May 12, 2008 | Along the Trinity River levees, Fort Worth, Texas | 11:05pm
Just got shot at

Funny about the dissonance of close calls. Like when you're riding a bike and a car rushes by very close, missing you by no more than an inch. Your body is still intact -- ain't nuthin -- and you go on about your business

But tonight, the second shot and the piercing ricochet of the bullet off the pole and then off a metal warehouse sent me ducking down the side of the levee to the water's edge. Never saw the shooter. I was northeast of town -- could've been somebody pulled off the freeway. I accidentally scared a big fat beaver who went flying/tumbling into the river likely screaming Bloody Mary Mother of Jesus in beaver language as he hit the water, slapping it hard with his tail sending a geyser up and his own loud crack out into the night before he disappeared below the surface.

The random attacks... like when walking to the store in a non-minority neighborhood and people speeding by in their cars throwing bottles out the window at me. At 50 mph they are powerful lords over me. Or in Lubbock they throw rocks from inside their apartment gates at night (sometimes even hiding in the bushes to do so.)

When you're under fire, your flesh feels very vulnerable. I can imagine what a dove feels like on September 1st.

Glad no bullet capped me though. Even as I had to walk horizontally along the steep bank pronating my right foot unnaturally against my ankle in order to keep moving and putting distance between me and the shooter, I thought: damn what a stupid waste it would've been if my ass was suddenly shot cold after all these years of work, getting this movement really set and going, and I hadn't completed any of the really big work yet. Wonder if the stray dogs woulda ate on me before anybody found me-- likely a couple days.

---
My prayers to all the people who died recently from all the violent storms (cyclone in Myanmar -- 100,000 people dead with many more threatened by lack of aid and medicine) and Sichuan province earthquake in China 10,000 dead, as well as almost 100 people from over 800 tornadoes in the US already this spring.

(The larger death numbers numb. Can you imagine how reeling the US would be if 10,000 people died in a single event. Americans have to realize it is just as catastrophic to Burmese folks or to the ethnic Han Chinese, Chinese Tibetans, and Hui Muslim Chinese.

I saw one Internet news post that one of the concerns against building the gargantuan (and ecologically and socially disastrous) Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze River was that the massive weight of the reservoir might exacerbate an earthquake's trigger point. Don't know about any of this, but the headline on Huffington Post tonight is THE ANGRY EARTH, and lots of posters are commenting about we humans ultimately being little more than fleas on a dog's back.

What matters is that people get the help they need now, in their time of massive suffering. Burma appears to have its own "Brownie" purposely doing "a heckuva job."

May 1, 2008 | Fort Worth, Texas | 3:00pm
I would rather go naked than wear fur, too. (Even before I met Roselyn Sanchez -- a very hot, beautiful woman)

Check out the hot new PETA ad with madd sexy Roselyn Sanchez ("I'd rather go naked than wear fur") in this month's KRAVE magazine.

Relatively new, Dallas-based KRAVE magazine www.kravemagazine.net must be hitting the big time, if PETA is advertising in them. I know they have started getting national distribution in select cities. (Will Young, the Publisher, is a friend, whose mother still lives in Como.)

Congratulations to Will, Karl, and everybody over at KRAVE for being a venue for such a luminous, beautiful photo editorial.

Something about the way Roselyn is pressing her palms against the plate glass window, looking in at us, knocks us out.

That ad is saying to urban folk, "Yeah, we can enjoy life and each other's company, we can love to be healthy and sexy, and we don't have to cause so much pain to others in order to do so."

Contrast that ad with the Noir Soul ad elsewhere in the magazine --you don't even want to imagine what was done to those animals before their fur and skin was ripped off their backs. In my opinion, people of color should especially know a thing or two about suffering, and not want to so frivolously pass it on.

Aside from that, KRAVE looks great, feels modern and, as Editor-in-Chief Karl Griggs says he wants, has the potential to build social awareness in men of color along with all our other lifestyle components.

April 28, 2008 | Fort Worth, Texas | 1:22m
In a Funk

In a funk. Our relate ain't workin out. I''ll prob come across all hard here, but the real truth is crushing disappointment, esp since it's so difficult and rare to meet other "real" dudes you really, really click with and have so much in common with. Was almost perfect. But still, we clashed.

