Image by Dana Moos via Flickr
by Rivera Sun
Writer, Dandelion Salad
April 5, 2023
At the post office, my neighbor rolled down the window of his pick-up truck to chat. As is typical in Northern Maine this time of year, we praised the sunlight, warmth, bare patches of ground, and eyed the shrinking snowbanks with delight.
Image by Scott Oves via Flickr
theAnalysis-news on Jul 8, 2022
John Bellamy Foster explains the ‘solution’ master-minded by global finance to resolve the imminent environmental crisis: create a multi-quadrillion dollar’s worth of assets on the back of everything nature does and expropriate it from the global commons to make a profit. Worse still: it is already happening.
Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr
Sent to Dandelion Salad by a friend; thanks, Jay!
Originally posted on June 10, 2019
April 11, 2022
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered on Jun 3, 2019
Dandelions are among the most populous and widespread plants on earth. The secret to their success has to do both with their unique characteristics, and their inextricable connection to humans. The history of humans and dandelions is forever linked in ways that may surprise you.
Image by Brett Davis via Flickr
by William T. Hathaway
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Germany
March 3, 2022
The financial wizards of Wall Street have devised a new way to profit from Mother Nature. They’ve created a class of stocks called Natural Asset Companies that will control the earth’s resources such as water, wildlife, forests, minerals, and farmland. The project was developed by the Intrinsic Exchange Group in partnership with the New York Stock Exchange, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the investment firm Aberdare Ventures.
Image by hans-juergen via Flickr
by Rivera Sun
Writer, Dandelion Salad
October 17, 2021
Winds of Change is the third novel in the Dandelion Trilogy by Rivera Sun. It’s a wild tale of resistance and resilience, people-powered democracy movements and the race for climate justice.
Image by RANT 73 – Visual Storyteller via Flickr
by Kenn Orphan
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Halifax, Nova Scotia
April 5, 2021
“We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.” ― Thich Nhat Hanh
One of the biggest lies that people in the global north were sold and have largely internalized is that we are separate from the biosphere from which we evolved and on which we depend upon for our very survival. Even as we stand on the precipice of ecological collapse, human supremacy over nature has been the unchallenged narrative. As a result, those who have taken up the struggle to protect this fragile arrangement of existence are often otherized. Their “cause” is treated as just one of many. The “treehugger?” The “environmentalist?” The person who “cares about the earth?” How noble. How non-threatening. It becomes just another cause in a myriad of causes.
Image by RANT 73 via Flickr
with Chris Hedges
RT America on Jul 21, 2018
Adam Frank, astrophysicist, describes the shifting state of planet earth and alien planets with journalist Chris Hedges for On Contact.
Image by Akhilesh Ravishankar via Flickr
swpTvUk on Jul 12, 2016
John Bellamy Foster discusses the theoretical and programmatic challenges that the Anthropocene, a dangerous new epoch in planetary history, poses for socialists in the 21st century.
Image by dmytrok via Flickr
by Bruce Gagnon
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Organizing Notes
April 22, 2012
From my talk in Santa Monica, California on April 4. Thanks to Mansoor Sabbagh, Director of Global Voices for Justice, for filming and editing the video.
Apr 21, 2012 by jeannekyle
Bruce Gagnon gave a talk on the topic of “The Deadly Connection: Endless War and the Ecological, Economic Crisis.” He is a veteran, activist, organizer, and coordinator for Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, founded in 1992.
By Charles Sullivan
Information Clearing House
January 20, 2012
Image by Resident on Earth via Flickr
Contrary to everything we have been taught, there is no actual United States of America. The U.S. is an occupied territory that could more accurately be described as the Corporate States of America. If the geopolitical states are united, the people are not. We are a nation divided by ideology and by social and economic class. The U.S. is not a democracy and it never was. The systems of power do not allow the voice of working people to be heard or their collective will to be acted upon.
by Chris Clugston
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
Sept. 16, 2011
Image by AZRainman via Flickr
Nature suckered us in with temporary abundance; a condition that we misconstrued as permanent…
The Set Up
Enabled by abundant and inexpensive domestic nonrenewable natural resources (NNRs)—fossil fuels, metals, and nonmetallic minerals—times were SO GOOD for Americans between the inception of our industrial revolution and the middle of the 20th century, that we came to believe that our domestic NNR supplies were unlimited and that our resulting prosperity was permanent.
by Chris Clugston
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
Sept. 9, 2011
Metaphorically, our well is running dry, yet we insist on tinkering with the pump.
