One Moon Past Solstice

One moon past solstice and shit continues to hit the fan. It seems the reactionaries, terrorists, 1%ers and those cheering for fundamentalist beliefs have taken the reigns for a final assault on the vast majority of us who advocate peace, cooperation and security based on meeting needs rather than killing those who are "different". Tragically, both the Israelis and Vladimir Putin claim moral high ground whilst their policies threaten innocents and create depraved crimes upon humanity. Peace has never poured from the end of a gun, only death and destruction can come from invasions, bombings, drones and air strikes. Closer to home, our failed Central American and South American policies are coming home to roost. Undermining duly elected governments, illegal funding of rebels and foisting puppet leaders on a region so close to home as well as the protracted "drug war" have led to trillions of dollars being shunted to thugs and terrorist organizations with enough capital to hire their own police forces, pay off police and continue to exploit our inflated markets. In just one moon, there have been thousands of children walking into our country to find a better life but no one has told them that in one of our biggest cities, murders have increased to more than one per hour. The anger and angst that is being felt throughout the people of planet Earth has reached a fever pitch. We are daily assaulted by horrifying incidents, the biggest floods, the biggest wildfires, the biggest earthquakes ever recorded are becoming routine. One moon past Solstice and we are coming into a bitter harvest.

Living by the seasons means that at this point in the year (in this part of the planet) we need to be harvesting, storing, securing the investment that we have made to hold us through the coming winter. Waging war, taking on futile fights and trying to take over through militarism is not sustainable. The writing has been on the wall for a long time, but few wanted to read the message. As we ramp up to a new normal, what humans can do to stem the tide of Idiocracy is three fold. First, teach and learn as much as possible, about whatever turns you on. Second, respect the children and the elders for without the first, there is no hope and without the second, there would be no us. Third, each one teach one about the beautiful abundance that comes from ratcheting back our reliance on fossil fuels, redefining our wants and needs, reducing, reusing and composting. In nature, no organism produces waste, only raw materials for some other organism to use to meet their needs. It is time to integrate this fact into everything we humans do.

I am spiritually and psychically crushed by the events of this moon and will be taking a brief hiatus from writing this blog. I will continue to write my seven posts per moon, but for the next ten days I will be silent in honor of the spirits lost through the recent aggression of idiots everywhere with far too much technology in their hands. Normally I tell people that silence is complicity, but for the next week and a half, I'm going to be anything but complicit. I will be focusing much more narrowly on my community and fixing something that has been broken for a long, long time. Please wish me luck and if you can afford to send a few dollars, please use our link through Paypal or send a check or money order using snail mail to: ECO-Tours of Wisconsin Inc. 1445 Porlier street Green Bay, WI 54301-3334

Coincidence?

This week the Russian backed separatists over-zealously took down a passenger aircraft that they supposedly mistook for a military transport plane. Militants in Israel also began a land offensive against Gaza. One of the most technologically superior forces in the world pitting themselves against mostly young people armed with sticks and stones and a tiny fraction of individuals with what amount to really big fireworks. Looking critically at casualty figures, when you have thousands dead, or even hundreds on one side and zero on the other, or mere single digits, these actions reek of bullying. How many times have each of us said, or wanted to say, pick on someone your own size. This time, no one seems to be saying anything.

It was evident what had happened even before the fact. Bullies, who to me, seem a lot like our tea party folks in both countries are at work tearing at the fabric, not only of civility, but of basic human values. Yet the majority of people whop do not agree with these radical positions are being forced to stand aside while power and control games are waged in their territory. In some cases on their very land! I for one will not stand idly by, holding my tongue. On the one hand, siege mentality corrupts even the most intelligent folks and fear of change, the "other" and presumed future losses associated with the dawn of a new age, but the costs of these old way responses to changing conditions assures that we can never reach a desired future state of justice, freedom, any of the democratic ideals or a balanced social structure that rewards individuals for benefits that they confer on their neighbors.

Instead, the tribe that I belong to is actually in the majority. We look to the change afoot as a hopeful sign that the next generation will find their way past many of the issues that seem to blind us. The peaceful loving people of the world have laid many thousands of wreaths and bouquets in honor of the innocent dead. Public awareness of the fact that Israelis often keep Palestinians as veritable slaves, complete with pass cards and wage slavery in a hostile land that is their homeland first, recently carved out of a landscape that used to be country that others called home. Like here in the U.S.A. the native people and their place on the planet are summarily ignored. this relationship takes being a horrible neighbor to the highest level. So too, the separatists in Crimea want nothing more than to be the worst neighbors possible. Much like the husband who purposely throws a red towel in the same load with his spouses white clothes, they seem to be hell bent on teaching their countrymen a lesson...They are saying with their actions that "We are terrifically irresponsible and not to be trusted in any case, perhaps you would rather we just did not play in this realm any longer."

