Gaia Schmaia

Ever since I first encountered James Lovelock's Gaia Theory in 1980, where it was featured in the 1980 edition of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, I have been enamored--some might even say obsessed--by the Gaia concept (as first formulated by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis), despite the fact that it has been ridiculed by scientists, sharply criticized by philosophers, largely ignored by the public and the mass media, condemned as heresy by Christians, and uncritically embraced and mythologized, much to its progenitors' dismay, by marginal California neopagans and mush-brained New-Agers. It has even been adopted as the name for one of those mass virtual reality games on the Internet, mostly for children, but having nothing at all to do with its original meaning, and even less with the deeper implications.

The Gaia concept has, to be sure, a few able defenders in philosophy, such as Mary Midgley, who sees it (as I always have) as "the next big idea." But my early hopes that the Gaia concept would be widely embraced by the global environmental movement and the intellectual avante garde, leading to a global transformation of cultural consciousness, have come to naught--in fact, many of my friends in the movement have never even heard of it, and could not care less. So why my persistent and almost obsessive adherence to these four letters--to Gaia?

My short answer is this: we still need a name for ourselves, a shared identification that crosses all national and cultural boundaries, and that refers to our true home--the only living planet we will ever know.  We still need a basis of identification that transcends the obsolete "man vs. nature" dichotomy of the Industrial Revolution, and that embodies humanity-within-nature as a single system. And "Gaia" is the only viable candidate for such a concept. "Earth" means "dirt," which is mostly how we have treated the planet hitherto. "The World" is too vague and anthropocentric--it comes from the Anglo-Saxon word "Werald" meaning "age of man" and is often used as a synonym for the entire universe (as in the French equivalent, "Le Monde").  "Gaia," however, is feminine, not neuter--like the names of the nation-states to which most of us give our primarily allegiance--"America" "Canada" "Russia" "China" and so forth. Yet Gaia is more real than any of these shifting cultural constructs. Like the names of the other planets, it is mythic in reference. But if a dead planet can be named after a mythic figure--like Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune--why can't a living, far-from-equilibrium planet like our own likewise have a deeply resonant mythic name? What are we afraid of? Having to admit that we are raping our own mother??

And so I am, and will always be, a Gaian.  Names matter, for they constitute the basis of our identification. And my short definition of this identification, this label, is one whose first allegiance is to the fabric of life on Earth. All other allegiances are secondary to this one. The nice thing about this identification also is that it is the only identity label I know that excludes absolutely no one nor any other living being on the planet. If there is any non-Gaian life, we don't yet know of it, and may never. So being a Gaian means identifying with all living beings. One can, with no contradiction, be a Gaian Buddhist (as I am), a Gaian Christian (like Wangari Maathai and Pope Francis, whether he knows it or not), a Gaian Jew (like Evan Eisenberg or the "Green Rabbis"), a Gaian Muslim, Hindu, Atheist, Agnostic, or whatever...for Gaianity does not require nor preclude any religious belief system, any more than it does any national identification.

Imagine, moreover, what the effect would be if more and more people self-identified as Gaians! This in itself could trigger a quiet revolution, a subversion and transformation of Glomart, the Spontaneous Remission of the Cancer of the Earth. It is worth a try, and as long as I draw breath, I will continue to promulgate Gaianity--Gaian consciousness--in whatever ways I can.

Visions and Revisions

The following is directly copied from a response I recently sent to my friend Al Markowitz, after he sent me a link to an excellent article on Truthout:

Robert W. McChesney: "Capitalism as we know it has got to go."

My response was as follows:

Thank you for sharing this excellent article, Al. McChesney has many astute insights that are well worth discussing and disseminating.