Ok, I'll stop talkin bout personal sh*%! and get back to bein a stone cold soldier down for the cause. And no, I ain't gon go listen to no Keyshia Cole or Mary J or other SAD AZZ MUSIC -- I'm put Nas on instead and get right back to work. Ain't nothin' ever stop me from my work -- even messed up distractions like this. Dammit. .... lol

April 17, 2008 | Fort Worth, Texas | 9:11pm
April Storms

Storm season again in North Texas. I bladed downtown to the big Main Street Arts Festival, then they sounded the sirens and got on the speakers saying a dangerous storm was coming, that it was already smashing Weatherford 30 miles to the west.

I beat it heading east down across the Trinity River, with the storm looming larger and larger over my shoulder and the winds picking up. It's funny how you can skate down a steep hill and have to push to get down because of the winds, when normally during calm you're sort of putting your life into your hands going close to 30 mph at that grade.

Ten minutes after I got to my house it caught up to me and started pounding with big hail stones. I'm in a new house, and for the first time ever it has a garage but I found out I didnt know how to open the damn thing since I'd never used it. I finally figured it out and ran out to get my car with all them big hail stones pounding me in the back of my skull and my shoulders, but i got the car inside. Least now I now how to open the garage door.

April 17, 2008 | Fort Worth, Texas | 11:00am

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24183188/

Check out this news story on MSNBC.com. It's sickening the ruin of all these lives for a glory war that did nothing but make the world more dangerous. And these injury numbers don't even take into account the amount of injuries multiple times higher that Iraqi civilians are enduring. There are no words to describe the colossal disaster, or the revulsion, of this absolutely unnecessary war. In human terms, the grief and ruin of lives is inconsolable.

I keep thinking about the young Mexican girl out in Lubbock who in the afternoons goes out to lie down between the gravestones of her two dead brothers. Both were in Iraq; one was killed over there, the other could never recover from the loss of his brother -- or what he saw over there -- and things got to a point where he killed himself after returning home.

So the sister is the only child left, and Lubbock afternoons with the cemetery grass gently crushing into her face are the only new memories she will ever have with her brothers.

Mental health injuries scar 300,000 U.S. troops
Only half of vets have sought help for depression, post-traumatic stress

Some 300,000 U.S. troops are suffering from major depression or post-traumatic stress from serving in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 320,000 received brain injuries, a new study estimates

April 11, 2008 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA | 6:38pm
Brain Cells at the Stretching Point

Today I was the closing speaker for this conference "Disruptive Environments: Journalists, Academics and Activists in Conversation" here at MIT.

The discourse is pretty rarefied and supersmart. As an on-the-ground activist, the stratospheres of academia are by no means my usual stomping grounds. My job is to distill important information into common, immediately applicable language, and help working class folk feel why ecological and health issues are immediately important to us. At first I felt a little out of place, but since I'm an information junkie I appreciated the expectations and challenges. Here, people casually speak about carbon ppm's and endocrine disruptors as casually as I might speak about the homeless down the corner with holes in his shoes and teeth or about lifting weights and drinking fresh wheatgrass juice. :) But to be honest, I find all the info pretty fascinating; and my brain cells can handle it. (Up to a point, anyway.)

They put me up at this bougie (sp?-- slang-short for bourgoisie (<-- I can never spell that word right and Im too much in a hurry to look it up) hotel called LeMeridien. It's the third trendy hotel I've been put up in in the last half year. Why in their bathrooms do they all have these new white bowl sinks set on top of a counter instead of just a regular sunken sink? I guess it's supposed to be trendy, but to me they look like them big white things they put over a poor dog's head so he don't scratch himself after he has his head worked on or something. These sink things aren't very functional, either. Take up the whole counter. And it's hard to stick your head down in there if you want to wash your mouth out after brushing your teeth.

April 2, 2008 | Somewhere over Central Texas on a Southwest Airlines flight between Austin and Dallas | 6:38pm
Great News - One step closer to freedom for the imprisoned Texas buffalo!

Very successful work day in Austin. Just got two big breakthroughs. First I got the Texas General Land Office to agree to give us at least 3 years for the critically endangered tallgrass Fort Worth Prairie Park if we can find the anchor buyer. What that means is our team doesn't have to come up with the whole $21 million all at once to save it from the developers. The Fort Worth Prairie Park is part of the most endangered major ecosystem in North America, and serves as a vital refuge for severely impacted and threatened wildlife and children.

