G8 ORGANIZING ~ news from Starhawk and other heroes

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G8 ORGANIZING ~ news from Starhawk and other heroes

Post by Whitebird Sings » June 9th, 2005, 8:50 am

A letter from Starhawk

Scotland G8 Updates: June 8, 2005
The Problem is the Problem

“The problem is the solution,” is a permaculture principle, but today the problem just seems like a problem. I was hoping to start out these updates for the Scotland G8 organizing with something upbeat and optimistic, but it hasn’t been that kind of a day. Yesterday I was climbing a beautiful mountain above a clear, calm loch where misty blue mountains rolled away toward the horizen. Today I was sweeping pigeon shit off the floor of a warehouse in inner-city Glasgow. That was actually a good part of the day—it is just these little contrasts, after all, that keep life interesting. The frustrating part was coming back into cell phone range last night to all the messages telling us that the site for the rural convergence space had once again fallen through at the last minute. The farmer who had been very keen on the deal had backed out, unexpectedly, at the very last minute for mysterious reasons.

Erik Ohlsen, my permaculture teaching buddy, and I were climbing that mountain to recover from the effort of teaching forty-odd students a ten-day crash course in permaculture and ecological design, aimed at creating a resource pool of knowledgeable people who could turn that rural convergence site into a model ecovillage, For ten days we wallowed in compost toilets and graywater systems—okay, I’m being metaphorical here—we wallowed in discussion of these things, conceiving of ways in which problems might become solutions, waste be transformed to resources, physical structures support directly democratic social structures and people might be encouraged to wash their hands. How many shits does it take to fill a 55 gallon drum, and what is that in liters? What could you do with it afterwards? How many liters of graywater would 5000 people produce in a week, and where could it go if the clay soil doesn’t drain? And just how did I become the Queen of Compost Toilets at this point in my life, anyway?

The work was hard, the rain was cold, the meandering old stone farmhouse had a beautiful simplicity in its design but three hundred years of cold and damp seemed to ooze out of the stones, and the hours were long. Usually students in our courses complain that they aren’t getting enough free time. These seemed to fill every spare moment with extras—meetings to discuss policies for the convergence spaces, special sessions to further discuss techniques of bioremediating toxic soil with mushrooms, late-night screenings after post-session rituals, all night watches for nuclear convoys passing by, and not a few parties!

The students ranged from young, full time activists who live full time in treehouses in an ongoing road protest camp (while completing their Ph.Ds, in some cases) to several steady, solid women and men my age, life long peace activists. Mother tongues included English, Scots, Irish, German, Polish, Spanish, French, Swedish, and Hebrew. Just try to decipher a Swedish/Scottish accent! There was also a large contingent of dogs, intent on recruiting us to help them perfect their stick-chasing form, and several exuberant and assertive children who often wandered in, sat down, and offered their own comments on the proceedings. In the end, we were exhausted but really, really pleased at how deeply the participants seemed to grasp the material we taught and make it their own. And it was very gratifying to see talents emerge—Brice giving a thorough and extensive presentation on alternative energy systems, quiet Beth drawing a stunning design for the convergence space,

Which is not to be—at least, not the one we were analyzing and designing for all week. As I write tonight, we’re still in a cliffhanger mode—will a new site be found by the Stirling Council? The Council, executive body of the nearest town, has become very supportive of our efforts. They can see the public health and safety advantages of having one campsite, with sanitary facilities certified and provided, instead of roving bands of protestors depositing their potential resource material willy nilly throughout the hills. I spoke to one of the Council members who sounded quite genuinely interested in all the features of greywater and especially the compost toilets. So our best hope now that the Council will find us a site on land they own and control. They’re looking. Cross your fingers, hold your breath, light a candle, and pray…

Overall, I’m phenomenally impressed by the level of care and thought and preparation going into every aspect of the mobilization. Dissent, the broad network of direct-action oriented groups, has been organizing up and down the land for over a year, and has managed to bring together a wide spectrum of groups. There are convergence spaces in Edinburgh and Glasgow that have been rented and will provide facilities for meetings, trainings, housing and feeding people. There are medics in training and kitchen collectives coming to cook and a two-week long training for trauma workers who will provide counseling and support for anyone suffering post traumatic stress. A network of nonviolent direct action trainers has been offering trainings for over a year in several regions of England and Scotland. A group of Pagans, the Tribe of Brigid, is coming with a geodesic dome to offer spiritual healing during the actions. Watching this all come together, I feel confident that if we do someday run the world—or rather, facilitate the world’s autonomous running of itself—we’ll all be fed, housed, educated, and all our physical and emotional needs will be well looked after. [emphasis added by WB]

And meanwhile, there’s the Cre8 Summit about to happen, an effort of a coalition of local groups here in Glasgow who are resisting the building of a motorway through a low-income community. The plan is to plant a garden, designed by the community, in a vacant lot in the motorway’s path, and hold a week of activities, workshops, cultural presentations and celebrations that bring alive something of the world we keep saying is possible. Everyone involved is deeply committed to strengthening the local, long term organizing around this issue and I’m very excited and honored to be involved—it’s just the kind of organizing and strategy that I think can be effective, tying the local issues to the global, planting a garden in the path of the bulldozers, opposing power-over and destruction with creativity and life.

Okay, I’m going to bed now. I don’t plan to send out daily updates just yet, but will write when something interesting is happening.

