Billionaire JB Pritzker, the current Governor of the State of Illinois in an annual constitutionally mandated “State Of The State” address of February 19, 2025, questioned the near and long-term State of the Union — of the United States of America,
the relevant paragraphs are excerpted below with a link to the full transcript:
Continue reading “The time is NOW for applied anti-fascist actions of resistance and desistance and acts of courage —firstly, by elected and sworn state and local leadership”Winter Sky Sunrises and endless Horizon, Mountains, Forests, Prairies and Waters were traded for cities, skyscrapers and highways, built and named by corporations, governments and militias to populate with executives, politicians, engineers, administrators, marketers, managers, soldiers and subordinates — the wealth of the corporate-nation city-state dependent on the slow, then fast, destruction of all the Land and Waters and Beings on Earth
the Earth, on which i stood to take this photo this very Morning — and, the Atmosphere, which made the Trees, the Snow, the Clouds, and the Sky colors possible at all, this very Morning.
steel towers, stone temples, asphalt streams, and concrete rivers built to ensure that our feet rarely touch the Earth, that our eyes rarely witness Living and Being;
that we look up or that we look down, but, that we barely look around, that we rarely look within and that we that we never look beyond — so that we forget to remember.
the cities were designed and engineered for doing — which is the opposite of Being;
doing, which is a euphemism for undoing;
undoing, which is actually destruction — and which is ultimately,
a forgetting.
Forgetting to remember where we came from.
Forgetting to remember what we are made of.
Forgetting to remember what we were made for.
Our Elders say that ceremony is the way we can remember to remember. In the dance of the giveaway, remember that the Earth is a gift that we must pass on, just as it came to us. When we forget, the dances we’ll need will be for mourning. For the passing of Polar Bears, the Silence of Cranes, for the Death of Rivers and the Memory of Snow.”
— Robin Wall Kimmerer
from her Northland College 2015 commencement address
a sweet spot, a warm, quiet evening,
of a too-soft winter here,
on & of the good Earth,
that tempts the comfortable one
to flirt with forgetting
the hard totality
of this hot and cold, man-made,
loud and brutal World.
if there was a Mother God,
if God was a Mother,
not “were”
this wouldn’t be
our reality
a dying planet
a deadened polity
mass extinction by chainsaw, net,
bolt-gun or bomb
they said, “96% of children in Gaza feel that death is imminent”
in Sudan, the famine is massive,
oh, this reaper, he is very discriminate
in Congo, there’s mass enslavement for minerals,
see the phone in her hand?! her hypocrisy?! she can’t claim to be innocent!
the Pacific’s so hot,
that it’s killed 4 million murres
while the Indigenous still invoke
“cultural rights” to baby seal furs
therefore,
God is either male — or, truer,
the God who created everything,
was the very first one extincted,
as Nietzsche,
and the german thinkers before him,
all, belatedly said,
“The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.”
Regular firearm, deer hunting season began yesterday in Michigan, United States of America, and the crack of rifles and the blast of shotguns destroy both peace and life.
There is some version of a legalized, defined kill list or belated, legalized “protection list” for nearly every non-human animal being population on Earth. And, for human animal being populations on Earth too.
What defines murder for human beings, of the human animal body?
INTENT.
All Hunting is INTENT – intent to kill.
All animal “livestock” agriculture is INTENT — intent to kill for profit.
Genocide is INTENT.
Continue reading “contemplating intent, consent, kill lists and ceasefire: deer hunting season, regular firearm, November 15 – 30, 2024 Michigan, U.S.”Dear Americans:
When you finally realize that the solution to the economy — rent and groceries (not the stock market, not your investment portfolio), to health and healthcare, bodily autonomy and reproductive rights, the climate crisis, to environmental destruction — of land, air, and water and biodiversity, to wealth inequality, to systemic racism/white supremacy, to colossal, empire-sized military and police budgets — and endless overt and proxy wars and ongoing GENOCIDE — CAN NOT and WILL NOT be found in the BALLOT BOX — blue or red,
— then what?
then, what will you do? will you hope to ride it out quietly with whatever measure of privilege you possess (white male, white adult, middle-classed, usefully employed in the systems of government or institutions of political or corporate power)?
Will you finally rise up and do the necessary-yet-awful, brave, brutal and hard work to resist and fight — like every dignified human collective across history and even today — like the Palestinians? Like the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho? Like the Maroons of Haiti — or will you be like the Germans — roll over, fall in line, bide your time — hope they come for your neighbor or coworker instead; maybe even turn them in?
This “nation is a massacre”, it always has been
for tens of millions of people right here of and on this land — and for hundreds of millions globally — even if that excludes you and yours (for now).
