THEY: AN ANSWER

GARY LLOYD at CSU CHANNEL ISLANDS

Confrontational art proved itself alive and well at California State University Channel Islands, where the Art Department sponsored an installation and accompanying performance by Gary Lloyd last Thursday, March 13, in a small gallery at their Camarillo campus.  “They: An Answer Driving the Problem, Revisted” took an updated look at work that has preoccupied the artist for many years, in an “interactive multimedia exhibition probing climate change and the impact of technology.”

“They,” as the exhibit and the artist’s gloss make clear, is actually “Us.”  The human species.  The overwhelming evidence—a good deal of it documented through a variety of media in the current show—is that our planet is in serious trouble.  With species disappearing at alarming rates, the ice cap melting, droughts, floods and fires in many parts of the globe, and so on—it’s a depressingly familiar list--the preponderance of credible science tells us that we are in danger of rendering the earth uninhabitable before the end of this present century.  Worse, we are rapidly approaching the tipping point beyond which all human efforts will be in vain.  This dire situation is compounded by the stranglehold in which the global ecosystem is held by corporate powers whose priority is profit, not the welfare of the Earth. 

Lloyd is convinced that we, the people of this planet, have “the answer”, if only we can find the will to use our technology in ways that benefit the earth rather than exploit it.  The technology, he insists, is simple, user-friendly, and as close to hand as a smart phone.  His performance gave him the opportunity to demonstrate his thesis, using Skype to instantaneously link like-minded people in China, Southern California and New York, in texts delivered in Mandarin Chinese and Spanish as well as English, in an offhand display of already ubiquitously existing systems we can use to facilitate communications and deploy our critical human intelligence in the resolution of our common problems.     

Intertwined with the communications issue is that of our energy consumption—and that’s not only the fossil fuels we Americans devour in vastly greater quantities than are our share as global citizens, but also the source of protein we use to fuel our bodies: meat.  The freeze-dried “meat axe” Lloyd created many years ago makes its doleful reappearance in the current show, reminding us of our ancient dependence on this food, and the only recently understood effects of its attendant demands on our natural environment.  Juxtaposed with his curiously “primitive” use of advanced technology, Lloyd’s trademark axes, skulls, and dug-out “book boats” remind us of the early roots of our human technology, and of the relatively short journey on which it has led us to wreak such havoc on the planet we inhabit.

Conscious that his performance was addressed primarily to college-aged art students, the artist was at pains to leave them a coherent, urgent and incontrovertible message: “I’m committed to this work; the planet expects—demands—no less of you.”  The performance ended on a deeply personal, confessional note, whose emotional intensity was unmistakable.  The father of two teenage boys, Lloyd made clear the responsibility he feels not only to the fragile and sorely tested Mother Earth, but to the family that is his own natural heritage.  It’s a responsibility that he poignantly required his audience to share. 

photo: Janice Tieken

Bird Week: Last Day

A couple of things, to round out what has been a week of birds. First, an artist, fellow-Brit and Los Angeles-based friend posted a link in the comments to the site of his latest series of paintings. Birds, of course. I found them delightful in their purposeful, playful reduction of form and their colorful brilliance. In their linear simplicity, too, the pictures perfectly capture that avian sense of superiority and that quizzical innocence of birds when confronted with their flightless human fellow-travelers. I hope you'll check them out and enjoy them as much as I did.

Next--not sure how all these bird-events piled up in a single week; it certainly wasn't by conscious intention--we watched a DVD of French film, "Winged Migration," which was an Academy Award Nominee back in 2002. I had missed it earlier, having mistaken it perhaps for that other film about migration, where the film-maker accompanies a flock of geese in a super-light aircraft (I've forgotten the title. Remind me, someone...) The French title is "Le Peuple migrateur"--the migration people, as in a people, or a nation, and the anthropomorphism suggested by the title bleeds through at times into the narrative of the film. The various feathered species do take on "character"--sometimes gawky, sometimes comic, sometimes elegant and graceful--and entertain us with their antics. The major theme, however, is the story of the incredible work that goes into their survival, the long journeys they must take each year to feeding grounds, depending on the seasons.