Anthropocentric Viewpoints
Our anthropocentric (human-centered) perspective offers two conflicting viewpoints regarding the underlying cause and appropriate solution associated with the economic malaise that persists throughout most of the industrialized world.
by Guadamour
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
June 13, 2011
Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr
Wild Law, exists as a frequency, an umbilical cord to the creative life force existing in all living things on Earth and in the universe, and quite possibly in every atom from the theoretical “Big Bang” to the end of eternity, a force connecting everything and everyone, and providing them with a soul In the second edition of his seminal ground-breaking book, Wild Law (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2011), Cormac Cullinan explores how one can tap into this cosmic juice and adapt laws of humankind into alignment with the natural laws of the “Great Earth Jurisprudence,” the physical laws governing all life on the planet and in the universe.
https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/
stimulator | July 08, 2010
As environmentalism becomes mainstream, corporations and well funded environmental organizations work hand in hand to divert the public’s efforts into market driven solutions.
With runaway climate change looming in the horizon, we must ask ourselves what are the tactics we are going to use to stop the destruction and take us beyond symbolic gestures.
By Charles Sullivan
10/22/07 ICH
My wife, Alice, and I hold a deed to twenty acres of land in Morgan County, West Virginia. To most people, there is nothing remarkable about this place. But to us, it is extraordinary. I have spent seventeen years exploring the botany of this land: photographing its wild flowers, learning the language of its avian citizens, and capturing its various moods on film and in pixels. Knowing it as I do, I could never think of this place as a resource. It is simply home: the source.
In a society that holds sacred the private ownership of property and economic self interest, it may seem strange that neither my wife nor I consider ourselves property owners. At best, we are squatters or temporary guardians of something that has inherent value; an evolving biological entity that exists far beyond the realm of economic self interest and monetary valuation systems.
Alice and I share this sacred space with numerous plants and animals—most of them wild, and some of them domesticated. Among the latter: five horses, three dogs, and numerous felines. We do not own these animals any more than they own us; they are not our pets. They are simply animal companions, members of the extended human family, and valued equally with human beings, mushrooms, and copperhead snakes.
Unlike my wife and me, none of these animals have to work for a living. They are not expected to perform tricks for us. They are simply free to be who they are. We do the best we can for them with our limited resources. What we get in return is priceless; something that defies quantification. Whatever it is, it is greater than the sum of its parts but as ethereal as the morning mist that rises from a brook. Yet, it is as real as the soil and sky.
It is impossible to commodify the sacred bonds that exist between the human animal, and the non-human animal—a bond that extents into the landscape that spawned them. To claim ownership of another living being, whether wild forest, or domesticated canine, is to break the sacred bonds and reduce them into commodities—mere objects for use. It is to make them our property and force them into slavery; objects for economic exploitation.
So it is with the land itself.
In an ownership society, the land is valued not as an evolved living biological entity with inherent value and rights, including the fulfillment of its own evolutionary destiny, but as a commodity—a natural resource.
In this unnatural schema, wild forests lose their structural and biological diversity to become pulp for paper mills, and are turned into toilet paper, or packaging for ipods. Diverse forests become tree farms and plantations, monocultures thirsting for toxic chemicals to keep them alive. They are no longer natural, no longer wholly real or authentic. This process of industrial forestry moves the land from the realm of the sacred into that of economic theory; and it is falsely called science. That which has inherent value is thus devolved into mere property, a commodity; divested of its sacredness, a severed part divorced from the whole.
Treated as private property, the wild earth, with its essential ecological processes, dies a death of a thousand cuts, as economic myth and Disneyesque plantations supplant the authentic natural landscape, and the artificial is freely substituted for the real.
Surrounded by the artificial, we live in a time when people can no longer tell the difference between the real and the synthetic; the natural and the unnatural. Sadly, they do not even know what has been lost or that it can never be replaced.
Thus we have a culture which holds that economic self interest is the highest expression of human freedom. It is a paradigm that asserts its superiority over all others, including the public welfare and the wellbeing of the earth. It is the foundation of Adam Smith’s capitalism, as espoused in The Wealth of Nations, and modified many times since.
But freedom that subjugates others is not freedom at all.
Private ownership is a paradigm that values the economic parts of nature—those that can accrue wealth to the land owner, while assigning no value to the parts that are economically unimportant, or the greater public good, including the world’s genetic libraries. Yet, in nature, it is often the non-economic parts that provide the essential ecological functions that make life itself possible. Not just human life—all life.
