North Atlantic Books is pleased to announce the launch of a new Sacred Activism series this Fall in collaboration with bestselling author of The Hope and Sacred Activism Institute founder Andrew Harvey, featuring visionary voices for a positive transformation.

Sacred Activism Series Mission Statement:

When the joy of compassionate service is combined with the pragmatic drive to transform all existing economic, social, and political institutions, a radical divine force is born: Sacred Activism. The Sacred Activism Series, published by North Atlantic Books, presents leading voices that embody the tenets of Sacred Activism—compassion, service, and sacred consciousness—while addressing the crucial issues of our time and inspiring radical action.

The series will launch with the September 3 release of Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation from Reciprocity Foundation founder Adam Bucko and bestselling author and world-renowned theologian Matthew Fox, timed for the two-year anniversary of the Occupy movement. The series also includes The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible by the bestselling author of Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein, and psychotherapist Carolyn Baker’s Collapsing Consciously, with more titles planned for Spring 2014.

Join the Sacred Activism Authors for a Pre-Launch Change-Makers’ Webinar Summit – June 25th

To introduce the series to press and organization leaders interested in applying the tenets of Sacred Activism to their own groups, North Atlantic Books will hold a special change-makers’ webinar summit on June 25 at 2 pm EST (11am PST) featuring a virtual panel presentation with all of the launch authors and North Atlantic Books Associate Publisher, Doug Reil.

Attendees will have the opportunity to:
• Get the insiders’ scoop on a burgeoning movement that aims to re-envision the Occupy Wall Street efforts for meaningful change.
• Meet the leading voices in the Sacred Activism movement, including Andrew Harvey, Adam Bucko, Matthew Fox, Charles Eisenstein, and Carolyn Baker.
• Get resources and tools for building a movement in one’s own community.

The webinar is open to a limited number of attendees. Please reserve your space today at http://nabcommunities.com/webinars.

Debut Titles in the Sacred Activism Series:

Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation by Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox, afterword by Lama Surya Das, foreword by Mona Eltahawy and Andrew Harvey (9/3/2013)

Overview: A call to action for a new era of spirituality-infused activism. Authors Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox encourage us to use our talents in service of compassion and justice and to move beyond our broken systems–economic, political, educational, and religious–discovering a spirituality that not only helps us to get along, but also encourages us to reevaluate our traditions, transforming them and in the process building a more sacred and just world. Read more on Occupy Spirituality

The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible by Charles Eisenstein (11/5/13)

Overview: The bestselling author of Sacred Economics and The Ascent of Humanity relates real-life stories of interbeing in action: how small, individual acts of courage, kindness, or self-trust have made the world a little more beautiful, and how the worst crises of our past and present have stemmed from a fundamental sense of separation–the very opposite of interbeing.

Collapsing Consciously: Transformative Truths for Turbulent Times by Carolyn Baker, Ph.D., foreword by John Michael Greer (11/19/13)

Overview:  A collection of probing essays and weekly meditations, this book addresses how to prepare emotionally and spiritually for the impending collapse of industrial civilization. Author Carolyn Baker offers wisdom, inspiration, and a sense of spiritual purpose for anyone who is concerned about the daunting future humankind has created.

At 11 AM EST today, The Guardian hosted a live question and answer session with the Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old former National Security Administrator contractor.

The transcript follows:

Glenn Greenwald 11:07am ET

Let’s begin with these:

1) Why did you choose Hong Kong to go to and then tell them about US hacking on their research facilities and universities?

2) How many sets of the documents you disclosed did you make, and how many different people have them? If anything happens to you, do they still exist?

Snowden’s Answer:

1) First, the US Government, just as they did with other whistleblowers, immediately and predictably destroyed any possibility of a fair trial at home, openly declaring me guilty of treason and that the disclosure of secret, criminal, and even unconstitutional acts is an unforgivable crime. That’s not justice, and it would be foolish to volunteer yourself to it if you can do more good outside of prison than in it.

Second, let’s be clear: I did not reveal any US operations against legitimate military targets. I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private businesses because it is dangerous. These nakedly, aggressively criminal acts are wrong no matter the target. Not only that, when NSA makes a technical mistake during an exploitation operation, critical systems crash. Congress hasn’t declared war on the countries – the majority of them are our allies – but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we’re not even fighting? So we can potentially reveal a potential terrorist with the potential to kill fewer Americans than our own Police? No, the public needs to know the kinds of things a government does in its name, or the “consent of the governed” is meaningless.

2) All I can say right now is the US Government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.

* * *

Ewen Macaskill 11:13am ET

I should have asked you this when I saw you but never got round to it……..Why did you just not fly direct to Iceland if that is your preferred country for asylum?

Snowden’s Answer:

Leaving the US was an incredible risk, as NSA employees must declare their foreign travel 30 days in advance and are monitored. There was a distinct possibility I would be interdicted en route, so I had to travel with no advance booking to a country with the cultural and legal framework to allow me to work without being immediately detained. Hong Kong provided that. Iceland could be pushed harder, quicker, before the public could have a chance to make their feelings known, and I would not put that past the current US administration.

* * *

ActivistGal 11:17am ET

You have said HERE that you admire both Ellsberg and Manning, but have argued that there is one important distinction between yourself and the army private…

“I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest,” he said. “There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”

Are you suggesting that Manning indiscriminately dumped secrets into the hands of Wikileaks and that he intended to harm people?

Snowden’s Answer:

No, I’m not. Wikileaks is a legitimate journalistic outlet and they carefully redacted all of their releases in accordance with a judgment of public interest. The unredacted release of cables was due to the failure of a partner journalist to control a passphrase. However, I understand that many media outlets used the argument that “documents were dumped” to smear Manning, and want to make it clear that it is not a valid assertion here.

* * *

D. Aram Mushegian II 11:20am

Did you lie about your salary? What is the issue there? Why did you tell Glenn Greenwald that your salary was $200,000 a year, when it was only $122,000 (according to the firm that fired you.)

Snowden’s Answer:

I was debriefed by Glenn and his peers over a number of days, and not all of those conversations were recorded. The statement I made about earnings was that $200,000 was my “career high” salary. I had to take pay cuts in the course of pursuing specific work. Booz was not the most I’ve been paid.

* * *

Gabrielaweb 11:23am ET

Why did you wait to release the documents if you said you wanted to tell the world about the NSA programs since before Obama became president?

Snowden’s Answer:

Obama’s campaign promises and election gave me faith that he would lead us toward fixing the problems he outlined in his quest for votes. Many Americans felt similarly. Unfortunately, shortly after assuming power, he closed the door on investigating systemic violations of law, deepened and expanded several abusive programs, and refused to spend the political capital to end the kind of human rights violations like we see in Guantanamo, where men still sit without charge.

* * *

Anthony De Rosa 11:27am ET

1.) Define in as much detail as you can what “direct access” means.

2.) Can analysts listen to content of domestic calls without a warrant?

Snowden’s Answer:

1.) More detail on how direct NSA’s accesses are is coming, but in general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on – it’s all the same. The restrictions against this are policy based, not technically based, and can change at any time. Additionally, audits are cursory, incomplete, and easily fooled by fake justifications. For at least GCHQ, the number of audited queries is only 5% of those performed.

2.) NSA likes to use “domestic” as a weasel word here for a number of reasons. The reality is that due to the FISA Amendments Act and its section 702 authorities, Americans’ communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant. They excuse this as “incidental” collection, but at the end of the day, someone at NSA still has the content of your communications. Even in the event of “warranted” intercept, it’s important to understand the intelligence community doesn’t always deal with what you would consider a “real” warrant like a Police department would have to, the “warrant” is more of a templated form they fill out and send to a reliable judge with a rubber stamp.

* * *

Glenn Greenwald follow-up:

When you say “someone at NSA still has the content of your communications” – what do you mean? Do you mean they have a record of it, or the actual content?