My problem has always been with terminology--a view McChesney shares, in part.  Both the words "capitalism" and "socialism" are 19th Century concepts that tend to carry a lot of baggage and beg questions;  they are connotatively loaded, value-laden terms which people define in vastly different ways, but adherents of each tend to project all of their worst nightmares on to those who identify with the opposing term. Thus, for many supporters of socialism, a "capitalist" is by definition a heartless, greedy, corrupt, money-grubbing swine, whether he is the CEO of Monsanto or the owner of a local microbrewery; conversely, for many on the right, anyone who calls himself a "socialist" is secretly plotting a brutal Stalinist dictatorship. The terms themselves, that is, engender fear and polarization.

This is partly why I invented the alternative term "Glomart" to characterize the Global Market Economy--that is, the multinational corporate oligarchy that has hijacked our governments and mass media alike, and that has everything to gain and nothing to lose from plundering the planet and externalizing all costs of doing business, by polluting air, water, and topsoil, fabricating "patriotic" pretexts for resource wars, and exploiting cheap labor in a pernicious "race to the bottom." Glomart is basically a global monopoly game--the playing out of an unregulated, zero-sum money game on a finite system, wherein the only possible outcome is that one set of players (the 1 percent--or even 0.1 percent) end up owning everything, and everyone else has nothing, and is in chronic debt to the "winners" for their houses and hotels. This also, of course, leads inevitably to ecological collapse, and a corresponding disintegration of the social fabric into a violent and desperate Hell on Earth, with shrinking enclaves of fiercely defended wealth in a sea of chaos, starvation, and violence.

Can this apocalyptic Glomart juggernaut be stopped? I'm not sure. In my darker moments, I see no more capacity for the restraint of human greed in the aggregate than I do for maggots in a feeding frenzy. The corporations and their captive nation states will consume and compete for the dwindling resources of our dying planet with ever-increasing ruthlessness until nothing is left and the whole system collapses into chaos. 

But in my more hopeful moments, I can visualize a rapid dissemination, at the grassroots, of what I broadly call "Gaian consciousness" undermining Glomart by subverting and redirecting its primary life-support system--money--through the choices we each make about where our money goes, and for what. (That is why they spend billions in advertising everywhere we look. They need us to buy what they sell). 

 What would happen if a meme went viral on the internet, encouraging and enabling people to assume responsibility for the social and ecological consequences of their spending decisions ("Good Buy"), their livelihoods ("Good Work") and their social activism and engagement ("Good Will")--especially if the latter involved mass Satyagraha campaigns of nonviolent noncooperation with evil, speaking truth to power, and building self-reliant local community economies? In other words, what if public consciousness were raised, big time, about making a choice, in every dollar they spend, earn, or invest, and in every activity in which they engage, between supporting Glomart or supporting Gaia?

That is my dream, in a nutshell--and it takes the threefold form, at the grassroots level, of growing gardens, growing community, and growing awareness. (I like catchy slogans, as they are useful mnemonics for rapidly spreading transformative ideas). The key concepts, or memes in need of dissemination, are as follows:

1. Glomart vs. Gaia: 
1. The realization that the Order of Money--Glomart--is utterly incompatible with the Order of Nature--Gaia. Money is nothing but arithmetic--an abstract, zero-sum transform of information about the relative market value of commodities. And inherent in this arithmetical money game is the basic production rule that requires maximization of profits at any cost--More is always Better.
2. Gaia, conversely, refers to the Order of Nature, a positive-sum symbiotic network of organisms that depend on sunlight and sustain topsoil, air, and water, where optimality is the defining value--Enough is enough.
2. The Quiet Revolution: A global, grassroots movement of Gaians, predicated on three broad themes:
1. Good Buy--assuming responsibility for the social and ecological consequences of every dollar we spend or invest.
2. Good Work--assuming responsibility for the social and ecological consequences of our livelihoods. Becoming local gardeners, cooperatives, and entrepreneurs, to create alternatives to Glomart-produced commodities and services.
3. Good Will--Taking care of everyone and everything, and abandoning no one and nothing. Mindful, strategic, and relentless social engagement based on Satyagraha principles:
1. Self-Reliance (Swaraj)
2. Speaking Truth to Power (Satya)
3. Nonviolent Noncooperation with Evil (Ahimsa)

Vertical and Horizontal Healing

"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

--Matthew 22: 35-40.

