Photo: Chandler Williams

Like almost everyone I know, I feel enraged and often helpless at the hand of Big Business and Government Inc.‘s lethal decisions to toxify our planet.

I have reviewed and put into practice just about every personal choice to reduce, reuse and recycle and still feel that so much more needs to be done.

After all is said and done, we are going to have to band together and demonstrate that we won’t take it anymore. In this last week two things renewed my hope and re-stoked the fire in my belly. Here’s what happened…

First, last night I watched an incredible movie called Fuel to learn how Big Oil is drowning our rights to health, happiness and freedom. This brilliant flick is chock-full of inspiring and hopeful stories with as of yet little-known realities for a clean fuel future. This is required viewing for every sane and reasonable global citizen!

Second, last weekend I organized (locally) and participated in an international sustainability event called Hands Across the Sand. It began last year as a grassroots response to the BP Oil Spill. There were hundreds of local Hands events worldwide this past weekend on beaches, in cities and on city hall steps across 39 states across the US and all across the world. The awesome thing about this event is that people went out into the visible world and showed up for what we want: No to offshore drilling, yes to clean energy future!

(Here’s the radio interview I did speaking out against dirty oil (scroll to the 40 minute marker)).

The technology to save humanity from autointoxication is alive and well. Yet the weakest link in stretching the chains to a sustainable future is the multinational companies and Government agencies that continue to share the same bed and act in ignorance to fill their own pockets. If we change our habits we disempower these slaveholders that control us by the weakest aspects of our being.

How can our politicians know what we want unless we tell them? It is up to each of us to let our policy-makers know what we want. It is up to each of us to vote for our future by purchasing sustainable products and foods and being extra mindful to consume less oil in all its myriad incarnations and support our local organic farmers. Sign the petitions that come to your email box. Stand up, take hold of urgency.

It’s up to us. May we all stand strong and band together for a healthy planet.

Here’s my poem-flag I erected and now fly in my heart for a different future…

TIDINGS: A Response to Gulf Oil Spill

Asleep for too long we have flung

The refined remains of our ancestors

Into the heavens and created, not heaven,

But a greenhouse here.

Now we have punctured the foundation of our ancient home

And into the sea spews what we have spit into sky,

Replete with rainbows, we set the slicks on fire, making clouds

Billowing full of fear, the rudeness of crude.

Dark, dark, and darker they drift across the Gulf

Evaporating our thankless baptisms to the ethers.

Soon the waterwheel of this modern creed shall complete:

Poison above and poison below, a ghastly rain.

Simple fortunes never enough, we are

Forever tossing copper into blue hoping for gold.

Sunlight and sand dollars won’t suffice

And white sand and white clouds are just for looks, right?

Every accumulation marks our fear of falling

Until even the sea floors suffocate from our grasp.

We ignore, ignore, ignore the ancient lore

Until we are in danger of being let go.

We exhume the oozing bodies of our forebears

And burn them on a pyre of reckless ambition.

We have thrown our belonging to the wind;

Now by tide, destiny is tithing us back.

Mystery, beauty, and wonder cannot be held

But in health and peace and praise

Experienced by the soul as the soul of a sparkling world

Oil the invisible well of hearts.

Let us rest for once for want of more by taking less.

We need prayers that move the chains and change our means,

At last shut down the grabbing factories of the mind, for if we

Must go away, our meager blessing could be to go awake.

2011 Jack Adam Weber, Poetic Healing