Snowden’s Answer:

Both. If I target for example an email address, for example under FAA 702, and that email address sent something to you, Joe America, the analyst gets it. All of it. IPs, raw data, content, headers, attachments, everything. And it gets saved for a very long time – and can be extended further with waivers rather than warrants.

* * *

HaraldK 11:41am ET

What are your thoughts on Google’s and Facebook’s denials? Do you think that they’re honestly in the dark about PRISM, or do you think they’re compelled to lie?

Perhaps this is a better question to a lawyer like Greenwald, but: If you’re presented with a secret order that you’re forbidding to reveal the existence of, what will they actually do if you simply refuse to comply (without revealing the order)?

Snowden’s Answer:

Their denials went through several revisions as it become more and more clear they were misleading and included identical, specific language across companies. As a result of these disclosures and the clout of these companies, we’re finally beginning to see more transparency and better details about these programs for the first time since their inception.

They are legally compelled to comply and maintain their silence in regard to specifics of the program, but that does not comply them from ethical obligation. If for example Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple refused to provide this cooperation with the Intelligence Community, what do you think the government would do? Shut them down?

* * *

MonaHol 11:55am ET

Ed Snowden, I thank you for your brave service to our country.

Some skepticism exists about certain of your claims, including this:

I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you, or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President if I had a personal email.

Do you stand by that, and if so, could you elaborate?

Snowden’s Answer:

Yes, I stand by it. US Persons do enjoy limited policy protections (and again, it’s important to understand that policy protection is no protection – policy is a one-way ratchet that only loosens) and one very weak technical protection – a near-the-front-end filter at our ingestion points. The filter is constantly out of date, is set at what is euphemistically referred to as the “widest allowable aperture,” and can be stripped out at any time. Even with the filter, US comms get ingested, and even more so as soon as they leave the border. Your protected communications shouldn’t stop being protected communications just because of the IP they’re tagged with.

More fundamentally, the “US Persons” protection in general is a distraction from the power and danger of this system. Suspicion-less surveillance does not become okay simply because it’s only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%. Our founders did not write that “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all US Persons are created equal.”

* * *

Spencer Ackerman 12:04pm ET

Edward, there is rampant speculation, outpacing facts, that you have or will provide classified US information to the Chinese or other governments in exchange for asylum. Have/will you?

Snowden’s Answer:

This is a predictable smear that I anticipated before going public, as the US media has a knee-jerk “RED CHINA!” reaction to anything involving HK or the PRC, and is intended to distract from the issue of US government misconduct. Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn’t I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.

* * *

12:10pm ET

Snowden’s Answer:

US officials say this every time there’s a public discussion that could limit their authority. US officials also provide misleading or directly false assertions about the value of these programs, as they did just recently with the Zazi case, which court documents clearly show was not unveiled by PRISM.

Journalists should ask a specific question: since these programs began operation shortly after September 11th, how many terrorist attacks were prevented SOLELY by information derived from this suspicionless surveillance that could not be gained via any other source? Then ask how many individual communications were ingested to achieve that, and ask yourself if it was worth it. Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we’ve been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.

Further, it’s important to bear in mind I’m being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.

* * *

Mathius1 12:12pm ET

Is encrypting my email any good at defeating the NSA surveillance? Id my data protected by standard encryption?

Snowden’s Answer:

Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.* * *

12:24PM ET

Snowden’s Answer:

Binney, Drake, Kiriakou, and Manning are all examples of how overly-harsh responses to public-interest whistle-blowing only escalate the scale, scope, and skill involved in future disclosures. Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrong-doing simply because they’ll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it. Instead, these draconian responses simply build better whistleblowers. If the Obama administration responds with an even harsher hand against me, they can be assured that they’ll soon find themselves facing an equally harsh public response.

This disclosure provides Obama an opportunity to appeal for a return to sanity, constitutional policy, and the rule of law rather than men. He still has plenty of time to go down in history as the President who looked into the abyss and stepped back, rather than leaping forward into it. I would advise he personally call for a special committee to review these interception programs, repudiate the dangerous “State Secrets” privilege, and, upon preparing to leave office, begin a tradition for all Presidents forthwith to demonstrate their respect for the law by appointing a special investigator to review the policies of their years in office for any wrongdoing. There can be no faith in government if our highest offices are excused from scrutiny – they should be setting the example of transparency.

* * *

Ryan Latvaitis 12:28pm ET

What would you say to others who are in a position to leak classified information that could improve public understanding of the intelligence apparatus of the USA and its effect on civil liberties?

What evidence do you have that refutes the assertion that the NSA is unable to listen to the content of telephone calls without an explicit and defined court order from FISC?

Snowden’s Answer:

This country is worth dying for.

* * *

AhBrightWings 12:34pm ET

My question: given the enormity of what you are facing now in terms of repercussions, can you describe the exact moment when you knew you absolutely were going to do this, no matter the fallout, and what it now feels like to be living in a post-revelation world? Or was it a series of moments that culminated in action? I think it might help other people contemplating becoming whistleblowers if they knew what the ah-ha moment was like. Again, thanks for your courage and heroism.

Snowden’s Answer:

I imagine everyone’s experience is different, but for me, there was no single moment. It was seeing a continuing litany of lies from senior officials to Congress – and therefore the American people – and the realization that that Congress, specifically the Gang of Eight, wholly supported the lies that compelled me to act. Seeing someone in the position of James Clapper – the Director of National Intelligence – baldly lying to the public without repercussion is the evidence of a subverted democracy. The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed.

* * *

Follow-up from the Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman:  12:37pm ET

Regarding whether you have secretly given classified information to the Chinese government, some are saying you didn’t answer clearly – can you give a flat no?

Snowden’s Answer:

No. I have had no contact with the Chinese government. Just like with the Guardian and the Washington Post, I only work with journalists.

* * *

Question: 12:41pm ET

So far are things going the way you thought they would regarding a public debate? – tikkamasala

Snowden’s Answer:

Initially I was very encouraged. Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicion-less surveillance in human history.

* * *

Final question from Glenn Greenwald: 12:43pm ET

Anything else you’d like to add?

Snowden’s Answer:

Thanks to everyone for their support, and remember that just because you are not the target of a surveillance program does not make it okay. The US Person / foreigner distinction is not a reasonable substitute for individualized suspicion, and is only applied to improve support for the program. This is the precise reason that NSA provides Congress with a special immunity to its surveillance.

# # #

“It is the interview the world’s media organizations have been chasing,” writes the Guardian, ”but instead Edward Snowden is giving Guardian readers the exclusive.”

Beginning at 11 AM EST, the news outlet is hosting a live question and answer session with the 29-year-old former National Security Administrator contractor, giving readers the opportunity to “ask him anything,” including why he revealed the NSA’s top-secret surveillance of US citizens, the international storm that has ensued, and the uncertain future he now faces.

An important caveat, they note:

[T]he live chat is subject to Snowden’s security concerns and also his access to a secure internet connection. It is possible that he will appear and disappear intermittently, so if it takes him a while to get through the questions, please be patient.

Curtis White, like me a student of modern culture and a self-avowed atheist, is probably best known to readers of this blog for his environmental writing in Orion magazine. He has a new book, The Science Delusion, and its heretical message is a warning against a dogma that he argues is as dangerous to our 21st century culture as that of the religious fanatics who tortured and silenced Galileo and other leading thinkers in the 16th century.

The book takes on a whole horde of fervent adherents to scientism, technophilia, the myth of ‘progress’ and simplistic ‘theories of everything’. It courageously deconstructs the ludicrous arguments of the “new athiests” (Dawkins, Hitchens, Hawking et al), the dumb-it-down science ‘journalists’ and pop neuroscience cultists (Jonah Lehrer, Damasio, Seung, Huxley, Pinker, Florida, many marketing ‘gurus’ and linguists, and many of the TEDTalk performers). The collective message of these groups is, in White’s words: “The human mind is a machine of flesh, neurons and chemicals; with enough money and computing power the jigsaw puzzle of the brain will be completed, and we will know what we are and how we should act”.