It's a miraculous film in many ways--not least in the extraordinary footage of birds in flight, taken from the air alongside or above them, in front or below. It captures the phenomenon of flight itself, its grace and apparent ease belied by the sheer, continuous effort that goes into it. The choreography of a full flock of birds in flight is awe-inspiring, genuinely moving, as is the persistence and instinctive courage it requires. For the pure beauty of natural environment and the wonder of nature's infinite variety of species, the film is unsurpassed.

Let's call it a tribute, though, rather than a study. There is no attempt to provide scientific explanations or information about the birds. It's a hymn to their beauty and their peculiar intelligence, a symphonic creation in image, movement and color. We go along willing for the ride and learn, perhaps, more about ourselves than about our feathered friends. We learn about the unique role of beauty in our lives, the need to discover ways of peaceful co-existence with other species. Man's role in the film is minimal--and inevitably destructive: as a flock of elegant geese flies over an expanse of water, we heard a sudden volley of shots and, heart-breakingly, birds crumple and fall; in urban areas along their migration route, birds suffocate in ugly, man-made pollution--caught in the slime of grease and mud; out on the prairies, they are trapped beneath the churning blades of harvesters.

It's inarguable now that we destroy our environment and threaten other living species at our own risk. In so many ways, the birds and animals and insects who share our planet with us are much wiser than we. Some hardy species, surely, will find ways to survive us, should we fail to live up to the challenge set by our own history and intelligence. Let's hope that some of them are birds. May all living beings finds peace and happiness in their lives.

(As a footnote, I feel obliged to pass on this Sarah Palin interview clip that was relayed to me via Daily Kos, as further--and deeply disturbing--evidence that this woman should not be allowed within a stone's thrown of the presidency. Please check it out, and forward it as widely as possible.)

Save the World

This, in the place of a Sunday sermon from Peter At Large...

My sister in England just sent me the link to this intriguing website, Parallel Community, which seeks to act as a contact point between people throughout the world who believe that there are many of us who share the desire for peace, a sustainable economy, and a viable future for humankind; and a distrust of the political systems whose misguided policies stand in the way of what real human beings actually want. The organization's introductory DVD is well worth a watch. I wrote to one of the founding members, Hamish Miller, to congratulate him on their work, and added a somewhat tongue-in-cheek observation:

Hamish, I love what you're doing! But it saddens me that everyone in your DVD has GREY HAIR, and WRINKLES and (men only, please!) BEARDS--just like myself. Where are the young people, who are the ones who will really feel the painful results of what we're doing to the earth? I imagine your organization is making good efforts to pull them in. One of the good things, I think, about our Barack Obama here in the United States is that he seems finally to have touched a chord amongst the young. Thanks for the good work, anyway. I will post a link on my blog, The Buddha Diaries, in the next couple of days. Blessings, Peter

I received the following friendly response:

Hi Peter,
Thank you for your response!
You're right! I AM a wrinkly grey haired bearded oldie but so many of the young folks had their heads down just surviving over here at the time we were doing the film. However this was when we were getting it together and since then a lot of young people have come around to help. You can depend on it that if there's another clip we oldies will keep well away! We need their energy but sometimes they need the help of our experience to guide the way. Watch this space for the young coming in to take over. They seem to have a pretty clear understanding of what's going on. We'll keep you in to what's happening and thank you for posting a link on your blog. It all helps enormously
Best wishes,
Hamish

I'm delighted to have been introduced to this worthy effort (thanks, Flora!), and plan to stay in touch. I'll also keep a link posted in my "Useful Sites" blogroll, in the hope that others, also, will continue to stay in touch with Hamish and his merry band.

Food

It's started. The BBC World News report on the startling rise in basic food costs throughout the world is alarming new evidence of the trouble we're in as a species. Unless we can learn to let go of our addiction to our comfortable standards of living, our excessive material possessions and our hunger for wealth, I do believe that we're headed for extinction--like those millions of other species that have failed to survive the continuing evolutionary process. Let's hope at least that we leave behind a world that's still habitable for other, more intelligent species, who share the planet and its resources with more foresight than ourselves.

