Summer Reading Suggestion

Language ..."is not merely a set of grammatical rules or a vocabulary. It is a flash of the human spirit, the vehicle by which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities."

Wade Davis

Anthropologist, Author, Explorer

Speak Out For Nature and Democracy in Canada

Recommended Winter Reading: Blessed Unrest

Five years on and this is still a most timely comment on how “people power” could really change the world—and save the planet.

Published in 2007, Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest may have been pushed to the back of your brain by the sheer number of books flooding the market every year since, but as Bill McKibben rightly identified, “Nothing you read for years to come will fill you with more hope and more determination."

Mid-decade, Hawken noted a groundswell of unrest and resistance rising from the bottom up ( think Occupy!) and pointed proudly to a new fierceness (his word!) in the world, not in the sense of ferocity but in the sense of determination — determination to stand up, speak out, and demand accountability, transparency, truth and justice from the power élite —   the corporations and the governments that collude with them.

So why are millions of people taking a stand for social justice and environmental justice around the world and across social media platforms? Because it’s hardwired into our genes: We fight because we love and we hope.

I’m a little late to the party too, in the sense that I did not get around to reading this book until only recently. So if you have not yet read Blessed Unrest, now’s a good time. It inspires courage and promotes hopefulness. We have a fighting chance, Hawken says, but only if we work together, for each other and for the well-being of our planet:

“The insanity of human destructiveness may be matched by an older grace and intelligence that is fastening us together  in ways we have never before seen or imagined.”

 “To come together we must know our place in a biological and cultural sense, and reclaim our role as as engaged agents of our continued existence.”

“We became human by working together and helping one another. According to immunologist Gerald Callahan, faith and love are literally buried in our gene and lympocytes, and what it takes to arrest our descent into chaos is one person after another remembering who and where they really are.”

Shift Your Perspective And Be The Change

In each crisis, we are told, there is opportunity, and humanity is going to be facing some major crises, no question. Already we are seeing the convergence of disturbing economic and environmental issues. Human population is growing as our resources are diminishing. World peace seems ever-elusive. Terrorism, food security, climate change, global corporatism, unprecedented levels of species extinction...

Yes, 2012 is poised to be a pivotal year, but not for those misguided misinterpretations of the Mayan calendar...however, we cannot discount the seriousness our situation.

Laszlo's book is an urgent appeal and a call to action. A declaration for planetary consciousness. We will need to be smarter, more creative, more responsible and more accountable in the years ahead. So let's start now. The sooner the better.

Laszlo outlines the three "unsustainabilities" - ecological, economic, social - and proceeds to discuss how we can take action to create conscious change, through various levels of activism  - civic, media, business and personal.

Definitely worth a read, and a timely read too.

May 2012 be a year of enlightenment and positive change.

Peace & Joy to all.

Shaking the Watchman's Rattle...

means sounding the alarm...

"A Rattler is any individual willing to sound the alarm. Whether the threat comes in the form of terrorism, obesity, deteriorating education, nuclear proliferation, overfishing the oceans or climate change, Rattlers bring people together to overcome adversity and to effect long-lasting change."

The Watchman's Rattle

Coming to a Democracy Near You

Another book recommendation from my shelf...

This is not just a lament for his own nation, America, this is a warning for all nations, all democracies that become "chained to the flickering shadows of celebrity culture, the spectacle of the arena and the airwaves, the lies of advertising, the endless personal dramas, many of them completely fictional, that have become the staples of news, celebrity gossip, New Age mysticism, and pop psychology."

Fair warning, Canada, we are not immune. The world is about to become one very large corporate state. Indeed, it already is...

More from Chris Hedges' brilliant, unflinching examination of a mass culture that has relinquished thoughtfulness and truth for illusion and entertainment:

The rise of the corporate state has grave political consequences, as we saw in Italy and Germany in the early part of the twentieth century. Antitrust laws not only regulate and control the marketplace. They also serve as bulwarks to protect democracy. And now that they are gone, now that we have a state run by and on behalf of corporations, we must expect inevitable and terrifying consequences.

As the pressure mounts, as this despair and impoverishment reach into larger and larger segments of the populace, the mechanisms of corporate and government control are being bolstered to prevent civil unrest and instability. The emergence of the corporate state always means the emergence of the security state.

The more we sever ourselves from a literate, print-based world, a world of complexity and nuance, a world of ideas, for one informed by comforting, reassuring images, fantasies, slogans, celebrities, and a lust for violence, the more we are destined to implode.

This book reveals just how deep the rot goes, and how, in a very real sense, we are currently living in a frightening global dystopia, the "brave new world" that early 20th century thinkers and writers presaged all those decades ago.

We, individual human beings as well as individual communities and nations, lose the power to control our destinies when we relinquish our birthright to think freely and to examine clearly, to analyze and to determine for ourselves what is right and wrong.

I am thinking now of Orwell, Huxley, and others. I was very young when I first began reading dystopian literature, but for the most part I've held onto a healthy trust in humanity and remained optimistic for our collective future, believing that those totalitarian scenarios could or would never come to pass, not after the lessons learned from the World Wars and the Holocaust.

How naive. Hedges' books articulate and document what has been systematically playing out over the course of the last few decades, revving into high gear in the 80s, when our leaders were pushing NAFTA and Free Trade - our power has been slyly wrested from us, and all the while we have allowed ourselves to be dazzled and entertained...

From my Shelf

Another year is winding down, so it seems like a good time to reflect on the books I've been reading these past eleven months. Not all of the books I read in 2011 were published in 2011. This isn't really a review of "new releases" then. Work keeps me busy, so I'm often late to the party as it were, and my reading wish list seems only to grow longer, never shorter. However, these books, I guarantee, are timely and relevant.

I've chosen only a few to feature, but they are so critically important to understanding the times in which we live that I feel compelled to talk about them every chance I get. I'm sure I drive my friends crazy.

So rather than a long-winded commentary from me, I'd prefer to let the authors speak for themselves. I'll just include a passage or two from each book. Maybe the quoted material will entice you to read more. There's also plenty on the Net about each one of them.

I'll start with Chris Hedges: Death of the Liberal Class, published in 2010.

In a traditional democracy, the liberal class functions as a safety valve. It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. It offers hope for change and proposes gradual steps toward greater equality. But the assault by the corporate state on the democratic state has claimed the liberal class as one of its victims.

….

The belief that we can make things happen through positive thoughts, by visualizing, by wanting them, by tapping into our inner strength, or by understanding that we our truly exceptional, is peddled to us by all aspects of the culture, from Oprah to the Christian Right. It is magical thinking. We can always make more money, meet new quotas, consume more products, and advance our careers. This magical thinking, this idea that human and personal progress is somehow inevitable, leads to political passivity. It permits societies to transfer their emotional allegiance to the absurd―whether embodied in professional sports or in celebrity culture―and ignore real problems. It exacerbates despair. It keeps us in a state of mass self-delusion.