The other, even bigger success is we just got Texas Parks and Wildlife to finally agree to take the first steps toward freedom and clemency for the surviving imprisoned native Texas buffalo (not that they ever did anything wrong except want to be left alone to roam, but that is another story). Imprisoned are 63 individual animals with ancient, purebred lineage, all that is left from the 4 million member herd, stuck in a 330 acre cage and losing their ancestral herd culture and behavior, not to mention going crazy from the confinement. The fact that the old hook-and-bullet agency, now headed by a new E.D., Carter Smith, is ready to partner with GPRC on landscape-scale protections and acknowledges the value of GPRC's work to blend social work with ecological recovery and protections shows major progress for Texas.

As for the buffalo, those big beautiful black animals who have suffered so much, at least one family group (for starters) will soon have thousands of wild acres to stretch their legs and souls and heartbeats again after they are released into a first portion of our new 12,000 acre Cynthia Ann Parker Wilderness preserve, which is about 200 miles northwest of Fort Worth. We're partnering with Foard County and Pease Rivers Partners. We expect to be able to expand in size. This work is a step toward something much bigger, not just in additional acreage but cross-culturally among people, from rural and urban, people of many different colors, cultures, ages and communities coming together for some good hard work and exciting progress. And this summer, our hood kids and our rez kids will meet out there for the Youth Summit!

March 28, 2008 | Fort Worth, Texas | 9:19pm
"Fresh Trade"

This afternoon was walking back from the corner store carrying a bottle of juice for my co-worker Yolanda and as I was about to cross a side street this big fat older dude pulls up in his shiny new silver van and asks me "What are you doing!"

Of course I first thought he was a plain-clothes cop so I didn't answer not that it was any of his business then he reaches for himself and asks if I "Want to make some money!" Here I am, a grown man and CEO of an 8 and half year old non-profit corporation and still... STILL I'm just an object to be consumed. It blows my mind the nerve of some of these people. He just decided to drive through my hood and see what he can consume.

I know I don't look like somebody to be messed with-- I wouldn't approach me on the street. But I guess if you own the world and are protected inside your big expensive vehicle with your foot on the gas pedal, you just go and consume whatever you want. You can buy anything. I know I'm supposed to be the upstanding citizen, and I most definitely am for the most part, having long ago learned how to convert helpless rage into positive action, but I should've punched a hole in his van.

I didn't because my mind was so focused on work and saving prairie dogs and our upcoming Youth Summit that I just let it go. Was I a punk for just letting it go?

A couple weeks ago I was walking down the sidewalk of an upscale area with lots of shops to get some fresh squeezed wheatgrass juice at a Jamba Juice and a cop passed, slowed down upon seeing me, and suddenly did a U-Turn into the parking lot, startling me. I stepped off the curb, and he turned on his sirens and made me sit down on that curb for a whole hour, his car hovering over me as he sat smugly in the driver's seat trying to find anything he could haul me in for, enjoying how much he could humiliate me. And when he couldn't find anything to hold me or take me in, he gave me a $200 ticket for stepping off the curb -- "jaywalking" -- which I had to pay cash for downtown.

All this stuff tries to pull me back down and make me mad and yeah it does make me angry but not to the point I will be pulled back down. I am way too productive and healthy to let them get me like that again. I'm not complaining, and I definitely thank God for how blessed and easy my life is compared to so many others, especially folk living in Darfur or any of a thousand other places, and especially animals, too, but still... It's like they are constantly trying to break me. Distract me from my success and life's work. Pull me back down. It never ends.

But nobody and nothing will get in my way. Nothing can stop me and others from working to build an empathy-based civilization where we get past the hatred and ugliness and violence of the past and open a door into the longest health.