Enough of this profane American existence.
Enough already.
Continue reading “Open Letter to Americans”aurora borealis
as experienced from the land i occupy, Michigan, North America, May 10th 2024
“The Earth is Our government.”
“We are not talking about any political solution. We are not talking about politics at all. We are talking about survival. Our survival will be guaranteed by we, the human people, accepting our responsibilities and honoring the Earth and the natural world of which we are a part will guarantee our survival. There are natural laws that we must honor and that we must obey. This is the only way in which can show the rightful honor to The Earth. We must remember that The Earth is the source of all of our life. The Earth takes care of us while we are alive in this form and The Earth takes us back when we have departed to the spirit world. We must remember The Earth. We must remember our spiritual, real power connection to The Earth. We are an extension of The Mother Earth. This is our source of power, not the economics, not the politics, not repressive government, not liberal government. Our source of power is us and our spiritual connection to The Earth and our recognition of that.”
-John Trudell
“Freedom... We’re born into a reality where you have to pay to be born, you have pay to die, and you gotta have money to live. Now where is the free?”
-John Trudell
“Our obligations and our loyalty have to be to the earth, and they have to be to our sense of community and to our people and to our relations. Our obligations and loyalty should not be to a government that will not take care of our needs. Our obligations and loyalty should not be to a government that has proven time and time again that it is the enemy of the people unless the people are rich in dollars. That has been the consistent history of Western civilization and the American Corporate State Government – that’s reality. They are not our friends, they do not care about us. We have to face the reality that we have an enemy.”
-John Trudell
“600 years ago, that word ‘Indian,’ that sound was never made in this hemisphere. That sound, that noise was never ever made … ever. And we’re trying to protect that — the Indian as an identity. … we’re starting not to recognize ourselves as human beings. We’re too busy trying to protect the idea of a Native American or an Indian, but we’re not Indians and we’re not Native Americans. We’re older than both concepts. We’re the people. We’re the human beings.”
-John Trudell
"There is no old way, no new way, there is a way of life. We must live in balance with the earth. We MUST do it. We have no choice....The Earth gives us life, not the American government. The earth gives us life, not the multi-national corporate government. The Earth gives us life, we need to have the Earth. We must have it, otherwise our life will be no more. So we must resist what they do."
-John Trudell
It’s our spiritual responsibility to protect the earth.
-John Trudell
THE EARTH IS OUR GOVERNMENT
Truly, one of the greatest evocative and provocative living contemporary artists, Survivance/resistance/futurist writers, and performance poets,
Diné artist Demian DinéYazhi’ ingeniously embedded “Free Palestine” in the flickering letters of their powerful, poemic-neon artwork at the Whitney Museum’s Whitney Biennial
we must stop imagining destruction + extraction + deforestation + cages + torture + displacement + surveillance + genocide!
we must stop predicting apocalypses + fascist governments + capitalist hierarchies!
we must pursue + predict + imagine routes toward liberation!
~ Demian DinéYazhi’
poemic-neon artwork: “we must stop imagining apocalypse/genocide + we must imagine liberation.”
the institution & curators were unaware;
yet “Free Palestine”
was intermittently revealed for those with the patience to observe the piece
the entire artwork faces out toward the Hudson River for all to see:
Continue reading “F R e E P a L e sT I nE”last evening, i finally finished watching the film “Oppenheimer” — a biographical film centered primarily on two forces of physics:
J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb
in the film, the cohort of physicists involved in the development of the atomic bomb postulated that the force and heat of the nuclear explosion could trigger a runaway atomic chain reaction by igniting atmospheric nitrogen —- thus, engulfing and destroying the entire planet — their confident mathematical conclusion: “near zero” — but not absolutely zero;
that infinitesimal quantum potential was apparently played to over-dramatic effect for the film — curious about the validity of this apocalyptic concern, i learned that this was never more than a scenario that required elimination in early mathematical and scientific due diligence;
still, the possibility instantly struck me as a parallel for the runaway greenhouse effect — where the greenhouse gas concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere trigger feedback loops that indeed ignite and fuel further feedback loops — causing abrupt climate change, planetary inhabitability and then mass extinction — where no adaptation, mitigation or survival is possible and plants, animals and humans die en masse —
conditions of which, we are on the cusp right now — an anthropogenic-caused-and-accelerated global temperature event horizon that is postulated as a very real probability by climate scientists and evolutionary/conservation biologists across the globe even as it’s played out as something that could occur over the next centuries or millennia rather than in this or the next decade or two —
yet, that more-than-zero-possibility scenario was detailed in a January 2024 article in Popular Mechanics based on a published model in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics
i write today to pay my belated respects and sympathies and to process my retroactive and present grief and rage:
Continue reading “Destroyers of World”this informal essay was inspired by Jeff Gibbs’ statement posted February 6, 2024;
I publish this, as per — to be publicly accountable and on record.
