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Occupy Earth


Green Sanctuary Message
Steve Todd
November 13, 2011

Readings:

“We call upon the spirit of evolution, the miraculous force that inspires rocks and dust to weave themselves into biology. You have stood by us for millions and billions of years – do not forsake us now. Empower us and awaken in us pure and dazzling creativity. You that can turn scales into feathers, seawater to blood, caterpillars to butterflies, metamorphose our species, awaken in us the powers that we need to survive the present crisis and evolve into more eons of our solar journey.

Awaken in us a sense of who we truly are: tiny ephemeral blossoms on the Tree of Life. Make the purpose and destiny of that tree our own purpose and destiny.

Fill each of us with love for our true Self, which includes all of the creatures and plants and landscapes of the world. Fill us with a powerful urge for the wellbeing and continual unfolding of this Self.

May we speak in all human councils on behalf of the animals and plants and landscapes of the Earth. May we shine with a pure inner passion that will spread rapidly through these leaden times. May we all awaken to our true and only nature – none other than the nature of Gaia, this living planet Earth.

We call upon the power which sustains the planets in their orbits, that wheels our Milky Way in its 200 million year spiral, to imbue our personalities and our relationships with harmony, endurance and joy. Fill us with a sense of immense time so that our brief flickering lives may truly reflect the work of vast ages past and also the millions of years of evolution whose potential lies in our trembling hands.

John Seed

"For too long, Wall Street has been occupying the offices of our government, and the cloakrooms of our legislatures. They've been a constant presence, rewarded not with pepper spray in the face but with yet more loopholes and tax breaks and subsidies and contracts. You could even say Wall Street's been occupying our atmosphere, since any attempts to do anything about climate change always run afoul of the biggest corporations on the planet. So it's a damned good thing the tables have turned."

Bill McKibben

(To Occupy Wall Street… A Hopeful Development)

Things are happening pretty fast. In mid-September, something called “Occupy Wall Street” started in New York City and “went viral” – as the trendy talkers say – spreading around the world. In other news, last Saturday, there was a protest event in Washington in which thousands of participants formed a human chain around the White House. They were there to urge President Obama to deny approval for the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline, which would cross the American Heartland to bring heavy crude oil from the Canadian Tar Sands to Texas oil refineries. One of the really big signs displayed by the protesters said, simply but provocatively, “OCCUPY EARTH!” (No doubt they got that idea from reading today’s message title in the November Clear Light Messenger!) And on Thursday President Obama announced his decision, which I’ll come back to in a bit.

We live in interesting times! And while the central focus of today’s message is NOT Occupy-Wall-Street, it is connected to that movement and informed by it. So let me start by telling you why I think Bill McKibben - writer, educator, environmental activist and Methodist Sunday School teacher, thinks Occupy Wall Street is “a damned good thing”… To Occupy Wall Street… Is A Hopeful Development.

Less than two months ago, in response to a call from the Canadian anti-consumerism magazine Adbusters to “Occupy Wall Street,” some of us did! On September 17, about a thousand protesters marched through the streets of New York, with an estimated 100 to 200 staying overnight in sleeping bags and cardboard boxes in Zuccotti Park in the Wall Street financial district.

By ‘some of us’ I mean some of us in the 99% - another new piece of jargon that means all of us who are not the top 1% of income earners and wealth holders in the United States. “We are the 99%” has become a rallying cry of "Occupy" protesters. It refers to the ever increasing concentration of wealth among the top 1% of people in the United States since about 1980.

Adbusters predicted that if Wall Street were “occupied” by protesters, it would "start setting the agenda for a new America." Another example of over-the-top marketing hype-speak? Or could it be finally coming true? There’s a thought to elicit a delicious shiver, and a quickening pulse!

As I’m sure you know, the “Occupy” protest has spread far beyond New York City. There have been rallies under the headings: “Occupy Boulder, Occupy Denver, Occupy London, Rome, Bogata - over 2,500 protest movements and events in at least 82 countries around the world. Maybe the agenda for a new America is just a part of something even larger still… And all so very spontaneous and homespun, with shared leadership and human microphones and bike powered electric generation and direct democracy.

