Restoring the Soil, Restoring Ourselves: Yoshikazu Kawaguchi

Great photography and content about Yoshikazu Kawaguchi 

at filmmaker and photographer Patrick M. Lyndon's website. 

 Lyndon's and Suhee Kang's film, Final Straw, 

explores natural farming in Korea, Japan, and the U.S.

Ted Taylor's beautiful essay at KJ, "Even in 'Just Enough' There is Abundance," follows farmer Yoshikazu Kawaguchi's return to traditional organic farming and the development of his natural philosophy:

In fact, all life in the natural world is lived, as demonstrated in the interrelationship of all living things. Plants cannot exist without animals, and vice-versa. If there is good harmony between the organisms, plants, and animals, the cycle of life continues. As a farmer, Kawaguchi's role is simply to nurture this natural order, by cutting the weeds back just enough so that new rice shoots can grow, but later her allows the weeds to grow along with the rice in harmony. This leads to wholeness, with everything living together.

Final Straw, an upcoming documentary by Patrick M. Lyndon and Suhee Kang, also explores Kawaguchi's world  (and that of Seonghyun Choi and other natural farmers in Japan and Korea):

Environmental artist duo Patrick Lydon and Suhee Kang... are now in the final post-production stage for the Final Straw documentary. Due for initial screening in Spring of 2014, Final Straw is a cinematic exploration of Japanese natural farming, and a philosophical ride through the minds of amazing individuals who offer simple solutions to modern issues of sustainability, both on the farm and in the city. The film interacts with a cast of office workers, chefs, musicians, and farmers alike, all of who are students of the late Japanese farmer/philosopher, Masanobu Fukuoka.

It all started on a small mist-covered mountain farm in South Korea, and continued to include over 20 natural farmers in East Asia and the USA. The Final Straw is a story about food, life, and philosophy from individuals who have a great deal of delicious secrets, and a great deal of wisdom to impart about life. Yet, while the Final Straw is a deeply rooted exploration of natural farming, it’s also a film which teaches equally as much about how to live life as it does about how to grow healthy food. And today, with over 1/2 of the world’s population living in urban areas, it seems we need to revisit this connection with nature more than ever before.

Over the past 100 years, our gradual reliance on industry and separation from the natural world have pushed us into the most epically unsustainable and unhealthy time period yet known to humanity.

Food and diet have quietly become the leading cause of death in the U.S., and on a world scale, intensive chemical-based industrial agriculture have caused the deterioration of billions of acres of farmland, the starvation of millions of human beings, and the loss of over 75% of our planet’s agricultural diversity.

The destruction of natural resources continues at an alarming rate, and both governments and food producers are looking for answers to questions of human health and ecological sustainability, with a multi-billion dollar industry leading the charge to find the most economically profitable answer.

It’s slightly amusing then, that that on a few small farms tucked away in the mountain valleys of Japan and South Korea, Patrick and Suhee found a very simple 4,000 year-old answer to this very perplexing modern question.

ICAN: "What Nuclear Weapons Really Do to People & the Environment"

Int. Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) Statement at the conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons in Oslo on March 2 & 3, 2013: "We wanted governments and diplomats to see what nuclear weapons really do to people and the environment. Happy to share with you the Civil Society video statement at the conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons in Oslo"

During the US military occupation of Japan, US authorities censored all media discussions of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But by 1952, the end of the Occupation, accounts of nuclear survivors’ ongoing struggles with radiation sickness became widespread.

 In 1954, 23 crew members of the Lucky Dragon Japanese fishing trawler were irradiated when the US nuclear test bombed the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. In protest, 30 million Japanese people — over a third of the population — signed a petition demanding the end of nuclear test bombings.

The US nuclear test bombed islands in the Asia-Pacific over 100 times from 1946 to 1962. Survivors of the Bikini Atoll bombings have suffered from miscarriages, profound birth defects, and high rates of cancer. The US also nuclear test bombed the American Southwest over 1,000 times.*  Washington's most recent (underground) nuclear test bombing took place in December 2012, with almost no media coverage. Hiroshima mayor Kazumi Matsui commented,  “I wonder why President Obama, who said he would seek a nuclear-free world, carried out the test."

Despite the well-known health and environmental consequences of nuclear radiation, and widespread protest, France nuclear bombed Mururoa, and its sister atoll Fangataufa in French Polynesia from 1966 to 1995.  Greenpeace reported that France's first nuclear (plutonium) bombing sucked all the water from the lagoon, "raining dead fish and mollusks down on the atoll", and  spread radioactive contamination across the Pacific to Peru and New Zealand.

The UK nuclear test bombed Australia from 1955 to 1963, exposing Australians, especially aboriginal Australians, to nuclear radiation. The Australian government forcibly removed tribal members from their homelands; when they attempted to return, they developed radiation-related health disorders. Radioactive contamination destroyed their way of life.

Although the human costs of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings are now known, the suffering of many hundreds of thousands of other nuclear (test bombings, depleted uranium weapons, uranium mining, nuclear weapons production, nuclear waste dumping) survivors worldwide remain much less known. However their suffering reflect a globally interrelated web of nuclear violence that touches us all.

* The National Cancer Institute runs a program to help Americans identify if they were exposed to radioactive 1-131 fallout from US nuclear test bombings  between 1951 and 1963; this isotope can cause thyroid disorder or cancer.

Nippon Myohoji: "Walk of Life" (命の行進 2012)

(空から一条の光が玄題旗に降り注ぎ、雲に、紫の帯になって、映っているようです！At the Kagoshima Prefecture Sendai nuclear power plant, before fasting, the priests engage in a prayer walk for purification from the sea. A streak of light from the sky fell on the flag from the sky, the clouds turned purple. Photo: Walk of Life on Facebook)

In early February, Nippon Myohoji Buddhist priests began a "Walk Of Life" across Japan, stopping at all the country's nuclear plants to offer prayers to the sacred grounds of each of these locations. Their final stop will be the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park on August 6.

This photo was taken in Kagoshima, at the southern tip of Kyushu.

Constellation Earth - Nagasaki

Paul Hawken: "The Biggest Global Movement in History"

It is my belief that we are part of a movement that is greater and deeper and broader than we ourselves know or can know. It flies under the radar of the media by and large. It is nonviolent. It is grassroots. It has no clusterbombs, no armies, and no helicopters. It has no central ideology. A male vertebrate is not in charge.

This unnamed movement is the most diverse movement the world has ever seen. The very word "movement" is too small to describe it. No one started this worldview. No one is in charge of it. There is no orthodoxy. It is global, classless, unquenchable, and tireless. Its shared understanding is arising spontaneously from different economic sectors, cultures, regions, and cohorts. It is growing and spreading worldwide, with no exception.

It has many roots. But primarily the origins are indigenous cultures, the environment and social justice movements. Those three sectors and their subsectors are intertwining, morphing, and enlarging... This is a democracy movement...It's marked by kinship, communities, symbiosis. It's Pachamama ("Mother Universe"). It's Mama. It's the earth talking back, waking up...

This talk is now five years old––but this clip of Paul Hawken speaking at a 2006 Bioneers conference describing the collective energy of hundreds of thousands of civil society organizations made up of tens of millions of people––if not more, from all over our planet–– is still breathtaking.

The social entrepreneur drew his talk from his 2007 book, Blessed Unrest: How The Largest Movement in the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming.

