On the Brink

As the spiral of time unfolds, we arrive at a point of choice. We could call it a fork in the road, but because of its urgency, I will call it "the brink." Behind us on the path stretches the 55 million years of the Cenozoic age, the age of the great flowering of life in all its dazzling complexity. We are a magnificent part of that unfolding, but by no means the only one. We are held firmly in the web of life.

The great flowering is over, due to our human impacts. We now face the choice of moving into an increasingly "Technozoic" age in which technology dominates Earth wisdom and processes, or an increasingly "Ecozoic" age in which science and technology serve not only us, but the planet's unfolding.

Rainforest activist John Seed says we will not turn the tide saving one forest or species at a time. Change requires a planetary shift in human awareness in this generation. We can choose to evolve or perish.

So here we stand on the brink, poised for a shift in consciousness. As a culture we are in our adolescence. Like adolescents who have stood apart, having pushed off from the defining shelter of the parent, we must now re-root ourselves in the matrix of the whole community of life. How can we achieve this?

We must find the spark of the elder within, must hear the thread of wisdom from our 4 1/2 billion year lineage: we are composed of the same elements as stars, forest-nurtured, enwombed, self-reflective. We are called upon to grow up. We must look clearly at each other to honor and encourage the elder within that we see emerging. And we must question deeply, urgently, what motivates human beings to change. What are our most primal needs? What truly satisfies those needs? And what is our culture currently offering to fill those needs, that instead leaves us hollow and needing more? What are the true roots of restoration and homecoming?

To work with these issues within a group, please contact Norine Cardea at 216-8400

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What Is Heart of the Earth Movement?

Heart:

We now know that the human brain supplies a running report of our environmental situation to the heart, and that the heart governs the brain's response. In essence, while the intelligence of the brain asks of a particular situation, "can it be done?" the intelligence of the heart asks, "should it be done?" It is imperative that we listen to the heart as well as the brain.

Earth:

The fertile matrix, the Mother Gaia from which the web of life began to unfold 4 1/2 billion years ago, which is still unfolding, and of which humans are a part.

Heart and Earth share the same letters. For generations the disembodied intellect has ruled, dazzled, and must now re-root in Heart and in Earth.

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What Is the Red Hills Bioregion?

The 300,000-acre Red Hills bioregion is embraced to the east and west by the watersheds of the winding Aucilla and Ochlockonee Rivers, both of which originate in Georgia and eventually empty into the Gulf of Mexico. To the north, the Red Hills encompass private plantation lands that harbor a significant portion of the native longleaf pine forests remaining in the United States. The Red Hills are bounded to the south by an ancient escarpment, and then the Gulf Coastal Lowlands bioregion unrolls in national forest pinewoods punctuated by clear cold springs, another twenty miles south to the Gulf of Mexico. The primary threat to our place is urban sprawl, fueled by a unsustainable rate of population increase.

A bioregion….

is a distinct geographic area encompassing a unique set of soils, climate, geological underpinnings, native plants and animals, and human culture, often defined by a watershed. A bioregion refers to both geographical terrain, and a terrain of consciousness-to both a place, and the ideas that have developed about how to live in that place.

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Around the turn of the century, Mahatma Gandhi encountered apartheid in South Africa. He organized the Indian community to resist a new governmental requirement designed to segregate and tighten controls. Gandhi asked people to sign a pledge to resist. He urged them to carefully consider the consequences of signing, for there were sure to be loss of jobs, imprisonment, and hardship. But they were also to consider the consequences of complying with a repressive governmental policy. All 2000 people present signed the pledge that night, and the resistance movement was born.

Inspired by Gandhi's work, we have designed a pledge and are seeking the company of 1000 people to join us. We strongly feel that in community we will be better informed, emboldened, and much more hopeful. We ask you to consider the consequences of signing the pledge, and the consequences of not.

Heart of the Earth Pledge
(PDF file, free Adobe Acrobat Reader® required to view)

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The deep ocean seafloor is often a cold, dark place, barren of life. Episodically a large bounty will arrive, a dead whale carcass will drift down from the surface.

Then sea life explodes: all manner of worms and other invertebrates arrive in larval form to colonize the dead organic matter and population increases dramatically--- for a short time. Inevitably the resource dwindles and the population collapses.

 

In a similar fashion, humans now live upon the resource of dead organic matter. We've found our dead whale below ground, in the form of oil, gas and coal--the fossil remains of plants that lived long ago.

