disintegrating. But the natural world is as real as the hard knocks of the real human world. They are, in fact, one and the same. So when are we going to wake up and manage our home (the “eco” of ecology and economy) the same way that we are so compelled to do in our workaday lives? When will the natural world become our work and our livelihood? When, if we can imagine it so, will we become animals once again?

Categories
Journal Musings Nature Stewardship

Voice of Reason

Kurt Vonnegut writes a chilling evaluation of the direction we are heading in as a species. The last line had my hair standing on end.

(Thanks, Robert Brady)

Lately the advertisements for the movie “The Day After Tomorrow” has hit the media here in Japan, and the scenes of the Earth in its dying throes has caused a lot of people to turn their heads. One evening while on my way to work, the entire interior of the train was plastered with posters and flyers of the movie.

While I am curious about the movie and would like to see where it takes the whole issue of caring for our planet, it bothers me very deeply that most people will probably just watch the movie for the thrill is induces, as if the degradation and destruction of all of life is just a media event and has no direct bearing on their lives.

As Vonnegut points out, we are all in for a terribly rude awakening.

Categories
Journal Nature Spiritual Connection Stewardship

While It Lasts

Erimo Light
Sunset off Cape Erimo, Hokkaido, Japan, 1997

Erimo Light
Sunset off Cape Erimo, Hokkaido, Japan, 1997

Lately I can’t shake the feeling that we are witnessing the end of our world. Too much seems to be unhinging and the very fragility of the mechanism kicking into play. Look at the strange weather, the nutty lopsidedness of our world politics, the unscrupulousness of big business, the obliteration of other creatures, the greater and greater focus on having more and more, and the constant, constant bad news. CNN seems to think the world consists of the American election campaign… For a four-year presidency, doesn’t it seem a little counterproductive and not a little dangerous to be spending a whole year exclusively focusing on winning the next election? Isn’t the leader supposed to be working on more important issues?

When I heard the report about the Pentagon predicting that by 2006 the first big effects of global warming will cause massive worldwide environmental catastrophes, all I could think was that the American government is weighing the wrong dangers. Iraq is nothing compared to the peril of our planet’s environmental collapse. What are we thinking? Why is it so hard for us to pay heed to the health and stability of our world? Is it the very nature of our inhabiting the sphere rather than looking down at it that makes it impossible for us to see it other than immensely big and inexhaustible? If so, then we are no different from mice in an overcrowded box.

On my way by train to a one day hike of Mount Takao west of Tokyo yesterday, I watched a mentally handicapped young man shuttle back and forth between train doors, excitedly pointing at passing trains and views of the scenery flicking by. His clear enjoyment of the world he was witnessing drew my attention throughout the 50 minute ride, and no one else on the train payed so much homage to the wonder and beauty of existing in this jewel of a world we live in. I wondered why it was that a man who supposedly understood less than the rest of us, could appreciate without prejudice what all of us are blessed with. Why is wonder necessarily the domain of the childlike?

It is what we are taught and the way we learn to see that instills the kernel of insight into our world and how we choose to interact with it. On my way home from the mountain, stepping up to the ticket vending machine at the train station, a Japanese boy of about 5 or 6 was sitting on the counter in front of the machine. I leaned in to buy a ticket and he, suddenly realizing that I was a foreigner appearing right beside to him, almost toppled off the counter. His eyes went wide as he exclaimed, “Whoa!”, an involuntary, ingrained reaction to foreigners that everyone around him has always taught him is the only reaction to foreigners that a Japanese should have. It was his education of the world and likely to follow him throughout his life. I laughed at the sheer irony of this boy and the earlier young man, that they should both carry such young minds, but be so different in their clarity.

Such a prejudice toward the world grows in many forms. Without being able to distinguish the structure and mechanism that keeps it all running there is no way for us to overcome our folly in destroying the very thing that sustains us.

I look out my window and it is all there, the world, our home, the mirage of our existence. The picture is getting cloudy, though. Soon there may be no more eyes to see it all.

Categories
America: Society Art of Living Iraq War Journal Nature Society Stewardship

Statement

Winter Cherry
Bare branches of a cherry tree in a kindergarten near my home, Chofu, Tokyo, Japan, 2004

Winter Cherry
Bare branches of a cherry tree in a kindergarten near my home, Chofu, Tokyo, Japan, 2004

I’ve had a lot of time to think. And the conclusions are not quite so cut and dried that I can claim enlightenment, but there have been some tightening of convictions and brushes with clarity. Here are some of the pebbles of insight into myself that I found:

• I love the Earth. Ever since I can remember it has been a more than average, deep anima within me. When close to the natural world, when interacting with other living things, when walking between the ground and the heavens and no human intervention to obscure the view, when the childlike excitement and fascination envelopes me while I crawl through thickets or wade up to my waist in swamp water or climb a tree to get a closer look at a nest or walk for days and days along a mountain ridge, those are the times I always feel most alive. I live in the heart of Tokyo now and am denied these things. It goes against my nature. Like Dersu Uzala (from Kurosawa’s film and the book by V.K. Arseniev) something dies within me when cities are the only connection to life that I have access to. For those who love cities this is impossible to explain.