The movement Hawken describes is not something new. Citing poet/environmentalist Gary Snyder and actor/activist/writer Peter Coyote––Blessed Unrest refers to "the great underground, a current of humanity that dates back to the Paleolithic and its lineage can be traced back to healers, priestesses, philosophers, monks, rabbis, poets, and artists 'who speak for the planet, for other species, for interdependence, a life that courses under and through and around empires.'" 

Hawken's imagination was captured by not only the explosion of movements––but also by the shift towards the "intertwingling" of causes––environmentalism; renewable energy and sustainability; biodiversity; indigenous issues; civil society, children's issues; community development; cultural heritage; democratic activism; fair trade; good governance; human rights; social and economic justice; disarmament and peacemaking; water and other resource rights; and gender issues.

Orion excerpts Blessed Unrest here.

"The history we carry is not just our own...what worries us is all ours...as the soul's call to human compassion."

After certain events, then—including The Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011— a new energy from the universe churns what is collective into what is individual to produce the mix Jung called “collective unconscious” which we all share.

The history we carry is not just our own. What worries and gnaws at us, like a dog a bone, is all of ours, as shown by the soul’s call to human compassion.

- Alan Botsford, freedom in harmony

Thich Nhat Hanh's and Joanna Macy's thoughts for Japan, humanity, & all beings

Via Jizo Chronicles, Thich Nhat Hanh's and Joanna Macy's thoughts for Japan after the great earthquake and tsunami:

Dear Friends in Japan,

As we contemplate the great number of people who have died in this tragedy, we may feel very strongly that we ourselves, in some part or manner, also have died.

The pain of one part of humankind is the pain of the whole of humankind. And the human species and the planet Earth are one body. What happens to one part of the body happens to the whole body.

An event such as this reminds us of the impermanent nature of our lives. It helps us remember that what’s most important is to love each other, to be there for each other, and to treasure each moment we have that we are alive. This is the best that we can do for those who have died: we can live in such a way that they continue, beautifully, in us.

Here in France and at our practice centers all over the world, our bothers and sisters will continue to chant for you, sending you the energy of peace, healing and protection. Our prayers are with you.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Nuclear-free activist Joanna Macy who spent time with the people  of Novozybkyov, a village about 100 miles from Chernobyl, in 1992, addresses the nuclear disaster in Fukushima:

Dear Ones,

In this hour of anguish we reach out to our Japanese colleagues and all beings of that noble and stricken land.  As our hearts unite in prayer for them, we experience our own non-separation from the immeasurable suffering inflicted by the successive earthquakes and tsunamis, and by the nuclear catastrophe these have triggered.

Having just begun the last week of my three-month retreat, I break silence to give voice to my solidarity with you all.  By speaking to you, I remind myself of what we can remember in this time of grief and fear.

It helps me to remember what I learned in Novozybkov with survivors of Chernobyl: that is that there are two basic responses to massive collective trauma.  One response is to let it destroy our trust in life and in each other, plummeting us into division, blame and despair.  The other is to let the shared cataclysm strengthen us into greater solidarity, and deepen our knowledge of our mutual belonging in the web of life. Your communications are evidence already of that second response.  Indeed the Work That Reconnects has been preparing us for it.

We remember to breathe.  As we have practiced, we breathe through the reports as we hear and the images of disaster. This helps us simply take in what is happening, and not be blocked by horror or the desire to fix or flee.

We also breathe with those who are caught up in this tragedy, in the intensity of panic, shock, and loss. Feel how this breathing-with helps your heart-mind fearlessly and tenderly embrace them.

You see, if we understand and accept the Great Unraveling, we can let it break us open to greater realizations of our innate solidarity.  That this realization in itself is a kind of “enlightenment” has been brought home to me in my retreat by two great teachers of Japan.

One is the 13th century Zen master Dogen.  He illumines our connections with the ancestors and the future ones, so that we can experience these connections in the immediate present moment.  So does the other figure, the archetypal bodhisattva Ksitigarbha, who is beloved in Japan, where he/she is known as Bodhisattva Jizo, with images everywhere.  Both of them help us realize that we are not alone in this moment of time, but surrounded by past and future generations ready to help.  We who inhabit the present can do what they cannot: that is to make choices and take action/  But the past and future ones are right at our side with support and guidance.

Also, to hold steady and open in this anguished time, try the Spiral of the Work That Reconnects. As I take in the catastrophe in Japan, the Spiral serves to ground my heart-mind, and widen its dimensions.  It brings gratitude for all those at work to bring support and clear reporting.  It helps me honor the heartbreak, to simply open to it and let it reveals our true nature and mutual belonging. It shows me how solidarity can move us forward, and offer us practical, immediate steps to alleviate suffering and enact safe, sustainable, and sane energy policies. An obvious urgency is to stop US government subsidies and loan guarantees to nuclear industries, including bills that are before Congress now.

As radiation from Fukushima spreads, I know that protection of self and family is on our minds.  I’m asking Anne to append here two kinds of information: about health measures, and some links to breaking news from Japan. See our page dedicated to this issue: http://joannamacy.net/nuclearguardianship/fukushima-dai-ichi-2011.html

Love,

Joanna

Keiko Miyamori: Bird Cages & the Gilded Boat, installation with soundscape by Steven Berkowitz @ Ise Cultural Foundation, NY, Jan 14-Feb 26

Keiko Miyamori is preoccupied with making visible the invisible connections between people and nature across our planet. Like many other Japanese-born and Japanese-American artists, she is haunted by the historical trauma of the Second World War. The Philly-based visual artist believes that, if we can better see the interconnections that bind us together with each other and the natural world, we would be less likely to engage in the nonsensical destruction of military violence and war. Her work is a visual artistic cure for the roots of violence: alienation, competition, and fear.

Miyamori's upcoming exhibition incorporates tree rubbings and birdsongs from five different continents to evoke a sense of planetary holism based upon the idea of the supercontinent Amasia:

"Amasia is one of the possible future supercontinents that could be formed by the merger of Asia and North America. It is based on the idea that the Pacific Plate is already subducting under Eurasia and North America and the process will eventually cause it to close...

"This project will share with my related projects a common goal of helping people to experience the 'connections' that exist between all of us with our surroundings...I have struggled to come to terms with terrible events in my cultural history that happened due to lack of feeling connected to the 'other,' the 'there' rather than 'here.' I hope that my installation will allow people to feel, through the freedom of imagination, a sense of global connection..."

Keiko Miyamori: Bird Cages and the Gilded Boat
an installation with soundscape by Steven Berkowitz
Curated by Sean A. Stoops

Ise Cultural Foundation
555 Broadway, New York, NY
January 14 - February 26, 2011

Opening reception: Friday, January 14, 6 - 8 PM

KAMIOTO - USA x Japan sound performance: Thursday, February 3, 6 - 7 PM
Gallery Talk: Saturday, February 26, 2 - 3 PM

(Gilded Boat: "The old found canoe was covered with Japanese washi paper pasted tight to obtain a new uniform skin... As a contrast, the inside of the boat will be gilded with gold leaf to symbolize the “inner” energy of the human vessel, how the human’s physical shell can hold its imagination." Text: Keiko Miyamori; Photo: Kenji Takigami)

As part of the Emerging Curators Program, the ISE Cultural Foundation presents: Keiko Miyamori: Bird Cages and the Gilded Boat a gallery exhibition curated by Sean A. Stoops, featuring a mixed media installation by Keiko Miyamori with an electronic “soundscape” composed by Steven Berkowitz. The exhibition runs January 14 - February 26, 2011, with an opening reception on Friday, January 14, 6 - 8 PM.

