you gotta move

like gino sings it, you gotta move. i dunno what the future holds. so i can't predict accuately what the effect of my actions will be. but i feel i can't stay in one place too long. so, i gotta move. this week, i got my nose buried in wikipedia, which is vast. next week, who knows?

alberta tar sands

canadians--you and me--are the biggest exporters of oil to the u.s.. much of that oil comes from the alberta tar sands, as detailed by andrew nikiforuk in his book Tar Sands. as a canadian, what are you going to do?

i'm at the shaver...

...in st. catharines. my tentative discharge date is april 16, with outpatient orientation on april 20, outpatient happening on wed and fri from 9 to 12, starting on apr. 24. i want to thank vicki for all these months of driving down to t.o. and for coordinating the visits and the emails. there's nothing for me in the village of waubaushene, and so we've decided to continue my rehab in st. catharines, where i grew up and went to high school, and my family still live.

note: june 2, and i'm still at the shaver. shortly after this post i fell.

the image of everything

There's this surfer dude who's actually got a PhD in Physics who has published in the respectable New Scientist a theory of everything, as reported in Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything.

He bases his math on this 248-dimensional lovely object [here drawn in two dimensions], known simply as E8.









i like the resemblance to mandalas, such as this arabic mandala:





















or this tibetan one:


























or indra's net of pearls






















or bucky fuller's geodesic dome:


















or m.c. escher:

first day at brock

i share two offices at brock in the dept of applied linguistics: one with the teaching assistants, and one with the research assistants (where i am now). classes don't start til next week, but i'm here doing research for one of the profs. wes is plugging in to the special needs department and looking forward to starting at brock in the near future.

this morning i biked to the farmers market downtown and bought whole wheat bread, peaches, and granola. at 11 am i called vki in her vancouver hotel and played wake-up music for her and rowan. they are off to burningman in nevada today, via san francisco and a green tortoise bus. wes and i had our first walk uptown and bus ride to brock. it's such a beautiful summer's day here in st. catharines.

off to mariposa

in a few hours it's off to orillia to the mariposa folk festival to catch serena ryder and hawksley workman tonight, followed by two days in the sun and closing with the grandest canuck gordon of them all, gordon lightfoot

happy father's day; found some old friends

last night a friend from long ago and far away found me on facebook. a phone call later and we chatted for a couple of hours.

tonight, the kids had me over at karen's house for supper and aftewards while karen and darlene were out for a canoe ride, and while watching monty python and the holy grail with them, i came across a book i had bought from renee in the 80s: we are all part of one another: a barbara deming reader. so, i went looking online for more about deming (1917-1984).

this is from Barbara Deming: An Activist Life, by Donna McCabe:

"For Barbara, the task for all of us is to erase the so-called differences between the sexes, bring out the women in all men, the man in all women. By doing so, we are able to act not as atomized individuals, but as parts of a larger community. We join gender back into an singular noun. Barbara saw this leap as possible when discussing gender in a way she was not able to understand during her lifetime of activism. "I would say myself that our sexuality is given us so that we can commune with one another. It cracks our single selves. Without sexuality we would be impossibly isolated within our individualities. We could not experience community, could not experience in our flesh the truth that we are, all of us, members one of another" (244). Our sexuality is very damaged. Damaged by the attempt to split it into the so-called male and so-called female. This lie is what has weakened any possibilities of communion. "If society did not try to make us all heterosexuals - and if patriarchy were dispelled and, with it, the power inequities that make most heterosexual relationships so distorting - my guess is that we would find ourselves quite naturally attracted to either sex" (246). Barbara recognized the base opposition that created all others to be gender. A separation of our very be-ing."

how timely is that now that i'm going back to school to study language and social justice? it's as if it's all coming back to me, and i hope to give it all back.

excerpt from temporary insanity: a world in transition, by philip slater

i was following up on one of the sociologists referenced in my textbook, Philip Slater. i never heard of him, but it seems i should have --not only is he a sociologist, he's an actor and a playwright. in 1982 he was chosen by MS. Magazine as one of its "male heroes."

here's the conclusion to a essay on his homepage:

the whole essay is worth reading, (he has a lot to say about religious fundamentalists, for example) but i thought i'd get to the point: the world is changing from a control culture to an integrative culture, and slater is optimistic....

he writes:


If change happened slowly and smoothly we might be able to handle it more gracefully. But that's not what happens. As they sense an old cultural system dying around them, those who espouse it will assert its values more harshly, more stridently, more desperately. The most extreme forms of authoritarianism, for example, occurred in the 1930s, when democracy was a growing trend.

