Saturday, November 14, 2015

Paris, Friday 13 November 2015

Art by Jean Julien, found on FB

Paris was attacked yesterday by male religious extremists. 127 people were murdered - people simply out on a Friday evening, enjoying the unusually warm weather, dining, going to a concert, shopping, watching a soccer game. Close to 200 people were injured, with reports that 80 of them sustained critical injuries. 

And for what?  The endless wars that men start and continue - that they have started and continued for millennia, all in the name of religion, of ethnicity, of culture, for Earth's resources, of greed, of violence, of destruction, of dominance, of superiority of all other life forms on Earth.  Their actions, their inflammatory words are like an auto immune disease for all of the rest of us living here on our beautiful Earth. They are malignant narcissists, psychopaths, sociopaths who won't stop - their addiction to violence will never be satiated because they don't want it to end - a calm and peaceful life is too boring for them - they crave excitement, titillation at any cost and that cost is the lives of all living beings that share this Earth with them.

I'm beginning to believe that the Y chromosome must be terribly degraded, causing some sort of insanity to overtake men. What else can account for this?
"Civilization is in a constant state of warfare.

Over the last 6500 years, more than 14,500 major wars have resulted in the death of almost 4 billion people. Since WWII, there have been about 30 armed conflicts per year on average, in which 90% of the casualties have been civilians."


--via Deep Green Resistance
Not to mention the non human life forms and ecosystems that have been killed, damaged and/or destroyed.

Men's words of peace, love, beauty, harmony are meaningless in the face of their actions.
“If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or ‘our’ country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex Instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share; but not to gratify my instincts, or protect either myself or my country. For, the outside will say, in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world...”
Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941) England
“Women are not at the peace table. We are not there where our commitment to peace, our capacities to find solutions through dialogue, debate, our sensitivities to human needs, human rights are sorely needed. Therefore, we still must press - from the outside...Feminists can make clear that one does not have to agree with the political or economic systems of a country in order to like and understand its people...The feminist movement has a vision. We understand, first of all, that we have but one earth, shared by one humanity. ...We will make it a woman’s world, not in the sense of control, or power, or dominance, but those values that we call women-centered values, will be diffused throughout society.”
Margarita Chant Papandreou. Greece/U.S.A.
“When we carry our eyes back through the long records of our history, we see wars of plunder, wars of conquest, wars of religion, wars of pride, wars of succession, wars of idle speculation, wars of unjust interference, and hardly among them one war of necessary self-defence in any of our essential or very important interests.”
Anna Barbauld, English poet, essayist, critic, 1793


Monday, November 2, 2015

Elephants being elephants


One more Elephant trekking camp has joined our Saddle Off program . Here are some of the 20 beautiful ladies who live in this camp which is joining our freedom program called " Elephant Keeper " .

The visitor will enjoy taking the herd to walk in the jungle, to feed them, watch them eating and foraging, swimming and playing in the mud. If you want to help more elephant out of the riding work, to take the saddle off of their backs, please help to support this program at Mae Pin elephant camp, Mae Wang district. More details on the program soon.

You can read more about Elephant Nature Park at their FB page and their website.

There is also a wonderful Nature program on PBS worth watch entitled Soul of the Elephant.

They are such remarkable beings - sensitive, intelligent, soulful - and it pains me greatly to read about them being poached and poisoned for their tusks.  Humans have so much to be ashamed of...


Pileated Woodpecker

A simply stunning shot of a male Pileated Woodpecker in flight—notice how he has twisted his neck around so that his head is upside-down relative to his body. Thanks to David Mintz in Florida for the photo.

I was fortunate to see a Pileated Woodpeck back in 2007 - walking in the woods with my dog, Kylie, I head the drumming and looked up to see one in a dead tree by the river.  I gasped and gave thanks to Nature for allowing me that opportunity as they are rare what with all of the development in the area.

Monday, October 26, 2015

Dance the fire of your longing...

(Image from here)

Reclaim what has been forgotten.
Dance the fire of your longing
under the waxing moon of your full presence.
Carry the seeds of your dreams
awhile longer in the womb of Nature’s being.
Let the Earth incubate
your wild if onlys
in its embryonic embrace
as you re-member the self you were so many eons ago
when you were forest and moonlight.

(Poem found on Tree Sisters FB page)

RIP Meamar


This beautiful male Amur Leopard was killed by an automobile - you can read the story here.

I had zero idea that there was even an Amur Leopard and had to read a little about them.  Apparently, there are only about 80 left in the world, so losing this beautiful male is very problematic for the species. 

You can read the Wiki entry here.

