The Tearfund carbon fast asks that we give up technology and re-allocate to the poor.    The Telegraph reports that Bishops in the Church of England are calling for a technology fast during Lent:

“[The technology fast] is a statement [of solidarity] with a world that does not have that ability to communicate the way we can and a reminder to us that perhaps we may have got beyond ourselves in terms of our own consumption of technology. We have galloped forward so fast maybe we have out-run our global responsibility in doing that.” – Bishop of Oxford, Rt Rev John Pritchard

Vincent Callebaut Architectures is designing entirely new spiritual spaces. Many of his recent designs are buildings that function as eco-technology. They integrate with the multiple environments that overlap in our cities: human, mechanical and Gaian.

OGMA releases his his first album. His ecstatic music can be heard on myspace.

Karla Tonella has constructed an online document where she is looking at Earth2, an NBC television series from the 1990s.

“Set 200 years in the future when the depleted Earth(1) is mostly uninhabitable, this series turns us back on ourselves to reconsider our relationship to our own planet, indigenous peoples and other species. While post-colonial and frontier metaphors abound, it is the metaphysical themes and the unique semi-sentient planet that set this program apart from other science fiction and adventure series. I will argue that the series uses archetypal figures and mythic themes to promote ideas of connectedness and wholeness as found in popular conceptions of the scientific theory known as the Gaia hypothesis.”

Continue reading…

Playing tonight, here:
The Wild Project, 195 East 3rd St., New York, NY
(Doors 7p, screening 8p sharp, $10)

via Elizabeth Housley

Story from North America (FULL VERSION!) from Kirsten Lepore on Vimeo.

Via Discerning Brute, Erin Pavlina tells her story of running the vegan spirituality software:

I grew up on burgers, fries and milkshakes. I ate the Standard American Diet my entire life.

Around the time I started college, I told the spirits that I wanted to be a hero. I wanted to save the planet. And I told them if they would just see fit to grant me superhuman powers that I would use them for good. I also told them I wanted to be a healer and asked for the power to heal people with touch.

They laughed and told me I wasn’t ready for such a thing. So I asked them what I had to do to get ready.

They told me to go vegetarian. They told me that in order to heal people and to have ”superhuman” powers and abilities that I would need to raise my vibration, my energy, and that one powerful way of doing that was to stop eating meat. They explained to me that an animal carries its torture and death with it when it is slaughtered, and that when we humans eat that energy, it lowers ours. That made a lot of sense, so I immediately told the spirits to go take a flying leap. There wasn’t any way I was going to go vegetarian! Give up my Big Macs? Pfft. Wasn’t there some other way? I asked them hopefully.

Nope, they said. You gotta stop making your body a graveyard for suffering, torture, and cruelty. I ignored their advice for years. But it always niggled in the back of my mind. How could I expect to live with compassion when I was allowing other people to murder an animal and feed it to me. Oh, the hypocrisy.

When I met Steve, he was a vegetarian. I remember being annoyed that he couldn’t eat at certain restaurants and was always trying to get me to go vegetarian too. I was always getting food poisoning and very ill when I ate animal products, so one day I decided to try going vegetarian for 30 days. I didn’t tell anyone, I just did it. And it was easy! Much much easier than I thought it would be.

I went back to the spirits and said, “Now can I have super powers?” They said, “You’re headed in the right direction, but eating eggs and milk and cheese is just as cruel as eating the animal’s flesh. Look into it and you’ll see.” I promptly ignored them again. I figured I had done quite enough! They thought differently. But I did notice that my
psychic abilities increased as a vegetarian and it did make me curious.

One day Steve told me he wanted to go vegan and raise our future children as vegans. It nearly broke us apart because I had NO intention of doing anything SO drastic! But once again, I decided to give it a try for 30 days and see for myself if it was something I wanted to do or not. Oh my goodness! The difference was amazing. I lost tons of weight, I felt great, 95% of my chronic health problems just magically vanished, and my psychic abilities increased massively. How could I possibly go back to eating ice cream and cheese? That would be like putting poison back into my body.

I starting reading and learning more about how food animals are treated and I could no longer be a part of their suffering. When I realized that I could live quite easily and happily without harming animals I made the firm decision to continue to be vegan. Not only did this increase my compassion, it increased my connection to the spirits. I was able to hear them more easily, and I started having more precognitive dreams. I started being able to “read” people and know what was going to happen to them. I guess you could say I became vastly more psychic. And they started giving me tasks and assignments to carry out. I felt like a first level hero.

So, that’s how I went from eating fast food to plant food. Even though the spirits were right all along, I just wasn’t ready to listen. And they understood that too. Free will and all.

From this experience, I learned that having superhuman powers doesn’t mean flying around and using x-ray vision. It means moving towards a higher vibration and moving closer to Source. And it’s that kind of “superhuman” power that will save our planet. Of course, that doesn’t stop me from trying to fly occasionally, and I do still have that cape tucked away somewhere … just in case.

This feels at first, in a speculative fiction sort-of-way, like one more step toward turning the planet into a large neural network… Building floating synapses for the network mind, out in the sea.

“In general, computing centers are located on a ship or ships, which are then anchored in a water body from which energy from natural motion of the water may be captured, and turned into electricity and/or pumping power for cooling pumps to carry heat away from computers in the data center,” Google writes in the patent application.

Read More…

(Posted about Bike Blessing on Drunk and In Charge of a Bicycle.)

