Nuclear Mayhem

In Japan, things will never be the same again. Just like after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  It is sad that we – as a human race – have not learned our lesson after those two terrible atrocities. Between them these two atom-bombings exterminated over 300,000 innocent civilians! It seems ironic that the nation subjected to those nuclear attacks some sixty five years ago went on to embrace the same technology and now pays a potentially awful price in lethal, long-lasting radio-activity in the atmosphere, land, oceans, and bodies of living things.

Those staggering images of the time the combination earthquake/monster tsunami hit the east coast of Honshu will haunt the Japanese for a very long time; in minutes, lives, livelihoods, houses, cars, whole towns were turned upside down and large ships were deposited on land far from their ocean moorings. In a few moments of time, we were all reminded of the tremendous unstoppable force of Nature; almost without warning, a catastrophic chain of events was unleashed that we ignore or brush off at our peril. The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant was a sitting duck for the wave of destruction.

It is human ingenuity through reductionist science that released the genie from the bottle, but Albert Einstein warned in 1946: The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

In a stunning new video, renowned physicist Dr. Michio Kaku lays it all out on a news interview without mincing words. He said, to the great shock of many:

"If it goes to a full-scale evacuation of all personnel, it means that firefighters are no longer putting water onto the cores. That's the only thing preventing a full-scale meltdown at three reactor sites. Once they evacuate, then we past the point of no return. Meltdowns are inevitable at three reactor sites, leading to a tragedy far beyond that of Chernobyl, creating permanent dead zones in Japan."

This truly shocking interview is at:

http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=604AB3FA803FF3647DF6E34EC5E8C8A0

The Three Mile Island nuclear accident was brushed off as being due to “human error”; the far more serious Chernobyl nuclear accident (which has killed almost a million people over time) was brushed off as due to “faulty design” and “careless maintenance”. What will we put the Fukushima nuclear accident down to? It will be blamed on an unprecedented natural calamity and antiquated design. I put it down to hubris and the human error in building it in the first place at a location prone to wild and unpredictable seismic activity. The nuclear industry is blinded by the almighty dollar at the best of times, and now is in denial about the perils of the power they espouse. They don’t know what they’re doing!

Even without a meltdown, Fukushima is going to take decades to shut down, and then, spent plutonium and uranium will not be gone, just covered over, transported away, out of sight, out of mind.

For the sake of all of humanity, shut all these plants down, worldwide! Make the necessary leap on over to ever-improving technologies that are truly clean, safe, and renewable, with Nature as their source. 

The Island of Naxos

                           

The road to Lionas, Naxos

After spending an acclimatizing week on a verdant Paros, nothing prepared us for the bold drama of neighbouring island of Naxos. From the moment the ship rounds the northern tip of Paros at Naoussa and the jagged peaks around Naxos town loom on the horizon, we were held in her thrall. The island throws up a mixed bag of weather in this pre-Spring off-season. The Aegean sun casts luminosity onto the brilliant whitewashed, electric-blue painted houses, verdant landscape, and omnipresent white marble. Cool northerly gusts whip up the dark blue sea, then grey scudding clouds swoop down over the high peaks, and torrential showers pass over and by. It is a delight to slip into the slow pace as we ramble and toodle along narrow winding streets, rustic roads, country paths and lonely beaches bereft of summer hordes. 

In a rented Fiat Panda, we set out to visit Koronos in the mountains and Lionas, a pretty cove 800 metres and 9 kilometres below. The drive that passes through the high-perched towns of Chalki, Filoti, and Apiranthos takes us along asphalted, seriously twisting roads with breathtaking vistas, often down around two thousand feet to the glistening blue ocean way below. The mountain sides are strewn with rocks and boulders, criss-crossed by stone walls demarcating property, even high on precipices.

In Koronos, hostess Matine cooked delectable dishes from her own greens, potatoes, cheese, and village lamb and pork. Her taverna is abuzz with loud conversation and oratory, thick with smoke. She put us up in the simple suite of a renovated house in the village. Down on the beach in Lionas, Gundi was entranced by the most interesting beach for rock-picking she has ever combed. The earthy and white tones of the weathered pebbles are varied and marbled; they gleam in their wet coat of seawater. I wander off to just perch and ponder in the marble amphitheatre above the vibrant green sea. What a joy to be here, at the wild remote edge of a Greek island, where a sturdy historied land meets a swirling fabled sea. At night, the glow of the village illuminates the massive rock-face of the south of the cove as darkness envelopes the sea, and the whooshing of the waters, the whistling of the wind above continue unabated.     

