Wildflower Stew

I’ve been working on a post about my heroes. Haven’t finished it yet but Captain Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherds is one of them. I got this press release today and couldn’t wait to share it with you. You can contact them at http://seashepherd.org

Sea Shepherd News
News Releases

01/31/2008

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society Needs Your Help to Return to the Southern Oceans to Defend the Whales from Illegal Japanese Whalers
THE WHALES NEED US TO RETURN TO THE SOUTHERN OCEAN WHALE SANCTUARY WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT TO DEFEND THE WHALES

Crew Needed:

For long Hours, cold weather, dangerous mission, spartan vegetarian meals, rough seas, icebergs, whalers, high seas pursuits, and the satisfaction of saving the lives of hundreds of whales.

We need volunteers with the following skills:

Shore Engineers to help repair one of the main engines in Port
Diesel Engineers
Navigators
A Medical Officer
Cooks
A Computer Expert
Photographer
Some Passionate unskilled volunteers

We also need to secure the following:

200 tons of fuel.

All the vegetarian food we can get - canned, dried, frozen.

The ship will arrive in Melbourne on February 2nd and will return as soon as we secure the fuel and complete repairs.

The Japanese whalers have two months of killing time left. We’ve stopped them for three weeks and we can stop them again and every day that we stop them from killing whales is a victory.

email: captainwatson@seashepherd.org
phone: +1 (360) 370-5650
fax: +1 (360) 370-5651
website: www.seashepherd.org

By Wylie Harris

Prairie Writers Circle

I look at the empty countryside around our farm and can’t help but wish it were as thick with people as when my grandparents made a living here. Until recently, though, the kindest name the rest of the world had for this wish was “nostalgia.”

Back then, leaving the farm made sense. The economy was growing on an energy-dense broth of cheap fossil fuels. The energy in those fuels replaced that from the muscles of farm people and their animals. Today one person can grow food for more than a hundred.

A century ago, almost 40 percent of the United States population worked on farms. But with industrialization, millions of farm folk, their labor cheapened, headed to the city for better wages. That tide continued until fewer than 2 million farmers — less than 1 percent of the country’s population — remain today.

Now, though, the seemingly limitless reserves of petroleum that fueled the past century’s exodus from the farm are about half gone. From here on, fossil fuels — and all the everyday essentials that depend on them, like transportation and food — will grow increasingly costly.

Without some miraculous new energy source, muscle power could soon again be a cheaper alternative to fossil fuels for growing food. Blunt economic pragmatism seems set to out-shout nostalgia in the call to put more farmers on the land.

Just how many more farmers would it take to cure farming’s fossil fuel habit? Lots, according to farmer and writer Sharon Astyk and “Oil Depletion Protocol” author Richard Heinberg, both leading activists for facing up to life after world oil production peaks. They estimate that without cheap fossil fuels, we would need 50 million new farmers. That’s one farmer for every two households in the United States , 25 times more than there are now.

This isn’t a move-to-the-boonies-or-starve ultimatum. In fact, many people are ideally positioned to become farmers right where they are — it’s the silver lining to suburban sprawl.

Suburbia occupies vast swaths of former prime U.S. farmland. NASA’s ecological forecasting research group reports that the people living there already water about 30 million acres of lawn, three times the land planted in irrigated corn.

Those lawns average somewhere between one-fifth and one-third of an acre. Authorities like gardening guru John Jeavons and “The Contrary Farmer” author Gene Logsdon say that’s ample land for growing a substantial portion of a family’s food.

This isn’t to say that the 50 million farmers-to-be should grow all their own food, nor that the entire country’s food supply can come from former lawns, parks and golf courses.

Rather, it’s to point out that growing as much of one’s own food as possible can be a cornerstone of sound household finance, and that the necessary land and water are already in the same places as many of the people who now participate only in the demand side of agriculture.

The most effective tactics for making farmers out of more of us are local: convincing homeowner associations that vegetable gardens look as nice as lawns, zoning boards that chickens belong in back yards, and state health agencies that bread baked in home kitchens for sale to neighbors isn’t any likelier to hurt anybody than Wonder Bread.

Rethinking what we mean by “farmer” is also important. The necessary transition is as much mental as political. “Farmers” who plow thousands of acres with gigantic diesel-guzzling tractors and sell corn by the bushel for their entire income aren’t much use in an age of expensive energy.

On the other hand, “farmers” who grow substantial amounts of food for their families and perhaps also for sale to neighbors, as primary income or not, are far better equipped to weather a forced fossil-fuel fast. This is the kind of farmer many of us are already within a hoe handle’s reach of becoming, and perhaps with less effort than we realize.