From the New York Times article:

Thousands of South Korean students, mainly networking through the Internet, immediately took to the streets, followed by a broader uproar.

The uprisings and protest in South Korea are a great example of the power Cyberactivism to affect and infect people (who may or may not have access to technology) with the call to action for social justice.

This is from the introduction to my paper in progress “Cyberactivism and The Courage to Be: Resisting Institutional Power in the Network Society”:

Technologies of resistance are manifold. The mythologies and histories of resistance are transmitted between actors, tribes, nations and networks through technologies as diverse as writing, dancing and uploading. Such means of transmission, information technologies, are foundational components of the cognitive spaces where we describe the indescribable, make the finite infinite and explore and expose the internal. These cognitive spaces are dreamplaces, realms of imagination and spiritual depth, where resistance is born from belief in
social justice and the possibility of a different, or even better, world. From the archaic to the advanced – information technologies are, as Davis (2004) describes them, “technocultural hybrids” (p. 7). These hybrid technologies are the revelatory vision, the pictograph and petroglyph, the smoke, the alphabet, the printing
press, the electronic signal, the telephone, radio, television, fax and satellite.

Along with the rise of networked information communication technologies emerges a potential new depth and scope for dreams of social justice. These are not only new means of resisting power but also new spaces for institutional power; technology is always the trickster, a coyote of the network society.

However, when used as a means to resist institutional power, information technologies can mediate the expression of what Tillich (1959) calls “ultimate concern.” When information technologies are engaged to communicate what Tillich (1959) calls “ultimate meaning” in answer to the “moral demands” of
“ultimate concern,” technology mediated communication becomes a religious practice.

“Natural Charcoal”

I contributed a little story about a food producer and their sugar refinery to The Discerning Brute. You can read it here.

I verified that the Domino refinery in question does not use cow bones. I read something recently that claimed it takes something like 7,800 cows to produce the ‘bone char’ for one industrial sugar filter. The sugar industry calls it “Natural Charcoal.” Right, like “Healthy Forests” and “No Child Left Behind.”

From: Susan Norrell
Date: Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 8:48 AM
Subject: RE: Industrial products

Hello Michael,

Our Yonkers refinery has never used natural charcoal filter (also known
to some as the bone char). They use a carbon filter process. If you
have any other questions, feel free to email me.

Regards,

Sue Norrell
Consumer Affairs
Domino Foods

Biblical events as if seen on Google earth.

God’s Eye View (Ark)

In his research blog, Gregory Donovan constructs a definition of his neologism “cyberenvironmentalism.” Donovan writes that “cyberenvironmentalism aims to develop ecologically informed environmental practice for the information age through interdisciplinary examination of cyborg ecology.” He further defines his new field as follows: “Pragmatic in its approach, constructive forms of relationship between cyborg and cyberenvironment are negotiated and re-negotiated through sustained scientific research.”

I propose that the current threats to human rights and social justice in cyberspace warrant not only a “pragmatic approach…negotiated and re-negotiated through sustained scientific research” as Donovan proposes but also a revolutionary theory as David Harvey demands, one “validated through revolutionary practice.”

This revolutionary practice is cyberenvironmental activism. Cyberenvironmental activism is the pursuit of social justice within cyberspaces using not only the tools of theory but also drawing on the rich history of radical actions outside of cyberenvironments (by groups such as the SDS, the Weathermen, FARC, The Black Panther Party, etc.) Online protesting brings to mind mobilization through list-serves and email or web sites such as Meetup or MoveOn, but these are usually just a method of communicating about a solidspace action to prepare for the ‘real’ protest, when the people assemble in a physical space together. But there is an arsenal of tools available to the online online-radical to engage the cyberenvironment.

Just as is true with the solidspace equivalents, many of the methods used in this sort of ‘virtual protesting’ are considered acts of terrorism or crime by authoritarian structures. (It is worth noting that most web sites and cyberspaces have ‘free speech zones’ where expression of certain kinds is allowed, the actions described here deny the restriction of those spaces and reclaim the cyberspace as a public forum.) The tools of cyberenvironmental activism include:

Civil Disobedience: refusal to participate in online activities, refusal to follow unjust rules online.

Sit-ins, aka “denial-of-service-attack”: visiting and refreshing a site en mass to the point of crashing it or preventing other visitors from accessing the site.

Graffiti: hacking sites and posting political messages.

Boycott, aka the “auction attack”: negative rating attacks on cybermarketplace sellers to prevent commerce.

Letter Writing: Email flooding, sending more email than the recipients inbox can handle.

What distinguishes cyberenvironmental activism from cyberenvironmentalism? Cyber-Activism does not rely on scientific research or a pragmatic approach, but rather on that aspect of the human spirit that demands immediate action when we witness injustice. Cyberenvironmentalism might serve to “agitate, educate and organize,” while Cyber-Activism takes direct ‘violent’ or ‘non-violent’ action against the barriers to social justice in cyberspace.

Why does the human spirit demand we engage in cyberenvironmental activism? Religion. Socialist theologian Paul Tillich defines Religion as that which is ultimate, infinite and unconditional in our spiritual life; ultimate concern. Tillich proposes this ultimate concern manifests as the unconditional seriousness of the moral demand. Activism is a religious practice, we engage in activism because we MUST. The “schizophrenic split” between theologians and scientists that Tillich examines can be a source of creative potential – within that chaotic area exists an opportunity for revolution.

Simon Haiduk created this “interactive permaculture learning module” reflecting the work of GaiaCraft.