Some have claimed it is leaderless, unfocussed, and without clear agendas, goals, or demands. But the essence of the protest is not that complicated. Occupy Wall Street is protesting: (1) Social and economic inequality – the growing disparity of wealth – the loss of the middle class. It is protesting (2) Corporate greed, corruption, and influence over government, particularly from the financial services sector – the loss of democracy. It is protesting (3) The absence of legal repercussions behind the recent global financial crisis – the unfairness of bank bailouts, despite continued obscene salaries, amid the wreckage of joblessness and home foreclosures – the loss of economic justice. And perhaps, trailing along in fourth place, there is the environmental aspect – (4) The notion that corporate gluttony and human narcissism among the well-heeled is ruining the commons, stealing shared resources, and destroying the future of life as we know it – the loss of a sustainable, protective planetary environment. Whew! Sounds like plenty of agenda to me!

Occupy Wall Street started with a handful of protesters in the middle of September. Now it represents a diverse group of Americans who feel disenfranchised by a political and financial system that ignores, dominates, and abuses the vast majority of us.

Occupy Wall Street is a leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, political persuasions, and gender identifications. It is black and yellow, red and blue, rainbow rich – all colors that go very well with “green”!

It is an outgrowth of the Arab Spring: the American Autumn. It is also a descendant of Thoreau and Gandhi and Walesa and Mandala, encouraging the use of nonviolence, civil disobedience, and bottom-up empowerment for real people to create real change.

Are you on-board with the Occupy agenda?
The protestors’ “Modest Call to Action” in September said, among other things:

  • If you agree that a person is entitled to the sweat of their brows, that being talented at management should not entitle others to act like overseers and overlords, that all workers should have the right to engage in decisions, democratically, then you might be one of us.
  • If you agree that freedom for some is not the same as freedom for all, and that freedom for all is the only true freedom, then you might be one of us.
  • If you agree that power is not right, that life trumps property, then you might be one of us.
  • If you agree that state and corporation are merely two sides of the same oppressive power structure, if you realize how media distorts things to preserve it, how it pits the people against the people to remain in power, then you might be one of us.

So, do we think there is anything here to get hopeful about? Anything that aligns with or supports our Unitarian Universalist Principles? Anything that speaks to our hearts’ longings and our deeper spiritual values?

If Wall Street Banks and other powerful corporations densely and intensely occupy the offices and halls of government – and they do! - it is easy to see how little room there would be for any of us to come and speak and have our voices heard.

And so McKibben writes, " They've been a constant presence, but rewarded not with pepper spray in the face but with yet more loopholes and tax breaks and subsidies and contracts. You could even say Wall Street's been occupying our atmosphere, since any attempts to do anything about climate change always run afoul of the biggest corporations on the planet. So it's a damned good thing the tables have turned."

The occupier is being occupied. And it might make a world of difference. Again, these are just my personal observations as an outsider, but I find it fascinating, and very hopeful…

Oh, and one final thing that I really appreciate about the Occupy movement: It has a sense of humor!

One of the arrows slung at the nascent Occupy Wall Street movement is that it lacks leadership. Protesters in Denver, however, appear to have found a solution befitting the movement’s freewheeling feel. On Tuesday, in response to what protesters described as Denver Mayor Michael Hancock’s insistence that they choose a leader, Occupy Denver’s General Assembly elected Shelby.

Shelby, said a statement on Occupy Denver’s website, “exhibits heart, warmth and an appreciation for the group over personal ambition that Occupy Denver members feel are sorely lacking in the leaders some of them have voted for.” Shelby, you should know, is a 3-year-old border collie. According to Occupy Denver, her election was actually inspired by GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney when he insisted to a heckler this summer that “Corporations are people, my friend.”  “Shelby, the Occupation points out, is closer to a person than any corporation: She can bleed, she can breed and she can show emotion. Either Shelby is a person, or corporations aren’t people,” the Occupy Denver statement said. Point made.

