EARTH DAY

Three quotes for Earth Day 2015:

“Earth processes that seem trivially slow in human time can accomplish stunning work in geologic time. Let the Colorado River erode its bed by 1/100th of an inch each year (about the thickness of one of your fingernails.) Multiply it by six million years, and you’ve carved the Grand Canyon. Take the creeping pace of which the continents move (about two inches per year on average, or roughly as fast as your fingernails grow). Stretch that over thirty million years, and a continent will travel nearly 1,000 miles. Stretch that over a few billions years, and continents will have time to wander from the tropics to the poles and back, crunching together to assemble super-continents, break apart into new configurations- and do all of that again several times over. Deep time, it could be said, is Nature’s way of giving the Earth room for its history. The recognition of deep time might be geology’s paramount contribution to human knowledge.”
― Keith Meldahl, Rough-Hewn Land: A Geologic Journey from California to the Rocky Mountains.


“I realized up there that our planet is not infinite. It's fragile. That may not be obvious to a lot of folks, and it's tough that people are fighting each other here on Earth instead of trying to get together and live on this planet. We look pretty vulnerable in the darkness of space.”
― Alan Shepard, astronaut.


“He who knows Mars, Venus, Mercury or Jupiter very well will also know very well how very precious our earth is!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan.

Amazing Grace Connection (& not forgetting Earth Day)

Until I recently watched a DVD of the 2006 film Amazing Grace about William Wilberforce's long struggle to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire, I had no idea that the song Amazing Grace had connection to his story. It does - though in real life probably a tenuous one and not nearly as directly as the movie implies. Still, the dramatic license involved helps the movie along nicely. It's a very good movie, well acted and well directed by Michael Apted who was also director of the wonderful "Up" series ( post on that series is HERE).

My post about William Wilberforce, from last year, around the time the movie Lincoln was released is at Lincoln, William Wilberforce & Abolition of Slavery. A commenter then reminded me about Amazing Grace, the biographical movie on Wilberforce, who was born in the same East coast English city port as I was, and was Member of Parliament for Yorkshire in the late 18th early 19th centuries.

Words of Amazing Grace, the song/hymn were written by John Newton, English seaman turned slave ship captain, turned poet, turned clergyman. As a seaman in the 18th century he was involved in the Atlantic slave trade, he had captained slave ships. After almost drowning in a storm at sea Newton became a devout Christian, but continued being a part of slave trading for years afterwards. Inferences in the movie Amazing Grace that the poem from which the song Amazing Grace sprang was written as a direct result of Newton "seeing the light" and repenting his connection to the slave trade are a wee bit skewed. The hymn was written around 1772, but Newton didn't begin to regret his part in the horrendously ugly slave trade until 1780 and didn't begin to speak out and fight for its abolition until 1785. (See Snopes entry HERE)

Movie trailer:



I'm a longtime fan of Il Divo - here's their version of the song/hymn:








AND....not forgetting that today is Earth Day

 Written by Joe Miller for a children's book illustrated by  Wilson McLean

I found this on a notice board on one of our trips, cannot recall where exactly, it was around 7 years ago. I'd saved it, came across it again when looking through a back-up disc from my old computer. Apt for Earth day, is it not?

Two Things I Knew & One I Didn't

1) April is Poetry Month
Have you noticed how seldom we hear a poem recited properly, with exactly the right mood, expression and emphasis? Even beautiful voices of talented actors or narrators tend to be reduced to an expressionless flat drone when reciting poems, denying us the emotion of the poets' clear intention when he/she wrote the lines. Perhaps there's some kind of rule book about this, some custom which dictates that emotion, when reading someone else's poems, will not be tolerated?

In honour of this Poetry Month I did find a couple of examples of actors who know their stuff and do a very good job with two short but lovely poems:

Dame Maggie Smith with Winds of Fate by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and Alan Bates with A.H. Clough's Invictus ~~~

2) Sunday 22nd April is EARTH DAY

From Save Earth Day, by Mark Hertsgaard

To give President Obama his due, his promotion of wind and solar energy and his ordering of higher vehicle fuel efficiency are laudable steps. But when he brags, as he did at a recent campaign event while posing in front of vast stacks of oil pipes, that his administration has “added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth” while also increasing oil drilling to record levels, Obama forfeits whatever credibility he once had as a politician who cares about the looming catastrophe of climate change. All of the above also violates Obama’s promise, at the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions to what amounted to a scientifically paltry 5 percent by 2020 compared to 1990 levels. But apparently the president feels he can get away with such betrayals without paying much of a political price.

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and ....DIDN'T KNOW ~~
Jared Harris, who currently plays Lane Pryce in Mad Men, and Dr. David Robert Jones in Fringe is a son of the late Richard Harris. Richard sang the definitive version of MacArthur Park, as well as personifying Dumbledore, King Arthur, A Man Called Horse and countless other characters in film. Ah yes - I see the likeness now!