Development is development is development. All development damages the remaining already profoundly fragmented wilderness-ish habitat no matter what kind of development it is — no matter the seemingly innocuous or good intent: a paved bike path through forest, a solar array in the desert, an ayahuasca retreat center on a river in northern Illinois, a new organic farm.
“If you build it, they will come.” And then never stop coming and building.
We must stop destroying land to build more of anything — we must begin to reclaim and return land to nature and welcome, encourage, champion and personally embody the practices of degrowth.
An example of behavior:
“You should build a little rental cottage on your land over there for supplemental income and to sustain yourself through your golden years.”
– no, i will not build anything there ever — that’s where i set out the salt licks for the deer – by the three apple trees; no, that area is too near to where the blue racer lays her eggs every summer; no! as tempting as that false security is, i will live modestly and reject improvements for improvement’s sake — and embrace flaws and maintenance, and do with what i have — or without. this land is not mine; i merely temporarily co-occupy and humbly and gratefully tend and share this land.
also, there are no more golden years — to quote Beatrix Kiddo, “Bitch, you don’t have a future” — do you understand the science, the projections? let me help you to, i want to.
An opposite example of behavior:
Continue reading “Degrowth or die-out: an imperative for the insatiable species.”i witnessed the last of the snow piles
hand-shoveled or machine-threwn
and the natural drifts too
and the mound in the hollow
of the hügelkultur crescent moon
slowly recede, in a mesmerizing, seemingly molassic, week’s long retreat
then finally and sadly, concede
to the undormant grasses and soft ground beneath
to the sunlit warmth
of these nouveau
great lakes winters
my god,
what global madness
this adored microcosm, my priceless homestead, reveals
and catechizes for me:
our violent, human heat
an unrelenting torrent of accelerant that would
vanquish the ancients
melt greenland’s sheets of ice,
calve antarctic glaciers, strand polar bears,
expose or drown granite, basalt, gneiss
all, in the time of
that old sugar maple’s life
she counted propane canisters
for her two Mr. Heaters
put batteries in her camp lanterns — circa 2004,
set out votive and prayer candles, matches and lighters,
worked past midnight
to empty, wash, fill or refill glass wine bottles with water for drinking, teeth-brushing, cooking
that is the advantage of the white wine screw cap bottles
p.s. VOGA pinot grigio is unrivaled for this use
she’s saved them over the months for this sole purpose, those Italians sure know what they’re doin’
she rotated supply: filled buckets with the previously stored precious water,
placed them in the bathtubs for toilet flushing
and in Igloo jugs
for hand and face washing
& dishwashing
(and, hoe baths too)
this beautiful welled water, pumped from 75 feet below the surface, 10 feet of clay and 65 of sand, her friend once researched county well drill permit records for her.
she made a pot of marinara, boiled 3 lbs of potatoes, planned for pancakes, printed out dutch oven bread recipes,
she set out the dog’s paw wax and his wardrobe of coats,
she refreshed her vintage wool blankets on low heat with honeysuckle-infused dryer sheets,
found her favorite j. crew wool men’s sweater, moss green — circa 1999, which reminded: she best learn some knitting – for repairs and darning, at the very least, the cuff seam is unraveling, but, my god, it’s so warm.
she filled all the bird feeders before sunset, although she’s spotted deer at them at twilight and midnight — using their tongues to excavate the seed,
she set the snow shovel and outdoor broom just outside, beside her back door
all this,
just in case
freezing lines and tree limbs knock the power out
and Lake Effect drifts become temporarily insurmountable
she’s always prepared, she always knows what to do
or can generally figure it out, figure a way out of it – and, without GPS
except:
what to do in
a genocide and in climate collapse.
Continue reading “preparation”
please FEED THE WILDLIFE! if you have means to do so — to help our Earthling kin survive and thrive in the extreme temperatures and conditions of winter and summer — and during fall and spring migration
why is this radical?
because we have been instilled and warned to not do this!
but we now need to feed the wildlife we share habitat with — precisely because we’ve destroyed so much of their own habitat — and their preferred and once-abundant wild food and water sources
(but please only set out food for those wild kin who visit or inhabit your yards, balconies, patios or city parks – still, never feed our more-than-human kin in wilderness, or national, federal, state or county parks, forests, natural areas or preserves)
the limineen | earthling, poet & crone 