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“No slave is a slave to the same lengths,
and in so full a sense of the word
as a wife is…however brutal a tyrant
she may unfortunately be chained to
~though she may know that he hates her ~
he can claim from her and enforce
the lowest degradation of a human being,
that of being made the instrument
of an animal function contrary to her inclinations.”
~John Stuart Mill as quoted in The Sexual Contract by Carole Pateman
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"If you don't hold yourself accountable...
there is no hope.
Stop part-timing conservation."
~Asher Jay in Art of the Matter
National Geographic Live
2.5.2015
Dear Friend,
My brother once told me he hates the color of his skin, his pale skin, because of the greed it represents. His self-hatred is a sentiment shared by many of Caucasian descent who are honest about what allows their position. This first letter with bison explores the shame that divides people by class, color, and sex to discern what may bring people together despite persistent harms.
For one who is born to empire and awakens to empire from within its confines, there are three responses to the tragedies of colonialism: rebel, harden, or live to rewrite the story by way of resolving harms. While there are countless variations, all responses to the genocide fit within these three major categories. For example, apathy is a form of hardening and retreat a form of rebellion, while artistry seeks to inspire resolve.
Acts of colonialism are rooted in an ownership mentality to which all participants, male and female, comply. Whether it is owning a spouse, an animal, land, water or any other ‘resource’, inherent to the colonialist mind is a righteous entitlement. The roots of this entitlement are so deep and far spread that a person is truly blind to the insult until something shakes loose, until the spouse goes away or the seasons fail. In this sense, people may now be grateful that the very foundations of being are crumbling around them.
Men slaughtered bison to near extinction in an attempt to starve other men and their families. The genocide was an enactment of what had been perpetrated on them. Genocide was then and remains today the way of survival. The colonialist does not comprehend the generosity of the homeland.
In a subconscious fear of abandonment, the colonialist mind makes property of everyone, including himself. If anyone is a slave in a system, everyone in that system is a slave. It does not matter if one closes the day with earnings of a million dollars or one dollar.
The harms are not resolved by condemning colonialists and their descendants. Judgment only fuels the shame that perpetrates the harms. At the same time, the harms that continue must come to an end very soon if any descendants are to survive the inheritance.
How does one call out the harm without shaming the perpetrator?
On the ground, stopping the harms looks like tearing down fences, both physical and imagined, so that bison are free to roam and a culture of generosity restored to the land.
It is rather simple innocent ignorance when someone who knows a city life suggests that bison be allowed immediate freedom from the confines of Yellowstone. The challenges of such freedom become real when one makes a living off the land surrounding the Park.
To capitalize on the work and lives of others is to control their sex whether they be plant or animal. What must go is this profiting off the creative, sexual energy of others.
As women claim their souls, may the lives of others be honored? Does ending the wife’s enslavement stop the rape of all inhabitants, the larger family all women feel to the bone?
In my experience, tough love changes the colonialist mind I know too well. May the pain not need to be much greater than it is now.
The most painful is to hate one’s own skin.
The shame is too much.
Let's not project this wound on my son’s generation, please.
Love and Blessings
thank you,
Megan
PS ex·tinc·tion wit·ness is an independent secular collaborative art project founded with intent to bring people together around a loss too great to hold alone while celebrating responses that promise to end harms perpetrated by default colonialism.
Your presence with and support of the project is greatly appreciated.
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invitation to pause is a 3.44~minute film
introducing ex·tinc·tion wit·ness
& some of the collaborating artists
Please see invitation to pause here
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"Political movement on the issue of climate change
will be like the rise in average
global temperatures ~ non-linear.
Things like the Pope weighing in...
to demand action,
tip the balance.
We will look back at this time
and wonder how
it could ever have seemed impossible
to get political action on the issue."
~Karyn Strickler in response to
things to see & do
This Changes Everything
by Naomi Klein
Project Drawdown
DRAWDOWN (ˈdrôˌdoun) n.
The point at which concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere begin to decline.
‘What’s Possible'
2014 UN Climate Summit Opening Film
First Policy Switch:
From a strategy of reducing problems to reversing them
Blindspot Think Tank, UK
"People are not inherently destructive and economic activity need not remain dependent on exploiting people, planet and the potential of the future. The economic vehicle need not remain stuck in reverse, making reverse progress. Janis Birkeland (2008) offers the third strategy option of ‘positive development’: 'The view that negative impacts are an inevitable consequence of development has blinded us to the obvious. We could design development to increase the size, health and resilience of natural systems, while improving human health and life quality.' "
read the First Policy Switch...
Women's Climate Action Agenda
Women's Earth Climate Action Network ~ WECAN
Derived from the collective efforts of the 2013 International Women's Earth and Climate Summit, major points of the Women's Climate Action Agenda action plan include: limiting global warming to 1.5-2.0 °Celsius ceiling, urgency to protect intact forest and assist with forest regeneration, leave almost all of the remaining fossil fuel reserves in the ground and stop further fossil fuel exploration and development. Women are calling for an emotional connection to all children, present and future.
read the Women's Climate Action Agenda...
Climate Disruption
a film by Kelly Nyks & Jared P. Scott
Climate Disruption tells the why and what of the People's Climate March.
watch Climate Disruption...
Reverberations Of War
edited recording of the 9.5.14 poetry reading at Shakespeare & Co., Missoula
listen to Reverberations Of War...
The Arctic Methane Monster’s Rapid Rise, Jennifer Hynes’ Power Point presentation about the predicted release of a superpower of methane from the Arctic. The presentation is dramatic and inflammatory, and Jennifer Hynes notes her personal belief that there is no avoidance of a Near Term Human Extinction.
The lens one gazes through and how one manages the response to information determines more than can be known.
