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A documentary film about people-powered change to be worked with, not consumed.
Down to Earth https://downtoearthfilm.com is the story of one family’s call to freedom after questioning the home, school and work system. As they quit the rat race we follow them on a five year journey in search of the wisdom of sages and shaman, or Earth Keepers, hidden in the remote tribal communities of Australia, the Amazon, Africa, the Andes, India and Ireland.
Gaining access to never filmed before tribes in the outback, desert and jungle with just a backpack and a camera each was no mean feat. Despite the different locations the family kept making the same connections, having the same conversations, just with different faces. And the Earth Keepers sharing their insights and wisdom for the first time with outsiders acknowledge that, "Now is the time for change.”
We are family
The film grew from director Rolf Winter’s dream of finding a retreat in nature for his wife and three young children, then aged 6, 7 and 10 (see his TED talk below). After spending a year in Hiawatha Forest in Michigan the family encounter Nowaten, a medicine man whose name means "He who listens," living in isolation there. He reluctantly agrees to being filmed, becoming the film’s main contributor.
Nowatan believes there is no purpose in living if you lose the land and forests, because we depend on forests for our spiritual connection and wellbeing. People are lost because they have lost connection with nature, and we are all members of nature. He says, “Life is simple, we complicate it, take only what you need.”
But, as Rolf says, we can’t all go back to the forest. So the film asks how do we lead a connected life in a fast-paced world? Real change is only going to happen with a changed mindset of you and me. The diverse problems facing humanity can no longer be delegated to our politicians and scientists, who ultimately are a reflection of us, the people. The time has come to transform our lives and create a new story, our own story. How exciting!
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The Lush Summit 14th-15th February 2018
Lush is the global soap franchise with 105 stores in the UK; its flagship store on London’s Oxford Street, well-known for using primarily ethically sourced ingredients in its bath bombs, bubble bars, floating islands oils, gels and shampoos. Every year Lush holds a summit for some of its' international staff from 900 stores in 49 countries so they can learn more about the key environmental and social issu
This year Chris Packham, the zoologist, BBC personality and birder, was Lush’s on-the-spot reporter covering the two day event. He tirelessly patrolled the cavernous building on the former site of Billingsgate fish market talking to campaigners working to conserve the oceans, whales and other marine, animal, plant and bird life. I was part of this unique atmosphere with Pat Thomas, director of Beyond GM and GM Free Me, who gave Chris an informative interview for broadcast on the Lush Summit livestream. Pat also chaired a roundtable discussion finding out that young people are concerned about GM food and trade agreements with the US since UK’s impending Brexit from Europe.
Lush does not test products on animals and in 2015 co-ordinated a march on Downing Street to protest animal rights with Common Decency, The League Against Cruel Sports and Animal Aid. Sourcing most of their ingredients from fruits and vegetables, the company no longer puts palm oil into its products and invests in small scale producers growing and processing essential oils and other materials in Guatemala, Pakistan, Kenya and the Lebanon. The Summit also showcased responsibly managed cork, cotton and paper.
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Alchemic Times – seeing beyond the illusion of separation, by Giles Hutchins
There’s an old saying ‘may you live in interesting times’. When someone said that to you it was seen as both a blessing and curse, because to live in interesting times means to deal with danger and opportunity, to embrace simultaneous breakdown and breakthrough. Which is exactly what this trilemma of social, economic and environmental crises is asking, is demanding, of us.
Our tried-and-tested modes and methods, our constructs and constrictions, the very habituations and acculturations we have become so inured in, are melting amid the alchemic heat of the moment. This metamorphic moment is now. This is humanity’s hour of reckoning. Each of us is being called to act as conscious conspirators, catalysts in this chemistry.
The ancient Greeks referred to such a time as Kairos, a supreme moment which is not adequately acted upon may pass us by. The good news is, myriad disciplines at the forefront of Western science – such as quantum physics, facilitation ecology, depth psychology and neurobiology – are discovering with increasingly sensitive instruments and sophisticated experiments the innate inter-relationality of life, the weave-and-weft of the world, the intricate sacredness of nature. The hand of science is reaching out to shake the hand of spirituality once again.
This of course is not new. This discovery of inter-relationality is as fresh as it is ancient. The timeless prophets, philosophers, poets, seers and shaman throughout the ages have long understood this innate interconnectedness of life.
Read more: Alchemic Times – seeing beyond the illusion of separation, by Giles Hutchins
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3rd June 2017
“You are part of the very weave o silken thread,” Rainer Maria Rilke
On the day of the Writing on the Wall festival at St John’s Church, Waterloo, heavily armed police officers patrolled the train station. Within hours, Britain’s latest terror attack had claimed innocent lives at nearby London Bridge. Amidst troubled times, and with the currency of care and consciousness as their starting point, living Poets are asking the important question: "How can poetry save the planet?"
