Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
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.
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 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.”
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.
The LA Mayor declared the city won’t spend $5 billion to re-power three aging natural gas plants, and instead called for transitioning the nation’s largest municipal utility to 100% clean, renewable energy: but how will we get there?
Donald Trump appointed Elliott Abrams as “Special Envoy to Venezuela” to help facilitate regime change in that country by the United States. This nod marks Mr. Abrams’ third assignment in U.S. Republican administrations. The following is a brief background of his career, summarized by
Rachel Bruhnke.
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.
‘Bellatrix: Volume 3’, features adventurous fiction, poetry, essays, and lyrics, and an excerpt of Jack Eidt’s psychic-animism fiction, Medicine Walk.
Buy the book!
