Wildflower Stew

What a visual - the first thing we saw was a half-sunken plane and the pitiful little stick figures of humans forlornly standing on the wings slowly sinking into the freezing river and then the ferries and tugs rushing to their side like a huddle of anxious mothers plucking them, every single one of them, from that icy death and bring them safely to shore. Not bad for an omen. Everyone was in danger, everyone was saved.

Except the geese. What were geese doing in New York in January? Now part of the post-incident discussion is about the problem of birds and planes sharing the air space. My friend, Joey Racano, an activist in California, has an interesting take on this in his blog at EarthSourceMedia, an imaginary conversation between the tower, a pilot and a flock of geese.

Another either/or question was asked this week in Chris Clarke’s blog Coyote Crossing - a fish or a tortoise. . . . “Where, exactly, is the line between a new Glen Canyon Dam on the wild river of your choice, on the one hand”, he said, and clearing 5.2 square miles of the Ivanpah Valley for the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System and relocating all the tortoises found on the site (which is a very complicated and probably fatal operation)?

Chris ends the article with: Which raises the question: why is a fish more valuable than a tortoise? Before we put our fingers on the map and say “there,” I’d like to hear an answer to that.

The only way to answer that question, in my opinion, is to find a way to look at the whole and sit down and make a plan that gives the best possible outcome for both the fish and the tortoise - and us and every other being involved.

The best example of this I have found is what has just happened in Ecuador. Ecuador has ratified a new constitution containing the “Rights of Nature” - the “right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its natural cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.” The government is now responsible for “precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems or the permanent alteration of natural cycles.”

Can you imagine? That “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” extends to all living things, to the fish and the tortoise, the human and the goose? Think of all the activities of human development - mining, drilling, producing energy, mass transportation, corporate agribiz and on and on - airplanes! - that interfere with wild nature. What does this actually mean? The people of Ecuador are ready to take on that question.

I have been following the work of the Peter Berg and the Planet Drum Foundation since it was founded in 1973. Planet Drum developed the concept of a bioregion: “a distinct area with coherent and interconnected plant and animal communities, and natural systems, often defined by a watershed”.

Since 1998, after El Nino rains and a 7.2 earthquake destroyed a large part of the Ecuadorian coastal city of Bahia de Caraquez, Planet Drum has been there carrying out a major bioregional project to re-vegetate a city barrio as well as surrounding hillsides with native trees for erosion control against future mudslides and creating an urban “wild corridor.” They also host a Bioregional Education Program for school kids in the area. Now the people of Ecuador are the first in the world to give equal rights to the natural world, itself.

In Starhawk’s book, “The Fifth Sacred Thing,” a book about how things could be in the not-so-distant future, the animals, the birds, the fish all have their representatives at the deciding councils. Let us hear from both the fish and the tortoise, from the geese as well as the humans on the plane.

Many Gazans feel hopeless in the face of the Israeli bombardment [GALLO/GETTY]

There was an article today in the New York Times business section
about how the reporters for Al Jazeera English are the only ones with unlimited access to information from inside the Gaza Strip about the war. To see live TV coverage from Al Jazeera you can go to Lifestation

Here is a diary entry from Mohammed Ali who is an Oxfam worker in Gaza city. Oxfam is a group of non-governmental organizations founded in England after WWII that works to end poverty and injustice and is a world leader in delivering emergency relief.

Are We Not Human?
By Mohammed Ali

As the death toll from Israel’s war on Gaza continues to climb, Mohammed Ali, an advocacy and media researcher for Oxfam who lives in Gaza City, will be keeping a diary of his feelings and experiences.

The air, the sea and the earth in Gaza City are now occupied by the Israeli military. They occupy Gazans’ minds, nerves and ears too.

In a bid to stop my children twitching, jerking, trembling and waking at every sound of an attack during their few hours of sleep and their many waking hours, I put cotton wool in their ears - it has not worked.

I wonder what damage is being done to my children’s tiny hearts. Theirs are not as big as mine, they can cope less with the stress that is being put on them.

We ran out of fuel for our generator, which meant that we were confined to a small room filled with eleven people, with little light for three days.

We have not had water either; our well can only pump water if it has electricity which most of the Gaza Strip has been denied since this nightmare started.

Unlike many other families, we were fortunate yesterday to find 20 litres of benzene to power our generator. No fuel has come in since the onset of this attack on Gaza so we had to pay seven times its usual price.