Thus sayeth Jesus, whom Christians worship as "the Lord," but whom I, following the Dalai Lama, simply honor as a Buddha--a fully awakened being whom I revere as the greatest of Dharma teachers, along with Gautama Siddhartha the Buddha, Lao Tzu, and a few others. 

He is answering the challenging question from a local scribe or lawyer, "Which is the greatest commandment of the (Hebrew) Law?" and his response is simply to quote two isolated passages from the Torah--Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18. His genius is to equate them: "And the second is like unto it."  In other words, loving God is inseparable from loving one's neighbor, just as loving one's neighbor is inseparable from loving oneself.  And therein, according to the Master, "hang all the law and the prophets." In other words, he is implying that Wisdom (loving God) and Compassion (loving our neighbors as ourselves) are two sides of the same coin. And all the rest is commentary. 

In Luke's version of the story, the Lawyer then challenges him with the $35 question: "Who is my neighbor??" In other words, where do we draw the boundaries of the Sacramental Community--who is in and who is out? Who is "us"--the so-called "people of God"--and who is "them"?

Jesus responds--typically--by telling an ironic story: the Parable of the Good Samaritan. But who were the Samaritans? They were the "other guys"--the folks the Israelites loved to hate (and vice versa). They lived--remarkably enough--in the area that we know today as the West Bank. 

So the Samaritans--or as we might call them today, the Palestinians--were the folks who lived on the other side of the tracks--or of the wall, as the case may be. In fact, the Disciples had just been thrown out of a Samaritan village, and were already smoldering in resentment at these lowly scum. So Jesus' parable could not have arisen at a more propitious moment--what the Buddha called "Skillful Means."

The story, of course, is quite familiar already: a traveler to Jericho is waylaid by highwaymen, robbed, and beaten. As he lies there bleeding, several of his fellow Israelites--a priest and a Levite--happen by as he moans and cries for help. Both cross the road--to the other side, to avoid him. After all, like the highwaymen themselves, scam artists were common on the remote mountain roads of the time--people who would pretend to be hurt and then rob you blind-- so the priest and the Levite were not taking any risks, and they hurried along, not looking back.  And then a Samaritan came along. In all likelihood, the battered traveler didn't even bother crying out for help--after all, he and the Samaritan were enemies--their peoples hated and despised one another as infidels.

We'll let Jesus tell the rest:

"When he saw him, he was moved with compassion, came to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. He set him on his own animal, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. On the next day, when he departed, he took out two denarii, and gave them to the host, and said to him, 'Take care of him. Whatever you spend beyond that, I will repay you when I return.' Now which of these three do you think seemed to be a neighbour to him who fell among the robbers?"

The answer, of course, is obvious. The loathed Samaritan--the guy we love to hate--was the only one of the three passersby whose compassion overrode any fear or mistrust that he might have encountered a scam artist, and who took the man in, brought him to an inn, dressed his wounds,  and even promised to reimburse the host in full for getting him home safely. 

The implications are equally obvious: to the question, "Who is my neighbor?"--that is, what are the boundaries of the Sacramental Community--Jesus was saying something radical for our time as well as his own: "Ain't no boundaries."

As we face the horrific crises of our time--anthropogenic climate destabilization, despoiling of our land, air, and water by greedy corporations, religious and ethnic hatreds coming to a boil, whether in Iraq, Ukraine, Gaza, or St. Louis, and so on, we need to keep this majestic teaching of Jesus close to our hearts--Loving God = Loving our neighbor as ourself--whoever that neighbor might be.

But how do we get there from here?  While Jesus tells us, unequivocally, what we need to do, the Buddha and the traditions he spawned on the other side of the Eurasian landmass give us a wide range of practical approaches to how to do it--how to grow ourselves, that is, into people like the Good Samaritan--people who know how to put love ahead of fear, and do what needs to be done.