March 16, 2008 | South Beach | Miami, Florida | 6:45pm
Year Six of the Iraq War About to Begin

March 15, 2008 | South Beach | Miami, Florida | 7:02pm
Tug-of-War and the battle-worn fish

OK I admit it. I been seeing somebody serious for the first time in a very long time. It's been years. Actually five years since I even dated anybody. Dude is from Connecticut projects, lived in NYC and DC but lives here now, is an athlete and social worker... yeah, and fine as hell. He's a street skater, works out, likes to play football on the beach, we cause an "8-Pack Distraction" hahaha when we walk or skate down the street together and the chemistry between us is very tight; is almost perfect except for some communication probs, but we'll see. Got a $100 RT ticket from a friend and came out for the weekend. Him and me went to a Miami competition down on Key Biscayne, and joined a tug-of-war team. Damn -- that shit is so intense-- had never done tug-of war before. I was the anchor, with him in front of me, and I can hardly describe the pressure of the fight; it's like every cell and molecule and blood vessel not to mention your heart is splitting open. You absolutely do NOT can not lose -- you find yourself absolutely REFUSING to be dragged in --- It's like this super-tense dug-in nervous bursting body panic refusal and war-bent fight... you get into this mindset... We won all the rounds but the last one. When each round was over, we collapsed into the sand, breathing so hard. Completely saps you. And I know Im a strong mug.

Now I know what a hooked fish feels like. Only we don't get razor sharp hooks rammed through our palms or guts and have to fight against that; we elect to play tug of war. But I can tell you I can see how a fish must feel.

Just recently, an ancient, 1000 pound hammerhead shark 14 feet long was caught off Florida, but died even though -- to the fishermen's credit -- he had intended to release him. The giant muscular beast died at the boat's edge, 100 years of life in the sea blown out for sport. (I've learned that many catch and release fish die because they are so exhausted. I can tell why now.)

The level of bursting body energy fighting the rope....

Now I understand how a fish feels.

March 13, 2008 | Houston, Texas | 11:12pm
Shadow World Thoughts

In Ghetto Plainsman, I write about the Shadow World, a place I go to when I have a passout, something that has been happening since I was very, very young after a head injury. I guess the Shadow World is just a step away from death. It's this world, but different. Green and alive; no noise. Except for the wind. Sometimes you can hear the wind, especially as you are rushing (or physically toiling, exhilaratingly) somehow across a great distance of landscape in a span of what seems at most hours, but the wind doesn't really sound in your ears, it sounds in your chest, like the animals' voices do. (They -- the animals -- seem to speak, but not with words. It just is, their speaking to you, and comes from their chests.)

Anyway, beneath the shattering chaos, cacophony and madness of the modern world, the deepest well of life still pulsates. I see so many broken people in this world. Guess I was one myself, but I recovered. The chaos, stress and madness of modern life is so extreme and loud that few people even touch the surface of that pulsating, quiet deep well beneath us. In the Will Smith movie I AM LEGEND, the other survivor, that woman from South America, tries to explain how and why she just knows she needs to head north to what used to be Vermont.

"Things are different now," she says. "It's quieter now. You can hear God."

Will can't understand what she means.

The original gift of life was -- and perhaps still is -- sacred. In silence. Still there. Still here. Just have to look so hard for it, beneath all our hatred, ugliness, chaos, war, evil, and destruction. Life being sacred, and birthed in silence and health, it should not have to be that the only way we can truly hear God and Earth again is for the human race to be annihilated, as the Will Smith movie proposes. Right now, nothing is sacred. And at Blockbusters all across America, nearly half the DVDs people rent for entertainment are torture-porn movies graphically showing young girls being brutalized, murdered, cut to pieces alive.

February 17, 2008 | Houston, Texas |3:13pm
Funny how I always expect people to be monsters

re Bob Ray's column about the book and the facts it reveals, and outing me, interesting that people are not hating and attacking me like I expected. Weird. Actually, people are saying he wrote a very powerful, spiritually uplifting column. And all the people who've contacted me acted real cool, in a real mature, supportive way, even tho nobody knew any of the details. Not what I expected. Funny how I automatically expect people to suddenly reveal seething evil and hate beneath their smiles. I've been thinking about this-- I automatically expect people to be monsters against which I have to perpetually and forever brace and prepare myself. Most of my life my whole world view has been that everybody is a real or potential threat, the world is a dangerous hostile place, and it is always guaranteed to shift for the worse at any moment. Of course this is not how I inhabit the world now, but I think subconsciously some of these expectations of people suddenly revealing a truly hateful, evil side are still there.