To Occupy… A spiritual choice

“Occupy” is one of those juicy, delicious, nuanced words with several meanings, different but related. 

  • It means (1) – to have a place, as in the home you occupy here in Boulder. 
  • It also means (2) to hold a position or a job or a way to spend your time – to have an occupation.
  • Further, it means (3) to be occupied, or preoccupied in your thoughts. To have an idea that occupies you!
  • And it can mean (4) to take control of a place by military conquest or settlement. An “occupation” as the state of being held or possessed.

When I ponder the state of occupying, and being occupied, I’m reminded of the gentle encouragement of yoga teachers at the beginning of class: To arrive. To settle in. To be completely present. To occupy this space and time fully and well. In this sense, to occupy is a Zen practice. A form of meditation. A spiritual choice.

To Occupy – in this sense - is to enter into a process - a process with vitality and love and, dare I say, ‘soul.’ Rather than a set of demands or a specific objective, it is a process the empowers communities to formulate and develop their own decisions.

Novelist Scott Turow has one of his lawyer characters muse about the deep and profound difference between a “we” society and civilization’s current pet project – the “me” society:

“Rational self-interest is the creed. Worship is performed at the altar of the free market. Foolish Freud, thinking everything was about sex. The modern capitalist knows it’s all about money. We need competition and profit motive to make it all work. Let everybody struggle to get their bucket in the stream and then do what they like with what they fish out. But what kind of ethical social system takes as its fundamental precepts the words ‘I’  ‘me’  and ‘mine’? Our two-year –olds start like that and we spend the next twenty years trying to teach them there’s more to life than that…”

And given a choice, who would want to live in a society where the rule is every man, woman and child for themselves?

Contrast these words from San Francisco writer and environmentalist Rebecca Solnit, which she titled:

Letter to a Dead Man About the Occupation of Hope (excerpts)

“Dear young man who died on the fourth day of this turbulent 2011, dear Mohammed Bouazizi,

I want to write you about an astonishing year -- with three months yet to run. I want to tell you about the power of despair and the margins of hope and the bonds of civil society.

I wish you could see the way that your small life and large death became a catalyst for the fall of so many dictators in what is known as the Arab Spring.

We are now in some sort of an American Fall. Civil society here has suddenly hit the ground running, and we are all headed toward a future no one imagined when you, a young Tunisian vegetable seller capable of giving so much, who instead had so much taken from you, burned yourself to death to protest your impoverished and humiliated state.

You lit yourself on fire on December 17, 2010, exactly nine months before Occupy Wall Street began. You lit yourself on fire because you were voiceless, powerless, and evidently without hope. And yet you must have had one small hope left: that your death would have an impact; that you, who had so few powers, had the power to protest. As it turned out, you had that power beyond your wildest dreams, and you had it because your hope, however diminished, was the dream of the many, the dream of what we now have started calling the 99%.

And so Tunisia erupted and overthrew its government, and Egypt caught fire, as did Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, and Libya… Distinctively, in so many of these uprisings the participants were not advocating for one party or a simple position, but for a better world, for dignity, for respect, for real democracy, for belonging, for hope and possibility -- and their economic underpinnings.
In a YouTube video of the New York occupation, I watched an old woman in a straw hat say, “We’re fighting for a society in which everyone is important.” What a beautiful summation!  Could any demand be clearer than that?  (She continues for several more pages then concludes:)

I don’t know exactly who this baby looks like, but I know that who you look like is not who you will become. This unanticipated baby has a month behind it and a future ahead of it that none of us can see, but its birth should give you hope.  

Love,
Rebecca

To Occupy Earth… Our Blue Boat Home

And so now, at last we come to the heart of the matter: What might it mean to Occupy Earth… Our Planetary Eco-system, our Mother Gaia, our Blue Boat Home? The “occupy” tag itself has already gone viral, so that we now have Occupy Wallmart, Occupy All Streets, Occupy Sesame Street, and so forth. As Watergate spawned Spygate and Climategate and dozens of other references to a cover up of unethical behavior, so “Occupy” may become attached to any number of objects we would like to see changed. I’ve just jumped to the logical endgame here with “Occupy Earth”.

