RACHEL CARSON

RACHEL CARSON

SPACESHIP EARTH

"We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent upon its vulnerable reserves of air and soil, all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave to the ancient enemies of man, half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all."

ADLAI STEVENSON, 1964

Sunday, December 10, 2017

THOMAS MERTON'S LETTER TO RACHEL CARSON (1963)

RACHEL CARSON and THOMAS MERTON
 KINGDOM OF THE CLOUDS
 SUNSET ARCH
 BENEATH THE CANOPY OF GRANDMOTHER POHUTAKAWA
REFLECTIONS OF TRANQUILITY

'Technology, Wisdom, and the Difficult Art of Civilizational Self-Awareness: Thomas Merton’s Beautiful Letter of Appreciation to Rachel Carson for Catalyzing the Environmental Movement' by Maria Popova


“Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent,” marine biologist and poet laureate of science Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964) wrote to her soul mate, Dorothy, before the release of Silent Spring — Carson’s epoch-making 1962 book that catalyzed the modern environmental movement.

Her courageous and sobering exposé of the assault on nature by the heedless use of chemicals — a dark subject to which she brought her exquisitely luminous prose — disquieted the nation into a major controversy. Despite the propagandist backlash and merciless attacks that government and industry hurled at the author, the popular press sided overwhelmingly with Carson. Her book, soon a record-breaking bestseller, went on to inspire the first-ever Earth Day and led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.
The avalanche of editorial enthusiasm for the rare miracle of Silent Spring was dwarfed by the thousands of letters Carson received from private citizens commending her on the moral courage of speaking inconvenient truth to power. 

In the winter of 1963, shortly before her untimely death, this apostle of science received a letter from an improbable admirer — the theologian and Trappist monk Thomas Merton (January 31, 1915–December 10, 1968), who had long admired Carson’s devotion to science as an expression of our spiritual bond with nature. His missive, found in the altogether magnificent Witness to Freedom: The Letters of Thomas Merton in Times of Crisis (public library), is a beautiful testament to how interconnected the deepest truths of existence are, how they transcend all boundaries of discipline and credo to bring us into naked contact with reality itself — and with our responsibility to the web of life.

Reaching out with “every expression of personal esteem” and commending Carson on the “fine, exact, and persuasive book,” Merton writes:
"[Silent Spring] is perhaps much more timely even than you or I realize. Though you are treating of just one aspect, and a rather detailed aspect, of our technological civilization, you are, perhaps without altogether realizing, contributing a most valuable and essential piece of evidence for the diagnosis of the ills of our civilization…. Your book makes it clear to me that there is a consistent pattern running through everything that we do, through every aspect of our culture, our thought, our economy, our whole way of life."
Such civilizational self-awareness is indeed Carson’s invaluable gift to posterity — that is, to us — though a gift of which we are yet to make conscientious use. With great foresight, both tragic and hopeful, Merton adds:
"It is now the most vitally important thing for all of us, however we may be concerned with our society, to try to arrive at a clear, cogent statement of our ills, so that we may begin to correct them. Otherwise, our efforts will be directed to purely superficial symptoms only, and perhaps not even at things related directly to the illness. On the contrary, it seems that our remedies are instinctively those which aggravate the sickness: the remedies are expressions of the sickness itself. 
I would almost dare to say that the sickness is perhaps a very real and very dreadful hatred of life as such, of course subconscious, buried under our pitiful and superficial optimism about ourselves and our affluent society. But I think that the very thought processes of materialistic affluence (and here the same things are found in all the different economic systems that seek affluence for its own sake) are ultimately self-defeating. They contain so many built-in frustrations that they inevitably lead us to despair in the midst of 'plenty' and 'happiness' and the awful fruit of this despair is indiscriminate, irresponsible destructiveness, hatred of life, carried on in the name of life itself. In order to 'survive' we instinctively destroy that on which our survival depends."
Reflecting on his collaboration with the great Zen teacher D.T. Suzuki and humanistic philosopher Erich Fromm on the poetic possibilities behind the notion of original sin, Merton adds:
"Technics and wisdom are not by any means opposed. On the contrary, the duty of our age, the 'vocation' of modern man is to unite them in a supreme humility which will result in a totally self-forgetful creativity and service."
Complement this portion of Witness to Freedom with Rachel Carson on writing and the loneliness of creative work, her brave, prescient letter against the government’s assault on science and nature, and the 1914 protest poem that emboldened her to write Silent Spring, then revisit other radiant beams of appreciation between great minds: Isaac Asimov’s fan mail to young Carl Sagan, Charles Dickens’s letter of admiration to George Eliot, teenage James Joyce’s expression of gratitude to Ibsen, Baudelaire’s “cry of gratitude” to Wagner, and Darwin’s touching letter of appreciation to his best friend and greatest supporter. 

