Why I wrote "When The Last Tree Dies."

      If you add up all the camping trips, all the hikes, all the walks short and long, I’ve spent most of my life outside. Nature was always the first place I went when the indoor world became too much. The solitude shaped me. Nature was and continues to be my teacher, my healer, my spiritual companion, and most of all, a part of me as vital as all the other parts.
That is why every wound to the planet is a wound to my own body. It is especially distressing when those wounds are caused by greed, by the insatiable need for power, by the futile pursuit of yet more material goods to fill the emptiness inside.
     I know the causes of that emptiness. Some are obvious, such as expecting a thing to replace a need. Others not so much, such as the “begging for prosperity” megachurch religions that teach their congregations how to beg god for material salvation. But the largest void is caused by the move away from nature as an integral part of self, and toward the one that sees it as a commodity, something to conquer, and worse, as an enemy that brings storms, and fires, and floods.
     In the same way that other cultures are demonized in order to exploit them for political and financial gain, so is nature. The media runs continual disaster narratives on a loop of fearmongering. But it never mentions the man-made causes of those disasters. It never mentions that greed is the root cause of most of them.
     The characters in my book suffered from the effects of corporate greed. Their world was already dying from abuse before Preacher Billy’s cult drove them to the mountains. The air was toxic, the water rationed, and the food artificial. Every fire, every storm, made them fear nature more. The more they feared, the farther apart they moved away from nature as a part of themselves.
     By sending them to the mountains, I gave them a chance to reconnect with nature, to fill the void left by those with nothing in their hearts but greed and a hunger for ever more power. I created communities that were vastly different from each other. I made them good and I made them evil.
     I didn’t make it pretty. I didn’t mute what corporate profit motives, religious mind control, and programmed fear does to a human being, because those kind of afflictions aren’t fiction. They are real. They are happening as a I type this.
     But I did make them human, because that means I still have faith in our ability to wake up as a planet. It means I know I’m not the only one who believes we must speak up, we must act, we must make ourselves heard, because if we don’t we, and the planet, are doomed.
     I wanted people to understand what makes people turn to charismatic preachers, politicians, and charlatans. I wanted people to understand what makes someone hate, what makes someone kill, what makes someone dehumanize others for their own gain. And I also wanted them to understand there’s a lot of power in love and we need to draw on it far more and on hate far less.
     If we understand these things, we understand each other. If we learn to fight for peace the same as we fight for war, maybe we will have less wars and more peace. If we start standing up for our planet the same way good people stand up for any abused human being, then maybe, just maybe, we can solve the problems together.
     My book is not a manual. It’s a warning with some suggestions. But more than anything it’s a love story for my relationship with nature. I grew up in a special time when the air was still clean, when I could drink from a river, when storms were natural instead of tragic. I want this world for the children of the future, but that means we have to fight for it now, because we really are running out of time.

                                        Buy "When The Last Tree Dies"

Why I wrote "When The Last Tree Dies."

Tree of Life, the movie

For the last several days I've been trying to find a way to put into words the feeling of continuity that weaves its way through the chaos of our individual existence. It was brought on by watching the devastation created by one of the owners of what was previously a lovely piece of land where heron nested in the trees and generations of squirrels trained new residents how to feed them their favorite treats. His reasoning for cutting down every single tree, some bigger around than many of us could embrace in one hug, was that he was building a solar house and needed to remove the trees so enough light would get through. He doesn't plan on living in it. He's building it with the intent of charging more than average to someone who is "one of them environmentalist types."

He really doesn't understand the contradiction, just as he doesn't understand how far apart he is from what nature truly is and means. He doesn't understand that those so-called environmentalist types have no interest in buying from someone who has so little respect for nature, so little understanding of what it even means to care about the environment, that he would cut down every single tree just to make his ugly devastation marketable.

In so many ways he is the poster boy for what happens when humans become disconnected from nature. And this is what I wanted to explain, the chaos that ensues when, in spite our continuity, in spite of our continual presence on this planet, we become disconnected from the part of us that is also part of the natural world. It's like trying to live without an essential organ like the heart or the brain.

Then last night I watched the movie "Tree of Life"  and something fell into place for me. I previously tried to explain the lack of compassion and shallowness of many of those on Wall Street, Congress, and heading up corporations as a lack of introspection. They are, for the most part,  mean, self-centered, materialistic excuses for human beings. They are what happens when your drugs of choice are alcohol and cocaine, drugs that numb feeling, drugs that allow you to be cruel and uncaring because you can always wipe them away with another dose. They are no different than the soldiers dosed on meth and Wagner so they could kill without conscience. One of the earliest uses of methamphetamine occurred during World War II. The German military dispensed Pervitin which was methamphetamine. It was freely administered to both tank crews and aircraft personnel.

Every generation has its drugs of choice and for mine it was LSD and marijuana, both which tend to make the imbiber more introspective. The inner landscape becomes inseparable from the outer landscape, and that is something we've lost, something that builder of the solar house has lost. It is also a theme I felt was covered in  "Tree of Life" in an especially beautiful and haunting way.