We have one day’s worth of food left and the nappies I bought two weeks ago are nearly gone. They are not good quality as little has been able to enter this strip of land since the blockade was imposed on us 18 months ago. Bad quality nappies mean unpleasant leakages, and for the last few days the little ones have had to be bathed in freezing cold water.

My sister who was with us the last time I wrote decided to return home in spite of our protests. She feared that with food reserves running out we might have to eat one meal a day rather than the two we have been having of late. At home she has a little food left, enough to keep her and her family going for a while longer.

We are now 11, huddled together in my parents’ dining room. My brother and I and our families moved there, thinking that the first floor may be the safest option.

There is a saying in Arabic which says “death in a group is a mercy”. I guess if we die together maybe, just maybe, we will feel less of the pain than in doing so alone.

I have had 8 hours sleep since the beginning of this conflict; we can hear attacks almost every minute.

I think to myself, if one of us is injured or needs medical attention what will happen? Ambulances are finding it difficult to reach civilians, roads are blocked by rubble, Israeli forces in their path - you could bleed to death.

Even if they did get to us, maybe we would be bombed on our way to the hospital. If we did reach the hospital there might not be enough room to treat us - there is little medication or equipment or any electricity to fuel the life-saving equipment. We would not even be able to get out of Gaza for the life-saving treatment we needed.

Hospitals are now running on back-up generators making life even more difficult for the doctors who are trying to cope with the influx of the injured. If fuel runs out for the generators, those on life-saving equipment will perish.

I heard a woman calling into a radio station today - ambulance services could not reach her and I guess she thought the radio station might be able to do something. She was wailing down the phone “our home is on fire, my children are dying, help me”. I do not know what happened to her and her children - I do not want to imagine.

I spend much of my time thinking that this could be the last hour of my existence.

As I try to fall asleep, I hear on the radio the numbers of people who have died rising by the hour. I wonder if tomorrow morning, I will be part of that body count, part of the next breaking news.

I will be just another number to all those watching the death and destruction in Gaza or maybe the fact that I work for Oxfam will mean that I will be a name and not just a number. I might be talked about for a minute and moments later forgotten, like all those other people who have had their lives taken away from them.

I am not afraid of dying - I know that one day we all must die. But not like this, not sitting idly in my home with my children in my arms waiting for our lives to be taken away. I am disgusted by this injustice.

What is the international community waiting for - to see even more dismembered people and families erased before they act? Time is ticking by and the numbers of dead and injured are increasing. What are they waiting for?

What is happening is against humanity, are we not human?

Sea Shepherd ship Steve Irwin

I was going over the issues I’ve been following this last year, checking to see what progress, if any, we have made. The Sea Shepherd is out there again, keeping the illegal Japanese whaling boats away from the protected whales in the Australian Antarctic Territory. Animal Planet is onboard filming this year.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault has opened. Seeds from all over the world have been placed in three caverns carved into the permafrost on an island just 500 miles from the North Pole for safekeeping. Norway has provided the funding for the project and developed it in collaboration with the Global Crop Diversity Trust.

The activists with the Buffalo Field Campaign are still in the field - in 20 below zero temperatures - out everyday on skis keeping watch over the last remaining herd of wild bison in this country.

In March of this year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced approximately 3.9 million acres of federal old-growth forest will remain protected as murrelet habitat “This reversal, coupled with a recent court decision throwing out a timber industry attempt to take the murrelet off the endangered species list, should end the timber industry’s profit-driven and illegal attack on the coastal forests that murrelets need to survive,” said Kristen Boyles, an attorney with Earthjustice.

And the California Supreme Court threw out a plan that had given protection of endangered species to a logging company, Pacific Lumber Co. who finally sold out to Humboldt Redwood Co. (HRC). The management of HRC met with the dedicated activists who have put their lives on the line for years and assured them that old growth groves on HRC land will be permanently protected. This video from North Coast EarthFirst! shows what was involved in protecting these trees, this habitat and the marbled murrelet.

The Wild Sky Wilderness bill protecting a 106,000-acre Wilderness in the heart of the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest in the Cascade Mountains of Washington state passed the U.S. Senate with both Democratic and Republican Senators giving unanimous approval much to my heart’s delight and I’m sure the delight of the black bears, bald eagles, mountain goats, wolverines, cougars and spotted owls who live there.

The devastation wrought by Hurricane Ike continues to remain unresolved on the Texas Gulf Coast. They are still trying to figure out how to get rid of the debris and many people are still waiting for FEMA trailers. Those living in tents faced snowfall last week! The number of residents has declined from 57,000 to about 40,000 and there has been a 30 percent reduction in school enrollment. Another community devastated as we move on to the next crisis.