Well, to all those who think that they have been put upon and who feel the desire to opt out of civil society, I call BULLSHIT! If you like the roads, you like the bridges, you may not like what your child learns in school, but you want the benefits of a stable, society with justice and meaningful lives for the greatest number of people, then you have to learn to be a good neighbor and learn to leave the world better because of your passing. Participants in civil societies cannot hide away and shirk their responsibilities to the greater good for long without compromising the quality of life for everyone.
Just as a community of plants and animals becomes more stable the more players it has, people cannot live as a monoculture, we just are not designed for it. Each of us fills a unique niche. If you are not building and creating, or at least growing you are on a trajectory toward death, destruction, dissolution and decay.

Not Another Biochar Blog!

Yes, you guessed it, I'm on a tirade again. I know a way to produce at least twice as much food on a set amount of land, and do it with style, grace and an eye to making the planet liveable into the long term future. It takes a bit of coaxing the fire goddess to come out and play, and some art, but mostly science in delivering this precious gift to the landscape. As the name implies, it is biologically activated carbon, which helps shrink the carbon footprint of humanity and it is an idea that ancient cultures, more advanced in some ways than our own developed nearly beyond the mists, and myths of our time.

True science in agriculture is more properly a biology lesson rather than one in organic chemistry.

This biochar revolution translates interestingly as a fractile form of our own humanity, or lack of it. Essentially the structures of and within biochar allow a person to hold fourteen acres of surface area in a single hand full. It is easy to understand that soil microbes would be safe, secure and prolific with material like tat around. Even people unschooled in biology can understand the tiny "pores" in the material act as territory and shelter for soil organisms.

Each of these microscopically tiny beings is a hydrophyllic (water loving) creature. When moisture is available, they thrive and hold on to as much as they can, then slowly excrete food for neighboring organisms. It is what they do when not assaulted with petrochemically based fertilizers. Biochar works by making "room" for the creatures that mediate nutrient upload for plants and the more soil organisms that there are in the soil. the healthier your plants become, reducing the needs for pest control and most soil amendments.

Donations help defray the costs of biochar workshops, ECO-Tours and tree planting across Northeast Wisconsin. Two years ago, we began making and sharing information on bio-char and want everyone to rediscover this miracle substance. As human beings, this substance is one of our birthrights and needs to be used everywhere! In principle, I try to avoid as much fossil fuel use as possible in my char making. I consider myself a charmaster for home and garden scale. Sizing up is something that I have a firm grasp of the physics, but have not built large scale devices for farm use. If we can find funding, I would love to create a char "incubator" project for farm scale operations. If you would like to donate specifically to char making projects, please tag your payment as such.

Thus Began Our Corpulence

Now and again we see in the "news" a ranking of states where the average person is the fattest. Being the beer and cheese state, Wisconsin often rates pretty high on these lists. It is not uncommon for bars to outnumber churches around here, but contrary to popular myth, we do not wear cheese on our heads, that is for folks who are not from around here who think that it will help them "fit in". Wisconsin frequently leads the nation in binge drinking in both frequency and intensity and a huge number of calories are contained in liquor of all types, so we get more than our fair share of those. What continues to startle me is the amount of carbohydrates and sugars that get consumed around here. Not just here in Wisconsin, but our nation as a whole seems hell bent on ruining our health virtually from childhood on.
What is most baffling to me is that the very foods that historically used to stave off starvation, eaten in relatively small quantities for relatively brief periods, have become common at every meal.

We may forget the history of our people, but anthropologists know that there are several factors combining to make us fat. Archaeology is finding proof that civilization came before bulk grain storage and that rather than a technology that increased life expectancy, created healthier human beings or assisted in making life better for the majority of humans alive on the planet, the rapid increase in grain production and storage actually led to many "modern" ills such as indentured servitude, wage slavery, prisons, graft and corruption. Even the Bible spreads the fiction that bread is the staff of life. The preponderance of the bread bowl at restaurants proves this beyond a shadow of doubt. Grains have always been the last line of defense against starvation, in the past we relied on the paleo diet. We did not eat grains routinely as a staple to be eaten every day.