The G8, the annual agenda setting meeting of the heads of state of the eight most powerful countries in the world, will meet in Gleneagles, Scotland, July 6-8.

For more information on the mobilizations, or to donate directly to the action, see:
www.dissent.org.uk <http://www.dissent.org.uk/>

Indymedia Scotland page scotland.indymedia.org

Starhawk
www.starhawk.org <http://www.starhawk.org/>

Feel free to post, forward, and reprint this article for non-commercial purposes. All other rights reserved.

Donations to help support Starhawk’s trainings and work can be sent to:
ACT
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U.S.A.

Starhawk is an activist, organizer, and author of The Earth Path, Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprisin, The Fifth SacredThing and other books on feminism, politics and earth-based spirituality. She teaches Earth Activist Trainings that combine permaculture design and activist skills, www.earthactivisttraining.org <http://www.earthactivisttraining.org/> , and works with the RANT trainer’s collective, www.rantcollective.net <http://www.rantcollective.net/> , that offers training and support for mobilizations around global justice and peace issues.

To get her periodic posts of her writings, email Starhawk-subscribe@lists.riseup.net and put ‘subscribe’ in the subject heading. If you’re on that list and don’t want any more of these writings, email Starhawk-unsubscribe@lists.riseup.net and put ‘unsubscribe’ in the subject heading.

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Post by Whitebird Sings » June 9th, 2005, 11:06 am

The New York Times

June 8, 2005

Crumbs for Africa
editorial

President Bush kept a remarkably straight face yesterday when he strode to the microphones with Britain's prime minister, Tony Blair, and told the world that the United States would now get around to spending $674 million in emergency aid that Congress had already approved for needy countries. That's it. Not a penny more to buy treated mosquito nets to help save the thousands of children in Sierra Leone who die every year of preventable malaria. Nothing more to train and pay teachers so 11-year-old girls in Kenya may go to school. And not a cent more to help Ghana develop the programs it needs to get legions of young boys off the streets.

Mr. Blair, who will be the host when the G-8, the club of eight leading economic powers, holds its annual meeting next month, is trying to line up pledges to double overall aid for Africa over the next 10 years. That extra $25 billion a year would do all those things, and much more, to raise the continent from dire poverty. Before getting to Washington, Mr. Blair had done very well, securing pledges of large increases from European Union members.

According to a poll, most Americans believe that the United States spends 24 percent of its budget on aid to poor countries; it actually spends well under a quarter of 1 percent. As Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist in charge of the United Nations' Millennium Project, put it so well, the notion that there is a flood of American aid going to Africa "is one of our great national myths." [emphasis added by WB]

The United States currently gives just 0.16 percent of its national income to help poor countries, despite signing a United Nations declaration three years ago in which rich countries agreed to increase their aid to 0.7 percent by 2015. Since then, Britain, France and Germany have all announced plans for how to get to 0.7 percent; America has not. The piddling amount Mr. Bush announced yesterday is not even 0.007 percent.

What is 0.7 percent of the American economy? About $80 billion. That is about the amount the Senate just approved for additional military spending, mostly in Iraq. It's not remotely close to the $140 billion corporate tax cut last year. [emphasis added by WB]

This should not be the image Mr. Bush wants to project around a world that is intently watching American actions on this issue. At a time when rich countries are mounting a noble and worthy effort to make poverty history, the Bush administration is showing itself to be completely out of touch by offering such a miserly drop in the bucket. It's no surprise that Mr. Bush's offer was greeted with scorn in television broadcasts and newspaper headlines around the world. "Bush Opposes U.K. Africa Debt Plan," blared the headline on the AllAfrica news service, based in Johannesburg. "Blair's Gambit: Shame Bush Into Paying," chimed in The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia.

The American people have a great heart. President Bush needs to stop concealing it.

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Post by Whitebird Sings » June 11th, 2005, 9:52 am

June 10, 2005

A Lighter Shade of Action Blues
By Starhawk

I feel like a bride jilted twice at the altar who gets a new proposal, We have a site for the rural convergence—maybe! The Stirling Council, who to their credit do seem to really want to work with us, have found a big field next to the football stadium, in a bend of the River Forth. Because it is close to an old rubbish dump, they need to test it for methane emissions—so we won’t know one hundred per cent for sure until next week sometime at the earliest, which is making us all nervous. However, aside from that it looks good, big enough, on the edge of town so we’re looking at fields and a couple of picturesque ruins, with access to the river, and with a fairy hawthorne in its midst. If we really get it, we can create a beautiful eco-village, and because it is slated for development, some of our problems around impact on the land will be much more easily solved.