The report notes a 75 percent increase in the cost of rice over the past twelve months, and a 13o percent increase in the price of wheat. The cost of corn has increased less steeply, but no less dramatically. It showed some of the results in various locations throughout the world, most notably in the Philippines, where dangerous stresses are already evident in the fabric of society. Anger and frustration mount, along with sheer, physical hunger. How long will it be before people start to fight for the food they need to survive? How long will it before nation becomes pitted against nation in the competition for this most basic of resources? How long will it be--no, this has already started--before people die of starvation?

So far, we Americans remain sitting relatively pretty. We whine about gas prices, watch food prices steadily mount and the financial markets teeter on the brink of disaster. We fume at the airport when our flight is delayed. The great middle class is not immune from the effects of global changes, but it has managed pretty much to ignore the plight of the truly poor. So far. But things will predictably get worse, as a result of our heedless consumption and our greed for the good life. In our most recent egregious misadventure, we have chosen biofuels for our machines over food for our people, destroying vast areas of agricultural land in favor of more profitable biofuel-producing plants. We are already paying for this stupidity.

Is there still time for a change of heart, a change of mind, a change of the policies that misguide us? It's such a huge change we will be required to embrace, it's doubtful whether we'll have the guts and the wisdom to do it before the tipping point is reached. And we don't even know where that tipping point is. We might already have passed it. What's clear, with the world population continuing to expand, is that sacrifice will be needed. We Americans will need to learn to honor the fact that there are other people in this world--just as human, if less "developed" than ourselves; and that, if we are to survive, we will need to make sacrifices to enable them, also, to survive. With India and China catching up with our profligate consumption of resources of all kinds--not to mention the attendant pollution--we must act very soon to slow down the approach of mass starvation, disease, violence, and war.

I realize that I'm not a voice crying in the wilderness, here. The voices are getting louder and more clamorous, their message more and more difficult to ignore. But denial is still rife in these United States, as is callous self-interest and willful blindness. This is no longer a matter of finding fixes for small problems, for putting out brushfires as and when they break out. We're talking, finally, about nothing less than the survival of our species.

The Diversity of Life

We often celebrate Ellie's birthday with a trip of one kind or another. This year, instead of boarding an airplane of climbing into the car, we decided on an adventure in public transportation--in Los Angeles, a regrettably rare event. Leaving the car a few blocks from the Sunset/Vermont Metro station, we descended into the bowels of the earth to find--a virtually deserted platform. Not a promising start. A loquacious young man with a bicycle held forth about the shortcomings of the Metro system, the predicament of the planet, and the deficiencies of the presidential candidates on both sides as we waited for the train and all the way down to the central 7th Street station, where we changed from the Red to the slightly more populous Blue line with an easy transfer, and rode on down--a fifty-minute trip--through the light industrial area south of Los Angeles and the long stretches of the South Central area, with a spectacular view of the distant San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains, now heavily draped in snow after the recent series of storms.

Once in Long Beach, we took a while to get our bearings. We spent some time in a fruitless search for a camera shop. We had, of course, forgotten to bring ours, and besides we have been planning to find a newer model than our now technologically ancient little Elph. No luck. We did find a Starbucks, though, and stopped for a cup of coffee and directions to the Aquarium. (Unfortunately, the friends we had been planning to catch up with, after many years, found themselves in a predicament which made it impossible to get together, so we missed them.) As it turned out, however, the Aquarium needed all the time we had, and more.

We were awed not only by the quality of the displays--spectacular!--but also by the incredible diversity of life forms. Fish, of course. And aquatic mammals. A million of them, all different sizes, shapes, and colors, elegant creatures, their bodies marvelously adapted to the element they share, their movement so beautifully economical and graceful, unhurried or darting, as fluid as the currents flowing around them. Some content to be simply fish, others posing as underwater plants or rocks, some delicately long and thin, some short and plump and clownish, some decidedly ugly.

