http://www.nbjc.org/news/sharon-j-lettman-named.html

Thought you might be interested in the following news item: It’s the first time a straight ally has been named to their E.D. position. Congratulations to both Ms. Lettman and the NBJC. Proud of the professionalism and effectiveness of this organization as they work further to build bridges in families and communities across the country.

New interview with Mandrake Society Internet Radio. A follow up from last year, focusing on GPRC especially and our ecological projects and how they mean for people in this time period we’re living in.

http://www.mandrakesocietyradio.com/2009/09/15/podcast-interview-with-jarid-manos-and-earl-fowlkes/

EXCERPT:

In the first half of the show, I’m speaking withJarid Manos, founder and CEO of Great Plains Restoration Council (GPRC). GPRC has been on the forefront of the ecological health movement and Jarid explains the new opportunities for the group as they celebrate ten years of their work. From his Ft. Worth offices, we also talked about their recently endorsed work of saving the native plants and animal life of Prairie Park. My first conversation with Jarid Manos was about his book, Ghetto Plainsman. Now in it’s second printing, he also talks about the book tour to support this provocative true story.

Good dance music..  Great dancing…   Dammit — here it is after midnight on Saturday night, I’ve gotta drive down to Houston in a few hours, I’m up trying to learn as much as I can about the impending (world doom) http://www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20090207-19369.html
melting of Arctic permafrost worldwide, which would more than double the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere, http://www.terranature.org/methaneSiberia.htm what’s the conversion rate of methane to carbon, and exactly how much is a goddamn gigaton of carbon anyway, and how much carbon could a couple million acres of new prairie restoration offset…  provided we could get the new jobs and work funded…

…And somehow I stumble across the video of Madonna’s new single, Celebration, one of two new tracks on her upcoming Greatest Hits CD.

It just hit me — dammit I miss the dance — just the body and soul disappearance into hours of movement, beats, and rhythm.

Funny to even remember that I was one of the paid dancers at an official release party for Madonna’s Vogue album…  Of course they always had us dance with our shirts off. Raw, tribal, athletic dance.

Back in the early 90s, global warming was still something in the future.

Aaiight– lemme get back to The Struggle…

Texas hot… North Texas hot… Mid-summer Texas prairie heat. Hotter than Houston. Weeks on end of 100+ degree temps… 102, 104, 106 degrees. Barely a cloud in the sky. Cyclical summer drought; searing skies without a drop of rain. At 725 feet, Fort Worth is low enough and central-east enough on the Great Plains to still hold some humidity, which makes all the difference, compared with the higher and drier and seemingly cooler Western Plains.

Read in the paper that it was in the 60’s in places like Detroit and Cleveland this weekend. Right now I cannot imagine 60 degree weather. Here, it’s above 80 when the Sun comes up. Here, people fight for rare, scrawny shade tree parking spaces. And I like heat, so if I’m saying something, it’s hhhot.

Been a long slog of a summer, days and weeks on end of work at GPRC as we catch up on a crucial body of work that we’d expected done from an associate but found out otherwise. I also have to finish the second edition edits and new epilogue for my book. Very soon.

Great lengths of solitude and endless work, broken only by interface with my core executive team and our youth. Little else. Weeks of sleep deprivation. Brain cells smoking. Still single. My son has been gone to Colorado only since July 4 but it feels like forever. It’s hhhhot.

I’m not complainin, just communicating. Right now I dream of ice-cold watermelon and a friendly smile.

For those who know my past, you know my faith in people is still relatively new, and has always been a little tenuous. Lately it feels a little shaky again.

Weak, flaky people drive me crazy. I don’t even go to church, but I know what the Bible says about ‘girding your loins”. I’d like to see a little more stamina, selflessness, skill and strategy and less inadequacy in Our Time of Great Struggle. Ask Jane Goodall. Or ask Nelson Mandela. That old mf spent 27 years in prison before he even really got started.

The Sun is my father, the Eye of God. Normally I seek out his blaze, to twist out my bones and purify my soul. But even I have sought relief from the constant glare this summer.

