What I learned

Me in front of the Berlin Wall, well a part of it that was
brought to the United States.

Maybe I shouldn't be trying to save the world after all. Maybe I'm missing the entire point. I mean, I'm thinking, if we are extinct, who's going to really care? Who's going to miss us? What is the purpose of perpetuating ourselves forever? Maybe this whole thing isn't about perpetuation, but maybe it's about LOVE. In this crazy world we live in with pain and death and daily surprises, LOVE appears the only constant. It is some strange, higher-evolved emotion that only humans, and maybe a few monkeys, can experience. But what if the LOVE keeps evolving until we are all warm fuzzy hippies? Is that the fate of mankind? We hug, love one another, and then turn to face our extinction?

Okay, allow me to be more pragmatic. MAYBE the reason I'm trying to save the world is for fairness — so future generations can still see and experience the same beauty that I have enjoyed. Maybe the little kids of the future are entitled to a patch of woods and a creek to play in.

Or, maybe it's a principle. Maybe it's not FAIR for humans to explode their numbers and consume every corner of the Earth like mindless parasites. MAYBE that's not fair to the millions of other species we share the Planet with.

Maybe, hell, maybe I just like the natural world. Maybe I'm just selfish and want to make it last.

And now, a little deep rambling...

The success of our country is due to our strong Economic Machine, which has brought most of us some degree of material wealth and comfort. Maybe the Republicans are the anointed caretakers of this engine. They are like little robed monks who walk around oiling, tuning, and generally pampering the Machine. Of course, the Machine makes a lot of nasty waste, which harms both people and nature. It is obviously wrong but when the Environmental Whackos complain, the Guardians circle the wagons and scream, "You cannot mess with our Machine!"

And the Whackos respond, "But the thing is poisoning us; it's slowly killing us and our children."

"But the Machine brings you wealth and prosperity," they say. "Without it we could not have the American Way that we all enjoy."

"But, but, what about the future?" you ask. "You are destroying the very world that sustains us."

"Don't worry about it because God will take care of that."

Truth Is A Lie, And A Lie Is Truth

Truth Is A Lie, and A Lie Is Truth

Breathe in,
Breathe out.
What you thought might be today
Is really tomorrow.

And the truth you twisted
Became my reality.

I listened, I listened until the night turned to day.
Capturing thoughts on paper, trying to capture life.
It's all too much.

Spinning cosmos and trying to understand it all.
I trusted you, but you betrayed me.
You listened to the corporate whore; you said you needed more.

Little tin soldiers marching in the desert, dying in the desert.
Muddled thoughts try to make sense of it all.

But the speed, the pace, the passion. Far too intense.
Because what is truth today becomes a lie tomorrow.

So, lay there and sleep.
And sip on the holy water to drown your sorrow.

As for me, I spin wildly in the abyss.
While I think about lost loves, victories, and all the things that I miss.

Breathe in, breathe out.
Take me away.
Breathe in, breathe out.
Don't let me stay.

A Wonderful Week For Canaries

Wangari Mathai, one
of my great heros.

I squealed with delight when I heard that Wangari Maathai had won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize last week. An environmental activist from Kenya, she typifies a great Yellow Canary in every way. As leader of the Green Belt Movement , she has helped to improve the environment, empower women, and fight corruption for nearly 30 years.

She is currently Kenya's Deputy Environmental Minister and the first black African woman to ever win a Nobel Prize. She is best known for leading a campaign to plant 30 million trees to counter deforestation.

"Many of the wars in Africa are fought over natural resources," she said. "Ensuring they are not destroyed is a way of ensuring there is no conflict."

This is a major discovery I made in January 1998, and it is a premise of this website and blog — that environmental protection and peacemaking go hand-and-hand.

In receiving the award, Dr. Maathai continued by saying:

"Don't farm in forests ... because we will lose our forests. We have been given the responsibility of caring for future generations, and the younger ones, so that they may have water."

This is exactly what I've been trying to say in different ways throughout my website and blog. Notice her beautiful phrase, "responsibility of caring for future generations." This is such a key part of what it's all about.

Here is what my greatest of all heros, Jimmy Carter, had to say about Dr. Maathai's award:

"She has fought courageously to protect the environment and human rights, in the face of severe governmental pressures to silence her often lonely voice. As an outstanding woman leader, she is a role model for other women throughout Africa struggling to improve the well-being of their families and communities."

And here's what the Nobel committee had to say in presenting the award:

"We believe that Maathai is a strong voice speaking for the best forces in Africa to promote peace and good living conditions on that continent."