An agrarian nation isn’t just a nostalgic wish after all. It’s insurance we can’t afford to live without.

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Wylie Harris ranches with his family in Cooke County , Texas , north of Fort Worth . A former W.K. Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Policy fellow, he wrote this comment for the Land Institute’s Prairie Writers Circle, Salina , Kan. http://landinstitute.org

Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
By Rebecca Solnit
A Review

So now everyone wants change! But the question is what kind of change? In “Hope in the Dark” Rebecca Solnit looks at activism and what constitutes real change in the world we live in. She says she was moved to write this book by the despair that followed the failure of the peace movement to stop the war in Iraq. First she points out what the peace movement did achieve. It created a community of people many of whom had never marched, joined a group, signed a petition or donated to a cause. Those networks and websites and coalitions still exist.

“By living out our hope and resistance in public together with strangers of all kinds, we overcame the catechism of fear; we trusted each other; we forged a community that bridged the differences among the peace-loving as we demonstrated our commitment to the people of Iraq.” An estimated 30 million people demonstrated for peace on February 15, 2003, from the scientists at McMurdo Station in the Antarctic to the Inuit in the Arctic and everywhere in between. That has never happened before.

Solnit reminds us of how much has changed already as the new millenium has unfolded in stages: the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the students in Tiananmen Square challenging the Chinese authority, South Africa’s Nelson Mandela released after 26 years in prison and becoming the president of his country, the dismantling of the Soviet Union. A poet becoming president of Czechoslovakia and a labor union organizer the leader of Poland. Miracles and wonder.

She describes the Zapatista’s first appearance on January 1, 1994, the day NAFTA went into effect because they recognized that NAFTA “was an economic death sentence for hundreds of thousands of small-scale Mexican farmers.”

The Fourth Declaration of the Lacondon Jungle that was issued two years later by the Zapatistas proclaimed: “A new lie is being sold to us as history. The lie of the defeat of hope, the lie of the defeat of dignity, the lie of the defeat of humanity . . . In place of humanity, they offer us the stock market index. In place of dignity, they offer us the globalization of misery. In place of hope, they offer us emptiness. In place of life, they offer us an International of Terror. Against the International of Terror that neoliberalism represents, we must raise the International of Hope. Unity, beyond borders, languages, colors, cultures, sexes, strategies and thoughts, of all those who prefer a living humanity. The International of Hope. Not the bureaucracy of hope, not an image inverse to, and thus similar to, what is annihilating us. Not power with a new sign or new clothes. A flower, yes, that flower of hope.”

Then there was the defining moment in 1999 in Seattle that made the global justice movement impossible to ignore. Fifty thousand people marched and ten thousand activists blockaded the downtown streets and forced the cancellation of that day’s meeting of the WTO, changing the whole dialogue of corporate globalization. “We are winning,” said the graffiti in Seattle.

And then, sadly, there was 9/11. Solnit points out that at first “there was a long moment when almost everyone seemed to pause, an opening when the nation might have taken another path.” Instead we were asked to go shopping and spy on our neighbors. Now we know they used 9/11 as justification to carry out a hidden agenda that had been there all along.

And through it all, sometimes feeling like a parallel world, the movement keeps building on what has come before. The wildlife are coming back in many places. The sock-eye salmon have returned in the hundreds of thousands to Lake Washington in Seattle, hawks and herons are sighted in Central Park; there are more buffalo on the plains now than at any time since the late 19th century. Bioremediation is not just a theory but a widely used practice and rivers are being reborn.

And consider this - the Internet was originally developed for use by the US military and now it is the greatest tool we have to transform the energy of conflict and domination into one of peace and justice. We are no longer stuck in an either/or world.

John Jordan, a Reclaim the Streets, global justice activist, wrote, “Taking power has been the goal at the end of the very straight and narrow road of most political movements of the past. Taking control of the future lies at the root of nearly every historical social change strategy, and yet we are building movements which believe that to ‘let go’ is the most powerful thing we can do - to let go, walk away from power and find freedom. Giving people back their creative agency, reactivating their potential for a direct intervention into the world is at the heart of the process.”

People ask me if I don’t get discouraged after all these years of being an activist, seeing how things are going. They say - what if it all goes to hell anyway? But I tell them that the game’s not over and even if we lose in the end, I want to live my life by what I believe. That’s why I appreciate books like “Hope in the Dark.” It’s like sitting around a campfire with old friends, sharing our stories and feeding our souls so we can stay strong and keep on keepin’ on.
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Rebecca Solnit has also written Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West and As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender and Art. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEA Fellowship for Literature. Rebecca Solnit lives in San Francisco.

