Maybe we should ask—maybe we should change that social norm of detached politeness and learn to care for each other better. We are taught to ignore our  intuition, our base knowledge about the truth of what we observe and see and feel around us. We are taught to mind our own business. I’m not convinced that’s working for us as a society. I’m not convinced of that anymore. 

I think we need each other. I think when times are hard, when times are good and grand, and when someone is struggling--we need to not forsake each other. We need to not mind our own business. We need, instead, to ask “are you ok, man-- really. Are you ok--It seems to me you are not ok. What can I do?“ 

We lost Michigan Mike this week, and so many others, so many other weeks. Maybe it’s just someone’s time to go. Maybe there’s nothing anyone can do. Maybe life really is just too much, or too cruel, or not the right thing for some people. But maybe not. Maybe we all, the living, the not suicidal, maybe if we had just taken some time, maybe we could have saved them, some of them. Maybe life could have turned around. …Maybe not. But I think we should try. I think we should all be ok with trying a little harder. Inserting ourselves into someone’s life a little better. 

Some people are sweet and kind and gentle, too gentle for this nastiness. For this hard cruel life. But we are civilized now. We humans…have come so far. Life is still hard and cruel, but as a community, as humans who are doing ok, perhaps we should do a little better for those who aren’t… Perhaps we could start asking, and really mean it: “Are you ok?” 

I find funerals to be extraordinary. Like a really good yoga class – on steroids. And acid. Death is commanding. Captivating. Shedding the layers of culture, of epoch, of fashion. Of time, and appointments that no longer need to be met. You become human, when a loved one dies. Just a simple human being, full of love and loss. You become part of the mourning family of friends. History surfaces. The stories of the Angel’s life, the fire that burned, are shared. The puzzle pieces begin to join as the people who cared come together. As they mourn together.  As they remember because it is the duty of the living, the compulsion of the living, to remember. 

I lived through the Information Age. Make no mistake, we are now living in the post Post-Information Age, and it's not pretty.

The Information Age began more or less with the printing press, and took root  as wealth and our ability to share information globally grew and as television provided nonstop news and documentary, and then skyrocketed to its Apex as the Internet became a way of life across the world. The Information Age has finally ended with the outright assault on Democracy and free speech, the re-consolidation of power in the very few, the Corporate coup of the United States government, and the overwhelming denial  of scientific validity on all fronts of power and societal organization. 

Humans finally had something to do with their big unwieldy brains. They had access to information with which to fill them and occupy their thoughts. The epoch search for truth and light and understanding and expertise was within reach. It was first and foremost the Democratization of information, and then the widespread dissemination of information that created the Information Age - That, and the natural human instinct to learn ever more. The masses could learn things for themselves. Doctors were held to a higher standard because patients came in prepared with information. Professors had competition. Traditional news outlets were no longer the only eyes and ears of the world.  

The bar - could have been raised. But instead, the frenzy for real knowledge is over. The major traditional news outlets began providing embedded, dumbed down news like substances, just like the big food companies now only provide toxic, dumbed down food like substances that make it hard for people to think clearly. They rebuffed any semblance of investigative, in depth, thoughtful, thought provoking reporting and instead started publishing corporate-government propaganda. Instead of hard hitting reporting, they touted only patriotism - allegiance to the corporate coup. 

On other fronts, a book burning resurgence became the knew anti-knowledge frenzy with the Bible again reigning Supreme. The Internet came under attack and the powerful elite decided that it should no longer be Free or Democratic, that rather, the people should not have open access to the information contained there. Corporations began paying people to spew vitriolic hatred towards anyone who sought knowledge (the liberal educated class, climate scientists, the EPA). The Feudal Lords and the Serfs have resurfaced. The New American Serf does not seek knowledge or enlightenment but only wants a wealthy Lord to give him a job. The Serf will then claim total allegiance to the Corporate Lord and through religious training has been conditioned to not question authority. This is the new America and the new American. 

The Entrepreneurial Class, the Investigative Class, the Intellectual Class, the Eco Class that hopes we will become smart enough to stop poisoning and destroying the Planet, are not counted in government job creation strategies that favor welfare for the Corporate Feudal Lords instead. The Corporate-Government takes our taxes and gives them right back to the big guns. That - is Feudalism. 