But in a clear example of how disconnected many have become from nature, I read that when the movie first aired, lots of people booed and jeered during the screening. It appears the plot didn't move fast enough for them and they were forced to endure multiple and astonishing scenes of beauty that weren't computer generated, but instead were created by so-called old fashioned  special effects techniques, like running liquid through objects and filming it.

For those of us who grew up in the 1950's and 1960's, not only did the film remind us that no matter how awful our childhoods were for the most part, there were also moments when as children we lived in a sacred world untouched by the harshness of life. We played, laughed, felt, reacted to the world around us because we didn't have the filters of television, the internet, instant access to information. We had to dream and create and imagine.

In many ways the evolution of our consciousness had to create LSD and marijuana, just as the current generation and the one before it had to create drugs like Ecstasy as part of their mental development, and also as a backlash against the numbness and cruelty of those who escaped with hard and unforgiving drugs like cocaine and alcohol.

But that numbing and disconnect is also found in the prevalence of young heroin addicts and those who can't face the day without anti-depressants. We live in a disconnected world and everyone copes according to whether they want to retreat inward or blunt what lives within the recesses of those dark places.

In "The Tree of Life" the choice is between faith or nature, and while faith seems to drive most of the characters, it does so against the powerful continuity of nature. It is a movie that demands you sit patiently and wait for events to unfold, a task that in this world of instant gratification proved too much for those who jeered in the audience. Nature always takes its time. Faith demands instant answers, instant relief to specific situations. In nature we are part of the play. In faith, we are the directors of not only our own play, but also those of everyone else. Nature connects us, faith disconnects us.

Those of my generation were raised by men who saw the worst humanity can inflict upon itself. They saw things no human can see and still keep their humanity intact. Like the father in the movie, played by Brad Pitt, they wanted to toughen us up so we could survive the horror that life would throw at us. They wanted to protect us from it and at the same time, hide it from us. It's why we grew up wanting to know more, wanting to see the source of the contradictions. If anything, we children of war survivors knew there was more to the story and so we went looking through introspection and the kind of drugs that are conducive to looking inwards. We became a generation of seekers who knew there were answers and that they would explain the chaos inside, the angst we felt at knowing we were part of something and yet not knowing how to completely be part of it.

One thing we do learn as we get older is that even introspection reaches a point where it becomes selfish and indulgent. We can't all be monks on the mountain top perpetually seeking answers. At some point we have to stop, look around us and take our place in the world. As sometimes this came too late in life to accomplish much more than survival and perpetuating our own gene pool, the chaotic pendulum shifted to children coming from us that didn't want to look so deep inside, that didn't want to feel so much, that didn't really have the chance to live in the sacred world of childhood we may have been the last generation to enjoy.

 So the pendulum got stuck on the selfish swing, the arc failed to move beyond the gimme stage of existence and we ended up with the culture of greed that now permeates the planet. We ended up letting faith kill nature because it was just easier to swallow someone else's truth rather than discover the path to our own.

The backdrop of the movie is music as Brad Pitt's character gave up a career in music to become an engineer, the ultimate betrayal of the artistic self. His failing was in not understanding he didn't have to give up one for the other, that nature can weave through both truths and music is the pulsating universe both within and without us. Compassion and altruism can be as strong as steel and concrete if you grow them from within.

At the end of the movie I just wanted to sit for awhile and absorb what I had seen because while it was familiar, it was also like entering an astonishing exhibit of beautiful art whose technical mastery seemed to mock the easy solution of computer generated imagery we've come to expect when we say "special effects." In many ways, that to me is the true message of the movie, that we've moved so far beyond the simplicity of nature we've lost the meaning of it. Just like the man destroying nature to appeal to environmentalists.


The Tree of Life (Three-Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo + Digital Copy)

Earth Day Humor by orsobear
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Tree of Life, the movie

Dysfunctional Planet

Sometimes we are so blinded by the bigger picture that we fail to notice it's made up of small pieces of exquisite and painful artistic moments that pass for our collective lives. And there's nothing like a death in the family to bring everything to a flash of blinding and humbling clarity.

For me, my mother's death and the circumstances around it painted a very clear picture of the world we live in. We are one large dysfunctional family who desperately need to change our relationship to each other and the planet if we are to survive as anything but wounded automatons. Within each of our own families are the families that occupy this planet. Within each of us and our respective villages lives both the cause and the cure. We have to open our eyes and our hearts and set aside the divisions or it's the end of us as a species worth anything but a scornful footnote in the passage of time.

Think carefully on this because it means our survival. Think of the last decade, the Bush/Cheney/Rove years, the divisions, the taking of sides, the losses, the rage, the despair,  and apply it not only to my family but to your own, and then apply it to the planet.

Look and see how expertly our fears and hurts and disappointments were and continue to be manipulated by those who can see what we no longer even recognize in ourselves anymore--that we are being led to the slaughter by those who care nothing about us other than the material sum of our parts. We are used by the politicians, the churches, the greedy until there's nothing left inside us that is our own anymore. We belong to them and they use us and then toss us aside because there's a continual replacement for us when we no longer suit their needs.

They are able to do this because dysfunctional is the new normal when it comes to families. How many of us have family members who don't speak to each other over something that happened years ago, something that I doubt most people can remember in complete details anymore if asked to explain it to someone else. All that remains is the gaping chest wound of misunderstanding, of division, of taking sides, of the us and them that divides us all.