More amazing, even, to me, were the displays of coral reefs, brilliant and unbelievably diverse in color and form, their life detectable in subtle shifts and movements, some soft and furry as a bed of moss, some leathery and bulbous, others tree-like, with long stems and brittle, twiggy branches. Then there were schools of jellyfish, luminous, diaphanous, dragging long trails of tentacles and clouds of mucous stuff; craggy, forbidding crabs and lobsters, spiny urchins, crusty starfish and flabby cucumbers and slugs.

I'd show you some of all this submarine splendor... but of course, we left the camera at home. Sorry about that! Here are a couple of pictures purloined from the web to give an inadequate impression of the wonder of it all.

photo credit

photo credit

The trip home proved that the Metro system in Los Angeles is not the lifeless underground desert it had first appeared to be. On the Blue Line train from Long Beach, every seat was taken, and the 7th Street station and the Red Line train back to Hollywood were crammed with human life forms as diverse as those marine ones at the aquarium--though considerably more noisy and inelegant. Still, we found it a pleasure to be rubbing shoulders in relative peace with so many fellow members of our contentious species--another rare event in this curious sprawl that passes for a city.

All in all, a good way to celebrate a birthday. And George was ecstatic in his greeting when we got back home.

Four and a Half Billion Years...

... so science tells us, since the birth of our lovely planet.



Beautiful, no? Another two billion, give or take, before it dies--assuming that our troublesome species doesn't find some way to blow it to smithereens before then. Now, I'm no judge of the exactitude of the science, but I'll buy into the general premise. Those billions seem more credible to me than the few odd thousand allowed by the Bible literalist crowd, not to mention the scant few left before their purported Rapture. "Modern man" has been around for a mere 40,000 to 50,000 years, so far as I can tell--the blink of an eye in the history of the planet. It's only 2,500 since the Buddha walked the byways of India with his followers, and a handful more than 2,000 since Jesus did the same in the Holy Land. So much for the stories we tell ourselves to assure our significance in the grand scheme of things.

And our little planet in relation to the vast universe? A grain of sand is surely immense in comparison. Like everything else, it is born, it ages, and it dies.

All of which, on New Year's Eve, offers me a healthy serving of humble pie. I tuned in last night to the History Channel's How the Earth Was Made and was awed by this two-hour program about the story of the planet. What a perspective this science offers on those things that seem of the most lasting importance to us, and on the brevity of our little lives! How short the journey that we take, from our arrival on Earth to the time of our departure! With the reminder of those immeasurable reaches of time and space that surround us on all sides--and off into the past and future--how infinitesimal this right-now moment seems! And yet, how wonderful and vital, since it's all we have.

So, well, it's goodbye to 2007, just one more added to those four and a half billion! We do, I think, learn more about our species as we go. Our consciousness continues, amazingly, to expand. There's still time enough for us to fulfill the better aspects of the human potential, rather than the worse, and I certainly plan to continue my own efforts to be that better, wiser and more generous person in the coming year. I'm also comforted by knowing that there are many, many more like me, and that we are in conversation with each other in numerous ways.

Thanks for joining me. I'll see you all in 2008...! Happy New Year's Eve!

Bumper Stickers

I have never once put a bumper sticker on my car--until now. It's a bit like wearing your heart on your sleeve, something I was taught, as a young English male, was never proper to do. The polite thing is to keep your opinions to yourself in all circumstances. And besides, who wants to drive around these days with an ad for a Kerry/Edwards ticket on one's rear end? Too painful. Or worse, Bush/Cheney. You'd risk brickbats, rotten eggs and tomatoes, or at the very least rude gestures on the freeway. (Though I like the simple W with a diagonal line through it.)

I do sympathize with a good number of the messages I see. I'm not opposed to peace, and all messages that signal support for that noble end never fail to warm my heart. I just worry that as soon as an eternal verity morphs into a bumper sticker, it degenerates into a cliche. "Support Our Troops" suggests so much that's different--and to me unacceptable--than what it's message purports to say that it makes my skin creep. I get a good laugh out of some bumper stickers, most recently "Honk if you like thinking about conceptual art." But once you get the joke... do you really want to be sharing your laudable sense of humor with every other driver on the freeway until your car finally makes the journey to its just reward in the junk yard? For me, no thanks. For the same reason, I personally reject tattoos.