Caduceus Journal's poetry Editor Jay Ramsay gathered the influential speakers together at St John's, each one prefacing their talk with a poem of choice. Giles Hutchins, business leader and author of The Illusion of Separation and Future Fit got the ball rolling with one of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, who is entreated to be transparent, transformed and aware of the bigger picture.
Giles does not doubt that this is the hour of humanity’s reckoning, a moment to rejoin the hands of science and spirituality. He said timeless wisdom and long understood deep interconnectedness and sacredness replaced in the West by materialism and reason is causing separation and increasing fear, anxiety and individualism. A poetic way of being in the world of harmony, compassion and wisdom is the ground on which we now must walk.
The Reverend Peter Owen Jones, aka BBC2’s Extreme Pilgrim accepts that humanity stands at the threshold, and that “We have journeyed to this amazing, fragile, beautiful, dangerous point.” Acceptance of the real has completely changed the way he walks through life in terms of his responsibilities to himself and to the rest of the planet because it is happening now. We are called to attend, nurture and give birth to what is becoming, he said. “We are reforming our understanding of reality and that is so exciting, what a privilege to be alive at this point and that understanding is immanent within every single moment of existence, we just have to be known by it and tap it to it and to surrender.” His was an immersive poem by John Clare.
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13th May 2017
Jane Goodall, a leading primatologist, conducted a 50 year survey of chimps in Tanzania. Now a Dame and recently named one of the world’s top 100 important scientists of all time, she has turned her attention to the Genetic Engineering debate.
Jane Goodall is concerned about the effects of genetically modified crops, dedicating a chapter to the subject in her books Seeds of Hope (2005) and Harvest of Hope (2013). Her concerns intensified when she saw farmers in Africa and Asia experiencing problems with a bacteria called “bt” (bacillus thurungenesis) inserted into a gentically modified crop.The crops were failing because the insect pests developed a resistance to the insecticide inside the plants. But non-target species of butterflies and bees were being harmed instead. And, there are other problems on farmlands in Africa, Asia and USA plagued by superweeds caused by the horizontal transfer of genes from GM crops to native weeds, growing out of all proportion and impossible to control or contain. Dr Goodall condemns the plight of farmers like Percy Schmeiser http://samburcher.com/articles/gm-food/39-who-owns-life-not-monsanto.html who was intimidated for taking legal action against GM crop manufacturers Monsanto when contaminated crops and superweeds spread onto his land.
At the launch of lawyer-turned-activist Steven Druker's book, Altered Genes and Twisted Truths for which Goodall has written the introduction, she recalled the independent scientific studies on rats that developed tumours as well as kidney and liver malfunctions when fed a diet of GM crops (See the independent studies of Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini, Irina Ermakova and Arpad Pusztai). She expressed her concern about Roundup, the world's top selling herbicide, also used in agriculture as a crop drying agent and an over-the-counter garden weedkiller. Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides and spray-resistant crops have played havoc with the physiology of lab rats as well as sows and piglets on farms. (See Farmer Pederson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZYiEsPVLTw) Glyphosate is banned in several countries, including Sri Lanka, because of high rates of kidney disease in farmers. Glyphosate was recently the subject of an International Tribunal at the Hague and found to be harmful to human health and the environment. http://samburcher.com/articles/agriculture/128-roundup-facing-its-judges.html
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22nd December 2016
At the Tribunal Against Monsanto in the Hague in October, lawyers, witnesses and civil society gave evidence of global harm from Roundup, Monsanto's over-the-counter weedkiller, containing a probable human carcinogen.
This landmark Tribunal, desgined to enact the procedures of an International Court of Justice and to hold the defendant accountable, comes at a time when transnational companies are failing to adhere to basic codes of conduct, have failed to clean up after themselves and are creating a dirty planet with poisonous sprays, the result of which has wiped out the monarch butterfly and is on the brink of destroying the bees. The imminent merger between Big Pharma Bayer and agri-giant Monsanto, faciliated to make greater profits from pushing the world's bestselling herbicide Roundup, presented a timely opportunity for a panel of five international judges to hear the testimony of some of Roundup's victims.
Monsanto would have us believe that Roundup is non-toxic and say it is as 'safe as table salt.' In 2016 there is no labelling to explain any health risks or precautions, yet just two days' exposure may double or triple the risk of harm. Roundup contains glyphosate, a probable human carcinogen, which is often combined with a compound in Monsanto's Agent Orange, a defoliant sprayed by the US military during the Vietnam War, to destroy crops and jungle cover. Bayer supplied the nerve gas, Zyklon B, used in the extermination camps during World War II.
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December 7th 2016
In a year of striking loss of notable people, David Bowie leaves us a musical to confound our shattered minds.