Yesterday I worked on informational materials as an act of faith that we would eventually need them, then went down to the warehouse to sweep up more pigeon-shit with the masked anarchists—dust masked, that is. It’s really sweet to see how hard everyone is working just to get the space clean enough to use without being a health hazard. There’s got to be a good country song in this, or perhaps a blues:

He promised me a green field
A river running free…
Was it the FBI or Special Branch
Took my farmer away from me?
He let me down…
I got the action blues

Now I’m stuck inside this warehouse
I’ve cried till I can’t cry no more
I feel like a dead pigeon
On a dusty sweatshop floor
In a bad part of town…
I got the action blues…

Then four of us and a dog piled into a car and drove to Edinburgh for an emergency meeting. We met in the garden of the Communications Workers Union social center, where a private birthday party was raging through the first two floors and on every trip to the bathroom one had to navigate through gaggles of teenage girls in heavy eye makeup and tight skirts holding a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. There were about twenty or thirty people at the meeting, crowded around long tables in the northern dusk, going round and round the question of what to do about a rural convergence, whether or not the site the Council offered would work, what alternatives were open if it didn’t. Phil, from the group People and Planet, facilitated most of the meeting and he did an impressive job of keeping the group on track and maintaining his humor and calm. Actually, so did everybody. It was just the kind of situation that can lead people into blaming and bitching, but it seemed that everyone was listening hard to each other,, that people were frustrated with the situation but not taking it out on each other, but really looking for the best solution. Again, I’m really admiring the commitment, skills, and sheer hard work of the on-the-ground organizers here,

By the time we got back to Glasgow, it was after 1 AM. Today I spent doing some errands and then going to Stirling to look at the new site, then back for a Cre8 meeting. I bought a drill and some tools so we can start building compost toilets—we seem to talk endlessly, almost obsessively about them and I’m determined to just build one and get it happening. All it takes, really, is a barrel and a toilet seat and a box.

So, keep the good thoughts and magic flowing. This site could work beautifully for an eco-village and convergence site, but if we get left at the altar again, we have literally no place else to go. And then, as the head of the Council put it with some alarm, “chaos reigns.”

Starhawk
www.starhawk.org <http://www.starhawk.org/>

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Post by Whitebird Sings » June 14th, 2005, 7:50 am

June 14, 2005
Cre8 Summit Begins!

By Starhawk

Cre8 Summit has begun, the community garden built on land where a much-contested motorway is planned through the Gorbals, an historic, low income community in Glasgow. The actions are finally underway. And it went beautifully!

At first the beginning seemed inauspicious. Saturday night the van carrying the kitchen for the garden got stopped by the police south of Glasgow. The driver got into the back of the police car to answer some questions and was wisked off without a word, leaving the van with no one to drive it. Sunday morning, June 12, dawned gray and drizzling. I declined to be on the team that got up at 5 AM to put up tents, but made my way down around 9:30, wondering what I would find.

The tents were up, and a few people were venturing out into the rain to continue to pick up garbage. The police had come by, and simply wished everybody luck. A seating circle of old tires had been made in a central area—a continuation of an area the neighborhood drinkers had already pioneered informally. Plants had been delivered, and a truckload of soil. We spent some time wandering around, trying to decide what should go where, while Rob drew up a map. We had advertised a 10 AM time for a community design process, but no one showed up, which didn’t actually surprise me. The organizers of the project deeply want to involve the community in the overall design, but my experience with such things has been that people get involved in actually doing things. An overall design seems very conceptual and overwhelming—building a raised bed or planting a flowerbed is fun and creative and that’s how people feel a sense of agency and ownership. But around noon we all gathered, looked at the map and what was already on the ground, and came up with a plan that built on what was already there—paths that dog walkers had made, the seating circle, a small beginning of a community garden in a few bathtubs up front. These things were, in fact, the input of the community, writ upon the ground.

As the afternoon wore on, the sun came out, and more people joined in. The bike ride arrived at 2 pm, with the JAM74 group who are organizing to stop the motorway scheduled to go through this vacant lot. A reporter from a local paper came out, and a local artist arrived to lead a mosaic workshop. Two young women built an herb spiral out of ‘urbanite’—broken up concrete. We filled tires with gravel and planted a few with ornamentals. We made a small vegetable garden in a big tub. A group of energetic men, joined by some of the neighborhood boys, attacked the high bank around the site with pickaxes and spades, and made a flat entranceway. Other neighbors came by to plant things or just to see what was going on.

The mood got brighter and brighter as the sun poked out of the clouds, then scurried back in periodically to let a few bursts of showers rain down. The garden grew! Abi from Talamh came by and showed me how to weave a living willow lattice arch—a skill I’ve been longing to acquire! And by the end of the day, the missing kitchen had arrived. The piece of barren, toxic, trashed ground we started with had been transformed into the beginnings of the community gathering place the organizers had dreamed of creating. After all their hard work, frustration, overwhelm, and fears, they had done it! And the best news—we got word that the motorway construction has been put back to at least 2007! That gives the community more time to organize, and more time we can be assured that our garden will remain. It’s a partial but important victory that contributes to the joyful mood as we continue to plant and beautify the waste ground.

Starhawk

...and to this I say
So mote it be!!!! :)

WB


FYI...

www.starhawk.org <http://www.starhawk.org/>

Feel free to post, forward, and reprint this article for non-commercial purposes. All other rights reserved.

Starhawk is an activist, organizer, and author of The Earth Path, Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising, The Fifth SacredThing and other books on feminism, politics and earth-based spirituality. She teaches Earth Activist Trainings that combine permaculture design and activist skills, www.earthactivisttraining.org <http://www.earthactivisttraining.org/> and works with the RANT trainer’s collective, www.rantcollective.net <http://www.rantcollective.net/> that offers training and support for mobilizations around global justice and peace issues.

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Post by Whitebird Sings » June 20th, 2005, 4:10 pm

G8 Scotland Update, June 20, Arise, the Faerie Army!