In times like these, I inadvertently pull back from people. This afternoon, after the gym I decided to run along the Clear Fork of the Trinity River. Stupidly I forgot my running shoes, so I just walked. The winds picked up, a few clouds rolled in and began condensing, and by the time I got to the little pecan grove a singular thundercloud was boiling above my head like a pristine atomic blast. I caught sight of movement way up there, past the roiling lip of white, black and grey clouds sliding over the bright blue. A vulture, a tiny black scythe, was slicing in and over the storm lip, buffeted by winds, like he was more than curious.  Having fun. God pulled the shade, and down here it suddenly seemed ten degrees cooler.

On my way back, the thunder began rumbling. A few bolts of lightning flashed electric white with that purple edge. Beyond the storm cloud the sky was bluebird clear, but we were in shadow. My eyelids grew heavy as if a giant hand had palmed them closed. The wind offered something, then left and it was calm. I would love to get struck by lightning, when it’s my time. Ride it all the way up and out.

I opened my eyes. About 30 feet away, a fine black woman with her hair pulled back was walking in the direction I’d come, her basset hound on a leash. You know how black recognizes fam and, even at that distance, heads helplessly catch; you’ve never seen each other but you suddenly have a momentary conversation like you’ve been knowing each other all your lives.

“I saw the thunder and lightning, but I still had to come,” she said, smiling beautifully. White teeth.

“Isn’t it nice?” I asked, forgetting my ‘always-cool and reserved’ and unconsciously praising my palms to the sky.  I smiled broadly back.

“It sure is,” she said, helplessly raising her arms a little too.

“Okay, well you have a blessed day,” we both said, passing out of each other’s lives forever.

Sometimes I think I owe my life to all the random black women in the world who have lifted me up in moments when I needed it most, as if I were grandson, son, future husband, brother, cousin, friend.

In my car, I opened the windows and the sunroof as I drove off. The thundercloud only dropped three big drops of rain; they landed on my windshield like liquid cats then quickly scrambled off.

OK… we’ve all had a stressful day — it’s a stressful life (but we’re still blessed).   So, anybody wan hear an Orangutan laugh?  Click here:
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/Components/audio/2009/2009-june/090604-orangutan-laughter.wma

Here’s a picture of a bebe orangutan being tickled when they did a study to chart animal laughter .   hey– after Tiananmen Square, we need some humor

For mo’ on this story, see MSNBC’s great “Cosmic Log” latest entry: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/06/04/1953175.aspx

p.s. dont let palm oil plantations destroy what’s left of their Indonesian rainforest home! www.ran.org (Sorry– couldn’t  resist getting in a lil activation   I don’t know why I love orangutans so much. Poor lil ugly dudes just want to live peacefully in wild Indonesia– a beautiful tropical forest nation of islands I will never get anywhere near.

Well it’s already June 4th in China, and I just watched a CNN report that the Chinese government has completely shut down Twitter, YouTube and other Internet sites, and is blocking CNN reporters from filming the square where thousands of unarmed students were slaughtered on June 4th, 1989 as the military rolled in to crush the democracy demonstrators. It’s just a few minutes into June 4th here in Texas, just past midnight. Dont know if I’ll be able to sleep. Back in ‘89 I was on the streets of NYC, one step from homelessness, just barely hanging on. In the six weeks of protests before the slaughter, I remember reading the newspapers left on the park benches, and the Newsday flasher in Times Square where the news screamed around the building.  At first there was a sense of possibility with all the students converging there in central Beijing, tens of thousands growing into hundreds of thousands, then a million, and then… there was a sense of something terrible about to happen — this coming 2 months after the catastrophic Exxon Valdez oil spill .. It felt like such a dark time.

Here’s a recap of the timeline:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/03/tiananmen-square-protests

What’s really unnerving is how completely the Chinese populace has been kept in the dark over this, especially young people. Few know what really happened. But even more disturbing is how placated people have become with material things, so much so that they don’t even want to know. (This desire to not know sounds disturbingly familiar.) They know something terrible happened, but as long as they’ve got enough sneakers and trendy clothes and iPods, they’re cool, even if they lost their opportunity to participate in the course of their future. And those who’ve tried to speak up about it are jailed, some for years.