This is a zealous and often vindictive cohort he’s up against. They have attacked anyone who dares oppose their ideology as “perpetrators of pseudo-science”, including some of the most brilliant scientific thinkers of our time like Stephen J Gould and Richard Lewontin, and they have dismissed, often without having bothered to read it, most philosophy as passé, and the arts (especially poetry) as irrelevant and trivial. They have also worked to discredit and censor proponents of any ‘popular’ ideas, no matter how promising or novel, that cannot be validated beyond doubt using current ‘scientific’ measures and processes.

White’s argument is that none of this is new: Just as 16th century astronomers who attempted to introduce a distressing complexity to geocentric religions were attacked and locked up as heretics, and the (still-misunderstood) 18th century Romanticists who attempted to create a secular dialectic accommodating both the (then new) rigid science of Newton and Descartes and the ‘non-scientific’ knowledge of many philosophers and artists of the time were dismissed as, well, hopeless romantics, so too are thinkers today who attempt to accommodate ‘non-scientific’ thinking in a more holistic worldview and explanation of how the world really works being excoriated by the absolutists of scientism.

Science is, after all, nothing more than the creation of approximate, limited and ever-changing models and metaphors of some aspects of reality, that are often interesting and sometimes (enormously) useful. As such, scientism makes a pathetic religion. But in the 21st century, we want to believe, and the promise of mathematical certainty and absolute knowledge of everything, which underlies the new cult of scientism and feeds off the intolerance (even loathing) we humans have for complexity and for the unknowability of most of reality, is as comforting to the bewildered and anxious minds of today as the old absolutist religions were to those who couldn’t fathom or accept the terrible new, seemingly-unarguable ‘knowledge’ of previous centuries.

The consequence of the new scientism dogma goes far beyond the censorship and dismissal of more creative and open inquiry; as it reinforces the equally rigid, simplistic and reductionist political, social and economic dogma of our culture, it becomes a force for tyranny, as White explains:

Any science that denies these realities [the randomness, guesswork and inherent imprecision of human inquiry and understanding] and insists on its certainties is morally dangerous, especially if it also aligns its ideology of certainty with the ruling ideology of the political state (as it has substantially done). When science flatters itself that it is the last man standing—philosophy dead, imagination dead, and art for entertainment only—it becomes its own enemy. It then puts on the mask of power, grim as the face of Bellarmine explaining to Galileo the particulars of his predicament while sitting in a room with instruments of torture. It is because of these concerns that [neo-Romantics like Morse] Peckham and [Jacob] Bronowski insist that science must come to see itself in the artist, and the two should together make common cause against dogma and social regimentation.

Without this collaboration with art in the name of the random (or the dynamic), science is doomed to moral sterility, or to a nihilism that asserts that there are no values (this is Alex Rosenberg’s position), or to groundless values such as “the only value, the only morality, is that which enhances biological homeostasis or the survival of the species genome.” In other words, the only value is whatever lends itself to the survival of a scrap of germ plasm. To which one should object, “Well, what’s the good of surviving, then? Must I think of myself as the moral equivalent of a virus?” In this view of things, DNA is merely a sort of parasite that builds its own host.

Our language does not make White’s task easy, and his ‘arguments’ for an accommodating, neo-Romantic revival tend as a result to be somewhat poetic, which will certainly infuriate and inflame his critics, but which I find (damned complexity- and unknowability-lover that I am) quite engaging. Example: “For an artist, entropy is not a matter of mechanics; it is an invitation to play, to join with the universe’s love affair with the random.”

White has some allies, such as BBC documentary writer Adam Curtis who concludes his anti-mechanical alarm call with this:

This is the story of how our modern scientific idea of nature, the self-regulating ecosystem, is actually a machine fantasy. It has little to do with the real complexity of nature. It is based on cybernetic ideas that were projected on to nature in the 1950s by ambitious scientists. A static machine theory of order that sees humans, and everything else on the planet, as components—cogs—in a system.

And another new book, Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience” by Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld assails the insanely simplistic extrapolations of brain imaging, as if they can somehow represent, or even ‘be’, our thoughts, personality, or behaviour.

If you doubt how scientific orthodoxy can become utterly blind to alternative ideas and evidence, read this article about a Harvard Chair who so distorted research about obesity and so savagely attacked researchers whose data diverged from that orthodoxy, that he was recently publicly rebuked by the journal Nature.

Or read the thoughtless, preposterous (and full of factual errors) ‘popular’ answers to this Quora question about whether language is necessary for thought. Are so many supposedly-educated people so devoid of critical thinking capacity and imagination that they really believe that these answers, many from scientists and PhDs, have any credibility at all?

White’s warning is important, and most of today’s philosophers, complex thinkers, artists and poets are silent on the dangers of scientism, and in any case have been drowned out by the righteous and fierce cacophony of the scientism ideologues. Capitalists and corporatists with their fraudulent calls for unregulated “free markets”, politicians who justify the atrocity of new technologies of total surveillance, endless war and murder-by-drone as necessary, and other members of the military-industrial establishment who see geoengineering, fracking, exploitation of the arctic and the continued war on nature as signs of ‘progress’, are among the apologists and cheerleaders for the scientism absolutists, and their collective power to doom our civilization to simplistic and reality-defying magical thinking needs to be fiercely challenged. White has at least thrown down the gauntlet.

It remains to be seen whether, in our complexity-loathing, homogenized, overly-busy and dumbed-down modern culture, anyone will care to join him. The tools for doing so, he says, include play, the embrace of dissonance and ambiguity and uncertainty, unabashed story-telling, rebellion, distrust of authority and power, and the audacity to challenge everything we’re told.

And, perhaps, the courage to face this century’s version of the Inquisition (complete with waterboarding, force-feeding, extraordinary renditioning, militarized ‘security’ forces, big data, the drones of surveillance and murder — and the opprobrium of the narrow-minded ideologues of scientism, capitalism, ‘anti-terrorism’, positivism, and enforced optimism) — if we dare to do so.

With the continuing release of secret files on the NSA’s spying programs on American citizens, spying programs supported in their entirety by the Obama Administration, it appears that the false illusion of Barack Obama as the reincarnation of Jack Kennedy is finally coming to an abrupt and rude end. It’s being assisted by the multiple stress fractures of the economy, joblessness, divisive politics and the growing distrust of government at all levels, ironically called forth by that very government. There’s also the environment and energy, when combined with the above, provides an opportunity to see the administration’s ineptitude at best, and their callous disregard for the constitution at the worst.

Now it’s going to get ugly. It’s already getting ugly.

Exposing a crime is now a crime? Interesting logic since having knowledge of a crime being committed and not coming forward can also be a crime. It’s called being an accomplice, and everyone in the NSA who knew, including the President, should be held accountable.

Edward Snowden – the 29 year-old whistleblower who mysteriously disappeared from Hong Kong yesterday – whose only crime is stealing documents to expose the crime of the dangerous violation of perhaps millions of citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights, is coming across as the all-American hero according to a poll today that showed 70% support for him and his actions with the American public. Compare that with the popularity of Congress who is mostly calling for Snowden’s Bradley Manning moment. If he continues to elude the CIA and American Security Apparatus can’t catch him soon, his stock will soar as Americans pretty much love a heroic underdog. One of the reporters from the Guardian newspaper who arranged with Snowden to meet in Hong Kong for interviews told the Associated Press that he had been contacted by “countless people” offering to pay for “anything [Snowden] might need.”

The faith of the people in the government has been dwindling steadily since the since the assassination of JFK and took a huge dive this week…but certainly not as big as the massive bubbles that are coming in the economy and the environment. Glenn Greenwald, who Snowden talked with, has also hinted at more revelations coming this week. Just what Obama needs, but this is of his own making, and we’ll all pay for it one way or another. So much for competence and the constitution.