Astrologically it goes like this:
Richard had Sun @ 7 Libra Jared has Mars at 4 Libra.

Jared has Sun, Pluto and Mercury in Virgo, Richard had Mercury & Neptune in Virgo.

Richard's Moon was in late (27) Capricorn, Jared's Moon (depending on his time of birth) is somewhere between 29 Capricorn and 14 Aquarius, and quite likely to be close to his Dad's Moon!

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EARTH DAY

Today is EARTH DAY.
I feel angered and too frustrated by local non-caring attitudes to be able to compose anything inspiring to myself or others. Our town authorities can't even be bothered to organise re-cycling facilities for newspapers and drinks cans. We have to drive a round trip of 70 miles to find somewhere to deposit our collections.

Whatever one's opinion on climate change/global warming - even if you think it's all "a hoax" as our Okie senator James Inhofe likes to declare at every available opportunity, wilful waste could still be addressed.

Before I blow a gasket, I'll give the post over to some people who put my feelings into words in ways far more eloquent than I can muster:

The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands. ~Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life, 1923


And Man created the plastic bag and the tin and aluminum can and the cellophane wrapper and the paper plate, and this was good because Man could then take his automobile and buy all his food in one place and He could save that which was good to eat in the refrigerator and throw away that which had no further use. And soon the earth was covered with plastic bags and aluminum cans and paper plates and disposable bottles and there was nowhere to sit down or walk, and Man shook his head and cried: "Look at this Godawful mess." ~Art Buchwald, 1970


"I really wonder what gives us the right to
wreck this poor planet of ours."
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.


Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.
~George Carlin

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap. ~Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.


It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment. ~Ansel Adams


The struggle to save the global environment is in one way much more difficult than the struggle to vanquish Hitler, for this time the war is with ourselves. We are the enemy, just as we have only ourselves as allies. ~Al Gore

Finally, just yesterday Bolivian President Evo Morales said, in a speech reported here

"The capitalist system looks to obtain the maximum possible gain, promoting unlimited growth on a finite planet," said Morales. "Capitalism is the source of asymmetries and imbalance in the world."

Our Planet Home

April 22 each year marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970.

The chart below is calculated for 12 noon today, Earth Day 2008, in Wichita, Kansas (a city located near the centre of the USA). Planetary positions will be the same anywhere in the world, but angles, house positions/clock times will differ.


There are two Grand Trines in the chart, one in Earth signs and one in Water signs. That seems very appropriate for Earth Day - harmonious blends of earth and water. These are harmonious configurations which seem to be saying that, just for a little while today, Earth Day, "the Universe is unfolding as it should" -words borrowed from "Desiderata". It's a day when groups of people around the globe celebrate and appreciate our beautiful planet.
The Grand Trines are formed by: Sun at 2 Taurus/Saturn at 1 Virgo/Pluto at 1 Capricorn - the Earth GT. Uranus at 21 Pisces/Mars at 21 Cancer and Moon at 28 Scorpio - the Water GT.

Since 1970 not enough has been done to protect this precious planet home of ours. In the past couple of years Al Gore has helped raise awareness of the serious problems which might face Earth's population in years to come due to climate change. Still, governments drag their feet or propose solutions which seem far too timid for the scale of potential problems.

Pluto hasn't yet fully established its Earthy Capricorn transit, but after the retrograde period, this planet of transformation will come firmly into its Earthiness. Whether this might indicate changes and transformations made voluntarily by the people and their governments, or changes forced upon us by events, remains to be seen.

"As we watch the sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog across the poisoned waters of our native earth, we must ask ourselves seriously whether we really wish some future universal historian on another planet to say about us: "With all their genius and with all their skill, they ran out of foresight and air and food and water and ideas," or, "They went on playing politics until their world collapsed around them." ~U Thant, 3rd Secretary General of the United Nations, in a speech, 1970

This is my own Earth Flag, it flies today and every day.

EARTH DAY

Today, 22 April, is Earth Day. Astrologically this is an appropriate date, in the first degrees of Taurus, fixed Earth sign of the zodiac.. There's stability and comfort in Taurus, appreciation of nature's wonder. Ruled by Venus, planet of love, beauty, relatedness, grace and harmony. Now, more than ever we humans need to appreciate and be aware of what we owe to our planet. Our time here may be in jeopardy.


"What a joy it is to feel the soft, springy earth under my feet once more, to follow grassy roads that lead to ferny brooks where I can bathe my fingers in a cataract of rippling notes, or to clamber over a stone wall into green fields that tumble and roll and climb in riotous gladness!" (Helen Keller)

"The whole world is, to me, very much "alive" - all the little growing things, even the rocks. I can't look at a swell bit of grass and earth, for instance, without feeling the essential life - the things going on within them. The same goes for a mountain, or a bit of the ocean, or a magnificent piece of old wood." (Ansel Adams)


"A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature."
--Henry David Thoreau


Please, let it not be that "We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap." ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Photgraphs from the Rocky Mountain National Park, taken by my husband..