In 1977, as a member of the National Council of Women of Kenya, she abandoned her promising career as a biology professor to pursue her environmental projects. She has since dedicated her life to making the world a better place.



A Message from the Canary...

Now, really, sometimes I have no idea why I'm keeping this blog, but this week I've gotten a better idea why. I know that I am not destined for greatness like Dr. Maathai and others that I have mentioned on this blog. However, there are young people around the world like Julia Butterfly and others who may be searching and who may stumble onto this blog. I hope that, if anything, my contribution to the world is to inspire some up-and-coming Canaries. All of us are like clay, and our lives are molded by our experiences — things we see, read, and hear. My hope is that this blog can provide one positive sound bite to some great, rising leader in our movement.

Ultimately, I do believe that we Canaries will prevail in our goal to promote peace and global sustainability. But, I also know that the institutions we are pushing against will persecute us, imprison us, and sometimes kill us. There are many Canaries around the world who are far greater than I because they are risking their lives to do what is right. From Thailand to Nigeria and from Mexico to Colombia, they are standing up against exploitation, hate, war, and inequality. These are the people who are going to ultimately save the Earth. I thank these true super heros for giving me hope, and I ask God to bless them.

— Sources: Associated Press, National Public Radio

Duck People: The Story Continues

Hey, this place is full of quacks! And, hey,
it's so crowded here the water is dirty and
I can't find a place to lay eggs. Maybe having
so many of us in this finite place isn't such
a good idea.

Okay, so the story continues ... in 1996 I was a loyal Republican and church leader. I spent four and a half years planting a church for the unchurched, but then I began thinking, "If this religion I was born into is so right, then why is everything so wrong?" I looked around and couldn't make sense of what was going on in the world. I was fiddling while Rome was burning.

So, I spent from July 1997 to November 2003 as an environmental activist, with a particular interest in population. I did volunteer work for Planned Parenthood, National Wildlife Federation, Population Connection, and spent massive hours helping the Sierra Club. I worked in political campaigns, held signs at demonstrations, attended endless meetings, and built coalitions. I volunteered with a passion, neglected my family, and won five awards. I held local, state, and national positions with the Sierra Club — every moment of my day I was busy doing something. I was totally driven.

This year, I rotated off most of my Sierra Club positions and have cut back on my volunteer time. This has allowed me to pursue my two other passions — Macintosh computers and tennis. But more importantly, it has given me valuable time to think. The thing I love about the Sierra Club is the wonderful people I have met — both the volunteers and staff. A really cool thing about the Club is that it operates about 200 e-mail discussion lists, so you can sign up for any environmental topic you want and have discussions with and make friends with people around the country.

Protecting the environment is extremely difficult because it is in our cultural DNA to continually grow and expand, usually with no regard for nature or the future. After six years of swimming against the tide of Mother Culture, and after years of banging my head against the wall, I have concluded that a new approach is needed.

For much of this year I have been in learning mode. Two areas that I have spent months studying are indigenous societies and human history. What I learned about indigenous peoples is that there have been thousands of small societies around the world that have lived sustainably for thousands of years. In just a few hundred years, Western Culture, along with its Industrial Revolution and One-Right-Way religion, has either severely disrupted or destroyed nearly all of these communities.

In regards to human history, I have learned that much about our behavior is determined by the past. When 9/11 struck America, we dug into our DNA and reverted to a primordial "panic" state. For the past three years our nation has not behaved rationally, rather we are in "fight and flee" mode. When you study history, you can better understand why we are acting the way we are.

Even more fascinating in my studies has been the evolution of religion. I am starting to see that the faith of the Hebrews was not written down by a few Jewish fathers, but rather Judaism, and its offshoot Christianity, are a collection of many ancient ideas and influences. Ancient Egyptian religion, in particular, seemed to serve as an incubator for many of the ideas now found in today's Big Three religions.

What I have concluded is that, hmm, well, I guess that religion is all about the human interpretation of God. In many respects, religion is either good or benign, but there is also some bad. As a great Canary once said at a lecture, "Religion has done some good and some bad, but mostly bad."

My interest at this point is to perhaps begin an outreach to religious fundamentalists. Right now I have no idea how to approach this, since the gap between me and a fundamentalist is vast, the topic of discussion is charged with emotion, and they are not really interested in what I have to say anyway. I know where they are coming from because I was once one of them. I will continue to listen to them, but I'm not so sure they will listen to me.

