March(ing) with a Springy Step

                Pablo Neruda’s poem, “Spring,” published in Fully Empowered (NYC: Farrar, 1962) reveals how each act we do, each step we take, however humble, matters immensely and brilliantly to who we are and our place on Mother Earth and to who we are becoming more deeply as human beings and creatures of the biosphere.

“Spring”   

The bird has come/to bring light to birth./ From every trill of his,/ water is born./ And between water and light which unwind the air,/ now the spring is inaugurated / now the seed is aware of its own growing;/ the root takes shape in the corolla,/at last the eyelids of the pollen open./ All this accomplished by a simple bird/ from his perch on a green branch.

“La Primavera” 

El pájaro ha venido/ a dar la luz: /de cada trino suyo / nace el agua./ Y entre agua y luz que el aire desarrollan/ ya está la primavera inaugurada/ ya sabe la semilla que ha crecido,/ la raíz se retrata en la corolla,/ se abren por fin los párpados del polen./ Todo lo hizo un pájaro sencillo/ desde una rama verde.

Step outside.  Breathe.  As the Bioneers love to remind us, “It’s all connected.”  Ah, yes, we are all connected.  Let’s act accordingly.  Step by step, springy step by springy step, quite a march(ing).

 

Thomas Linzey for We, the People, 2.0

Santa Monica welcomes Thomas Linzey, who will be giving an inspiring talk to be filmed for a new project called We, the People, 2.0.  To Linzey, “The environmental movement is a failure.  Whether it’s climate change or the health of our oceans, air, and soil, the planet is worse off now than it was 40 years ago, and rapidly declining. Yet, corporations have more rights than our communities or ecosystems and are doing just fine.  This is how we fix this situation.”

Thomas Linzey: Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund Fights for Community Rights and the Rights of Nature   

to be portrayed in a new film–We, the People, 2.0

Sunday, February 26, 2012

2 – 4:30 p.m.

Santa Monica Main Library, Martin Luther King Auditorium

601 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica, CA 90401

(This is a free event.)

Tree Media is filming WE THE PEOPLE 2.0.  The time is now for this film.

Leila Conners, who co-directed the critically acclaimed film, The Eleventh Hour, sets out to bring us the voice of Thomas Linzey, awakening us to the grandeur of what we can do to revitalize caring for our natural ecosystems and ourselves.  Leila lets us know how momentous it is to be making We, the People, 2.0.  She relates, “Having dealt with environmental issues now for over 15 years, I know that the work of Thomas Linzey is THE solution to endless environmental destruction.  I’ve often wondered, as I know many of you have, why, if we all want clean air, water and soil and a healthy planet for our children, why can’t we make this happen?  Why is it just getting worse?  Thomas has the answer and also the solution. It’s across the board, it answers the 99%.  That’s why we are making this film, because everyone needs to hear about this work.”

With our help through crowd-funding, the film can be made.  Check in with Tree Media to help out!

Paying for Our Carbon Footprint Saves Us

How much does our carbon footprint cost?   It is time for us to be honest and put a price on carbon, the use of which spews CO2 into the atmosphere.  Not paying attention to what that pollution costs our climate, natural ecosystems, public and personal health, and future generations causes huge problems and fosters a lie that the quality of life is currently improving.  

For real progress, a growing movement, including, Dr. Jim Hansen, Director, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the world’s leading climate scientist, is calling for a carbon tax.

What is a carbon tax?   According to the folks writing at carbontax.org, simply put it:

A carbon tax is a tax on the carbon content of fuels — effectively a tax on the carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels. Thus, carbon tax is shorthand for carbon dioxide tax or CO2 tax.

Unlike what we might first think, it is actually more expensive for us not to pay for the CO2 our industry and lifestyles emit into the atmosphere.  Listening to Dr. Hansen relate the ingenious idea of a refundable tax that could reduce our fossil fuel use by 30% in ten years stimulates the possibility of being responsible for how we move in and impact the real world.

Paying for our carbon footprint saves us.

Rachel Carson on Our First Existential Principle

Like the Birth of Venus wondrously portrayed by the Renaissance artist Botticelli, life, too, rises from the sea.  Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us displays the origins of life on Mother Earth as an enthralling literary portrait.