Tensions around the U.S. are high for many reasons, one of which is the largely unspoken fear of a lot of people that something is seriously wrong with our country. And with the Sequestration delivering cuts in federal programs, especially programs to the poor and needy, anger is rising. And as trends forecaster Gerald Celente says, “when people lose everything, they lose it.”

I fear – and I pray I’m wrong – that the best we can do at this point is to build our community ties and our resilience so that we can be prepared to assist and serve when the smoke clears, providing there’s not too much damage. Which, by the way, could have been at least somewhat mitigated had we allowed the system to unwind in 2007 instead of continuing business as usual and allowing the super rich to get super-richer…

A friend who is from Germany sent me a link to a new David brooks article called “the Solitary Leaker,” and points out that Brooks furor on betrayal is a weak one, and that Brooks is displaying his limitations as a journalist. My friend stated:

Everything [Brooks] addressed about social cohesion isn’t served right now by the social and political systems. Snowden isn’t as solitary. He has revealed something which no journalist of the NYT is revealing. As always in history- somebody or some groups and strange events which pop up and simply disrupt the mainstream procedures.

Brooks also states that Snowden’s “right that the procedures he’s unveiled could lend themselves to abuse in the future,” but one thing Brooks fails to see is that these are the abuses and they are not acceptable. And yes, left unchallenged by us all, they will get – and are getting – worse.

While he was a candidate in 2008, Obama praised instances of whistleblowing as “acts of courage and patriotism” that “should be encouraged rather than stifled as they have been during the Bush administration.” But since his election critics have repeatedly called into question his record on supporting whistleblowers, pointing to several individuals who have not been praised, but were prosecuted. In fact, Obama has been more aggressive than Bush in in targeting whistleblowers, even though there’s a huge public interest in the disclosure of waste, fraud and abuse.

Several investigative journalists attest in “War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State,” that the crackdown on leaks seems deliberately intended to have a chilling affect. Add on top the scandal that the Justice Department secretly tapped scores of phone lines at the Associated Press, it becomes obvious – once again – that our government is out of control and that speaking truth to power is now a criminal act.

Other examples you might not know about via Washington’s Blog:

• You might have learned that the Department of Justice is prosecuting a whistleblower regarding North Korea … as well as the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News who reported on what the whistleblower told him.
• You might have read that the Department of Justice Inspector General published a new report today saying that former U.S. Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke leaked a document intended to smear Operation Fast and Furious scandal whistleblower
• And you may even have caught ABC News’ report today that an armed minder trailed reporters … preventing them from being able to talk to whistleblowers
• The Pentagon recently smeared USA Today reporters  because they investigated illegal Pentagon propaganda
• Reporters covering the Occupy protests were targeted for arrest
• The Bush White House worked hard to smear CIA officers,  bloggers and anyone else who criticized the Iraq war
• After Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges, journalist Naomi Wolf, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and others sued the government to enjoin the NDAA’s allowance of the indefinite detention of Americans – the judge asked the government attorneys 5 times whether journalists like Hedges could be indefinitely detained simply for interviewing and then writing about bad guys. The government refused to promise that journalists like Hedges won’t be thrown in a dungeon for the rest of their lives without any right to talk to a judge.
• An al-Jazeera journalist – in no way connected to any terrorist group – was held at Guantánamo for six years … so the U.S. could find out about the Arabic news network.
• Indeed, reporters who even speak with whistleblowers may be treated as terrorists.
• Wikileaks’ head Julian Assange could face the death penalty for his heinous crime of leaking whistleblower information which make those in power uncomfortable … i.e. being a reporter.
• Subsequently, Congress considered a bill which would make even mainstream reporters liable for publishing leaked information.

Journalist and former constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald notes:

The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty [says that "The alternative to 'conspiring' with leakers to get information: Just writing what the government tells you."]

That, of course, is precisely the point of the unprecedented Obama war on whistleblowers and press freedoms: to ensure that the only information the public can get is information that the Obama administration wants it to have. That’s why Obama’s one-side games with secrecy – we’ll prolifically leak when it glorifies the president and severely punish all other kinds – is designed to construct the classic propaganda model. And it’s good to see journalists finally speaking out in genuine outrage and concern about all of this.

This is not a partisan issue. It goes to the core of who we are and what kind of government we’re willing to settle for. Indeed, Bush was worse than Nixon on unlawful spying and harassment of reporters…but so is Obama. In fact, Obama has gone after whistleblowers more viciously than Bush, Nixon, or any president in history.  Indeed, the Obama administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other presidents combined.

Does Snowden create the conditions of distrust and separation, or is it the system that creates Snowdens?

We would do well to remember this quote from Krishnamurti:

 ”It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” 

As I reflect on my travels and interactions during the past year, one theme persists in my conversations with folks about collapse. Whereas the most burning questions used to relate to timelines and the speed of collapse, what I now hear more about these days is a nearly bottomless pit of longing so many people have to be held in some kind of community where one need not face the unraveling alone. When people ask me about options for intentional or unintentional communities, I have little to offer other than websites of various ecovillages and the more abundant options of informal community structures centered around food, alternative healing, Occupy Movement projects, spirituality, or other action-based endeavors. Little is yet available for those seeking residence in a community of collapse-aware individuals who are preparing to navigate the future together while at the same time attempting to maintain a cordial relationship with the world outside the community.

Forming alternative communities requires financial commitments; knowledge of vital skills; acquisition of land, housing, equipment; and strong ties among members. Assuming that all of these bulwarks of community are in place, what seems the most problematic overall is communication and a solid sense of connection, particularly in the arenas of gender issues and conflict.

Rarely are these pragmatic or logistical issues which can be resolved with the intellect. Rather, they encompass myriad emotional dynamics that reverberate much more from the soul than our sensibilities. For those who argue that “there is no such thing as soul,” I would remind them that ours is one of few cultures on earth which would make such an assertion. The ancients were steeped in knowledge of the soul, not because, as some assume, they were archaic and stupid (as compared with modern humans, the assumption goes, who are so much further “advanced”) but because they lived closer to nature. Disconnection from nature has caused us to lose touch with the soul, which is, in fact, the connecting principle of life, and it is precisely in the domain of soul where connection is enriched, deepened, and solidified.

Conflict

In this culture, few people understand that conflict is an essential aspect of any human relationship. Without it, relationships become sterile and vacuous. When people, whether in a one-to-one relationship or in a community, consistently agree on everything, conflict will invariably erupt because something in us craves the color, texture, taste, and timbre of disagreement. Divergent perspectives in human relationships potentially provide the ingredients for a feast of conviviality enhanced by new experiences of the deeper layers of oneself and the other. Conflict offers the juice that lubricates the arid landscape of tranquil concurrence and facilitates unforeseen ventures into virgin territories of the heart and soul.

Human relationships need conflict in order to thrive. But for us, unlike our indigenous brothers and sisters, conflict is usually synonymous in our minds with warfare, hostility, betrayal, domination, and the intent to harm the other. Our one-dimensional experiences of conflict have usually been those that result in separation and rejection.

Furthermore, in the “polite society” of Anglophile industrial civilization, one learns to behave in a manner that accedes to the assumed or verbalized wishes of one’s peers. Disagreement is in “poor taste.” Go along to get along.

This kind of inculcation assumes that things are always as they seem and blatantly excludes the possibility of the human shadow. Overall, indigenous cultures understand that the persona we present is always attended by an “inner other” that we prefer to conceal. Carl Jung named this unconscious aspect of the psyche, “the shadow.” Thus, in traditional societies, one usually finds specific rituals or practices that honor the shadow and as a result, provide structured opportunities for its members to disagree, and even to do so mightily, but without doing harm to anyone.