But when we think about it a bit more deeply, it is interesting – and quite significant – to note that the agenda is actually the opposite! As environmental activists, we focus, we protest, we act, in both real and symbolic ways, not to change Earth, as we would like to change Wall Street, but to avoid changing her. Not to reform Earth, but to reform ourselves.

Were we to occupy Earth, after the model of the movement we’ve been discussing, it would not be to cause a disruption in the normal course of business, but to avoid doing so! Occupations, be they military occupations or those of protest movements, are meant to shake things up, to disrupt, to be highly visible, irritating, even destructive. Occupying Earth signifies something closer to the Zen state I mentioned earlier. It is “being there,” being fully present and engaged in a way that fits, and fits in, as part of a larger whole, as something organic and right.
 

The context is different too, isn’t it? A protest movement against human devised and human run systems may go global to the extent that those systems occur in many places and affect people in virtually all places on the globe. But going global takes on a whole new dimension when it is, as John Seed says, Gaia, this living planet Earth, we are attempting to come into a new relationship with. Listen again to those words:

Awaken in us a sense of who we truly are: tiny ephemeral blossoms on the Tree of Life. Make the purpose and destiny of that tree our own purpose and destiny.

Fill each of us with love for our true Self, which includes all of the creatures and plants and landscapes of the world. Fill us with a powerful urge for the wellbeing and continual unfolding of this Self.

May we speak in all human councils on behalf of the animals and plants and landscapes of the Earth. May we shine with a pure inner passion that will spread rapidly through these leaden times. May we all awaken to our true and only nature – none other than the nature of Gaia, this living planet Earth.

To Occupy Earth is to find our natural and rightful place within something so whole and so holy that we come with the reverence of a worshipper and the open heart of a supplicant, wanting only to experience and learn, and perhaps in some small way support, that which is far greater than ourselves.

To Occupy Earth is to learn to live not for ourselves, demanding our share, focused on self, but to live in community – the community of life, the fellowship of evolving beings and an unfolding Cosmos.

To Occupy Earth generates an agenda – a set of goals – on a whole new level. It is the agenda of letting Gaia do her thing and try to fit in! It is the goal to not interfere with her old-growth forests, which she calls simply forest – where plants and animals and climate all sing in harmony. It is the goal of taking our energy from the sun, as She has done for four billion years, not rip and tear through her skin to gouge out solids and liquids and gasses to be burned and turned into toxic, radioactive pollutions and contaminations. It is the goal to drink the water she filters and breathe the air she freshens and eat the bounty of her earth, untainted by fracking fluids and smokestack chemicals and genetically modified, for-corporate-profit organisms that she hasn’t had even a measly few million years to consider and approve.

To Occupy Earth is to have the blinding realization, the aha, the enlightenment – that this was NOT all put here to be used - and used up - at our discretion. That we are NOT the only creatures here (obviously!), nor even, from a Gaian perspective the most important or most useful or most necessary, or most moral or intelligent or enlightened or enduring creatures here. We are but a small and transient part of a vastly greater whole, an interdependent web.

And perhaps most shockingly, To Occupy Earth is to realize that we did not create that web, we didn’t cause it, and if it becomes damaged we will scarcely know how to try to repair it, But, BUT we now must face the terrible reality that we CAN destroy it.

It is that spirit that we enter into John Seed’s prayer: “We call upon the spirit of evolution, the miraculous force that inspires rocks and dust to weave themselves into biology. You have stood by us for millions and billions of years – do not forsake us now. Empower us and awaken in us pure and dazzling creativity. You that can turn scales into feathers, seawater to blood, caterpillars to butterflies, metamorphose our species, awaken in us the powers that we need to survive the present crisis and evolve into more eons of our solar journey.”

Pointing out these difference, this higher order of magnitude, is not to say that there are no connections between Occupy Earth and Occupy Wall Street; there are, and they are many. They are tangible and real.  For one example: Fossil fuels enable the current economic system to continue because it is global and requires a lot of fossil fuels for production and transportation. Multi-national corporations won't do well if we stop burning fossil fuels.

