In short, WSKG printed an article that was basically a reprint of a press release by natural gas industry folks, who had arranged a study that apparently showed that regulations can make fracking safer. My position is that fracking is intrinsically unsafe. They used a photo I’d posted for another activist on Flickr to illustrate the article, which Bill brought to my attention. I told them I wanted them to take it down, and that using a photo taken by anti-fracking activists was obviously a bad choice for what was essentially a piece of industry propaganda. They took it down. Yay!

Read Bill’s post for a rebuttal to the points made in the article – he knows his stuff!

Companies to check out:

• Maggie’s Organics
• Satori Hemp Movement
• Gaiam

If you know of other good companies that we should check out, please tell us about them by posting a comment below – thanks! In particular, I’m looking for a good pair of slim-fitting jeans that aren’t made by (sexist, exploitative) American Apparel. Any tips?

If you haven’t heard of NIMBYism, it’s the attitude “Not in my backyard” and it’s a double-edged sword. We can and should be against development that hurts our communities, but renewable energy is something that we can ALL get behind.

I’ve designed this graphic that we’re planning on putting on yard signs and bumper stickers. We plan to give 10% of profits to Shaleshock, 10% to Sustainable Tompkins and the rest will go directly into renewable energy projects on our home – starting with a bike generator!

Before we invest the up front cost into printing, we want to know what people think. Do you like the design? Would you buy a sign for your yard?

In honor of International Workers Day and the Mayan calendar, we offer a 7th installment of Shirari’s Peace and Love Podcast. (Our last episode was way back in February 2009!)

Listen for an update on our lives, our perspective on Occupy and 2012 and the idea of apocalypse, activist resources and tips, and a general pep talk. In summary: We love you.

Please post comments or contact us to tell us what you think. Thanks! Peace and love!

I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t heard of Saul Bass before watching this video (his legacy is discussed at the very end during the credits). Born in the Bronx in 1920 to Eastern European Jewish parents, Bass designed some of the most iconic logos of our time (AT&T, Girl Scouts of America, Kleenex and more) and revolutionized the art of title design through his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock and later, Martin Scorsese. Awesome.

For future reference and as a note to creative folks and activists: The artful combination of shamanic journeying, performance art, improvisation, and interactive theatre is a very good idea.

At TEDWomen, Tony Porter makes a call to men everywhere: Don’t “act like a man.” Telling powerful stories from his own life, he shows how this mentality, drummed into so many men and boys, can lead men to disrespect, mistreat and abuse women and each other. His solution: Break free of the “man box.” Tony Porter is an educator and activist who is internationally recognized for his effort to end violence against women.

Also discovered and appreciated yesterday:

• The Good Men Project
• Men Advocating Real Change (MARC)

And if you haven’t yet seen it (and contributed, if you’re a man), take a look at Men Who Trust Women, a Tumblr where men can voice their confidence in women to make our own reproductive choices. (Because we’re not sexbots and we’re not Barbie Dolls, but, you know, humans, with brains.) Thank you to all of the men who are taking a stand against sexism – we need all the feminist allies we can get!

I visited a museum of Native American culture and read a lot of texts celebrating a history of whalehunting; human slavery and wars were glossed over. Inside of me are drops of Cherokee and Iroquois blood that yearn to reconnect with their heritage, but I’m unwilling to look at any form of exploitation in a positive light. I read these cards describing the hunt and I mourn.

Nearly everything else is beautiful. I usually try to state what I’m for, not what I’m against. But I have to stand with trees and whales. They can’t say “stand up for me” out loud, but I can hear them anyway.

A friend and I once performed a tandem storytelling called “Body Talk” about discovering the ancestral blessings of our kith and kin. Opalanga is an African American griot and she is very tall, like a yew tree, and as slender. I am una Mexicana, and am built close to the ground and am of extravagant body. In addition to being mocked for being tall, as a child she was told that the split between her front teeth was the sign of being a liar. I was told that my body shape and size were the signs of being inferior and of having no self-control.

In this concurrent telling about body, we spoke of the slings and arrows we received throughout our lives because, according to the great “they,” our bodies were too much of this and not enough of that. In our telling, we sang a mourning song for the bodies we were not allowed to enjoy. We rocked, we danced, we looked at each other. We were each thinking the other is so mysterious-looking in such a beautiful way, how could anyone have thought otherwise?

