Fourteen Acres Per Handful

Much of the time I feel like Jack, the poor little lad from the English fable that we were all told when we were young. Jack and the Beanstalk Jack, poor lad whose mother told him to go sell his beloved cow at market Jack, that boy who returned with magic beans, but was belittled Jack. The boy who climbed above the clouds and brought home a bag of gold coins on his first trip, the goose that lays golden eggs on his second climb up the stalk and ultimately the golden harp which plays by itself. The Giant, who "owns" all three of these treasures is killed by the boy when he cuts down the magical beanstalk, ending the threat from this over-sized beast. You may remember the refrain..."Fee, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of and Englishman. Be he alive, or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread.", a variant and elaboration of what was originally written by Shakespear (from King Lear, act three, scene four) When Jack traded his prize cow, who had gone dry, for a handful of beans, his mother thought him daft. She flew into a rage and thrust the magic beans to the ground outside their cottage. Overnight the beanstalk grew taller than the clouds.

In my own time I have had many valuable resources that have run dry. I routinely had to sell off all of my prize possessions so that my mother could move the family cross country in search of her fortunes, or in fact, even her whims. My own magic beans were the bits of information that I was able to glean. some came from research and study, others came from strange old men, mystical yet intrigued by my rapt attention. There were even some magic beans that I found within my own psyche, but they were all tossed out the window by the adults who raised me. Instead of growing into a mile high beanstalk overnight, the tendrils continue to grow and the length of their magic is infinite. I have spent my life climbing up and down, bringing back treasures.

Unlike Jack, I have not raised the ire of the giant. I keep it on the down low, only taking what the beast thinks is waste. This has not always been a pleasant occupation. Once, when I found enough sash cord to make a person-sized nest of tangled asbestos laced string, I got deathly ill from untangling the mass and making skeins for use as art material. The skeleton that I created with the waste nearly killed me, but the resource was distributed into a safe finished product that keeps the asbestos contained. In slides yet to be transfered I have a few photos of the skeleton that I fashioned. A masterwork done entirely with rope, string and twine, woven and wrought into human form.

Making biochar is a perfect example. I live in a part of the country where wood products are big business. Finding pure sawdust, without glues or chemical treatment of any kind is easy. Most producers of this kind of waste would rather give it away for free than pay to haul it off. Turning that liability into value added product (char and bio-char) is relatively easy and although it takes energy to get the process to completion, it can be done with minimal equipment and a campfire, which allows folks to get together and participate in the char-making process.

Understanding the value of char requires seeing several co-mingled aspects of the material. First and foremost, it holds six times it's own weight in water. Areas that are drought prone can be stabilized by using biochar. The water holding capacity alone is only a tiny fraction of the benefits that accrue by using this amazing substance. The entire surface, on a microscopic level are covered with fissures, craters and micro-topography that provides habitat for soil organisms. Anywhere char exists in soil, with air, but without direct sunlight, billions of beneficial organisms can exist in a single tablespoon. These organisms hold additional water within their cell membranes, increasing water holding capacity many fold more than the char itself. Biochar is inhabited by organisms that provide the interface between compounds that exist in the soil and the plants themselves. Just like the bacteria in our gut, the soil microbes inhabiting the char help create easily absorbed and adsorbed nutrients. The life that biochar holds in the soil is perhaps more important than the amazing water holding capacity of the material.

This is the char making vessel that I have been using. It creates just over one gallon of char per three hour burn.

If you are not yet questioning how this miracle substance can be flying under the radar, read the last two paragraphs again. It is easy to explain why. Money. No one and no corporation can corner the market on bio-char. It is best when created locally with as little transportation cost as possible. There are a handful of people in the country who can teach about this material, but anyone willing to look into it themselves can learn the ancient technology, experiment with it and start to comprehend the art and science of creating healthy soils. Monsanto cannot patent it, no corporate welfare could make sense if we all have the knowledge of how to make and use char. When mid-sized small commercial char generators are utilized, the costs of adding biochar to an agricultural system can be as low as $90 per acre. Home gardens can be enriched for a few dollars and half a dozen hours worth of home brewed biochar. Full details for home and small commercial scale materials, devices and enrichment methods can be obtained through our state not-for-profit. donations of fifty dollars get you access to our full seminar notes, ideas book and glossary of terms. Interested parties are asked to write ECO-Tours directly to find out about having seminars in your area. Fourteen forty-five Porlier street, G.B.WI 54301-3334 USA. Or just stay in touch by leaving comments here.

