Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Santa Barbara Literary Journal releases Bellatrix: Volume 3 this June, which among adventurous fiction, poetry, essays, and lyrics, features an excerpt of Jack Eidt’s psychic-animism fiction, Medicine Walk. Join us for readings and other entertainments in SB on June 14.
Marcus Lopez Senior, member of the Barbareno Chumash Nation in California, speaks with Jack Eidt from SoCal 350 on climate chaos and the impacts on the Chumash people from fires, mudslides, colonization, land theft, gentrification, and offshore drilling.
Jack Eidt writes on the California wildfires and their dangerous connection with climate change, melting of Arctic sea ice, and the drying out of the US West Coast. We must reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, get cracking on a just transition to an economy based on clean, efficient, renewable energy, and start making our homes and lives more extreme-climate-resilient.
The most recent oil spill on the Santa Barbara coast that has decimated wildlife and soiled California beaches with tar over a 350-mile area has been an unmitigated disaster. It illustrates weaknesses in basic safety measures for pipelines and crude by rail, as well as risks associated with industry plans to expand tar sands and other extreme drilling infrastructure on the West Coast.
Hutash, the Earth Mother, created the first Chumash people on the island of Limuw, now known as Santa Cruz Island. They were made from the seeds of a Magic Plant.
Art Cisneros is a Chumash elder and firekeeper. The Chumash People are the original native peoples of the central California Coast. Art holds the sacred space for their annual Tomol crossing to Limu on the Channel Islands. Lately, he has undertaken a series of ceremonies focused on healing humanity’s relationship with the climate, responding to the ongoing drought and extreme weather, prayers that he shared with the people at the Great March for Climate Action LA Launch on March 1, 2014, in the Port of Los Angeles.
The California Condor Recovery Program has defied the odds to rescue from oblivion the last of the prehistorics and icon of Native Californian cosmology. Threats such as lead ammunition, microtrash, and sprawling land development threaten these impressive gains of an endangered species. The film “The Condor’s Shadow” documents this struggle.