An indigenous person steeped in his or her tradition, when entering a room of individuals who are conversing in “cozy concurrence,” might find such apparently seamless consensus puzzling. She might become very curious about what is not being said, or she may intentionally “stir the pot” in order to evoke controversy. Non-indigenous members of the “polite” gathering might experience this as rude, crass, or provocative, and indeed, such behavior is deviant in the context of the mores of industrial civilization.

Jung believed, and certainly most indigenous traditions would agree, that when the shadow is ignored or repressed, it does not vanish, but invariably persists and usually with a vengeance so that the untidiness of dealing with it directly is paled by comparison when experiencing its inexorable eruption. In other words, address the shadow now because it will not be ignored and in one way or other, will insist on being seen.

The shadow consists of thoughts, feelings, and impulses that we disown and dis-identify with. For example, we consciously want a particular dialog to go well and end harmoniously, but another part of us, out of our awareness, really wants to be “right” or may even want to sabotage the conversation. Or, we may be only vaguely aware that we distrust someone, and when engaged in dialog, because we want to trust them and deepen our connection with them, we ignore our distrust then end up speaking or acting in a hostile or passive-aggressive manner. Had we paid more attention to our compulsion to be “right” in the first instance and our distrust in the second, we may have behaved differently.

Ancient traditions such as Greek mythology viewed humans a complex creatures who were comprised of many characteristics which they called “spirits.” Some of these traits we may be familiar with and others to a lesser degree or not at all. From the perspective of mythology and Jungian psychology, it is as if a cast of characters inhabits the psyche and influences our thoughts, feelings, moods, and behavior. (No, I am not referring to multiple personalities.)  Predictably, we feel and often express these traits when we are in conflict, although they may not be fully conscious, and because we are not familiar with the “community” living within us, we find it exceedingly difficult to abide amicably with the external community. Therefore, it behooves anyone longing for external community to become very familiar with the one inside. This is not to say that we must develop complete familiarity with our internal community before entering an external one, but it does mean that interactions with an external community will activate most of the members of our internal community. The real question is: How will we deal with that? Have we developed the necessary skills, or do we need assistance in doing so?

No one can be 100% aware of his shadow 100% of the time, but with practice, we can deepen our awareness and prevent words or actions “out of left field” that harm, alienate, or undermine our relationships. Moreover, a deepening awareness of our own shadow serves to protect us from the shadow of others and speech or behavior by them that could harm us.

So how do we engage in conflict with each other, opening ourselves to the shadow in ourselves and the other? How do we navigate what may feel like mine fields of shadow material both internally and externally?

First we must recognize that we and all human beings possess a shadow as part of the infrastructure of the psyche. Acknowledging and working consciously with the shadow is scary, risky, and threatening to the ego, but the rewards are momentous, and the consequences of not doing that work is costly on every level.

One way people can develop a relationship with the shadow that may prove useful is to journal about what they may already know or suspect about it. In addition, we might depict it artistically—paint, draw, sculpt, or write a poem. We can also ask for dreams about the shadow which often works well for getting clues sooner rather than later. And of course, after we have some sense of it in terms of an image or a dream, we can sit quietly with eyes closed and dialog with it silently and directly as if we were having a conversation with another human being.

Developing familiarity with the shadow is particularly useful in our relationships with people in the external world. When we engage in dialog that, as they say, “pushes our buttons,” we can be fairly certain that some aspect of the shadow has been triggered. Once again, as is so often the case in human relationships, it is crucial to be tuned in to our bodies so that we have an expanded range of communication “equipment” that operates not merely from the intellect, but from intuition and physical sensation as well.

In my experience, men often navigate conflict better than women. At worst, men deal with conflict through war, but at their best, they hold the tension of opposing forces in their bodies and do not act from the shadow but with consciousness and clarity in an attempt to resolve the issues at hand. On the other hand, women have been enculturated with the notion that disagreement in any form is not “nice” and that they must accede to and above all, please the other. In many cases, they have disowned their shadow for so long that accessing it is exceedingly difficult. In some situations, they are comfortable with ranting about their conflicts or complaining about them indirectly, but stepping into the fire of the actual conflict and working with it directly is too intimidating because it involves the willingness to risk not being nice—or perhaps incurring what they perceive as the wrath of males.

The good news is that when skillfully contained within the parameters of clearly-defined groundrules, often facilitated by people trained in conflict resolution and shadow work, groups and individuals can engage in conflict in ways that bring not only the resolution of problems, but even more intimacy with each other so that the “feast of conviviality” of which I spoke earlier, becomes not merely an idyllic notion, but a palpable event in the body.

Men And Women

For better or worse, the last four decades have been profoundly shaped by feminist consciousness. I am a feminist, and I have no problem with saying so. While I am not satisfied with the gains women have made in terms of equality since the 1970s, I am aware that the lives of most women have been greatly improved by the magnitude of them. I am also pleased with changing attitudes toward Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender people, particularly in the new millennium. Yet these strides in human equality could vanish overnight in the likely event of a national or natural disaster or a terrorist event, and they will most certainly be drastically altered as industrial civilization disintegrates.

James Howard Kunstler has written and spoken profusely his opinion regarding the role of women post-collapse. From his perspective, as the larger systems fail and as law enforcement protection rapidly deteriorates as a result of economic meltdown, myriad eruptions of violence will occur and will escalate in many communities. While Kunstler believes it will be directed toward both men and women, he asserts that women will bear the brunt of it. Readers familiar with his novels World Made By Hand and The Witch of Hebron, are aware of his portrayal of women in those works which essentially depict three female roles: subservient spouse or partner; physically repugnant, overbearing cult leader; and earth-mother hooker. Kunstler argues that in a chaotic, collapsing world, the status of women will devolve to a pre-feminist movement level as if that twentieth-century social phenomenon never occurred.

While I disagree with Kunstler regarding the extent to which feminist influences in the culture will be rolled back in collapse, I do believe that violence against both genders will proliferate. In the first place, one has only to observe the gun hysteria that has engulfed this culture to find this assertion plausible. Furthermore, in times of social chaos and myriad layers of collapse, violence usually becomes epidemic and most certainly will in any culture as unprepared for collapse as this one unequivocally is. Scapegoating, racism, sexism, and homophobia are likely to rage as society disintegrates.

In two of Hollywood’s recent post-apocalyptic portrayals, The Road and The Book of Eli, the treatment of women becomes profoundly barbaric. In these depictions of life post-collapse, a woman cannot survive unless she does whatever is necessary to be protected by boorish, brutal men.

Few collapse-aware women are actually talking about this. In my book Navigating The Coming Chaos, I have included an entire section on violence against women in collapse, but the conversation about this issue needs to be expanded, as well as deepened in terms of exploring the ramifications not only of the inevitability of escalating violence against women, but the emotions this reality evokes and what pro-active measures we will take as individuals and communities. Moreover, the unspoken elephant in the room in many communities and gatherings of collapse-aware individuals is a repository of wounding carried by both genders in relation to the other.

The overt assumption is that men and women will join forces to sustain and protect one another, but not far beneath the surface are myriad lingering resentments, injuries, and other shadow material that will invariably erupt in a chaotic milieu—and that in current time already subtly contaminate cross-gender relationships and discourse.

If indeed our geographic regions become more volatile and warlike, how will both genders navigate this, and to what extent will the wounds we carry which we attribute to the other gender influence our relationships with it? Escalating violence changes people, as any war veteran can attest. Is the only alternative that women become more aggressively feminist and men become more patriarchal? How will we prevent demonizing the other gender when we both desperately need to ally with each other? How will each gender take responsibility for the shadow masculine and shadow feminine, characterized by the destructive aspects of each, that we all seek to have “evolved beyond”?

Moreover, what happens with LGTB members of a community in a time of scapegoating and perceived threats to “masculinity” or “femininity”? What is the role of these individual in venues where “gender wars” have erupted? Do heterosexual women exclude some lesbians because they are “too masculine” or do some heterosexual men tell gay men to “man up or get out”?