Two Superior Properties

They say that changes come on the wind. I certainly have seen it happen enough in the past to know when the spirit of change is nigh. this is one of those times.

My Grandaughter exhibiting my coat of many colors...well half of it anyway. I am working on a book describing the story that goes with every patch on this jacket, What would you pay for 180 stories? That's enough to read one a day for six moons!

 We have discovered property on Lake Superior! This takes us one step closer to having a Northern ECO-Tour Resort. We have also found a property that is less than two hours by bicycle from the shoreline property that is nearly forty acres and includes the headwaters of a creek. It has been heavily impacted on about ten of the acres and will provide plenty of opportunity for reforestation, ECO-Agriculture and aquaponics. Donations for these properties can be made through our normal Paypal account or by sending direct to ECO-Tours at 1445 Porlier street Green Bay, Wisconsin 54301 USA.
 We were talking of the ways of the winds not very many days ago. You see, they come this time of year. Brutal and sustained, they speak to our souls of winter beginning to push back summer and they echo the insight that will be gleaned by breathing the frostbitten air of the long dark nights to come.

We also now have a You tube video that explains a bit about our work and the Leave No trace Ethics that help guide tourists to not only be respectful stewards, but to leave the natural world in such a way that others can enjoy it in the same condition as they found it. This visual ECO-Tour shows several places that we have planted and gives sound information on some of what we do. One caveat, at 0:45, (forty-five seconds in) the video says we are a 501(c)3 org. We are a state registered not-for-profit, but the costs of federal registration have been too great for our current budget. We are looking to register with the federal government in the future, but for now, we are only a state institution. We will be making a video of our biochar process soon and hope to create videos featuring benefits of ECO-Tours for guests, landowners and folks who donate soon.

Essentially, ten hours of sustained, twenty mile an hour winds, brings the air that was over Lake Superior  last night, fresh to our morning lungs. Some of the least disturbed, and consequently least polluted air on the continent, and my spirit is blessed with it. This element of change that the winds represents makes one restless and energized, no matter what time it is, day or night. Some things need to be done. With gusts of fifty, the north shore of Lake Superior has come to my lungs. Biochar made at this time would help capture some of that northern influence, inoculating it with whatever bacteria, fungi and spores it carried with it. The unique Breath of the North might well be used to best effect on north slopes and cooler wetter sites, I would imagine, because they most nearly replicate where the air brought them from.

Immeasurable thank-yous go out to Brenda Huisman for her video capture and editing, as well as the voice over for our first video. In spite of horrible conditions, extremely limited resources and having very little time to spend on it, she, of course, did what she does best, and her efforts are deeply appreciated.

To "finance" the northern acreage, we are looking for ten folks who can put $1K into "Deer Camp" it would allow you to stay during the 10 day deer gun season for a Cultural Heritage Encampment, Northern Folk School. This is not only a traditional deer camp, but living history encampment with fall chores being part of the gig.

Great Spirits passing frequently bring high wind events, and when we honor the ancestors, their spirits too, are disrupted. rustled as it were, like sheets in the wind. They know that we humans will once more re-live passed grief, and try to cast off shackles that we have created in our own minds; that there will be attention paid to them constrains them in ways that they cannot express yet, it has reigned them in at inappropriate times, the rest of the year and probably don't want to be bothered. That is why it is essential to make peace with the past and it is such a blessing to be blessed with what the dead have given us. In these nights of Sowen, What we unburden ourselves of will return to the Earth with those echoes that trace infinite, passed, other lives. We literally breathe the same noble gasses that the dinosaurs did, and in the night huddle together for warmth, and the blessed return of the Sun.

One more order of business...to make the Shoreline property a reality, we need ten people to step up and pre-pay a week rental on the beach, also $1K. We are having a beautiful and sustainable time with our Air B&B listing and will be running all three properties to make the payments, that is why we can offer such awesome rewards for your participation. Redemption of your "gifts" can take place at any time and will come with as much programming, or lack of it as you desire. From full-blown ECO-Tours and guide services, to utter solitude, you only get what you come for.