How many of us have people in our lives from broken relationships that fester in pain, that isolate us and them from the heartbreak of loss? How many shattered friendships do we have that can never be repaired? How much of our lives are taken up by avoiding people instead of welcoming them? How much hate grows inside us like an evil little seed waiting to destroy everything in us that can love?

When we are like this, we are weak instead of strong. The users come along and find easy pickings. All they have to do is put on a TV show that gives us images of those we fear and then play upon that fear. Why, in the 21st century, do we still allow manipulative and evil entities like Fox News and its hateful talking heads, the Rush Limbaughs pushing drug-fueled hatred, the politicians who are beholden to corporations instead of people, to define us?

Can anyone on this planet who swallows that crap on a daily basis explain to me in anything but slogans why they hate someone? Or is everything now a talking point written by someone else, reduced to a sound bite with no substance, with no purpose but to divide us from one another?

How far back in time does someone have to go before the immigrant becomes the invader? When these hatemongers talk about taking our country back, who do we take it back from? The Native Americans we stole it from, the Mexicans who were disenfranchised from it because white people wanted it without having to pay anything for it? The Canadians whose boundaries crisscrossed our own so often we can barely tell each other apart?

Where are the papers of those who invaded this country and filled it with hateful white people? Under what justification did those same people enslave other people based on the color of their skin and think of it as anything but the most evil of actions another human being can perpetuate on another?

When did religion become an excuse to hate, to divide, to conquer? Do these haters even bother to read the Bible and its message sof love, tolerance, and acceptance? When did unholy intermediaries with hateful agendas become humanity's direct link to spirituality and connectedness with nature and each other? And why in this supposedly advanced civilization do we still allow the same people who believed the earth was flat to define who we love and marry? What the fuck is wrong with us that so many swallow this crap so easily?

I think the answers to all these questions lie within our own families, our own relationships, our own discarded and destroyed friendships. We are the small pictures within the large picture and we need to take a very close look at it before any hope of a better world for those that come after us, dies with us. Will our decade be the one that destroys hope for the entire planet because we were so obsessed with our own wounds that we failed to see how deeply others were wounded too?

I'm asking people to start within themselves and heal at least a small piece as a precious beginning to a new world. My own family never had a chance because war took their humanity before it had a chance to grow into something strong enough to fight against the divisions. But that doesn't mean I can't heal at least a small wound in myself that is there because of their wounds.

Maybe by doing so I can forgive those who hurt me so they won't continue to hurt me by taking up permanent residence in my heart. I understand all too well my parents were victims of things beyond their control but that doesn't mean I have to follow on that path. I have options they never had and if I let those options go to waste, then what was the point of their hurt, for nothing exists just to exist. Something gives it birth, something feeds it to make it live, something makes it grow strong and powerful.

I've said over and over again that working for peace is not for the weak. It takes strength to move forward when others view it as wasted idealism. It takes courage to look war in the face and say I will defeat you. It takes setting aside the divisions and working together to stand up to power and say we are stronger than you. It takes finding the place inside yourself that wants peace and making it strong enough to defeat hate.

That place is there inside us all. We must find it. We must ignore the noise machine of hate and work together for a better world, one where corporations don't destroy our planet in their greed to satisfy our own greed. We must simplify what we believe and how we live. We must reach out to each other and stop putting up walls, stop blaming others for things that are our own fault. We must grow up and be accountable for our own actions and quit using Bibles and religions and dead friendships as excuses to be complete and total jerks. We must embrace our humanity or we will lose it forever.

Love's Truest Language by orsobear
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Dysfunctional Planet

Embracing Your Inner Lunatic

I had an interesting conversation this evening with someone I don't know very well but whose intelligence always intrigues me. He has a way of phrasing his thoughts so that others can take part in the process of their formation. Tonight he lead me down the path of creating peace by equating the direction toward it as an inward focus spreading outward.

This is not to be confused with the simplicity of saying peace begins from within. That misses the whole point of it being a participatory process that involves the idea, the desire, the sharing, and the action. For example, I can say I want peace, but what does that really mean? Does it mean I have to sit cross-legged and dream inward and hope something leaks out and basically infects others? Or does it mean that I am an activist who seeks to promote peace as a part of my activism?

That is the path my friend took me down tonight and after a few hours of reading, of thinking, of talking about other things to other people, I think I can give him somewhat of an answer. But it won't be a short answer because it's not so easily explained. I can only give examples from myself and hope it makes enough sense to others so they will join me on the same path wearing their own shoes or no shoes or maybe just dragging along behind me. The possibility even exists they could be leading me somehow.

First of all, it does begin within. But the question one has to ask is what is the within? To me it includes the ability to laugh, to mock the absurd, to challenge the mean, to disabuse the intolerant, to speak up against the ingrained.

I have the perfect venue for doing all of that. I design t-shirts and other things with my world view on them. I make fun of and challenge racists. I promote tolerance while attacking intolerance. I point out the evils of war, organized religion, hate, and just plain old fashioned stupidity that is the real cause of much of the earth's many problems.