I try to give this some perspective by drawing the lines between what my grandmother told me about the hurricane of 1900 in Galveston and what is happening now, between what my great grandmother said the first time she saw a car and how the wisdom of her comments is coming back around.

I think about the craziness out there - Israel and the Palestinians, Pakistan and India, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan - and I know that there are ordinary people there, like many of us here, who just want the violence to stop.

And I 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.

Since 2003, Starhawk has been visiting Palestine and participating in the International Solidarity Movement monitoring and writing about the situation there. In this post on December 30, she clarifies some of the issues and offers a radical solution:

On Gaza
by Starhawk

December 30, 2008

All day I’ve been thinking about Gaza, listening to reports on NPR, following the news on the internet when I can spare a moment. I’ve been thinking about the friends I made there four years ago, and wondering how they are faring, and imagining their terror as the bombs fall on that giant, open-air prison.

The Israeli ambassador speaks movingly of the terror felt by Israeli children as Hamas rockets explode in the night. I agree with him-that no child should have her sleep menaced by rocket fire, or wake in the night fearing death.

But I can’t help but remember one night on the Rafah border, sleeping in a house close to the line, watching the children dive for cover as bullets thudded into the walls. There was a shell-hole in the back room they liked to jump through into the garden, which at that time still held fruit trees and chickens. Their mother fed me eggs, and their grandmother stuffed oranges into my pockets with the shy pride every gardener shares.

That house is gone, now, along with all of its neighbors. Those children wake in the night, every night of their lives, in terror. I don’t know if they have survived the hunger, the lack of medical supplies, the bombs. I only know that they are children, too.

I’ve ridden on busses in Israel. I understand that gnawing fear, the squirrely feeling in the pit of your stomach, how you eye your fellow passengers wondering if any of them are too thick around the middle. Could that portly fellow be wearing a suicide belt, or just too many late night snacks of hummus? That’s no way to live.

But I’ve also walked the pock-marked streets of Rafah, where every house bears the scars of Israeli snipers, where tanks prowled the border every night, where children played in the rubble, sometimes under fire, and this was all four years ago, when things were much, much better there.

And I just don’t get it. I mean, I get why suicide bombs and homemade rockets that kill innocent civilians are wrong. I just don’t get why bombs from F16s that kill far more innocent civilians are right. Why a kid from the ghetto who shoots a cop is a criminal, but a pilot who bombs a police station from the air is a hero.

Is it a distance thing? Does the air or the altitude confer a purifying effect? Or is it a matter of scale? Individual murder is vile, but mass murder, carried out by a state as an aspect of national policy, that’s a fine and noble thing?

I don’t get how my own people can be doing this. Or rather, I do get it. I am a Jew, by birth and upbringing, born six years after the Holocaust ended, raised on the myth and hope of Israel. The myth goes like this:
“For two thousand years we wandered in exile, homeless and
persecuted, nearly destroyed utterly by the Nazis. But out of that
suffering was born one good thing-the homeland that we have come back
to, our own land at last, where we can be safe, and proud, and
strong.”
That’s a powerful story, a moving story. There’s only one problem with it-it leaves the Palestinians out. It has to leave them out, for if we were to admit that the homeland belonged to another people, well, that spoils the story.

The result is a kind of psychic blind spot where the Palestinians are concerned. If you are truly invested in Israel as the Jewish homeland, the Jewish state, then you can’t let the Palestinians be real to you. It’s like you can’t really focus on them. Golda Meir said, “The Palestinians, who are they? They don’t exist.” We hear, “There is no partner for peace,” “There is no one to talk to.”

And so Israel, a modern state with high standards of hygiene, a state rooted in a religion that requires washing your hands before you eat and regular, ritual baths, builds settlements that don’t bother to construct sewage treatment plants. They just dump raw sewage onto the Palestinian fields across the fence, somewhat like a spaceship ejecting its wastes into the void. I am truly not making this up-I’ve seen it, smelled it, and it’s a known though shameful fact. But if the Palestinians aren’t really real-who are they? They don’t exist!-then the land they inhabit becomes a kind of void in the psyche, and it isn’t really real, either. At times, in those border villages, walking the fencelines of settlements, you feel like you have slipped into a science fiction movie, where parallel universes exist in the same space, but in different strands of reality, that never touch.