Tonight, as I breathe the air of restlessness solitude, that lives over Lake Superior, Part of my soul is tied to her breath. This is one of the parts of my soul that I love to share through ECO-Tours. If you can develop your own affinity for place in the world, we have done our job. Letting go of our old souls and stepping into fragile territory, like an insect shedding it's protective cover, we are vulnerable at this time too. Treading on ice for the first time each winter, we are hyper-cautious, but without great sacrifice, great rewards will never come. If the Sowen season cannot allow your shackles to be shed, Lord and Lady help you make it through 'til next year.

Focalizing is a process of allowing collective will to express itself, by sacrificing your own idiosyncratic intention for what works for everyone.  This concept is at the heart of ECO-Tours. Every adventure that we orchestrate is the result of what participants bring with them, what they choose to leave behind, a spirit of revelation that distills the essential abundance around us, and perfecting the ritual and art of the give back.

There are things to do, arte to be made, miracles to participate in. When you are ready to, join us for your tour and learn about a place inside your self as well as all that surrounds us and that many of us forget to enlist in our grappling with the distractions of a modern world.

May the Dark Lord and Lady Bless you.
Peace, and BE Good STEWARDS!

Char "Meltdown"

My char retort in action. Made from a simple stainless steel vessel. Before use, I removed any plastic or rubber parts, replacing them with steel and copper. 

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but it is hard to capture exactly how awesome this burn was. I had trouble finding time to create this batch, because financial pressures and the rapidly closing tree planting window has required me to spend all of my time elsewhere. I had to burn some wood and decided that the char could wait no longer. Here is a bit of context to help understand what you are looking at. I reduced five gallons of very dry sawdust to char in about two hours. My last burn, with fresh sawdust which took over five hours to "cook". That burn created massive amounts of steam during the first of those five hours. This was another animal altogether!

One consequence of the speed at which the dry material liberated hydrogen and oxygen is that the pressure inside the vessel went way up. As you can see by the flame, we had some fear that material inside the vessel might fly up and clog an outlet creating a massive and rapid increase in pressure that would be catastrophic. Luckily, the removable lid had enough blow by to allow the hot gasses to escape. You can see the flammable gasses escaping around the lid (where the wing-nuts are) This burn was so fast, and so hot, that when the process was finished, the lid had partially melted. The next upgrade to the device will be to make a new lid of steel rather than aluminum.

The other thing that the image cannot convey is the sound. It was like we had a rocket engine in our yard. The clean burning flame was about two feet long for the duration of the burn and the fiery jet was almost unimaginably persistent. It became reduced slightly a couple of times, but by simply jostling the container a few times to "stir" the contents, the flame continued as the material inside was charred. Because I live in a state where wood products are a major industry, I have been experimenting with charring the sawdust. It helps to reduce waste and can easily be scaled up to industrial levels without the time (and energy) consuming process of crushing. Even though I have a great method of crushing the char from wood, it is still a bit messy and as long as clean sawdust is readily available, I will continue to use it. After seeing the efficiency of this burn, I may have to commit to using dry material for making char instead of the fresh stuff.

Wood may seem dry when you buy it, but this sawdust had aged for about a month in the open air of my garage. I suspect that it lost over half of the moisture that had been contained in it. I may have to weigh two samples, before drying and after drying to get a better idea of how much water is in the fresh sawdust. My retort and I are available for demonstrations and during my half-day presentation I will demonstrate and discuss a variety of options and methods for producing or procurement of char, grinding methods and optimal size of char for agricultural and garden use, inoculation, water holding capacity and the biology of organisms that inhabit char. All speakers fees and honoraria will help to enhance our programs and offset costs of our school of sustainability.  

Tree Planting

We have been planting trees for forty years. In the early days, we were a small group of friends, but registering as a not-for-profit in the Wisconsin, our efforts have mushroomed. We continue to seek efficiencies that allow us to plant more trees at lower cost and increase word of mouth advertising that secures the best and most loyal ECO-Tourists (guests) and supporters (donors). with protection, watering, weeding and aftercare, our seedlings cost about ten dollars each in monetary value, but we frequently cut that number significantly by planting tree seeds, which typically cost a bit less, but require a bit more effort. We have had years where we got over a million seeds at once that were perfect for planting large areas and we have had years when we were only able to plant a few hundred acorns, maple seeds or walnuts. Much of this is due to time availability and what tree seeds we do find. Some years are naturally better than others and this year has been about average.

