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sonoma vineyards beauty in spring
Eco-Cultural-Travel

Wild Sonoma’s ‘Valley of the Moon’ – Living with the Land

The Sonoma Valley in Northern California is known for it’s world-class wine, gentle hills, and year-round temperate climate, where novelist-gentleman-farmer Jack London set up his ode to wild sustainability one hundred years before it became a thing. Flying over in a hot air balloon, hiking the protected hillsides to find a precious Pinot Noir at one of the 425 wineries, sailing off the coast, there are many ways to get lost in them hills.

Beltane, Scotland
Rituals and Traditions

The Pagan Spring Fertility Origins of May Day

May Day (May 1) marks the return of Spring in the Northern Hemisphere, with origins in ancient agricultural rituals to ensure fertility, handed down from the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. Later permutations included the Celtic festival of Beltane and Germanic festival of Walpurgis Night. May Day falls exactly half a year from All Saints Day (November 1), and cross-quarter day with pagan overtones. Today, this ancient festival survives, including gathering wildflowers and decorating a May tree or Maypole, around which people dance, and some use it for political protest in association with International Workers Day.

Pauline oliveros, Postcard Theatre
Sound

Pauline Oliveros and her Beautiful Canopies of Sound

Pauline Oliveros was a vital creator of new music, a renowned electronic art music innovator and composer, an accordionist, the founder of deep listening and other experimental practices, a genius inventor of sound-making software, and a fearless champion on issues of gender, race, ability, and sexual orientation. Following is an essay on her “Sonic Meditations.”

Being the Change
EcoJustice Radio

Mobilizing a Climate Revolution – EcoJustice Radio

Massive climate disruption continues to strike all over the world, one disaster after another, droughts, wildfires, typhoons, mega-floods, with glaciers melting and methane escaping from deep under the permafrost. The UN IPCC said we have 12 more years to stabilize greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere to avoid runaway climate change. We need solutions to this problem to spark a climate revolution. Jessica Aldridge speaks with NASA climate scientist and author Peter Kalmus and Sam Berndt also a scientist and a coordinator of the Sunrise Movement Los Angeles.

bison, extinction, hunting
Earth

Ecological Amnesia: Life Without Wild Things

We have forgotten the flocks of passenger pigeons that blotted out the sun, the herds of bison that shook the ground, and the untamed places in which we destroyed them. This is ecological amnesia. This capacity to forget, this fluidity of memory, has dire implications in a world dense with people, all desperate to satisfy their immediate material needs. Yet, the way forward is land and water protection and regeneration, permaculture, and community reconnection with the wild.