Friday, June 17—which happened to be my birthday, was also the last formal day of work at the Cre8 Summit, the garden project built on land slated for a motorway in the low-income Glasgow community called the Gorbals. All week long, activists and a steady stream of locals had beed building the garden, collecting rubble and building new beds, filling tires with topsoil and planting hazels, berries, fruit trees. The atmosphere was relaxed and happy, the police unobtrusive. We even got some good press.

When anarchist organizing works, it’s a beautiful process to behold. Work and play blur, and everyone chips in and does what needs to be done without anyone giving orders or directions. The garden consistently had that feel. People were doing hard, sometimes unpleasant physical work: hauling rubble, digging out banks, picking up garbage—but all of it joyfully, with something of the feeling of kids building a clubhouse or digging a snow fort out of a bank. Addi, the slender, smiling woman from Ao Tearoa (New Zealand), who had been at our training, decided to build a labyrinth, and soon had devoted young men carting bricks. Jo, the magenta-haired videographer I was staying with, along with Flee and others built a Sensory Garden, with raised beds accessible by wheelchair devoted to Smell, Taste, Touch and Sight, with tripods hung with chimes for Hearing. I had offered to lead a cob session, but one day it rained, and the next day the clay was too wet. Finally, on my birthday we had two tons of topsoil delivered, which proved to be a perfect consistency for cob—which is a kind of adobe made of clay, sand and straw. We mixed up a batch by dancing on the clay until it deflocculates—loses its molecular structure and becomes a kind of glue holding the sand particles together in a natural form of concrete. We added straw and rolled up big balls, or ‘cobs’ then punched and pummeled them into a bench on a base made of chunks of concrete. Rob and Uri and Harry, some of the Earth Activist Training organizers and former students, joined in and we rolled up balls and discussed anarchist theory.

When we broke for dinner, a young Quebecois woman* named Miriam asked me for advice. She’d painted a faerie on the mural at the front of the garden, and wanted it to say something. “I want a faerie army,” she said, “for the actions. Like the clown army.” There is indeed a Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army in the works, which has been holding clown trainings for months and hopes to field hundreds of clowns at the actions.

“Do you realize that, on this land, if you call for a faery army you will get a real faerie army?” I asked her.

“Yes, that’s what I want!”

“A faerie army—let’s be a faerie army!”

Others started taking up the cry, and suddenly I realized that a faery army is, of course, exactly what I want to see marching up the road on July 6, bringing alive all the powers of the land and the raging earth to confront the power of the G8. On Miriam’s mural, someone had painted, “Beneath the concrete…the garden!” (A revision of an old Situationist slogan from the sixties: “Benearth the concrete…the beach!”) Miriam added: “The faerie army rises, Hidden power of earth.”

After dinner, I suddenly found myself confronted with a small blockade, keeping me occupied until the Chaos kitchen produced five or six different kinds of cakes, and some very sweet cards, a bottle of champagne and one of cider. A group called Tapooka that teaches circus arts came by and completed the celebration by teaching us to spin plates. I passed on the stilt-walking lesson, but felt quite happy and touched. As a kid, I never had one of the those birthday parties with clowns—only rich people did such things in those days. Now I’d had one! Then we made cob again, and worked on the bench until dark. All in all, I haven’t done so many creative projects since art school, if not nursery school!

The next day, Saturday, was the closing festival and party for the first phase of Cre8, which I had to miss as I’d promised to go up to Findhorn for a talk and training. For that matter, I missed the train as well, in spite of Rob’s valiant efforts to get me there, due to Glasgow’s maddening layout of one-way streets and labyrinthine detours. But I arrived in time to speak to a good crowd of people, many of whom are planning to come down to the actions. Sunday I did a day-long training for the group—direct action as a spiritual practice.

Findhorn is often perceived by activists as one of those apolitical, New Age places where people are more likely to meditate than act—and I’m sure there are people here who fit that description. But the people in the workshop have an impressive record of political and social activism. They include an old Rainforest Action Network campaigner, a Greenham Common woman who was on a walk I took part in in 1985 across the military firing ranges of Salisbury Plain to Stonehenge, an organizer from Australia who has helped to save a mountain sacred to the aboriginals, another who is restoring the native Scottish forests in the highlands, and many others. They are really excited about coming down to Gleneagles setting up a neighborhood at the eco-camp, and forming affinity groups to take part in the actions.

And we do seem to have a rural convergence site underway. The council has signed a contract, the first tests to see if there is residual methane from an old dump a few fields away have come back okay. We’re pricing plumbing parts and tracking down barrels. Thanks to all who have sent us energy, and special thanks to those local organizers who have been sweating through various bureaucracies and negotiations literally for months, staying up too late, making one more phone call, sending that last email and handling that last detail. May they have enough strength left to enjoy it when it happens. As for me, I won’t quite relax and be sure it is happening until we’re on site, setting up those compost toilets we’ve been obsessing about for weeks.