By the way, I love my iPod, and I am thankful for the imperfect democracy we have here in the United States, but I also know — and am saddened — that legions of people right here in this country are, by their own determined ignorance, willing accomplices to their own victimization — regarding their own personal health, or that of Planet Earth which sustains all life.

Photos from The Huffington Post

Just saw the new Terminator movie with my friend and photographer Jarriel Jones. Watching that unrelenting army of monstrous machines out to destroy all human life with such overwhelming firepower and cold, crushing calculation, I couldn’t help thinking that is exactly what we’ve done to the animals — in fact all other life — of this planet.  Sigh– just wanted go see something mindless and escapist, and found a gut-clenching allegory instead. Over this lifetime I’ve really come to love people and believe in the human race, and we can’t let ourselves be defined like the monsters we’ve been to the rest of creation.

“What I feel being a human being is it’s just having the freedom to be yourself Not caring what other people think Just having that freedom to be you”

– Brandy

Video for “Right Here (Departed)” (in case you ain’t seen it yet — is deep). And beautiful– like herself. (Yeah = this mug’s a long time fan of Brandy.)

CLICK HERE TO SEE BRANDY’S VIDEO

Glad to see Van Jones, of Green for All, as one of the primary panelists on this past weekend’s State of the Black Union 2009, Afternoon Session, held at the Los Angeles Convention Center.  Watch it on C-SPAN here. http://tinyurl.com/bhot2f

Van, from Oakland-based Green for All, who is author of the NY Times Bestseller THE GREEN COLLAR ECONOMY, has been at the top in calling for green jobs to lift people, especially people of color, out of poverty while addressing environmental issues.  Unfortunately,all this excellent clamor for rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure is still ignoring the need to rebuild the nation’s devastated natural infrastructure.

How about Green for All Life….  If we can now just breathe into place the major missing component of the emerging Green Collar Economy, the creation of green jobs in wildlands restoration, the Green Economy will be complete. This is Ecological Heath– healing ourselves through healing the Earth.

Great Plains Restoration Council seems to be the only one calling this, and we are already demonstrating it in our project areas.  www.gprc.org We need to become a nation of workers again, only this time building up life, not tearing it down.

First Week of February, 2009

Ridin Miami citybus thru steaming Afropuffd toenail-painted bigbootytightjeans female-n-tanktopped men slinging streets like an Angie Stone vid

Well that was the first night I got there. Man I love Miami– one of the few places I can disappear into to get some intensive writing done. Course it got cold and blustery after the first night,  but I love it any way, and it could be my secret second city if I had the dollars and hadn’t just told you.  The gritty, comfortable streets and the aqua Caribe sea and South Beach tropical life all blended into one. I went to view the Everglades restoration with my friends from Operation Green Leaves, http://www.oglhaiti.com/, which is based in Miami and helps Haiti replant its devastated hillsides but also, along with a couple other orgs, helps local inner city Miami youth experience the South Florida Everglades wilderness. I also helped participate in a planning session at National Park HQs for the upcoming March for Parks which, considering the recent terrible AK-47 slaughter of innocent young people (2 teenagers killed, 7 wounded) on the corner in Liberty City (a neighborhood of Miami) while they were playing a game of street dice http://www.miamiherald.com/460/story/871201.html is def going to be welcome for all who get to come. http://www.npca.org/take_action/upcoming_events/march-for-parks.html

To experience such sweeping expanses of wilderness sawgrass prairie makes our hearts hurt out here in the Great Plains, where we’re left holding on for dear life to tiny patches of our native prairies and plains. South Florida is putting Texas to shame as far as ecological protection. Everglades National Park alone is 1.5 million acres, and that doesn’t even include Big Cypress. And now the State of Florida is working at purchasing 187,000 acres of U.S. Sugar-owned land for restoration north of the Park and south of Lake Okeechobee.

