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Andrew HarveySacred Activism

Globe in classroom, New Orleans by Chris Jordan from "In Katrina's Wake" (2005)

I believe we are heading into the eye of a perfect storm, which threatens the human race and a great deal of nature. I think it is extremely important that we all stop denying just how dangerous, insane and savage this perfect storm of crises is, and just what it means for all of us and the world. I think you know what those crises are. There is a holocaust going on that the doomsayers had predicted. There is a retreat among many of the major religions into fundamentalism, which disorders our unity. There is the domination of a kind of corporate magnate who is brutal and addicted to power, exploitation and greed. The mass media, largely owned by corporations, is filling our minds with violence, trash and celebrity trivia, at the very moment where you and I need to be inspired, galvanized and given the authentic information.

There is a lifestyle, which you and I both live, hectic, driven and multi-tasking, which makes it almost impossible for even the most well-meaning of us to have the kind of pleasure and peace in which to hear the voice of the soul that could guide us. When you bring all of these crises together, and factor in the population explosion, what we are looking at is a perfect storm of interrelated crises that are all manifestations of a selective force - human self. This human self has lost the most fundamental connection of all, the connection with the sacred nature of creation and of life. I think it is very important that we all wake up fast, because all those who are not awake now are going to be, very soon. The crisis is not going to relent and it is going to get very much fiercer very soon.

I believe this storm of crises is an evolutionary possibility of unprecendented intensity. It gives us the opportunity to gaze into the mirror of our destiny, and to see very clearly, that unless you and I evolve to the next level of putting our deepest principles and holiest compassion and greatest passion for life into direct, clear. radical action on every level, we will simply not survive. This great death we are living, that we are manifesting out of addiction, greed, extraordinary apathy and fantastic lack of concern for life is also potentially the birth canal of an unprecedented birth. A chastened, humbled humanity, opened at last by tragedy, awakened by the knowledge of the shadow may really claim our innate, sacred consciousness, start acting from our heart and turn apocalypse into grace, nightmare into opportunity, redeem terrible tragedy by gathering together on a massive scale to transform the world.

This crisis is the equivalent on a global scale of a crisis that a mystic goes through at a certain moment on the path. In Christian mysticism it is called the 'Dark Night of the Soul'. In the metaphysical systems of Mahayana Buddhism, it is the shattering of the false or created self. Can humanity see this immense consciousness as a God-sent, God-given, God-ordained opportunity to unlearn all our dangerous attainments? If humanity could settle in the deep ground of divine inspiration and learn how to go through the shattering ordeal with authentic grace, authentic commitment to transformation, then not only will we survive, but humanity will be transformed and born into an authentic divine nature, through the death of the collective false self that is manifesting this great death and wrecking everything. What is there in us that can birth a divine humanity, transformed by tragedy, illumined by shattering knowledge and transfigured by divine grace? What force can give us the power to turn this devastating situation around?

Four years after my teacher Father Bede Griffiths died, I had a dream in which he showed me two rivers. One was a river of fire going toward the sea. The other was a river of even more intense fire. They met at the sea in a glorious, radiant, divine explosion of energy. I heard a voice saying, "These two rivers are the two noblest forces of the human psyche. They are the river of the mystic's passion for God and the river of the activist's passion for justice. When these two rivers meet, a third fire is born that is ordained to transform everything. It the fire of divine compassion and love in action."

The vision gave me a term Sacred Activism and in honour of that I wrote a book. If you believe, as I do, that we are facing extreme danger together with extreme opportunity, I ask you in the name of Buddha to get up at three o'clock in the morning someday soon, surround yourself with the peace of God in whichever way you understand it, and ask youself one question. Which of all the causes in this beleaguered, damaged world breaks my heart the most? Please dare to ask yourself this question, and dare to listen to what your heart says to you. If you do, your heart will reveal to you a sacred mission that belongs just to you, and that will be the deepest and most radiant voice of your soul. You will be given at that moment, an injunction and a direction. What you can do then is to join with other people with a similar heartbreak, and work together in your local community, to do something real about what it is that you advocate in yourself.

I talk about this vision of sacred activism widely, and I am also involved in a way of grounding it in the world called Networks of Grace. These networks are going to be cells of six to twelve people gathered around a heartbreak, or a profession, or a passion, dedicating in their local communities to start a grassroots, radical revolution of the third power; Love in Action. It is the only way we will get a chance for it to work. If we wait for corporations to transform our situation, we will wait until the last tree is burnt down. If we wait for politicians to have a major spiritual transformation and suddenly give millions away and start feeding the poor, we will be waiting for the last animal to disappear. This revolution of the soul in action depends upon you and me. We are getting real about the tragedy of where we are now, the opportunity of where we can go, and the heartbreak you and I feel. When we get real about these things, we are impelled to come together in networks of grace and do something about it. 