Starhawk

www.starhawk.org <http://www.starhawk.org/>

[*for those who may not know... "Quebecois" ...is simply someone from the province of Quebec in my Canada :wink: WB]

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Post by Whitebird Sings » June 23rd, 2005, 6:54 pm

Scotland G8 Update June 23, 2005 Solstice at Roslin Glen

By Starhawk

I spent most of today in Stirling talking to Council members about greywater and compost toilets. We’re coming down the home stretch—tomorrow is the final licensing meeting, and overall it’s looking good. I have to say the Council has been very supportive and are quite genuinely interested in some of the alternatives. But I didn’t get much sleep the night before. For some reason, dealing with all the physical realities and the details of these projects throws me into a kind of flashback to high school—staying up late trying to finish a term project.—that awful feeling when you don’t have enough time to finish and you have to finish anyway, and you can’t find the fact or the reference you need and the library is closed. (Okay, I guess that dates me all right!) And while I can stand quite calmly in front of a line of riot cops I have to fight not to panic about exactly how many tank adaptors we need for greywater tanks—challenging to figure out when we don’t know how many kitchens there will be or how many people are coming altogether.

The Council has a composting and recycling officer who had actually read my books and seemed a little surprised at my role in this. “I can understand how you’d be drawn to the politics and the activism,” he said.
“But how did I become the Queen of Compost Toilets? I wonder that myself,” I admitted.
At Findhorn, I found myself thinking how easy it would be to spend my whole life at beautiful places like that, giving workshops, actually getting paid for giving workshops! And being treated in the way people do when they see you as an important person coming to teach them something. Instead of grappling with the problems of what to do with the shit. of ten thousand people. And the answer that came to me is either:

I am deeply and nobly dedicated to the cause.

Or

I’m not very smart.


But seriously, compost toilets are as holy and beautiful as anything else. What could be more magical than the transformation of something hated, feared, and considered a disgusting waste into a valuable resource, a source of fertility? When does it get better than that?

So my Summer Solstice began, appropriately enough, with a tour of the sewage treatment plant at Findhorn, which is actually a beautiful, lush greenhouse filled with tanks holding plants and organisms that treat the blackwater biologically. I was given the full tour by Michael Shaw, the engineer who designed the system and who worked for many years with John and Nancy Todd, the originators of the method they call a Living Machine. Michael also gave me invaluable advice and help on our greywater and compost toilet plans, and was extremely kind and supportive.

Then I got a lift down to Roslin Glen, on the outskirts of Edinburgh. About thirty of us met outside Roslin Chapel—a small, fifteenth century chapel with many esoteric associations, made famous in the Da Vinci Code novel. It’s set on a hill above a steep valley, and we hiked down through the trees to the river below. There some of us plunged into the water, to cleanse and release. It was cold and rejuvenating and wonderful to lie in the clear stream and let go of some of the tension I’ve been carrying.

Then we hiked uphill to a grove of ancient yew trees. Some of the people from the encampment at Bilston Glen had come to join us. Bilston is one of the long-term camps that activists have set up to block construction of a roadway that would destroy the integrity of the forest that still rings Edinburgh’s urban spread. There’s a long tradition of these camps in England and Scotland, and the land laws still retain some ancient features that allow camping on the commons and prevent them from being quickly removed, as they would be back in the US. In fact, they can last for years. The Faslane peace camp has been holding opposition to nuclear weapons in Scotland for many, many years. Back in the eighties, women opposed to US nuclear weapons in Britain camped at Greenham Common outside the missile base, and remained for over two decades. There’s also a centuries-old tradition of the outlaws in the forest, those who can’t or won’t concede to the demands and oppression of society simply moving out and living in the woods. Robin Hood’s Merry Men were the forerunners of the Bilston posse.

Some of us wanted to do some focused, somewhat formal magic for the solstice—at least, I did. Others wanted to hang around the fire, kick back, and celebrate in a much looser way. There was a certain disparity of energies that was resolved when one of the women present suggested we circle around a nearby tree, a giant chestnut that was full of eyes and faces. We did, and wove a web of connection to link with some of our Pagan Cluster friends in Philadelphia who were protesting against the biotech industry’s annual conference.

At the end of the ritual, we did a Tarot reading for the action, and I wish I could tell you what it said but I didn’t write it down and don’t remember it all. Then we visited more of the ancient trees, huge chestnuts and oaks with trunks as thick as a house. The whole glen does truly have an ancient and magical feel to it.

The next morning I came back and visited the chapel. If Pagans, instead of Christians, had built cathedrals they would have built them like Roslin. Every surface is carved with images of nature, leaves, flowers, roots, branches, animals and birds. It’s full of the Green Man—the mysterious face with foliage and leaves coming out of it that is, oddly enough, found in churches all over Europe. Roslin has over a hundred of them. I sat in the South doorway, where there are two faces, one upside down and one right side up, and meditated on the turning of the wheel and the shifting of powers.

Starhawk
www.starhawk.org <http://www.starhawk.org/>

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Post by Whitebird Sings » June 27th, 2005, 11:21 am

Make Poverty History

Thousands of people will be descending on Edinburgh this Saturday 2 July to call for G8 leaders to help Make Poverty History.

To find out everything you need to know about the day, go to www.makepovertyhistory.org/docs/mobilisation.pdf for the complete campaigners’ guide.

If you are coming to Edinburgh and would be able to volunteerto steward at the rally on Saturday, please download and fill in the form at www.makepovertyhistory.org/docs/stewardform.doc and send it to g8volunteer@millipedia.co.uk


Thank you for your support.