Used with permission. Copyright Michael G. Shepard

Three years ago I read the following story written by West Coast environmental activist and musician Joey Racano. (You can hear his music here and read his blog here.)

I was just starting my online magazine Wildflower Stew and the story of this mysterious little auk touched my heart and I was determined to work hard to get their story and others like it out there to more people. I had a wonderful year publishing my magazine until disaster struck and it was hacked beyond my ability to fix it.

After a pause and a move, I started up again with this blog and recently I found the marbled murrelet is back in the news. So I am sending you Joey’s original story so you’ll know who this amazing little bird is and then you can read what we can all do so that the marbled murrelet is not lost to us.
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The Miracle of the Marbled Murrelet

-Joey Racano
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On December 27, 2007, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit against the Interior Department charging that decisions about threatened and endangered species including the marbled murrelet were changed because of political pressure. The deputy assistant secretary, Julie Macdonald, resigned in May over allegations that scientists’ evidence had been ignored and their reports rewritten.

Earlier this fall, Earthjustice, a public-interest law firm representing several conservation groups, had written to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorn, asking that he reinstate the marbled murrelet. A lawyer for the group wrote that e-mails and meeting notes obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that MacDonald “improperly interfered with the science underlying the marbled murrelet status review.”

The US Fish & Wildlife Service had previously identified 3,590,642 acres in three states as critical habitat, but after the politically motivated rewrite is suddenly proposing to exclude 3,368,950 acres - leaving only 221,692 acres of protected habitat. Here is a copy of the revised proposal from November, 2006.

How did this happen? Craig Manson, Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish, Wildlife and Parks, was not happy with the results of a review that affirmed that the marbled murrelet in the Pacific Northwest deserved to be listed as threatened. The American Forest Resource Council, representing the timber industry, had sued the Fish and Wildlife Service to review the status of the marbled murrelets because 90 precent of the remaining old growth trees suitable for nesting (making them critical to the little bird’s survival, obviously) are found on public land - which the timber industry wanted to get their hands, er rather their chainsaws, on.

Everybody, and every bird, needs a home. The Endangered Species Act requires that federal agencies define and protect critical habitat “essential to the conservation of the species.” When the review affirmed that indeed the marbled murrelet was threatened, well, Craig Manson just rewrote it. In fact, Manson has been quoted as questioning the value of even trying to save species that are threatened - “because they can’t adjust to change.” Meaning, I suppose, that if the marbled murrelet can’t adapt to having their nesting sites clear-cut, then they’re expendable. This is the person who is head of the agency responsible for enforcing the Endangered Species Act!

The marbled murrelet faces the combined threats of logging, gill-net mortality, and oil spills. Big corporations behind them all. Maybe if we take the time, if we have the heart, to save this tiny, fragile, mysterious, innocent little feathered creature, we will have the heart for all the other work we’re going to have do to heal this wounded planet. I have a print of a beautiful watercolor of the marbled murrelet by artist Ram Papish - which you can get from Good Nature Publishing - over my computer to inspire me. If those little guys can keep on keepin’ on, so can I.

Here are some things you can do to help keep this little bird alive in our world:

Support those on the front lines.
North Coast Earth First! has used non-violent civil disobedience and direct action to save some of the last remaining old growth redwood and douglas fir forests left on Earth. Located in Humboldt County, California, they have a 20-year legacy of non-violence, including no property destruction, and they have brought tens of thousands of people together to save these ancient forests with a combination of tree-sits, roadblocks, rallies, lockdowns, media, ground support, legal support, lawsuits, and strong spirits. They also seek to end the destructive practices of clearcutting, herbicide spraying, and logging on steep and unstable slopes, and to expose the big timber corporations, as well as the corruption and complicity of the so-called regulatory agencies and law enforcement. Visit the main website for Earth First! for more opportunities to take action.

Join Earth Justice - their motto is “because the earth needs a good lawyer.” Oh boy, do we.

The Center for Biological Diversity protects endangered species and wild places through science, policy, education and environmental law. You can join their action network and become a biodiversity activist.

Of course, the venerable elder of the caring-about-birds family is the Audubon Society. You will find a wealth of information about the marbled murrelet and you can join local habitat protection groups, the Christmas bird count going on now or the actions associated with the Important Bird Areas.

And don’t forget - “Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea, joy to you and me.”
- Hoyt Axton