The growth of Integrative Culture and the simultaneous rise of fundamentalism around the world make us feel the world's going in opposite directions at the same time. We've never been more concerned about the environment yet never more destructive of it; never more distrustful of technology yet never more dependent on it; never more opposed to violence yet never more fascinated with it; never more ego-driven and never more hungry to lose ourselves in something beyond ego; never more health conscious yet never more unhealthy. And while we've never had more ways of connecting with each other, we've never felt more disconnected.

These are the predictable symptoms of a culture in transition. Old familiar habits have begun to seem irrelevant or destructive, while the emerging system still feels awkward and uncomfortable, like shoes that haven't yet shaped themselves to our feet.

[his conclusion;]

It will be decades before Integrative Culture achieves the kind of general acceptance that Control Culture enjoyed for thousands of years.

..

A new cultural system tends to be built around what was trivialized in the old one. Integrative values were never absent during the Controller era, they were simply assigned inferior status--something women concerned themselves with. Similarly, when Integrative Culture achieves a comfortable preponderance in our shrinking world, Controller values will have a niche—something men play with. The kind of consensus that will permit this is a long way off, but we can take some comfort from the likelihood that our descendants will enjoy it. Prophets of doom always attract an audience because people love drama, but the probable reality is more mundane: we can expect a long period of adaptation, during which violent flare-ups, like those of this decade, will gradually diminish in frequency as more and more of the world embraces the emerging culture. Life on our planet will then settle into an equilibrium--one that may not create any more happiness, but will at least be more stable.

Declaration of Interdependence

Declaration of Interdependence

Five members of the David Suzuki Foundation team wrote the following Declaration of Interdependence in 1992 for the United Nations' Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

In 2001, Finnish composer Pehr Henrik Nordgren wrote his Symphony no. 6 "Interdependence" based on the declaration, which also served as lyrics to the piece. It was performed for the first time in Sendai, Japan in December, 2001.

version française
Download the declaration as an Adobe PDF document.

This We Know

We are the earth, through the plants and animals that nourish us.

We are the rains and the oceans that flow through our veins.

We are the breath of the forests of the land, and the plants of the sea.

We are human animals, related to all other life as descendants of the firstborn cell.

We share with these kin a common history, written in our genes.

We share a common present, filled with uncertainty.

And we share a common future, as yet untold.

We humans are but one of thirty million species weaving the thin layer of life enveloping the world.

The stability of communities of living things depends upon this diversity.

Linked in that web, we are interconnected -- using, cleansing, sharing and replenishing the fundamental elements of life.

Our home, planet Earth, is finite; all life shares its resources and the energy from the sun, and therefore has limits to growth.

For the first time, we have touched those limits.

When we compromise the air, the water, the soil and the variety of life, we steal from the endless future to serve the fleeting present.

This We Believe

Humans have become so numerous and our tools so powerful that we have driven fellow creatures to extinction, dammed the great rivers, torn down ancient forests, poisoned the earth, rain and wind, and ripped holes in the sky.

Our science has brought pain as well as joy; our comfort is paid for by the suffering of millions.

We are learning from our mistakes, we are mourning our vanished kin, and we now build a new politics of hope.

We respect and uphold the absolute need for clean air, water and soil.

We see that economic activities that benefit the few while shrinking the inheritance of many are wrong.

And since environmental degradation erodes biological capital forever, full ecological and social cost must enter all equations of development.

We are one brief generation in the long march of time; the future is not ours to erase.

So where knowledge is limited, we will remember all those who will walk after us, and err on the side of caution.

This We Resolve

All this that we know and believe must now become the foundation of the way we live.

At this turning point in our relationship with Earth, we work for an evolution: from dominance to partnership; from fragmentation to connection; from insecurity, to interdependence.

stop heavy metal pollution

i don't mean led zep or metallica, i mean cadmium, mercury, etc.

here's a quote from david suzuki.