How amazed I was to hear that as an adult she had journeyed to the Gambia in West Africa and found some of her ancestral people who, lo! had among their tribe, many people who were very tall like the yew tree and as slender, and who had slits between their front teeth. This split, they explained to her, was called Sakaya Yallah, meaning “opening of God” … and it was understood as a sign of wisdom.

How surprised she was when I told her, that as an adult, I had journeyed to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico and found some of my ancestral people, who lo! were a tribe with giant women who were strong, flirtatious, and commanding in their size. They had patted me and plucked at me, boldly remarking that I was not quite fat enough. Did I eat enough? Had I been ill? I must try harder, they explained, for women are La Tierra, made round like the earth herself, for the earth holds so much.

So in the performance, as in our lives, our personal stories, which began as experiences both oppressive and depressive, end with joy and a strong sense of self. Opalanga understands that her height is her beauty, her smile one of wisdom, and that the voice of God is always close to her lips. I understand my body as not separate from the land, that my feet are made to hold my ground, my body a vessel made to carry much. We learned, from powerful people outside our own United States culture, to revalue the body, to refute ideas and language that would revile the mysterious body, or that would ignore the female body as an instrument of knowing.

I can’t wait to see this movie. It’s so beautiful to see women rising up!

I ♥ science! And Neil DeGrasse Tyson!

“The biggest event in human history is the rise of women to full partnership with men, because it’s only that partnership that’s going to allow the world to flourish.”

Right on! Let’s do it, sisters!

See also:

• Our “gender” bookshelf on Goodreads
• Our Delicious links tagged with Gender
• Our Delicious links tagged with Feminism

“There are a whole lot of historical factors that have played a part in our being where we are today, and I think that to even to begin to understand our contemporary issues and contemporary problems, you have to understand a little bit about that history.”
- Wilma Mankiller

These stills are from Ayurveda: The Art of Being.

“Fast rather than slow, more rather than less – this flashy ‘development’ is linked directly to society’s impending collapse. It has only served to separate man from nature.”
- Masanobu Fukuoka

How do you want humans to live? What kind of life would feel most healthy and enjoyable? What kind of impact do we want to have on our environment and on other species?

“We can live any way we want.”
- Annie Dillard

This video made me cry because I too grew up in an accepting family but took a very long time to come out, and even to figure out what was going on with my gender and sexuality. Internalized homophobia and transphobia and sexism and other isms are very real. When your own government only grudgingly concedes you basic rights to freedom over your own body and who you’re allowed to love, and the media and society at large seems to agree that your body and feelings and actions and your very soul are somehow intrinsically wrong, and your kind are being bullied and murdered and raped and tortured all over the world, often legally – well, that’s a hard thing to get around/over, for some of us.

And now, because we’ve recently learned that privileged people are more likely to take candy from babies because they haven’t learned what it’s like to suffer and aren’t good at things like empathy, I have a public service announcement, in case any rich white heterosexual Christian able-bodied cisgendered men are reading our blog:

♥ Take heed, boys. Y’all are making a lot of folks miserable. Time to start acting like members of a community, instead of looking out only for yourselves. 99% + 1% = 100%! ♥

Photo: Let Love Rule

Are you into yoga? Any advice for me?

Watch 2012: Time for Change – it will make you very hopeful about the future, and is full of beautiful ideas for things we can do to make the world a more just and peaceful place. It’s also very nicely made, with great animations and incredible interviews with folks from different cultures.

Whether you believe that 2012 will be a momentous year or not, you can still practice living with intention and consciousness. So if you don’t see this movie, at least come up with a nice plan for positive changes you might like to see in the future. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, “Every morning, when we wake up, we have twenty-four brand-new hours to live. What a precious gift! We have the capacity to live in a way that these twenty-four hours will bring peace, joy, and happiness to ourselves and others.”

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
- Yeats

“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”
- Rachel Carson

“I have seen the weapons of mass destruction called disposability consciousness. And if we want to heal the world we have to begin to use tools of mass compassion.”
- Julia Butterfly Hill

“Squids are friends, not food”

“Come forth into the light of things, let nature be your teacher.”
- Wordsworth

“We lose our souls if we lose the experience of the forest, the butterflies, the song of the birds, if we can’t see the stars at night.”
- Thomas Berry

Help save the animals in the oceans:

• Greenpeace
• Vegan soapbox: Why no fish?
• About Veganism (Vegan Ithaca)