The class that still seeks information and rightness and self-made freedom is poo-pooed, is vilified, is hated in America now. Because this is the class that questions, that does not fall into line, but that actually holds the hope for a future where corporations don't control the government, the water supplies, the jobs, the environment, the educational institutions, the Internet. 

The assault on the Information Age is pathetic. It ignores that we are all in this together and that all humans have inherent dignity, a right to small business and a right to a clean environment. We are falling into a Post-Information Age Dark Ages, and given the massiveness of the power structure making it happen, this one will be a lot harder to come out of. 

Read More on the New Dark Age:
The American Thinker, Is a New Dark Age at Hand?

Whatever one may think about the issue of burning coal, extending Xcel's Franchise Agreement with the City of Boulder, or about climate change and Xcel's level of contribution to it, one thing we should all easily be able to agree on, is that Sunflowers are good. 

Not only are they incredibly beautiful, they also grow quite well in sunny Colorado. More importantly, the roots prevent erosion and the seeds of sunflowers provide much needed food for bird populations throughout the cold fall and winter. Bird populations around the country are crashing because humans are destroying their food sources, their habitat, creating air pollution, and interfering with their mating rituals. One good thing that we as citizens and as gardeners of planet earth can do, is plant flowers, let them go to seed and leave them standing all winter long. We can all learn to be amazed at the level of habitat we can provide simply by planting a few sunflowers - and giving those rich and nutritious seeds to the birds. Sunflowers also readily reseed themselves creating even more food for the following year. 

This is why I am so dismayed that the Sunflowers recently planted at the Valmont Plant by well meaning citizens, have been cut down! I cannot imagine the level of absurd ruthlessness one must feel in order to bring oneself to cut down sunflowers in a barren wind blown place where nothing else is growing. Xcel wants us to believe that they have decent intentions in their negotiations with Boulder, but this ridiculous act of cutting down sunflowers makes that claim ever more difficult to swallow. 

Sincerely,
//Liz

(Yesterday's Letter to the Editor - Daily Camera, Boulder, CO)

I attended a workshop recently and the conversation arose about sexist jokes. Through this conversation, I learned that people sometimes say to their friends (or soon to be ex-friends) that they are not ok with sexist jokes. With belittling women - or men- as the case may be, in that sort of stereotypically violent way that insensitive jokes so often do. 

Don't get me wrong. I'm ok with jokes. I'm ok with terribly offensive jokes - as long as they come from a place of, well, joking. A place of love. A place that is far higher that the banality of the joke. When the banality of the joke is funny because it touches on some societal soft spot, I find it to be - funny. It is funny because it is being told by someone who actually understands the depth of the soft spot. Who uses the joke, to get at the truth.

When, on the other hand, the joke is told by an actual racist or an actual sexist, all of a sudden, it's not funny. Most of my friends are pretty smart, enlightened, loving, and so I can fully appreciate many of their disgusting jokes. 

I learned though that you can actually tell someone that certain types of jokes are not ok with you. That you do not want certain types of jokes (perhaps told by certain types of people) to be told around you. 

I appreciate that, and this weekend it dawned on me - There is another category of terribly offensive jokes. This category is SO terribly offensive to me that I think I will begin to tell people that I am just not ok with these types of jokes (unless of course, from people who get it, and are actually making a joke).

I'm talking about nature jokes. Ecosystem Jokes. Jokes about how if someone pays their taxes they have every right to destroy whatever they want to destroy. As if paying taxes is a blank check to be an asshole and ruin the planet for everyone else. 

I find this we are better than nature, we have the right to control and torture anything we want because we are human type of thinking to be so horrendously offensive that I can no longer tolerate joking about it. It's not funny. It is causing ALL of the suffering in the world. And it is going to cause the destruction of any hope for health and happiness in the world. To me, that's just not a joking matter, and I think the small minded people who are so myopic that this is actually how they see things, need to be confronted about it. 

Is putting an end to eco-jokes by the small minded, the next political correct hot button? I sure hope so - I know how much certain people hate the whole PC thing...

I just celebrated my 38th birthday. I enter the next year with some sadness as I look around at the world and the culture that I live in. I remember learning when I was young, about how that evil German was a master of propaganda - how he somehow used it to win over the people. As a child, I remember thinking, "How could the people be so stupid - so duped?" But when I look around at my own culture, or the dominant one that I live in the midst of, I see that we are just as duped and perhaps even more stupid. 