The simplest way to stop heavy metals: don't buy things you don't need, especially electronics. The sad fact is that all those great electronic devices usually go obsolete very quickly. (The average useful life for a computer is only five years, and about 18 months for cell phones.) If you must buy something, buy it second-hand. Here are some places to get used goods:

Freecycle: http://www.freecycle.org
Craigslist: http://toronto.craigslist.org/about/cities.html
Salvation Army: http://www.salvationarmy.ca/

and i didn't know that

coal-burning power plants are the single largest source of mercury in Canada. Reducing your energy use helps keep mercury out of the environment.

on this page there are links to more info: http://www.davidsuzuki.org/NatureChallenge/newsletters/Metal_June2007/page5.asp

"planning my day"

I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult.
E. B. White (1899 - 1985)

it's not about me: a review of the purpose driven life

the 40 days of purpose are presented in rick warren's bestseller, the purpose driven life, which is a well-crafted book, though sprinkled with cliches and rhetorical devices such as alliteration and acronyms, all tied up neatly with a bow. he develops quite a system of belief, quite an infectious ideology. the 40 days of purpose for me as it turns out is to confront my own ideology in the face of rick warren's and to ask myself, what do i find attractive about rick warren's purpose, what do i find repulsive, and why?

there are five main purposes, and the final purpose, as it turns out and as revealed by rick's father from his deathbed, is to "save one more for Jesus!"

up to that point i was attracted to the daily revelation of purpose: turn from worldly pursuits, serve your community, be inclusive (at least, of believers and their faults).

while warren does not overtly come out for or against homosexuality, he does use patriarchal language in refering to god only in the masculine, he opposes abortion, and he avows that he is a conservative christian. i infer that his personal stance on homosexuality falls in line with other conservatives.

however, none of these views is mainline to his purpose, nor me seeking my purpose, and i read on through the 40 days' deluge. but when i heard that death-bed cry of salvation, i realized that the real purpose of a christian is to espouse the unique moral superiority of being christian and save every nonbeliever from the sinking ship SS Humanity.

which has bothered me for decades. and it continued to bother me this past year as i returned to church. moral superiority is a sin with which i'm well-acquainted; it is a paintbrush with which i've painted myself many times in the past, and am sure to do so again. i might be doing it right now, as i wonder if warren's Salvation-Only-Thru-Christ is morally bankrupt in our multicultural and pluralistic world. there are many people, non-christians, who live devout, self-sacrificing lives. their evident faith and action are integrated. if they were christian, they'd be sainted, they'd be saved.

and do i paint myself again when i wonder if i'm morally superior to hypocritical Christians who deny full communion with their fellow christians on the grounds of their sexual orientation, or their gender?

in the beginning, the real purpose of warren's book is stated in the first paragraph. here it is in its entirety:

It's not about you.

it's not about me, it's about god. or at least my search for god. to a degree, i agree with warren that the purpose-driven life of a christian seeks five things: (1) worship god, (2) grow in fellowship with others in god, (3) serve god, (4) grow like christ, and (5) move in this world driven by worship and fellowship and service and growing. the last is my re-interpretation of warren's fifth, evangelical purpose: "to be on a mission with God in the world," because i don't like the context of 'mission,' which is loaded with that "solo Christos sola" (Spanish for 'Only Christ Saves") evangelism, that dying battle-cry, "Save another one for Jesus!"

over time, my moral superiority, whether as an atheist or as an ardent christian, has hurt a lot of people. in many ways i prefer the humbleness of my agnostic days, when it wasn't about me and god was ineffable and i was more open to the mystery of the universe and the love that is all around me.

perhaps that is my path as a christian, a path of humility, to worship, to serve, to commune, to grow, and to move.

be an ontario peakbuster!

"The Ontario Clean Air Alliance is challenging communities across Ontario to reduce the need for dirty coal by reducing their use of electricity in peak periods. We will recognize the communities that do the most to use the least in October 2007, so make sure your community is an energy winner!

"Find out how you can be a Peak Buster and Challenge Your Community"

Canada, Africa, and the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany

Dear Prime Minister,

Regarding Canada's participation in this year's G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, June 6-8. Africa's issues with development are on the table, and I believe Canada can play a significant role:

• Enabling sustainable economic growth in Africa by improving economic policies,
debt, and strengthening local markets and businesses;
• Promoting democracy by supporting African institutions that foster citizen participation;
• Establishing peace and security by strengthening the peace building and conflict-
abilities of African regional organizations;
• Fighting disease by strengthening national health systems, improving AIDS prevention
treatment, and designing programs to retain African doctors and nurses.