It comes down, in my view, to integrating Vertical and Horizontal healing.

"Vertical Healing" refers to all the arts of "loving God"--which Hindus classify as the Way of Devotion (Bakhti Yoga), the Way of (intellectual) Contemplation (Jnana Yoga), the Way of Selfless Service (Karma Yoga) and the "Royal Way" (Raja Yoga) of direct attainment through the eightfold Yogic path--Yama, Niyama, Asana, Pranayama, Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana, and Samadhi (or integrative realization of Oneness).

Other traditions, of course, have other formulations of this path of self-purification, but they all strongly overlap. They all involve the vertical integration of Body, Mind, and Spirit.

"Horizontal Healing," then refers to political activism--that is, to all ongoing efforts to bring peace and justice to our communities, our nations, and our planet--including, but not limited to, agitation for human rights, labor activism, environmental advocacy, nonviolent civil disobedience, and so on.

The problem is, the practitioners of vertical and horizontal healing are mostly very different people, who are at times scornful of the other. Vertical practitioners--whether Yogins, Tai Chi masters, Catholic priests, or scholars, often get so caught up in their head trips (or body-mind integration disciplines) that they look down on those who get caught up in worldly pursuits. Similarly, social and political activists are often so driven, so obsessed, and so chronically angry at the evils of the world that they are contemptuous of anyone who wastes his or her time meditating or chanting mantras.

Yet--as Jesus knew--vertical and horizontal healing are inseparable. You cannot truly love God--in any cultural permutation of that idea--without loving your neighbor as yourself--all your neighbors, including the animals and plants on which we all depend for our survival. And we cannot truly bring peace, justice, and environmental healing to our planet without first--or simultaneously--realizing inner peace, equanimity, compassion, and joy within ourselves. As Lao Tzu put it--

What is firmly established cannot be uprooted.
What is firmly grasped cannot slip away.
It will be honoured from generation to generation.

Cultivate Virtue in yourself,
And Virtue will be real.
Cultivate it in the family,
And Virtue will abound.
Cultivate it in the village,
And Virtue will grow.
Cultivate it in the nation,
And Virtue will be abundant.
Cultivate it in the universe,
And Virtue will be everywhere...

So healing our families, communities, and planet must begin by cultivating virtue in ourselves. Here is an easy formula to remember:

THE GOAL:

Health-Competence-Resilience.
Body-Mind-Spirit, 
Self-Community-Planet. 

THE PATH:

Breathe, Observe, Let Go
Be well, Do good work, Keep in touch,
Learn, teach, heal, and create.

Wangari Maathai on Democracy

"All political systems, institutions of the state, and cultural values (as well as pathways toward, and indicators of, economic growth) are justifiable only insofar as they encourage basic freedoms, including human rights, and individual and collective well-being. In that respect, democracy doesn’t solely mean “one person, one vote.” It also means, among other things, the protection of minority rights; an effective and truly representative parliament; an independent judiciary; an informed and engaged citizenry; an independent fourth estate; the rights to assemble, practice one’s religion freely, and advocate for one’s view peacefully without fear of reprisal or arbitrary arrest; and an empowered and active civil society that can operate without intimidation. By this definition, many African countries—and indeed, many societies in both the developing and developed worlds—fall short of genuine democracy. Likewise, “development” doesn’t only entail the acquisition of material things, although everyone should have enough to live with dignity and without fear of starvation or becoming homeless. Instead, it means achieving a quality of life that is sustainable, and allowing the expression of the full range of creativity and humanity."

Wangari Maathai (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate)

The Challenge for Africa (Random House/Anchor Books, 2009), p. 56

The above passage is, in my view, the most eloquent, complete, and resonant definition of democracy as an ideal since the Declaration of Independence.  This is all the more remarkable since its author, Wangari Maathai, learned English as a second language, and other than her relatively brief time studying abroad in the US,  spent most of the rest of her life in her native Kenya, which was under British colonial rule in her childhood, and since independence in 1963, has been, at best, an unstable democracy, prone to corruption, dictatorial rule, and sporadic violence between competing ethnic factions. 

