Wildflower Stew

Photo: Eucalyptus plantations in South Africa go on as far as the eye can see. Escaped eucalyptus trees are found widely outside of the plantations. Photo: Petermann/ GJEP

This is a franken-tree emergency! According to an article in the Organic Consumers Association newsletter, the Department of Agriculture is about to approve field trials for genetically engineered eucalyptus trees - 260,000 of them - without even conducting an Environmental Impact Statement to assess potential negative effects.

The company ArborGen wants to conduct 29 field trials. Here’s a quote from Anne Petermann of the Global Justice Ecology Project:

“Scientists at Duke University in North Carolina have created pollen models that show tree pollen traveling from a forest in North Carolina for over 1,000 kilometers northward into eastern Canada. Scientists researching sterility in trees have admitted that 100 percent guaranteed sterility in GE trees is impossible. This evidence implies that if GE trees are released into the environment, widespread and irreversible contamination of native forests cannot be prevented.”

And if that doesn’t make your hair stand on end, try this:

One of the experimental GE tree varieties is a known host for cryptococcus gatti, a fatal fungal pathogen whose spores cause meningitis in people and animals.

Comments are being accepted by the USDA until July 6, 2009. Here’s a link to a form for making a comment to the USDA. Let’s stop this before it even starts.

Juxtaposition

Ragged leaves hanging limp in the heat

Hole-y and spotted against the steely sky

The delicate shades of living green

Dark green, light green, bright green, bless my eyes

Relieving the pain of metal and pavement

Wafting a hint of oxygen my way

as they tremble in a passing breeze . . . .

. . . . swan . . . .

Here’s another one for May Day. I love sunflowers. The juxtaposition in this video would do any guerrilla gardener proud.

You might celebrate May Day by dancing around with flowers in your hair. Or you might celebrate it by marching down the street as a worker or an immigrant to stand up for your rights and fight oppression. Or you might send out a distress signal if you’re at sea and pirates attack - May Day! May Day! (which comes from the French m’aidez - help me!). Where did a holiday with such a wide range of meanings originate?

The roots of May Day go deep into the earth and way back in time to the ancient Celts and Saxons celebrating Beltane, the day of fire. It was a feast of fertility and bonfires to call back the sun after the long cold winter and prepare the ground for planting. A May Queen was chosen and young men and women danced around the May Pole romantically entwining long ribbons from the pole as they danced. When the church arrived in Britain, this was of course banned. Then reinstated, then banned. It’s had a sketchy history. The Puritans hated it but it kept coming back. So it got kind of toned it down in this country as the Puritans tried to turn it into a playful holiday for children.

But then in the US and Canada, May Day became a working class holiday after the national strikes of May 1, 1886, calling for eight hour workdays. In Chicago, the police attacked the marchers, killing six of them. The next day as the workers marched again in Haymarket Square to protest police brutality, a bomb exploded in the midst of the police, killing eight of them. The police arrested eight trade unionists claiming they threw the bomb, a charge that was never proven. Some said that the bomb was dropped by an agent provacateur of the police trying to run away after being recognized by the crowd. Despite not being able to prove that they had anything to do with the bomb, four of the anarchists were found guilty and executed by the state of Illinois.

In Paris, in 1889, the First International proclaimed May 1 as an international workers holiday in memory of the Haymarket Martyrs and the red flag became a symbol of the blood of the martyrs for worker’s rights. For a list of IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) May Day events from Edinburgh to New York City to San Francisco go here:
http://www.iww.org/en/event/2009/05/01/day

In Salem and Portland, Oregon - March and Rally for Immigrant and Workers’ Rights: Economic Justice for All! For more information go here:
http://willamettereds.blogspot.com/2009/04/may-day-events-in-salem-portland.html

I like this is version of May Day from In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre http://www.hobt.org in Minneapolis Minnesota:

Our MayDay Parade, Ceremony, and Festival has always been rooted in two important traditional celebrations—the celebration of the “GREEN ROOT” of Earth’s green energy rising in Spring, and the “RED ROOT” of human work energy rising from mind, heart and hand.
Our theme this year celebrates the merging of the red and green energies of the world. We cheer on the great merging of the human social justice movements with the environmental movements to remember humans as responsible relatives of the earth.
As we experience the fall of our economic systems built on debt, consumer waste, the theft and sickening of earth resources, we gather to rebuild an economic system that protects and sustains our Earth as a “Common Treasury for All.”