Nature conservancy is good. I want to save the planet. I want to save the whales. I worry about the bees, and I do hug trees, of course, whenever the opportunity presents itself. As for those random acts of kindness... they used to be a refreshing bagatelle, but they have long since had their charm eroded by over-familiarity. Or am I just being cynical again?

Having begun this entry earlier, I took more than usual interest in the rear ends of cars as Ellie and I took our morning walk around Silver Lake. A lot of traffic there, believe me, and a lot of parked cars on the streets. I was surpised to see that only a tiny fraction of them were adorned with stickers. Perhaps they're going the way of the ill-starred John Kerry. Out of the literally hundreds of free advertising spaces, I saw only five in use. "WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER." Certainly. One of those verities I was mentioning above. "USC MOM"--a higher education version of the "I'm a Proud Parent" syndrome. "Shirley Chisholm For President." No kidding! (She ran in 1972, and died on January 1, 2005--having lived long enough to witness the current assault on the U.S. constitution which she so nobly served.) One (very small) JOHN KERRY 04 sticker. And an advertisement for CATNAP, with a www address for easy contact.

Anyway, here's the point. I received from a friend the gift of the only bumper sticker I have ever actually attached to my car. Here it is, on my super energy-saving, self-righteously environment-conscious car. (It's name itself is a bumper sticker, no?)



Okay, accuse me of wearing my heart on my sleeve. I just feel comfortable with this one. First off, it asks a question, it doesn't come up with the answer. It invites contemplation. I like that. Second, it's modest both in scale and color. Third, it's playful--a parody of the whole WWJD thing. And fourth... well, I like it.

What do you think? Do you have a bumper sticker? Kucinich, anyone? (I thought he was great in the debate last night!)

Halloween--and the Cold War

We spent Halloween evening with artists. No hobgoblins, inexplicably, at the door--at least until our daughter, Sarah, and her friend, also dinner guests, disappeared from the table and reappeared shortly as high seas pirate and Goo the Cat (seen here, hissing...)


Scared the fur off George the dog. But no little ones--suprisingly, because we do have small children in the area. And Ellie had found little trail mix treats, nuts and raisins, to spare their little teeth. Ah, well.

An interesting evening, though. Our old friend Keith Sklar is in town from New York, in connection with the exhibition he has curated for the Jail Gallery in downtown Los Angeles. It's called Pie in the Face--words picked from this Kurt Vonnegut quotation that attracted his attention:

When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam was, every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer, painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction, focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high. -- Kurt Vonnegut (2003)

The artists in the show are all responding with grim, Vonnegutian humor and a kind of finger-in-your-eye aesthetic defiance to the dire straights into which the world seems to have fallen today, If you're interested in hearing more, you could listen to my interview with Keith in my current installment of The Art of Outrage on Artscene Visual Radio.

Keith brought one of the artists from his show along with him to dinner. Aidas Bareikis an immigrant to the United States from his native Lithuania, now lives and works in New York. This image of his work ...



... gives some idea of what Keith is after with "Pie in the Face." A timely exhibit, you'll agree, for Halloweeen. Bareikis's eerie "figures" seem entangled in the cobweb of some grisly dance of death.

Aidas came up with an interesting thought when the conversation turned, inevitably, to politics after dinner. He suggested that Americans are mistaken in believing that the Cold War is over, and particularly that America was the winner. Ask any European, he contended, and you'll hear that America lost, and a glimpse at the current geopolitical situation would seem to support his contention.

