Protest at Belo Monte Dam Site in Brazil

On Nov. 1, a collaboration of 500 indigenous leaders, fishermen, and residents gathered to protest at the site of the Belo Monte Dam, where machinery is continuing to arrive to construct the world's largest proposed dam. The group had vowed to sit on the site permanently, but officials from the building corporation presented legal papers which effectively cleared the group off. Nonetheless, this unprecedented alliance of indigenous leaders and fishermen sat in together for 15 hours. Read more here

Not Just Climate Change: 3 Other Challenges

I love how the Wildlife Conservation Society goes beyond the glaring challenge of climate change to look at three other challenges to the trio of environment, animals, and humans. According to them, WCS:

focus[es] on four global challenges: Emerging wildlife diseases, climate change, the increasing harvest of natural resources by local communities, and the expansion of extractive industries. As part of our mission to save wildlife and wild places, we support local human interests by fostering sustainable livelihoods—a balance that is essential to the success of long-term conservation.

For example, the WCS fosters an organic "conservation cotton" clothing initiative in Zambia in those very regions with the highest biodiversity.
Read more here

Good News! Heal Main Street, Tax Wall Street

You know, it's all good news these days. California nurses recently got together on a SF street and gave out free food to the hungry--whom they, as nurses, have been seeing a lot more of these days. More people are flooding into hospitals as basic government services are cut. As nurses, they're trained to heal people. So, they say, shouldn't we be getting in on healing the good 'ol US of A?

Here's their plan: pass a Financial Transaction Tax. The tax will help finance public services to prevent the cutting of the safety net that keeps the moderately-okay folks from slipping out to become the poor folks.

The National Nurses Union proposes a “Main Street Contract for the American People” that would raise $350 billion dollars by charging “a tiny tax on Wall Street trading of 0.5% on transactions like stocks, bonds, foreign currency bets and derivatives.”

I know, you're thinking, how could this be good news, this tax hasn't been passed yet!
Yet: We are transformed in acts of the imagination. Right now, the imagination of nurses across the United States has me reeling...for the better. Thanks, nurses, for beginning the healing.

Read more here

Are Sea Levels Really Rising? Yes, We Can See Them. Waiting on the Island of Tuvalu

Are Tides Rising? A fascinating web site, World View of Global Warming, documents before and after photos of shores to show that, yes indeed, the waters are rising. Somehow, it makes a difference to see it with your own eyes.

Above, we see kids sitting on their porch on the Pacific island of Tuvalu. Ten years ago, a student in one of my college classes, a lovely young woman, reported that she hailed from the island of Tuvalu. A recent immigrant, she missed it terribly, she said. So why then had she come? I asked. She had been sent by the elders to leave the island, because the island soon would be underwater. She smiled broadly as she said it. Among us two, it was perhaps only I who felt bitter that the actions of high carbon producing nations such as ours were driving her and her people from their island home. Since then, I have heard that many from Tuvalu have emigrated to Australia in a program. As you can imagine, many of the departees are young people, while their elders remain as the waters rise, nothing able to convince them to loosen their grasp on the land to which their souls, and the souls of their ancestors, have clung.

See photos of sea shore rise here

Cement (Once Living Stone)

At home today, I pulled off the shelf a maroon-colored spiral bound journal dated 2003 and began reading. I came upon this poem. So dramatic I was!

What Lives In Me

Though I bear no progeny
What lives in me
Will live on in the flowers
In the rocks and in the altars
In the drops of the sea;
In the cement of the plazas,
Once living stone,
And in your heart, eternally.
Let the tombstone read:
I was human with all my griefs
I was blasted with the winter of hope.

Above is my photo of a friend walking.

July 20 Reading in Berkeley

I'll be reading at Pegasus Books in Berkeley on July 20th.

Lyrics and Dirges: A Monthly Reading Series
Start: 7:30 pm
Location: Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, CA
(510) 649-1320 Curated by Sharon Coleman

Complete list of readers: Joseph Lease, Adam David Miller, Tiffany Higgins, Doeba Bropleh, and Claudia Castro Luna.

See Event Details, Full Bios

Goddesses of Warnings

Ms. Homeland Security: Illegal Entry Dress Tent, 40" x 50", 2005, by Robin Lasser and Adrienne Pao

Thanks to friend and artist Michele Guieu, who let me know about Robin Lasser's affecting work. Here we see two images from Robin's series of tents.

Michele calls the female tent-figures goddesses of warnings.

The cool image below refers, airily, to the melting of our glaciers.
Ice Queen: Glacial Retreat Dress Tent
40 x 48 inch color photograph, 2008

See more art by Robin Lasser