Fossil energy has fueled the advent and development of the industrial age and allowed our population to explode. The product of our industrial respiration, Carbon dioxide (CO2) has increased in the atmosphere and now threatens to spoil our nest. The atmosphere does more than provide us with oxygen to breathe, it controls the heat balance of the world. The trouble is, compared to the ocean, the atmosphere is relatively small in mass, so human induced changes can affect it dramatically.

Prior to the advent of the industrial age, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was about 280 ppm (parts per million). Today its over 360 ppm. That's an increase of about 30% in less than 300 years. For the earth, this is an unprecedented rate of change, about 10,000 years worth of change compressed into 100 years. And there is more CO2 in our air now than at any time since humans evolved, more than anytime over the last million years! The earth is used to slow changes, not fast ones. Slow changes allow the biosphere and earth's species time to adjust. Quick change may cause biological chaos and disrupt agricultural production.

Carbon dioxide is critical to controlling the earth's heat balance because it absorbs infrared radiation (IR), basically heat. The atmosphere is transparent to visible radiation, which is mostly what the sun radiates. Coming to earth from the sun, visible radiation passes through the clear atmosphere and hits the earth. A portion of it is absorbed and re-radiated back to space as IR. CO2 traps this IR and reflects it back to the earth's surface, causing further warming.

This is called the greenhouse effect. Without it, water would freeze on earth. With too much greenhouse effect, water would boil off, leaving the surface of earth a desert. This may have been what happened on earth's neighbor, Venus. There is a delicate balance between sunlight, CO2 concentration and heat which we must be careful not to perturb. To illustrate the greenhouse effect, consider a car with the windows rolled up. The sun's rays pass through the cars windows (visible light), and hit the car's seats. There the visible light is absorbed, and re-radiated to the interior of the car as IR. But the car's glass windows, while transparent to visible light, are opaque to IR, so the heat is trapped within the car, and the car's interior temperature becomes unbearable.

In figure 1, you can see that the concentration of CO2 in air has increased dramatically since we began mining oil, gas and coal in the 1700s. Right now CO2 is higher now than at anytime in human history and its concentration is predicted to double in the next century. Not coincidentally, temperature records indicate that a 1 degree (F) rise in temperature has occurred over the last century. The 10 warmest years of the century have occurred since 1983, and the 7 warmest years of the century occurred since 1990. Mathematical models predict a 2-6 degree rise in temperature by the year 2100. Temperature changes will be greatest near the poles which may cause melting of the ice caps and rises in sea level.

Is this temperature change significant? In glacial times, 20,000 years ago, temperatures were only 9 degrees cooler and the ice sheets extended as far south as New York City. So we may expect warmer temperatures to impact our climate too. In figure 2, you can see that temperature and CO2 concentration are intimately linked. Over the past 150,000 years, when temperature has been high, in interglacial periods, CO2 has been high. When temperature has been low, in glacial periods, CO2 has been low.

Why is this significant? In addition to sea level change, climatic change makes it difficult to grow food and provide clean potable water for the massive population of humans now on earth, over six billion.

Will we be able to provide food and clean water for all six billion of us in the face of the likely disruptions in climate?

Dr. Jeff Chanton is a wetlands scientist in FSU 's Department of Oceanography.

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One Family Takes the Heart of the Earth Pledge

For me this summer, the intense heat and drought in North Florida brought home the reality of global warming. It shifted from being a distant threat to a very present reality, and energy conservation shifted from one of a number of "good things to do" to a pressing priority. Then I met Norine Cardea and Sue Cerulean and learned about their idea for Heart of the Earth movement. Norine talked about the tendency for people to be overwhelmed and immobilized by feelings of guilt and despair, and feel powerless in the face of the immensity of global warming. This new movement would focus on empowering people to move beyond despair and inaction, multiplying our individual efforts by group support and group action.

I came to maturity in the seventies with a consciousness of environmental limits. Set the thermostat lower in winter, raise it in summer, recycle, turn off lights, buy a car that gets good mileage, live close to work-these were precepts of good citizenship. Gradually over the years our country has shifted away from this focus. My husband and I got married, had a child, and our focus shifted too.

In small and large ways we have compromised our environmental concerns. The biggest and most lasting compromise was in where we lived. Drawn to the trees, the schools, and the family-oriented neighborhood, even before we arrived in Tallahassee or I had a job, we fell in love with a home in Killearn Lakes. And so, with increasing discomfort, we find ourselves putting 20,500 miles a year on one car and 18,200 on the other, commuting a 25-mile daily roundtrip to work, plus our share of family trips. As it is for most Americans, transportation is our biggest challenge in reducing our fossil fuel use.