It's not ALL Bush's fault. He simply put the proverbial icing on the cake (if that's not too alluring an image) that we Americans have been baking for some fifty years, essentially since the fear of Communism gave us the cold war and the arms race. Since then we have been busy squandering our wealth and our human resources in pursuit of some desperate need to defend ourselves from every imagined woe and foe. We have been so eager to protect, each of us, our individual well-being that we have forgotten how to live in a civil and humane society, one that cares for even the least of its citizens. In our posturing, bullying, and lecturing the rest of the world about how great we are, we have forgotten how to behave like a great country.

We have lost the war. We are continuing to lose wars on every front, not least the struggle to save our species from extinction. "Everybody knows the war is over," intones the inimitable Leonard Cohen: "Everybody knows the good guys lost. Everybody knows the plague is coming, everybody knows it's coming fast."

By the way, have you noticed how often our presidential candidates use that phrase: "Everybody knows..."? Have they been listening to Leonard Cohen, too?

Just a few thoughts for Halloween, friends. Forgive me...

Oh, Yes: Earth Day

That's today. As Ellie points out, every day should be Earth Day. I saw a brief clip from a televised interview with Rachel Carson, the author of the pioneering "Silent Spring," in which she wondered aloud about "what is going to happen to our children?" That was 1962. Forty-five years have passed since then. Children born that year are now forty-five years old. Who knows what cancers or other chemical imbalances of brain and body have manifested in their lives? There's still a huge amount we don't know about the effect our modern-era "progress" has had on our species and on the planet Earth, but we know enough to understand that Rachel Carson had foresight that few others had back then. To be sure, there has been progress. The Environmental Protection Agency owes its existence in part to Carson's activism. But how long it has taken us to come to a common agreement with her that we may well be destroying ourselves along with our habitat--and not only, now, through our ignorance, but rather despite the knowledge with which our scientists provide us, through our misguided public policies. And how much longer will we put up with the prevarications of an administration that puts cronyism and corporate profits above the common good? Happy Earth Day, everyone.

Earth Day

A special thanks, on this lovely day, to Digital Dharma for the reminder that tomorrow is Earth Day, and that the Earth needs metta, too! And for providing this link to an urgently important essay by James Hansen, the NASA scientist who came out in public recently to complain that the agency had been trying to silence him on issues related to global warming.

A Busy Week

It has been a busy week, and an unusually public one for me: I participated as a panelist in a discussion of digital media and the changes they have wrought in the art world at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, at a celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Artscene magazine. Visitors to The Buddha Diaries will recall that I contribute a monthly audio piece, "The Art of Outrage" to Artscene Visual Radio, and it was a pleasure to sit on a panel with my fellow contributors to that site. The event was a great success and a fitting tribute to the efforts of the publisher Bill Lasarow--despite a chill wind that threatened the outdoor dinner in the museum's atrium court, and the performances laid on for the occasion.

Aside from the panel, I had two readings from The Bush Diaries and The Buddha Diaries at Democratic clubs in widely dispersed locations--one well to the south in Cerritos, the other a good way east in San Dimas. I enjoyed them both, and determined to do more of this--in part to do what I can to get juices flowing for the next election. My view--one shared at least by the enthusiastic gatherings I spoke to--is that we desperately need a significant win if we want to get our country back on track.

A note on the environment: Driving out to San Dimas along the 210 freeway was an inch-by-inch, foot-by-foot experience. I thought I had allowed ample time, but it took three times longer than I had expected. The four eastbound lanes were all choked with traffic. As I sat there--trying to practice my best equanimity--trains sped past in either direction on the Metroline tracks, set in between the east- and west-bound lanes of the freeway. I had plenty of time to take my eyes off the road for long enough to note that they were virtually empty--a sad commentary on the adjacent freeway lanes, crammed solid with mostly single-occupant vehicles. Like my own. But mine, at least, was a Prius! That's my excuse.

Ishmael

I picked up a copy of "Ishmael" yesterday, and started to reread it after, what? fifteen years since I first read it. The pages of my paperback edition have turned brown with the years, but it's still an amazing read. A novel of sorts, by Daniel Quinn, it takes the form of a Socratic dialogue about the relationship between us humans and the planet we inhabit. The participants are two characters, a teacher and a student. I know it sounds kind of boring when I desribe it that way. Perhaps it will help when I add, for the benefit of those who have not come across this marvelous book, that the teacher is a gigantic, full-grown gorilla whose name, of course, is Ishmael. Since his physical configuration disallows the command of human speech, he communicates through a kind of mental telepathy whose vehicle is the eyes.