The above is the transcript of a talk by mystical scholar, poet & translator Andrew Harvey at the NYC launch of Bhikkhu Bodhi's Buddhist Global Relief project 

 Email your Senators and tell them to VOTE YES on Clean Energy Jobs for America.

There's a clean energy bill sitting, waiting in Congress.

A bill that the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund says "will break foreign oil's stranglehold on our country, reduce carbon pollution, and create jobs right here in America--good jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced."

And the NRDC Action Fund wants you to do something about it. It's simple enough-- visit thisisourmoment.org to email your senators and ask them to pass the Clean Energy Jobs & American Power Act. They even got an all-star cast including Leonardo DiCaprio, Jason Bateman and Edward Norton cracking jokes and urging you to do this one, simple thing.

"Flood the inboxes of your senators, it freaks them out," Bateman says. "They don't even know how to use e-mail, then they see a bunch of stuff in the inbox, they know they gotta do something."

Let's hope so. Justin Long even takes off his pants to get the point across.

Watch this great video here.  thisisourmoment.org

SOURCE:  The Huffington Post   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/28/nrdc-clean-energy-bill-ce_n_440104.html

Share this video with a friend and help spread the word.
This should take less than 5 minutes -- here is what you can do:

1. Tell your senators This is Our Moment, by clicking this link

2. Spread the word about this video by posting this link on your Facebook wall

3. Update your Facebook status to "Thisisourmoment.org" so friends will see our video

4. Tweet ThisIsOurMoment.org and tell your followers to take action today!

5. Post ThisIsOurMoment.org on your personal blogs

The Past Decade Has Been 
The Hottest On Record 

Smoke clouds from Station Wildfire rise above Haines Canyon, Tujunga,
CA - August 29th 2009. 

The first decade of the twenty-first century was the hottest since recordkeeping began in 1880. With an average global temperature of 14.52 degrees Celsius (58.1 degrees Fahrenheit), this decade was 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than any previous decade. The year 2005 was the hottest on record, while 2007 and 2009 tied for second hottest. In fact, 9 of the 10 warmest years on record occurred in the past decade.

Temperature rise has accelerated in recent decades. The earth’s temperature is now 0.8 degrees Celsius (1.4 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than it was in the first decade of the twentieth century, and two-thirds of that increase has taken place since 1970.

Even with these seemingly small increases in global temperature, natural systems are already starting to respond, as evidenced by melting ice sheets and glaciers, shifting weather patterns, and changes in the timing of seasonal events. If temperatures continue to rise on their current trajectory, by the end of the century they will have left the narrow range in which human civilization has developed and flourished.

Though temperatures are rising around the globe, some areas are warming faster than others, with the greatest warming taking place in the Arctic. Paleoclimate records from Arctic lakes, tree rings, and ice cores reveal that the past decade was the warmest of the past two millennia. Warming is amplified in the Arctic for a number of reasons, including the loss of the region’s extensive snow and ice cover: as temperatures rise and light-reflecting ice melts, it is replaced by darker water, which absorbs more energy from the sun, thereby accelerating warming. In parts of the Arctic, average annual temperatures have increased by as much as 2–3 degrees Celsius (3.6–5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) since the 1950s. In 2007, Arctic summer sea ice shrank to its lowest extent on record, leaving the Northwest Passage completely ice-free for the first time in human memory. Then 2008 and 2009 brought the second and third lowest extent of Arctic summer ice on record.

The earth’s temperature is determined by a number of factors. One major influence is the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). This cycle, which involves large shifts in atmospheric and ocean temperatures over the tropical Pacific, has two phases: El Niño, which typically raises average global temperature, and La Niña, which lowers it. Year-to-year temperature variations are also influenced by the amount of energy the earth receives from the sun: increases in solar activity tend to raise global temperatures, while decreases in solar activity lower them.

These natural cycles alone, however, fail to explain the temperature patterns of the last decade. While the strongest El Niño of the century pushed 1998 temperatures up to their then-record high, temperatures in the hottest year (2005) did not receive a boost from El Niño. And 2007 was tied for second hottest year on record, despite the development of a cooling La Niña. Furthermore, while global temperatures have been climbing to record heights, incoming solar energy has in fact been declining since the beginning of the decade. In early 2009, solar activity reached its lowest level in a century.