We have recently found a supporter who cannot afford to make donations, but who has time to stop out at the City Compost Facility on a somewhat regular basis. He has found us many, many tree seeds, which are far easier to deal with in piles than they are when they are spread across the ground under a giant old tree. He has become a great source for seeds and seedlings that find their way into the Earth without draining our bank account. The reason that I explain this in some level of detail is because I see the need for doing this sort of work nearly everywhere. Trees can transform the landscape and with a bit of effort, many places that humans have deforested the land can be recovered.

When the Russians first invaded Afghanistan, their first attempt at making the population beholden to them was to cut down every tree in every courtyard of every compound, leaving the locals without any sort of reliable, albeit tiny, source of food in their immediate vicinity. Additionally, their shady retreats were turned into nothing more than parking lots. My idea for U.S. intervention there was to give each of our soldiers one thousand fruit and nut tree seedlings that they would have been responsible for, and when they could find places to plant them and people who would care for them, their "tour" would be over. In a scenario like this, there would have been no shots fired, no assaults on our people and no unnecessary casualties. People can tell the difference between those who want to exert power and control over them and those who want to lift them out of a difficult situation.

I recently heard that in cities across the U.S., there is a push to create Million Tree Pledges, creating plans for reforesting our cities. Here at ECO-Tours, we have expanded our area of operations steadily outward, first working in the watershed that we live within, then planting in areas that flow away from our city, ultimately expanding to plant in the watershed of two of the Great Lakes, Michigan and Superior. It is becoming harder and harder to find areas that have not been ransacked by the power and control freaks, stripped of vegetation and paved over, many of these areas may never recover, unless we humans stop abusing the landscape. I applaud the Million Tree idea, however, if cities continue to plant non-native populations, or limit themselves to just one or even three species of trees in their planting mix, we will soon find that the efforts are for naught. We have been down those roads before.

When I was a child, there were many millions of elm trees, planted along nearly every residential street in America, (at least every place that they would grow) before I was ten, a pathogen came through and nearly eliminated the population. It spread like wildfire and within a few short years, the street trees were gone. Neighborhoods that had looked like giant living cathedrals of green were turned into harsh, hot, dry landscapes that made playing out in the quiet streets a thing of the past. The cities across America that had lost those giant elm trees seem to have learned nothing because they all seem to have rushed to plant ash trees in their place. The ashes are being wiped out, a bit more slowly, but because of the same type of monoculture planting.

In recent years, city foresters are seemingly beginning to understand the need for a mix of species, but only time will tell whether their efforts will be enough to change the balance of species enough to build a resilient forest where our cities have most ravaged the natural environment. I regularly see trees that have truncated lives because the wrong species got planted "too close to a house", or "too close to a street". They are taken down because they are "Too messy" or because "the birds that sit in the branches shit on my car". I have seen trees that only wanted the moisture that would normally be there for them, but that died because the drains in the street had turned that patch of ground into a desert, or trees that had found a way to survive in spite of human interventions killed when the street was widened. I have even seen trees killed because humans deemed one afternoon of entertainment to be of more value than the trees, that had been there for decades, quietly making the air just a little bit cleaner, making that area just a bit more habitable, and invisibly taking what they needed from the planet without harm to a single living being.

When I first began planting trees, I thought that the process would one day become boring or that at least I would tire of doing the work. This has not been the case. When I gently spread the filamentous root system of a tiny shoot into the ground, I get as much satisfaction today, at age fifty-something as I did when I was twenty, or ten. when i breathe my carbon-filled breath into the hole or say a prayer of blessing into the tiny sprig's leaves, my spirit mingles with that of a living be-ing. It releases all of the goodwill and hope that one can muster into the tissues of another entity. I have seen birds show up, where none had been before, within minutes of planting a small tree. They fly in alight on one of the branches and I have seen them immediately transform the newly planted tree into an ecosystem in and of itself. See, frequently birds, as part of their pre-flight check, defecate. This nutrient rich shit not only helps fertilize the tree, but also builds the soil with much needed organisms and organic matter. Having a hand in this transformative process is always powerful, always amazing and always increases the feelings of intimacy that one feels for the world around them.

I understand that some people don't like to get their hands dirty. I do. I understand that for the uninitiated, it sounds like "too much work", but in my experience, there is nothing better than fresh air to breathe, wild berries to eat when one is on a walk, and clean water to drink. The trees we plant today will one day provide for us in ways that we may not be able to fathom. My goal is not to help myself to the benefits of all of the trees that I plant, but to offer them as hopeful messengers that speak to the spirits of all those who will enjoy their shade over the years. If it is only for the birds, it will all be worth it.