Sunday, December 3, 2017

DR. CLAUDIA VON WERLHOF: A TRUE 'RACHEL CARSON OF TODAY' - ON THE BRINK RADIO INTERVIEW on DR. ROSALIE BERTELL, GEO-PHYSICAL WARFARE, 'THINKING LIKE A PLANET' & THE DEMENTIA OF PATRIARCHY

AUSTRIAN ECO-TECHNETRONIC VISIONARY
DR. CLAUDIA VON WERLHOF

“What is planned now are climate and weather wars, wars in which earthquakes and volcanoes, floods and droughts, hurricanes and monsoon rains will play a role.“ Dr. Rosalie Bertell, 2013

"The officially announced reasons for so called climate change that have been identified as being caused by CO2 emissions, proves to be a falsehood deliberately introduced into the world in order to obscure the reasons for the large number of changes occurring in nature." Dr. Claudia von Werlhof, 2015

Dr. Claudia von Werlhof is very much a 'Rachel Carson of Today' who is carrying the torch of her friend and mentor the legendary Dr. Rosalie Bertell, Catholic nun, nuclear awareness educator and geo-physical war-fare activist, as well as advancing her critique of military-industrial civilization as the product of several millennia of progressive patriarchal dementia.

CLAUDIA'S WEB-SITE
'PLANETARY MOVEMENT FOR MOTHER EARTH'
http://www.pbme-online.org/

MOTHER EARTH UNDER ATTACK FROM 'MAN, THE WISE'

LOREN EISELEY ON THE 'HSMV, OR Homo Sapiens Macro Virus'
http://synthaissance.blogspot.co.nz/2008/12/world-eaters-loren-eiseley.html

This On The Brink radio interview was recorded a couple years ago but the messages are more relevant now than ever, as the artifacts, consequences and after-maths of the essentially invisible geo-physical warfare scenario envelope us in a 'climate of increasing ignorance' in which the bogey of 'climate change' is embraced by legions of brain-washed devotees and real global threats to life like ionizing radiation and microwaves are marginalized or absent from the public radar.

Please read von Werlhof's excellent and brand new article "Earth as Weapon, Geo-Engineering as War" published just this week on Prof. Michel Chossudovsky's GlobalResearch web-site, which I consider to be one of the most informative and highly credible sources of meaningful information on the web.

I am honoured that Claudia included a reference to my comprehensive 'geo-terrorism' article from 2011. Thanks Claudia :)

LISTEN AND/OR DOWN-LOAME ACHIVE LINK FOR THIS SHOW
https://soundcloud.com/jeff-kataklysmos/on-the-brink-radio-104-claudia-von-werlhof-mother-earth-as-targetweaponplanetary-consciousness


DR. CLAUDIA von WERLHOF, "EARTH AS WAPON, GEO-ENGINEERING AS WAR"
https://www.globalresearch.ca/earth-as-weapon-geo-engineering-as-war/5620460


