A Resistance Movement to save the Planet

If you're trying to imagine what the vision of a movement like this might be you might want to check out this article by Derrick Jensen. I'll post a quote below.

What I want is for us to think like members of a serious resistance movement.


What does that look like? Well, to start, it doesn’t have to mean handling guns. Even when the IRA was at its strongest, only 2 percent of its members ever picked up weapons. The same is true for the Underground Railroad; Harriet Tubman and others carried guns, but Quakers and other pacifists who ran safe houses were also crucial to that work. What they all held in common was a commitment to their cause, and a willingness to work together in the resistance.

A serious resistance movement also means a commitment to winning, which means figuring out what “winning” means to you. For me, winning means living in a world with more wild salmon every year than the year before, more migratory songbirds, more amphibians, more large fish in the oceans, and for that matter oceans not being murdered. It means less dioxin in every mother’s breast milk. It means living in a world where there are fewer dams each year than the year before. More native forests. More wild wetlands. It means living in a world not being ravaged by the industrial economy. And I’ll do whatever it takes to get there (and if, by the way, you believe that “whatever it takes” is code language for violence, you’re revealing nothing more than your own belief that nonviolence is ineffective).--Derrick Jensen

Obama and Politics

Ran Prieur has had some really insightful political posts on December 14th, 15th, and 17th. I especially like this part:

Obama's moral failure was running for president in the first place. He should have known he was not going to be able to keep his campaign promises, and knowing that, he should not have made them, and then there's no point in running. But you know who also runs for president? Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul. They are all feeding the lie, and they probably believe it themselves, that the Emperor rules the Empire, and not the other way around.

Life After Ishmael

There have been a few times that I've wanted to rename this blog to Life After Ishmael. The book simply had a big impact on me. For example, when I'm reading a book by any author I find myself asking if what the author is saying has any relation to what Daniel Quinn had to say in Ishmael. This is happening quite often as I'm reading Karen Armstrong's The Case for God. Take this quote for instance.

"In his conversations Socrates sought not merely to inform but to form the minds of his interlocutors, producing within them a profound psychological change. Wisdom was about insight, not amassing information." Pg. 59

I had a "profound psychological change" after reading Ishmael. As it stands right now it's a mystery to me how it happened, but no doubt it happened.




http://www.amazon.com/Case-God-Karen-Armstrong/dp/0307269183

The Great Chain of Being

I'm still going through my notebooks. More on what Nature means to us.

"The Great Chain of Being concept is a product of the Middle Ages, but it wasn't left behind during the Renaissance. Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz all wrote about it with complete seriousness. In fact, it's never been left behind, has it? Even people who don't believe in God or angels still perceive Man to be at the top of the chain of life on this planet. He stands apart and above all the rest--the rest being that which during the Age of Enlightenment came to be known as 'Nature.'"--Daniel Quinn, Pg. 81, If They Give you Lined Paper Write Sideways

Phillip K. Dick on Reality

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away." --Phillip K. Dick

I've always liked this essay by him. It's titled: How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later

Anxiety, Abram and Animism

I'm starting to understand why Daniel Quinn will not use the term nature in his work. In The Story of B he even titled a section Dynamiting Nature. In that section he talks about why using the term nature in any discussion can be decieving.

Anyway, back to another quote I dug up out of my notebook that speaks to my understanding.

"From an animistic perspective, the clearest source of all this disstress, both physical and psychological, lies in the aforementioned violence needlessly perpetrated by out civilization on the ecology of the planet, only by alleviating the latter will we be able to heal the former." --David Abram, Pg.22, The Spell of the Sensuous

Perhaps what we do to the earth we do to ourselves.

Stories and Calvin Luther Martin

In going through my notebooks I found these two quotes about story:

"....[The story]had a spirit, yua: the story itself was a living thing."-- Pg.2

"....the story may be thinking you rather than you thinking it."--Pg.3

Both of those quotes are out of Martin's book The Way of the Human Being.