Opening Our Resort

It is funny how occasionally, the things that we need the most are right before our eyes. It is even more interesting that the experiences leading us to that place and time do not allow us to see them. When I learned that dandelions are good for the liver, I had been living under a toxic cloud for nearly a decade. It did not change the healing properties of the plant that I was unaware, but it did change the way I lived amongst the environment forever. I have studied herbal healing and medicinal plants for decades, but I am still learning specific attributes that are important in members of the plant kingdom that I have either not paid close attention to, forgotten, just never needed, or did not know that I, or people I have helped could benefit from before. Research into most fields often reveal that the more we learn, the more there is to learn. Perhaps it should not be surprising then, that the answers we seek are often right before our eyes. One of the quirks of our perception is that we are blind to most of what surrounds us. In my Theories of Aesthetic Perception  class, one of the points that is important is that we are constantly sorting, sifting and winnowing the reality that we confront, as much for self-preservation as anything. There is no way to take in the totality of experience, so we dump 99.9% of what our senses provide to us in the dust bin of ignorance. We cling desperately to the things we deem important and the rest is just chaff, left wherever it has fallen.

We, my wife Nancy and I, purchased a rental property across the street from our home a decade ago. It is currently being transformed. We are remodeling and furnishing the two apartments, making space for an Air B&B. Our experiences have allowed us to envision the B&B concept with a few valuable twists. One place that we like to stay calls itself a B no B, a bit more like a motel for people who can make their own breakfast or find their own way in the world. Those who want to keep to themselves, or who have special dietary needs, find that this sort of place is perfect. As hosts, we can be across the street and out of guest's hair during their stay. However, if our desired, we can provide many extras as needed or by request. We offer those who stay with us ECO-Tours, equipment rentals and guide services. Even if all that is desired is a campfire to sit around in the evening, we can arrange for that as well. In the past, our perceptions were limited by prior experiences, but now we are looking more closely at what exists right across the street from where we live.

Perhaps the history of the place, or our own experiences limited what we could see as possible there, but that is not unusual. The constraints on what we can see are never visible, until they are shattered. We purchased the property with one thing in the forefront of our minds, it sounds funny now, but the people living there were terrible neighbors and we wanted them to be gone. We had the eviction notice drawn up ahead of time so that after closing on the property, we could deliver it immediately. It may be the first time in history that a person getting evicted was happy to have to leave. The woman who was renting there actually hugged me for kicking her out!

Of the three adults who had signed the lease, only one remained. This older lady told me that the other two were in prison. The families of those two, plus a friend of the older woman had decided to make that place the home base of their activities and a permanent place to crash or drop off their children whenever they needed a break from them or were in town. I guess that officially, it wasn't considered a child care center, because most of the children were related, but to the neighbors, seeing six to ten children running around at any one time made us wonder. This was not, however the problem. What was bad were the dozen police calls to the property every few moons. Waking up in the middle of the night to one hassle or another and having to hear the ugly details of lives out of balance was too much for Nancy and I to bear.

The details of owning a rental property were far from our minds when we bought the place. The thought of gaining peace of mind pushed out all other perceptions, so we bought it. Since then, there has only been one long-term tenant in the lower and perhaps half a dozen renters upstairs. One by one, each of the neighbors has gone out of the way to thank us for buying the property and for that we feel pretty happy, but our perceptions being limited had led us to only see the place in a certain way. Within the past couple years we started hearing about home share programs, couch surfing websites and air B&B. Some of our friends and family have traveled using these online resources and had a great time of it, many staying in other folks spare bedrooms or coming and going from entire homes left vacant by their owners. Then, we found out that one of our friends opens her home to guests nearby and we had a few long talks with her about what she was doing through Air B&B. She loves it and by reading her reviews on the website, her guests do too!

We are currently working feverishly to ready the upper apartment for our first guest, who will be arriving in the coming week. Onsite we already have dozens of edible landscape plants at least the same number of healing herbs and garden beds that are managed with an eye toward permaculture and sustainability. We are adjacent to over 160 acres that will never be developed and directly across the street from the property is the East River which is a great place to canoe. There is also a walking trail/parkway along the river bank for recreation. As many things in nature show, great things often grow from tiny beginnings. ECO-Tours has organically grown from a group of three into a network of folks who can plant hundreds of trees in a single day. There is no reason to believe that our modest beginnings with space for four guests could grow into a Summer Camp/Resort that can accommodate hundreds of ECO-Tourists. The greatest oaks start from a single acorn.