Friday, October 23, 2015

Science is not above reproach

Protect the Polar Bear

Polar bear suffering from abusive science

A sad image of a starving polar bear went viral a few months ago. This shocking image came to my attention a couple of days ago. It shows a MALE polar bear being wounded, suffocated, by a collar device. The photo is less than 2 weeks old. It is from the east Alaskan part of the coast of the Southern Beaufort Sea.

I have had confirmation that the USFWS are aware of this bear and its predicament. According to my sources, they are ”monitoring the bear”. Word is that the bear does not belong to a USFWS program, it has been collared under a Canadian regime.
Generally, only polar bear females are collared. Males develop much thicker necks and have the potential to either pull the collars off over their heads (if they are loose enough) or get strangled by the collars (if they are tight enough).

A timed self-release device that allows the collars to fall off before the male polar bears get problems from them is apparently the reason behind a program to experimentally put collars on males in the Southern Beaufort Sea – a methodology used by only one senior polar bear researcher.

Also female polar bears routinely suffer from their collars and from the human handling associated with putting them on. Scientists are well aware of this. They have even among themselves coined the term “stinker” for bears with collars that cause such gross inflammation and infection that they smell very bad upon renewed human contact!
The invasive methods used in polar bear science are a general problem. Self-restraint, and a respectful approach to individual bears, is a universal scarcity in polar bear science. Clearly, the chase/sedate/handle/collar methods are traumatic. With male polar bears, collaring is a failure. Whether it is due to failed release mechanism, or to bad programming of the timers, the result is suffocating bears. The photographer of this particular bear, and other sources, assure me that this is not a unique case. 

Polar bears are in dire straits already – due mostly to over hunting and sea ice melting. The Southern Beaufort Sea subpopulation of polar bears has been dramatically crashing in recent years, and the continued utterly unsustainable hunting on both the Canadian and US sides of the border is driving the subpopulation towards extirpation. The management and “conservation” of polar bears is already a disgrace. The last thing these bears need is additional casualties due to scientific experiments.

The USFWS says they do not have funds to save this bear right now. Really? Well, someone needs to take responsibility for their actions. Canada? In the meantime, the polar bear suffers.

Monday, October 19, 2015

Reddish Egret

 

Reddish Egret (Egretta rufescens) in Florida, USA by ER Post on Flickr.

Sunday, October 18, 2015

Friday, October 16, 2015

Australian Pelicans

Australian Pelicans in breeding colors. In the breeding season the large bills take on brighter colors and are used as flags to attract the opposite sex when they flap in the breeze. 

Kangaroo Island, South Australia by Grame Guy

Eagle Huntress


                          
Ashol-Pan, the now 14-year-old Mongolian/Kazakh celebrity who rose to fame online, is a primary example of the potential of new media technologies to transform the lives of nomadic women. In January, 2016, Ashol-Pan will star alongside her family in Eagle Huntress, a documentary that follows her life in the remote mountains of Tsambagarav Uul National Park. The film will also call attention to the rapidly disappearing tradition of eagle hunting.

A day earlier, Ashol-Pan’s mother, Almagul, had sat in front of the camera and talked about her daily life, oriented around caring for livestock and making dairy products and food for her family. She has never eagle-hunted, although she often feeds and cares for her daughter’s and husband’s eagles. She has a cellphone, which she uses infrequently, and watches television occasionally with her family — especially films in Mongolian. She likes technology, but is in no way attached to it. She is proud of her daughter’s fame, but then, she is proud of all of her four children. And while she feels that technology has played a role in her daughter’s celebrity status, she does not have a desire to use technology more regularly. She is satisfied with her life.

At the end of the interview, I asked: “How has fame changed your daughter’s life?” Almagul smiled. “We’ve been very lucky. I’m very proud of my daughter. But, I also worry about her. In Mongolia, we have this belief that fame is bad luck. So, I worry that too much fame will bring my daughter bad luck.”
You can read the rest of this article here.


You can see more pictures of Ashol-Pan here, along with more information about her and Mongolian nomad culture.

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Wizardry

(Click to enlarge)

Merlin catching a dragonfly

Photo by Carl Woo

(where you can find the top 100 amazing photos)

Sunday, October 11, 2015

Reasserting her willdish nature...

(Image from here)

When women reassert
their relationship with the wildish nature,
they are gifted with a permanent
and internal watcher,
a knower,
a visionary, ...
an oracle,
an inspiratrice,
an intuitive,
a maker,
a creator,
an inventor,
and a listener who guide,
suggest,
and urge vibrant life
in the inner and outer worlds.
When women are close to this nature,
the fact of that relationship glows through them.
The wild teacher,
wild mother,
wild mentor
supports their inner and outer lives,
no matter what.

~ Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes -Women Who Run With The Wolves