I am a researcher by profession, and so I volunteered to compile information about consumer impacts on global warming, and to come up with a way of measuring the collective impact of our actions. (See the box on the next page.) I discovered we emit roughly 18.6 tons of CO2 annually into the atmosphere just from driving our cars!

Initially, my husband and I decided we could carpool with each other at least once or twice a week. Although we work in a state government complex on the other side of town, we are fortunate that we work within ten minutes of each other.

Inspired by Heart of the Earth, our carpooling soon expanded to three days a week. The once seemingly insurmountable difficulties of coordinating our schedules and daytime trips were easily resolved by staggering our lunchtimes and using our flextime. The benefits of one of us being able to snooze or read on the way, and having more time to communicate with each other, have far outweighed any inconvenience.

We set a goal of reducing our driving by another 50 miles per week by planning and combining trips and getting bicycle baskets for occasional bike trips to the grocery store (our 15-year-old is scandalized at the thought of her mother riding a bike to Publix, but she'll live). The combined benefits include $434 a year in savings on gasoline costs (estimating $1.67 per gallon for gas) and a reduction of 3.1 tons per year in our total carbon dioxide emissions. Immediately, with no pain and no regrets, we will achieve a 17 percent reduction in our use of fossil fuel for transportation.

Shortly after we began focusing on our fossil fuel use, I was faced with a choice of driving or flying for a planned business trip to Tampa. Flying is preferable in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, but planes are estimated to account for 10 percent of America's total greenhouse gases. I decided to take a bus-the best alternative for the environment. My supervisor had never heard of anyone doing it, but we got it approved easily (it also saves them money). I look forward to the trip, with six to seven hours each way to catch up on reading.

Our long-term plan to reach the goal of a 30% reduction may include buying a Honda Insight or a Toyota Prius, hybrid cars that get 52 to 70 miles per gallon, when we need to replace one of our aging cars. The 52 MPG Toyota would reduce our CO2 emissions for transportation by over 6 tons per year, allowing us to exceed our pledge with a 35 percent reduction in our transportation emissions.

Upcoming issues will share our story as we reduce our fossil fuel use in other areas. I will also be offering a class and support group to find actions that fit into our lives, share ideas and successes, and measure our impact. Join us and contribute to our first 100 tons of reductions in carbon dioxide emissions!

Heart of the Earth was born of the idea that we can do something about the toll that we exact on our environment, right here where we live, right now in our busy lives in this consumer-oriented society, in the choices we make everyday. We have just begun, and already thirty of us have a taken the pledge to reduce global warming by reducing our fossil fuel use by 30 percent or more. By working together, we will support each other and multiply our impact-environmentally, economically, and politically.

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This summer my family vacationed in New York and spent a couple of days in New York City. Of course we had to see the view from the top of the Empire State building. Looking out over the city from the 86th floor, I was struck by the sheer massiveness of the cityscape.

When I quieted myself and listened, I suddenly heard the immense, inescapable roar of the city. From this vantage point, all of the millions of individual sounds from every part of the landscape merged into one relentless sound, distant yet overwhelming. It sounded like the rumbling of a thousand trains in the distance, the roar of a single, enormous, fossil fuel burning engine. Contrasted with the quiet above us, it was strange, a little eerie.

I realized that for almost half an hour, I hadn't even noticed this sound. The incredible roar of the city stayed just below my screen of consciousness, only intruding when I "woke up" to the sound.

We see and hear stories of poverty, injustice, toxic waste, atrocities and impending environmental catastrophe on a daily basis. It seems too painful and too overwhelming to feel. So out of necessity for our survival, we disconnect and numb ourselves to our world and to our surroundings in order to cope, we tune it out.

But in our efforts to protect ourselves, we have, in essence, gone into isolation and denial. We have put ourselves in a kind of protective bubble that keeps us isolated and walled out from our neighbors and fellow travelers on the planet. We have created the illusion that we can be, and are, separate from our environment and each other.

This "psychic numbing" has enormous personal and global consequences. From this place of isolation and disconnection, we act as if we are islands unto ourselves and that our decisions and actions have little or no effect on others or other creatures on the earth. If we allow ourselves to be aware of our impact as a species, we feel overwhelmed and powerless.

We may ask, "what can I do to make a difference?" We may distrust our own intelligence or feel guilty that we have so much and so many have so little. In our society, it is hard not to feed, clothe, and transport ourselves at the expense of the natural world and other people's well-being.