Keiko Miyamori explores of her experiences and history through sculpture and installation art. Bird Cages and the Gilded Boat is a new installation of Miyamori’s recent sculptures and works on paper. Bird Cages Without Roofs consists of altered bird cage sculptures with open tops, implying a basic desire to escape the struggles and conflicts that keep people confined in metaphoric “cages;” addressing the dichotomy of captivity and freedom. The Bird Cages are juxtaposed with Gilded Boat, a basic wood canoe transformed into a dream-like vessel and embellished with classical Japanese art materials- washi paper with charcoal frottage from tree bark on the hull and a gilded interior of gold-leaf. Unifying the sculptures are a series of Tree Rubbings with charcoal on washi paper, created from numerous trees in five continents, based on Miyamori’s travels over the past few years. These works on paper are combined with regional grain, corn, and nuts in clear, circular frames, intimating natural cycles of trees and plants. Miyamori’s recent visits to Australia, Brazil, Japan, and Kenya were supported by grants from Philadelphia organizations- the Independence Foundation and the Center for Emerging Visual Artists.


For this exhibition, Steven Berkowitz presents a new sound art work created from tree bark - rubbing patterns in Keiko Miyamori’s installation- turning the visible markings into the musical “notes” of an ambient “soundscape.” Field recordings of specific bird songs from around the world are mixed into the aural environment. Berkowitz researched native bird sounds from the locations that Miyamori visited in her tour of five continents. The resulting multi-channel “soundscape” creates the impression in the gallery of an invisible aviary, with a chorus of birds from around the globe. Keiko Miyamori’s installation, combined with Steven Berkowitz’s audio, allude to journeys between different stages of being and natural elements: air, earth, and water.

On Thursday, February 3, 6 - 8 PM, the gallery presents- KAMIOTO: A Conversation of Forest and City, a “USA x Japan” sound performance with a live internet / video collaboration between New York City and Ryugasaki, Japan. The special event - directed by Keiko Miyamori - features electronic sound art by Steven Berkowitz, video by Hsiang-Chin Moe (both at ISE gallery in NY), and in Japan, percussion by Chikara Miura with children at Ryugasaki kindergarten from the wild Japanse cedar forest.

On Saturday, February 26, 2 - 3 PM, there will be a gallery talk with the curator and the artists discussing the installation and their work in general.

Additional support for this exhibition has been provided by:
the Independence Foundation (Philadelphia) and the Center for Emerging Visual Artists (Philadelphia) Sake Discoveries, LLC (New York City) and the Forestry Agency (Japan).

About the Artists and Curator:

Keiko Miyamori is a Japanese-American artist based in New York and Philadelphia, PA. Keiko Miyamori earned her MFA and BFA at University of Tsukuba, Japan and has lived in Philadelphia, PA since 2000. Miyamori explores of her experiences and history through sculpture and installation art.

Steven Berkowitz has a MFA in Photography from Tyler School of Art, Temple University and is currently a professor there, dividing his time between New York City and Philadelphia. Berkowitz has exhibited and performed in numerous art venues in the United States, Japan, and Europe. Berkowitz frequently creates sound art for gallery installations, both for his own photography and in collaboration with other artists.

Sean A. Stoops is a curator and new media artist living in Philadelphia. Stoops has a MFA in video art and curating from Transart Institute, Donau University -- an international graduate program for new media art, based in Linz, Austria and Berlin, Germany. He earned his BFA in painting from Tyler School of Art, Temple University and studied at Temple Abroad in Rome, Italy. Stoops has curated and exhibited at many art galleries in Philadelphia including: the Painted Bride Art Center, Asian Arts Initiative, International House, and Rebekah Templeton Contemporary Art. This is his first curated exhibition in New York City. See also: "Keiko Miyamori's Tsunagu Series Connects People and Nature throughout the World"

Human rights awardees inspire Tokyo audience in emotional ceremony

Kanda Kaori, Kitamura Toshiko, Tairah Firdous, interpreter (Motoyama Hisako, Director of the Asia-Japan Women's Resource Center)

“The one and only way to bring about positive change in the world is through love.”

Journalist and social activist Kitamura Toshiko, one of the honorees at the Woman Human Rights Activities Award (or Yayori Award) ceremony held in Tokyo this past Saturday afternoon, revealed that she was able to arrive at this seemingly simple understanding only after a period of profound soul-searching.

"At one point in my life, I was driven almost exclusively by anger. After reaching a point where my work was no longer sustainable, however, I turned to spiritual pursuits including meditation and yoga. Only then was I able to realize what was missing in my approach."

In her work with numerous social issues, including child abuse, homelessness, youth bullying and suicide, Kitamura has deeply probed corners of society where love is often painfully lacking.

Her selection as this year's Yayori Journalist awardee was in recognition of her tireless commitment to these issues—as well as her recognition of the interconnections therein. In fact, her understanding of the common thread between all forms of discrimination and suffering—and her ability to look past surface-level social categorizations in order to connect with the common humanity that we all share—has often led to uncomfortable moments with others who do not share her vision.

Kitamura Toshiko

"When some members of the women's movement heard that I was working with homeless people in Osaka's Kamagasaki district, they reacted by saying they couldn't understand why I would want to spend that much time with 'a bunch of lewd men'," she said. "Similarly, when I began a correspondence with a youth who was jailed after killing a homeless person—telling him that I believed in him and his capacity to change—I was harshly criticized by some of the other Kamagasaki volunteers as having betrayed the life-affirming work that we were trying to do there.

"In fact, violence is something that we are all capable of. Instead of immediately condemning someone for committing a violent act, then, we must seek to understand what particular constellation of factors caused that person to act in the way that they did," she emphasized to Saturday's attendees—most of whom (including myself) were in tears as her gentle and yet powerful words traveled straight into our heart-centers. "It is only when we calm our rage with love that we are able to have compassion for others and encourage them to change in positive ways."

Also speaking at Saturday's event was documentary filmmaker and human rights activist Tairah Firdous, who grew up in Kashmir amidst constant turmoil as India and Pakistan have continued a decades-long power struggle over the region. She received the Yayori Award in support of her forthcoming documentary, which will focus on Kashmiri survivors of rape and torture.

"The Indian government has declared Kashmir a 'disturbed area', and implemented an Armed Forces Special Powers Act that essentially gives state officials free license to do whatever they feel like," Firdous explained to Saturday's audience. "What this means in terms of actual experience are continuous human rights violations including forced migration, searches without warrants, arbitrary arrests and detention, torture, and rape.

Tairah Firdous

"My own work with these issues began when my family was forced to leave our home after my father was arrested and tortured on six different occasions, even though he had absolutely nothing to do with the conflict," Firdous told attendees. "Completely innocent peoples' lives are being shattered within this political climate, and so I intend to expose the killings and other unreported human rights violations so that the rest of the world will know what is really happening."

New to the 2010 awards lineup was a special prize given to Kanda Kaori, a kodan (traditional storytelling) performer whose work focuses on issues connected to war and other forms of institutionalized violence.

