Renewing our strengths to strengthen and heal our Earth

One of Earth’s remarkable gifts is the cycle of life that Nature regenerates.  In a sense all Life recycles.  All life–including human life, from dust to dust, recycles.

Metaphorically, a kind of recycling is revealed as the Earth rotates, and sunrise lights each day; moonrise brightens night.  Such a natural reality can boost one’s spirit of renewal.  At this time, the week of the People’s Climate March, Flood Wall Street,  the UN people’s summit and momentum on the divestment from fossil fuels, individual and collective strengths have been revitalizing.  In community our
strengths abound, our individuality shines.

Deepening actions and taking new actions to live in healthy and humane ways, loving and honoring each other and all creatures of Earth’s biosphere enable us to breathe anew.

As people marched, stood up, spoke out and sat-in, a sense of ourselves rose as citizens of the world and fellow creatures of the biosphere.

 

At home in our daily lives what does that look like?  When we have choices to make, what do we choose to do?  Take the time to walk a mile instead of driving it.  Listen to the birds; feel the breeze or heat as air sensations.  Greet a neighbor.  Turn from Facebook to a real book.  Read in solitude, to a child, with a group.   Plant a seed, a sunflower, a tree, a garden.  Cultivate with others.  Remove a lawn.  Refresh reuse with imagination.  Ask, “Do I need to buy this thing?”  Buy local.  Help create a restoration.  Build a  local economy based on restoration, learning, service.

There’s much to do and we have the power.  It’s the power not the purchase that marks our freedom.  That’s the strength we need that in turn can strengthen and heal Earth, Mother Earth.

It’s time to express ourselves by enacting humane, ecological habits of being.

Organic Growers Feed the Spirit and Body Politic

            Last week being with the Eco-Farm community at Asilomar, CA assured me that the organic growers—farmers, gardeners, and all who study, support, supply, partner or ally with them—feed more than populations.   As they cultivate and care for the land, the crops or animals, helping the biodiversity of flora and fauna and watersheds to flourish, these organic growers participate in a growing organic grassroots that feed our national and international spirit and the health of our body politic.

Since J. I. Rodale founded in 1930 the Rodale business in farming and publishing to focus on healing and the synergy of healthy soil and healthy people, organic growing practices and understandings have boosted what it means to see that human beings are a dynamic part of Nature and to have thriving relationships with the natural world.  More than 1600 people were a part of the 2014 Eco-Farm Conference initiated 34 years ago continuing the deepening of an ecological consciousness.  Some of the elders in the organic growing community convened a week earlier to reflect on what has been learned and what needs to be done.

Certainly, what has been done has included helping to generate an environmental, a.k.a sustainability, movement and many policies and laws that affect the political economy, starting with limiting damage that can be done to the biosphere.  Although there is much more to be done, the near-settled 2014 Farm Bill has provisions that assist organic farming and research.  Yet, in the United States, environmental laws have generally been based on the Commerce Clause in the Constitution, which recognizes Nature as property, a thing to be consumed or used.

Thankfully, in places, like Santa Monica, CA, the 20 year-old, continually updated, City’s Sustainability Plan has led to shifting the paradigm to recognize the rights of Nature in a Sustainability Bill of Rights.  Natural ecosystems, like a community, have fundamental inherent rights to thrive.  Those rights supersede private corporate interests.  Now, any Santa Monica citizen has standing to speak for the ecosystem and, if necessary, in a court of law to defend those rights of the Natural ecosystems, particularly the watershed, within the city.  Here’s an example of a local community deciding for itself how to be healthy and truly sustainable.

  At the 2014 Eco-Farm conference new seeds for opening minds and practicing humane habits were planted.  Visiting nearby independent organic farms and a community cannery-kitchen commenced the lessons.  Later, tucked in in Asilomar’s Monterey Pine forest across from sand dunes and ocean, it was enlightening to sit in gracious spaces—architectural weaves of wood, stone and light—to converse, question, or dine with a multigenerational gathering of farmers, gardeners, students, scientists, activists, educators, merchants, craftspeople, artists, poets, physicians, academics, leaders and neighbors. Keynote speaker Dr.Temple Grandin urged us to be better observers, attentive to the details that take into consideration an animal’s thinking-in-pictures.  Closing presenter Maria Rodale reminded us, as her grandfather understood, organic growing heals—in short, to Ms. Rodale, “More love, less fear.”   With such consciousness, the organic community is quite an animated organic grassroots that enliven the spirit and body politic.

The People’s Song is to Save Mother Earth

Saturday, September 21, in Seattle’s Myrtle Edwards Park, the Puget Sound poured into Elliot Bay and refreshed us at the shoreline.  There, our determination and love of Mother Earth, our commitment to our fellow creatures, especially the young, meshed with the breezy sunshine to bathe us.  Bill McKibben named it such a pretty “solar spill,” to me, our balm and nourishment.