When I was on the West Bank, during Israeli incursions the Israeli military would often take over a Palestinian house to billet their soldiers. Many times, they would simply lock the family who owned it into one room, and keep them there, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days parents, grandparents, kids and all. I’ve sat with a family, singing to the children while soldiers trashed their house, and I’ve been detained by a group of soldiers playing cards in the kitchen with a family locked in the other room. (I got out of that one-but that’s another story.)

It’s a kind of uneasy feeling, having something locked away in a room in your house that you can’t look at. Ever caught a mouse in a glue trap? And you can’t bear to watch it suffer, so you leave the room and close the door and don’t come back until it’s really, really dead.

Like a horrific fractal, the locked room repeats on different scales. The Israelis have built a wall to lock away the West Bank. And Gaza itself is one huge, locked room. Close the borders, keep food and medical supplies and necessities from getting through, and perhaps they will just quietly fade out of existence and stop spoiling our story.

“All we want is a return to calm,” the Israeli ambassador says. “All we want is peace.”

One way to get peace is to exterminate what threatens you. In fact, that may be the prime directive of the last few thousand years.

But attempts to exterminate pests breed resistance, whether you’re dealing with insects or bacteria or people. The more insecticides you pour on a field, the more pests you have to deal with-because insecticides are always more potent at killing the beneficial bugs than the pesky ones.

The harshness, the crackdowns, the border closings, the checkpoints, the assassinations, the incursions, the building of settlements deep into Palestinian territory, all the daily frustrations and humiliations of occupation, have been breeding the conditions for Hamas, or something like it, to thrive. If Israel truly wants peace, there’s a more subtle, a more intelligent and more effective strategy to pursue than simply trying to kill the enemy and anyone else who happens to be in the vicinity.

It’s this-instead of killing what threatens you, feed what you want to grow. Consider in what conditions peace can thrive, and create them, just as you would prepare the bed for the crops you want to plant. Find those among your opponents who also want peace, and support them. Make alliances. Offer your enemies incentives to change, and reward your friends.

Of course, to follow such a strategy, you must actually see and know your enemy. If they are nothing to you but cartoon characters of terrorists, you will not be able to tell one from another, to discern the religious fanatic from the guy muttering under his breath, “F-ing Hammas, they closed the cinema again!”

And you must be willing to give something up. No one gets peace if your basic bargaining position is, “I get everything I want, and you eat my shit.” You might get a temporary victory, but it will never be a peaceful one.

To know and see the enemy, you must let them into the story. They must become real to you, nuanced, distinctive as individuals. But when we let the Palestinians into the story, it changes. Oh, how painfully it changes! For there is no way to tell a new story, one that includes both peoples of the land, without starting like this:
“In our yearning for a homeland, in our attempts as a threatened and
traumatized people to find safety and power, we have done a great
wrong to another people, and now we must atone.”
Just try saying it. If you, like me, were raised on that other story, just try this one out. Say it three times. It hurts, yes, but it might also bring a great, liberating sense of relief with it.

And if you’re not Jewish, if you’re American, if you’re white, if you’re German, if you’re a thousand other things, really, if you’re a human being, there’s probably some version of that story that is true for you.

Out of our own great need and fear and pain, we have often done great harm, and we are called to atone. To atone is to be at one-to stop drawing a circle that includes our tribe and excludes the other, and start drawing a larger circle that takes everyone in.

How do we atone? Open your eyes. Look into the face of the enemy, and see a human being, flawed, distinct, unique and precious. Stop killing. Start talking. Compost the shit and the rot and feed the olive trees.

Act. Cross the line. There are Israelis who do it all the time, joining with Palestinians on the West Bank to protest the wall, watching at checkpoints, refusing to serve in the occupying army, standing for peace. Thousands have demonstrated this week in Tel Aviv.

There are Palestinians who advocate nonviolent resistance, who have organized their villages to protest the wall, who face tear gas, beatings, arrests, rubber bullets and real bullets to make their stand.

There are internationals who have put themselves on the line-like the boatload of human rights activists, journalists and doctors on board the Dignity, the ship from the Free Gaza movement that was rammed and fired on by the Israeli navy yesterday as it attempted to reach Gaza with humanitarian aid.

Maybe we can’t all do that. But we can all write a letter, make a phone call, send an email. We can make the Palestinian people visible to us, and to the world. When we do so, we make a world that is safer for every child.

Below is a good summary of some of the actions we can take. Please feel free to repost this. In fact, send it to someone you think will disagree with it.