"After I finished the obligatory three-year period of apprenticeship and was able to start my own career as a professional performer, I went on vacation in Saipan to celebrate," she told Saturday's crowd. "I was completely unprepared, however, for what I saw: a sunken U.S. military ship and other lingering remnants of World War II, which seemed so completely out of place amidst an otherwise idyllic scene of beauty. After I got over my shock, it became clear to me that I must use my craft to communicate the personal suffering unleashed by wars."

Kanda Kaori

Kanda followed her acceptance speech with a brief kodan performance detailing the painful final hours of a Yokohama family after a U.S military jet crashed into their home in September 1977, badly burning their two toddlers, who died several hours later. Again, there were few dry eyes in the room at her emotional interpretation of the tragic event, memorialized in a bronze statue in a Yokohama seaside park titled Ai no boshizou ("An Image of a Mother's Love"). The statue represents the two small boys with their mother, who also died four years later from complications sustained in the crash.

Ai no boshizou ("An Image of a Mother's Love")

"I sometimes feel overwhelmed by pain while preparing my performances, which have focused on horrific issues such as the Hiroshima atomic bombing and the Chernobyl nuclear power accident," Kanda said. "However, I will continue to speak out against war and other injustices, and encourage my protegees to do the same—particularly as Japan continues to follow the United States in its misguided war escapades."

Saturday's event was held at a small chapel located on the same grounds as the Women's Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM), an institution founded by the Violence Against Women in War Network (VAWW-Net) that was spearheaded by the late Matsui Yayori (from whom the Yayori Awards have been bequeathed). The museum is presently housing an exhibition commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan's Military Sexual Slavery that took place in 2000. Following the ceremony, a separate memorial was held in remembrance of the of the so-called "comfort women" who have died before having attained full justice for their suffering.

More information about the Yayori Award program may be read at this previous post. For full profiles of the 2010 (and past year) awardees, see the official website.

Text by Kimberly Hughes
Photos by Ando Makiko

The Practice of the Wild featuring Gary Snyder comes to NY starting Nov. 10

John J. Healey's The Practice of the Wild featuring deep ecologist and poet-essayist Gary Snyder and author Jim Harrison comes to NY this month.

There will be a screening at the Jacob Burns Film Center on Wednesday, November 10. The second event will be an opening night screening at the Quad Cinema (13th Street in Manhattan between 5th & 6th Avenues) on Friday, November 12.

The San Francisco International Film Festival description:

The wild requires that we learn the terrain, nod to all the plants and animals and birds, ford the streams and cross the ridges, and tell a good story when we get back home.

So writes legendary Beat poet Gary Snyder in his influential 1990 collection from which this celebratory documentary takes its name and finds its restoring rhythms of nature, image and word. Occupying a hallowed yet humble position within the realms of poetry, academia, ecological activism and spiritual practice, Snyder has distinguished himself among peers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac by becoming both a countercultural hero and a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Director John J. Healey skillfully intertwines the many fascinating aspects of Snyder’s journey through nature and across the page, sagely pairing the poet with his cantankerous compadre and fellow scribe Jim Harrison. Together, the two old friends roam the verdant hills of the central California coast, musing eloquently and with hard-won wisdom and earthy humor on Bay Area bohemia, Zen Buddhism and the morally charged interdependence of all living things.

Whether reminiscing about a camping trip with Kerouac, recalling the writing of his seminal Turtle Island or being held by his ankles and dangled over a cliff in Japan as a test of truth-telling, Snyder is a warm and captivating presence.

“Life in the wild is not just eating berries in the sunlight,” the poet tells us, and true to his ageless inquisitiveness, The Practice of the Wild seeks out and finds so much more.

KJ's biodiversity issue features Snyder's seminal "Ecology, Place and the Awakening of Compassion" (first published in Buddhist Peace Fellowship's quarterly, Turning Wheel):

Oecology, as it used to be spelled, is a scientific study of relationships, energy-transfers, mutualities, connections, and cause-and-effect networks within natural systems. By virtue of its finding, it has become a discipline that informs the world about the danger of the breakdown of the biological world. In a way, it is to Euro-American global economic development as anthropology used to be to colonialism. That is to say, a kind of counter-science generated by the abuses of the development culture (and capable of being misused by unscrupulous science mercenaries in the service of the development culture). The word “ecological” has also come to be used to mean something like “environmentally conscious.”

Read Gary Snyder's entire essay — "Ecology, Place, and the Awakening of Compassion" — at KJ online at this page.

(Gary Snyder during his Japan years (1956-1964). Image: Modern American Poetry)

For more on Gary Snyder, see this comprehensive collection of background info at Modern American Poetry.

A set that includes The Practice of the Wild DVD and a companion book (The Etiquette of Freedom) is available at online book dealers for around $US20.

"Connections become obvious when we destroy them" Winifred Bird on Biodiversity

Stewart Wachs of Kyoto Journal listens intently to Winifred's interpretation of biodiversity

What does "biodiversity" mean to you and me? Is it just another catch phrase for the corporate world to use in the mass media?

Or is it more?

With the intricate gardens of Eiun-in Temple painting a rich landscape behind her, Winifred Bird, a writer for Kyoto Journal, shares her awakening to the deep interconnections between the biodiversity of the natural world and the seemingly disconnected experience of human beings in today's societies at the Kyoto Journal Biodiversity Special Launch Party.

I’ve been thinking a lot about biodiversity lately. Actually, since last summer, biodiversity has pretty much taken over my life. Partly that’s because I’ve been lucky enough to be working on this great special issue of Kyoto Journal, and partly for a couple of other projects. I guess you could say I’ve hopped on the COP10 media bandwagon, but the funny thing is, I sometimes still don’t feel like I have a firm grasp on what biodiversity actually is and why it matters. This could have something to do with the fact that I haven’t formally studied biology since tenth grade, but I think a lot of the general public is also pretty hazy on the term, if they’ve heard it at all. It’s not one of those easy-access words like “nature” or “open space” or even “extinction,” that you hear and just immediately visualize. It’s not even really about individual species – a panda here, a tiger there - it’s about the whole picture, how everything works together and is connected, and for me, that’s been a hard thing to get my head around because it’s just so huge. But I had a bit of a biodiversity breakthrough earlier this summer that I’d like to share with you.

Around July I had a lull in my writing work, so I went up to Gifu to help my husband out with a project he was doing there. He’s a carpenter, and he was building a cabin up in this vacation development way out in the mountains near Gujo Hachiman, and to cut costs we were camping at the worksite. It’s a vacation area, so during the week the place is a real ghost town, and it became our own little world. One morning, we’d set up our breakfast table, which was actually a plank balanced on top of some boxes, and we were sitting across from each other drinking our tea, and suddenly it was just like I had fallen inside a cheesy love song. It just struck me that we were made for each other. Not just on a personal level, but on a biological one, the level of elemental man and woman. We fit together perfectly and we literally can’t live without each other, in the sense that we need each other in order to procreate our species. And the amazing thing is that this not only works on a utilitarian level, but this interdependence is also incredibly beautiful. It’s not only procreation, but also love. And then it hit me really strong that the same thing is true for the whole world – that the fox and the rabbit, the flower and the bee, everything, is made for each other, everything fits together in the most immense and beautiful pattern.