One lively evening in Lionas, at the Delfinaki taverna of Manolis and Vasso Koufopoulos, English-speaking Lionas resident Apostoulos taught us of the concepts of filoxenia and aftarkis. He says these are both especially well-honed on Naxos. Manolis’ fine fresh rosé wine was free-flowing and Apostoulos acted as interpreter not only of language, but also of cultural refinements. He explained that filoxenia is what Naxians, and Greeks, welcome visitors with. Once they warm to you, their hearts and souls open up to wrap you in a blanket of stoic insight. Filoxenia, that literally means "love of strangers", is a generosity of spirit, a joyful kind of the-best-of-what's-mine-is-yours attitude in which Greeks take great pride as a defining attribute. Manolis spent over thirty years mining emery from within the local mountains; now he is a proud farmer and food producer. He beams as he brings us olives from the family trees, rosé wine made from the family grapes, honey produced by the family bees, eggs from the family chickens, meat and cheese from his brother’s goats and sheep. And filoxenia is a main reason that he loves to provide this bounty and Vasso loves to cook it.

Aftarkis is an ancient word that literally means ‘sufficient in oneself.’ It is used to describe a person who, through discipline, has become independent of all external circumstances, and who has discovered within him- or her-self resources that meet the demands of any situation that may arise. Naxians display aftarkis probably because of the challenges of surviving and sustaining livelihood, community and culture on a mountainous island.

Naxos is blessed as the most fertile island of the Cyclades. It has a good supply of water in a region where water is usually inadequate. Mount Zas at 999 metres is the highest peak in the Cyclades, and tends to trap the clouds, generating greater rainfall. This has made agriculture an important economic sector with various vegetable and fruit crops as well as cattle breeding, sheep- and goat-rearing, making Naxos the most self sufficient of the island group. Grapes, oranges, lemons, limes, figs, olives find ideal conditions, generating not only fruit, but precious wine and olive oil. Tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, cucumbers all grow robustly here. Growing wild on the hillsides island-wide are sage, rosemary, thyme, oregano, giant fennel. Yellow-flowering clover carpets the soil between the olive and citrus trees. Beekeepers make a delectable thyme honey, especially renowned in Gundi’s favourite little mountain village of Keramoti, so picturesquely located in its high verdant valley. Farmers make milk, cheese, butter, yogurt, and succulent chicken, pork, lamb, beef. Fishermen bring in an array of fish large and small, squid, octopus, and shrimp, (though catches are much smaller than they used to be). This all makes for a local food culture which is vibrant, hearty, and sustained by each succeeding generation of wonderful cooks. Portions are generally large and overly-generous. Naxians love their food and wine, and they love to share it. Filoxenia is alive and well on Naxos.

Back home, I miss the intoxication of it all already…

Going to Greece

We’re off to Paros – not Paris as in French metropolis, but Paros, beguiling Cycladic island in Greece. Always, Gundi and I have been drawn to islands. All those years ago we lapped up and (ever since) gushed over Bali, travelled through Java, blissed out on Tioman, sojourned on Ometepe, and visited close family on the open Pacific shore of Vancouver Island. We have dreamed of Majorca, Sicily, the Seychelles, but now we are taking the plunge to satisfy the yen to spend slow time on a Greek island. In fact, we are going to get greedy and take in adjacent Naxos as well.

Having been on but one cruise in my life – some forty years ago as a teenager on a school-arranged Mediterranean tour taking in Venice, Corfu, Athens, Crete, Tunis, Naples, Rome, and Pisa – I am impatient for that moment when island landfall appears on the horizon and we approach a bustling port. Paros drew us with its picturesque little harbour at Naoussa, white marble, lively towns, navigable size, hilly terrain, high villages, beaches and coves, mellow and friendly reputation.

We will plonk ourselves down in Naoussa for a few days, explore the town, nearby beach rock formations at Kolymbithres. We’ll then head up in the hills to the quaint village of Lefkes. We’ll go walking from there on the ancient Byzantine Road through the villages of Prodromos and Marpissa, on to the little fishing harbour at Piso Livadi. We will inhale the heady scent of wild sage and thyme, blooming wildflowers. Sometime after that, we’ll head over to Naxos on the ferry to take in a very fertile island dotted with traditional whitewashed villages, impressive mountain landscapes, fishing harbours, Byzantine churches. On the way I will be getting Gundi to read the draft manuscript of my book, about living and growing here on the land in eastern Canada. It is tentatively titled Leafy Greens in the Rolling Hills.