Best wishes


Sarah Williams
Campaigns Officer
Anti-Slavery International
s.williams@antislavery.org

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Post by Whitebird Sings » July 3rd, 2005, 9:29 am

Protesters march ahead of G-8 summit

Last Updated Sat, 02 Jul 2005 13:31:53 EDT
CBC News

Anti-poverty activists wearing white marched through Edinburgh Saturday to back their "Make Poverty History" campaign.

About 200,000 demonstrators converged on the Scottish capital, at the urging of Live 8 organizer Bob Geldolf, to get their message across ahead of the July 6-8 summit of the G-8 countries at nearby Gleneagles.

The crowd was twice the size expected to take part in the march, held to pressure wealthy countries to do more to tackle global poverty.

They planned to form a huge human bracelet around the city as part of the kickoff to a week of anti-poverty activism.

"Our voice today is a legitimate voice to our elected leaders on behalf of the millions who have no voice," Scottish Cardinal Keith O'Brien said.

The events coincide with the series of Live 8 concerts being held on Saturday in cities around the world.

Pope Benedict has called on world leaders to live up to their promises and reduce the debt of the world's poorest countries.

In a statement read by Cardinal O'Brien in Edinburgh, the Pope said God intended for the world's resources to be available equally to all. He called on G-8 leaders to ensure a more just distribution of the world's resources.

http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/ ... 50702.html

emphasis added by WB... {{{HUGS}}}

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Post by Whitebird Sings » July 3rd, 2005, 12:05 pm

G8 Scotland update July 2, 2005
The Ecovillage Opens!


By Starhawk

Our eco-village is a reality. Those lines that Beth drew on paper weeks ago are now a meandering roadway of boards and chicken wire. Those endless discussions about composting toilets have been translated into small structures complete with curtains and informative signs. The weeks of pondering greywater systems have led to two intense days of building them, one after another after another. I had a moment of realization yesterday—that normally in a two-week permaculture course we might build one demonstration greywater system—in the last few days we’ve done over a dozen!

My friends have arrived, Lisa, Juniper, Geneva, Delyla, Sabo and Laura, with her kids Geneva, Sequoia and Mo. We’re all camped near the fairy tree, together with other friends and a small group of Pagans.

People are pouring in, tents are going up, some of them amazing structures like the double-hooped, canted I-don’t-know-what-to-call-it that looks like a giant covered wagon hoop. Barrios are filling up, kitchens are setting up. Everyone has been working for days, like a happy beehive humming with activity. We’ve managed to overcome the chaotic moments of panic and a thousand disasters and now it seems that every project attracts the workers that it needs. I have a great crew of people putting in greywater systems and helping with the compost loos. Every morning we check in on the days’ work, split into groups and go off and do it. Some skilled carpenters have helped build the structures for the loos, and some less skilled carpenters have gained more skill completing them. We have designed a greywater system to fit the needs and sites of each kitchen. At some later point I’ll write something longer and describe them more fully—for those interested. We even provided the medics with a biofilter using straw inoculated weeks ago with mushroom mycelium that break down toxins. We’ve brewed up lactobacillus inoculant to help the compost toilets break down. I think I’ve found a local community garden-called an allotment over here—to take our kitchen scraps. I’ve personally tested the composting toilet, and found it very comfortable (although I realized at a crucial moment that it desperately needed screening from the back, which has now been provided.

There have been a thousand frustrating moments and a million irritations, but right now I’m just enjoying the satisfaction of seeing this all come together. There’s a hundred times I’ve asked myself, “Why do I put up with this?’ The answer is the sheer beauty of seeing how this work happens when it happens well: everyone working together for the sheer joy of it, everyone looking for what contribution they can make, what job they can do. For every job, however grueling or hard—carrying heavy boards or staffing the gate at 3 AM, there’s a willing volunteer. There are people who hold more information and help figure out what to do—Elanor takes on the job of coordinating jobs, for example. If we need workers for something, we tell her. If someone wants to help out, they ask her. But there is no one issuing orders or telling people what to do, no coercion, no bosses. And so, where only a week ago we finally got permission to use the site, today we have a small city in progress that seems to spring magically into being.

Now, if only we could get the meetings to be as good as the work!
Today is the Make Poverty History March, the big one in Edinburgh. We hope to have a small ritual at the end, at 5 pm, If you’re here and get this, Assemble 5pm on Bruntsfield Links (grassed area to west of Meadows Park,
where the MPH march will assemble). Look out got the Scottish
Dragon-Reclaiming Coalition banner!
Starhawk

www.starhawk.org <http://www.starhawk.org/>

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Post by Whitebird Sings » July 3rd, 2005, 6:54 pm

Update Sunday July 3, 2005

Make Poverty History

Yesterday was the big march in Edinburgh. We grabbed a ride on the transport van from the convergence. It’s an aspect of this mobilization that someone has thought about every possible support feature—even down to hiring minivans to transport demonstrators. Mark, who has led climbs in the Himalayas, was our driver. “How long will you be picking people up,” we asked. “Until everyone gets home,” he replied. I was thinking about how bus driving is one of those unglamorous jobs that aren’t high status in ordinary life, and how missing the action in order to drive other people to it is the kind of thing that a hierarchical society reserves for some lesser class—but here it’s a job that has plenty of volunteers, because it needs to be done. And how we appreciate it!