Wangari Maathai was a Gaian Bodhisattva--an enlightened being who saw clearly, and devoted her life to, the integration of ecological healing, empowerment of local communities and of women in particular, and the cultivation of real democracy. Her life work was the Green Belt Movement, which began with planting a tree in her own back yard, and blossomed into a mass movement of rural African women who planted millions of trees to restore the devastated landscapes of Kenya. She won the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts in 2004, and died in 2011. If you have some time, be sure to see the magnificent documentary that celebrates her life and career: Taking Root.

Imagine...

"Imagine all the people...living for today..."
--John Lennon.

I'm quite sure that most people today consider John Lennon's iconic song "Imagine" to be little more than a naive and utterly impossible hippie fantasy, a piece of nostalgia to be indulged now and then, or, for some, a dangerous socialistic, heretical screed...another reason to stamp out "godless liberalism."

But I love this song for another, unlikely reason: because it is a luminous description of reality.  What??? you ask. Consider:

• In actuality, there is no Heaven or Hell. These are not actual "places" we somehow fly to (or descend to) after death, but metaphors, at best, for states of mind.
• In actuality, all the people do live for today, whether they know it or not. The past is gone and irretrievable; the future is just a mental formation, an imaginative projection. Neither actually exists--only the present moment does.
• In actuality, there are no countries--the view from space discloses no actual borders between nation states. Nations, likewise, are collectively held mental formations.
• In actuality, there are no possessions. Everything we "own" (including our own bodies) is just a temporary configuration of causes and conditions in transit between us and someone or something else, and is a product of ongoing interactions with their exterior. Without everything in the universe, there would not be anything in the universe--this is because that is, and vice versa, and all is in constant flux and transformation.

But what about "No religion too"? This is the line that provokes the most heated reactions, quite naturally. ("See? I told you--he is a Godless Commie who wants to suppress God's people," I can hear the right-wing zealots scream.)

In the spirit of the rest of the lyrics, I would suggest that Lennon is saying, or at least we can interpret, that no one religion has a patent on Truth; that it is "nothing to kill or die for."  And likewise, as with no Heaven, no Hell, and no national borders, and no real possessions, there is no such thing as "religion" in the real world--that is, in the "inescapable network of mutuality" that is Gaia. Religion, likewise, is a mental formation, without any actual counterpart in the real world.

That being the case, let's do a bit more imagining. Imagine what might happen if...

• a Dharma Gaia movement took root, simply because people discovered the joy of meditating, and the mental and spiritual wholeness and joy of aligning the health, competence and resilience of their own bodies, minds, and spirits with that of their communities and their planet, and because none of this threatened their existing religious beliefs. The movement would not be a religion; there is no mandatory ideology. At its core is basic meditation practice, common throughout wisdom traditions of the world: Breathe - Observe - Let Go - Abide. To this it adds learning to identify oneself with one's community and planet simultaneously--or as Lao Tzu put it, "Taking care of everything (and everyone) and abandoning nothing (and no one)."
• Dharma Gaia circles started springing up everywhere, adapted for the local culture--in schools, churches, synagogues, community centers, even places of work, simply because people enjoyed the practice, and derived such personal and social benefits of doing so. (In Christian churches, for example, where the word "Dharma" is often considered heresy and "Gaia" as a pagan earth deity to be stamped out, one could simply call it "the mustardseed project" after the Parable of the Mustard Seed.) There would be no Dharma Gaia hierarchy, no enforcement of orthodoxy, but there would be ongoing communication, through the Web, of ideas and best practices for healing self, community, and planet simultaneously among all the various self-organizing circles. Its iconography will be simply the photo-image of the Earth, which has already gone viral all over the planet.
• As a direct consequence, local farm markets, tree-planting cooperatives, and garden cooperatives started springing up in communities throughout the world, as people reclaimed their food and healed the land, rivers, and topsoil that provides it.
• In any instances where Glomart perversely persists in lucrative efforts to plunder the planet and enslave its inhabitants (i.e. clearcutting forests, mountaintop removal mining, fracking, blood diamonds, overfishing, etc.) Gaians would plan and execute focused and relentless Satyagraha campaigns to disrupt their despoliation, while simultaneously restoring democracy from the ground up by mobilizing voters to throw Glomart-owned politicians out of office, through a widespread Campaign for the Public Interest.
• The net effect of all such efforts would be Spontaneous Remission of the Cancer of the Earth--a global culture where everyone was well aware that humanity is a part of, not apart from Gaia, and therefore everyone is committed to honoring and nurturing the biological conditions of our existence--topsoil, air, water, and sunlight;  that "possessions" are borrowed temporarily from Gaia, not owned; that "countries" are simply administrative conveniences, and nothing to kill or die for; and that "religions" are fine as social cohesives, provided they reject toxic "my way or no way" ideologies. A world, in short, where it is common knowledge, as William Blake said, that "Everything that lives is holy."