It will be so refreshing to take in off-season island culture, character, food and drink, to inhale the soul of a locality. Most of all, I just want to lap up the heritage and the land and look out over the dark blue Aegean.

Back to the Garden

True love in the garden...

We are stardust.

We are golden.

And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden…

Way back in 1969 – over forty years ago now – Joni Mitchell wrote Woodstock in a hotel room in New York City as she watched reports of the events at the Woodstock Festival on television. (She had been advised by a manager that appearing on the Dick Cavett Show instead would be a better choice than performing at Woodstock).

In the intervening years, the world has seen growing corporatization, expanded government control and curtailment of personal freedoms, and with this the accelerating scourge of globalization and marginalization of small-scale, community-based initiatives. The need has become ever greater to get ourselves back to the garden. And, in truth, many of us are doing it, back there, as we see a resurgence in organic farms and foods, local production, farmers markets; we just need more of the same to stem the tide sweeping so many treasured things away in the depleted soils and wastewater of the mainstream.

As a society, we are now another stage further removed from Nature’s way. Over half the world’s population is now urban. Having gone through the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, and a 20th century riddled with wars of massive carnage and devastation from chemicals, atomic and nuclear agents, we now live at the beginning of the 21st century in an age of great upheaval and shifting empires. Synthetic materials and new technologies now rule the roost.

In medicine, pharmaceuticals, vaccines, radiation are prescribed, gradually sidelining all time-honoured natural, traditional treatments. In farming, factory feedlots, antibiotics, pesticides, chemical fertilizer and genetically-modified crops are promoted, as control of natural seeds and lands gets wrested away. In food, sterilization, pasteurization, irradiation, genetic modification are the order of the day for those that control the production and distribution system. In the environment, indiscriminate deforestation, mining, resource exploitation, desecration of land and ocean, and an inexorable build-up of greenhouse gases hold sway. In all these areas, ever more carcinogens, toxins, poisons cause escalated disease in humans, animals, plants, “natural” environments. The bottom line for the western capitalist system is man-made, geared for profit, making some much richer, and many much the poorer. Obscene levels of power are enjoyed by ruthless elites in the form of centralized government, mega-corporations, secret cabals, the ultra-rich, all at the expense of the power-starved masses.

Those who control this state of affairs exercise greed, repression, and perpetuate misery and disease. A renewed connection to Nature and all things natural would help us all to reclaim and recover health, sanity, dignity, meaning, happiness. We need to keep on engaging, person by person, step by step, community by community, movement by movement – without selling out. Change has to come from the grassroots up, as it is very unlikely to come from the top down. Back to the garden, one more time.



The Revolution Has Begun - "The Shift Hits the Fan"

I have just finished reading When Healing Becomes A Crime, Kenny Ausubel’s riveting fullsome account of the politicization of mainstream medicine, and the victimization of alternative medicine.

Kenny is an extraordinary voice for a changing paradigm for the world at the start of the 21^st century, and via the platform of Bioneers, he and his wife Nina Simons have started the wheels in motion.

The Revolution Has Begun - "The Shift Hits the Fan"

By Kenny Ausubel
Co-CEO and Founder, Bioneers, www.bioneers.org

Excerpts from the address opening the Bioneers Conference, October 15th, 2010, San Rafael, California.

For the full text, go to http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kenny-ausubel/the-revolution-has-begun_b_764128.html

The Bottleneck. The Great Disruption. Peak Everything. The Great Turning.

Whatever you call it, it's the big enchilada.

In the words of filmmaker Tom Shadyac, "The shift is hitting the fan." We're experiencing the dawn of a revolutionary transformation. This awkward 'tween state marks the end of pre-history - the sunset of an ecologically illiterate civilization. Like a baby being born, a new world is crowning….

From breakdown to breakthrough, it's a revolution from the heart of nature and the human heart. It leads with a basic shift in our relationship with nature from resource and object to mentor, model and partner. Game-changing breakthroughs in science, technology and design such as biomimicry are revolutionizing our very ways of knowing. The Rights of Nature movement is recognizing the inalienable rights of the non-human world of ecosystems and critters, widening our circle of compassion and kinship. Greater decentralization and localization are building resilience from the ground up - shaped by ancient indigenous wisdom of becoming native to our place.