In all this I try and be myself, to be true to what I believe and am. That's always the hard part because we are social animals, no matter how much we try and claim we are not. I am no different that way. I prefer being liked instead of disliked. I love being loved. I want to be appreciated. I want to be accepted. I want to be part of the whole I dream about and try to create.

But at the same time I can't let myself be led by those wants and desires. I lose my integrity if I apologize for the parts of me that are controversial. How can I effectively argue for a secular world that doesn't bludgeon and kill people over religion if I am not upfront and unapologetic about my Atheism?

How can I speak up for civil liberties if I don't practice them myself by advocating for people's rights to control their own bodies? If I want to have abortions, smoke pot, marry someone gay, drink vodka for breakfast, and vote for politicians who respect those rights, it is my body and my business. But I have to be all those things sincerely or I will be just a well-meaning hypocrite.

If I want a better world with resources that will last so future generations can share in them as I have shared in them, then it becomes a social and spiritual obligation to speak up against things that damage the planet whether they are small acts of refusing to use things that will end up in a landfill, all the way to pointing out that treating your vagina like a clown car is not a matter of whether you can afford to breed like Duggars but instead is a matter of selfishly using up resources that belong to future generations.

It is the same with war. I can object to Iraq and Afghanistan the same way I objected to Vietnam but unless I do more than object, there will always be war because its existence does not depend on me. It depends on those who profit from it--the arms merchants, the pentagon procurers, the politicians who pretend it's about honor and not about campaign contributions from the war profiteers. In my teens I marched in the streets, I camped out at Federal Buildings, I helped my friends write the kind of essays that would allow them to file as Conscientious Objectors, to convince draft boards they were not fit to kill another human being. Now I write those words on t-shirts and spread the message all over the world.

But does it make any difference, does it change anything? Of course, because if  I've learned one thing in my years on this planet it's that we need company to effect great change. Yes we can talk about single people who have made a difference but that is denying that we are not moles living in a pile of dirt waiting to be hosed out of our warm den. I am who I am because of others in my life, because of the examples I looked up to and also those I looked down on. You never know who's going to influence you until you get old enough to look backwards in time.

So yes, it all begins from within and spreads outward, but what varies is the all. That's how the path defines itself, by the all that we are. Once I realized this on more than an intellectual level, everything else just fell into place. I understand that we are all more than the messenger, more than the doer, more than the believer. We are the whole that moves as one with all our integrity and honor intact toward a goal that benefits everyone. In fact, the best goals are those that leave us out of the equation completely and allows us to do for others without the need for a reward, or a thank you, or anything but the knowledge that even a small step forward is progress if we do it sincerely.

And in all this I am reminded of one of the most interesting people I met in my life that of course I didn't fully appreciate until years after his death. He was my uncle's friend and died shortly after playing at his memorial service when he was in his 80's and blind. I don't know why he popped back up in my memory after all these years, but I suspect it's because I saw him then and I see him now as a man who truly lived his life as the man he was. Reading about him has been an entertaining process because everyone has a story, an opinion, a memory of the man as they perceived him, so I will share the googleness that exists around his name: http://tinyurl.com/ennio-bolognini and let you choose what you will to entertain and inspire you.

Inner Lunatic from Crazy Old Lady Of Peace Store
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Embracing Your Inner Lunatic

The Company We Keep

I've always believed that we are known by how we treat others on our way through the maze of life. There's nothing more revealing of character defects than how those above the crowd treat those below them in status, wealth, power, and dignity. It's why we elected a President who represented the paradigm shift many of us already felt and wanted to make the norm instead of a quaint idea embraced by an idealistic few.

We knew that treating others with dignity and respect were the keys to creating a better, kinder and more gentle world. We knew that a planet that was lacking in humanity would soon cease to hold anything resembling the enlightened and wise human being. It would deteriorate into an us vs. them, me first, take it all before someone else does jungle of savage and cruel excuses for human beings.

I've tried most of my life to only be around those who are kind, who care about others more than they care about themselves, who are supportive of endeavors without being enablers of bad habits and ideas, who say good things about those who are not in their presence rather than spread mean and self-serving untruths.

I haven't always been successful as I'm one of those people who prefer to believe the best of someone before I accept the worse. And of course, love is the great blindspot that filters all truths, as is the need for survival, the ache for friendship that won't betray you, and the idea that won't turn out to be something other than it claimed to be.

But I'm a fast learner and definitely can say that no one has ever fooled me twice. And along with that learning came the shaping that made me who I am today--someone who will not compromise on her ethics and expects others to live the same way.

For several years I've had many Cafepress shops. I was okay with some of their merchandise as I didn't believe college students who were looking for a beer drinking party shirt cared much if some poor Guatemalan villager made 10 cents for the shirt they just paid 30 dollars for. It didn't seem important that a shirt be 100 percent organic and sweatshop free if it was just going to be used as a limited message against a political candidate I detested. It seemed fitting in a way to use it for that purpose. I always figured people voted with their wallets anyway so if the origin and distribution of the merchandise was offensive to them, they'd simply walk away and buy it elsewhere.

But when I opened a shop that reflected the passion I felt over our need to save the environment, to fight against the corporate takeover of our limited and precious resources, and to promote a healthy lifestyle through the choice of organic food, vegetarianism and other issues that affected me directly, then it began to matter.