One model to which I consistently return is that found in the West African Dagara Tribe of Burkina Faso in which LGBT people are perceived as “gatekeepers” between the tangible, human world and the eternal. For this reason, in the Dagara Tribe, LGBT men and women hold special roles in ceremony and in negotiations between groups of heterosexuals who are experiencing conflict with the other gender. Because the Dagara community recognizes the value of the energies of both masculine and feminine that LGBT individuals possess, they are enlisted as liaisons between heterosexual women and men in conflict. Similarly, in the traditions of many First Nation tribes on this continent, a “two-spirits” person was valued as the bearer of “special medicine” which included esteemed roles in ceremony and in negotiations between genders.

Near-Term Extinction

As the discussion of near-term extinction (NTE) churns in conversations among the collapse-aware, no one can declare with certainty when it will occur or that all life forms on this planet will be eliminated by it. Small pockets of survival here and there may be possible. Obviously, any survivors would need to ask themselves if anything is left to them that merits their perseverance. If they decide to persevere, then clearly, they will need to determine what kind of human community they wish to form. We do not know to what extent they might be informed by the unhealed gender relations of their forbearers, nor can we predict the roles of women and men in those incipient communities. What we do know is that in terms of relationships with the other gender, they will know a great deal about what doesn’t work.

I am often asked if in the light of NTE, any of this really matters. For me, this is like asking, “Since we are all going to die eventually, should I get out of bed tomorrow morning?” On the one hand, the possibility of NTE does and should alter our perspective of what matters most in the demise of industrial civilization. For some, nothing really matters except bringing down empire. For others, their lives are about much more than NTE, yet they now want to prepare for collapse in the light of it.

For me, the likelihood of NTE does not cause me to simply give up and begin concocting my very special suicide potion because it matters to me how I live the rest of my days on the planet. Profoundly important to me is the legacy I leave, even if there are no survivors to assimilate it. What matters is that I have left it. Moreover, far more important to me is how I have touched other lives of the human and more-than-human community and how those lives have touched mine.

Are you a more whole and conscious human being because you knew me? Am I more alive, compassionate, and wizened because I knew you? Are other species fed, protected, and in less pain because they encountered me? Certainly my heart is more open, tender, and loving because I encountered them. Where do I make meaning for others in the last days of NTE? Where do I find and make meaning for myself as my species ceases to exist?

For me, it’s about how I touch your life and how you touch mine. It’s about how we slog through our conflict and discover one thing about each other that we didn’t know and that would have been tragic never to have seen. That, as the poet Rebecca del Rio says, is the only “Constant”:  

We live for constants,
Rain in winter, the cat
Curled like a furry comma
On the edge of the bed.

Sometimes, many times
These don’t come, instead
There is drought, the father dies,
The mother grows old.

The constant is this:
The mind insists, persists in the insane
Circle of creation from chaos.
Make order of mystery.

“Listen to me,” it shouts.
So we listen.
Constant chatter, constant need
Growing like a curse.

The constant is this:
Life is chaos, disintegration, blooming
Anew into order and collapsing
Again to blossom into something more perfect,
Then chaos, disintegration and on.

We watch helplessly, entranced
Like the magician’s audience,
The hypnotist’s mark.

Nothing to do but join hands,
Bow heads, say blessings
To the capricious, wild
original god.

Renegade naturalist Doug Peacock on saving ourselves from a bleak future

While the grizzlies near his Montana home hibernate, Doug Peacock retreats to southern Arizona to a town near the Mexican border where he can wander 100 miles before hitting another town. The self-described desert rat honed his wilderness affinities under legendary conservationist Edward Abbey, author of Desert Solitaire, and was the inspiration for George Hayduke, the eco-saboteur central to the The Monkey Wrench Gang. For anyone who’s ever wanted to take a chainsaw to a billboard or watch a dam implode so a river can run free again, Peacock and Abbey have long been totems.

Abbey was always a proponent of saving wilderness areas — half a century ago, he was saying we didn’t have enough wilderness lands in the U.S., and now we have even fewer.

“At the end of the last book, In the Shadow of the Sabertooth, I end up with Ed Abbey because of a promise I made to him from 15 years ago — and the fact that he was dead does not relieve me of that obligation,” Peacock says. “Thirty-some years ago, he came to the conclusion that the only thing worth saving was wilderness, and he also said that it is always a patriot’s duty to be prepared to defend his country from its government, and I take those things to heart and I’m very loyal to Ed. I do a lot of introductions for his books and forewards to Desert Solitaire and things like that. I’m not just an old friend who loved him and buried him, I’m also a great admirer of his work and the value of his words, and I try to keep that a living legacy.”

When Abbey died, Peacock rolled him up in a sleeping bag and buried him in an undisclosed location in the desert near Mexico. While he’s in New Mexico, Peacock says, he visits Abbey’s grave.

“I go out and sit there and take a Mexican beer and drink half and pour the other half on the grave and have a conversation with the rocks,” Peacock says.

This winter, Peacock was also taking his yellow notepads and a chair into desert washes and writing with the pad on his lap. That’s where he finished his latest book, In the Shadow of the Sabertooth: A Renegade Naturalist Considers Global Warming, the First Americans and the Terrible Beasts of the Pleistocene, after a five-year effort that took him through thousands of pages of research papers.

“I’m used to writing memoirs, where you just scratch it off and you don’t worry about a lot of important facts getting in the way of a good story,” Peacock says. “If you can’t remember if it happened last year or the year before, it doesn’t matter. You can’t tell whoppers. But you can’t even tell a little lie in this book. You’ve got to get everything right. I’m a natural born liar and those memoirs came a lot easier.”

In addition to research on grizzlies, Peacock write a memoir on returning to the wilderness after serving in Vietnam.

His earlier books included Grizzly Years, one of several books produced in the decades he’s spent researching grizzlies, and Walking It Off, a memoir on how the wilderness helped him recover after his time in Vietnam as a Green Beret medic.

This latest book, In the Shadow of the Sabertooth, looks at the specter of global warming and what we, as humans, may have to do to adapt to a warming planet based on the changes suffered by homo sapiens during the last period of global warming, about 15,000 years ago.

“It’s just a bummer story,” he says of the outlook on climate change today, “but I didn’t want to write a bummer book, so I wrote about when global warming happened once before to homo sapiens — that’s about 15,000 years ago right here in North America. I’m not expecting it to draw a lot of solid parallels between the two periods of global warming. The one we’re in today is much, much worse, but it was more a parable of global warming, and what really interested me was how human beings perceive threat or peril and how they adapt to change. And so I spent a lot of time writing about the old story and the reason is, the modern story, it doesn’t look good.”

In the coming decades, he says, we could see areas of the world no longer able to support agriculture. Climate change may dramatically affect the lives of the next generation, he says, and he notices that when he talks to younger audiences, he pulls his punches slightly.

The solution 15,000 years ago was to migrate, but with 7 billion people on the planet, he says, that isn’t an option.

“The prognosis is bleak and it looks very painful and very deadly to all species of animals, not excepting the two-legged variety,” he says.

The inspiration for his work starts just behind his home about 30 miles north of Yellowstone Park, where warmer winters have allowed for an explosion in the white bark pine beetle population in the past six years. The mountain ranges have turned from green to red in beetle kill — and pine nuts are the single most important food for Yellowstone-area grizzlies he’s studied for decades, he says. “I’ve been saying for 40 years the fates of men and bears are mingled — and not quite flippantly, either,” Peacock says. “So that was a big red flag for me.”

The bears he’s spent most of four decades studying, grizzlies, will have few places to go — and though the species has been extirpated in Colorado since 1979, with rumored sightings as recent as 2006 and promising evidence from a study Peacock himself led in the ’90s, Colorado’s high mountains may provide some of the better remaining habitat for grizzlies, or wolverines and wolves, which are also extirpated in Colorado.