There are authors who explain in detail both the scientific and health reasons for avoiding too much grain, carbohydrates generally and sugar but to really get a sense of  what we are doing to our bodies, we need to look more closely at our food system. Corporate "farmers" love a monocrop. They cannot be bothered with the thoughtful and long-term commitment that is required to practice husbandry. Doing in-depth research and controlling what plants are used to produce the best seed for future planting is something that has been taken care of by multi-national corporate welfare recipients. I have people in my family who own one of the largest corn seed production facilities in our state, so I have a bit of an understanding of how these sorts of things work. In addition to hiring "illegals" to do the detassling,  they are one of the largest energy users in their county because Lord and Lady know plowing up thousands of acres is a lot of petrochemical work. They cannot rely on fall weather to dry their crop. It is too valuable, so massive energy inputs are needed to husk, shell and dry the seed corn. The physical production of grain is often as bad for the planet as the resulting "food" that we create from the crops.

I will not belabor the point, but let us just say that production of cash crop grains in our country has become such large business that the common person would be unable to fathom the depth of depravity required to wreck entire ecosystems for the sake of cash. Remember, in a capitalistic society, the people who are most rewarded are those with the largest piles of cash. The money is considered a "good" whether it was come by ruthlessly or not. The grain producers are ruthless.

Inside our bodies this ubiquitous material chafes at our cells, creating damage throughout our bodies. Our bodies then throw white blood cells to those cells trying to heal the damage. This causes inflammation. In many cases, this leads to pain. Culturally we have been taught that we can take comfort in food. There are even (usually high carbohydrate and high sugar) foods that we call comfort foods, but actually, these things when put in our bodies create a lack of comfort and often lead to disease. Swallowing the great lie that bread is the staff of life was a breaking point for humans. It has led to great pain, unending sacrifice, slavery, riots and ill-health for billions of people worldwide. when you look a little more closely, you can see why the ruling classes and food producers love them...They last nearly forever when compared to vegetables, they pack the biggest caloric punch by volume and therefore can be manipulated, packaged, shipped and consumed easily nearly everywhere on the planet.

The terrible part is that these sorts of conveniences always come with a hefty price.  

Waves of Sound for Vivid Imagery

This is one of my favorite things about writing. There is amongst the people of today a virtual cacophony of voices, of perspectives of strident lies even, that reverberate through society. Those who are listening are hearing a voice of discord and retribution blasted from the rooftops wherever money has led to policy. Those who are listening also respond to the true voices that are hearing the call of Mother Earth and her creatures, all sounding the same eternal voice of giving. When i write, I aim to create songs of response to the calls of the wild. Encouraging my readers to respond with equal measure of delight and creativity. My stories can only live within you, without an audience, all of my words mean nothing. We may be the only people on the planet today that hear the voices of nature imploring us to change, but we stand as one people on the brink of wresting power from the dying grip of the multinational corporations.

Biocharproject.org

We represent, to the powers that be, a vast ocean of humanity and when our waters slosh, no man-made erection will stand before the tsunami of public opinion. No hope will exist for those who would exploit us for their own gain, nor will we stand for their infernal poisoning, their lies or their excuses any longer. The song that we must begin to sing is the song of giving back to nature, not desecrating it further. That is why I continue to plant trees, make what part of the world that I have the ability to change, just that much better for the next generation. That is why I garden, do it organically, and it is why I make char as well. The last time we had the retort on the fire, a guest at the bonfire said, "Perhaps, if the end times do come, this will be one thing that we might need to know to survive." I cannot hope to delude you, if Lord and Lady will it, my words can help move things along.

Memorializing Another Friend

Mij, Jim backwards is how he introduced himself. Consummate professional that he was, he always listened carefully, while watching the entire sphere of our environment, worked efficiently and was able to bear even the worst conditions with grace and dogged perseverance. I had many things to thank him for, many injuries avoided, many hours saved by listening to his sage advice. This is meant to be a huge compliment and it is not often that I lavish this much praise on folks more than a decade younger, but his life instilled the wisdom of years in his countenance, whilst never losing his childlike curiosity and playfulness. I take this opportunity to say to all, we could all stand to be a bit more like Mij.

His uncanny encyclopedic ability to discuss music generally, even bands that he did not like, created vast areas of overlap with a huge percentage of the population. He could talk to anyone about music who had experienced music as an important part of their life and quite possibly teach them something they did not know about their favorite band. I talked to many who became fast friends when they met Mij, someone would mention a band, or a song, and the lyrics would flow, or the lead guitar player's other band would be mentioned, leading to excited banter about the band members and solo exploits of those players. Crazy shit. I thought that I had broad tastes, but the range and depth of my musical world was dwarfed by his unique knowledge. It often led to me questioning how much time I really spent raising my children...half my life, really.