I justified my shop at Cafepress even though I was not completely happy with their reluctance to come right out and say these products are not made by people we exploited for a large profit margin in a third world country. I felt they allowed individual artists the opportunity to promote their message in a supportive and like environment. The people who are and were shopkeepers at Cafepress were individual small business owners, the kind of people I support in my everyday life when I choose where to spend my money. I don't shop at Wal-mart, don't eat at McDonalds, and I buy my lattes from my neighbor who is feeding her family with the profits from her personally owned stand instead of Starbucks.

That has all changed. Cafepress is no longer the small shopkeeper many of us prefer to support. Their front page now sports Coca-Cola designs and other corporate contracts. The small shopkeeper is being squeezed out and replaced with those who will work for far less and stay within the corporate lines. Artists are no longer allowed to set the price for their personally created works. Cafepress will do it for them and will also only pay the individual artist 10 percent and no more. This means that the average artist will make about a dollar on every shirt they sell and pennies on buttons and stickers. And worst of all, that doesn't mean lower prices for the consumer. It means that Cafepress is giving themselves the profit we once made.

Of course, this is all within their right to do so. It is their marketplace, their business, and their problem. But for me and other shoppers who take into consideration where the merchandise comes from, how the employees are treated, and how exploitive and corporate-owned the business is, shopping there is no longer an option. In my mind they are no different now than Wal-Mart or their new BFF, Coca-Cola.

Therefore, I and many others are moving many of our designs away from them. And in the way life has of making lemonade, I found the perfect venue for my Environment designs. Skreened.com represents everything I believe a company can represent and still make money. Take a look at their statement of purpose:

Here's what excites me about offering these products through Skreened:

"Everything SKREENED offers is made in the United States byAmerican Apparel.

Since we take a strong stance against any kind of exploitive labor practices, we have chosen to print on American Apparel. Their employees are paid fair wages and have an excellent work environment.

After it's all said and done, wouldn't you rather pay just a little bit more for the peace-of-mind that comes with knowing that no one was exploited to put a cheap shirt on your back? read more

I am looking forward to helping them grow their business with my many designs devoted to saving the earth and each other. I encourage you to shop there and support them because we all need to put our money where our personal beliefs and ethics are or why have them? Here are a couple offerings to get you started, and note that you can take the design that is on this product and put it on one of their other offerings if you wish. You can also add your own text to it. Have fun folks. I am.

This shirt is available at Ursine Logic's Environment Store.

This shirt is available at Ursine Logic's Environment Store.

Later I'll tell you what I really enjoy and appreciate about Zazzle. They are embracing Cafepress shopkeepers with open arms, lots of support, and a cool range of products. They're a great place for those special gifts.

Cafepress, Skreened, Organic, American Apparel, Sweatshop Free, Environment, anti-corporation

The Company We Keep

Nature, Atheism, and Me

Here's an excerpt from an email I received from a woman named Amy today:

..."I'm curious how you reconcile your unbelief in God with your spiritual connection with nature."


Dear Amy:

Basically, it's quite simple. I believe the greatest harm we can do is to objectify someone or something. This strips the life from it, the individuation from it, the very spirit that makes it so powerful and unique. This is what religion and belief in God does to people and nature. It takes a living organism like a tree and defines it as a thing separate from us, as an object created by an invisible force outside of ourselves. That makes it easier to cut down because it becomes "lumber" rather than  "part of ourselves," just as it becomes easier to perpetuate hatred and harm on human beings we perceive as being "not us."

Our official enemies never look, talk or act like us. They can't because then it would be harder to make enemies of our fellow human beings. And they always have different religious beliefs because that's a handy way to create the "us" and "them" so even the most uneducated, ignorant moron can understand these ain't godly folks and so we can abuse, torture and kill them in our God's name with no repercussions.

We do this on all levels of existence: my wife, my husband, my dog, my cat, my house. We do not see this as placing limits on what those living organisms can be, but merely as assigning personal ownership or belongingness to them. By objectifying someone or something, we make a place for them and keep them there.

I see such behavior as a destructive force. I see it as stunting the growth of things we perceive as existing outside ourselves. I see deifying a person or thing as the first step towards destroying it.

There is a big difference between saying "my spouse" and saying "part of me."  It is the same with trees in the forest. If I see them as something God made, then they cease to exist as living, breathing organisms that are an integral part of the whole. But if I see them as part of me, then they are me as my arm is me and as my heart is me.

We both still exist in the same moment in time, but our existence is not separate nor created by an external force.  If a tree in the forest is equal to my arm, then it requires thought, awareness, and an ability to understand my actions have consequences before I go blithely removing either a tree or my arm.

There are those who will and have argued with me that God made both the trees and me, without thinking for a moment that we might have vastly different opinions on how me and tree came to be. This is the blindness of religion. It operates by reducing things down to small pieces that can then be controlled, manipulated, and defined to suit personal biases and bigotry. That I might believe differently is automatically perceived as wrong and needing to be changed. That is ego gone wild and is never a good thing.