We made our personal commitments in solidarity with the young boy who asked us to “save Mother Earth” and waved our red banners to “Draw the Line” against the Keystone XL pipeline and confront the climate crisis.

That  excessive materialism and unconscious consumerism have largely generated climate change does not deter us from awakening to our finest consciousness and humane living in the Anthropocene Age.

The beauty of that realization rushed back to me later in the evening when I sat immersed in a local Seattle performance of Les Miserables and the “People’s Song”uplifted the voices in unison to assert the human power to live free, joyfully and lovingly.

The Law is that Nature has rights in Santa Monica: “We are a living, breathing planet.”

It took no more than a minute, perhaps because nearly three years of thoughtful work, education and advocacy made it so obvious, that on Tuesday, April 9, 2013, the Santa Monica City Council unanimously, 7 – 0, enacted into law the Sustainability Bill of Rights (SBR).  The ordinance recognizes the rights of Nature and community rights as fundamental and inalienable, superseding corporate interests.  Accordingly,  “Natural communities and ecosystems possess fundamental and inalienable rights to exist and flourish in the City Of Santa Monica.”  The law challenges the legal status of nature as merely property and empowers the City or residents to bring actions on behalf of local ecosystems.

Significantly, this new law codifies “that corporate entities, and their directors and managers, do not enjoy special privileges or powers under the law that subordinate the community’s rights to their private interests.” Commercial corporate interests shall not violate the community’s rights for a sustainable future nor treat the natural ecosystem as property for short-term profit.

The ordinance reflects a momentous, ecologically conscious act of local self-government.  It was sparked by the absurd and destructive Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission Supreme Court 2010 ruling that unleashed unlimited corporate or union funds in United States elections, equating spending money with the people’s protected free speech.

The city’s Task Force on the Environment foresaw a flurry of potential election spending by polluters jeopardizing natural environment protections.  Biologist Mark Gold, task force chairman, brought forth ideas he was considering with environmental lawyers about a legal paradigm shift regarding Nature and its relationship to human beings.

Linda Sheehan, the Earth Law Center’s Executive Director and Shannon Biggs, Global Exchange’s rights-based organizer, partnered with the task force, along with residents who convened Santa Monica Neighbors Unite! to promote understanding and passage of the SBR.  Thomas Linzey, co-founder of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, lent early support, and his colleagues brought the Democracy School to town.  Santa Monica City Attorney, Marsha Moutrie, spent months studying and grappling with bold possibilities and developed the legal language with Gold and Sheehan.   Dean Kubani and Shannon Parry, leaders from the city’s Office of Sustainability and Environment added to the deliberations with care.

The community really stepped up engaged in local meetings at homes or at neighborhood associations, workshops and town halls.  Santa Monica College and Santa Monica High School student leaders endorsed the SBR right away and immediately joined SM Neighbors Unite!, energizing gatherings and so inspiring the city council.  SMC’s Associated Students Presidents Harrison Wills and Parker Jean and SaMoHi Solar Alliance 2011 – 2012 co-presidents Charlotte Biren and Jenna Perelman, along with the school’s Team Marine, have proven invaluable as dedicated environmentalists with vivid imagination, joy and understanding.

On January 24, 2012, where the city council resolved to move forward with the SBR, the mighty voices of youth particularly heralded the profound meaning of this bold ordinance.

Some might argue that the SBR needs to be stronger by denying U.S. Constitutional protections of corporate personhood rights or of the Commerce Clause that favor corporations over community interests.  True, but the SBR advances our natural world’s protections in ways that energize our struggle to hold sacred Mother Earth, safeguarding her, ourselves and our community rights.

The reality is that when we recognize the rights of Nature, we really deepen and strengthen our human rights.  Our biological existence—synapse, heartbeat and breath—is entwined so delicately with the elements and energy of Earth’s biosphere and natural ecosystems that embrace, comprise and nourish us.  Mother Earth brings life to our metaphysical being.  In the material world, our natural being bears our souls.

Realizing the vitality of Nature verifies the vividness and vulnerability of our own lives.  Where would we be without Nature?  Such a simple question can unearth a bounty of lush understandings or tremulous uncertainties.   Where would we be without Nature?

Marianne Simon, a community member, serenely voiced an eloquent answer that deeply moved us at the March 12 council meeting’s first reading of the Sustainability Bill of Rights  ordinance.  Listen to her and others there:

     We are a living breathing planet over 4 billion years old.  As humans we showed    up some few thousand years ago, and have the illusion that we control things.  But the way we’ve done things up to this point has not always been for the greater good.