Now, potentially, I'm into my second half century and I have to carry on the work for more friends passing the veil. As long as I have to speak, I will speak for those friends and brothers who have passed the veil. Cancer, as we all know, continues to blossom within the human population, perhaps in all creatures. We know what causes cancer. We have known for decades. The mix of chemicals and radiation that we surround our selves with is permeating our beings. every time we fill our tanks with gasoline, we dose ourselves with benzene one of the oldest carcinogens to be recognized (only after rock dust), PAHs (poly aromatic hydrocarbons), fly ash (another form of rock dust), acid mists, vinyl chloride, solvents and fugitive emissions of formaldehyde, O3 (ground level ozone), SOx (sulfur oxides), NOx (nitrogen oxides), particulates etc. Even in food and cosmetics, there are poisons that contaminate our bodies. A good source of information about reducing your exposure through personal care products can be found at the Environmental Working Group's website. Once we educate ourselves, we only have two choices, to remain silent and be complicit in the poisoning of the planet and future generations, or to stop the madness.

I do not want to say these things for my own good, but for the good people who are dying around us from preventable disease. That is why we plant trees, that is why we continue to live on less and revel in the challenges of living richer lives with less impact. I honor my place amongst the tribes of humankind. The gifts that I have received through giving back to the ecosphere cannot be put into words. I am sure that anyone who tries to live a bit more sustainably will be rewarded similarly. The heartbreaking part is knowing that some have still not seen the light and that our government is loath to constrain the most recent round of global devastation and poisoning. The mushrooming cancer epidemic is certainly not going to end any time soon, especially if we continue to use what fresh water we have left to inject into the bedrock to get oil and natural gas out. As we look to the passing of yet another friend, let us remember that only the living can make change occur. It is fruitless to mourn the loss of such dear friends if we do not redouble our efforts to change. Perhaps in a future generation we will master the art of living without waste, like every other creature on the planet. All that we cast off will feed another trophic level and circles will always complete. Perhaps we will pass from the earth without having become a repositories for toxic chemicals and radiation that were in our environment.

I'm going to listen to was Not Was for my good friend Mij, not because he liked them, but he knew them from an obscure lyric that I happened to repeat casually at work one day. "I was choking on a fish I ate for dinner, it was good while it lasted, should've fasted." Then I'm going to follow it up with a little Zappa and finish off the set with Discipline, one of my favorites from King Crimson.

Mental Maps

Just as printed maps or the ones we read online are lies, so too are the maps we use for trying to navigate our mental and emotional lives. Whatever descriptor we choose, and however we choose to apply it to our mental maps, they both over-represent the things which we are pointing out on the landscape, but so too they work to obscure other parts of the picture. In the case of old style maps, where ink lines on paper were a schematic for roads or trails, drawing a map for a traveler must, by definition ignore the biota and ecosystems upon which the road network was imposed upon. Even when I was a child I realized that if the drawing was true to scale, the main roads would be over a mile wide. Alas, another example of only seeing what we are told to see. It is easy to overlook things when we look at life like a vast array of pigeonholes, each filled with a specific notion or meaning, a perspective and "understanding". These ideas, like maps, neglect much of what they truly are for the sake of our putting them to use. We think we are understanding the region, based on the maps we have allowed to be "true" in our current conceptualization of the world, solar system, star cluster, galaxy, universe and perhaps multiverse around us. Even when we pour endless hours into contemplating the most trivial definitions, we find that there can be much debate and range of opinion about what if any meaning their own particular perspectives warrant. My orienteering has led me to perceive many things from a unique perspective and this creates shades of meaning for me that no one else should have. We communicate in spite of these things.

If we cannot agree on the same map, will it necessarily lead to problems? Not if we understand that each map that we create is the best we can do with what we have at our disposal. We can not help our urge to use iconography, letting trite words represent vast fields of possibility. In some ways, I urge my readers to be like the spider. I recently learned that spiders can not only tell what sector of their web holds prey, relative size but the difference between dust, leaves or seed pods falling into the web as well. Their map of at least the space within their web is light years ahead of any information and retrieval system designed by humans.

We often prop up our own egos up with minutia, neglecting the more important and profound truths.we even live our lives according to arbitrary principles that have been foisted upon us by others, neglecting to study or suss out why. We have one of the most elaborate and deft processors ever created between our ears, but we allow others to determine what sub routines we run in them. We are facing a very real threat today from those who would supplant our highly evolved capacity for thought and reason with centuries old folk wisdom. It was one thing when social control and religious doctrine went hand in hand with the divine right of Kings, but in the world today, the last thing we need is to be bowing down to the rich and powerful. These are the same people who have destroyed the environment for generations, ignored social ills in favor of their own enrichment and crushed anyone who stood in their way.