A strange premise? Let me quote a passage from the beginning of the book which conveys some sense of its tone, its content, and the quality of thought. Ishmael starts out with a question: "Among the people of your culture...," he asks,

"... which want to destroy the world?"
" As far as I know, no one specifically wants to destroy the world."
"And yet you do destroy it, each of you. Each of you contributes daily to the destruction of the world."
"Yes, that's so."
"Why don't you stop?"
I shrugged. "Frankly, we don't know how."
"You're captives of a system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live."
"Yes, that's the way it seems."
"So. You are captives--and you have made a captive of the world itself. That's what's at stake, isn't it?--your captivity and the captivity of the world."
"Yes, that's so. I've just never thought of it that way."

Which, so far as I'm concerned, is what the Buddhist meditation practice is all about. It's about learning to recognize in what ways I am captive to systems that control the way I think and the way I act, and learning to free myself from them. It's about learning to be human, and to live in as enlightened a manner as possible. Ishmael will soon begin to instruct his student about the difference between the culture he calls the Leavers and the culture he calls the Takers. The people of our culture--the one that is destroying the world--are the Takers. The Leavers are those who leave no footprint where they walk, and for whom all resources are renewable. We Takers, believing unquestioningly in the myth that this our god-given right, are busy taking the planet from them.

"Ishmael" was first published in 1992. Its warning was already obvious by then, to anyone who wished to see. But in the world of power politics, Al Gore's was the only voice in the wilderness--and look what happened to him. The fact that we have begun to resurrect him now from the oblivion to which we sought to consign him does not compensate for the ridicule to which he was subjected for so many years. It's sad that Quinn's voice, one of the relatively few, along with Gore's, was not more widely heard, or at least more widely heeded, fifteen years ago. We have squandered a good deal of the precious time that has been granted us to save ourselves, and save the planet Earth--if not for our own species, then for some future species on the evolutionary path.

In the meantime, may we all learn to leave more and take less. May we all learn to free ourselves from those systems we have designed for our own destruction. May we all be more conscious of what it is we do.

Weather

This morning's news of death and disaster in Central Florida due to tornado activity coincides with the larger news that accompanies the concurrent release of the United Nations report on climate change. We have too long chosen to remain deaf to the signals from our planet with the result that the damage caused by our negligence is now, according to the scientists who contributed to this study, basically irreversible. The harm we have inflicted on our little corner of the universe is surely no more than an infinitesimal blip on the cosmic radar screen; but to us, the human species--well, Florida is likely to prove but a minor foretaste. Even Katrina, with all her deadly force, may look like a tempest in a teapot when compared with what the Earth has in store for us, her unruliest inhabitants.


The UN report makes clear that the effects of our industrial and post-industrial consumption and our burning of the fossil fuel resources that enabled it may last for centuries to come. Whether the human species will survive its own mindless improvidence and greed remains an open question. We pride ourselves on the knowledge we have gained about the planet we are given to inhabit, but surely our ignorance is far greater. In the grand scheme of things, I suppose, it matters little to the universe--perhaps even to the planet itself--whether this one troublesome species survives. We have contributed already to the extinction of so many others, and the world keeps turning inexorably, shrugging off the loss and adapting to the change in ways of which we humans seem incapable. Our minds are prisoners of old ways of thinking, old conceptions of what it is we need--and what we need is always more than what we have. We seem fated to strive for the "growth" and "progress" that will assure our downfall.

Until we learn that there must be some limit to our grasping, until we learn tolerance and patience for the needs of other humans and of other species, we will continue down this path toward eventual destruction. We need to be more mindful that it is our actions that contribute to the creation of the world we live in; and our actions, should we all finally agree to make it so, that can begin to reverse the disastrous path that we have chosen.