Our planet is being destroyed by this kind of limited eo thinking. By assigning God credit for the oceans, then we give them an artificial vastness that allows our corporate garbage creators to pollute and destroy them because, well, they are just so vast and can't possibly have a limit if God created them. We apply this same wrong thinking to the air, the soil, and every single resource on the earth.

But if we don't believe God created the oceans or the trees or the air, and instead believe they grew out of a natural scientific process that unlike religion, retains the same truth generation after generation, then they become a finite body of water, a forest that will not renew itself for decades beyond our lives, and air that will choke instead of giving us life, if we do not protect them and start treating them as an integral part of ourselves.

We must step outside the artificial excuse of God-created and realize that our planet must be protected by us, by real human beings who have the power to do or not do this,  or these essential resources will no longer be a source of life, nourishment, and spiritual replenishment.

That is why the increase in destruction of our natural resources has risen equally with the rise of claiming that God made everything and everyone believes in God. I'm willing to bet the corporate thugs that donated to the Republican party pushed religion as a political platform to help them take what they wanted without oversight.

Throughout time criminals and the most corrupt of politicians have used God as a partner in their crimes.  I suspect many of the most ardent of God-pushers don't believe half the crap they shovel towards the masses because if they did, then surely they wouldn't destroy the planet with God watching their every move.

So yes, I can reconcile my Atheism with the spiritual sense of self and belongingness I feel when I'm out in Nature because I never separated myself from the natural world with something as artificial as religion. I accept personal responsbility for anything I do to Nature. I do not blame an outside force like God for a tree I cut down, a stream I damn, or a species I wipe out because I like how it tastes on my dinner plate. I am as it is and we all are. Once we as human beings understand that, then maybe we can stop killing each other and live in harmony for a change. After all, when is the last time you heard about a tree taking out another tree because of their religious differences? It takes human beings to come up with something so ridiculous and disconnected from each other.

Tired of that silly Jesus fish? Are you a freethinker too smart to believe dinosaurs were on the ark? Amuse yourself and other with two dinosaurs munching down on ribs of Jesus fish over a campfire. Magnet may be purchased at The Godless Heathen, a shop for Atheists, Freethinkers, Agnostics, and Unbelievers.

Atheism, Atheist, Environment, Global Warming, Climate Change, Natural Resources, Nature

Nature, Atheism, and Me

What Child-Free By Choice Means

When I came of age in the 60's and 70's, one of the big issues of the day was overpopulation. It was a subject that took on new relevance with the advent of reliable birth control such as the pill. And it spun off into an idea that was radical at the time: having children was a choice not an obligation.

At the same time as the pill came on the scene, there were other factors at work such as the growing Feminist movement that also served to show women had more choices than staying home and popping out babies. Even though the idea of equality for women was not a new idea, it finally reached the mainstream in the 60's after JFK appointed Eleanor Roosevelt as chairwoman of President's Commission on the Status of Women. Much of what we consider "women's issues" now, such as equality in the workplace, maternity leave, etc came from the studies conducted by the commission.

With this new awareness of women as more than baby machines it was inevitable that large numbers of us realized we could do more with our lives and leave behind a more powerful legacy of work, art, literature, music and contributions to the sciences if we remained child-free. A book that influenced many to remain child-free was Ellen Peck's The Baby Trap. She presented a powerful argument that used real world examples to show not everyone needed to breed to live and enjoy a fruitful life.

As I grew up and matured into an adult woman I had many examples of successful and child-free women to show me this was a valid choice in a world faced with hunger and wars brought on by overpopulation. The images of starvation in places like Ethiopia really affected me and a lot of people my age. We saw the devastation and accepted our role in it and knew our contributions, although small, would be large ones if more people believed as we did.

Many of us chose not to bring children into a world always at war and running out of precious resources. It allowed us to move forward and learn to create a legacy that came from our hearts and minds instead of from our physical bodies. And for the most part the rest of the population was okay with this. They considered it strange, eccentric at times, but completely and totally our choice.

One of my reasons for opening up a Cafepress store that is devoted completely to the child-free by choice is because this tolerance for "our choice" has changed in the last few years. There's almost this rage at those of us who made this choice, as if we are somehow defective or threatening to those who choose to breed. I've had less hatred directed toward my left of radical politics and my Atheism than I've had directed at me because I actively promote a child-free lifestyle.

I consider this hatred as stemming from the Entitlement Movement that believes having babies somehow gives one special powers over the rest of the population. These special powers translate into such things as forcing adults to watch only kid-oriented television, movies, and have access only to child-safe entertainment and lifestyles. The old-fashioned idea of parenting being something that took place in the home has fallen down the pit of letting the government, the schools, and the churches raise children instead of the parents. The Entitlement Movement never learned about off switches, v-chips, filtering software, or adults only, and those of us who choose a child-free lifestyle have to suffer for their ignorance and inflated sense of me-me-me.

My child-free by choice store is one way to bring the choice back to life and out of the hands of the entitlement bunch. I have a range of designs that include options such as overpopulation, anti-war philosophies, and yes, some that the breeders by choice will consider mean and insulting. The reason for those is that parents sometimes fail to get the idea that not everyone wants to interact with their children, not everyone thinks it's okay to let children run over every one's right to existence, and it draws on the old-fashioned idea that you had them so you raise them.