The mental maps we need to create to navigate the future need to include ideologies like create no waste, do no harm and give back to assure that everyone has enough. Teaching these basic concepts and making sure that we are beginning to understand the world around us will require better mind maps than we have ever had before and the ability to understand that however accurate we make them, in the final analysis they can only hint at certain truths at the expense of others. We also need to remember the very stark contrast between the map and the territory. We dare not concentrate too fully on the pretty lines of demarcation and the clean look of our perceptual tools, but the real experience, the actual terrain and the interaction of life that happens around us. Once we begin to understand where we are and how we got here, the maps won't matter anyway.

Safety Pins and Needles

Our language has inherent flaws and misnomers with which we attempt to confront our world, the implications of that process of coding and decoding remains mostly unsaid, mostly unstudied and yet, these processes are complicit in fostering our ability to turn our collective head away, from new information, uncomfortable truths and to disregard blatant evidence. Sometimes, even the most compelling reasons to change. Inside the safety pin lies the point of a very dangerous message. like the tool itself, the words that we choose, can be used to heal, stitch and lance, the message may be beyond our ability to describe, but I will take a tiny stab at it.

This week alone, I asked myself some seriously twisted questions about our language. First, I mused over the fact that monosyllabic is a misnomer. Onomatopoeia is not what it sounds like either. With simple things being described in complicated terms, we often insulate truth from the people who need a dose of it the most. Lots of words and terms seem to not only allow, but encourage mis-understanding.

Safety pin, was an obvious oddity because of the close pairing of nearly opposite ideas. I was wearing a shirt that had a safety pin on it the other day and when questioned about it, I said that I wore it to enhance my happiness. Whether at work or play, I almost never wear gloves, which leads to a more than average number of slivers. If I find a safety pin, I often pin it to my shirt and it lets me rest a little easier knowing that if I get a sliver, I can immediately remove it, without having to look around for a safety pin. Two people, hearing the story, seemed to think that I was crazy, taking a certain level of delight from this sort of "prepared" state, like I was betting on a sliver or something. The third person, on hearing it appeared to understand that if one got a relatively large number of slivers, that this preparedness itself could be a palpable "good". We were split two to two on which reality was valid.

The differing meanings that we share, or don't, do as much to relay and convey information as to lose and twist it.  Like the spring end of the safety pin, the rest would be useless without it, but the most minute twist ever occurs at this end. The working parts are as far removed from this end as possible, yet without the twist, there could be no grasp. The two who thought I was crazy, probably continued to think that I should just wear gloves. My own reliance on positive contact between whatever tools or work surface I have to deal with and my hands requires me to be bare handed, even if it means that my skin partially freezes to the surface in the cold, or if it is covered with oil, dirt or slivers means nothing to them. I will use gloves for hot materials, just because the smell of burning leather is better than that of my own flesh, plus, the pain would be a torment. Slivers can be gotten out, the rest washes off. What is striking about language is that we can rarely unseat someone from their own comfortable beliefs, even when we are lucky enough to change someone's perspective, it is them who have changed position and only at their own behest. Just as easily, they could have gotten the glazed eye look, blinked a few times and said, that can't be right, falling back into the comfortable ignorance that inhabited them in the first place. What is necessary in changing one's perspective, is the ability to have a sort of binocular vision from our old perspective and a new one simultaneously and working out how to tweak our new vision to see more clearly in the future.

Teasing out our own way amongst the newly opening horizons of possibility requires a level of self-reflection and self-knowledge than ever before. Perhaps this is where the needling comes in. A certain level of discomfort may be necessary to get some people off their couch. I'm anxious for the rapidly approaching time when the vast majority sees through the sham of our corporatocracy, their elitist crap and the resulting world dominion at the hands of a few dozen corporations. In my country, our Supreme Court has sided with corporations far too often, this week again. The justices who sell out our people to the corporate welfare whores are pretending they are patriots. Tyrannical and despicable as it sounds, we are all forced to pay for things that we do not believe in, but if a corporation can "believe" it, and it justifies an exemption from responsibility, then Hell's Bells! We need to red-neckonize it.

The punks that I knew all held the iconic safety pin as a sort of North star of their attire. Pinning and patching things up, especially after they had been rent asunder was just a fact of life...still is in most places.