Rather than ENSO cycles or variations in solar irradiance, human-induced warming from heat-trapping greenhouse gases has become the dominant climate influence. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen rapidly since the start of the Industrial Revolution, climbing from 280 parts per million (ppm) in the late eighteenth century to 387 ppm today. Researchers recently reported that the last time atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were this high was roughly 15 million years ago, when sea level was 25–40 meters (80 to 130 feet) higher, and temperatures were approximately 3–6 degrees Celsius warmer.

The risks posed by rising global temperature are widespread. As the atmosphere warms, mountain glaciers that provide water to over a billion people are melting. Melting ice sheets and thermal expansion of oceans raise sea levels, threatening coastal populations. Increasing temperatures bring decreasing crop yields, putting world food supplies at risk. And ecosystems worldwide are irrevocably altered, placing large numbers of species at risk of extinction.

Higher global temperatures also bring with them more frequent and severe extreme weather events. Over the past few decades, scientists have noted an increase in hot extremes and a decrease in cold extremes across the globe. As temperatures rise further, heat waves will become more frequent and intense. Longer and more severe droughts will take place over wider areas; an upsurge in global drought since the 1970s, associated with higher temperatures, has already been observed. At the same time, as temperatures rise, the water-holding capacity of the atmosphere increases, leading to more intense storms and flooding in areas that are already wet.

The past decade saw many record-breaking extreme weather events, providing examples of the kinds of incidents expected to become more frequent with global warming. In the summer of 2003, Europe experienced an intense heat wave that led to over 52,000 deaths. In the United States, where daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last 10 years, persistent drought plagued parts of the South and West for much of the second half of the decade. A 2006 heat wave affecting the West and Midwest was blamed for 140 deaths in California.

The combination of high temperatures and drought makes a dangerous recipe for wildfire; indeed, 2006 and 2007 saw the worst fire seasons on record in the United States. A similar combination led to disaster in southeastern Australia in early 2009: on what is now known as Black Saturday, intense, rapidly spreading bushfires killed 173 people and burned over a million acres.

Other areas have experienced unusually heavy rains and flooding over the past decade. Record flooding hit Central Europe in 2002, causing over 100 deaths and forcing 450,000 people to evacuate. In summer 2007, the worst flooding in 60 years in England and Wales killed nine people and caused billions of dollars worth of damage; that May to July period was the wettest in the region since recordkeeping began in 1766. In 2008, extensive flooding occurred in several parts of the African continent; Algeria saw its worst floods in a century, while Zimbabwe’s floods were its worst on record.

As temperatures rise, warmer oceans provide more energy to feed tropical storms. The past few decades have seen an increase in the frequency of the most severe hurricanes, and researchers have identified rising sea surface temperatures as the primary cause. The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was the worst on record, with 27 named storms, 15 of which were classified as hurricanes—including Hurricane Katrina, which caused over 1,300 deaths and $125 billion in financial losses.

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international body of over 2,500 scientists, released its Fourth Assessment Report, in which it called the recent warming of the globe “unequivocal.” The report projected a rise in average global temperature of 1.1–6.4 degrees Celsius (2–11 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. Based on the most recent scientific assessments, if greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow at their current pace, the temperature rise by the end of the century will likely reach or exceed the upper end of these projections. Already, effects of increasing temperatures such as accelerating ice melt and sea level rise are outpacing the IPCC’s predictions of just three years ago. Without significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, global temperature will rise dramatically by the end of the century, creating a world that looks vastly different from the one we know today.

This is a policy release from Earth Policy Institute, one of our preferred sources for up-to-date information with integrity. It was written by Amy Heinzerling, & the Global Temperature Index data are from NASA.. EPI is directed by Lester R. Brown and is dedicated to planning a sustainable future, as well as providing a roadmap of how to get from here to there. 

I enjoy growing my own food. We spent very little in getting the garden ready for sowing. We compost regularly and use the nutrient rich compost in our garden. There's very little work involved once you figure out how it works. I encourage anyone to recycle their food wastes. Just be sure to learn what and what not to throw into the compost pile and you'll do just fine. And to save water, be sure to mulch heavily with hay or straw. For arid regions, this really makes sense.

 

Urban Roots, a film about the emergence of urban farming out of the vacant lots of Detroit, is now on twitter.  Be the first to know when the film is completed, about screenings and premiers.  Also find out when the urban farming action site goes live.

http://twitter.com/urbanrootsfilm