– Starhawk

Updated Action Alert on Gaza:

We Need “Sustained, Determined Political Action”
December 29, 2008

As of this writing, a third consecutive day of Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip have killed an estimated 315 Palestinians and injured more than 1,400. According to the UN, at least 51 of the victims were civilians and 8 were children. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has vowed ominously “a war to the bitter end.”

Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip are being carried out with F16 fighter jets, Apache helicopters, and naval gunboats all given to Israel by the United States with our tax dollars.

From 2001-2006, the United States transferred to Israel more than $200 million worth of spare parts to fly its fleet of F16’s and more than $100 million worth of helicopter spare parts for its fleet of Apaches. In July 2008, the United States gave Israel 186 million gallons of JP-8 aviation jet fuel and signed a contract to transfer an addition $1.9 billion worth of littoral combat ships to the Israeli navy. Last year, the United States signed a $1.3 billion contract with Raytheon to transfer to Israel thousands of TOW, Hellfire, and “bunker buster” missiles.

Make no mistake about it-Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip would not be possible without the jets, helicopters, ships, missiles, and fuel provided by the United States.

Information for action — you can go directly to two websites:

End the Occupation

And United for Peace and Justice and get to working links.

You can email Obama or post comments at http://change.gov/.

Ali Abunimah, of The Electronic Intifada, wrote, “Palestinians everywhere are asking for solidarity, real solidarity, in the form of sustained, determined political action.” In light of our country’s enabling role in Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip, it is the least we can do. Here’s how:

1. Attend a protest or vigil, or organize one yourself.

2. Contact the White House, the State Department, your Representative and Senators, and the Obama Transition Team to protest Israel’s war on Gaza and demand an immediate cease-fire.

White House: 202-456-1111 or comments@whitehouse.gov

State Department: 202-647-6575

Congress: 202-224-3121

3. Make your voice heard in the media. Contact your local media by phoning into a talk show or writing a letter to the editor.
.
4. Tell President-Elect Barack Obama that we need a change in Israel/Palestine policy.

5. Sign up to organize people in your community to end U.S. military aid to Israel.
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6. Come to Washington, DC for Inauguration Day on January 20. Upwards of 4 million people are expected in Washington, DC for President-Elect Obama’s inauguration. This is a perfect time for us to reach out to and educate our fellow citizens about U.S. policy toward Palestine/Israel.
.
7. Join Democracy in Action in Washington, DC for a Grassroots Advocacy Training and Lobby Day on February 1-2.

Interfaith Peace-Builders and the US Campaign are organizing this exciting two-day event, featuring interactive, skills-building workshops and the chance to meet with your Representative and Senators to discuss U.S. policy toward Israel/Palestine. Spaces are filling up fast.

Starhawk is an activist, organizer, and author of The Earth Path, as well as Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising, The Fifth Sacred Thing; and eight other books on feminism, politics and earth-based spirituality. She teaches Earth Activist Trainings that combine permaculture design and activist skills, and works to offer training and support for mobilizations around global justice and peace issues.

Copyright (c) 2008, 2009 by Starhawk. All rights reserved. This copyright protects Starhawk’s right to future publication of her work. Nonprofit, activist, and educational groups may circulate this essay (forward it, reprint it, translate it, post it, or reproduce it) for nonprofit uses. Please do not change any part of it without permission. Readers are invited to visit the web site: www.starhawk.org.

I want to thank Susie over at Suburban Guerrilla for turning me on to this writer, Brian Kaller, who lives in rural Ireland . . . here’s an excerpt:

We live a strange life, those of us who follow closely the breaking of the world. We look at our kitchens and offices and bus stops and see products of petroleum-powered machines on the other side of the world, transported here in petroleum engines. We flick past the mainstream media every morning and go straight to BBC Science, the Oil Drum and Energy Bulletin, scroll through the allied blogs and listen to podcasts on the bus – all while working regular jobs, paying mortgages and caring for children and elderly, each week filled with the burning usual.

In my case, I am also a father, and I want my daughter to have a decent life in a strange time. I am in my 30s now, but I knew five of my great-grandparents, all born in the 19th century, and my daughter, if she is lucky, may live to see the 22nd. Her life might span humanity’s most important decades, and before she is even an adult, the world could grow much more difficult – energy shortages, food shortages, economic collapses and a Malthusian crush. I want her to be able to realize what is happening, and not to be bewildered by a domino line of solitary unthinkables –you can’t drink the water here, the power went out, it’s not safe there anymore.