Also, right after the Cuban Missile Crisis, a secret missile base was installed deep inside the Everglades, and the Park Service gave us a private tour. All around the base is 6,000 acres of former farmland that has been restored to native habitat very successfully.

View more pics in the the stand-alone slide show we’ve created in the panel to the right.

While in Miami, I also (finally) read Toni Morrison’s BELOVED, and I read it deeply and thoroughly, word by word. I think it is one of the best books in American literature. Raw, pungent, nature soaked humanity — the story of people on the land is the American Story, and Toni Morrison perfected it. I’m gon do a lil youtube vid about this.

Happy 2009

What’s up Everybody.

I hope this finds you blessed and well, and that your 2009 (can you believe the sound of that?) allows you nothing but the most satisfying, healthy life. I also hope you are ready to get involved in your new life of service. That’s right, it’s 2009 and you need to make ‘09 what it needs to be – healthy, vital, lithe, lean, mean and green — that is you in 2009 – because by visiting this page you are on your way to becoming a SAMURAI and a samurai is one who serves, and our world is in so much trouble and we are in so much danger that we all need to do whatever we can.  How’s that for an extended sentence. But you can still have the most exhilarating life by getting healthy and giving back!

The good news is that I’ve never seen people so activated, and I’ve been in the struggle one way or another for a long time. I see people ready to work, get involved. Produce tangible change by our own minds and hands. What we have to do is get ourselves energized through specific action leading to measurable results. Specific steps with achieved benchmarks reaching larger and larger goals. Resist polluters and planetary destroyers, specifically work on healing ecosystems, our bodies, our waters, our relationships, ourselves, work diligently and with great care with children, allowing them the Socratic method of self-discovery which unlocks their creative, incisive potential.

Every truly beneficial action you take is a breath into the next 5,000 years. I simply refuse to believe that we are a nation of millions that’s just happily and sloppily waving as we go over the cliff, taking the whole Earth down with us.

20 years ago, it was “It takes a nation of millions to hold us back.”  Now, it’s gotta be: “It takes a nation of millions to move us forward!”

OK — we can talk more about the movement stuff later.

My 2008 was  a lil rough. But I aint complainin, because of course I could be in Gaza or Darfur or any of a thousand hells, so I know I’m blessed. But I had my (still a little new) faith shaken in people — can you believe I let a few “false prophets” come into my life where I must’ve been sleep for real and I trusted them, only for them to try to wreak damage. And I am the last person who is naive, so I don’t know what happened.  I remember the past life where I used to trust no one — can’t go back to that now. Gon work on this.

Anyways — Happy New Year ( yeah I know it;s a little late but you know .. non-profit mugs are BUSY!)  Stay tuned for a lot more activity and interaction in 09! We’re gearing up for some big advancements forward.

PEACE

P.S. I got a question: Why are most dudes crazy?  It’s funny — I was once the most wretched, messed up, self-destructive person, but now Im just a regular, well-adjusted dude. All I do is work hard and work out and take care of my son and his ma. Why is it so hard to find somebody who ain’t crazy — esp when they ain’t seen half the shit I have.  Hey I’m just askin.

One clue came when the scientists saw a tarsier open its mouth in the wild. “It looked like it might be vocalizing, but I couldn’t hear anything,” Gursky-Doyen said. She speculated that the creature might have been calling in frequencies that couldn’t be heard by humans, but were well-suited to cut through the cacophony of forest rainfall.

Given that millions of acres of Indonesian primeval forest are being bulldozed, destroyed and burned down to the ground and converted into palm oil plantations for “biofuel,” (thereby making Indonesia the third worst carbon polluter after the U.S. and China), while driving the orangutan and the Indonesian forest primeval toward extinction (so much killing of life, as every square foot of forest they attack is filled with living animals) the similarity between this pygmy tarsier, the Kodama and the breathtaking filmPrincess Mononoke — one of the best films ever made — is more than a little haunting.

Watch Princess Mononoke on DVD when you get the chance.