Traditional May Day song:

The fires light, this merry night, upon the first of May,
We’ll merry meet, and summer greet, now Winter’s gone away.
•
•
Chorus: Beltane Night, the time is right, the life-force doth awake.
So dance and sing, around the ring, and Summer magic make.
•
•
The gorse and broom and heather bloom, and goodly grows the grain.
In every tree, new life we see. The summer comes again.

New life’s alive, in every hive; new nests in every tree.
Be free and fair, like earth and air, like bird, and hare, and bee

In Gabon, a country without a culture of civic engagement, Marc Ona led efforts to publicly expose the unlawful agreements behind a huge mining project threatening the sensitive ecosystems of Gabon’s equatorial rainforests.

Marc Ona Essangui, 45, is president and founder of the environmental NGO Brainforest and president of the network of NGOs called Environment Gabon. Wheelchair-bound due to childhood polio, Ona also works for handicapped rights and Internet availability for Africans.

In December 2008, Ona and several other civil society leaders were arrested and held without charge and without access to legal representation in deplorable conditions in a basement cell for five days. Ona was later transferred to prison and charged with possession of documents allegedly for dissemination and propaganda with intent to incite rebellion against the state authorities, a charge which he denies. After media reports about the unlawful arrest from outlets in Africa, the EU and the US, the government released Ona, though the charges have not yet been dropped.

Ona and five other activists were awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize—the world’s largest award for grassroots environmental activists, which this week celebrated its 20th anniversary in the San Francisco Opera House.

You can read the rest of the story and see a video about the Ivindo National Park, a 3,000 square kilometer park with forest elephants, western lowland gorillas, chimpanzees, and forest buffalo. The park is cherished by the Gabonese people. The park is also home to the Kongou and Mingouli Falls, the most admired waterfalls in the equatorial forests of Africa, drawing international tourists to the rural West African country.
: http://goldmanprize.org/2009/africa

Good news. As I look around on this earth day, I see plenty of reasons to feel good. From where I stand, I see more and more people participating in a positive way in the community around them.

More gardens are being planted, more voices standing up for the planet, more children being reunited with the natural world, more care for the world that still remains.

Maybe the way I’m looking at it is a matter of a glass half-full or half-empty but it’s also exponential the way one act can touch off a chain reaction. When I moved into this urban apartment after living in remote rural places most of my life, I felt totally cut off from the natural world. I got a few houseplants and put them around my apartment and then I expanded to a little potted garden on my balcony and now I feel like I live in a jungle! And my neighbors have started growing flowers and food, too. Now we are looking for a place to have a real garden.

People in the town where I live are taking more interest in what happens to the parks, the quality of the air, mass transit, bike lanes - a lot of issues that have been languishing for years. More people are finding ways to interact with the community to support themselves. What I see is people regaining their sense of self-determination and self-respect, willing to work for what they believe in.

To do the things we must do to survive as a species and as a society, it is going to take collective action. But first it is going to take heart. And I believe that each seed we plant and each cause we take on nurtures the heart of change. So I wish you the best in all your endeavors. May we all find peace and abundance in harmony with each other on this blue pearl in the vastness of space.

The pear tree reaches out for light. A little bird ate all the tiny pears. We caught him just as he was finishing off the last ones.

My narrow sliver of growing space . . . .

Organic Italian pole beans!

Another great song for peace:

I’m busy in my balcony garden planting flowers, herbs and Italian pole beans to go with my grapevine and pear tree. I love this video so I’m passing it on . . . enjoy . . . more soon . . . swan . . .

Gardening for the End of the Oil Age

Every morning I get up and drink my coffee by the window and watch the sun come up. Birds fly up from the trees across the way. They are mostly pigeons and grackles, city street scavengers, and I just see them in sort of an abstract way as shapes against the sky.

The only sound besides their scrawking is the occasional motor of a central air conditioning unit running downstairs behind the building. So it’s usually a squawk or a mechanical hum and that’s it for a morning concert and I kind of tune it out. But this morning as I sat there, sipping my coffee, my mind innocent from sleep, one bird flew over and I heard . . . the sound of a bird’s wings flapping - the sound of a bird’s wings flapping! It was so amazing. Flap, flap, flap, flap. No other sound. Just flap, flap, flap.

I have never from that window heard that sound - of the thousands of birds that I’ve watched fly over every morning as I have sat there for 2 1/2 years. Suddenly there was a pause in the squawk and the hum and there it was - the sound of one bird flapping . . .