Superorganism - Example of Emergence

Here is a video of the structure of a massive ant colony (the way they learn about it is despicable and an example of the ravages of reductionist science)... This demonstrates how superorganisms design elegantly - patterns from nature abundantly demonstrating wise design.

Eco-Conferences 2010

Interested in up and coming eco-conferences? Here's a new site with oodles of listings to tempt you to convene and confab!

http://www.conferencealerts.com/environment.htm

Blueberry Blue

But the Earth, capital E, is so much larger than this, on such a different scale, immortal on the scale of billions of years beyond our own droplet of consciousness momentarily raised from this river of Life. She/It will persevere after the cleansing waters released by her detoxify the current poisons and wash away our buildings, and—sadly —our grandchildren. She-It will persist and thrive beyond our reckoning, though our form of worship and praise has been in places inadequate to the beautiful offerings life has made with us. Companera praisesongs momentarily raised, unfurling, then composting, each species, some untimely quenched by the poisonmaker greed of a culture and time too late coming clear to the incompleteness of our vision and the scale of our folly. Swimme and Thomas Berry think the Earth is working through us now to birth a new species. I love their optimism, not sure I subscribe to that magazine.

[picture of "Milky Way Galaxy Appears Over Ontario"
Credit & Copyright: Kerry-Ann Lecky Hepburn (Weather and Sky Photography) Nasa.gov (Creative Commons - Attribution) http://z.hubpages.com/u/443819_f496.jpg]

But a longer faith breathes me, knowing the freshness of time, of She-It-Earth, four billion years young. So nimble, lithe, creative. Able to hibernate for 100 million years of rebirth. Able to boil oceans to get a bath. So many systren solar systems, galaxies, and universes await. We are a blink, our young species, barely a toddler on the scale of mammalian species. We will learn to walk or we will not, but this push for life is so much larger than us, which is what keeps me grinning, that and waking up to mugwort mustering flowers, to the kale seed pods whisper-shaking in the early morning crowsquawk breeze with the melodies of song sparrow bringing lavender to anemonepale skywash, tinting finally to the palest clary sage tongue blue; "blue" insufficient. Calendula blue. Raspberry blue. Fox blue. Spruce blue. Feverfew blue. Crocosmia blue. Yellow road sign hexagon weed plant blue. Grass blue. Sage blue. Fuschia clematis blue. Heliotrope blue. Pumpkin flower blue. Pumpkin blue, Zucchini blue. Basil blue. Zinnia blue, dahlia blue, iris blue. Marionberry blue, sour apple blue, blueberry blue, All this in the moment symphony blue of sky becoming this particular exquisite gift of day, this long languorous summer blue, a long gift of plant party praise flower fruiting. May we be songs of earth and Earth this day, blueberry songs, skritch skritch bird songs, the sleeping slugs in afternoon heat amount of somnolent; the sleeking blackfeather emphatic of small ravens. May we caress each other as this first breeze of now nurtures our left cheek, peach fuzz like peaches somewhere ripening. May we be worthy of this twirl of Earth, the particular gift of HerIts dance. May we be worthy, and may we praise it all as the complex first morning orange of nasturtiums with yellow backside petals contrast with rose geranium reddening organza colored seed and leaf here where the Goddess watches sunrise.

Journal for Sustainability Education Launches

Prescott College's premiere edition of the Journal for Sustainability Education launched today. Includes great pieces :

• Dennis Martinez on The Value of Indigenous Ways of Knowing to Western Science and Environmental Sustainability
• Rick Medrick's Review of Andres Edwards’ Thriving Beyond Sustainability
• Jordana DeZeeuw Spencer's An Evolving Definition of Sustainability
• Pramod Parajuli's auto-ethnography "At Home in Prescott: Confluence of Streams in my Journey as an Interdisciplinary Sustainability Educator"

and a trove of other gems including examples of sustainability curricula, approaches, and resources.

Can the Earth as Mountain Store the Knowing When the Beings Have Passed? - A Revery on Biocultural Diversity Loss and Language Extinction

[Excerpted from "Petal Fall 42010 of Pacific Cascadia:
Manuscripts, sound files and visual imagery unearthed in the Pacific Cascadia dig of 43343-United Federation of Planets Official Terra-Ethnography
The Life of Terrans, Volume 317: Turtle Island Rites"]


[Manuscript A-1375] [Visual Plates V-9873L-N]

Can the Earth as mountain store the knowing when the beings have passed? Human, plant, ecosystemic. The intricate coevolving weaving, the heart felt presencing, the ways that Scutellaria, Artemisia, Magnolia and humans have intertwined? Is myth the seed carrier, into the mountains? Are our stories shared a living Svalbard of seed stock stored, the mythseeds of intertwining? How will Earth hold all this to the next great flowering? The lost languages, the ways of walking, barefoot, the songs? And how will Earth thrive in the meantime, these songs that helped the sun rise, these prayers that companioned Moon? If we are part of life, part of what is required, then in this time of dissolving, flattening, this time of erasure and the great mindsicknesses that roll across humankind, in this time, if we are not doing as we have done, then the planthunger and storythirst, the songdrought and poemunravelling, how we miss Earth and Earth misses us. All this wavekeening without solace. Perhaps the flowering magnolia can carry us, perhaps old volcanoes ripe with rhododendron.

