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Making Sense of Change The Real Challenge The Damage Report First Things First A Forest of Blue Conflict Water Transits: Walking into Wilderness Voxpop: Stewardship Consuming Green Servitude Defined Rise and Spread A Charter of Care Growing Illusion The Terminator Bug Sustainable Seafood Underdog Inventors Reclaiming Childhood The Territories of Hope The Green Grass of Home A Creative Revolution Only the Poets Can Save Us Now Wetlands Discovery Bee Here Now On Mind Bending The Diaper Dilemma Getting a Green Job Urban Hen 101 Making a Difference Why Local is Logical Butterfly Dreams

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NextOkanagan QREiUgDxFrHnKqsBR iEIBsvUQDxFrHnKq Next Okanagan is your local information

not being told by our media. It is the story of the

source reporting and interpreting the events and trends in the Okanagan, covering the story of our region’s response to the extraordinary challenges and opportunities that we face, and the story of the emergence of a new culture of local resilience.

relocalization process being precipitated by necessity and possibility. It also represents the beginning of a change towards a more balanced and thoughtful approach to the business of life, and the life of business. Together we face a convergence of interrelated global challenges

that are forcing us to find better ways of doing things and making our communities work. We are changing our attitudes toward – and relationship with – energy, climate, food, economics, health, waste, and the environment. At the same time, we are establishing new norms for how we communicate, work, live our lives, and ensure that the goods and services we need are sustainably produced and available from reliable local sources where possible.

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There is a story emerging in our world that is

Making Sense of Change Telling real Stories:

Chickens, Bugs & Bees

Only Poets Can Save Us Redefining Stewardship A Creative Revolution Our Morbid Obsession is Necessary Now with Our Lawns

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â&#x2013; A

recession is when your neighbour has to tighten his belt. A depression is when you have to tighten your own belt. And a panic is when you have no belt to tighten and your pants fall down. â&#x2013; Tommy Douglas

Making Sense of Change

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OKANAGAN MEDIA ALLIANCE

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Ucontents

Invocation

The Real Challenge

dispatches

9. 11. 12. 12. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 21.

papercuts

25. 27. 28. 30. 33.

Growing Illusion | Dave Pollard The Terminator Bug | Andrew Nikoforuk Sustainable Seafood | Jane Moody Underdog Inventors | Tyler Hamilton Reclaiming Childhood

features

41. 47. 53. 63. 65. 71.

practica

89. 90. 91. 93. 94. 96 97.

Epiphonies

99.

Butterfly Dreams | Karin Wilson

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Bdispatches

B The Damage Report An Environmental Update By Donella H. Meadows What the Earth sees is that its species are vanishing at a rate it hasn’t seen in 65 million years. That 40 percent of its agricultural soils have been degraded. That half its forests have disappeared and half its wetlands have been filled or drained, and that, despite Earth Day, all these trends are accelerating.

The planet is not impressed by fancy speeches. Leonardo DiCaprio interviewing Bill Clinton about global warming is not an Earth-shaking event. The Earth has no way of

registering good intentions or future inventions or high hopes. It doesn’t even pay attention to dollars, which are, from a planet’s point of view, just a charming human invention. Planets measure only physical things – energy and materials and their flows into and out of the changing populations of living creatures. What the Earth sees is that on the first Earth Day in 1970 there were 3.7 billion of those hyperactive critters called humans, and now there are over 6 billion. Back in 1970 those humans drew from the Earth’s crust 46 million barrels of oil every day now they draw 78 million. Natural gas extraction has nearly tripled in thirty years, from 34 trillion cubic feet per year to 95 trillion. We mined 2.2 billion metric tons of coal in 1970; this year we’ll mine about 3.8 billion. The planet feels this fossil fuel use in many ways, as the fuels are extracted (and spilled) and shipped (and spilled) and refined (generating toxics) and burned into numerous pollutants, including carbon dioxide, which traps outgoing energy and warms things up. Despite global conferences and brave promises, what the Earth notices is that human carbon emissions have increased from 3.9 million metric tons in 1970 to an estimated 6.4 million this year. You would think that an unimaginably huge thing like a planet would not notice the one degree (Fahrenheit) warming it has experienced since 1970. But on the scale of a whole planet, one degree is a big deal, especially since it is not spread evenly. The poles have warmed more than the equator, the winters more than the summers, the nights more than the days. That means that temperature DIFFERENCES from one place to another have been changing much more than the average temperature has changed. Temperature differences are what make winds blow, rains rain, ocean currents flow. What the Earth sees is that its species are vanishing at a rate it hasn’t seen in 65 million years. That 40 percent of its agricultural soils have been degraded. That half