The digital communications revolution is primed to spread solutions without borders at texting speed. Historic demographic shifts are fertilizing the landscape - from the ascendancy of women's leadership to the worldbeat of cultural and racial pluralism. Empires and dynasties are waning and waxing with sudden shifts in the balance of global power.

When a chrysalis turns into a butterfly, the caterpillar's immune system attacks the very first of the butterfly's cells as invaders. The pushback will be equally fierce, casting shadows of widespread destruction and violence, mass migrations, virulent ideologies, and ethnic strife. Yet in the end, the big, hairy caterpillar audaciously becomes a beautiful butterfly….

In truth, the world is reaching "peak everything," in Richard Heinberg's words. A global economy built on unlimited growth and massive resource use is heading for inevitable contraction.

A major barrier in the U.S. is the annual military budget of over a trillion dollars. Although the Defense Department has embraced climate change as a top national security issue, national sustainability must move front and center. As David Orr observes, "The concept of sustainability should be the new organizing principle for both domestic and foreign policy. Sustainability is the core of a national development strategy designed to enhance our security, build prosperity from the ground up, and reduce ecological damage, risks of climate destabilization and the necessity of fighting endless wars over dwindling resources."….

But for now, the U.S. is being left behind. As a leader at Germany's Deutsche Bank stated, "They're asleep at the wheel on climate change, asleep at the wheel on job growth, asleep at the wheel on this industrial revolution taking place in the energy industry." Rather than catastrophe, business competitiveness may ultimately prove the more compelling driver.

Yet as Einstein said, we cannot solve the problem with the same mentality that created it. Brother, can you spare a paradigm? The supreme challenge of global interdependence is to foster meta-cooperation in a full world….

Shifting the mindscape starts with systems thinking. Complex systems by nature are unpredictable, nonlinear and cannot be controlled. The key to building resilience is to foster the system's capacity to adapt to dramatic change. As Dana Meadows observed, "A diverse system with multiple pathways and redundancies is more stable and less vulnerable to external shock than a uniform system with little diversity."

A paradigm is the hardest thing to change in a system, but it can happen fast. As Meadows advised, "Keep pointing at anomalies and failures in the old paradigm. Keep speaking loudly and with assurance, from the new one. Insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. Don't waste time with reactionaries; work with active change agents, and the vast middle ground of open people."

At the core is the transformation to a restoration economy.

What's afoot globally today are the re-envisioning of the economy and the redesign of the corporation into diverse structures of business ownership and governance - such as large-scale co-operatives, mission-controlled social businesses and foundation-owned social profit companies. Bill Gates calls it "creative capitalism." It works. Employee-owned firms modestly outperform their peers. Foundation-owned, values-driven companies perform at least as well or better. In Europe, co-ops comprise 12 percent of GDP and engage 60 percent of the population. Marjorie Kelly terms them "emergent new organizational species" designed like living systems to deliver human and ecological benefits as well as profits.

Another seismic meta-trend transforming the economy and society at large is the ascendancy of women's leadership. As writer Hanna Rosin points out in "The End of Men," "Those societies that take advantage of the talents of all of their adults, not just half of them, have pulled away from the rest." One study measuring the economic and political power of women in 162 countries found with few exceptions that the greater the power of women, the greater the nation's economic success. As David Gergen wrote, "Women are knocking on the door of leadership at the very moment when their talents are especially well matched with the requirements of the day."

Natural systems have their own operating instructions, as biomimicry master Janine Benyus describes. Nature runs on current sunlight. Nature banks on diversity. Nature rewards co-operation. Nature builds from the bottom up. Nature recycles everything. And Earth's mission statement: Life creates conditions conducive to life..

Given that the most important element in systems is purpose and goals, the big question is: What's the economy for? If the goal is building resilience, the priority flips from growth and expansion to sufficiency and a sustainable prosperity. Resilience also favors economic re-localization, which in turn produces greater energy and food security….

The ruling story according to Western Civilization took hold about 500 years ago with the birth of the Scientific Revolution and exaltation of human reason. When the Copernican revolution showed the Earth revolves around the sun, science redefined humanity's place in the natural order and the cosmos.