Of course, it’s the most obvious of clichés to say that we’re all connected and that that every piece of the puzzle matters. These are things that I know on an intellectual level, as I’m sure you all do, but how often is it that we really feel that connection? How often does the pattern flash before our eyes in all its Technicolor complexity? I said a second ago that it’s completely obvious that everything is connected, but in another sense it’s not obvious at all. It’s not like the connections are visible, like a giant string net tying me to that tree to that cat to that mosquito. My basic instinct, admittedly as an American and someone who’s neither a biologist nor a Buddhist, is to think of myself as an independent unit, rather than as part of something larger, a part that doesn’t work when it’s isolated from that larger picture.

The connections become obvious, of course, when we destroy them. When we hunt all the sea otters and then the urchins that they used to feed on explode out of control and eat the kelp forests where they live down to the nub, and then the fish that breed in these kelp beds decline and we go fishing and there aren’t any fish out there, then we understand that nature is a network where every piece matters. The trick is to see it before we’ve destroyed it, to somehow raise our awareness enough to protect what we’re used to taking for granted.

I was talking to a scientist recently who gave me another example of how we often don’t become aware of the value of biodiversity until a disaster strikes. His name is Thomas Elmqvist, and he teaches natural resource management at the Stockholm Resilience Center at Stockholm University, and he’ll also be in Nagoya for COP 10 as part of the Swedish delegation. For about twenty years, Elmqvist has been studying a forest in Samoa where two different types of flying fox play a key role in dispersing seeds. Basically they eat tree fruit then drop the seeds throughout the forest. One species, the dominant one, did most of this work while the other was less abundant and played a fairly minor role in the forest.

In the early nineties, a major hurricane hit the forest and knocked down a lot of trees. What happened afterwards with the flying foxes is really fascinating. The dominant species went down to the forest floor to search for fallen fruit, and when these animals are on the ground they’re very slow, they kind of creep along, so this species was essentially wiped out by predators. Meanwhile, the subdominant species stayed up in the trees and survived by eating young leaves. When flowers and fruits started to appear in the remaining trees again, this formerly inconsequential flying fox was the one that was still around to carry on seed dispersal.

Elmqvist says he suspects that if there hadn’t been this diversity in the flying fox species – he calls it “response diversity within functional groups” – it’s quite likely many of the plant species in the forest would not have been propagated, and alien plant seeds would have blow in on the wind and been able to gain a foothold in the forest, possibly causing it to flip to a very different kind of environment. His point in telling this story was that diversity is what gives ecosystems their resilience when disaster inevitably strikes. It’s kind of like biodiversity is the ultimate life insurance policy: it ensures that in one form or another, life will go on.

But on a more basic level, what this story illustrates for me is that there is a whole lot of stuff going on in the natural world that I’m unaware of, yet completely dependent on for all sorts of goods and services. We don’t want to mess around out there too much. We don’t want to start saying, why do we need two kinds of flying fox? One is doing the job just fine. We’ve got to keep reminding ourselves of the limits to our own knowledge. At the same time we’ve got to keep trying to learn more and become more aware of how everything, including ourselves, is interrelated. Hopefully this issue of Kyoto Journal can be a part of that.

-Posted by Jen Teeter. (Thank you Winifred for sharing your speech with us!)

Kenzaburo Oe's "Hiroshima and the Art of Outrage" illuminates interconnections between Hiroshima bombing, Okinawa bases, & nuclear "umbrella"

Kenzaburo Oe has been a principal voice in public soul-searching in Japan in matters of war and peace since his emergence as a literary wunderkind during the late 1950's. Scholar John Nathan described the novelist as a "spokesman for the postwar generation" whose novels explored the lives of "young Japanese struggling to survive with dignity in desecrated society." Oe said the three seminal influences on his personal and creative development were the birth of his handicapped son, Hikari, and his visits to Hiroshima and Okinawa.


Concerned about the accelerated remilitarization of Japan during the Koizumi-Bush era, Oe joined with prominent Japanese thinkers in founding 9-Jo No Kai (The Article 9 Association) in 2004. In 2008, Oe prevailed in a lawsuit challenging his essay, Okinawa Notes in which the author adhered to the widely accepted assertion that the Japanese military forced civilians to commit mass suicide during the Battle of Okinawa. Earlier this summer, speaking an Article 9 Association meeting in Tokyo on June 19 (the 50th anniversary of the automatic enactment of the revised Japan-U.S. Security Treaty on June 19, 1960), Oe called for a reduction in military bases on Okinawa in accordance with the Peace Constitution.

In "Hiroshima and the Art of Outrage," published by the New York Times, Oe articulates the interconnections between atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the 60-year U.S.-Japan military occupation of Okinawa; and ongoing attempts by military industrialists to undermine Japan's non-nuclear principles:

THE Futenma Marine Corps Air Station on Okinawa, one of the largest United States military bases in East Asia, is in the center of a crowded city. The American and Japanese governments acknowledge the dangers of this situation, and they agreed nearly 15 years ago that the base should be moved; however, no move has yet been made.

In 2009 a new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, tantalized Okinawans with the prospect of moving the despised base off the island, but he was recently forced to resign, in part because of his failure to keep that promise. Mr. Hatoyama’s successor, Naoto Kan, has made it clear that he intends to respect the United States-Japan security treaty — a position that, while not directly related to the issue of dialing down the United States military presence in Japan, may indicate which way the wind is blowing.

It was recently reported here that a government panel is about to submit a policy paper to Prime Minister Kan, suggesting that regarding Japan’s “three nonnuclear principles” — prohibiting the production, possession and introduction of nuclear weapons — it was not wise to “limit the helping hand of the United States,” and recommending that we allow the transport of nuclear arms through our territory to improve the so-called nuclear umbrella.

When I read about this in the newspaper last week, I felt a great sense of outrage. (I’ll explain later why that word has such deep significance for me.) I felt the same way when another outrageous bit of news came to light this year: the decades-old, Okinawa-related secret agreement entered into by the United States and Japan in contravention of the third of the three nonnuclear principles, which forbids bringing nuclear weapons into Japan.

At the annual Hiroshima Peace Ceremony on Friday, this year marking the 65th anniversary of the dropping of the atom bomb, representatives from Britain, France and the United States planned to be in attendance, for the first time. This is a public event at which government leaders give speeches, but it also has a more profound and private aspect, as the atomic bomb survivors offer ritual consolation to the spirits of their dead relatives. Of all the official events that have been created during the past 200 years of modernization, the peace ceremony has the greatest degree of moral seriousness... In Edward W. Said’s last book, “On Late Style,” he gives many examples of artists (composers, musicians, poets, writers) whose work as they grew older contained a peculiar sort of concentrated tension, hovering on the brink of catastrophe, and who, in their later years, used that tension to express their epochs, their worlds, their societies, themselves.

As for me, on the day last week when I learned about the revival of the nuclear-umbrella ideology, I looked at myself sitting alone in my study in the dead of night . . . . . . and what I saw was an aged, powerless human being, motionless under the weight of this great outrage, just feeling the peculiarly concentrated tension, as if doing so (while doing nothing) were an art form in itself. And for that old Japanese man, perhaps sitting there alone in silent protest will be his own “late work.”

Read the entire essay here.

(See also:  Kenzaburo Oe's "Misreading, Espionage and 'Beautiful Martyrdom': On Hearing the Okinawa ‘Mass Suicides’ Suit Court Verdict," published at Japan Focus in 2008.

