Terraforming refers to the theoretical ability to reach an unpopulated planet and change it so that it's like Earth -- at least what we think Earth is like, which depends on where you're from: the Amazon or the Sahara. But humans on a space ship are likely to insist on a planet that is uniform and like what they know, which is mechanical and technical. No one thinks of "terriforming" the crew to fit the planet. But given a bit of time, the space ship will redesign the crew to fit its own design.
DNA is not a bar code. Bar codes arise from a mercantile set of mind which values inventory and sales prices more than life itself, which is always changing. Control freak humans would rather change the world than change themselves, even grow. They often operate on the basis of "brands," packaging, sources, profit, treating abstract concepts as though they were "realities." Even more problematic, they constantly recreate what they escaped in the past, even though they didn't like it in the first place. People move to the SW to escape hay fever, and then plant the very same growth that makes them sneeze.
Our policies at the Mexican border -- separating children from families, trying toddlers in court for the crime of being in the wrong place, "adopting" brown children, and holding people in concentration camps -- are creating a tomorrow of relentless hatred and disruption. Christianity has been guilty of insisting on conformity, the same uniformity, when we know that humans and other living things are infinitely various on many levels as documented by "omics," meaning all the intricate networks of reciprocating relationships that are active in a body, not just the genome and epigenome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_omics_topics_in_biology
At the same time, the behavior of long-time politicians has taken inexplicable and contradictory turns -- documented by video as never possible before -- so impossible to account for that people even doubt bribes and threats explain the reversal, instead beginning to suggest the equivalent of something in the water, drugging or infecting.
The following links are to life-preserving forces among people. They are alive, growing and effective. But we don't see much about them on Twitter. Yet they are becoming the equivalent of "religion" with various institutions and networks. People talk about "the Green New Deal." That's only part of it. To quote Ausubel's speech: "Instead what’s rising up is the return of the repressed. Everyone who has been othered, marginalized and deleted. The poor. Working people. Women. People of color. Indigenous Peoples. Immigrants. LGBTQ people. Young people. The last shall be first after all." The whole planet will flip. We hope.
Following is a series of links to people who are terriforming the way humans participate in the earth because they are part of it. They say "caretaking" but that's not quite right. They are joining it, part of it, being in it and therefore being changed as much as changing. (I include the whole address in case the link gets broken somehow.)
When Alcatraz was occupied, Vicki Santana, Blackfeet early lawyer, was there. Saturday, November 23, 2019
My own progression has not been through commitment to one community of humans, though there are several specific groups that I've been part of and have been part of me. Some tried to claim me as theirs alone but my drive has been down deep through all groups to the bedrock, the existential level that underlies all human life and even on through the bedrock. I've said geology is next to theology. There is no god. There is a planet and the surface on which we live plus its molten heart. I see them as holy.
This last link is to Terry Tempest Williams and it is an essay rather than a video talk, which is fitting because it's about a writing class. Wyoming is a little tougher than Montana, arguably, but this is closer to the way I'm thinking. I work alone; I don't leave the house. My experience now is mostly secondhand and remembered. I say, "I alone escaped to tell you."
These people are demonstrating another thing I say sometimes: "Witness and testify." In this case it is the Pronghorns who must witness, even as they stand dying, caught in barbed wire. It is the writers who must testify about what it's like to terrorform Earth into a murdering pit for the sake of profit. I'll end this a bit short. Go read this essay. And at the Winter Equinox, listen to the Paul Winter Consort in the Cathedral of St.John the Divine (PBS if you can't travel there), and think of the Council of the Pronghorn.
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