Sculptures in clay

 by Max Leiva from Art Artists Artwork on FB

Sharing with Sepia Saturday

Meme this week has to do with the postal deliveries in snow. I diverged as usual!

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Today's quote:

From Starhawk's substack "Where Will We Stand?" newsletter this week - she shares about reading this book:

Sand Talk: How Ecological Wisdom Can Save the World, by Tyson Yungaporta, an Australian aboriginal man. Pulling myself away from endlessly doom scrolling or to read Yungaporta’s words feels a little like coming out of a filthy dive reeking of stale cigarette smoke and old urine into clean, fresh rain-washed air. And Yungaporta is very clear about what the world means:

“In our world nothing can be known or even exist unless it is in relation to other things. Critically, those things that are connected are less important than the forces of connection between them. We exist to form these relationships, which make up the energy that holds creation together.” P.149-150

Yungaporta, Robin Wall Kimmerer, many other indigenous writers frame the world as a web of relationships in which we are embedded, and to which we are responsible. That world view sees us as mutually responsible for one another, bound together in networks of reciprocity and generosity. People are here for a purpose—to take care of one another, of land and community, practically and spiritually.

As Yungaporta says, “Some new cultures keep asking, “Why are we here?” It’s easy. This is why we’re here. We look after things on the earth and in the sky and the places in between.” P.96

Yungaporta also offers a clear diagnosis of what’s wrong with the world today.

“Emu is a troublemaker who brings into being the most destructive idea in existence: I am greater than you; you are less than me. This is the source of all human misery. Aboriginal society was designed over thousands of years to deal with this problem. Some people are just idiots--and everybody has a bit of idiot in them from time to time, coming from some deep place inside that whispers, “You are special. You are greater than other people and things. You are more important than everything and everyone. All things in all people exist to serve you. This behavior needs massive checks and balances to contain the damage it can do…” p25

Thank you Starhawk and Yungaporta!

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In case you've missed all my posts for the last couple of months...there are a lot of goddesses. Here are some of the more ancient ones:

Archaeologists were mainly men who discovered these figures, and they called them Venus because that's the culture they could relate to, and then they called them fertility objects to promote the birth of more children (suppposedly.) 

Marija Gimbutus (a female archaeologist) has refuted this, and described these matriarchal cultures which had no defense systems indicative of their peaceful nature, where goddesses were venerated by a whole population. I mentioned Gimbutus before in my blog: Why I'm an Environmentalist.

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And a bit of the Doors music in Playing for Change (thanks to fellow blogger, Linda Sue.)

"Silent Spring" has it's birth anniversary

Here's what Writer's Almanac Newsletter published on Sept. 27, 2017. I think it should be memorialized as a holiday, when Silent Spring was published. What changed so much!

" Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking book Silent Spring was published on this date in 1962.

 Carson was a marine biologist, but she was also a crafter of lyrical prose who contributed to magazines like The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly, and who had already published three popular lyrical books about the sea. One of these — The Sea Around Us (1951) — had won the National Book Award. In the course of her work, Carson became aware of the ways that chemical pesticides were harming plants and wildlife. She felt it was important to make the public aware of this, but she was not an investigative journalist and didn’t feel confident enough to write what she called the “poison book.” She began trying to interest magazines in the subject as early as 1945. In 1958, Carson’s friend mentioned that she was finding a lot of dead birds in her Massachusetts bird sanctuary. Carson, in turn, wrote to E.B. White, who was an editor at The New Yorker. She suggested that White write an article about pesticides. He said the magazine would be keen to publish such an article, but he encouraged her to write it herself. The article became a multiyear project that Carson pursued through personal tragedies like the death of her mother, and her own diagnosis with breast cancer in 1960.

By 1962, many scientists had published work that questioned whether the widespread and indiscriminate use of pesticides like DDT was safe. Carson gathered these reports in one place, and then used her literary talents to bring the issue to vivid life. The New Yorker serialized Silent Spring in the summer of 1962, and it was published in book form in September. The title comes from one of the book’s chapters, in which Carson paints a picture of a future spring morning without birdsong. “No witchcraft,” Carson writes, “no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.”

The book was a huge best-seller, and although she was dreadfully ill from her cancer treatments, Carson appeared on many television shows to defend her research. Eric Sevareid, who interviewed Carson for CBS Reports, later said he was afraid she wouldn’t live long enough to see the broadcast of their interview. In June 1963, she appeared before a Senate subcommittee and gave policy recommendations that she had worked on for five years. She didn’t advocate a ban on all pesticides, but recommended that they be used more judiciously. Aerial spraying was the worst culprit, because it could end up on people’s private land without their knowledge or consent. “If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem,” Carson said.

Chemical companies, backed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, were not fans of the book. They tried to sue Carson, her publisher, and The New Yorker. They spent $250,000 on a smear campaign, calling her a “hysterical woman” and a communist, and casting doubt on her scientific bona fides. A former secretary of agriculture wondered publicly why a spinster with no children cared so much about genetics. But all the scandal only helped the book become a household name. President Kennedy read it with interest, and instructed his science advisors to look into Carson’s allegations against DDT. They determined that her claims held up, but it was still 10 years before the widespread use of DDT was banned in the United States. Carson still has her detractors today who say that the banning of DDT killed more people — due to malaria-carrying mosquitos — than Hitler.

Carson died of breast cancer in April 1964. She lived to see the book’s commercial success. She didn’t live to see the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, or the Environmental Protection Agency — all of which came about due, in large part, to Silent Spring."

Photo by fellow blogger, Beyond the Fields We Know

And for those who like Playing for Change (as I certainly do) here's a beautifully done bluesy rendition with lots of beautiful scenery, as well as climate change effects.

John Paul Jones on "When the Levee Breaks

The Weight

A great video of Playing for Change...with some artists I'm sure you'll recognize!

Thanks to my friend, Martha, for posting this on FB.