Spontaneous Remission?

"We were talking/About the space between us all/And the people/Who hide themselves behind a wall/of Illusion..." --George Harrison.

Today, I was having lunch with two of my closest friends, Tench  and Michael, and we got into a lively conversation about the seemingly irreversible erosion of democracy into corporate oligarchy, and the apparent futility of any normal political channels for rectifying this situation--whether by mounting grassroots campaigns to elect honest candidates who would actually serve the public interest rather than their corporate sponsors, forming and mobilizing labor unions, or organizing mass demonstrations of popular opposition and protest, or whatever--given the overwhelming power of the corporate media for ignoring or suppressing us completely and brainwashing the general public into mindless consumerism, ignorance, and complacency. Indeed, Michael, taking his cue from Plato, feels that "Hoi Polloi"--the common masses--are hopelessly benighted and easily manipulated by advertising, attack ads, or appeals to boneheaded fundamentalism and patriotic belligerence, and thus could never be awakened to confront the beast of self-serving corporate power and Glomart consumerism directly.

By "Glomart" I refer to the Global Market Economy--that is, the entire global money-based complex (mal)adaptive system of multinational corporations, banks, and captive governments, based on an unquestioned logic of maximization ("More is always better") that has become the Cancer of the Earth, with nothing to lose and everything to gain from plundering the planet and exploiting and/or brainwashing its inhabitants--turning citizens into passive consumers and/or cheap labor, communities into "markets" and nature--all of nature--into commodities for quick sale...and then externalizing the costs of doing business--passing those costs onto the public--as pollution, ravaged landscapes, declining public health, and an atmosphere overloaded with carbon that is slowly cooking us all...

I am not entirely sure, however, that Glomart is invincible.   History has shown, repeatedly, that viral ideas, starting at the grassroots level with a new, self-validating and self-replicating mythology, have the power to undermine powerful empires and transform whole cultures in a remarkably short historical period. Three obvious historical examples are the rise of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam; others were the power of Confucianism in China to transform chaotic warring states into the most coherent, highly organized, and efficient bureaucracy the world had ever known. Or--more recently--the Scientific Revolution and its power to undermine centuries of entrenched and repressive Medieval superstition and launch the rapidly evolving modern era of industrialization, innovation, and democratic freedoms.  All of these vastly transformative cultural movements occurred in times when communication moved at the glacially slow pace of letters carried on horseback; imagine what could happen today, with the instantaneous global reach of the Internet, if a similar viral idea captured, motivated, and transformed the imaginations of people today, in the way the Cross, the Quran, or the Dharma Wheel did in the past...