“The bottom line is human tolerance,” he says. “Humans got to quit killing those animals, and that’s why they never get very far. One agency or another or just individuals shoot them out of fear, ignorance, hatred. It’s really beyond irrational, at least it is up here.”

Those animals need to be around just like wilderness areas need to be around, he says, as a necessary part of our human psychology.

“All our evolution has taken place in essentially a single habitat whose remnants today we call wilderness,” he says. “We didn’t evolve in villages or with farming. We evolved as hunters and gatherers foraging out on wild lands that still survive today. … I think it’s just a good strategy to keep good-sized chunks of that original habitat around just as a safety valve for reasons we don’t even know yet.”

Peacock’s love affair with the wilderness started in Colorado in 1964, working solo on a geology thesis on the western side of the Sangre de Cristos. He didn’t see another human being all summer long, he says.

Then, he shipped out to the jungles of Vietnam as a Green Beret medic and dealt with the death and destruction of what he calls a bad war, an unnecessary war. He returned just as the snow was melting in the Rocky Mountains, and a malaria attack drove him to Yellowstone.

“I came back and I was like a wounded animal, like thousands of other vets, and I couldn’t talk to anybody, and I went where I was most comfortable, which was wilderness, and eventually I ran into grizzlies. They really got me out of myself like nothing else could,” he says. “That’s kind of an ageless formula. It doesn’t matter if it’s Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam. The healing power of wild country and wild animals, it’s just a powerful, timeless formula for mending. Not that you mend all the way, because you never do.”

He still has hair trigger reactions, he says, but spending time in grizzly country made him take a look at himself in a way that created an enforced humility and forced him to pay attention to something outside his life — or risk losing that life to a bear.

“One thing that you really need to be able to do is look inwards and look in at your life, and that’s very hard sometimes, you’re so wrapped up in yourself,” he says. “The one place where self indulgence is utterly impossible is grizzly country because there’s something out there that’s big, and if it chooses it can kill and eat your ass.”

As he learned his way around grizzlies, there were a few close calls. He’s been charged by bears multiple times. His response — the only safe response, he says — has been to stand his ground without screaming, running or trying to climb a tree to get away.

“I don’t move a muscle, literally, I don’t blink an eye. I’ll talk softly,” he says. The bears charge, and then veer off at the last moment. “One mother actually skidded to a stop within a few feet of me and reached forward and sort of sniffed my pant leg, then turned around and ran away.”

His approach now is to travel quietly unless he thinks he runs the risk of surprising a bear, particularly one napping, then he’ll make noise — cough, or sing softly.

“I used to say, you know, it’s OK, you can sing softly, but whatever you do, never sing country western,” he says, and laughs. “I don’t know, I might have been joking, but maybe not. I just haven’t tested — I don’t have the data yet.”

That he met Edward Abbey right about the time he came back from Vietnam was no accident either, he says. He returned from war and saw the Rocky Mountains he turned to for refuge being chewed up by mines, clear cutting and development as the destruction of a homeland. It’s a battle now to save what’s left of them.

“I tended to regard defense of that homeland very militantly. I still do,” he says. “I think it’s that important. I think if we lose these places, I think we’ve lost ourselves, not just our souls but I think we’ll lose our physical existence on earth. It’s that important and I will fight it like a war. It’s the most important thing I do. It’s a cause I’d die for.”

Climate change should be the main focus for environmental activists now. Among the conclusions he reaches in his new book, he says, is “in lieu of other action, maybe the best thing you can do to fight for a future for yourself and your kind and the creatures around you is fight for wilderness. Fight for saving wild habitats in any size or form. Anything that smells like wilderness is close enough.”

Doug Peacock: Grizzlies, Wilderness and War, a talk and book signing, will take place at 7 p.m. Thursday, June 13, at Chautauqua Auditorium, 900 Baseline Road. Tickets are $14 and are available at www.chautauqua.com.

“The cognitive dissonance we feel – as GDP figures rise and we feel ever more tired, stressed and scared – is REAL … and must be challenged,” says Professor Calvin Jones.

 
But what do you do with those feelings of stress and fear? How are you coping, deep inside?

 
A few months back we at Environmental Change-Makers saw an astounding video which was right on point. It was from Peak Moment TV, an interview of Carolyn Baker. (see the video at youtu.be/8Z2VxvAuCzc ) That’s when we knew we had to bring Carolyn Baker to L.A.

 
“The external growth of a budding economy is over,” Carolyn confirms. “The focus on growth now needs to be in the inner world.”

 
Carolyn Baker uses storytelling, drumming, poetry, group work, and meditation to help us address the inner feelings that come with massive-level change. She will be here in L.A./Westchester on June 22, and will present a day-long experiential workshop. Sat Jun 22, 10am-4pm, $25 prepaid, $30 at the door. RSVP necessary: www.tinyurl.com/cbakerworkshop or (310) 670-4777 Please bring potluck lunch to share. site: Holy Nativity Church, 6700 W. 83rd, Westchester/LA 90045

Go to the Calendar Section of this site to register and learn details
Hosted by Environmental Change-Makers
www.EnviroChangeMakers.org

This is not the age of information.
This is not
the age of information.

Forget the news,
and the radio,
and the blurred screen.

This is the time of loaves
and fishes.

People are hungry,
and one good word is bread
for a thousand.

~David Whyte~

It’s Memorial Day, 2013, and I’m awaiting my flight to Denver from Baltimore. This year, re-entry from the Age of Limits Conference into the unreal world of industrial civilization has been particularly challenging. After being safely ensconsed in the forest for four days with fellow-doomers, a return to empire is even more jarring for me than it was last year. Was it the fact that yet another year has passed and life on this planet has gotten so much worse? Was it the dire realities of climate change with which we are now confronted that seem certain to shorten our time on earth? Or was it the likelihood that we have crossed some vague threshold of which we are all aware in our bones but have been really been afraid to name? We feel it, but it’s easier to use words like “400 parts per million,” “Fukushima,” “a recession that never ends,” and “endless war” than to actually articulate the reality of a point of no return.

At the conference, the food was delicious, and the conversation even richer, but this doom girl can only hold so much distressing information in her body for so long before she numbs out, feel pissed off, or start dissing the people who are communicating it. Like the other attendees of this conference, I need a place to talk about these formidable feelings and share them with others who feel as overwhelmed as I do. I need to touch and be touched. I need to sing, hear some poetry, and possibly tell a story with my drum…oh, and please pass the Kleenex when you get done grabbing a handful for your own use.

The Age of Limits Conference is a microcosm of the collapse-aware community worldwide. Myriad variables apply, but one constant remains: People are hungry for something more than cognitive presentations and Power Points.

Four Quarters, the venue of the Age of Limits Conferences in 2012 and 2013, is an interfaith sanctuary and non-intentional lifeboat community situated on 150 acres of beautiful and functional land, paid off last year and now owned outright by its board of directors. The consciousness and natural beauty of the land offer an ideal setting for conversing about collapse, community, and how we will navigate a daunting future. Particularly appropriate, from my perspective, is Four Quarters’ emphasis on earth-based spirituality. No one who attends any function there is required to buy into any particular philosophy or spiritual path, but I can think of no other venue that is more suited for intimate connection with the earth community and the sacred than what Four Quarters has created and tended over the years.

I could tell you about each presenter at the Age of Limits and what he or she said, but you’ve heard it all before. However, what you may not have sufficiently heard is the cry of your own heart and the hearts of others who know in their own heads what you know in yours. Rather, as Mary Oliver says, “Tell me your despair, and I’ll tell you mine.” Sadly, in this culture, few people have learned that while knowledge is power, how we hold that knowledge in our bodies, and what we do with it from there is potentially far more powerful than the mere accumulation of data.

