Monthly Archives: August 2022

August 19, 2022

Shadow Play

By DP

We are grateful to the editors of the ever-excellent Orion magazine for alerting us to the publication of Crane Maiden, a collaboration between author Brenda Peterson and artist Ed Young. Published by Chin Music Press, the book is also on display as an animated exhibit in the Eric Carle Museum.

A brief excerpt below:

 

 

 

And a note from the artist:

Taoism is an ancient philosophy of nature, simplicity, and humor. The dualism of Chinese Taoism calls us to attend to opposites, like two faces of the same coin—light and dark, parting and reunion, gravity and flight. Yin and yang complete each other, cannot exist separately, enrich and fulfill the other. Their “interplay of energy makes harmony,” writes Lao Tzu in his classic Tao Te Ching. Just as in physics, the positive and negative magnetic fields synthesize and work as a whole. 

In China, cranes are symbolic creatures of nature. They bring good fortune and rain to crops and wetlands, as well as flood and destruction. Good and evil coexist in this Taoist balancing act. The West perceives truth as static perfection, but Chinese philosophy embraces polarities, always in a state of change, always alive. So red-crowned cranes embody both extremes, like the cosmos, or a vessel that can be perceived as half empty or half full.

How will we choose to live, to dance?

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August 12, 2022

Fortress Conservation

By DP

At the end of a week that included wildly premature celebrations over the passage of a profoundly flawed climate bill, we relay a letter from Extinction Rebellion Global Support, reporting on an often overlooked aspect of conservation in the global south:

Since early 2022, the Maasai in northern Tanzania have intensified their fight against eviction from their ancestral lands in the Ngorongoro conservation area and Loliondo.

The government wants to use the lands to make a safari park and expand trophy hunting opportunities, and have subjected the Maasai communities to waves of violence, exclusion, and evictions. Over the past months, XR Youth Solidarity and other rebel groups have organised joint international solidarity actions with the Maasai.

In February, the Maasai organised a blockade at the entrance to the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. At the same time, rebels in London and Edinburgh protested outside the Tanzanian High Commission and several travel agencies who fuel the tourism that is driving the Maasai evictions.

Conservation projects often involve the violent theft of land from indigenous and other local communities, most of whom have lived in harmony with that land for millennia. It is known as Fortress Conservation, or colonial conservation, and the Environmental Justice Atlas currently records 141 cases worldwide.

Fortress Conservation is accepted or even practiced by many well-known organizations, for example WWF, and is used by corporations to greenwash their extractivism. The Maasai and rebel groups have launched a boycott of companies that benefit from the practice and the tourism it fosters.

80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity is on indigenous lands, and communities like the Massai want to lead our efforts to protect the planet and stop ecocide, not be displaced by them.

In July, a delegation of indigenous East African people travelled to a major conservation conference in Rwanda and demanded an end to Fortress Conservation, and the beginning of indigenous led conservation without Western intervention.

 

MAASAI BLOCKADE IN NGORONGORO

 

 

 

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August 5, 2022

The Golden Strand

By DP

Now comes the richly layered voice of Terry Tempest Williams, with a few paragraphs from a recent essay.

The image is from the extraordinary exhibition In Memory, by Shiota Chiharu, as relayed from the website of the Gana Art Center.

 

 

 

A statement from Shiota Chiharu, offered during a press conference following the opening of her exhibition:

“I wanted to put emphasis on the boat, because I believe that boats hold memories and their role is to move and carry them places. I call dresses, or clothes, a second skin because I believe they connect people together and are a means to express themselves. The paper represents the thoughts that people have. I am also fond of boats because while riding in them, they always have people think about where they are headed toward, and where their destination is. The color white may typically be used as a symbol for death, but I think otherwise. To me, it means both life and death, because when there’s an end, there is always another beginning.” 

 

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