https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6510/1515

http://act.credoaction.com/sign/wastewater_food?sp_ref=216264552.4.170133.o.1.3&referring_akid=.9880174.KGH5OX&source=clickcopy_sp

Yet another example of legislators and/or big business making unethical decisions on behalf of consumers and the planet. No doubt those that make these decisions have their own unaffected food sources and/or they don’t realize what they are doing and/or they just don’t care. Certainly they rely on ignorance and the blind trust of those too blinkered or too kind or too-busy-getting-by to think that another human being could make decisions like these.

Wake up! These decisions are being made all the time and more and more often as the planet become more degraded.

Watch more closely and you will see them sneaking through this/that piece of legislation that benefits no one – other than the unaccountable, unscrupulous interests of big business. WTF are politicians on the taxpayer’s dime doing spending time on legislation that takes people rights away in order to make wealthy companies a few more bucks?

Clean water supplies are dwindling the world over. No corner of the earth is untouched by the silly consumption decisions that we continue to make (or not make) as we sleepwalk ourselves towards system collapse.

And we simply cannot allow fracking and prospecting to ruin what water we have not yet ravaged, while big companies make a fortune wrangling up good sources for their own benefit.

Please, for the sake of our children, lets do our research and consume in a more ethical manner. And remember that we also have the right and the power to demand that legislators make decisions in such a manner as well.

DRC authorities approve reserve boundaries in major boost for local people and endangered Grauer’s gorillas

Source: New era for conservation and communities in Itombwe

http://www.treehugger.com/culture/10-wonderful-words-about-nature-we-dont-have-us.html

PROJECTAPOLOGY IS GOING HERE:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3410009/Startling-moment-young-boy-appears-KISS-polar-bear-thank-goodness-bullet-proof-glass-between.html

What a beautiful specimen.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-1298022/Man-rescues-benguela-dolphin-stranded-beach.html

I am sitting on a rock in the forest when a stranger approaches:

“Imagine that you are here and that I’m here

and that we can do anything that we can dream of,” she starts.

Elaborating,

she starts to check off a list of being that floats conveniently to the fore,

like a powerpoint in the sky:

“In dreaming or in waking:

I am not currently a refugee,

nor am I currently bound by famine with very few options – check.”

I am not currently detained against my will – check;

I am not currently homeless, though this may be a deficit as relates my degree of comfort – check;

I have my speaking voice and can communicate with others [this may be a deficit too] –

even in languages I don’t know, with google translate – check;

I have been educated, able to think critically and to solve problems creatively;

I have my limbs and they work;

I am not terminally ill (well I am, yet seem currently to be in good health);

I am crippled by past trauma yet have the ability, will and resources to heal these wounds –  check.”

She stops and looks at me with an earnestness that could spontaneously cure a hardened alcoholic of denial:
“Now fuck off and start being grateful for everything you have and start using what you have been given to create change in the world.”

Source: EPA Finds Atrazine Likely Harming Most Species of Plants, Animals in U.S.

Grizzly bear numbers in the Greater Yellowstone area have improved since the animals were first protected in 1975, but the bears continue to be threatened by isolation from other grizzly populations, loss of key food sources and human-caused mortalities. Overall grizzlies occupy less than 2 percent of their historic range in the lower 48 — and yet the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed to remove protections from Yellowstone’s bears.

Source: Yellowstone Bears Need Your Help

Project Apology started off as a satire, as a mirror on human disconnectedness, as an art project.

It seems it was always going to become an interactive workshop event.

This process has taken place gradually over time as the project has dissolved in and out of focus in the midst of other projects and life responsibilities.  The fact that it has worked out this way I think has been beneficial, as it has grown in depth beside the depth of my own life experience amidst challenging events, which has brought tone not only to the delivery of acknowledgement/apology, but also to the underlying ideas and principals that gave birth to the project in the first place.

The first formal workshop was held at The Allan Brooks Nature Center through the Caetani Center, with a small yet diverse audience (in terms of belief systems).

It turned out to be an amazing experience, one that enabled numerous insights to crystallize and offered many leanings about taking the workshop format, and the project, further. The handful of participants were fully engaged and impassioned.  After a brief introduction to explain the project and set the context, we kicked off by apologizing to a hive of honey bees, inside the center.  There after we went outdoors and delivered a communal apology to the valley and all it’s inhabitants. During this time, a critically endangered Great Basin Spadefoot Toad, appeared literally at our feet, croaking seemingly in solidarity (or protest) This was followed by an open ended period of solo reflection and apology/acknowledgement time.

While most threw themselves into the process, one person was particularly resistant and took up a ‘voice of reason’ positioning, making statements like the ones below:

“This is just to make ourselves feel better…it doesn’t really do anything for the creatures who we apologize to.”

“Aren’t we over the hump in terms of conservation efforts, aren’t things getting better.”

Another participant, a biologist and ecologist, who was previously quite skeptical about the project, threw himself into the act of acknowledgment and apology, and was overwhelmed with emotion, to the point that he actually suggested that I warn people about the possibility of an emotional, transformative response, which in fact I had done and do do [he had just not been present]. Nevertheless, his testimony was certainly very strong qualitative evidence of the transformative power of the process of apologizing in its ability to, particularly in a facilitated scenario, to transcend rationalizing about our effect on the environment and to bring it into actual feeling terms, thus bringing down the veils of the illusion of separateness

Although we are all aware of the damage that is being done at the unconscious level, it is clear that many of find it too uncomfortable to engage in the scientific reality at the level of conscious feeling.   Ironically this is exactly what needs to happen if more species are to survive. We can only move forward by realizing and accepting where we are. To do so individually, I believe is part of our responsibility as human beings on this planet right now.

Acknowledging and sitting with the discomfort, accepting the disharmony, is the only way to move through it.