In the light of David Whyte’s poem and the information overload that many of us felt at this conference, I was intrigued by the use of the word “hungry” and “craving” which many participants expressed when they described their longing for spiritual and emotional processes that would facilitate their holding megadoses of new and disturbing information. The attendees at the conference represent only one segment of the collapse-aware population, but as a result of my experience at the conference and traveling throughout the country and working with individuals nationally and around the world, I hear the exact same longing expressed repeatedly and almost verbatim wherever I go. If anyone has any doubt that this aspect of confronting collapse is crucial, they are not listening.

Throughout collapse literature I hear references ad nauseum to the Five Stages of Grief, but when some individuals actually have the opportunity to feel their grief in a safe, supportive container such as the one provided this year at the Age of Limits Conference or other venues, one may hear responses like “Well, I’ve finished my grieving,” or “I prefer to grieve in private.” I can appreciate the latter response since in this culture we have been taught that grief is a private matter and that no one around us really wants to see, hear, or feel it with us. Unlike many indigenous cultures, we have been told that our grief is messy, cowardly, and somehow infringes on the personal space of others. We have never known the deep, bedrock solidarity that comes from members of a community grieving together, and perhaps if we had, we would encounter fewer interpersonal difficulties when we attempt to create or inhabit communal living because what many indigenous cultures have discovered is that members of the community need each others’ grief. In grieving together, we not only validate the grief we carry and the grief of the other, but we provide a caring container—a soft place to fall where we share our common humanity and dip into a healing well of compassion from which civilization has forbidden us to drink.

As for “finishing” our grief, I believe that is nothing less than humanly impossible. Asserting that one has finished one’s grief is like saying that one has finished breathing. That is precisely how natural grief is—and how necessary, particularly in a culture as suicidal and psychotic as this one. Grief is an integral, fundamental part of the human experience. It is, in fact, a barometer of our aliveness and vitality as well as our empathy and compassion. Declaring that we are done with it merely attests to a fear of what we have attempted to bury in the body that aches to be felt and shared. The truth is that feeling our grief is profoundly empowering and enlivening, which many people report as a result of allowing themselves to enter it fully. They soon discover that grief strengthens us whereas resisting grief wears us down.

In venues where collapse and collapse issues are discussed, a palpable cloud of grief permeates the atmosphere, and try as they may, people cannot remain in their heads indefinitely in their attempt to evade it. Eventually, a diet of pure information becomes overload which becomes revulsion which then leads to avoidance. Why else do the masses refuse to recognize collapse for what it is? Most inhabitants of industrial civilization have erected massive walls of denial precisely because of the seething sea of emotion and meaninglessness that lie just beneath the surface and that are eerily stirred by any consideration of losing their preferred set of living arrangements. This is why, as my friend Mark Rabinowitz says, “Denial is an infinitely renewable resource.”

Our anger and fear in relation to collapse may come and go, but grief seems to be a bottomless pit that the human condition does not allow us to “finish.” In fact, if we were to ask some indigenous individuals to “finish their grief,” they would simply smile and affirm that they cannot and will not because although they may have never heard of William Blake, they know in the cells of their bodies that “The deeper the sorrow, the greater the joy.” People who allow themselves to grieve deeply, invariably report this exact paradoxical experience.

In terms of the collapse-aware community overall, myriad variables apply, but one constant remains: People are hungry for something more than cognitive presentations and Power Points. Unfortunately, most of what is written and spoken by collapse watchers originates from and appeals to the intellect. And while I do not disparage reason, we need to remind ourselves that the so-called Age of Reason is not only over, but gave birth to the very industrial civilization that is destroying the planet and the future of our grandchildren. If reason alone could deliver us from the total disintegration of the industrial paradigm, it would have by now.

This year’s Age of Limits Conference included a grief observance at which 44 people (one-third of the attendees) were present. At one point in the ceremony, I noticed perhaps twenty or more people standing close to each other and holding onto each other as they chanted together an African song. “Holding onto each other” is a metaphor we often use when speaking about navigating collapse, but in this particular moment, the metaphor became a literal event and one which several people told me later took them to a discernible, profoundly new and embodied sense of community and deep connection.

While on the one hand we must always welcome new information about the realities of collapse, we are increasingly being compelled to grapple with the limits of purely cognitive means of preparing for it. Isn’t it time that we admit our insatiable hunger for something more—for the loaves and fishes we create for ourselves when we feel our emotions about collapse and share them with our companions on the preparatory journey? The loaves and fishes will not provide “solutions,” but they will sustain the soul and nourish our humanity as we confront the increasingly agonizing realities of the planet’s demise.

Tell me your despair, and I’ll tell you mine. What matters is not the removal of our despair, but the fact that we are sharing it and thereby creating something eternal—something that cannot be erased by the collapse of industrial civilization but endures beyond it.

The Age of Limits Conference model is an experiment and by no means a failed one at this point. Its planners are willing to learn from errors and adapt accordingly. Plans are already being implemented for next year’s conference which will include several small process groups where participants can gather in order to share the feelings and insights that come up for them in large group presentations. Other kinds of small groups may also be included such as those that offer the opportunity to channel emotions artistically or give and receive healing touch.

While participants want and benefit from hearing presentations from leaders in collapse awareness, it is now clear that this is not enough because the longing for conversation and community appears to be surpassing a desire for information. As a result, I expect that going forward, AOL Conferences will become the gold standard of collapse gatherings—increasingly magnetic beacons of sanity and kinship as the unraveling intensifies, especially if conference planners skillfully read the hunger for loaves and fishes, as well as information. I hope you’ll join me there next year.

From my perspective, the most powerful presentation in this conference was the one yesterday by Guy McPherson who shared the truly hard science about climate change and Near-Term Extinction (NTE). The science is more than substantial, to which some conference participants who ARE scientists could attest. The presentation was sobering and, indeed, sad as we all recognized that the only thing that can slow down irreversible climate change is the collapse of industrial civilization. For those in doubt, I encourage you to follow Guy’s other presentations on You Tube and at his blog Nature Bats Last.

Again, from my perspective, most of the presentations at the conference, as with last year’s conference, kept us in our heads with little attention if any to the heart and body. Thus, the grief observance I offered on Saturday night was attended by about 1/3 of the conference attendees and desperately needed, according to them, so that we could do something with the painful emotions that get stirred at this kind of event. In a conversation with Orren Whiddon following the conference, we agreed that I would return next year to not only present a workshop and facilitate a grief observance, but also facilitate process groups every day at the conference where participants can discuss and work through their feelings about what comes up for them in hearing some truly disturbing information. (If you’re not disturbed about the realities of collapse, you are truly not paying attention.) The most sane response to all of this is first, deep grief, and then taking action by discovering our life purpose in the face of NTE and numerous other catastrophes and offering every last gift we possess to the world for the well being (however short-lived) of the earth community

While I cherish the information which we are privileged to receive in conferences of this nature, I am adamant that if we are left with it in the absence of processing our feelings about it, we will be less likely to cultivate our own resilience in the wake of collapse and beyond.

Nevertheless, I invite you to consider attending the conference next year when a few new presenters are likely to appear. Who knows what will unfold between now and then, but if current patterns prevail, there is little reason to expect good news in the world around us. The beauty and blessing of the Age of Limits Conference, however, are the myriad opportunities it offers for connection, validation, and community building while being embraced by some of the most luscious land in the country. I would love it if you could join me there in 2014.

Today is Memorial Day, created many years ago with the intention of honoring the fallen in battle. While we hold them in our hearts alongside the horrors of war, what must also be remembered and cherished on this day is the earth community in which we are innately and organically embedded. Whatever you believe about NTE, which is really of little importance in the larger scheme of things, we are losing this planet by way of the actions of our very immature, uninitiated, unwizened species. If you can, go out in nature today and reconnect with some aspect of it. Hold it close to your heart as you would your child or a beloved. These are the good ole days, and this is as good as it is likely to get.