Yes, Bill McKibben, Yes.

Bill McKibben, an outspoken activist and inspiration author (among other things) has recently written another though-but-more-importantly-action-provoking post over at Grist. Check it out. He says:

Mostly, we need to tell the truth, resolutely and constantly. Fossil fuel is wrecking the one earth we've got. It's not going to go away because we ask politely. If we want a world that works, we're going to have to raise our voices.

I recently read the book he mentions writing in 1989, called The End of Nature. It was scary and depressing, and what's worse, it was written 20 years ago and a lot of the issues are still around, as prevalent as ever. It led me to scrawl across my notebook:

HOW CAN PEOPLE NOT SEE THIS GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS AS THE BIGGEST ISSUE OF OUR TIME?

I'll share what I thought were a couple pivotal quotes, if you don't have the time to read the whole thing.
His premise is, I think encapsulated in this particular sentence:

"The invention of nuclear weapons may actually have marked the beginning of the end of nature: we possessed, finally, the capacity to overmaster nature, to leave an indelible imprint everywhere all at once."

To elaborate:

"If the waves crash up against the beach, eroding dunes and destroying homes, it is not the awesome power of Mother Nature. It is the awesome power of man, who has overpowered in a century the processes that have been slowly evolving and changing of their own accord since the earth was born."

And another:

"We live, all of a sudden, in an astroturf world, and though an astroturf world may have a God, he can't speak through the grass, or even be slient through it and let us hear."

I think this last one hits particularly home for anyone who is remotely spiritual. If your spirituality is even loosely connected with God as life, God as unity, or if there is any Nature in your God, it's a point worth considering.

To deal with guilt, we must take responsibility. We Americans alone are responsible for a huge percentage of global environmental harm (which continues as you read). Knowing this, as many do, we must address it. We must strive as individuals to use less energy, to produce less waste, and to educate our friends and family how (and why) to do these things as well. As consumers, we must demand better products, electric cars, organic foods, local products, sweat-free clothes. We must lead by example and show the world we recognize what we've done, take responsibility for it, and as a nation provide a better way of life as an example for the world.

We must reject products that lie about being "environmentally friendly," and seek to create criteria of our own for how we should treat our environment. What, by the way, is your "environment?" Have you thought about this? Is it something you're intimately familiar with or just catch a glimpse of on your commute? How does Organic Ranch Dressing help our environment?

We must become environmentally-informed consumers, and choose products wisely, not based on ads or alluring packaging.

We must examine and change our habits.

Oh, and I'm tired of this mediocre, middle-of-the-road, compromising bullshit. Let's get mad, let's get radical, and let's get some shit done. Right on Bill.

Gendered TED

'ingenious' - click for bigger version

check out the genders of the people on TEDs 'beautiful' and 'ingenious' tags. a friend and i were looking at the videos tagged 'ingenious' on TED and noticed that they're *all* men, and i jokingly said that 'beautiful' would be all women. unfortunately it was.

'beautiful' - click for bigger version

i'm not trying to place blame on TED or anything, because i'm pretty sure these are user-generated tags, just pointing out (because someone should) that it's a little sexist...

One impression of rural Costa Rica

The past week we've been traveling to some pretty rural towns. I noticed that men stare "deeper" there, with more penetration, as compared to what I normally experience around here, in the urban areas. In most of Latin America, men stare pretty often, and sometimes do more (whistle/beep/etc), but this was different. Like 90% of the men on the street stared at me and it made me feel physically, viscerally objectified. Made me feel like I was wearing a bikini, when I was wearing way more clothes than the climate allowed for (hardly any skin showing)...wishing I had a cloak to add on top. I can't find the right word for it, 'disgusting' keeps popping up, but that's not quite it. Completely devalued? Naked? I'm not sure. They were definitely not looking at what I felt was me. All of this was walking next to Justin - and a couple of times he said buenas dias/noches or hola to them and they didn't even acknowledge him, just stared right past him to me, through me. God, it was creepy and I hated being there. So unwelcome.

As for staring at my sister's ass

First, why do guys think I give a shit about how hot my sister* is?? Or that it isn't offensive...I feel some mature part of myself suppressing the inevitable rant so I can actually tell you something coherent, and I've been trying to think how to word it. It goes something like this:

Privilege has a history that the privileged are often blind to. It would be one thing, let's say, in a vacuum society with a blank slate, for a man to look at a woman's ass. It's biological, sexual, evolutionary. Completely guilt-free, and, well, natural. Same with the reverse (woman checking out a man)(EDIT: or a woman checking out a woman or a man checking out a man).

However, in our society, that is not the case. The case is that for the past few hundred years (maybe even thousand), women have been constructed as objects in mens' minds. We have been forced to act according to man's will. We are told how to dress, how to walk, how to please him. We are fed a history of lies - of how we are made from him (Eve from Adam), of how we are not as holy as He (no female Priests, Rabbis (until lately), few deities), of how we are not as powerful (no presidents, political leaders, few CEOs), we are told we are weak, we are not artistic or creative (no major female artists, poets, writers, inventors until the past 2 centuries). We are dehumanized, demoralized, and thus dominated by the male psyche. So, when you stare at a woman's ass in our society, that's what you're reinforcing.

When you tell me about staring at my sister's ass, you ask me to justify that, and I cannot.

(* I use this word in the broadest sense possible.)

why is doing what makes you happy crazy? why do we wait until we die to realize that living in the present moment is what we want to be doing, and until then live only in false hopes of one day becoming self-actualized? i can't possibly be the only one to realize these things, to face unhappiness, and to struggle with it. do other people do this? i suppose, yes, other people are unhappy, and do fix it - either through prozac, other drugs (i.e. alcohol), or other means of consumption - all different ways of some way or other losing oneself. why are we afraid to recognize our unhappiness? are we scared we won't be able to address it? i guess patch was right when he said that most people are depressed because they feel alone. maybe one day, together we can figure out why.