Autumnal Equinox 2014

Life seeks balance and what better time to speak of it than around the Equinox. This time, more than any other hangs in between High Sun and Low Sun. Many of us who live in temperate climates enjoy the Spring and Fall seasons best of all. Not too hot and not too cold as Goldilocks would say. This year, the balance is being perturbed in several ways. I prefer not to get too topical in this blog, focusing instead on the natural world and all it has to teach us, but the times have changed drastically enough that it seems imperative to focus on events that have been in the news, or possibly some that have not, because our future quality of life hangs in the balance as well. Unlike the changing of the seasons, which come around in a regular cycle, we are pushing the limits of rational behavior and disrupting the very fabric of our lives, often without even knowing it.

This Equinox was marked by over four hundred thousand individuals protesting ecological insanity in New York City. Climate change protesters, kudos to them, brought home the fact that changes in the way we do business, procure our energy and meet the needs of human populations around the world need to change. In fact, the next day, many of the same people walked down to Wall Street and continued to protest against the corporate elite who have stacked the deck against sanity.

 In Pennsylvania, where tens of thousands are being subjected to living in a police state, there is an ongoing manhunt for a cop killer survivalist. Massive resources are being brought to bear, all for one guy. This is the state that brought fracking into the news because of the flaming tap water and the intransigence of the corporados, who still refuse to release the list of toxic chemicals that they are pumping deep into the Earth. It seems that we are so inundated with distraction techniques that one can no longer tell if a cop killer is even a threat, while the police defend those who would poison our water. No expense is being spared, they say, but a simple fly over with an infra-red camera would find their quarry in short order. We had an armed gunman kill some people at the Upper Michigan - Wisconsin border a few years ago and the perpetrator was in custody within a few hours. hiding your body heat signature is not easy. The days are turning to weeks and schools remain closed, roadblocks are still in place and the local volunteer fire department has become both communications center and drop off point for snacks, sandwiches, drinks and cookies. Friends living in that area are convinced that the police are doing their best at finding the individual. I am not convinced.

In the high plains, the fracking nightmare has mushroomed beyond comprehension, even satellite imagery sees the transformation lighting up the night sky. Parts of Texas are the same way, riddled with roads, shoulder to shoulder drill pads and nothing to show for it but tax breaks, subsidized oil and natural gas and waste. conservation is so much cheaper! This nightmare continues north across the border in Canada, where oil shale "development" has and continues to defile one of the last great open spaces on the continent. Shit gets in the water, no one takes responsibility. Toxic waste ruins watershed after watershed and no one seems to be at fault. In the minds of the exploiters, we are the ones to blame...we keep pumping the gasoline into our vehicles.

The oceanic gyrae continue to be flooded with plastic that has slipped mindlessly beyond our ability to control. a friend was telling me the other day that, "Organisms now exist that can eat plastic." but he was dumbfounded when I explained that they are not eating it in any real sense. The food they consume is attached to plastic and therefore it is becoming integrated in the food chain. This cannot be mistaken for "eating" plastic, or using it for nutrition. I can swallow plastic as well, but it will not ever become part of a nutritious diet. In the final analysis, plastic is a non-food product. Children have swallowed marbles since they were invented, but it can't make them food. Just because plastic becomes trapped inside your body certainly can't make it food.

Across the sea, in Syria, we are blowing things to smithereens again, hesitating to call it war. If anyone tried doing the same thing to out oil wells or financial institutions I think it would be called war. Even the women and children that have perished in just the first two nights of bombing have been referred to as, "Children and spouses of insurgents." how this makes their human rights any less important than out own, I will never know. Examining the list of countries that support us in our bombing missions reads like a who's who of nations that summarily deny civil rights to their people. If these are the kinds of "friends" we count among the league of nations, then I don't want to be part of this any more. Not in my name! The Saudi's after all provided refuge to those who supposedly brought down the world Trade Center on 9-11. Israel just killed many thousands of their neighbors, guaranteeing the need for an even larger military in the future. What is often forgotten by the hawks who  design these actions is that every innocent killed becomes a martyr, with generations of hate that will be directed at you for your arbitrary attacks. No healing ever occurred, and nothing positive has ever been created by the firing of a single rocket or the dropping of a single bomb.