Edinburgh was packed with people, and full of the energy of a city when a big demonstration is happening. The organizers of the Make Poverty History march asked everyone to dress in white, and most people did. Not the clowns, the fairy army or the anarchists of course, but the overall impression was a sea of white and those of us who had neglected to pack any white clothes stood out like little dark blots. Lisa, Juniper, Geneva and I cruised through the rally area, then ran directly into a small group of the local Pagans with whom we had a date to have a ritual later. Niall, Louise and Victoria were carrying a banner for the combined Dragon Network—a Pagan activist network in the British Isles, and Scotland Reclaiming. “Now is the day, Now is the hour, Ours is the Magic, Ours is the Power!” it read.

We marched together for a short while, but the march was so crowded the pace was more of a crawl. I’m always glad for that, politically, as it means that there are lots and lots of people there—over 200,000, we’re told. But I’m not so glad for that personally, and our group of four cut out after a bit to do what we like to do: walk fast along the edges of the march, duck in and out, meet friends and hang out with them, stop off and check out the side streets. We stopped into the Dissent meeting and training space at the Edinburgh University Student Union, We had some moments of excitement when we heard a call to go support a group of anarchists being chased by the cops. We watched a lot of very nervous cops in light blue vests being ordered around the streets, running after a contingent in black. The captain was bawling out orders, and we realized that in the U.S., they all have radios so we never hear the orders. Here they don’t. They also don’t have guns! Later they brought out black helmeted riot cops, who also did not appear to have guns, and surrounded the group in black and penned them in. People came out onto the street above to cheer and chant and support them, and our friends in the great action band, The Infernal Noise Brigade, serenaded them. The cops eventually let them all go.

The nice moment for me was that we actually had half an hour to sit in a café and eat something while sitting still, not driving, walking, or in a meeting. Well, it turned into a sort of informal meeting about the actions, with a friend we met. I went outside to go over to where we’d planned to meet for the ritual, and ran into Rooh and Maren, friends from the EAT course who also wanted to come. Rooh writes amazing and wonderful chants and we cruised back through the crowd, singing.

About forty people gathered for the ritual. Niall and Louise and Victoria had planned the first part, to introduce the rest of us to the Scottish land spirits. Some of the Tribe of Brigid arrived from England, women I knew from Reclaiming events, and a group of the Findhorn people I’d met the week before, and we began. There was some trouble and misunderstanding at first, trying to mesh our various traditions. It’s been my experience that when people meet who are channeling strong powers, but at somewhat different frequencies, the energies create what feels like either intense anxiety or irritation until they mesh. When we finally meshed, Niall and Louise led invocations to Bride and the Cailleach, the Old Woman, invited us all to invoke whatever deities we felt moved to call, and then led a beautiful visualization of a web of healing that we are all creating for the earth. I led a spiral dance, and we raised a very intense and wonderful cone of power. Niall was holding my elbow and I could feel our energies gradually align, and feel the Wild Old Woman howling through me, whipping up the winds, raising a storm, and then Bride the healer singing love and compassion. The rain was indeed threatening as we grounded and opened our circle, and word came that gale force winds were expected back at the convergence. Alarmed, we headed back, again gratefully catching the vans.

Today was the day of the various Alternative Summits, but though I was originally scheduled to speak at one of them, no one had contacted me recently, I couldn’t find my name on any of the programs or schedules although others kept telling me they’d seen it somewhere on the internet, and I eventually gave up looking for it and settled in to work on the greywater systems. Almost all of them needed some major reworking, as they were based on the premise that water drains away through soil, and the soil we’re camping on is such pure clay that they simply weren’t draining at all. Applying the permaculture principle that the problem is the solution, we’re turning them into ponds, but that required the use of a mini-bulldozer digging machine, and a lot of time and redesigning. So I spent a lot of the day appreciating some deep irony in the universe, as I worked on the pond being dug by Fuzz, whom I met in Rafah right after Rachel Corrie was killed, crushed by a bigger version of an Israeli army bulldozer as she tried to prevent it from demolishing a Palestinian home.

Tonight the camp is filling up. Lots of trainings and meetings and new people eager to help are arriving. Tomorrow is the Faslane blockade. I am hoping to go, but also pulled to stay and finish the greywater systems. I haven’t had time yet to do any of the usual things I like to do: trainings for actions, facilitating meetings, obsessing about actions. But for once, there are plenty of other people around to do them, and lots of support.

Now for a shower!
Starhawk
www.starhawk.org <http://www.starhawk.org/>

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Post by Whitebird Sings » July 6th, 2005, 10:01 am

G8 Update July 5, 2005

The Night Before the Action


Tonight the camp was all abuzz, people coming in, lots of people going out to avoid the possibility of all being blocked in tomorrow morning. It was full of the excited energy of masses of people preparing for action—once again another tactical nightmare, a few thousand of us up against fifteen thousand police. No one naively expects this to be easy—it may not even be possible, but we have to try. So the day is spent in meetings and trainings. The meetings are finally running more smoothly. We have a small collective of direct action trainers and facilitators who have taken on the task of making the meetings happen and finding good facilitators for them. They are also offering trainings and helping affinity groups get together. All over camp, circles of people are meeting, small affinity groups deciding their plans, bigger clumps of people working on action plans. The odds are against us but the energy is sweet.