I have no idea how I became a Yellow Canary and became different from the Yellow Ducks. I have no idea why I became a progressive idealist instead of an unquestioning follower. I really don't. But I had lunch today with another Canary who is just like me, and that is reassuring.

Maybe I am insane, but maybe I'm not. Only God knows.

Yellow Canary

Yellow Canaries Are Everywhere

Let's put him on the mantel. No, let's
set him over the toilet. Yeah, that's a
good idea. Yeah, that Canary was
a tortured soul. Poor guy.

The Good News...

Is that there are actually thousands of Yellow Canaries around the world, just like me. These are people who care about the future and do great things to make the world better. They are writers, poets, politicians, ministers, corporate leaders, and lowly grunts like me. All of us have one thing in common — we care. We worry about what the world will be like in seven generations or in 100 years. We really don't WANT to see humans destroy both themselves and their home Planet. But with our nukes, sloppy land use policies, and indifference toward the Natural World, we seem determined to kill ourselves.

I can always spot a Canary out in a crowd. Always when I meet them, I find we have similar views about life. Whether they are trying to help kids out in the inner city or building solar windmills, I immediately respect and admire them. I have the deepest respect for humans that try to make my world better.

The Canaries who've been at this for a long time usually "see the light" and become concerned about SUSTAINABILITY. Simply defined, sustainability is living in such a way that we leave the world in as good or better shape for the next generation. That's all there is to it, and that's all I ask. There are hundreds of indigenous societies that have lived this way for thousands of years, but they are small. Western Capitalism, on the other hand, is a huge locust that consumes everything in its path. Armed with an accommodating religion, Western Capitalism consumes, rapes, and destroys. In return for our allegiance to this Whore, we get a house, color TV, and a can of beans.

But some people are questioning the Mother Culture that we worship. They are saying, "Wow, if we melt the polar caps then the poor island nations won't have a place to live." But Mother Culture says, "Buy that Hummer because God has blessed you and whip out those credit cards because it's Christmastime."

Interestingly, Canaries are more concentrated in some areas more than others. The Scandinavian nations, for example, are modern societies that appear truly committed to sustainability. They are leading the way for the rest of us. Even in some parts of the United States, there are concentrations of Canaries, such as in New England and the Pacific states. But in the so-called Bible Belt states, Canaries are an extreme rarity.

If you think I'm suggesting a correlation between fundamentalist Christianity and a disregard for sustainability, well, sadly, I am. My biggest goal in life is to get the conservative faith community to embrace sustainability. That is it. Sadly, my particular denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, was making small steps toward this goal before being seized by extremists in the mid 1990s. Most of the moderates have been purged from my denomination, and these were the men and women who provided hope.

Who the hell are these Christian extremists? I tend to think that they are people who are scared. At the very least they are scared of change, and at worse they are terrified of seeing their traditional religious paradigm crumbling.

Okay, well, I'm rambling. There's nothing worse than a rambling canary. So, I will end my post with an excerpt from a great Scandinavian Canary. It is from Gro Harlem Brundtland, MD. Dr. Brundtland is the past prime minister of Norway and recently completed a term as secretary general of the World Health Organization. When I first read one of her essays, I just started crying. I had never read anything more powerful.

From Gro Harlem Brundtland, one of the world's greatest Canaries:

Although modern transportation and communication systems are bringing the world closer together, the economic and social gaps between us are still widening. Our knowledge may have taken man to the moon, but our mismanagement and over-exploitation of the world's natural resources have brought life on Earth closer to extinction.

For the first time in history, human activities are having a severe, possibly irreversible, impact on nature and the living conditions of all the species on our Planet. Global warming, depletion of the ozone layer, lack of clean water, extensive loss of species and biological diversity, acceleration of deforestation, and desertification are all signs of the global crisis now approaching.

And that, my friends, is the crux of my problem. And whether you choose to accept it or not, it is your problem too.

Are We God's Mistake?

Yum, yum, more drugs to keep us alive so that we
can pay taxes. We all want to live as long as we can
even if it means pumping ourselves up with chemicals.
But if heaven is so wonderful, why are we all so
afraid to die?


Well, why write when my Canary Friend Alan can say it all so much better:


I think I'll change sides.

I'll vote for Bush, buy a gas-guzzler; encourage all women to have as many children as humanly possible (I think that's 26). Buy more and more stuff, greed is good, war is good, other countries are happier when we dominate them. After all God meant for America to own all the world's oil.

Yep, lets get it over with. The sooner the Planet's eco-system crashes and humans become extinct the better. Maybe God will be a bit more careful with his/her next big brain experiment, or on second thought maybe one is enough.