Even if my eyes are characteristically dry, let me tell you that it is ok to weep, even if, for you, like me, that weeping only comes on the inside, suddenly, at an unexpected moment, and if only for a moment, jerks up through your chest. Before I/we/you soldier on.

There's no moon out, it's very dark, about 2 degrees above zero, and I just came back from an after work couple-mile walk up a frozen dirt track out into the empty, silent, rolling prairie. Emptied prairie. Such wide open land, stretching to as far as you can see, but... The life shot; no fire next time.

Everybody knows the dark isn't really dark; you just have to get used to it. I am very used to disappearing into the dark. My feet plant themselves lightly into the ground, so only the closest animals (survivors who live in the dirt, may they stay blessed) will know of my passing.

The countless stars. Mass across the black sky.

I have walked this Earth for thousands and thousands of years beneath the hot sun or cold wind and the bright or dark sky, and still never a day or night is the same.

My exhaustion level is much recovered from the point it was a couple weeks ago.

I walked up and down the frozen grass hills beneath the sky of stars, alternately thinking about our work up here on the Rez, or the 'bout-to-go national Ecological Health Movement, or the silence and emptiness around me. Making my way up a larger hill, at the top I let my head fall back to stare up at the stars. Directly overhead they seemed to have exploded outward, like from a single giant star themselves, with billions of others faint like glowing yellow dust in the black behind.

Our slaughter of countless souls across the world. People and animals. Our tiny, stricken, beautiful planet. Hundreds if not thousands of years of not acting right; of defining ourselves by ignorant mindless violence. Our crushing, murderous behavior as if a fuck you to God and Earth's abundance and beauty. The damn shame of this ragged, emptied (dreams died in the bloody snow) Oglala prairie. Our emptiness.

January 23, 2008 | South Beach | Miami, Florida |1:39pm
Blackened Old Man and the Sea

There's this old dude sitting on an upturned milk crate on the beach not far from the water's edge, staring out to sea. He's got a big old wiry beard that's gone completely white, his hair is napped and knotted, and his skin long-ago permanently blackened by the sun. His old, gnarled body has no fat and looks hard like black tree limbs. His pants have slipped down a little and you can tell he's originally lighter-- one of those mixed yella mf's like me that blacken in the sun that nobody ever can figure out what the hell we are. Lot of folk like that on the spicy East Coast, particularly Miami, DC, Philly, and NYC. He could be 80 or 60, who the hell knows. After a life of being outside on the street, he prob dont even know. He's just staring out at the sea, toward Cuba; he's got this white plastic grocery bag with some shit in it next to him on the sand. I know how easily that could've been me. Huh-- wonder if it could still end up being me. I followed his gaze, looking out across the paradise-aqua-blue waters to Cuba invisible over the swelling horizon. Yesterday I swam strongly out to sea, just past the buoys where you're not supposed to go. For a moment, I wondered again, like I've always done in the ocean, especially off Texas, if I should swim out just a little more, then maybe a little more.... ?

January 19, 2008 | NASA Space Center | Houston, Texas | 2:32pm
My last day of being straight lol

Down here with my son Kaiden, and while the Space Center wasn't that interesting, but our guerilla skate on the back parking lots was. (Kaiden and me and our rollerblades have never seen a big open parking lot we didn't like.) Look at the space capsule they just tossed out back by an old shed.

Anyhow, Bob Ray Sander's big column about the book (and me) comes out tomorrow in the Sunday Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and on top of all the stress at work, i've felt like this last week was like being forced down a gangplank, or an impending serious trial. I've dreaded this moment my whole life, having for most of life hated and resisted the fact of my "orientation." All this time I've being able to keep it low. After tomorrow, everybody gon know my business, what I had to do to survive, and for me it is a public turning point I guess. Ugh. But I know if I'm gon keep it real, I gotta really keep it real, and that includes my vulnerabilities, not the cartoonish street thug version of keeping it real that so many put on. Which ain't to say I'm a punk, or ever will let anybody punk me regardless of whether I'm straight or not, but... Pretty stressed bout all this. Of course, my probs are nothing, and I am so blessed and lucky compared to so many other people, so I'll shut up now.