Ikuo Hirayama, artist from Hiroshima: War is the "supreme folly of humankind"

(Image: Art Acknowledgement News)

Ikuo Hirayama passed away in December 2009, five months before the Miroku Project's Nara 2010: Conferences on the Future of East Asia, which he chaired, was to begin.

The renowned artist and Silk Roads preservation activist said that the wish for peace was the core of his work. His fervent quest was born when he was a fifteen-year-old living in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. That morning, he witnessed the atomic bombing "like a flashbulb had gone off right in front of me." Suffering from radiation-induced leukopenia, Hirayama knew he wanted to work for world peace but did not know how to do this until his mind suddenly filled with spontaneous image of the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang who defied his government to go in search of Buddhist texts:

As a child I suffered from the effects of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. This devastating experience has made me harbor a strong wish for world peace, just as I believe monk Xuanzang did. Identifying with him thus, I have wished to relive his journey of sacrifice and discovery along the Silk Road.

In following Xuanzang's footsteps across the Silk Roads, Hirayama realized the deep historical and cultural interconnections between Eurasia, Africa, and the Middle East, all the way to Japan:

What we call Japanese fine arts have their origin in China...If Chinese art objects of the early Tang age were excavated (in Japan) now, they would be taken for Japanese objects. With the passage of time, Japanese fine arts became recognizably different from Chinese fine arts, but in the Asuka, Hakuho and Tenpyo periods, that is, in the seventh century, the two were identical.

This realization of human unity helped to heal Hirayama's psyche and spirit. His journeys west also reinforced his knowledge of the devastation of war:

It’s no exaggeration to say that a culture can be wiped out in a second by war. Many ruins and remains found along the Silk Road are the result of war, the supreme folly of humankind.

It took the artist decades to recover enough personal strength to look backwards into his life, at what happened in Hiroshima. When he did, he was ready to portray the atomic bombing in his medium, Nihon-ga, the richly colored traditional Japanese paint medium using dry mineral pigments, which originated in India and was brought to Japan via the artist's beloved Silk Roads.

"Ikuo Hirayama says the wish for peace is at the core of his art work" by NPR's Robert Rand, published in 2008, explores Hirayama's peace activism through visual art and historic preservation:

Today, the Japanese city of Hiroshima is a thriving metropolis of 1.2 million that speaks with the rumble and squeal of streetcars and traffic. But on Aug. 6, 1945, an atomic bomb shattered the city, killing more than 90,000. Of those who survived, one man, Ikuo Hirayama, would go on to turn the devastation into art...

"There was a powerful flash right in front of me. I covered my ears. And there was a strong wind, and I squatted down and the wind went right over my head. And I then tried to escape through waterfalls of fire..."

Many of his friends died. Hirayama grew ill from radiation sickness and his white-blood-cell count plummeted, but eventually he recovered. He left Hiroshima, adopted Buddhism as a way of honoring the dead, and took up painting, practicing an ancient technique called Nihonga, in which colors are blended from ground-up mineral pigments, then attached to the canvas with glue.

Hirayama became famous as a painter of Buddhist images and of the Silk Road, the highway that brought Buddhism to Japan. His Silk Road paintings convey Hirayama's belief that the road, with its exchange of commerce and ideas, showed that cultures can interact constructively. The paintings epitomize a sense of hopefulness and cooperation, peace and tranquility, the antithesis to Hiroshima, 1945...

Two decades after the bombing, Hirayama finally returned to Hiroshima. He visited the city's Atomic Bomb Memorial Park, and found himself drawn by the hiss and flicker of a flame honoring the dead.

"I saw the color of the fire, which was orange. It reminded me of the day of the bombing, and I could not get rid of that color behind my eyelids," he says.

Hirayama immediately began sketching out what would become one of his most powerful works, a huge, six-paneled canvas called "The Holocaust of Hiroshima..."

(Takato Kageyama, who lost his parents and two sisters in the bombing, stands before "The Holocaust of Hiroshima." Photo: NPR)

Hirayama says that despite the sorrow and destruction portrayed in "The Holocaust of Hiroshima," the painting offers a message of hope.

"The Buddhist god is telling everybody to rise like a Phoenix, to stand up and live for all eternity," he explains. "I believe that art can overcome hardships. I believe that flowers can blossom from anguish and inhumanity. You can overcome these things and make something beautiful..."

"I started to create my artwork as a requiem for those who lost their lives in the war. The wish for peace is at the core of my work," says Hirayama.

Read Rand's entire article here.

— JD

Beyond History as Antagonism—"Silk Roads: Samarkand to Nara"

Some political scientists and writers—seeking to legitimate preemptive permanent war—have propagated an image of "clashing civilizations" as the dominant theme of history.  This perspective overlooks the significance peaceful trading, cooperation, intercultural merging in the ongoing co-creation of our shared history. Although territorial conflicts betweeen empires as well as more mundane forms of violence took place during this period, the Silk Roads exemplifes an elevated period of global civilization in which peaceful trading and collaborative exchanges predominated.

Kyoto Journal's latest issue, "Silk Roads: Samarkand to Nara," revisits this time period when the Silk Roads connected the myriad, interrelated cultures of Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and all of Asia.

"10,000 Miles Away: Chang’an and Nara” introduces the issue by challenging British Poet Rudyard Kipling’s assumption that never the "East" and "West” shall meet:

Instead, the very opposite has been happening ever since humans moved out of Africa and into Eurasian crossroads. Groups did not just split off, but continued to meet again and again throughout history, re-merging their cultures every time around.

Contributor Eiji Hattori's essay, "Civilizations Never Clash. Ignorance Does Clash," the moral center of the issue, refutes the view of world history as antagonism, and eloquently sets forth an alternative paradigm of the history of collaborative civilization:

If we look at human history, we can see that “civilizations have consistently encountered one another, and have grown and developed through those encounters”. That is what “dialogue between civilizations” means. Dialogue, in fact, indicates cross-fertilization, not negotiation.

Hattori also challenges the idea that "civilization" was created by the "West."

The illusion that Western civilization is the one and only civilization has been shared not only by people of Europe and the United States, but also by non-Westerners until quite recently. Why? It is because textbooks written by colonial powers during the colonial period spread around the world. The singular view of “civilization” was fed to children through “education”.

Guest editor Leanne Ogasawara's Tang Dynasty Times, from which four contributions were sourced, is linked here; four articles are available online at the KJ site:

 "Of Bonds, 'the Word' and Trade: There are no straight lines through mountains" by Jeff Fuchs:

“There are no straight lines through the mountains.” This ‘truth’ rumbles out of Lobsang’s mouth, a mouth that seems as unyielding and direct as the words that pass through it. I have heard these words before from ancient traders who still remember a time when mule and camel caravans wound their way to and from the great market towns of Asia and the Middle East...

"Beauty and Power on China's Silk Road" by Sam Crane:

The tour guide opened the door and we stepped into darkness. It took a moment for us to adjust visually but slowly, slowly the interior of the small cave came into view.

In front of us stood a statue of Buddha, about three meters high, surrounded by swirling painted blues and reds and browns — flanked by two smaller statues of guardians. The light from the open doorway fell on the Buddha and suffused throughout the space...

Into Dasht-e Kavir: Notes From the Great Salt Desert.

Story and photos by Steven Tizzard:


In Iran it is the year 1388, a new year, the spring, the month of Farvardin. It is the celebration of Norouz, a Zoroastrian festival that has survived, despite being usurped in this land by Islam, its heir; despite being turned outlaw for a time in the most vigorous days of the Revolution. This celebration of the vernal equinox flourishes again, the most important holiday in ancient Persia and modern Iran...