In a transformed and magical Kings Cross, a spacious pop-up theatre with black walls and dark corridors is playing host to a musical based on the songs by David Bowie. The set is ominously neutral, a kind of fawn colour is everywhere. Fawn bedcovers are strewn over a bed and, already on stage, the leading actor is dressed head to toe in fawn as the audience is ushered to their seats. A band is poised to play behind aquarium glass windows draped with fawn curtains.
Lazarus picks up where the film The Man Who Fell to Earth, written by Walter Tevis and starring David Bowie left off. Bowie’s original character, the alien Thomas Newton, played admirably here by Michael C Hall, has succumbed to a life of perpetual gin and Twinkies after being abandoned by his lover Mary Lou. His personal assistant Elly, a sexual anorexic, becomes obsessed with Mary Lou, colouring her hair to look like her and wearing her left-behind clothes. As Newton’s mental health unravels, a muse appears in a form of a girl (gifted newcomer 15 year old Sophia Anne Caruso) who tells him she knows a way he can return to his home planet. But with her comes a host of dark entities who commit unspeakable acts and force Newton to do the same. The intensity creates madness, addiction and a desire to escape reality.
Songs such as Lazarus, Changes, Sound and Vision, Heroes, It's No Game, Absolute Beginners and Where Are We Now from Blackstar, Hunky Dory, Low, Heroes, Scary Monsters, Absolute Beginners, and The Next Day respectively are interpreted by the original New York cast whilst colourful projections, sticky tape, strange liquids, sex and violence animate the fawn backdrop. David Bowie’s last public appearance was the opening night of Lazarus off Broadway in December 2015. He has left a musical cannon that will resonate forever and Lazarus reflects the fragility and frustrations of our imperfect life on earth.
Photo (c) Sam Burcher 2016 .
Lazarus plays until 21 January 2017 at the Kings Cross Theatre
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September 2016
2016 is the 40th anniversary of Punk Rock and the British Library has a modern collection of punk and new-wave memorabilia on show.
By his own admission curators are always trying to draw attention to their collections. So, an exhibition celebrating punk’s 40th anniversary is Andy Linehan's opportunity to show that the British Library collects modern material as well as Shakespeare, Alice in Wonderland and the Magna Carta, all recent exhibitions.
The British Library Sound Archive is amongst the most wide ranging in the world and mirrors what the written word archive does. Its ambition to get hold of a copy of everything published in the UK relies on donations from record companies. Andy explained in the sunlit piazza overlooked by Paolozzi’s four metre high bronze statue of Isaac Newton measuring time inspired by a William Blake engraving how the exhibition came about.
“We utilised our own collection of records, fanzines, music press, flyers and personal documents, he said. "But some of the material, for example the letter from EMI Records sacking Glen Matlock, the original bass player with the Sex Pistols, we borrowed from England’s Dreaming author Jon Savage’s punk archives stored in Liverpool John Moore’s University.”
How easy was it to organise and who has seen it?
“It’s a complete mix of material and that’s one of the nice things about it. People of an age reminiscing about their youth and younger people discovering something completely new. Yesterday someone walked through with a couple of kids aged around 6 years old and one put on the headphones to listen to the Pistols and started reacting to the music, so the idea that kids can get something out of it is brilliant. We got lots of press interest in Japan, France, and America, so tourists put us on their ‘to see’ list."
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26 August 2016
It came as quite a shock when Dr Mae-Wan Ho and her colleague, genetics Professor Joe Cummins, died within months of each other in April and January, respectively. Both were vociferous critics of GMOs, but it was Mae-Wan Ho's seminal book, Genetic Engineering, Dream or Nightmare? (1999), that flung the doors open for this unpredictable biotechnology to be hotly debated since the late 1990s.
Her funeral at London's Golders Green Crematorium was sombre and intimate: a celebration of her many achievements, culminating in the playing of Peter, Paul and Mary's 1960's political anthem, Where have all the flowers gone, when will they ever learn? Poignant lyrics by Pete Seeger, reflecting Mae-Wan Ho as a teacher and scientist on a world scale.
I first met Mae-Wan, aged 60, in 2001. She was youthful and compelling, a tiny dynamo full of intelligence, independence and a childlike charisma. Yet she inspired the respect of the white, male-dominated Western science community. I joined her Institute of Science in Society to help organise briefings in both the UK and European Parliaments, drawing attention to the threat to bees from the toxic weedkiller, glyphosate, marshalling efforts to keep GM crops out of Europe's fields and launching three groundbreaking reports: Food Futures Now, Which Energy? and Green Energies 100% Renewable by 2050 in response to the crises in food, farming and energy. And we set about circulating the radical journal Science in Society.