And as our development increases exponentially around the world, we have to look at our approach through different eyes.

The earth was here before us, and at this rate, she will be here after us.  No matter how much we eviscerate, level, dam or channel, it is just a matter of time, before things revert.  But the question becomes at what point in our process do we, as a species, become at risk?

How much water do we have to taint, before there is none left to drink? How many mountains do we have to level before we drown in our own avalanche of sludge.  How many oceans do we poison, before we ourselves have nothing to ingest but those self same poisons.  How many species, varieties do we destroy before we find ourselves vulnerable to a devastating virus, bacteria or wilt.?  All the money in the world won’t save us.

Ask a 5 year old and they will tell you the answer.  How can such an intelligent race be so stupid in their shortsightedness about our future.

It is long overdue that the earth have a seat at the table in the decisions we make.  In how we utilize our resources in a sustainable manner, in how we can grow and support future generations of not just human beings, but all living things.

It is long overdue that this bill become the standard by which we guide ourselves and our impact on the planet.”

The Rights of Nature in Santa Monica!

It’s time!  March 12, 2013, the Santa Monica Sustainability Bill of Rights is set to be considered by the Santa Monica City Council after two years of study and advocacy.  With imagination and deep understanding of the influence that Santa Monica can have to shift the legal paradigm for environmental and human sustainability, the Task Force on the Environment has recommended a new law that recognizes the rights of Nature and the community rights to supersede corporate interests.

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

6:30 p.m.

Santa Monica City Council Meeting

Santa Monica City Hall, 1685 Main Street, 2^nd Floor

Santa Monica, CA 90401

Agenda Item 7-C: Introduction and First Reading of an Ordinance Establishing Sustainable Rights for Santa Monica residents and the natural environment.

 STAFF REPORT and SBR Ordinance

Who Determines our Sustainable Future—Residents or Corporations?

We need a Santa Monica Sustainability Bill of Rights to protect our water, air, and land and to remedy climate change.

Write or telephone council members: council@smgov.net or (310) 458-8201.

            In 1994, Santa Monica established its first comprehensive City Sustainability Plan.  The city and community have worked hard to protect the natural ecosystems that make life possible.  Based on the recommendation of the Santa Monica’s Task Force on the Environment, Santa Monica will now move to recognize the rights of Nature with a new legal paradigm for sustainability to be a legal obligation and not just a voluntary intention.  Now, we need to ensure that the rights of the community and our natural ecosystems take precedence over corporate interests.

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

The Supreme Court’s January 2010 Citizens United ruling has given corporations freedom- of-speech rights that belong to “We, the People.”  Our environmental laws and regulations can thus be weakened by corporate campaign donations buying politicians’ loyalties that can lead to laws favoring corporate interests above everything else.

Santa Monica needs a Sustainability Bill of Rights as the law to protect our inalienable rights to a sustainable future.  We are a part of Nature, and our natural ecosystems are not solely property to manage and control. 

 A Santa Monica Sustainability Bill of Rights empowers the community to:

•  Have sustainable water, food, energy, air, soil, climate systems, waste treatment, etc.;

•  Set policies that advance self-sufficiency within the City to help achieve those goals;

•  Decide how to ensure the community’s health, safety and welfare; and

•  Put sustainable needs of people and natural ecosystems above corporate interests.

The Splendor of Being

“If you could see the Earth illuminated when you were in a place as dark as night, it would look to you more splendid than the moon.” –Galileo Galilei

To see our Mother Earth in her quintessence in the Milky Way reminds us that all living beings potentially bear her splendor.  Only as each of us, as human beings and fellow creatures of the biosphere, acting  compassionately, reflecting deep understanding and thought can our splendor really shine.

Travel through such beauty with NASA.

Rachel’s Gift of Water

Children and young people see deeply into how we are one on this planet.

As one nine year-old, Rachel Beckwith, could ask that gifts for her birthday be giving water to others, each of us can imagine how we can turn our hopes into practical service for others to share in Mother Earth’s nourishment.  Imagine and act with love.  Rachel’s inspiration gives to all of us.

Bike it! Takes a Load of CO2 off and Wakes You Up!

by Charlotte . . .

As one of our principal goals, the SaMoHi Solar Alliance (SSA) works to reduce our school’s carbon footprint through encouraging positive green behavioral changes in the SaMoHi student body and community. Currently, our largest campaign is Bike Day – a day in which we encourage students to get to and from school using alternative forms of transportation– such as walking, bicycling, skate boarding, and using public transit.

Using a carbon calculator, we determined that Samohi could prevent approximately 2,500 tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere if every student and administrator rode his or her bike once a week.