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The Power of Vision

its forests have disappeared and half its wetlands have been filled or drained, and that, despite Earth Day, all these trends are accelerating. All creatures, including humans, are exquisitely attuned to the weather. All creatures, including us, are noticing weather weirdness and trying to adjust, by moving, by fruiting earlier or migrating later, by building up whatever protections are possible against flood and drought. The Earth is reacting to weather changes too, shrinking glaciers, splitting off nation-sized chunks of Antarctic ice sheet, enhancing the cycles we call El Nino and La Nina. “Earth Day, Shmearth Day,” the planet must be thinking as its fever mounts. “Are you folks ever going to take me seriously?” Since the first Earth Day our global vehicle population has swelled from 246 to 730 million. Air traffic has gone up by a factor of six. The rate at which we grind up trees to make paper has doubled (to 200 million metric tons per year). We coax from the soil, with the help of strange chemicals, 2.25 times as much wheat, 2.5 times as much corn, 2.2 times as much rice, almost twice as much sugar, almost four times as many soybeans as we did thirty years ago. We pull from the oceans almost twice as much fish. With the fish we can see clearly how the planet behaves, when we push it too far. It does not feel sorry for us; it just follows its own rules. Fish become harder and harder to find. If they are caught before they’re old enough to reproduce, if their nursery habitat is destroyed, if we scoop up not only the cod, but the capelin upon which the cod feeds, the fish may never come back. The Earth does not care that we didn’t mean it, that we promise not to do it again, that we make nice gestures every Earth Day. We have among us die-hard optimists who will berate me for not reporting the good news since the last Earth Day. There is plenty of it, but it is mostly measured in human terms, not Earth terms. Average human life expectancy has risen since 1970 from 58 to 66 years. Gross world product has more than doubled, from 16 to 39 trillion dollars. Recycling has increased, but so has trash generation, so the Earth receives more garbage than ever before. Wind and solar power generation have soared, but so have coal-fired, gas-fired and nuclear generation. In human terms there has been breathtaking progress. In 1970 there weren’t any cell phones or video players. There was no Internet; there were no dot-coms. Nor was anyone infected with AIDS, of course, nor did we have to worry about genetic engineering. Global spending on advertising was only one-third of what it is now (in inflation-corrected dollars). Third-World debt was one-eighth of what it is now. Whether you call any of that progress, it is all beneath the notice of the Earth. What the Earth sees is that its species are vanishing at a rate it hasn’t seen in 65 million years. That 40 percent of its agricultural soils have been degraded. That half its forests have disappeared and half its wetlands have been filled or drained, and that, despite Earth Day, all these trends are accelerating. Earth Day is beginning to remind me of Mother’s Day, a commercial occasion upon which you buy flowers for the person who, every other day of the year, cleans up after you. Guilt-assuaging. Trivializing. Actually dangerous. All mothers have their breaking points. Mother Earth does not soften hers with patience or forgiveness or sentimentality. B

Donella Meadows I’ve learned how to tap the part of me from which vision comes. It’s not the mind. It’s not the rational set of skills we have as human beings. You might call it heart or soul or some combination of the two. I’ve learned some generalizations about this process for which I was so poorly trained. One thing I’ve learned is that you are trying to articulate what you really want, not what you think you can get. What is a sustainable world that you would like to live in, that would satisfy your deepest dreams and longings? Second, if you can get to that picture, you are under no obligation to tell us how to get there. My experience is, having now many times created a vision and then brought it, in some form, into being, is that I never know, at the beginning, how to get there. But as I articulate the vision and share it with people, the path reveals itself. And it would never reveal itself if I were not putting out the vision of what I really want and finding that other people really want it too. As I said already, visions don’t come from a rational place, but visions do have to be honed by rationality. There does have to be a responsibility. Visions become responsible through all sorts of processes, and the best one that I know is sharing it with other people. The more a vision is shared, the more responsible it gets, and the more ethical it gets. When I’m clear about a vision that I’m trying to bring forth, it informs my choices. It makes me see options that I wouldn’t have seen. And so, I am amazed at the practicality of visioning. Donella H. Meadows was Adjunct Professor of Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College when she wrote this. She is best known to the world as the lead author of the international bestselling book The Limits to Growth, which reported on a study of long-term global trends in population, economics, and the environment. She was a leading voice in what has become known as the “sustainability movement,” an international effort to reverse damaging trends in the environment, economy, and social systems. Genuinely unconcerned with her international fame, she often referred to herself simply as “a farmer and a writer.”

