On Positive Transformation to Health and Sustainability through Food Sovereignty | Ron Kinley’s TED talk: Guerrilla Gardening in South Central LA | Vandana Shiva Soil not Oil | Dahlia Wasfi MD on Monsanto’s Seed Terrorism in Iraq | Joe Brewer Working for Billionaires

Okay, well, my preceding blog featuring the over-the-top frightening and provocative wake-up call about human actions on the planet, needs to be answered and redirected to subjects spelling out hope, again and again. I have the tendency to veer towards economic issues and casting the blame towards the culprits, the 1% of course. Why do I feel that enough is enough? Because there’s a tendency among all of us to just feel powerless and sort of heading towards a crash, so that we become even more reckless. Say you are becoming late for an event, and there can become a point where you teeter towards not going at all, because of whatever story you’re telling yourself in your head. Or better analogy, since many people are weight conscious and become obsessed with what they shouldn’t be eating, and then wind up over-indulging big time, because once they’ve ‘broken their rule’ they say, what the hell and now after putting that diet off another day…the downward spiral may set in and feeling upset with oneself and powerless, now feeds a cycle of rationalization.

I often gravitate to talking about economics, bringing up the corpocrisy of capitalism. That’s why the article about “Making money for Billionaires” by Joe Brewer reverberates. Brewer’s punch line, “Will we honor the sacredness of life on Earth and evolve our global economy so that is in service of life? Or will we desecrate all that is sacred in this world so that a handful of families can have a few more yachts, a few more marble bath tubs, and bragging rights that they are the ones who died with the most toys?”

I don’t meant to scare people, though I may.

global land and sea temperatures 1.11C warmer in April 2016

Fact: Last month, April was the warmest on record. The Guardian features this article. “April breaks global temperature record, marking seven months of new highs”

Fact: Michael Slezak writes for the Guardian, “World’s carbon dioxide concentration teetering on the point of no return”

Fact: The economics of the fossil fuel industry fuels climate change which disrupts peoples lives and impoverishing their connection to nature, as does the economic political system of capitalism which has effectively taken away peoples’ rights to sustainable living.

That’s why dozens of ecological and environmental awareness groups coordinated a world-wide two-week global wave of escalated action to keep coal, oil and gas in the ground. Break Free from Fossil Fuels – through investing physically in ways to avoid these fuels and replace them with others, as well as through divestment from schools, institutions and companies that use these.

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WHAT WE CAN DO! Anyone who is conscious, is aware of the gist of our current reality. Yet perhaps not everyone realizes just how interconnected things are; the earth’s atmosphere and climate, the various species flickering out of existence, the state of human affairs, wellness and disease connected to diet and food growth, resources and how much is leveraged by economics and greed. Yes, you all have heard of the 1% and the 99%. You see on the news the ravages of war and greed.

I couldn’t get this blog out quickly enough for my own taste, except that it has left the exposé on the lies we live there resting further on my top page. Having attended the alternative climate talks coinciding with those among dignitaries in Paris during the same two weeks December 2015, one of the main themes among the various presentations by ecological evangelists, activists, journalists and environmental entrepreneurs, was the need to create a new story to portray the radically changing climate and the radically shifting needs and solutions, so that the message for change will not be disregarded through hopelessness or gloom, but presented as palpable alternatives that can be embraced; with refreshing new ways to approach the subject – in positive ways – that people can grasp and feel inspired by and inclined to act on. Sort of like presenting things in chewable bites that are savory and delicious rather than presenting something so ferociously unwieldy and ugly that the easiest reaction is simply to turn one’s back and pretend it isn’t there, like that homeless person you step around on your way to work in a metropolitan area from the car door to the office entrance.

On this note, I am going to be treating a number of alternative change measures that we all can embrace, over the next blogs.

This one is about the easiest and perhaps most overlooked means of creating change and controlling this through one’s own actions: the food you put in your mouth. As the founders of Collective Evolution state, change happens from within.

No better place to start, than what you put into your mouth, and how this food is grown.

Ron Finley: A guerrilla gardener in South Central LA TED talks about Los Angeles’s vacant lots

Ron Finley Guerrila Gardener where the artist’s palette are plants and trees

Guerrilla gardening is actually an established concept; according to an entry in wikipedia: guerrilla gardening is the act of gardening on land that the gardeners do not have the legal rights to utilize, such as an abandoned site, an area that is not being cared for, or private property.

You can contact Ron Finley, the Gangsta Gardener at http://ronfinley.com to help the Ron Finley Project grow in more communities.

Deepak Chopra Center 7 Spiritual Laws of Gardening by Leo Carver

As the author Leo Carver mentions in his article for the Chopra Center The 7 Spiritual Laws of Gardening “The wisdom traditions of the world often refer to the oneness and transcendence one feels when interacting with nature.”

There’s been an ongoing obstructionism of peoples’ food and farmers’ seeds going on in India, as witnessed through articles like this one, The Seeds Of Suicide: How Monsanto Destroys Farming

Vandana Shiva is an Indian scholar, environmental activist and anti-globalization author who has written more than 20 books. She’s a ferociously intelligent woman who brings her economic and political insights into her speeches, in which she eloquently articulates why things are the way they are, as dictated by the economic trends of the last half of the century in capitalism and corporate greed and globalization. I witnessed her speaking this last December in Paris as a panelist during the climate talks, orchestrated by the Place to B. She has worked to promote biodiversity in agriculture. “Central to Shiva’s work is the idea of seed freedom, or the rejection of corporate patents on seeds.” Much of her work has been on educating the public about food and agriculture, as in Vandana Shiva’s Speech on Food and Agriculture Systems
In it she mentions that “fertilizers, which are toxic and poisonous, were originally designed as weapons of war…and that 6,000 chemicals are unleashed every year by these companies. She casually points out as she’s describing the terrorism of Monsanto and it’s hijacking of the seeds of Indian farmers, that “this was earlier, this was before these companies controlled governments, research at universities and before they controlled the media.” Hearing her words reminded me of what I learned viewing multiple documentaries after the Wall Street financial collapse, where it was elucidated clearly how the world’s financial systems have infiltrated educational institutions, to be proponents and perpetuators of their own system.

She talks about Monsanto ‘We Must End Monsanto’s Colonization, Its Enslavement of Farmers’

and food sovereignty as does Dahlia Wasfi MD, a physician, peace and environmental activist. Waif talks about Iraq, its occupation and the experiment of Monsanto with their own chemicals and the farmers of Iraq. Wasfi talks in this video about Iraq’s seed industry and its destruction by Monsanto, who forbid them (Iraqi farmers) after 2003 to maintain their seed bank and share their seeds. What happened in India is happening currently in Iraq, with respect to Monsanto’s occupation of farmer’s seeds.

I just discovered the site Salud America, reading that the Las Cruces, New Mexico city council members were meeting on May 23, 2016, to discuss plans for expanding the local agriculture and food environment through a comprehensive Urban Agriculture and Food Policy plan developed by local non-profit La Semilla Food Center (semilla=seed). That’s good news! I presume more of this awareness and activities around urban gardening are springing up in various states.

Carol Keiter aka nomadbeatz ~ As an avid blogger who is presently picking up where I left off with my eBook to complete it and and beginning again to compose music, I ask you rather unambiguously and unabashedly to please donate, if you are able. !-))

In my carolkeiter blog I talk about the Sovereignty of Consciousness.