Seeds for Thought: an Ecopsychology Blog

Thinking about a different war

I’ve been thinking about the Vietnam War lately—partly because I just completed teaching a class on Asian American Literature at the University of Minnesota, and we spent some time on the Vietnam War because it was the direct cause of almost all the Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian immigration to the US during the past three decades. My class of 31 included three Vietnamese American students and seven Hmong American students, some of whom were born in refugee camps in Thailand where a large number of Hmong people still live, waiting to get home or get out, more than 30 years after the end of the war that dispossessed them of their land. I’ll write more about this—the importance of place and the land in the writing of many Asian American authors is something I was somewhat surprised but pleased to find.

But back to war. I’ve also been thinking about Vietnam because for anyone who remembers that time, especially any US person over the age of about 50, it’s difficult not to compare what is happening today in Iraq with what happened then—the wars themselves and the US reasons for being in them, as well as the public response and the Congressional action (or lack thereof) in stopping both of these insane and dangerous wars. As the job approval rating for Bush sinks below 30 percent, and the Congress elected with a crystal clear mandate last fall to end this war refuses to take up its responsibility, many who remember Vietnam are recalling how that war ended. Some say the Congress simply refused to authorize more funds, and that was it. Is that what really happened?

Ecopsychology in the Dust Bowl

I was talking with a friend who works on local fair trade—helping establish structures for greater availability of locally produced food and raising awareness of the importance of eating locally. He had been in Mexico, where the focus of most activism around food was on trying to preserve subsistence and small market farming in an economy that was driving people off the land at the rate of hundreds every week.

We agreed that the concerns are different in countries like Mexico, where this process is under way today, and the US, where the majority of people have already left farming and so many of us are that much further removed from direct connection with the land. Although family farms are still being foreclosed every day in this country, the last big eviction of people from the land was 70 years ago during the Dust Bowl, when several hundred thousand small landowners and tenant farmers were forced to leave their homes by banks and owners who decided to mechanize and by a long drought that made the land unproductive. At the time my friend and I had this conversation, I was reading Steinbeck’s masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath, a quasi-journalistic chronicle of that event.

Virtual case study scenario--slow food

I'm taking a class in the "Innovation Studies" Department, on Individualism and Collectivism. The paper for this class involves developing a "virtual case study" that explores some aspect of this topic in a way that might be applicable in real life, to a real problem. I chose a scenario involving the "meme" of slow food, which is a movement that started in Italy to counter the homogenization of cuisine and the obliteration of local food traditions. Slow food also embodies a more general slowing down, building community, bringing people together and increasing focus on the beauty of nature in urban areas.

I wondered whether reviving a practice of cooking and eating real food, food from the local area, grown sustainably and enjoyed with other people at least occasionally could be a meme that would spread virally. Ultimately, I am interested in whether the kinds of cultural changes that are part of this "meme" or "meme cluster" could be expected to bring about a regeneration of democratic processes and more open and productive ways of dealing with conflict than are typical in highly individualistic US society. I am very interested in responses to what follows. Please let me know what you think.

Day of Atonement

Groups of native Americans have been trying for years to get mainstream attention to the real meaning of US Thanksgiving. In Canada, Thanksgiving seems to be truly a celebration of the harvest. But in the US, the mythology of "Indians and Pilgrims" that is taught to every schoolchild and still believed by most adults is a cover-up of what the day was originally about, a celebration of a massacre of Pequot women, children and men.

Robert Jensen, journalism professor at the University of Texas, tells this history and urges that USians not just ought, but need, to transform Thanksgiving from the self-indulgent family-centered eating orgy into a day of atonement for the massacre that started the whole thing and all the centuries-long effort to get rid of the original inhabitants of this continent through murder, massacre, smallpox-infected blankets, stealing their land, breaking treaties and corraling the remainder of the tribes in reservations. The degradation of native people continues with severe poverty, unemployment, health issues and suicide rates.

Torture and the assault on values

I think I’m suffering from PTSD brought on by living under political leadership that every single day launches another assault on my humanity. There seems to be no end to the twisting and shredding of the democratic, humane principles on which I and all other USians have been taught to believe our country is founded -- and which we deeply believe it should be following.