I will be adding designs on a more frequent basis now that it is it's own store instead of a section in Ursine Logic, and I'll also be adding cat and dog designs as many child-free humans devote a lot of time to making sure our furry companions have a good life. For those who think the child-free are selfish, just check out how many of us do support causes that deal with poverty, hunger, the environment, and saving innocent furry creatures that others have abandoned to a life of misery and death before you drop words like "selfish" so casually.

And if you have a favorite design idea or phrase you'd like to see on a t-shirt or other item, do drop me a line and I'll put it together for you because it's time we work together to save what's left of this planet's precious resources.

My email is ursinelogic at gmail dot com. Hate mail will be posted with a link to your email, and threats will be forwarded to law enforcement. On no other topic have I been forced to post that warning, which tells you how rabid breeders can get when their world view is threatened.

Peace.

What Child-Free By Choice Means

Al Gore, The Environment, Blog Action Day

As I look over the present field of Democratic candidates I realize my heart is not with any of them. Sure, I appreciate Kucinich and his honestly true anti-war stance as it mirrors my own. And I wonder at times what kind of country we are when we view someone like Kucinich as "unelectable" because he doesn't appeal to the fringe religious warmongering whackos that Karl Rove pandered to just as the Fascists pandered to broke European aristocrats to further their own agenda. I understand the concept of democracy really means the lowest common denominator shall rule, but do we have to settle for less all the time?

I am one of those people who really does believe in the power of human beings to grow, evolve, change, admit mistakes and embrace altruism over selfishness. The only problem is the number is still small and it needs to increase before being a good person becomes a valid demographic in this country. I will either live to see it or I will die saying goodbye to a planet that allowed its tenants to destroy it into oblivion.

I cannot understand the shortsightedness of people who fail to understand they are destroying the future of their own generations. How can they care so little about their own grandchildren? How can they leave them with perpetual war that enriches only the warmongers and makes cannon fodder out of the rest? How can they leave them a planet that has been stripped of all resources by a horde of corporate looters who obviously chose not to breed or have no faith they will be survived by their offspring. How can they love their own flesh and blood so little that they don't care they are leaving them a crap pile of festering debt and hatred as a legacy. If I was a kid I'd be seriously pissed at adults right now. How dare they do this to someone else's future?

So today, as I ponder a world where Al Gore becomes the President he was cheated out of being by an idiot who ended up destroying this country far more effectively than any enemy from the outside, and as I think about the bounty of nature that is stripped for corporate gain without any consideration for future generations, I imagine that today, Blog Action Day, needs to be a call for all of us to take a good long look at what we're letting happen all around us.

Are we really so busy, so indifferent, so burned out that we let this corporate looting continue? Or do we still have enough in us to get good and angry enough to turn out the corporate whores in congress and replace them with people who can see a future beyond their own bank accounts? Do we have enough spare change left that we can donate it to an organization devoted to peace, to saving the planet, to electing responsible individuals who will right the wrongs of Bushco's unconscionable thievery of our lives and resources?

It's not too late. What are you doing today to make a difference?

Al Gore, The Environment, Blog Action Day

Gore Wins (again)

So, let's see...that's Jimmy Carter AND Al Gore, both guaranteed ulcer machines for the Republicans. Let the whining begin...heee, heeee, whoooo, haaaawwww, heeee....

Gore Wins (again)

Save The Planet, Save Ourselves

Whenever I need a break from the stresses of day to day life, I go for a walk. It helps that I live in a magnificent part of the world. Within a half hour of my home I can walk by a river, a couple lakes, a saltwater bay, and numerous parks with tall trees and creeks and ponds. By most people's standards, especially those who live in urban environments, I live in a wondrous nature paradise. I show it off to visitors. I live in awe of its stunning beauty even now, a quarter century since I first moved here. It never pales for me. It never loses its magic.

But I can also see the changes. The mountains and hills that surround much of this area have bald patches from the obscenity of being one of the few places in the world that still clear cuts entire mountainsides without any thought to future or even present generations. In the rainy season, which is a good deal of the year here, the clear cut patches become conduits for mud and debris filled flood waters that destroy homes and farmlands at their foothills.

In the out of control greed of slash and burn GOP rule these last few years, the families in those homes and farms become insignificant. It doesn't matter how long they've lived there or if their family homes and farms get washed away in the debris. Only one thing matters and that is how much the corporate clear cutters can get for the mountain's "lumber." There is no thought to the safety and well-being of the people below. The spindly replacements are reforested into the ground using desperate, transient and undocumented laborers willing to work for little money. And then everyone moves on and what the deer don't eat, the winter rains wash away, leaving a few tiny twigs to replace the thick forests that were clear cut away.

The mountains and hills stripped bare by cut and run profit taking are forgotten. They become as insignificant as the human beings whose lives were permanently devastated by the profit grabbing from above. Sadly, in some of the cases, those who were destroyed and will be destroyed are the same loggers and their families hired by the corporations to put their own property in danger. The Corporate Pigs know people don't dare complain or worry out loud when they're desperate for work. They shut up and pray. And they collect their paychecks until the Pigs move on to somewhere else. And then the loggers pray the unemployment checks don't run out before they find more work, and their homes won't wash away, and that mudslides won't turn into raging avalanches of boulders, uprooted stumps, and small trees left to rot because they weren't big enough to put on the truck or small enough to plant back into the ground. In the meantime, the rains come and the hill turns to mud and prayers don't seem quite enough anymore.

