Brazil’s Pantanal is the world’s largest tropical wetland, covering an area nearly the size of Britain. Only today, it isn’t so wet. After a summer of drought, catastrophic fires are raging that have devastated 2.4 million hectares of land already this year. (That’s more than has burned in California, Oregon, and Washington combined.) Its precious […]
Ecology & Earth Healing
The Cure of the Earth
This essay was originally published on CommonDreams.org. The Amazon is one of the most intensely alive places on Earth. I won’t bore you with a rendition of its ecological services, nor its role in anchoring the planet’s patterns of rainfall. Nor will I recite the horrible things that may happen to us humans should it […]
Extinction and the Revolution of Love
Contrary to its self-conception, Extinction Rebellion is not actually about climate change. The climate issue is, rather, the vehicle for the expression of a deeper yearning. Greta Thunberg and the climate strikers embody a refusal to comply with a system that is anti-life. “I will not go to school. I will not participate in this. I want no part of the program.”
The Amazon: How do we heal a burning heart?
Like a lot of people, I’ve been deeply affected by what’s been happening in the Amazon in 2019.
Deforestation has reached double the rate of last year, as the red line of logging and fires, many of them set deliberately to clear land for soybeans and cattle, encroaches deeper and deeper into the heart of the Amazon rainforest.
Armed land-grabbers are dislocating Indigenous people and killing those who resist. Even legally protected lands are getting logged and destroyed. It’s just horrifying. And I feel, sometimes, these waves of helplessness, like watching a car wreck in slow motion. The grief is so strong – what do I do with it?
Xylella: Supervillain or Symptom
Of Almonds and Olives Once again the dreaded plant pathogen Xylella fastidiosa has come onto my radar. I first wrote about it in the context of olive trees in southern Europe; now it is affecting almond trees as well. In the old us-versus-them, conquest-of-nature paradigm, the response to a deadly plant disease is to exert […]
Every Act a Ceremony
I met a woman a few weeks ago who works with a Kogi mama, or shaman, from the Sierra Nevada of Colombia. He came to California a few years ago and performed extensive ceremonies on a particular spot of land. He said, “You’d better do a ceremony here regularly, or there will be serious fires.” […]