I call upon you and our government for Canada to work unilaterally and as a mediator between the other nations:

Canada must renew its promise to double aid to Africa by 2008-2009 by creating a timetable for increasing our official development assistance to 0.7% of gross national income.

The AIDS pandemic may be the greatest crisis of all. Seventy-five percent of the world’s 40 million people living with HIV/AIDS are in Sub-Saharan Africa. The 2005 Gleneagles G8 summit promised universal access to HIV treatment by 2010, but is falling short of this goal.

Canada can work towards the creation of a comprehensive plan to address the health crisis by increasing funding for prevention and treatment programs, strengthening infrastructure, retaining local health-care workers, and improving management and access to information. At the same time, Canada can guide the G8 to ensure that such broad approaches do not let donors influence national policy-making in ways that citizens cannot.

Furthermore, Canada can use its experience as a major food-producing and resource-rich nation to advise the G8 summit to find ways to strengthen regional markets in Africa that support local agriculture and food supplies. We must also advocate for stronger corporate responsibility guidelines for international mining companies, and trade laws that allow developing countries to stabilize their economies by regulating imports and exports and setting environmental standards.

There are also significant problems with the debt cancellation agreement signed at the 2005 Gleneagles G8 summit. Very few countries are eligible, and those that are must agree to a set of harsh conditions from the World Band and International Monetary Fund (IMF) that have already been shown to worsen poverty. Canada must live up to the spirit of Gleneagles and support full, unconditional debt cancellation for 62 of the world’s poorest countries so they can redirect their resources towards health, education, and economic development on their own terms.

Sincerely,

Peter Ladage
Midland, Ontario

with information from make poverty history

malalai joya needs your help!

you can read and view this courageous young woman's struggle at http://www.malalaijoya.com/index1024.htm. she needs all the international exposure she can get right now to protect her from those who want to kill her and silence her. on the site there are email addresses for the president of afghanistan and other officials. here is the letter i wrote:

Date: Wed, 23 May 2007 22:03:03 -0400 (EDT)
From: Peter Ladage
Subject: Concern for Malalai Joya
To: president@afghanistangov.org
Cc: aquddus@supremecourt.gov.af, hasib-n786@yahoo.com, moinews@gmail.com,
wahed.moi@gmail.com, info@moj.gov.af, hidayatr@moj.gov.af,
mj@malalaijoya.com

Dear Mr. President,

I am greatly troubled to learn of the expulsion of one of the members of your parliament, Malalai Joya, and that death threats are being uttered against her.

I am sure that your great country honours the will of the people who elected Ms. Joya to represent them. I understand that she has done much good for the poor and the children of Farah, and that she is much loved and respected.

As you know, Malalai Joya is greatly respected around the world, and her humanitarian efforts bring much respect to your great country.

I am sure that as President you will do everything in your power to protect this honoured citizen and restore this parliamentarian to her seat in your legislature.

Most sincerely and humbly,

Peter Ladage,
Canada

i also wrote to our government.


who is malalai joya?

from Human Rights Watch (http://hrw.org/english/docs/2007/05/23/afghan15995.htm):

The Afghan parliament should immediately reinstate Malalai Joya, a member suspended for criticizing colleagues, and revise parliamentary procedures that restrict freedom of speech, Human Rights Watch said today.

Joya, 28, is the youngest member of the Afghan legislature. As a 19-year-old refugee in Pakistan, she taught literacy courses to other Afghan women. During the Taliban years, she ran an orphanage and health clinic in Afghanistan. In 2003, she gained international attention for speaking out publicly against warlords involved in drafting the Afghan Constitution. Two years later, she was the top vote-getter from Farah province in Afghanistan's parliamentary elections, and was easily elected to the lower house of the legislature.

Since her election, Joya has continued to be an outspoken defender and promoter of the rights of Afghan women and children. She has also continued to publicly call for accountability for war crimes, even those perpetrated by fellow parliamentarians.

Joya has survived four assassination attempts, travels with armed guards and reportedly never spends two nights in the same place.

Birdsong & Coffee

i know some of you are planning to go to cellarman's friday night to enjoy my band, blind mary.
but before you do, i urge you to see the SHARE Film Presentation of Birdsong & Coffee.