Here in Morgan County, wild forests provide shade on hot summer afternoons, and diverse habitat for multitudes of species, both plant and animal. Together, the interrelationship formed by these species constitute a dance of life that promotes the dynamic equilibrium of a complex ecosystem—the magnificent Central Appalachian Hardwood and Mixed Mesophytic Forest.
Aided by fungus and precipitation, insects residing in decaying trees move nutrients through the earth, building healthy soil. Forests purify the air and remove pollutants, while also trapping and holding greenhouse gases. Wild forests filter pollutants from streams and rivers, providing pure drinking water to foxes, beetles, and people. All of this, and much, much, more, is provided without cost to us; as a right of citizenship in this world.
Left alone, the wild earth—unlike human constructed systems, is a beautifully self-regulating arrangement in dynamic equilibrium; a system that runs on biological capital, rather than artificial economic arrangements. The management of such systems, which have evolved over billions of years, implies the superiority of man over nature, his dominion over the earth—a dangerous and foolish notion that requires unfathomable hubris, and equal parts stupidity.
Cultures that are based upon reductionism and monoculture fail to perceive the organic whole of life; the interconnectedness of all things, both living and non-living. Economic formulae, no matter how sophisticated and scientific they may appear, are a construct of the human mind—an artificial system of accounting. Nature does not recognize them. They have no validity in the real world. Yet we think they are of overriding importance, the basis of everything we do; man as center of the universe, as in the time of Ptolemy.
In truth, ecology and biology are the natural capital upon which nature works. They are the underpinning of all social and economic paradigms—bar none. Impair and denigrate them and everything in them, including us, is diminished. Damage them excessively, and everything falls, including our precious ownership society.
Ecological integrity is the foundation of planetary health. It is the organizing principle of life. Undermining that integrity for short term profits is to limit all future options in perpetuity, the ultimate incarnation of insensate greed and selfishness. It is the work of foolish and misguided men who are undoing the world; men who cannot conceive of anything larger than themselves, including the public welfare, or the planetary ecology; the world’s only authentic economy.
Ecological literacy, understanding how nature works, must necessarily supersede economic self interest in favor of the collective good, the organic whole. The world was not made to be exploited, to be divided into parcels and privatized. Contrary to popular belief, human beings are not masters of the earth. We are subject to the same immutable natural law as yeast cells. We were blessed with a few short years in paradise, and the gift of consciousness of our place in the cosmos.
If we are, indeed, rational beings, we have a moral obligation to defend our place from those who would defile and exploit it. Our allegiance is to the earth and to one another, not to monetary systems that exploit and cheapen life for profit.
Like all economic systems that are not based upon real science, or an appropriate land ethic, the concept of property rights and private ownership are misguided and ultimately self-destructive constructs. The public welfare and the ecological integrity of the earth exceed all economic self interests in importance. Economics are based upon self-serving, false premises, whereas ecology is real.
There are dire consequences to ignoring reality, for substituting the artificial for the natural. The earth will never conform to our views of her. The needs of the greater biological community outweigh the wants of the self-interested few, looking to make a fast buck.
It is a sad and foolish notion that nature must conform to man and his prideful economic constructs. The world operates on natural capital—biological processes from which humankind evolved. That understanding must be the guiding principle in all that we do. Unlike the mythos promoted by economics, ecological literacy encourages a healthy sense of belonging to something much larger than the sum of its parts, the greater biological community; it promotes a healthy sense of the sacred.
Conservationist David Brower once stated: “Economics is a form of brain damage.” I could not agree more. We need to develop a holistic world view in place of that which was born of hubris and economic self interest. That view will not be born of capitalism, or any repressive religious theology. It can only come from healthful interaction with the organic world, in the big outside.
Henry Thoreau astutely observed, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” Like the American Indian, Thoreau’s world view was not anthropocentric (man-centered), it was biocentric (earth-centered); holistic and whole. That is a world view we can live with.
The most precious things in life are those that cannot be commodified, and hence, owned. Like twenty acres in a place we call West Virginia—beauty, grace, elegance, and tranquility cannot be bought and sold, or traded on Wall Street. These qualities are a gift unto the world provided without cost. We should freely enjoy them in ways that are non-consumptive, and therefore, non-destructive. We should give thanks for the natural wealth the world possesses and leave it for others to enjoy, long after we have departed this life.
As Edward Abbey, an anarchist, once lamented, “The earth belongs to everyone, and to no one.” We are simply citizens of the greater biological community, distinguished only by our capacity for destruction and self deception.
Charles Sullivan is a nature photographer, free-lance writer, and community activist residing in the Ridge and Valley Province of geopolitical West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at csullivan@phreego.com.
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