 "A Minute and 100 Meters Down the Road" by David Maney:

(Copyright: David Maney)

Urumqi, Xinjiang, Sept. 3, 2009. The soldier outside the station had one hand on the barrel and the other on the butt of his shotgun. There were two military trucks by the bus stop and two soldiers in the back-right seats of every bus leaving Urumqi station.

Welcome to west China.

I arrived via long-haul train, 40 hours and just under 4,000km in a hard-seat, from Beijing, where rumours were circulating about the extent of the military presence, needle attacks, Uighur and Han street gangs, and the validity of the reports coming out of Xinjiang....

The issue includes an interview with composer Minoru Miki who revived Japan's traditional musical exchanges through his project, the "Orchestra Asia."

Miki explains his impetus:

The Japanese society of the eighth century was extremely internationalized and integrated with the rest of Asia. Foreigners comprised much of the skilled labor force and, like England in the 16th and 17th centuries, there was an active exchange of artists, musicians and statesmen with the mainland. It is one of my dreams to re-create an active musical exchange with the rest of Asia.

Miki, a timeless visionary, has an English-language page at his website.

For a further glimpse of the contents of the issue, visit Kyoto Journal's website.

Finding Connections: Sea, Forest & Our Lives—Pacific Asia Resource Center DVD features individuals who saved their eco-systems

The Pacific Asia Resource Center (PARC) has worked since the 1970’s to promote sustainable development and fair trade in Asia. The Japanese NGO has released their newest DVD, Finding Connections: Sea, Forest and Our Lives, produced to encourage sustainable development and biodiversity conservation in Japan and abroad—particularly in rapidly developing Asian countries.

In the name of "development," humans are destroying ever-increasing swathes of our planet; thus wiping out entire eco-systems which we depend upon for food production and the continuation of life itself. Finding Connections: Sea, Forest and Our Lives features ordinary people who defy this trend living in harmony with nature—often against overwhelming forces. By listening to their experiences, we learn about the intimate interconnections between humans and nature.

Patterns of human relationships with nature reflect values that have changed with time. During the 1960's, Japan’s oceans, rivers, forests and fields underwent major changes as the country attempted to double its national income by exporting industrial products. At this time, productivity and efficiency ruled. Finding Connections: Sea, Forest and Our Lives paints a picture of staggering environmental damage throughout the Japanese archipelago:

• Coastal tidal flats, precious habitats for various aquatic species that sustain the food chain of the sea, were destroyed when corporations reclaimed shores to build industrial plants.

• The flows of rivers, which bring rich nutrition from mountains to the sea, were interrupted by dams built to generate electricity, prevent floods, and create reservoirs. The government build the dams meet projected increases of industrial and domestic water demand.

•  Broad-leafed trees, the natural vegetation of the Japanese archipelago, were replaced with conifers in order to meet growing demand for wood, which later began to face fierce competition from imports.

•  Planted conifer trees were left abandoned; their reduced water-holding capacity resulted in floods and landslides.

•  Chemical fertilizers and pesticides were introduced to agricultural fields through which rivers and oceans flowed.
However, ordinary citizens, who dedicated their lives to saving the natural eco-systems that make up their homes and provide their livelihood, made a difference:

Kudoh Kohta (Representative director of Iwaizumi Pure-wood Funiture): “All living things are protected by the environment and the earth...humans are just one of these species.”

Kohta believes that trees must only be used sustainably, taking into consideration the pace of forest regeneration. The furniture artisan runs a furniture work shop that operates on the concept, “Making furniture that last for 300 years with trees that have lived for 300 years.”

Kumagai Hiroyuki (Former Executive Director of the Campaign Coalition Against the Niitsuki Dam): “We’ll never get back those 27 years. We spent blood and sweat, but now we have peace of mind. We preserved the foundation of our livelihoods.”

Kumagai led the campaign coalition against a local dam project for almost three decades; engaged in relentless civil research and promotion until the project was finally frozen in 1997. He was elected as a local city council member.

Hatakeyama Shigeatsu (Oyster farmer, Representive Director of Mizuyama Sea Farm): “It’s important to raise awareness among people living in the river basin.”

Hatakeyama, a fisher, planted broad-leaf trees along upstream mountains along a river slated for a dam project, to let people know that rivers are vital sources of nutrition for the blessings of the ocean. His movement, named “The Forest Is the Sweetheart of the Sea,” gathered widespread attention.

Ohno Kazutoshi (President of Funabashi City Fishery Cooperative): “Rivers flowing into Tokyo Bay were once full of aquatic species. Tokyo Bay and its tidal flats were also habitats for various marine species. But human beings destroyed these habitats. They didn’t do so on purpose, but out of ignorance.”

Ohno lived on Tokyo Bay for over 60 years carrying out his family’s fishing business. Its tradition may be traced back to the 17th century. He contributed to the conservation of Sanbanze, an 1800-hectare tidal flat remaining in Tokyo Bay. The fisher emphasizes its importance for the fishery.

Onodera Hiroshi: “With wet rice paddies, you can harvest a certain amount of rice without fertilizer, since the water from forests is rich in nutrients.”

Onodera, a farmer living upstream of the basin, joined “The Forest Is the Sweetheart of the Sea” movement, thereby becoming inspired to stop raising broiler chickens and become an organic farmer.

With natural resources rapidly disappearing throughout the world, we believe the Japanese experience can help us reconsider the concept of “development” itself—helping us to relearn what we’ve lost. It is our hope that more people will make the choice to return to natural, sustainable lifestyles.

For further information, please contact Natsumi Koike from PARC: Tel: +81-3-5209-3455 Mail: video@parc-jp.org

PARC would be very happy to provide sample DVDs upon request.


Video information:
Title: Finding Connections ; Sea, Forest and Our Lives
Directed by Suzuki Toshiaki, Produced by Pacific Asia Resource Center (PARC), May. 2010

● 35min, DVD (NTSC or PAL)
● Bilingual (Japanese/English)
● Price $20 for developing countries, $60 for developed countries
● “Finding Connections; Sea, Forest and Our Lives”

Contents

Chapter 1: Nature Changed by People
Humans and Nature in the Modern Era / Reclaimed Tidal Wetlands and the Impoverished Sea

Chapter 2: Severed Connections
The Agricultural Basic Law and the National Income-Doubling plan / Extensive Forestation and Increased Timber Imports

Chapter 3: The Roles of the Forests and Rivers
The Soil and Water Holding Capacity of Mountains / Proliferating Dams / Connecting the Mountains and the Sea / Awareness Changed Reality / Harnessing Nature in the Mountains

Chapter 4: Interconnected Lives
Culture of Broad-leaf Forests / Sanbanze, a Fishing Ground in Northern Tokyo Bay / Values behind Choices

The video website page is here.

Fierce Light: When Spirit Meets Action—Transforming Crisis into Compassionate Activism

"Fierce Light" is filmmaker Velcrow Ripper's term for what Martin Luther King called "Love in Action" and Gandhi called "Soul Force." These concepts reflect nonviolent social change philosophy and action rooted in compassion, faith, and what Gandhi called "satyagraha," the power of truth.