You can read the rest of this post and more of his observations at Restoring Mayberry Kaller, who is a former newspaper reporter and managing editor, now lives in County Kildare, Ireland, helping prepare local villages for peak oil and other challenges.

Myself, I have eleven grandchildren and one great grandson and I think about these things in long time lines, too. My great grandmother told me about seeing a car for the first time. When I asked her what she thought, she said, “I thought it was a bad idea. It would scare the horses.”

Now that a lot of people are into backyard gardening, the next thing that comes to mind is “why not have a few chickens, too?” Since many cities have laws about not keeping livestock, there is actually an underground urban chicken movement. As you can imagine, trying to keep a yard-full of cluckers and squawkers quiet is pretty hard to do. Let’s not even talk about the cock-a-doodle-do at 5 AM. But now thanks to grassroots activist groups like Backyard Chickens more cities from Maine to Colorado are passing ordinances to allow a small number of legal hens in the yard.

When you grow your own, buy local, go to a farmer’s market or join a community supported agriculture cooperative (where you pay a set amount at the beginning of the season and get a boxful of farm grown veggies and fruit every week) farm-fresh eggs - or backyard-fresh eggs - just make it better.

It also makes it possible to not go to WalMart for your food.

In this urban apartment where I live, most of the people have had gardens, a lot of us have also had chickens, before ending up in the city. We would like nothing better than to tear up the parking lot, put in rows of corn and beans and have some chickens for eggs. It would improve the quality of everyone’s diet, too! I also took a poll of who would quit using the dryer in the laundry room if we had a clothes line and every single person said - “oh, yes! I really miss hanging my clothes on a line.” Maybe we’re a little old fashioned over here in our corner of Austin but I suspect there are a lot of people who miss the old ways even if they are too young to have actually experienced them.

Children learn valuable lessons by connecting with their food source. One of them that comes to mind is the time that a friend of mine had just received a box of newly hatched turkey chicks. It was a very cold December evening and she was worried about keeping them warm through the night. We decided to put them in the oven with only the pilot light on so it was a toasty, comfortable 80-something degrees in there. Just right for the chicks. We put them in a big roaster pan and just as we were slipping the chirping little guys into the oven, her 3 year old came hauling round the corner into the kitchen, saw what we were doing and starting screaming bloody murder! After we calmed him down, we all had a good laugh but I’ll bet he remembers that to this day.

The thing I love the most about living this way is how life flows with the weather, the seaons, and the unique character of each day. There is a close and personal connection between the earth, the sky, what you eat and how you feel. It is a feeling of completeness and reciprocity with the natural world. When you watch the rain fall on your early spring garden, when you’re on first name basis with the hen who laid the eggs you’re eating for breakfast - you get it. No words are needed. It might just be the most healing thing we can do and in the process take back control of one of our most basic needs.

Another helpful website I found was from a group in Albuquerque called Urban Chickens They are building a network of urban chicken keepers and offer help with establishing pro-chicken ordinances and laws. They also have a blog and some really down to earth advice on all things chicken.

Maybe when we turn off our dryers and put up clotheslines, put some solar panels on our roofs, dig up the front yard and put in corn and beans and run a few chickens in the back - even in the cities we can start living like we belong here again.

Sunday, December 7th, 2008
The New Press will be hosting a memorial celebration of the life and work of Studs Terkel, who died on October 31st at the age of 96, on Sunday, December 7th at 4:00 pm in The Great Hall of Cooper Union.

Participants will include:

Jimmy Breslin (Pulitzer Prize-winning Newsday columnist and author)
Steve Earle and Allison Moorer (musicians);
Laura Flanders (host of GritTV and RadioNation and New York Times bestselling author)
Sydney Lewis (long-time friend and collaborator);
Walter Mosley (best-selling author)
Victor Navasky (publisher emeritus of The Nation and Director of the George Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism at Columbia Journalism);
Andre Schiffrin (founding director of The New Press and Studs’ editor and publisher);
Dan Terkell (son of the late Ida and Studs Terkel);
Katrina vanden Heuvel (editor and publisher of The Nation);
Gary Younge (columnist and feature writer for The Guardian);
Howard Zinn (historian, activist, and prize-winning author of A People’s History of the United States)

Co-sponsored by The Nation and The Indypendent.

The event will be open to the public and free of charge.

Location: The Great Hall of Cooper Union, 7 East 7th Street at Third Avenue, New York City (map)
Time: 4:00 pm-6:00 pm