Personal Reflection
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A Paradoxical Trip
So, I’m flying today, to help the environment. Seriously. I’m on a work trip to lobby in Washington, D.C., meeting with Congressional and Senatorial offices to promote wilderness protections and promote the designation of three new National Monuments. If ever there were a net-benefit reason to put that carbon in the atmosphere, this would be it. Wild lands are essential for biodiversity, and sequester tremendous volumes of atmospheric carbon when they are managed for thriving ecosystems. My organization, CalWild, is the preeminent voice for protection of wild areas on public lands in the state of California–an internationally-recognized biological diversity hot spot. California also plays an outsized role in climate policy…
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Defying the Death Cult
It’s time for a frank conversation. The US Supreme Court handed down a ruling this week that will be devastating to the environment. It casts into question the government’s authority to regulate environmental destruction in general. Pollution, death and rapine of habitat lands will result. So let us speak very plainly. I have posted before about the Overculture: the subtext of beliefs, values and norms that inform culture in the English-speaking world, and to some degree the entire Western world. The Overculture has a lot of very serious moral and ethical (and practical) problems. It doesn’t contribute to human happiness or fulfillment. It doesn’t work well for any save the…
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Aging, Intimacy and Atheopaganism
Intimacy is the gold standard of human relating. It is the authentic, vulnerable sharing of the inner worlds of those connecting with one another, and is a deeply nourishing, though sometimes scary experience. It is a human need; we thrive when we have it, and often suffer when we don’t. Under the Overculture, intimacy is usually conflated with sex, the idea being that the only times we are intimate and the only people with whom we are intimate are those we connect with in our sexual lives. This is a sad state of affairs, and one we should work to transcend. It is one of the places where our Atheopagan…
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NATURALISTIC PAGANISM: A Challenge to the Paradigms of the Overculture
A Presentation to the 2023 Conference on Current Pagan Studies: January 15, 2023 THANKS for inviting me to present to the 19th annual Conference on Current Pagan Studies! I’d like to extend my appreciation to the organizers and co-creators of this event. We live in times of deep crises: Clearly, people who are aware of the challenges we face need to be vocal about their concerns, and work to see them gain traction. We also live in times of deep religious transition: These phenomena offer both challenges and opportunities for Pagans.As stated in the description of this conference, the witch embodies a rebellious archetype, and on the face of it…
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Ad Astra
I was six. We lived on the West Coast, so we had to get up early to see it. Grainy, on a small-screen, huge-bodied black and white television full of vacuum tubes, the mighty rocket standing, and the countdown… “…4…3…2…1…LIFTOFF We have LIFTOFF of Apollo Seven!” It was 1968. I didn’t understand very much about what was happening except that we were going to the Moon, and this was a step. We were going. To the Moon. I already knew, somehow, that I lived in the future. And you can laugh about that, that a kid in 1968 would think things so advanced, but we had cars and submarines and…
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GUEST POST: This is Not My Beautiful House
A guest post by JD Stillwater: ©JD Stillwater 2022 | jdstillwater.earth My spouse and I have a beautiful house here in central Pennsylvania. Our names are on the deed, but it is not our house. No, this is not a post in which I confess to forgery or identity theft. Our legal system asserts that my house is rightfully mine, but it is that system that I want to challenge, and what its spiritual depravity does to us as human beings. Especially human beings in this country, at this time in history, with so. Many. Possessions. If you were an adult in the 1980s, you may now have a Talking…