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Picture yourself in a boat on a lake in the Dalai Lama’s back garden about to explore the Temple of Lukhang. The Wellcome Library pulls off a masterstroke by recreating it in a fascinating exhibition.
In 1645 building began on a winter residence for the 5th Dalai Lama. The Potala Palace looms over Tibet’s capital city Lhasa, and is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site museum cramming in up to 3000 visitors a day. Towards the end of the 17th Century, the 6th Dalai Lama built the Lukhang Temple on the willow covered lake island hidden behind the Potala as a private retreat.
The uppermost chambers of the Lukhang Temple concealed a secret: some 2,500 metres of murals depicting 84 yogis undertaking the vigorous physical and contemplative spiritual practices necessary for enlightenment. In 1986 Thomas Laird, a young photographer, made a complete record of the vivid pink, gold-red, green, white and celestial blue wall paintings known as The Great Perfection (Dzogchen). These life-size, digitised images are the backdrop to the Wellcome exhibition. In 2006, Laird showed the murals to the 14th Dalai Lama, in exile from Tibet since 1959. He had never seen the paintings before and deciphering the arcane symbols, referred to them as ‘motivational tools’ for human development.
Originally accessible only by boat, the Lukhang Temple was designed as a harmonious three dimensional mandala representing outward reality, inner experience and the transcendent state beyond time and space. The three levels built in the Tibetan, Chinese and Mongolian styles reflecting Tibet’s complex political history. Its purpose as a watery sanctuary appeased the Naga and the Lu, the elemental energies that Tibetan Buddhists believe were here long before the emergence of human beings.
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19th October 2015
The V&A 's David Bowie and Alexander McQueen Savage Beauty exhibitions provided insights into the visionary genius of fashion leaders. It’s current exhibitionTextiles of India explores the origins of producing beautiful threads from the earth’s raw materials
Blues, reds, yellows and greens
India has provided the world with cotton and silk for centuries. Indian cotton was known to the Romans as “woven winds.” By the 1630’s fine quality, cheap fabrics imported from India by the Dutch and the British caused the complaint, “You can’t tell servant from master.”
The art of extracting colour from nature begins with a nod to indigo dyeing. Indigo is the magical blue colour derived from the leaves of the plant Indigofera tinctoria. And, India’s name is inextricably linked with both indigo and Indikon, the ancient Greek word for dye. Issac Newton named the sixth colour of his prism after it in 1660 when the East India Company were importing the pigment into England. An infinite array of patterns can be produced on cloth by string or wax resist dip-dyeing.
From the deepest red to the lightest pink, the shades so indicative of India’s crazily colourful chintz, are extracts from the root bark of the chay plant (Oldenlandia umbellata) which grows around the southern tip of India and in Sri Lanka. Unlike indigo, chay requires a mordant or a fixative to bind colour with cloth. A vibrant golden orange extract of turmeric flowers, plants and roots (Curcuma longa) combines with indigo to make green. Surprisingly, pomegranate rind is rich in tannins from which numerous earthy and yellow tones come.
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June 2015
by Steven M Druker, Clear River Press, Salt Lake City, UT, USA.
In this revealing book American lawyer Steven Druker uncovers the skullduggery committed since the mid-1970’s by high ranking scientists and organisations on both sides of the Atlantic. It was the US Government’s apathy, with its weak legislation of genetic engineering, that prompted Druker, a public safety lawyer and founder of the Alliance of Biointegrity, to initiate a lawsuit against the US Department of Agriculture in 1998. By forcing the handover of copies of its internal files he made public the blatant collusion with the GM companies in violating its own food safety regulations.
Dr and Dame Jane Goodall, the world's leading primatologist, writes in her glowing forward that this is the most important book in 50 years for longterm planetary sustainability. She lent her unreserved support at its' launch in London in April, timely since, under pressure from the US, the UK and Europe are considering waiving long standing restrictions on GMOs.
Druker dismantles the assumptions that GM is safe and will fulfil the promise of solving the world’s food problems through the manipulation of genes, a process that is imprecise and impossible to recall from the environement. He delves into the abuse of science by those intent on reducing the whole of the organism to parts that can be controlled by an elite few. And he explains that engineering a new gene is only possible by first splicing it with a strain of E coli bacteria and a piece of lab constructed, recombinant DNA - two strands of DNA joined together - one being made of a cloning vector such as a tumour or virus.
It was our most august scientific institution, the Royal Society, which targeted Arpad Pusztai when he worked at the Rowett Institute, whose design won out over 30 others as a protocol to test genetically engineered potatoes. Their attempts to crush his findings of significant physiological problems in rats have set off alarm bells that have not stopped ringing. Druker states that since ‘no two GM insertion events are the same’, Pusztai’s potato experiment cannot be repeated because his results were destroyed by the British Government, indicating how much they threatened their agenda to promote GM technology.