"Coffee drinkers will be astonished to learn that they hold in their hands the fate of farm families, farming communities, and entire ecosystems in coffee-growing regions like Costa Rica. In this film we hear from experts and students, from coffee lovers and bird lovers, and-most importantly-from coffee farmers themselves. We learn how their lives and ours are inextricably linked, economically and environmentally." http://www.olddogdocumentaries.com/vid_bsc.html

THEN come on out to cellarman's and enjoy the band. we'll be there till midnight, and we can stay till 2 a.m. talking about coffee and birds and the rest of life.

if you want to go to the film, please call ahead so that sue knows how many are coming.

that's what men are good for

wars rage on in israel and palestine and around the world
at home and in the forests and oceans

"now words i think are just a noisy dirty wind
makes the trouble we get in so why do we speak
now we made another war that's what men are good for
men with stupid insecurities not a lot more"
-- hawksley workman, merry christmas (i love you), almost a full moon

who killed the electric car?

saw who killed the electric car? last night at SHARE.

really, really good. i never thought i'd feel weepy about a car.

check out the website.

rent the dvd.

the source of pollution

moses said:

11-16 Make sure you don't forget God, your God, by not keeping his commandments, his rules and regulations that I command you today. Make sure that when you eat and are satisfied, build pleasant houses and settle in, see your herds and flocks flourish and more and more money come in, watch your standard of living going up and up—make sure you don't become so full of yourself and your things that you forget God, your God,

the God who delivered you from Egyptian slavery;
the God who led you through that huge and fearsome wilderness, those desolate, arid badlands crawling with fiery snakes and scorpions;
the God who gave you water gushing from hard rock;
the God who gave you manna to eat in the wilderness, something your ancestors had never heard of, in order to give you a taste of the hard life, to test you so that you would be prepared to live well in the days ahead of you.

17-18 If you start thinking to yourselves, "I did all this. And all by myself. I'm rich. It's all mine!"—well, think again. Remember that God, your God, gave you the strength to produce all this wealth so as to confirm the covenant that he promised to your ancestors—as it is today.

19-20 If you forget, forget God, your God, and start taking up with other gods, serving and worshiping them, I'm on record right now as giving you firm warning: that will be the end of you; I mean it—destruction. You'll go to your doom—the same as the nations God is destroying before you; doom because you wouldn't obey the Voice of God, your God.

Deuteronomy 8:11-20 (The Message)

the thing is, at the root of it, i believe this is the cause of global warming: people forgetting their spiritual source, whether buddhist, abrahamic, shinto, daoist, hindu, shamanist, whatever.

chief seattle said 153 years ago:

A few more moons, a few more winters, and not one of the descendants of the mighty hosts that once moved over this broad land or lived in happy homes, protected by the Great Spirit, will remain to mourn over the graves of a people once more powerful and hopeful than yours. But why should I mourn at the untimely fate of my people? Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless. Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come, for even the White Man whose God walked and talked with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We will see.

... Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as the swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch. Our departed braves, fond mothers, glad, happy hearted maidens, and even the little children who lived here and rejoiced here for a brief season, will love these somber solitudes and at eventide they greet shadowy returning spirits. And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone.

Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless. Dead, did I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds.

in all things, praise god, remember her first, walk in her ways, then go out and combat global warming and all manner of social injustice.

jesus said:

6-8... "Isaiah was right about frauds like you, hit the bull's-eye in fact:

These people make a big show of saying the right thing,
but their heart isn't in it.

They act like they are worshiping me,
but they don't mean it.

They just use me as a cover
for teaching whatever suits their fancy,

Ditching God's command
and taking up the latest fads."

20-23He went on: "It's what comes out of a person that pollutes: obscenities, lusts, thefts, murders, adulteries, greed, depravity, deceptive dealings, carousing, mean looks, slander, arrogance, foolishness—all these are vomit from the heart. There is the source of your pollution."

Mark 7:6-8,20-23 (The Message)

happy easter

on good friday, i began 40 days towards a purpose-driven life, reading through rick warren's the purpose driven life. days 1 and 3 are okay; i've had some reservations about day 2: "[God ] planned the days of your life ... God left no detail to chance ... Nothing in your life is arbitrary. It's all for a purpose." (p. 23) i don't have a problem with god having complete control of my life. but I need to know more about how free will and evil work within that framework.