The balance to all of these events and activities is that more and more people are learning to live on less. Greater and greater numbers each day are coming to realize the fallacy of business as usual. Each and every opportunity to share our sanity, our ideas and our commitment to change must be taken. Healing a world so full of sick ideas may seem daunting, but we have one another and the facts are on the side of right, not might. Love is the foil to all of this hate. I speak out at this time because of my own beliefs that our species is worth saving. There is no planet "B".

 

Developing an Ecology of Mind

It has been said that worry is like paying rent for a place you may never live. Worry saps energy that is essential in transforming the world around us. There are many things that we cannot change. These things must be accepted. Wasting our energy worrying about them only takes us out of a position of power within the universe. There are many thought processes that drain away our life force and especially at this time we cannot afford to squander our energies on things we cannot change and that may never occur. The word power is often confused because of the ways our culture has distorted it, but power in and of itself is not bad, what corrupts power is the attempt to wield it over other beings. Fortunately there are also many things that we do have the power to change that need to be done differently, done better, or in some cases not done at all. Finding appropriate vehicles of our energies, tasks that will make the biggest positive change with the least effort, is necessary if we are to keep in touch with our own sacred body, mind and spirit. As we begin the process of growing into a more benign species that can co-exist with nature, we must learn to think and act like the beings that have live here without destabilizing the climate, poisoning the lakes and rivers, or contaminating the air which we all depend on for survival.

There are plenty of new age philosophies that tout the theory that we can think our way to a better life, but I am deeply suspicious of many of them. I think that I am a successful and wealthy person every day. I visualize myself as a person with nothing but leisure and a secure future, but at this point in my life, My retirement savings will be depleted within a few moons of whenever I stop working. I have not yet gotten to the point where I can afford to say no to opportunities to make money and I do have relatively good health, but my wealth is of friends, relationships and ideas, all things that are undervalued in the marketplace. I visualize myself having the freedom to move about the planet, develop new relationships and influence greater numbers of people by sharing what I have learned, but the fact remains that I am a wage slave that has very limited funds with which to pursue these avenues. What has been much more profitable for me has been to reduce the waste of energy that worry would sap from my life.

In the study of ecology, the most striking feature that one will never see is waste. Each and every thing in nature is providing food, home or breeding ground for some other trophic level. Humans have a knack for not understanding this. It can be difficult for some to step out of their limited perspective, but waste, as we know it, is non-existent in nature. Having the good sense and discipline necessary to reign in our minds and their rampant waste of energy is essential to a healthy ecology of mind. The big money capitalizes on our fears and worries, but that is another thing we do not see inherent in nature, money.

Here at ECO-Tours of Wisconsin, we put all of our income into trees, dirt to plant them in or materials necessary for their protection. With this focus, we have reduced our waste and increased our survival rate for the trees that we do plant. Like an organism, we have grown larger, but remained committed to increasing our efficiency as well. The organic growth that we have experienced has allowed us to keep up with the changes that a growing organization faces, without losing focus or momentum. In the earliest days, we were able to plant a few hundred trees each year and now that many of them are tall enough to dwarf the homes that they were planted near, they are also providing a source of seed for future generations of trees. The exponential growth of a single tree mirrors the exponential growth of our reforestation efforts. This year, we have had a bunch of trees donated by other folks who specialize in starting trees from seed, so their efforts have joined with ours to create synergy. another aspect of the natural world that is clear to those who study the environment. Symbiotic relationships, in which both parties benefit from a relationship, are common in nature and as we mimic natural systems, we can benefit from these relationships as well.

By calming our minds, we unleash immense power that has been wasted trying to fit in, trying to play nice, trying to act appropriately. In nature none of these concepts exist. In the natural world, every organism just is. It seems that every being on the planet is content with being themselves. Learning to be true to our nature is perhaps the hardest thing we humans have to learn to do. In many cases, humans have been lying to themselves for so long about who they are, that the calm of being true to our own spirit, calming our own minds and healing our bodies seems an impossible task. Here at ECO-Tours we teach by example what massive change can occur if we just do a little digging, learn about our place in the natural systems that surround us and act in ways that efficiently express our unity with the planet.