“When the Soldiers Come, the People Leave”: Life Under Israeli Occupation

“There is a Palestinian saying that all the politicians should be sent to the moon so that they can look back and see that we all live on one world”– a Palestinian-American teacher at BirZeit.
During the recent US election, Canadian Sabina Lautensach observed in her editorial in the Journal of Human Security that those [...]

Legal Rights for Nature

“We talk about the state sovereignty and the tribal sovereignty, but those ant communities under the big fir trees are sovereign too.. some nights you can’t see the stars at all [because of city lights]. That’s wrong.  Those stars are sovereign. They have a right to be seen”.
Billy Frank, Jr., in Messages from Frank’s Landing
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In [...]

Mixing Discovery and Conquest: A Recipe for Destruction

The worldview that links discovery with conquest has caused considerable social and environmental harm.   This attitude has deep roots in Western history.  Julius Caesar’s famous motto Veni, Vidi, Vici (I came, I saw, I conquered), featured on some  modern t-shirts, couldn’t be more clear on this point.  Discovery is a prelude to conquest.
Caesar himself didn’t [...]

Thomas Berry 1914-2009

On the occasion of the death of Catholic priest and theologian (or “geologian”, as he preferred to call himself) Thomas Berry at age 94, I would like to reflect upon his model of a morality centered in the earthly community of life.
Thomas Berry’s philosophy was strikingly immanent and earth-centered.  In his seminal Dream of the [...]

How can you not plant a rose in wartime?

“They always put social experiments in the easiest, most fertile places.  We wanted the hardest place.  We figured if we could do it here, we could do it anywhere.”
– Paolo Lugari (Gaviotas)
Some forty years ago, Paolo Lugari and a group of supporters founded the community of Gaviotas on the llanos-an aluminum-laced plain in Colombia situated [...]

Caring and the “Fore-caring” of Precaution: Watching over the Commons

One day when I visited a Chehalis grandmother that I sat and spoke with many times, she called my attention to the prairie in front of her house. She loved that prairie which brought her the smell of wild strawberries in June and remembered images of her ancestors with their slender digging sticks prying camas [...]

Partnering with the Natural World

In 1927 Chehalis elder Mary Heck testified on behalf of her people before the U.S. Court of Claims. She spoke in Chehalis, enumerating the things a non-Indian court might count in terms of value.
She listed the houses that had been destroyed by pioneers who wanted the cleared land on which they stood. She told how [...]

The NIMBY Lie, part II: self-destructive consequences

The NIMBY (not in my backyard) stance assumes we can obliterate an “enemy” without attacking our own well being in the process. The reasoning goes like this:  we are separate and distinct and very different from our enemies. We can build a fence to keep them out– or attack them given our superior intelligence/strength/higher status [...]

Blame Game or Natural Harvest?

Last night in the vice presidential debate Sarah Palin insisted we should not look to the past and play the “blame game”– but harvest time gives us another perspective.
Harvest time is time for pumpkins and apples and (at my house) figs and persimmons if we can beat the birds and squirrels to them. It [...]

Breast Milk and Salmon Waters: shared contamination and what to do about it.

I recently reviewed Tainted Milk, in which Maria Boswell-Penc investigates why so little attention has been paid to the contamination of breast milk in the U. S. with dangerous chemicals such as endocrine disruptors.
After assessing the data, Boswell-Penc concludes that breast feeding is still the best way to nourish your baby, especially since organic [...]

Diplomacy with the Nations of Life

The perception of other natural life as nations with distinct ways of life, values, perceptions, rights, and territories of their own would allow us to see the natural world in a more holistic way. This is not a new idea. This perception inspired indigenous Northwesterners to treat the first salmon taken from a run with [...]

Concerned about the Economy but not Global Warming?

Yesterday a buyer for a local market told me the prices of bulk food items have gone up– way up. Some of them have doubled. “It’s scary!” he exclaimed.
High food prices are driven in part by rising gas prices, since we transport much of our food over substantial distances. But they are also [...]

The NIMBY Lie

The NIMBY (Not in My Backyard)  idea that something is fine, even necessary as long as it is not in one’s own backyard, makes us downright stupid about social and environmental decisions. Even as we try to divide up the world into good parts where we live and bad parts where we don’t, [...]

Hunger Hell

What is your idea of hell? In 1976 Lower Chehalis elder Henry Cultee (from the Grays Harbor area of Washington State) told me his version of the traditional story in which Bluejay visits the Land of the Dead. There, amidst entire nations of Indian people and animal species, Bluejay found a white man, munching away, [...]