When they went ashore the animals that took up a land life carried with them a part of the sea in their bodies, a heritage which they passed on to their children and which even today links each land animal with its origin in the ancient sea. Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal—each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water.  This is our inheritance from the day, untold millions of years ago, when a remote ancestor, having progressed from the one-celled to the many-celled stage, first developed a circulatory system in which the fluid was merely the water of the sea.  In the same way, our lime-hardened skeletons are a heritage from the calcium-rich ocean of Cambrian time.  Even the protoplasm that streams within each cell of our bodies has the chemical structure impressed upon all living matter when the first simple creatures were brought forth in the ancient sea.  And as life itself began in the sea, so each of us begins his individual life in a miniature ocean within his mother’s womb, and in the stages of his embryonic development repeats the steps by which his race evolved, from gill-breathing inhabitants of a water world to creatures able to live on land.  (28 – 29)

 

 

Sustain!

Resolution Declaring the City’s Commitment to Sustainable Rights

After 9 p.m. on a beautiful Tuesday night, before scores of eager young people, families, friends, neighbors, and allies, the Santa Monica City Council agreed 6 – 0 to approve a resolution to advance a Sustainability Bill of Rights at its January 24, 2012 meeting!  It’s a big first step.

Earlier, as the late afternoon light melted into crimson, violet and bronze, the sunset swept the community into Nature’s embrace.   Rallying on the steps of the Santa Monica City Hall, a couple of blocks from the Pacific Ocean, all sorts of people gathered to boost their energies for the upcoming meeting.  Charlotte Biren and Jenna Perelman, the co-presidents of the SaMoHi Solar Alliance, led the way by speaking clearly about the future that, as Jenna beautifully noted, we hold in our hands.

She called to our minds the gospel spiritual, “He’s got the Whole World in His Hands,” and emphasized that “He, we” can change, as we need now, to set ourselves on a firm sustainable footing.  Charlotte uplifted our spirit with her exuberance and determination to stress that it is the younger generations who will have to live with [or not] the results of how we now regard and use our natural resources.

Thanks to the inspiration of these two young women, other youths, many from SaMoHi Team Marine and Heal the Bay, came, too, bicycling, skateboarding, walking, or driving over to be a part of a growing local movement.  Clearly, the Millennials are wiling to press ahead in bold ways to sustain a future.  With activists and community members from all ages, they take seriously that we need to shift the paradigm from seeing Nature as ours to manage or control to recognizing the “fundamental rights of natural communities and ecosystems to exist, thrive and evolve,” as the resolution declares.  In short, it’s a shift to community rights and the rights of Nature coming before and being above corporate interests.

Participatory democracy moved indoors into a packed city council chambers, and a little after 8 p.m., 40 of us stood up before the city council to support the binding resolution to commit to a real sustainable future that the city’s Task Force on the Environment had brought forward.  A wide variety of people who live, work or study in or visit Santa Monica examined the issue based on diverse perspectives.

Parker, one of the Santa Monica College student leaders, quoted John Muir stressing, “God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.”  What Muir asserted about trees bears the truth for all of Nature.

By 9:30 p.m., the council voted 6 – 0 to require that the city staff makes sure that our City Sustainability Plan update, due by September, includes the practices, policies and new goals called for by the Sustainability Bill of Rights. The council resolved that the staff come back with proposed statute(s) that will make the commitments legal, enforceable obligations.

Okay, the Move to Amend resolution stumbled and fell 2 – 4.  The challenge is to convince the council that abolishing corporate “personhood” is not going too far and that that it is what the community calls for, after what our mayor expects to be a public airing and debate.  So be it.

It is indeed a serious matter to amend our Constitution.  As advocates, we’ll move forward to hold public discussions and debates for a serious, not a symbolic, vote from our council to put an end to affording corporations the rights of people.

It means we will also do our best to bring in a Democracy School.   All of our efforts are strengthening our sustainable future.

Here are two accounts of Tuesday’s community and council actions for a Sustainability Bill of Rights. http://www.smdp.com/hc.e.73358.lasso#print

http://santamonica.patch.com/articles/council-moves-toward-making-green-goals-mandatory

We Need You!

 We Need You to Help Us Choose a

Sustainability Bill of Rights

for Santa Monica to Protect our Clean Water, Air and Land

  and a Move to Amend Resolution!

 Why?  Big corporations are dominating people, Nature and our democracy.