• I love the human race. People can be capable of so much beauty and grace and generosity. When they open their minds and care for one another and the places they live in, our imaginations are limitless. As a integral participant in the dance of the natural world, our role is as the steward of this world, with the means and awareness to protect all that is around us. Other animals have their place in the scheme, ours is to protect. And therefore I want to see that I position myself within my own life to fulfill my role as steward. And to resist with all my heart and intellect and abilities those who would destroy our world.

• The planet is in danger. How long are we going to sit around squabbling about this? It is not some parlor room debate where the “winner” gets to make a toast. It is the lives of millions and millions of our fellow creatures and our very own survival that is at stake. The danger is NOW! And yet we sit around like crash victims, staring with disbelief out the window. Meanwhile we play like fools with our weapons, our chemicals, our water, our air as if there isn’t a care in the world. The whole scenario seems to be following, step-by-step, Kim Stanley Robinson’s warning, from his Mars series books, where the Earth falls into worldwide catastrophe. We are on the verge of meltdown and still denying it. The planet cannot take this abuse any more.

• My anger is not impotent or inconsequential. When I react with anger to what the United States and Bush are doing it is out of pain and love for the planet and for all people. I cannot sit idly by while there are those who would destroy it all. Meditation and a letting go of self is all important of course, but what self will there be to let go of if there are no people to examine themselves? Before Hitler took control so many people had opportunities to voice their anger and prevent him from coming to power. If the Blacks in America had not voiced their anger at and opposition to their suppression, where would they be today? Certainly much worse off than they are. Or the Indians. If Gandhi had not seized upon the strength of his anger with Britain, where would the Indians be today? No, I will not back down and whimper in a closet. I am angry. I am opposed to what is happening and, though I am but a small voice and cannot do much, I will do what I can to oppose the world order that the United States is forcing on everyone. This in no way means that I am not angry about other countries and what they are doing, or that I think other places are perfect, but the United States poses the biggest threat to the world today. If the United States cannot learn to live in harmony with the rest of the world, if they continually shake the tree without thinking of others or the tree itself, then I will work to oppose it.

• Bush is a criminal. Not just a local criminal within the U.S. itself, but an international war criminal. He has attacked and murdered thousands upon thousands of people. He has started two wars, based on lies, and defied the international community. He has upset the balance of the entire world, possibly putting the stability of the world’s economy in jeopardy. Personally, I believe that he was responsible for the New York tragedy… there are just too many coincidences, lies, and sleights of hand to see it any other way, much as Americans are just too horror-struck to admit the possibility of such a heinous act on the part of their own president. Almost no one in America has even entertained the possibility of this, in spite of the awful lies and acts that Bush has already committed. The fixed election; denying access to the information about what happened before the New York tragedy; tripping up the investigations; planning the attack on Iraq long before the tragedy; the inability to find bin Laden (who was in the employ of the CIA for many years…which is suspicious in itself); the convenient death of Senator Paul Wellstone; the illegal and humiliating internment of people denied even the most basic human rights at Guantanamo; the backing of Sharon’s atrocious subjugation of the Palestinian people… just how many more outrageous and “evil” acts must cross the television screen before people wake up and inquire into the goings on behind all these things? Bush should be subjected to an investigation at least… really he should be facing trial in an international court.

I am certainly not going to back down and quietly “accept” the state of affairs. Bush losing the election this year allows a great criminal to get away without answering for his crimes. That simply is not enough for me. Someone has got to say something, even if the outcry is ineffective. At least I am trying and not simpering in some cage. If Bush manages to get you to cower, then he has won. He’s managed to gain the crown without even really making much of an effort.

• I will find peace. If I hold fast to my convictions and practice loving what I love, if I get out there and protect the world and people who mean so much to me, if I don’t let someone bully and intimidate me, I will find the steadfastness within me and know who I am. THAT is what I will meditate upon, not some wilted stem that forgets who and what it is.

But it would certainly be easier and the going a little lighter if others of you would join me, if we would join hands and stand up together. Many small voices can chorus into a roar. Even mice have strength in numbers.