Ripper's 2008 documentary Fierce Light: Where Spirit Meets Action tells several stories that show the victories of grassroots activists relying on nonviolent methods against seemingly overwhelming forces of hate, oppression, greed, and violence.

The Canadian director begins his film by sharing his personal reactions to the assassination of his friend, journalist Brad Will, killed by government paramilitary gunmen in Oaxaca, Mexico, while filming a teacher's strike. He then asks himself this question:

Why do I keep working to change the world when we're up against impossible odds and how can I even think about spirituality when they're killing my friends?

The film follows how Ripper and others respond to this question by affirmative attitude and action—regardless of specific outcome. And many of the multi-leveled outcomes are not what they initially appear to be.

Compassionate activists featured include civil rights activist John Lewis, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, Archibishop Desmond Tutu, Daryl Hannah, eco-activist Julia Butterfly Hill, Ralph Nader, eco-organizer Van Jones, eco-activist John Quigley, actor Danny Glover, and Engaged Buddhist Joanna Macy.

Congressman Lewis described how spirituality formed the heart of the American Civil Rights Movement. His strategic advice:

Get in the way.

Fierce Light followed the movement to save South Central Farms, an urban cooperative farm and garden project in Los Angeles, in real time. Daryl Hannah, Julia Butterfly Hill and John Quigley joined a mass sit-in of urban farmers who attempted to prevent the eviction and closure of the farm.

Van Jones observed during this struggle:

Our whole species is on trial.

In the episode on war and the wounds of war, Thich Nhat Hahn talks about actions that come from the heart. He emphasizes that war, as with all violence, starts at the level of thought and emotion.

If we want to end the war in the world, we need to end the war in our own hearts.

Two million Vietnamese people and 60,000 Americans died during the Vietnam War. Fierce Light shows Hahn returning to Vietnam in 2007 after 40 years of exile, leading a ceremony to help heal the wounds of war. At dusk, with candles floating on lotus flowers illuminating the sacred space those who have gathered have created, the Buddhist monk invites all the souls of deceased people to gather with them for release.

In the segment on the Civil Rights Movement John Lewis relates how social change for human rights merged with the movement to end the war in Vietnam. During this period, Thich Hahn and Martin Luther King became colleagues in their struggle to show the connections between racism, neo-colonialism, militarism, and war.

How do we stay strong, clear, and focused in our grassroots work to support the shift from a primitive and unsustainable civilization based on structural exploitation and state violence to an affirmative and sustainable civilization based on cooperation?

Congressman Lewis guides us:

We've been in the storm so long, I don't know of any other way—but the way of Love...

The Fierce Love on YouTube offers many inspiring "video diaries" spotlighting Aung San Suu Kyi & Alan Clements (the first American ordained Buddhist priest in Burma) and the movement for democracy in Burma; the creation of Bat Nha monastery and its persecution by the Vietnamese government; Congressman John Lewis; the World Social Forum; and Gandhi's Phoenix Ashram and Robben Island in South Africa; and more.

My Lai Peace Park where U.S. Veterans, My Lai survivors, & Hibakusha gathered to pray for the end of war and for world peace

Children in My Lai, (Photo: My Lai Peace Park website)

The My Lai Peace Park was initiated by Quakers of Madison, Wisconsin and Vietnam war veteran Mike Boehm to help heal ongoing trauma from the Vietnam War experienced by Vietnamese civilians, veterans and American veterans.

Beginning with the My Lai Loan Fund, established January 10, 1994, the Madison Quakers have funded a series of projects in My Lai. They include the My Lai Primary Schools, My Lai Peace Park, medical supplies, and the Art Penpals project. Other projects funded by the Madison Quakers are loan funds in seventeen other villages (as of 2007), the construction of 'compassion houses', aid for ethnic minorities, the Sisters Meeting Sisters project and more.

The objectives of these projects go beyond economic aid. For almost 40 years My Lai has been evoked only in the context of grief, anger and recrimination. Before beginning our first project in My Lai the Madison Quakers were resolved to break that chain of hatred and to find ways to re-humanize people who had been de-humanized; the Vietnamese people certainly, but also American veterans, anti-Vietnam war protestors and others. By breaking the chains of hatred which have kept us apart we begin to understand that we are more alike than we are different.

We have shown over the years that if we can sit down with humility and respect and a willingness to listen and learn from each other then anything is possible. If hope can rise from the ashes of My Lai it can arise anywhere.

In 2008, Nanzan University historian Hiroshi Fujimoto, together with Mike Boehm, accompanied a group of Hibakusha to My Lai Peace Park for the 40th anniversary of My Lai where they gathered with the survivors of the My Lai massacre on March 16 in a plea for the end of weapons of mass destruction and peace in the world.

The Madison Quakers have worked with the people of My Lai to build primary schools; to fund hundreds of My Lai women in small businesses, and to build simple "Compassion Houses" for families Agent Orange victims.

Mike Boehm's moving "Hope Rises from the Ashes of My Lai," the story of his journey from war in Vietnam to "homelessness," (a healing time of retreat), to working to heal trauma from the Vietnam War in himself, other veterans, and survivors in Vietnam and their descendants--shows how positive transformation in one human being has ripple effects to others and the larger world. In Boehm's life, this led to the flowering of healing and hope at My Lai Peace Park.

"The Biggest Global Movement in History" — Citizen Action for Biodiversity, Indigenous & Traditional cultures, Sustainability, Peace & Justice

It is my belief that we are part of a movement that is greater and deeper and broader than we ourselves know or can know. It flies under the radar of the media by and large. It is nonviolent. It is grassroots. It has no clusterbombs, no armies, and no helicopters. It has no central ideology. A male vertebrate is not in charge.

This unnamed movement is the most diverse movement the world has ever seen. The very word "movement" is too small to describe it. No one started this worldview. No one is in charge of it. There is no orthodoxy. It is global, classless, unquenchable, and tireless. Its shared understanding is arising spontaneously from different economic sectors, cultures, regions, and cohorts. It is growing and spreading worldwide, with no exception.

It has many roots. But primarily the origins are indigenous cultures, the environment and social justice movements. Those three sectors and their subsectors are intertwining, morphing, and enlarging... This is a democracy movement...It's marked by kinship, communities, symbiosis. It's Pachamama ("Mother Universe"). It's Mama. It's the earth talking back, waking up...

The talk is now three years old––but this clip of Paul Hawken speaking at a 2006 Bioneers conference describing the collective energy of hundreds of thousands of civil society organizations made up of tens of million of people––if not more, from all over our planet–– is breathtaking and more relevant than ever.

The social entrepreneur drew his talk from his 2007 book, Blessed Unrest: How The Largest Movement in the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming.

The movement Hawken describes is not something new. Citing poet/environmentalist Gary Snyder and actor/activist/writer Peter Coyote––Blessed Unrest refers to "the great underground, a current of humanity that dates back to the Paleolithic and its lineage can be traced back to healers, priestesses, philosophers, monks, rabbis, poets, and artists 'who speak for the planet, for other species, for interdependence, a life that courses under and through and around empires.'"

Hawken's imagination was captured by not only the explosion of movements––but also by the shift towards the "intertwingling" of causes––environmentalism; sustainability; biodiversity; indigenous issues; civil society, children's issues; community development; cultural heritage; democratic activism; fair trade; good governance; human rights; social, and economic justice; disarmament and peacemaking; water and other resource rights; and gender issues.

Orion excerpts Blessed Unrest here.