For the science, it is worth watching Jennifer's presentation.
Much of the information she shares is solid and the danger is real.
However, the conclusions Jennifer draws are tainted with fear, to which we are all susceptible. Jennifer's conclusions are challenged by this review from Steven Running, Regents Professor, Director at Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group, Department of Ecosystem and Conservation Sciences, University of Montana:
"Well, [Jennifer Hynes] has sure spent a lot of time reading up on this science. The slides shown are from solid research papers and datasets, I use some of them myself. Boreal methane hydrates are real, and there is a lot of it. However the thermodynamics are such that there is no way it could melt out and be released within a year or two, and the biosphere will not simply collapse. Her final statement that within a year the Arctic sea ice will be gone is simply a wild extrapolation. The latest Arctic sea ice data, downloaded 10min ago, shows that 2014 did NOT end up as the biggest melt on record, and there is no evidence that Arctic sea ice will be totally gone by Sept 2015 ie 1 year from now. Antarctica also has a large ice mass this year. So her projection that the ice will disappear and the biosphere will simply unravel in the next 1-2 years simply has no factual basis. I admire the kind of passion and effort people like her bring to the global warming issue, but passing around this sort of misinformation does not help us to have a mature discussion about humanity's next choices." ~SR
It is important to read both Jennifer and Steven, to act now in a steady, focused, determined fashion as if there is no time to stall or sidestep ultimate solutions.
Fracking May Be Worse Than Burning Coal
Bill Mckibben
“In a paper published in the journal Climate Change in May 2011, they concluded that somewhere between 3.6 percent and 7.9 percent of the methane from fracking wells was escaping into the atmosphere as its made its way from underground to end user. Which is a lot. More than enough, as we shall see, to make fracking worse for climate change than the coal it was replacing.
... We need to look beyond methane leakage for a moment, and think about the transition to gas in a larger context. Because if we’re replacing coal with gas, it means we’re not replacing it with something else. .. in fact, in just the same years that we’ve learned to frack we’ve also learned an awful lot about how to scale up wind and sun. And that means that far from being a bridge, the big investments in natural gas may actually be a breakwater that keeps this new wave of truly clean energy from washing onto our shores.
… As it turns out, economists have studied the dynamics of this transition, and each time reached the same conclusion: because gas undercuts wind and sun just as much as it undercuts coal, there’s no net climate benefit in switching to it. For instance, the venerable International Energy Agency in 2011 concluded that a large-scale shift to gas would “muscle out” low-carbon fuels and still result in raising the globe’s temperatures 3.5 degrees Celsius—75 percent above the 2-degree level that the world’s governments have identified as the disaster line.
…to meet that two-degree target (and since just one degree is already causing havoc, we sure should), global gas consumption would have to peak as early as 2020. Which is, in infrastructure terms, right about now—if we want to be moving past natural gas by 2020, we need to stop investing in it now.”
read Fracking May Be Worse...
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“The redwoods were not made to be worshiped,
but they do help us in our worship.”
~Dean Ohlman for RBC Ministries in Celebrating the Wonder of A Tree
"As soon as I got out into Heaven's light
I started on another long excursion,
making haste with all my heart
to store my mind with the Lord's beauty
and thus be ready to any fate, light or dark.
And it was from this time that my long continuous wanderings
may be said to have fairly commenced.
I bade adieu to all my mechanical inventions,
determined to devote the rest of my life
to the study of the inventions of God."
~John Muir
However it is we wish to know God and the great love for ourselves and others, the forest will clearly no longer sustain an assault. The ocean is as present to the end of resilience.
The light coming in this time of revelation is purely to guide us through what we have already conjured by way of ignorance and self-judgment ~ a long dark night in which our children will share with one another out of real hunger.
~Megan Hollingsworth, excerpt from THE WAY OF UNCERTAINTY continue reading...
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VIRGIN 
(7:20 ~minute film)
see VIRGIN at Vimeo here
The title references virgin
in the original sense:
“Virgin was a label of strength and independence
by being used to describe the goddesses who were immune
to the temptations of Dionysus, Greek god of seduction
and wine. Virginity was once a term of power.”
~Palo Alto Medical Foundation
To VIRGIN is to proclaim the GREATEST HUMAN TRAITS.
Of these HONESTY is the greatest of all.
A documentation of healing ceremony with redwood grove of Oakland Hills, California, VIRGIN weaves poetry and song to convey a message of compassion for the perpetrator.
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a brief on
VIRGIN
includes some of the poetry
featured in VIRGIN and a brief
on the intent of this production at vimeo
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From Amazon Watch: 12.6.2014 "hundreds of indigenous peoples from communities across the Amazon joined together on a beach in Lima, Peru to create a massive "human banner" image to promote awareness about territorial rights for indigenous peoples in the global climate conversation." read more and see the banner...
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Feral Theatre's
Funeral for Lost Species
Please see this short film for highlights from a performance and sculpture installation at St Peter's Church, Brighton Fringe Festival, May 2011. Many artists contributed to this innovative exploration of extinction and ecological grief, in which audiences and participants engaged on a visceral and emotional level with humankind's power to destroy and create.
See 'Funeral for Lost Species' on Vimeo
Also please see The Life Cairn Project
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this Extinction Symbol is NOT
an ex·tinc·tion wit·ness creation
and ex·tinc·tion wit·ness encourages
the placement of this symbol
in public spaces
you may even tattoo this on your skin
per the request of the artist
who is based in the UK
please DO NOT commercialize
the extinction symbol
ie please DO NOT print the symbol on t-shirts
mugs or other products for sale
please create this symbol
in your own way
in a special place
preferably in view for all to see
Thank You!
more at Extinction Symbol
join in at flickr group
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