I also see this same lack of foresight when I look to the bay. Salmon comes from out of town now. Some of my once favorite fish aren't safe to eat in large quantities anymore. I can't find any fresh mussels in the store and the shrimp and clams come from China instead of from the fishing boats these days. The waterfront is changing from industrial to overpriced condominiums for urban refugees and wealthy retirees. But the train still runs below these condos and parts of the bay are preceded by the words: Superfund cleanup...

It's also impossible to walk from one end of town to the other anymore without crossing a major highway or intersection. The interurban trail system crosses more and more through urban areas and instead of forests, they are part of people's backyards. The traffic is horrendous and the roads are falling apart. There's no money to fix anything and yet new housing developments take over more homeland, and more poor and working poor are evicted from apartments that are converting to condos. The air smells like fuel, gasoline, diesel and continual traffic in many parts of town now. It is noisy and crime-infested in more and more of it. It is a dying paradise.

But the saddest part of all this is what is happening to the wildlife. Unchecked growth has displaced so many of the creatures who live around here. During a cold stretch a few weeks ago when the snow froze on the ground and didn't melt for days, I ended up with squirrels, raccoons, possums, and so many birds they would empty the feeder in less than an hour. I put out pans of hot water that they drank thirstily and quickly before it froze.

And the deer came. Skinny, hungry, thirsty deer who were so desperate they put aside all their fear of human beings. I fed them apples and gave them water and felt both a sense of awe that they were eating from my hands and also a deep sadness that in a place so lush, so beautiful, so filled with plenty, these beautiful creatures were starving because their homes were gone. Their grazing meadows were now condo villages. Their creeks were now in the middle of housing developments. They had to dodge traffic to go from block to block to try and find something to eat that wasn't frozen solid under the snow.

I took a picture of one of them after he hungrily ate three apples in a row and drank a bowl of water. He's tiny with ribs showing through his fur. But he's so beautiful and such a symbol of what greed and a total disregard for nature leaves behind. Look at him good. Look in those eyes. And then get out and do something to reverse the damage being done to our planet because no human should be able to get so close to a wild creature. It's just not natural. And it's our fault.

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Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for more designs.

Save The Planet, Save Ourselves

Some Enraged Thoughts On Global Warming

After watching "An Inconvenient Truth," I was left with a wide range of emotions that mixed with the ones I had over the stolen election of 2000 and the subsequent disaster the Bushco thieves have wrought upon the planet. I rarely get angry. I believe anger is something that feeds on you and turns you into a hate zombie consumed by things beyond your control. But I've been angry for a long time now and today when everything the Bushco bastards tried to suppress about Global Warming and Climate Change was finally allowed to see a glimmer of daylight, I became furious.

From day one this administration has threatened, blackmailed, intimidated and bought off Scientists, Doctors, Teachers, Scholars, and just about everyone who believed something that threatened Bushco bank accounts. They inflicted their junk science creationism voodoo on a generation of school children who couldn't fight back and demand a real education. They turned stem cells into a political tool instead of using their influence to help those who have long ago given up on hope. They cheated human beings out of real research that could have found the cure for cancer in favor of enriching pharmaceutical donors with millions of dollars of happy pills sales, that also had the added benefit of keeping people drugged and indifferent. They lied and sat on proof of Global Warming so oil companies could make billions of dollars in profits without having to even clean up their messes--like Exxon and the still unpaid costs of the Valdez environmental catastrophe. They let an American city die and have done shit to make it live again.

Everywhere they could cut a corner for security, safety and the common good in favor of lining their own pockets, they did. I long ago realized that Bushco cares only about money and the power it brings. All the rest of it, the religious crap, the fetus worship, the Middle East plan to slaughter everyone into democracy has nothing to do with ideology. They will pretend to believe whatever pays the best. And they will find a way to silence anyone who threatens their obscene and money-hungry pursuit of power. If the Republican Christo-Fascists ever cut off the money supply they use to buy legislation that puts us square into another dark age of religious persecution of the non-believers and the turning of women into chattel, they would turn on them as well. If the oil in the Middle East disappeared overnight, the very next day the troops would be coming home and there would be no interest in bringing "democracy" to places like Iran anymore.

But the worst damage they did was to the planet, a place that belongs to everyone and not just Bushco, a place that belongs to future generations and not just the greedy bastards that have staked their oily, greasy claim all over it. They tried to hide the damage their policies were doing. They lied about the effect of those policies. They cheated their grandchildren out of the only real legacy they had any right to pass on: a clean and healthy planet. For this reason alone, they should hang for their crime of murder, because it's a murder that doesn't end with this generation. It will continue to kill and destroy for generations to come and that is what makes them truly evil. Future generations will curse the names of these bastard ancestors that make up Buscho and if there is such a thing as an afterlife, may they hear their voices loud and clear for eternity.

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Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for more designs.

Some Enraged Thoughts On Global Warming