November 22, 2007 | Fort Worth, Texas | 2:24pm
Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving. I just got back from the gym. As I was walking home, I was thinking how sometimes people recoil when they hear I'm a vegan, and how some people cringe when they think about vegetarian foods. This has always struck me as so odd, because we enjoy foods that are clean, organic, natural, super-healthy, excellent tasting, and deeply satisfying. I guess they've never had veg soul food. In any case, flesh smells like flesh to me, whether it's human or animal. One time a few years back I was walking down my alley in Denver and as I was approaching a dumpster I immediately smelled it -- death. I have an excellent sense of smell. It was half a person, buried in the trash in there. Another block up, the rest of him was in another dumpster. Last year, long after I had moved back to Texas, my South Dakota Director came down for a Board meeting. She left a restaurant bag filled with barbecued meat leftovers under the desk, and a few days later I came back to the office and it was the same smell. Like somebody had died in there.

Peace and blessings to all.

p.s. (www.Tofurky.com) :)

September 11, 2007 | Fort Worth, Texas | 12:28pm
"Prairie dog killing contests are not only morally obscene, but science shows are devastating to the ecosystem"

Risk-disturbance overrides density dependence in a hunted colonial rodent, the black-tailed prairie dog Cynomys ludovicianus
By Jonathan N. Pauli and Steven W. Buskirk

This new study scientifically shows how prairie dog shooting events/killing contests leave the survivors in a severe state of trauma and dysfunction, where they lose body weight, don't come up above ground nearly as much anymore, pregnancies collapse etc. Of course the prairie dogs can't understand what the hell is happening when they see their family members just suddenly explode in a mist of blood and guts. And it suddenly makes the above-ground outside world, the loving Mother Earth blessed in sunlight and health, where they have raised their families for generations, where they have literally worshipped the Sun, a terrifying, inexplicable, extremely dangerous place. After a million years of being here, prairie dogs are comfortably interwoven into their roles in the ecosystem, and have learned how to deal with predators, but they have no comprehension of killing contests, where humans blow them up from far away with expensive high-powered rifles and shooting tables, etc, for "IVG" --"Instant Visual Gratification" and "Red Mist" sport.

September 6, 2007 | Fort Worth, Texas | 12:21am
"FACT CORRECTION re RECENT BOOK REVIEW"

Well with my book coming out this past Saturday, I guess my business is now 'in the street' and I'm just going to have to deal with it, being the extremely private person I am. If it helps wake people up to the urgent need to heal ourselves through healing the Earth -- to act now while there is still time -- it is all worth it.

But I must emphatically make a correction here, pertaining to an otherwise good review of Ghetto Plainsman that came out on Sept. 1 in Whole Life Times.

I greatly appreciate the compliments, but wow some facts in this review are wrong! I was not born and raised in the ghetto; I fell (deeply) down into it. As is very clear in the book, I actually had a very rural childhood, and ended up in the cities. And I did not have a crack addiction -- I smoked crack only once in my life.

In my lowest, I did try nearly every drug at one point or another, but doing drugs was just never my thing.

The addiction was alcohol aided by utter despair and a sense of everything hopeless and collapsing, both personally and in the world.

It is very important for me to have the facts straight.

In other news, publicist Marvin from Jade Dressler Communications in NYC and I had a good time at our first event, In the Life Atlanta, over Labor Day Weekend, where I was one of the featured authors at the Literary Cafe. The response was great. We met a lot of folk from all over the country who are dong great work, and we were all glad to know of each others' efforts to improve our tenancy here on Earth, from doctors fighting HIV/AIDS contagion in prison to women trying to help stem despair and violence in Detroit to artists, writers, singers from all over, and much more. We also of course sold books, and made a lot of friends. ATL is a great city, and Im looking forward to the book signing there that is being planned now for later this fall. Thanks to everybody who stopped by the booth in Piedmont Park on Sunday, and to all the organizers of ITL-ATL.

July 23, 2007 | Fort Worth, Texas | 6:29pm
"Do you know what it's like to bury a child?"

Every time I hear a child’s voice it strikes a fierce nerve – the need to protect. Being a father myself to a 9 year old, I know how much effort goes into raising a child and making sure he or she has the support and confidence needed to stand strong, be aware, and be well in this world.