Perhaps the defining characteristic of the modern mind is the belief in a radical separation between the human self and the external world. According to the modern mind, Tarnas observes, "Apart from the human being, the cosmos is seen as entirely impersonal and unconscious... mere matter in motion, mechanistic and purposeless, ruled by chance and necessity. It is altogether indifferent to human consciousness and values. The world outside the human being lacks conscious intelligence, it lacks interiority, and it lacks intrinsic meaning and purpose... For the modern mind, the only source of meaning in the universe is human consciousness."

The modern mind stands in radical contrast with the primal worldview, exemplified by indigenous cultures. As Tarnas continues, "Primal experience takes place within a world soul, an anima mundi, a living matrix of embodied meaning. Because the world is understood as speaking a symbolic language, direct communication of meaning and purpose from world to human can occur."

The linear, mechanistic, reductionist worldview has yielded as science has radically evolved into a vastly more complex view of interdependence and other ways of knowing. From complexity and chaos theory to the Gaia Hypothesis, a new cosmology is unfolding. In this scientific revolution, the Earth does not revolve around us….

Away from the mainstream

Distracted, nauseated by mainstream media, and its shrill panderings; by mainstream medicine, and its monopoly on disease; by mainstream food, and its unlabelled carcinogens; by mainstream farming, and its chemical toxins....

We are way happier and healthier, away in left field, where the grass grows lusher, the flowers bloom bolder, and where we, and the cows, can eat our natural diet, untainted by all that mainstream sludge.

Hill-walking with Janko

During our recent family reunion in Shrewsbury and the surrounding Shropshire countryside, I came to the realization that we are a pretty diverse and eclectic bunch. Among our number are a glass artist, a naturopath, a newspaper journalist, three linguists, two kindergarten teachers, two community social workers, a housing consultant, an organic farmer, and a renewable energy specialist.

It was important for me to spend a day out walking with Janko, my nephew and the recent graduate in renewable energy studies in Berlin. We have a common love of wild places, open country, the great outdoors, so it was only natural that we chose a walk up on the high Shropshire hills, with magnificent views in all directions. We set out at the ancient stone circle of Mitchell’s Fold, which sits high in the Shropshire hills, on the long ridge of Stapeley Hill, 1000 feet above sea level and close to the Welsh border. Its exposed position gives fine views of the Stiperstones to the east and the Welsh hills to the west. From this heathland height, we clambered down the steep valley slopes to fenced woodlands. Here we were happy to stir up no end of pheasants and were taken aback by each new sudden ruffling and noisy flight of pairs. We stopped at an old ruin of a homestead tucked into the fold of the valley, a pastoral setting at one time for a sheltered orchard and meadow. On the slopes above grew corn and grain, carved out of the autumnal brown ferns and the green uplands shorn by roaming sheep. As we climbed again past ponds through the soggy soft grasses, light shafts flitted across the distant hills bathing the land in that poetic light so special in British hill country. At the craggy tors atop the ridges, we paused to inhale the clear crisp air and reflect on the splendour of the 360-degree view.

We talked about the endless opportunities for Janko as he sets out exploring possibilities with wind, solar power, super-efficient energy-saving alternative power systems and the places around the world to effect and implement them. Living in Berlin, Janko loves to get away to the woods and lakes of northern Sweden, sharing in food growing, bee-keeping, fishing, living on the land within a local community with a number of friends from several countries. To return to the land after an arduous spell of urban confinement is to let out a primal roar and then open up one’s soul to wonder. I am fortunate enough to be opened up most of the time, living in the hills, working the land, and growing fresh food for Gundi and myself and to take to market. However, I do envy young man Janko as he sets out on a fascinating path that – I have no doubt – will lead to much invention and fulfilment, as he helps to introduce brilliant, simple energy-saving systems that make homes, communities, businesses smarter and more efficient. “Why didn’t I think of that?”, they will all ask about each new innovation. If I had my time over – with more of a pragmatic bent - I would be following Janko’s path, effecting change based on simple, natural methodologies.

Our walk ended at dusk, up on the Long Mynd, with spectacular views to the distant Brecon Beacons, Welsh Hills, and the Malverns. It seemed we looked out on forever, with the bewitching lights twinkling on in the farms, towns and cities all around, and we two blown away by the cold wind, steep drop-offs, and a deep sense of communion.