It is essential that we begin to feel again and emerge from our isolation. The pain for the world, including the fear, anger, sorrow and guilt we feel on behalf of life on Earth is natural and healthy. It is dysfunctional only to the extent that it is misunderstood and repressed. For the problems and subsequent consequences don't lie with our pain for the world, but in our repression and denial of it.

For me, Heart of the Earth offers an opportunity to address and impact this issue of psychic numbing and disconnection. Heart of the Earth can be a tool to move us beyond our feelings of hopelessness and helplessness. We can take back our power and connect again to each other and to the beauty of life all around us. Understanding how we block our pain, connecting with each other, and sharing joyful moments can heal ourselves and ultimately, our planet. As Joanna Macy states, we must "come back to life" and allow ourselves to feel and appreciate our interconnectiveness to each other and to all the creatures on the earth.

Understanding how we block our pain, connecting with each other, and sharing joyful moments, is how we can heal ourselves and ultimately, our planet. As Joanna Macy states, we must "come back to life" and allow ourselves to feel and appreciate our interconnectiveness to each other and to all the creatures on the earth.

If you are interested in participating with others in a "Come Back To Life," group, contact Barry Fraser at (850) 668-1364

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Did you feel that? The air is a little bit cooler. The sun is moving lower in the southern sky. Even the rain feels a little different. It can all mean only one thing - fall is coming!

In a bioregion where you can grow food all year long, fall and winter are my favorite seasons to garden. Mid to late September is the time to plant greens of all sorts. I am starting kale from seed, and can be eating the "thinnings" in a few weeks. The trick is to plant kale seeds fairly thick and later reduce the density by pulling up a few seedlings here and there. These are great in a salad and you may get enough to cook. By winter, you should have some well spaced kale plants beginning to produce leaves for steaming. I'm planting chard now as well, which can be stubborn to germinate- but those beautiful, succulent green leaves with red and white stems are hard to beat. Now is also a good time to put in lettuce and spinach. I may purchase some transplants of different lettuce varieties to get some salads sooner, but I also plant presoaked seeds of several lettuce varieties, and of spinach.

This year, my goal is to eat my own grown broccoli, peas and greens at Thanksgiving. It could happen! I usually put in transplants of broccoli, along with green and purple cabbage. The broccoli will produce into the early spring, if you cut the heads as they mature and allow the side branches to continue producing smaller heads. One of the best parts about fall and winter gardening is that there are far fewer insect pests. The occasional pests you do see are usually few and can be plucked and discarded, or allowed to do their minimal thing, if you wish.

Dennis Hardin has grown his own greens for more than 15 years

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Every year, my friend Ann and I use a half-humorous, half-serious game to get through the very serious heat of Red Hills summer.

We begin watching for signs of fall, sometime in July, usually reporting to each other the first fading of sycamore leaves not long after the fourth of July (probably due to just plain high temperatures, compounded with drought). Although our motives for wishing fall into an early start are easy to see through, it's a rewarding practice to always be watching for the subtle changes in the place we live, through the birds, the plants, the levels of water in the creeks.

The last few nights, I've noticed an unaccustomed sharp bouncing rattle-the first acorns, dropping from the live oak branches above our roof-now that's a real sign of fall! And there are many more. The sourwood trees along creek bottoms are reddening. Autumn wildflowers are opening in the piney woods: I see ironweed, asters, and blazing stars when I ride on the Munson Hills bike trail once or twice each week.

Some signs of fall are conspicuous by their absence. No more purple martins, or Mississippi and swallow-tailed kites-our earliest migrants have already headed south. But they are replaced, in a sense, by the lovely warblers passing through-even if I don't see them every day, I enjoy the sightings of blackburnian, Kentucky, yellow, and many more warblers reported on the local birder's listserver.

But really it's not so sudden, none of it, not the shift in temperature, the native flowerings, nor the movement of the birds. Despite the pivotal dates that we mark (the autumn equinox, on September 22), the natural world is always evolving from what it was to what it will next become.

A northwestern artist, Sandra Lopez, once spent a whole year marking the seasonal changes on her land, by keeping a "day box." She created something like a company mailbox, partitioned into 365 tiny compartments. Each day she would wander the woods where she lives, searching for a natural object that typified that day, that season, in her mind, and displayed it in the box. The end result was a striking collage of berry and feather and leaf and much more, and I am sure, a keener relationship with the natural cycling of time at her place on the planet.

Susan Cerulean is a writer living in the Red Hills bioregion.