Failure to act will result in catastrophic and runaway climate change that will dramatically undermine the systems that make earth livable. Therefore the reality of the climate science and the call for climate justice are critical filters through which all concerns for the economy, education, healthcare and democracy should be considered.

We shouldn't build the revolution on a dirty energy economy. Those who are concerned about the economy and jobs today, shouldn't settle for short term economies based on fossil fuels which will undermine both the planet and economic opportunities and health for future generations.

This one example, the use of fossil fuels and the specter of climate change, is more than sufficient to reveal the awesomely high stakes involved in the movement I’m calling Occupy Earth.

In addressing the protesters at Zuccotti Park, Canadian author and social activist Naomi Klein made the connection and acknowledged the stakes. She said:

 “Today everyone can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And it is trashing the natural world as well. We are over fishing our oceans, polluting our water with fracking and deepwater drilling, turning to the dirtiest forms of energy on the planet, like the Alberta tar sands. And the atmosphere cannot absorb the amount of carbon we are putting into it, creating dangerous warming. The new normal is serial disasters: economic and ecological.”

“The task of our time is to turn this around. To insist that we can afford to build a decent, inclusive society while at the same time, respect the real limits of what the Earth can take.”

"What climate change means is that we have to do this on a deadline. This time our movement cannot get distracted, divided, burned out or swept away by events. This time we have to succeed."

And she concludes: “Let’s treat this beautiful movement as if it is the most important thing in the world. Because it is. It really is.”

Now briefly: What are some concrete things one could do to align oneself with the Occupy Movement, in this new, unique “Occupy Earth” sense, and to make a difference, in Boulder and the World?

  • Stop the Keystone XL Pipeline. Climate Science guru James Hansen has said if we take the step of mining the earth for more oil with the Tar Sands and Shale deposits, it is “Game Over” for stopping the worst case scenarios of climate change. President Obama’s decision on Thursday was to not build it – for now! This is being claimed as a great environmental victory. But it’s not the final buzzer on this game. More study. More deliberation. More input. Make sure he hears yours!
  • Support the continuing efforts to refute the destructive fiction of “Corporate Personhood.” Hurray for Boulder in passing that resolution and standing as an example and an encouragement to other communities and people across the country. Corporations, like Shelby the dog, are not people. Free speech does not include unlimited anonymous corporate money to buy politicians. Join Move to Amend to call for a Constitutional Amendment that trumps the Supreme Court’s crucially bad decision in the Citizens United Case.
  • Support the Robin Hood Tax – the simple idea of a fraction of 1% tax on most financial market transactions to begin to redistribute the tax burden and build much needed government revenues for important social programs. Google RobinHoodTax.org to learn more.
  • Support Boulder Light and Power and Boulder’s Clean Energy Future. Add your energy and attention to make sure this is done courageously, competently, and well.
  • Become knowledgeable about the very destructive and threatening practice of Fracking. It’s happening in Boulder County! 764 oil and gas wells exist in Boulder County, and just last month (October 2011), toxic fracking fluid contaminated ground water on Boulder County agricultural land near Valmont and 95th Street.
  • Join the Boulder County GMO – KNOW effort to ban growing Genetically Modified crops on County public lands and open spaces. And here I’ll give you the most specific opportunity of all. Go the the crucial meeting this Tuesday, November 15, at 5:30 pm in Longmont, when there will be one last opportunity for public comment.

That’s six clear opportunities to make a difference. There are dozens of other ways too. You don’t have to do them all. Pick one. Or pick two. But Consider. Choose. And Act.

Occupying Earth is a full time occupation. And an honorable one. And a rewarding one.

We call upon the power which sustains the planets in their orbits, that wheels our Milky Way in its 200 million year spiral, to imbue our personalities and our relationships with harmony, endurance and joy. Fill us with a sense of immense time so that our brief flickering lives may truly reflect the work of vast ages past and also the millions of years of evolution whose potential lies in our trembling hands.


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