Exactly a month after the humongous 9.0 earthquake and tsunami, Japan has finally raised the severity level of the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant from level 5 to level 7. That’s the highest there is. I guess they could no longer deny reality. Maybe we can’t either. The decision came after another [...]
Filed under: ecology, technology | Tagged: aftershock, Christchurch, earthquake, Fukushima, Japan, level 7, nuclear power, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, tsunami | 3 Comments »
The super-moon is clearly having its effect on me. I’m not exactly a wide-eyed optimist, my sense of tragedy is rather well-developed, and I certainly don’t think in terms of “cosmic evolutionary steps” like the writer quoted below, yet I found her description of life right now in Sendai, Japan, very moving. I was sent [...]
Filed under: ecology, existence, sanity | Tagged: Anne Thomas, earthquake, Japan, Sendai, supermoon | 9 Comments »
Somehow, with the news horrible from Japan to the Middle East, the idea that there’s going to be a “super-moon” this weekend — a huge full moon, with that sunlit pile of rock closer to the earth than it’s been in 18 years — makes me happy. Some people are apparently seeing all kinds of [...]
Filed under: ecology, pantheism | Tagged: full moon, Japan, Middle east, periapsis, perigee | 4 Comments »
Replying to an email from a friend just now, I quoted a line from Percy Bysshe Shelley‘s “Ozymandias,’ written in response to a giant sculpture of a pharoah’s head lying on its side at Luxor, Egypt. Then as I thought of the whole poem, I began to get chills up and down my spine. So [...]
Filed under: ecology, existence, technology | Tagged: Egypt, Japan, Luxor, nuclear disaster, Ozymandias, Shelley | 3 Comments »
Hey, I know time is supposed to have speeded up recently – the Web, mass connectivity, and all that. I know everything seems to be going faster than we can keep up with. But this fast? Turns out we’ve gone and created our very own geological era — entirely human-made. Goodbye, Holocene. Welcome to what [...]
Filed under: ecology, existence | Tagged: Anthropocene, carbon content, desert, environment change, geology, God, Holocene, industrial revolution, Mount Sinai, mysticism, Royal Society, time | 1 Comment »
Well, it happened again: the high-desert high. I don’t know if it’s something only certain people are liable to – some peculiar set of eye, brain, and metabolism – but every time I go into high desert, whether southern Sinai, northern New Mexico, or as this time, the 5000-foot high volcanic hills northwest of Guadalajara, [...]
Filed under: ecology, existence, pantheism | Tagged: animism, Ansel Adams, Bach, Bosque de Primavera, Golan Heights, golden spruce, Hopi mesas, Jerusalem, Medina, Monterey Peninsula, Nurat Fateh Ali Khan, Paul Simon, Queen Charlotte Islands, Qum, Seattle, Yosemite | 8 Comments »
This is my olive tree, and yes, that’s a boat in the background: It doesn’t ‘fit’ with anything else on my floating garden here in Seattle (pines, maples, bamboo, herbs), but I don’t care. It reminds me of the Middle East (so what if it’s a European olive instead of a Middle Eastern one) — [...]
Filed under: ecology, Judaism, Middle East, ugliness | Tagged: Israel, olive trees, Palestine, poison, settlers, West Bank | 10 Comments »
Clever ‘Nature’ takeoff — the endangered plastic bag: California wants to ban them. Now I do too. —- (Thanks to Dan Savage at Slog.)
Filed under: ecology | Tagged: 'Nature', ban, California, mockumentary, plastic bags | 2 Comments »
My copy of Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard is as tattered as a book can be and still hold together enough to be called a book. It is the record of a kind of Zen pilgrimage into one of the most remote parts of the Himalayas, undertaken for many reasons, but among them, the hope [...]
Filed under: Buddhism, ecology, existence, technology | Tagged: 'Nature', 'Silent Roar, Himalayas, Mac OS X, Peter Matthiessen, snow leopards, Zen | 5 Comments »