Yesterday Juniper, Lisa and I went out to Faslane to support the blockade there. There’s a longstanding campaign against the nuclear weapons that the British Government keeps in Scotland, the trident missiles on submarines at the Faslane base. The peace camp at Faslane has been there for something like twenty-five years, and the annual blockade is something of a ritual, very nonviolent, well organized and quite peaceful. We went to the south gate, alongside a beautiful sea loch, where a happy crowd was dancing in front of the locked gates. A small group of people were locked down on the road, lying down with their arms in big tubes. Inside, their hands are tied to carabiners clipped to a metal pin, so that the police can’t pull them apart. They would have to be carefully cut out of the tubes, taking much time and prolonging the blockade. But no police are trying to evict them: they’ve closed the base for the day, and people are dancing and celebrating. A group of women dressed in white kimonos, perhaps commemorating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, walk up and stand before the police. Clowns in army fatigues, part of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, dust the shoes of the cops. We move on to the north gate, where a similar crowd is dancing and drumming.

But we can’t stay, because we have responsibilities back at the camp. We’re still putting in greywater systems and fixing ones that have gone wrong. The clay soil we’re on is clay but no soil and does not drain at all. Every soakaway pit becomes a pond. Juniper, fortunately, is an engineer and hydrologist. Patrick, another engineer, offers to help. We manage to relocate some of the kitchen soakaways to places where they can be piped or drained away, but others need to be redug.or enlarged. We’ve got a digger machine, basically a mini-bulldozer, for a second day, and one of the high points for me was taking a turn on it and learning to work the thing. I can see why every boy in the camp was following Fuzz around, begging for a turn. It’s a real sense of power. We’ve got a couple of systems working well; others will become storage ponds and I call a friend to bring down duckweed to float in them! Even the problems do have their educational side, however. I call a small meeting, asking for a representative from each barrio, each neighborhood, to take on responsibility for maintaining the compost toilets and greywater in their area. Because the ditches fill up, people have to watch how much water they use. Because we’ve built compost toilets, we have to actually think about what happens to our shit, and who is going to deal with us. “We’re spoiled, normally,” a young woman tells me. “We don’t usually have to think about any of this.” “It’s anarchism in practice,” I tell them. “Being self-responsible at a very, very basic level.” In that moment, watching the realization dawn on them that water has to go somewhere, and shit has to be dealt with somehow, I feel that all the work and stress of this project has been worth it.

Meanwhile we’re getting horrible reports from the Carnival for Full Enjoyment in Edinburgh. Police have attacked demonstrators with horses, people have been injured, there’s a riot going on. Finally our friends return and we get the full story. Some of these later prove to be rumors, but there have been altercations and injuries, and a few arrests. But the clowns, I’m told by a friend, shifted the energy and helped calm the crowd.

At the end of the day, Catherine and I do a training for an Irish group who are protesting a Shell oil refinery to be built in County Mayo. Five local farmers have refused to sell their land, and been jailed by the Irish government. Some of the contingent has stayed home to support them. The others, who are here, organize and demonstration and possible occupation of the company headquarters. They are a mix of ages—lots of youth but a good sprinkling of the middle-aged. One of the pleasures of this particular mobilization is that it does span the generations—the average age is probably late twenties and there are many people in their thirties, forties, and even a few of us older than that!

But there’s all along been a chaotic, slippery quality to the energy of this project, something that resists plans and timetables and logical organization. Maybe it’s the fairies, hanging around the hawthorne tree. By the end of the day, we have plans, multiple plans, plans so complex and overlaid with fallbacks that even if we’re infiltrated, I doubt the cops can understand them. We barely do. There are small affinity groups off on secret missions. There are others who want to plan an open blockade, something that everyone can join on to: but they can’t quite bring themselves to announce when and where it will be, as the police will undoubtedly shut it down. The mass action sort of devolves into an action of small groups, and someone else plans a truly mass action but still can’t bring themselves to announce exactly when and where it is. There are times when I love the camp and everyone in it: it has a sweet energy and is truly a glimpse of a world we could create. There are other moments when I swear I’ll never do this or anything like it again. Like late at night when we’re all having our pre-action melt downs. Suddenly all the plans seem completely chaotic—but then, chaos is what we’re trying to create, and when chaos is your goal, you’ve got all the forces of the universe with you. I’m just going to put my trust in some other kind of order, some forces that are working us, and hope.

We do rituals—weave a web of connection, go out and tie strings of yarn to the fairy tree. But we can’t quite ever find the right time, or communicate the right message or form the right plan to draw in everyone who moight want to be there.

So now it’s late, and I’m going to send this off, catch some sleep, and then it will be time for the action. Please envision our web holding strong, and send us some energy through it, and some luck!

Starhawk
www.starhawk.org <http://www.starhawk.org/>

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Post by stilltrucking » July 11th, 2005, 11:47 am

The odds are against us but the energy is sweet.
*******
Some of these later prove to be rumors, but there have been altercations and injuries, and a few arrests. But the clowns, I’m told by a friend, shifted the energy and helped calm the crowd.
**************

If I was fortunate enough to be in Scotland last week, that would be the main point of the protest, practice runs at being street shrinks, as in The Question of Lay Analysis.



I read starhawk's little ditty about "where is my farmer" I am no farmer just pottering around in Doreen's Garden. Send in the clowns. I suppose I see the events in scotland last week as a boot camp for clowns. A chance for the people who are sheppards of the sheep to work and play. Tactics learned about media tricks is valuable info. They bring it home to the hive, something sweet for our hearts' treasure.

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