We live in a time where the rug has been pulled out from under everyone, and everyone is scraping and scrapping to survive, but without really knowing how anymore. So we look to the big corporations, because they are rich and must be smart, and must have solutions. They tell us they have solutions and we believe them. 

But they don't have solutions. What they are doing is taking our money and making us sick. They feed us food that makes us sick. They drain our rivers and make the rivers sick. They mine the fossils fuels and then pump them into the air. That also makes us and the planet sicker. Sicker. Ever-sicker. 

We environmentalists, sustainability activists, agrarian revolutionaries, want everybody to wake up and to see the destruction, but as I go through one more year around the sun, I notice that my fellow Americans have ceased even trying to rid their own bodies of sickness. Diabetes caused by eating poisonous, non-nutritious junk food, continues to sky rocket. Everybody walks around with headaches, throat aches, allergies and all kinds of other food and polluted environment-caused maladies. And they don't even try to change a damn thing about how they take care of themselves. 

We have gotten used to sickness, and Americans no longer even try to get better, to save themselves. How can we expect them to even consider making the planet less sick? 

The definition of sustainability is not something that is agreed upon really by anyone in the professional sphere. The Backyard Agrarian idea of sustainability has to do not with stasis, setting things up to simply remain the same, or in balance. Rather, in this overwhelmingly sick and declining planet, sustainability, requires implementation of the concept of rejuvenation. Sustainability requires that we rejuvenate ecosystems or create the conditions so that natural systems can become rejuvenated, not that we simply decrease our level of destruction.

It's the same with the human body. If eating too much junk food is making you sick and obese, it is not enough to simply reduce the amount of junk food you eat. You will remain sick and malnourished. Rather a sick person needs to rejuvenate himself, feed himself good food, create the conditions for health in order to rejuvenate the body, in order to get better.

They What makes me sad as I enter a new year of life, is that I look around and I see the people I share the planet with, and they are not even trying to make themselves not sick. They just eat the junk, and use the poisons and live as sick people for their whole lives. People have bought the propaganda, and believe that the things that have made them sick are the things that will make them cool, or even cure them. Because they have bought the propaganda they do not see clearly, they do not seek truth, and they revere the propaganda providers.  

The thing that makes me sad is that if people are so deluded about their own health, I truly fear there may be no hope for saving this planet and for ensuring that the possibility even exists for any of us to live happy, healthy lives. 

The onward march continues. 

Living in a society that insists on progress towards mass suicide is, to say the least, disconcerting. We insist on subsidizing a food system that produces poisonous food that gives everybody diabetes. We subsidize the farmers that grow that "corn" through financial handouts and through even more insidious means like building ever-more dams to provide the water that is spewed randomly into the air to water the junk food crops. 

People cry personal choice, but the truth is that my right to personal choice is vastly undermined as the government agencies continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on building dams, diverting water from already impoverished rivers, just so that junk food farmers can use whatever irresponsible watering practices they want. 

In the midst of the budget crisis, a sane culture would question the funding of practices that continue to kill the ecosystems upon which all life and culture depend.

Rivers are the veins of planet earth and we Americans are like heroin addicts continuously pumping poisons into them and then draining them dry. We are killing the flood plains, the bugs, the lizards, the birds,  the tadpoles, the fish, the cottonwoods... and then we wonder why despite all the money we spend, why we all feel so disconnected, so depressed, so lecherous. 

We need to stop marching in step behind the Army Corp of Engineers, Denver Water, Big Ag and City Planners and Big Box Developers and we need to stop the tourniqueting of our precious rivers. 

Join the facebook community action against the expansion of Gross Dam and help rethink our water use strategies. 

Having been out of the professional gardening world for around a year, and having just taken a walk through my wild forest garden, bursting with hidden flowers, many of them edible, I notice that my garden aesthetic is entirely, unshakably changed - for the better. There is a Landscape Imperative, and in this dying world, we gardeners have to meet it. 

Perhaps in a different world, in a less civilized world, in a less industrial world, a different kind of garden, a more tamed, more contrived garden would be appropriate. Would be exciting. Would be acceptable. But in a world where wilderness is sparse and under attack, where the planet is calling out for us to help it so it doesn't die, where it is easy not to notice or nurture  the workings of the natural systems, a Wild Garden, is how we begin to meet the Landscape Imperative, and it is far more delightful - than yet another cookie cutter landscape.