Perhaps it is this drinking of the ancestor blood, the thick black cemetery ooze of a time before has spiritinfected us. We drink deeply draughts of extincted kin from a time before, perhaps this elixir of ancient cemeteries is a kind of voudoun, and so extinction calls us to it closely. The dark moon time, scythe to extinction. So we need to seed-in, pull the essential information close against the unkind conditions. A time of assessment and discernment. What will Earth harvest from us for some future time? What if we can only bring one thing, or one pattern of life, what will we carry forward as gifts to Earthlife eons from now, some time as different as dinosaurs?

I have no peace in this. Perhaps mountainEarth, fibrileEarth, nitrogenEarth, hydrogenEarth, waterEarth, cloudEarth, riverEarth, magmaEarth, perhaps Earth can carry us deep within. Can Earth know peace? Carrying the mythseeds of us, the distillation, may it not be futurepoison, or if poison, then may it be homeopathic, provoking a healing response. Wholeness, that is this prayer when the spring petalopen flowers contradict the larger scythetimecycle we seem to embody. May Earth know peace. And may we, as a form of living miracle, embody allseason peace though the signs are grim and the grimreap of culture, of beings, unassailably surrounds us. We are beacons of another possibility. May we be these seeds, the mutations, skyrattlingly beautiful, aberrant, potent, vining out also unassailable, awakening and catalytic, clear water in a time of drought, clear water in a time of oilseep, in a time of dinosaurblood. Clear water tingling some older knowing: Life!

Tragic Close of SUNY Southhampton Eco-Campus

Commemorating the work of my colleague Aimee DeChambeau to create human-scale education at SUNY. The SUNY Southhampton campus will be closed due to budget cuts and reopened as a massive commuter school.

So sad to see all that love and design not be able to immediately be a resource to the next generation - I wonder if there were a way to turnaround the campus instead so it could be a profit center for SUNY (not only tuition --but also/instead, produce and products, innovation center)....

In terms of some models for higher education...

Fractal/complexity/emergence science offers more scalable and fleet footed models than these large organizations with so much middle management freight. It shows how sustainability is not only about the "how" of physical infrastructure but also the "how" of scales and power structures. What is at the heart of a school? Is it a campus? Is it about a rendering of 17th/18th century mansions/palaces/ with large lawn expanses and the caricature-ization of the leisure class (which by the way implies a servant/slave class, see Rosemary Radford Ruether/I'll save the rest of this rant) or is it more like a working class/productive farm/garden/food forest? with mentoring and apprenticeships, embedded in the community. What about education "booths" or "observation pods" (stations) in public parks? What about bunkhouses, backpacks and distributed computing while tending the geese and llamas instead of all this overhead of large buildings where people can sit inside in regal/majestic courts, completely divorced from weather elements, sometimes without sky? What about goatbarn roundtables while pulling beans?

Beyond the Hero's (or Hera's) Journey

Just can't resist offering a feminist expansion of what is rendered [a la Joe (Campbell)] as "the hero's journey." I am assuming other feminist scholars besides myself have done the work of deconstructing this "archetype" as only a partial rendering of the many, ecological, connecting archetypal patterns and rhythms for discovery and deepening. I forgive Campbell, for he was such an ardent journeyer and was so beautiful in his way-showing, for this limitation which we can now see in that work. The emphasis of a single being, a "hero," whose journey involves deepening isolation and different-than-ness (OK I could really go on and on here about this, I'll stop myself), deracination, challenge etc. is so ...dominator, so Western. Earth-based practitioners have proposed that for our culture, instead of solo quests (which might make sense as rites of passage in cultures of deep embedded connection), we need to engage in the modes and patterns of the men's/women's movements, about circling, creativity, culture-making, and connection.

A really interesting question is: what would an ecological, planetary-emergent model for rites of passage look like rather than the solitary-being narrative of a disconnected cell - what if contexted properly as part of the larger bloodstream of the earth? How would we need to upend our grammar to properly position ourselves in a narrative of the world-in-the-present-moment-perhaps-unfurling-in-this-water-sac-and-also-as-the-orison-of-4-billion-years-in-process-and-motion-and-evolution? How do we reframe our narratives as the planet-in-bodies?

Just to stir the cauldron and widen our gyre...