Since our initial event in October of 2007, we have seen a tremendous increase in not only the number of Bike Day participants, but also in the number of students biking and using other forms of alternative transportation on a daily basis. The numbers have increased from an average of twelve bikes in the school bike racks on any given day in 2007 to an average of about 30 at the start of 2009. On Bike Days the numbers swell to over 100 student bikers and participants.

To encourage students to take part in Bike Days, SSA has set up a system of initiatives – offering free popsicles to all participants and raffles for prizes that range from donated bike bells and helmets to actual bikes. The event has grown into our school’s culture as students begin to anticipate the next Bike Day events.

Working recently with Samohi PTSA, we drafted a Bike Day/Bike Safety Proposition for Santa Monica Malibu Unified School District (SMMUSD) that the school board recently passed – expanding bike safety, education, and access throughout the district. The proposition also called for a district-wide Bike.

At this point in time, Bike It! has experienced a transition to the district-wide Bike It! Walk It! Day.  The district’s sensation has been driven by students and PTSA members.  SSA students have given presentations at the middle schools in order to encourage students on the benefits of biking and alternative transportation.  In June 2011, the success of the two district wide Bike It! Days in 2010-2011 school year got SSA a school district commendation, Santa Monica City youth commendation, and a Presidential Environmental Youth Award presented from President Obama and the Environmental Protection Agency.  With this publicity, Bike It! Day has grown as a well-known and well-appreciated SMMUSD event including all schools willing to participate.

As one young woman joyfully exclaims, “The best thing about riding a bike is waking up.”

Friends at Rio+20

When we breathe deeply on Mother Earth, it’s uplifting to have friends and feisty allies to protect her. Explore how Linda Sheehan and her team at Earth Law Center persevere.

Linda has been a fabulous inspiration to us in Santa Monica as one of the lead-lawyers working with us to make our Sustainability Bill of Rights real and replenishing.

Commencement: a Cultural Climate Change of Consciousness

Sheathed in coolness or sunshine, gowns flowing, caps bobbing, smiles glowing, June’s Commencement season blossoms with enthralling personalities and invigorating commitments as some of our brightest, most inspiring young environmental leaders are celebrating their graduation from Santa Monica High School or Santa Monica College.  Charlotte, Jenna, James, Luis, Joshua, like millions of students across the planet, are set to advance to the next level of their academic studies, but the truth is these young scholar-activists are already advanced, far advanced.  For they see beyond mainstream culture and are energized to help lead a cultural climate change of consciousness that we urgently need, starting with ending fossil fuels being our main means of powering our lives.  This is the gift of the class of 2012.

Cognizant that how we, as the human species, inhabit the biosphere impacts others and Nature’s communities and ecosystem, these young spirits take seriously the fact that their lives matter to the Seventh Generation, 140 to 175 years in the future.  They understand that posterity’s well-being and the quality of long-term life on Mother Earth depends on who we are now, who we are becoming and how we choose in our daily lives to provide for ourselves and our communities.  Sustainability is no slogan, no branding to these young leaders.  It is the commitment to press to make renewable energy generation a commonplace and to shift the impact of our lives and our economy to be primarily restorative and regenerative not singularly extractive or exploitative. This is the profound and powerful challenge for the class of 2012 in the Anthropocene Age.

As reported in May by the Christian Science Monitor, current CO2 levels at the Artic, a precursor for other regions, have been recorded to be at 400 pmm, accelerating climate change and further jeopardizing the conditions amenable to life and ironically, to the material conveniences and physical comforts that define progress in the industrial world.  Convenience and comfort are now costing us too much.  This obsolete version of progress is costing us too much of Nature and too much of our own human potential, especially in terms of a truly innovative economy that conserves as it produces.

Mother Earth is tipping into uninhabitable conditions.  Truly, the climate change that we need is a cultural one that values our humanity being a part of Nature and relishes in caring for our natural habitats and ecosystems, oceans, watersheds and forests, etc.

Listening and learning from the young and young-in-spirit leaders will help show us the way.  Three come to mind: Brittany Trilford from New Zealand, Severn Cullis-Suzuki from Canada, and Bill McKibben from the United States.

“Are You Here to Save Face — or Save Us?”: Brittany Trilford, 17, Addresses World Leaders at Rio+20”

“At Rio+20, Severn Cullis-Suzuki Revisits Historic ’92 Speech, Fights for Next Generation’s Survival”

“Bill McKibben, environmentalist and author. Co-founder of 350.org, an environmental group working to help solve the climate crisis.

Will we re-imagine our lives and meet the challenge that what we know requires us to power our lives on renewable energy?  School’s out.  Mother Earth and humanity are not—not yet.  As Mark Twain admonishes us, “Don’t let school get in the way of your education.”