Could this happen, given today's vast population, and the torrent of information flowing electronically around the world--and given the sophisticated control of mass media by the ever-watchful guardians of Glomart to make sure no truly subversive idea ever penetrates beyond a small coterie of discontents who mostly talk to each other?  I would say it can, but the viral idea, to succeed, must be sufficiently innocuous to the guardians of the Glomart money machine that by the time they catch wind of its transformative potential, it has already spread beyond their control, and all they can do is scramble to adapt to it.  That, and the viral idea must be of the sort whose beneficial effects are immediately obvious to those who hear it and practice it, so that it quickly self-replicates and spreads to others.  Finally, that viral idea, like any good virus, must attack Glomart where it lives and is most vulnerable. And of course, it must have its own mythology--its own imagery and iconography--to facilitate identification and acceptance.

Here is one possibility. Pass it on.

Where is Glomart most vulnerable?  Very simply, Glomart thrives entirely by their success in parting us from our money--if they cannot get our dollars, corporations will quickly fail. This is why they invest billions in pervasive advertising, everywhere--to ensure that we continue to buy their products and services, for by this alone do they survive, no matter how big and powerful they may be.

We must take our cue from this simple fact: Glomart eats and breathes money, and needs our money as much as we need oxygen. What would happen if we simply withheld that money from them, spending it instead on locally grown and marketed produce and products, whenever we could?  They would try, of course--they are already trying--to mimic local enterprise in order to reclaim the hold they once had on our wallets. We already see this in the fact, for example, that the new Glomart pseudo-cities that are springing up, like Hampton Town Centre, here where I live, are now boasting that they, too, will have "Farmer's Markets" on weekends, to exploit our growing appetite for real food, rather than Glomart-produced junk foods. Naturally, with their cash infusion, these ersatz "farmer's markets" will look more glitzy, and thus attract more customers than real farm markets...

So we need something more than appeals to "buy fresh, buy local" to subvert Glomart domination, however commendable these recent trends may be.

The Revolution may begin in our wallets--seeing every dollar as a vote for either Glomart or Gaia, and voting for Gaia whenever, however, and to whatever degree we can--but in order to gain a foothold, it will have to be rooted more deeply, at the core of our being.  In short, we need some serious mind-training, as the Buddha (and Jesus and St. Francis and Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Wangari Maathai knew very well...)

I have launched my own experiment along these lines.  I am teaching my students--all my students--how to meditate, by starting every class with a short Qigong sequence followed by 3 minutes of meditation using a simple 4-step mantra:  Breathe - Observe - Let Go - Abide. Each is correlated with a natural phase of the breathing process: Inhale (Breathe); Pause (Observe); Exhale (Let Go); and Pause (Abide).  It is very easy to learn, does not threaten their belief systems (they don't have to "believe" anything in order to practice), and--most importantly--as they themselves acknowledge, it feels good.

Once they get the hang of this very basic practice, we are moving to the next phase: teaching the Dharma.  First I instruct them to associate these four phases with the cycle of life: Birth and childhood (Breathe); Adulthood (Observe); Old Age (Let Go) and Death (Abide). Next, we correlate these four phases with what Buddhists call the "Four Brahma-Viharas" (Abodes of God) but which I translate and demystify as "the Four Adaptive Attitudes:" Gratitude (Breathe); Compassion (Observe); Joy (Let Go); and Equanimity (Abide). Then I start introducing them to other Dharma teachings from the world's wisdom traditions, such as Chapter 16 of Lao Tzu ("Empty yourself of everything...") so they can see that the Dharma is, indeed, ancient and universal--that it can be found in every religious culture on the planet, in some guise.

The next step, of course, is to teach them, as George Harrison puts it, to "see beyond themselves"--that is, to extend the basic mantra into the Tenfold Dharma Gaia Mantra for self-transformation into a planetary healing agent, by the following:

1. Reclaim the moment:  Breathe, Observe, Let Go (Abide);
2. Reclaim the day: Be well, Do good work, Keep in touch (Abide)
3. Reclaim your life: Learn, Teach, Heal, Create.