It was bad enough when then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales wrote the now-infamous memo declaring that the Geneva Conventions for the humane treatment of prisoners of war were “obsolete” and “quaint,” and didn’t apply to those arrested in the Bush Administration’s “War on Terror.” Suddenly torture, something that I had considered to be completely, totally and unequivocally rejected by any society calling itself civilized, was once again thinkable. Here’s an article I wrote then.

When we all do better

Paul Wellstone, former US Senator from Minnesota who died in a suspicious plane crash three years ago, just two weeks before the 2002 election (at which time he was way ahead in the polls, his numbers having gone up shortly after he voted against giving the Prez the authority to invade Iraq, the only Senator up for re-election who did so), had a saying: “When we all do better, we all do better.” Maybe he didn’t coin it, but he said it a lot.

The phrase has a tautological aspect that may bother some logicians. It seems so obvious! Duh!

Yet as I think about it, this concept reflects a view of human nature that departs rather radically from the one that’s dominant today and has been in Western culture for a few thousand years at least.

Heating costs may reprioritize survival

Home heating costs are predicted to rise 30% to 70% this winter. The increase, the steepest in any of our lifetimes, comes when economic security for many Minnesotans is shaky at best.

(Meanwhile, during the past week Exxon-Mobil Corp. posted third-quarter profits of $11 billion -- that is billion with a "b" and that’s profits, not overall revenue -- the highest quarterly profit ever reported by any company anywhere. The other giant transnational oil corporations were not far behind. But I digress…)

The governor of Minnesota mentioned recently that he would like to convene a special session of the legislature. Great! I thought. Finally my state government is taking seriously its responsibilities to the people of this state. They're going to talk about how to help people already economically stressed, who are simply unable to come up with an extra $100 or $200 a month to stay warm this winter. Hey, maybe they’d even think of putting a cap on how much oil companies can charge, when we’re talking about a basic need like heat in a cold climate.

But no. That is not with the governor wants to talk about.

Granny D's ecopsychology

When I read Doris "Granny D" Haddock’s speech given at Concord, Mass., last week I wondered if she’d been reading ecopsychology!

Granny D has been political through and through since I’ve known of her in the past five years. Now 95, she's a New England matriarch, not politically active until she became concerned about big-money interests controlling elections, and walked across the country at the age of 89 to highlight the desperate need for campaign finance reform. Since then, she has become a speaker on democracy in great demand, and usually addresses such issues as corporate control of media, campaign finance reform of course, the benefits of fair trade, and how individual people can contribute to making our whole system more democratic.

But in her talk last week, she went beneath policies and consumer behavior, beneath the politics of corporate power, and addressed the issue of human nature. What kind of creatures are we, she asked, and how do we really want to live? And how do our answers to these questions help us to understand -- and counter -- the political forces of imperialism and repression that are dominating our nation and our world and threatening us with destruction?

Personal responsibiltiy at Abu Ghraib

Last week private Lynndie England was convicted for her role in abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib in 2003, and sentenced to three years in a military prison. England, who was 19 years old at the time, will be memorialized forever in the first set of photos released to the public depicting the personal and sexual humiliation of male Iraqi prisoners, as the “leash girl” who held one end of a strap that was around the neck of a prisoner lying on the floor. The pictures of her grinning as she pointed to a naked prisoner’s genitals will probably wind up in history books (the genital area suitably blurred, as it always is when these photos are shown on television).

England said in an interview with NBC’s Stone Phillips that she knew what she was doing was wrong, but she was in love with one of the guards, and he urged her to let herself be photographed. He wanted her there because her presence racheted up the humiliation level for the Muslim men. She couldn’t say “no” to this guard, she claimed. In addition, she said he and others had told higher-ups what they were doing to the prisoners in their charge, and received enthusiastic approval. She described the atmosphere at the prison as loose, and said the soldiers in charge had little to nothing in the way of rules of conduct or limitations on what they could try to “soften prisoners up” for interrogation.

Salsa or politics? Salsa!

Okay, so, today I have 22 ripe tomatoes, four or five onions, a handful of jalapenos and some green peppers, and it's going to be a glorious day more like late summer than mid-continent autumn.

Let's see, should I sit in front of my computer writing about politics, or should I make salsa? Politics? Salsa? Politics? Salsa?

Salsa wins! Tune in next week for politics--that is, if the tomatoes stop coming! ;-)