  Tuesday, January 24, 2012

 5:30 p.m. Rally

Support Sustainability Bill of Rights on the steps of City Hall

6:30 p.m.

 Santa Monica City Council Meeting

Santa Monica City Hall

1685 Main Street

Council Chambers, 2nd Floor

Santa Monica, CA 90401

 Join Santa Monica Neighbors Unite! Urge our city council to agree! council@smgov.net or (310) 458-8201

 ………………

Santa Monica Blue Bus Lines #2, #3, #4 and #8 serve City Hall. Free parking (w/validation) on Olympic Drive, in the Civic Center Parking Structure

Who Decides, Santa Monica?

Who decides, Santa Monica?  Just US—making sure that our community rights and the rights of Nature thrive so we survive! 

SMSustainabilityBillofRightsDRAFT120111

      Sunshine or rain.  Sweet air.  Iridescent Earth.

Walking from home to our Santa Monica community garden early on a bright winter morning is one of the best ways for me to wake up.  Vivid cerulean skies sharpen the senses.  The sapphire ocean engraves a crisp line that carries the eye to a freckled boy whose hair tousles in the wind with the laughter of a girl, both riding bikes behind a woman, probably their mom, on her bike.  Scenes like these awaken me to what really matters.

Breathing in, breathing out: what beckons me outside pulsates within—my being a part of Nature.  That simple, profound, obvious fact makes everything clear.  We are a part of Nature—not above, beyond or separate from, but a part of Nature.   Nature—the Creation—makes our lives possible.

Natural ecosystems generate the force and energy of existence on earth—Mother Earth.  Denying or avoiding that truth does not change that reality.  Our human existence is a biological reality, an evolutionary testimony.  Human species, Homo sapiens, we are creatures of the biosphere.  To deny that reality threatens us.  To threaten that reality denies us.

It is critical that we confront these fundamental truths of our humanity, especially in these times of climate change, corporate domination, mass consumerism and militarism—the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans.  To me, in “Occupy” terms, it is time to  “reclaim our humanity.”  That is one big reason that in Santa Monica, California, more and more of us see that a vital way to do exactly that is to establish a Sustainability Bill of Rights ordinance, rooted in our community rights and the rights of Nature taking precedence over and subordinating corporate interests.

The vision is to build upon our seventeen-year comprehensive Santa Monica City Sustainability Plan first established in 1994.  A Sustainability Bill of Rights would establish that the measurable goals of our sustainability are enforceable legal obligations, not just voluntary intentions.  Over the years, our city and community have worked hard to protect our natural ecosystem, but the nation’s system of environmental laws and regulations are just not enough to secure our natural world and our lives.

On January 24, 2012, neighbors and allies will bring the ideas and commitments of a Sustainability Bill of Rights before our Santa Monica City Council to be carried forth.

We need to shift our paradigm and recognize the rights of Nature that assure our human rights.  Codifying that consciousness in laws and practices that relegate corporate profits and power to a subservient position is essential to life.  In concert with the international movement for the rights of Nature and working directly with the Earth Law Center, Global Exchange and the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, we are creating coalitions, including Santa Monica Neighbors Unite! to build understanding and support for a Sustainability Bill of Rights.

Yes, it is a momentous, existential expectation, what “We, the People” in Santa Monica can choose.  “We, the People,” the ultimate sovereign in our republic and the source of our democratic power, can take nothing for granted.

In early December, we learned from the Global Carbon Project that from 2009 – 2010 carbon emissions on Earth leaped 5.9%.  A looming increase in a single year, the jump is arguably the largest since the Industrial Revolution.  Yet, our United States political leaders quibble, dodge or stall, including at last month’s United Nations climate change conference in Durban, South Africa.  Oil profiteers press the State Department and the Obama Administration to allow TransCanada Corp. to build the XL Keystone pipeline, keeping us stuck in the sludge of dependence on dirty fossil fuels, the extraction of which produces multiple times the amount of Green House Gas emissions than do conventional modes of extraction—“crude” oil indeed.

International carbon outputs bedevil us, but locally we can invigorate what it means to be responsible in reducing our own emissions, as we also conserve, preserve and restore our natural ecosystems in imaginative ways that renew us.  We can begin by valuing our community rights to clean water, air and land as our birthrights and our true commonwealth.

It is up to us to decide—just us.