Cecile Pineda will be talking about the Apology to a Whale: Words to Mend a World project and signing books during the month of February:
SCHEDULE OF FEBRUARY APPEARANCES
PLEASE NOTE CANCELATION BELOW
February 13 - PEN WEST at 3 PM
home of
Margret Schaefer
1 Quail Avenue, Berkeley
RSVP & directions:
NOTE:
space is limited. Call for
reservations
reservations
February 25 – Ethnic Studies
Postponed till further notice
because of staffing problems at the library.
February 1 – S.F. Occupy Forum at
6 PM
Global Exchange
2017 Mission St. at 16th Street 2nd floor
San Francisco
A link to this talk will be
posted on this newsletter as soon as it becomes available thanks to a team of
WILPF-Disarm/End Wars women who joined S.F. Occupy Forum. The WILPF team is on a West Coast speaking tour ranging
from Southern California to Bremerton, WA, home of the trident submarine, where
a great part of the US arsenal is stored.
GETTING IT RIGHT- MAKING IT WORK
Apology to a Whale:
Words to Mend a World makes the case that the sameold sameold doesn’t work.
“Civilization” has resorted to it repeatedly, in disregard of Einstein’s dictum
that repeating the same behavior hoping to achieve different results is a form
of dementia, but unfortunately there’s no locked facility big enough to hold 7.4
billions of us and counting.
Western European civilization
is the technologically dominant civilization or our time. Global technological
culture is its ultimate articulation. All seven billions of us are now in
thrall to its totalitarianism and technology. Its overarching power
arrangements—economic, geopolitical, and technological—are destroying our planet.
The good news is that pockets
exist in the world, small enclaves where new ways of thinking are being
implemented. None of them are entirely radical because none are entirely free of the taint of the old culture. This
week, a number of such projects modeling significant change have caught my eye.
•A landmark settlement in the federal
class action Ashker v. Governor of California will effectively end indeterminate, long-term
solitary confinement in all California state prisons.
•Obama announced a
ban on solitary confinement for juveniles in federal prison.
As such, neither development
signifies a radical re-thinking of incarceration itself. Both initiatives still
carry the taint of old ways of thinking.
Michael Moore talks about
Norway’s radical approach to incarceration here at 20:29.
•In response to growing
popular outrage against the militarization of law enforcement, exemplified by
police lynchings of people of color, and police violence accompanying arrest of
demonstrators practicing civil disobedience, some police forces are rethinking use of force practices.
•Last
year for the first time, New York City allocated a line item in its budget to develop
worker-owned cooperatives. And the number of worker cooperatives in the city has tripled since
2014. Foundation grants have been made available to owners who may be thinking
of transforming entrepreneurial businesses into such cooperatives.
•Movement Rights, a new
organization, formed just over a year ago which focuses on the Rights of Mother
Earth, is working with indigenous people in California and nationwide in efforts
to ban fracking, oil trains, and other unnatural disasters, modeled on a study
of Cultural Survival’s New Zealand Project among the Moari, “I am the River,
the River is Me, giving the rights of a person to the Whanganai River.
•As
of now the EPA joins the Surgeon General’s early warning system, a reflection that
health of the body is metaphor for health of the planet. Modeled on gas pump
labels in some provinces of Canada, and in response to the threat of climate
change, the San Francisco City Attorney’s office drafted a proposed label to be
displayed on city gas pumps. But when we give up driving altogether for public
transportation and walking, we’ll be lots farther along the road to stemming
some of global warming’s impacts.
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