Finally, they are instructed to make the connection, in every decision they make, between the health, competence, and resilience of themselves, their communities, and the planet simultaneously.

In this way, ordinary people can be transformed into Dharma practitioners, and Dharma practitioners into Gaians--that is, into agents of Spontaneous Remission of the Cancer of the Earth, seeing themselves in all others and identifying with all of life, in everything they do.

Glomart may never know what hit them...

Is this the promised end?

I just finished reading a comprehensive report by a superb investigative journalist, Dahr Jamail, on the global impacts of climate disruption, and the persistence of obtuse denial among some of our more benighted politicians and corporate funded public "intellectuals" who should know better. I recommend reading this, even if it may well ruin your day: http://truth-out.org/news/item/25051-dahr-jamail-the-brink-of-mass-extinction#.U81rthbKVd4.gmail

This catalogue of devastating worldwide effects of ACD (Anthropogenic Climate Disruption) was enough to knock the wind out of the sails of any optimist, for the implications of this report are grim indeed: we have set in motion a juggernaut of successive, mutually reinforcing, climate-related catastrophes--droughts, floods, rising sea levels, mass extinctions, killer heat waves, disappearing aquifers, tropical diseases--many already well underway, and all on an accelerating, irreversible trajectory to get steadily and incrementally worse, promising a horrific future--one that I would not wish upon my worst enemy--for all young people today, and any subsequent generations.

Such ghastly news creates, for me, a recurrent ethical dilemma: how do I share this soul-wrenching information with my students, without leaving them feeling hopeless, embittered, and demoralized? Or do I simply let them persist in the illusion, officially cultivated by my college and in fact reinforced throughout the educational establishment, as well as through all commercial media, that the future will simply be a continuation of the past, an arena of boundless opportunity where, if they apply themselves, they can launch a satisfying career and realize the American Dream of comfortable affluence and suburban contentment for themselves and their children? Who are we kidding?

It seems to me that a middle way between the false optimism of business as usual on a dying planet and simply succumbing to despair is to follow a threefold path in reaching out to others:: (1) the wake-up call--awakening people to he scope and urgency of the problem, even if they are shocked and horrified by the evidence presented; (2) profile one or more visionaries, who are already addressing this issue courageously and constructively and/or forging whole new paths toward ecological sanity; and (3) providing small steps that your audience can take, starting today, to follow the path of these visionaries.

 I have chosen the path of one of my icons, Wangari Maathai of Kenya, whose life work, for which she won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, was the Green Belt Movement--a magnificent grassroots movement she inaugurated among rural women in Kenya in 1977 to plant millions of trees in order to restore their watersheds from the devastation of many years of deforestation and soil erosion. The effect of this movement was to mobilize women politically as well, and as a consequence, she became a political force, and ended up causing the downfall of the oligarchic dictator, Daniel Arap Moi, and restoring democracy to Kenya. (Her story is chronicled in her autobiography, Unbowed, as well as in a documentary, "Taking Root," which is available in segments on YouTube.)

Wangari was no naive optimist; she was keenly aware of the formidable, overwhelming challenges that face Africa in particular, and the planet in general. But she never gave in to despair, but remained ebullient, resilient, and courageous right up to her untimely death from cancer in 2011.

She left us an inspiring, though paradoxical message--especially geared toward young children--in her famous and charming Hummingbird parable: a hummingbird learns that a forest fire is raging, and all the other animals are fleeing in despair. So the hummingbird flies to a river, takes a drop of water in its tiny beak, and flies back to deposit it on the fire, then repeats the procedure, ad infinitum. The lesson in her parable? "I am a hummingbird. I will do what I can."

The parable is paradoxical, of course, because the hummingbird's tiny efforts to put out a massive forest fire are so obviously futile. But Wangari's own wonderful smile, her own indefatigable courage and love, are an essential part of this parable--she embodies what she speaks; a determination never to give up, to do what needs to be done, even if the entire planet is on fire.