Recently, over in Dallas, a 14-year old boy was shot in the neck and killed during an argument that got out of hand. It’s not an uncommon story. His mother, surrounded by the grieving family, told a reporter, “Do you know what it’s like to bury a child?”

I’ve been thinking about the intense bond between most parents and their children. For some, their children represent the high point of their lives. Knowing that there is no love like that between a good parent and a child, I’ve been thinking of all the children and young adults whose lives, both American and Iraqi, were mindlessly smeared out of existence by this Oil War in Iraq, or by all the environmental injustices by heedless industry that have ruined so many communities throughout the years. I’ve watched the wracking grief of parents who’ve lost their children, nearly indescribable in its pain. Trying to comprehend all this death and grief repeating itself over and over and over again, the mind short-circuits.

I don’t understand the behavior of some people in power, when they have kids and breathe air and drink water like the rest of us. How can they view other children as disposable?

Check out Tammy Cromer-Campbell’s new photographic essay book, Fruit of the Orchard: Environmental Justice in East Texas, chronicling the compromised lives and ruined bodies of a local, predominantly black community of Winona, TX by a company – called “American Ecology” (!) – who viewed people as disposable. All to make a buck.

In her book, Ms. Cromer-Campbell writes: “Winona children suffer numerous health problems: birth defects, rare tumors and cancers, stunted growth, brain and liver damage, kidney malfunction and failure, skin discolorations, immune deficiencies, and chromosomal abnormalities (genetic mutations). Most residents attribute many unexplained illnesses and some deaths to the American Ecology facility.”

We need to build a new society based on personal power and protection of the health and natural world for everybody. How much longer are we going to just stand by?

Tornado sirens all goin off now.... rain blowing horizontally about 60 -- 70 mph... just whipping down the street in great waves... thunder cracking over head, trees all bent over... lightning flashing...

I'm sitting just inside the open front porch door in this old two story house turned daycare turned GPRC headquarters... and it just occurred to me that if the tornado comes this way, I really have no where to go. There are no ditches out front.

Maybe I will crawl in with the water heater at the center of the building?

Ok... the closest siren just came on, its wailing sound waves seeming to roll toward me over the city like... well waves, because of the gusting, driving wind and rain...

Maybe I should close this laptop... I'm imagining when this city used to just be wide open tallgrass prairie...

Can't beat spring in Texas!

It's occurred to me that out here in Flyover Country, even in 2007, we're still mythologized by our weather and landscape. One example: tornadoes both thrill and terrify folk-- at the same time.

This wild-caught Gulf Coast Spiny Softshell turtle was kept inside an aquarium in the Visitor's Center of Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge in far South Texas. She spent her days and nights clawing and pushing against the tank's glass wall, trying to get out, clearly exhibiting signs of zoochosis, which is a mental illness that often sets into confined animals who are driven mad by captivity. (Zoochosis manifests itself by nervous pacing, endless, mindless pushing against the walls, deep depression, head rocking, and sometimes even self-mutilation. Polar bears are especially noted for this.) After insistent conversations with Refuge staff, especially Jody Mays, who is official Wildlife Biologist for Laguna Atascosa, upon my return home I received word a few weeks later that the Spiny Softshell was allowed to return to her native habitat and live out the rest of her life in the wild as fate, God and the turtle herself will have it. We should all thank Ms. Mays < EMAIL > for consideration of this turtle's perspective. While the big picture is always most important, saving great swaths of native habitat for as many animals as possible, it's ok to care about the individual too, especially when there is something so specific we can do to ease another's pain. Our lives are not just for ourselves.

What you can do:
Make sure that National Wildlife Refuges are just that -- refuges for wildlife. National Wildlife Refuges are places for people to ethically experience native wildlife on wildlife's own terms, in the wild, in their own native habitats. If you see native wildlife being exhibited in captivity in a visitor center, ask why, and ask for their return to the wild. Often you will get defensive protests from staff, but if you dig deeper, most of their arguments do not hold water. NWR's are supposed to be refuges, not zoos. It's ok to speak up!! One person's actions can make a huge positive difference in another's life.

For more info on Laguna Atascosa click here
This 46,000 acre Refuge of remnant coastal prairie, ocelot thorn scrub, tidal flats, lomas and lagoons is one of my favorite places in the world.