"Since World War II the development and employment of new military technologies in the East and the West have been the basis of destructions in the very 'life systems', as Bertell calls them, of our planet. The book presents us with a unique historical documentation, which reads like a breathtaking thriller. Its scope ranges from chemical, biological, and nuclear technological development and warfare to the post nuclear, especially in the field of electromagnetic 'plasma' weapons, not only threatening to wipe out all life on earth using technologies that are able to produce huge catastrophes, but also threatening to destroy the planet itself. The essence of the thriller Rosalie Bertell has written lies precisely in this escalation. For, it is literally this planetary dimension, which connected to warfare that has been taking action for a long time already, is completely new and unimagined. The beginning of this development started with the use of detrimental substances in industrial agriculture, and in the medical field – such as herbicides, pesticides, detergents, chlorine, and anesthetics – which were used during both world wars. It was Rachel Carson (Carson 1962), the first 'eco-feminist' who protested against this development.



"GEO-TERRORISM AND TECHNETRONIC WARFARE" Jeff Phillips
http://geo-terrorism.blogspot.co.nz/2011/03/geo-terrorism-and-technetronic-warfare.html


 “Engineering” is the back-bone of “civilization”, itself a recent innovation in the time-line of homo sapiens. “Civilized” people are themselves the product of engineering. “Progress” is defined as the unlimited expansion of “civilization” and therefore the results of engineering. The “social engineers” who created “money” have increasingly guided and controlled scientific research and technological development, and manipulate the dynamics of the mega-machine for “elite” agendas. In the early 21st century, due to unhindered concentration of political and economic power unfettered by over-sight and accountability, technological methods now exist which would be considered only as ‘science-fiction’ by the scientifically illiterate masses. Weaponization and exploitation of the natural world is rampant; the entire human population is the de facto “enemy.” Few people notice the narrowing of our perceptual bandwidth, the “engineering of consent” contributing to our contemporary psychic malaise, and the “orchestration of reality” that shapes our world-view. Fewer still can distinguish the blurring boundaries between “reality” and “unreality”, between “natural” and “man-made” disasters in thekoyaanisqatsi-matrix of today. Are we “engineering” own demise through a fusion of technologically-empowered control regimes with our own ‘unconscious jihad against nature’ driven by capitalism as a de facto religion?” Do industrial civilizations contain the seeds of their own destruction? Our onward-march has become a free-fall off of the precipice of sanity here on the only planet with life as we know it.

"MOTHER EARTH AS TARGET AND WEAPON"
http://geo-terrorism.blogspot.co.nz/2012/07/mother-earth-as-target-weapon-update-on.html

DR. ROSALIE BERTELL

THETHE 'PEACEFUL ATOM'

DR. ROSALIE BERTELL, "THE FUTURE OF PLANET EARTH:  ARE WE THE LAST SURVIVING GENERATIONS? RADIO-ACTIVITY AND THE GRADUAL EXTINCTION OF LIFE?"
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-future-of-planet-earth-are-we-the-last-surviving-generations-radioactivity-and-the-gradual-extinction-of-life/5361283

"What I think we are doing is that our generation is making a decision on how many future generations there will be. How much in short depends on how careless we are. So we already shortened future generations because whenever you introduce genetic defect then this line will eventually die out. But some will go two generations, some will go seven generations.
When you are talking about constant low radiation exposure, what you are doing is introducing mistakes into the gene-pool. And those mistakes will eventually turn up by killing that line, that cell line, that species line. The amount of damage determines whether this happens in two generations or in seven generations or 10 generations. So what we are doing by introducing more mistakes into the DNA or the Gene pool is we are shortening the number of generations that will be viable on the planet.
We have shortened the number of generations that will follow us. We have shortened that already. So we reduced the viability of living systems on this planet, whether it can recover or not. We don’t have any outside source to get new DNA. So have the DNA we have, whoever will live on this planet in the future is present right now in the DNA. So if we damage it we don’t have another place to get it.
There will be no living thing on earth in the future that is not present now in a seed, in a sperm and the ovum of all living plants and animals. So it is all here now. It is not going to come from Mars or somewhere. Living things come from living things. So we carry this very precious seed for the future. And when you damage it you do two things. You produce a less viable harmonized organism with the environment; at the same time we are leaving the toxic and radioactive waste around. So you are going to have a more hazardous environment and a less capable organism. That is a death syndrome for the species, not only for the individual. It is going to be harder to live. And the body will be less able to take stress and you are increasing the stress at the same time."
THE 'ULTIMATE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE'
 SUFFERING FROM MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION

"WE ARE NOT ALONE...YET: HOW WE ARE WAGING WAR ON A TRUE 'EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE" Jeff Phillips, 2012
http://tutunui-wananga.blogspot.co.nz/2012/08/we-are-not-aloneyet-how-we-are-waging.html

INTERVIEW WITH DR. ROSALIE BERTELL
http://www.pbme-online.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Bewegung_9_Info-Brief_eng.pdf

"...I think for practical purposes the military has abandoned nuclear bombs. I think they are unusable, and they keep them as a threat and they also keep them to keep a very large part of the population busy trying to write books, and why they shouldn’t have them and how you could manage.. - You know, zero nuclear weapons and all this sort of things. And so it keeps a lot of people busy that are not looking at the other things that they are really doing. But this isn’t unusual because if you look at World War One where they used gas - they never used that again in a war. It went into the pesticides, herbicides and defoliants) of the Vietnam war, and so if you look at the technology of a war it changes by the next war so you really shouldn’t be back here fighting the one that they used the last time, you should be trying to figure out what they are going to use in the next one. And I believe there will be weather wars."

RACHEL CARSON

"Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp. What is the message signaled by the hordes of diatoms, flashing their microscopic lights in the night sea?"


"The great tides at the close of the Middle Ages, with their accompanying snow and ice, furious winds, and inundating floods, are more than five centuries behind us. The era of weakest tidal movements, with a climate as benign as that of the early Middle Ages, is about four centuries ahead. We have therefore begun to move strongly into a period of warmer, milder weather. There will be fluctuations, as earth and sun and moon move through space and the tidal power waxes and wanes. But the long trend is toward a warmer earth; the pendulum is swinging."


"The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth's vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species—man—acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.

During the past quarter century this power has not only increased to one of disturbing magnitude but it has changed in character. The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials."

DDT

"The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature. Radiation is no longer merely the background radiation of rocks, the bombardment of cosmic rays, the ultraviolet of the sun that have existed before there was any life on earth; radiation is now the unnatural creation of man's tampering with the atom. The chemicals to which life is asked to make its adjustment are no longer merely the calcium and silica and copper and all the rest of the minerals washed out of the rocks and carried in rivers to the sea; they are the synthetic creations of man's inventive mind, brewed in his laboratories, and having no counterparts in nature."


"For mankind as a whole, a possession infinitely more valuable than individual life is our genetic heritage, our link with past and future. Shaped through long aeons of evolution, oru genes not only make us what we are, but hold in their minute beings the future – be it one of promise or threat. Yet genetic deterioration through man-made agents is the menace of our time, ‘the last and greatest danger to our civilization."


AUSTRIAN ECOLOGICAL VISIONARY 
FRIEDRICH HUNDERTWASSER

“It is madness to be part of a merciless competition, running amok straight into a fatal illusion, into the deadlock of economic growth. Our technical achievement must match our creative responsibility. We are far behind, unfortunately. We cannot think as fast as we use more and more dangerous tools. Genetic engineering violates the laws of nature in complete ignorance of the function of beauty in all manifestation of creation. This short-sighted contempt of the beauty and the inter-woven variety of creation triggers the suicide of humanity. Because the so-called unnecessary beauty is essential for the survival of this earth. Little to nothing is done to counteract the visual pollution which is the most dangerous of all pollutions because it kills the soul. As we are now reaching the limits of growth, only decentralization, reflection and slowing down in harmony with nature can save us. If you reach an abyss, only a step back can save you.

Friedrich Hundertwasser, 1999