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B First Things First a design manifesto the question of value-free design has been continually contested in the graphic design community between those who are concerned about the need for values in design and those who believe it should be value-free. those who believe that design can be free from values reject the idea that graphic designers should concern themselves with underlying political questions. those who are concerned about values believe that designers should be critical and take a stand in their choice of work, for instance by not promoting industries and products perceived to be harmful.

The First Things First 2000 manifesto is an updated version of the earlier First Things First manifesto written and published in 1964 by Ken Garland, a British designer. The 2000 manifesto was signed by a group from the international graphic design community, and simultaneously published in Adbusters (Canada), Emigre and AIGA Journal of Graphic Design (United States), Eye and Blueprint (Britain) and Items (Netherlands) and was subsequently published in many other magazines and books around the world, sometimes in translation. Its aim was to generate discussion about the graphic design professionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s priorities in the design press and at design schools. Some designers welcomed this attempt to reopen the debate, while others rejected it.

We, the undersigned, are graphic designers, art directors and visual communicators who have been raised in a world in which the techniques and apparatus of advertising have persistently been presented to us as the most lucrative, effective and desirable use of our talents. Many design teachers and mentors promote this belief; the market rewards it; a tide of books and publications reinforces it. Encouraged in this direction, designers then apply their skill and imagination to sell dog biscuits, designer coffee, diamonds, detergents, hair gel, cigarettes, credit cards, sneakers, butt toners, light beer and heavy-duty recreational vehicles. Commercial work has always paid the bills, but many graphic designers have now let it become, in large measure, what graphic designers do. This, in turn, is how the world perceives design. The professionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s time and energy is used up manufacturing demand for things that are inessential at best. Many of us have grown increasingly uncomfortable with this view of design. Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising, marketing and brand development are supporting, and implicitly endorsing, a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact. To some extent we are all helping draft a reductive and immeasurably harmful code of public discourse. There are pursuits more worthy of our problem-solving skills. Unprecedented environmental, social and cultural crises demand our attention. Many cultural interventions, social marketing campaigns, books, magazines, exhibitions, educational tools, television programs, films, charitable causes and other information design projects urgently require our expertise and help. We propose a reversal of priorities in favor of more useful, lasting and democratic forms of communication - a mindshift away from product marketing and toward the exploration and production of a new kind of meaning. The scope of debate is shrinking; it must expand. Consumerism is running uncontested; it must be challenged by other perspectives expressed, in part, through the visual languages and resources of design. In 1964, 22 visual communicators signed the original call for our skills to be put to worthwhile use. With the explosive growth of global commercial culture, their message has only grown more urgent. Today, we renew their manifesto in expectation that no more decades will pass before it is taken to heart. B

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h Sustainable Seafood Recipes that Are Good for the Planet

apptitude When looking to make smart, sustainable seafood choices, use the Ocean Wise iPhone application – an easy-to-use app that provides consumers with over 3000 Ocean Wise restaurants, markets and supplier venues from coast to coast, and a comprehensive list of ocean-friendly seafood options.

Ocean Wise is a nation-wide conservation program designed to educate restaurants and consumers about the issues surrounding sustainable seafood. Created by the Vancouver Aquarium, Ocean Wise has an affiliation with restaurants, markets, suppliers and food services, striving to ensure that everyone works together to make ocean-friendly buying choices in an environmentally conscious world. Overfishing is the greatest threat to our oceans today. The world's marine life is quickly being depleted. An estimated 90% of all large, predatory fish are already gone from the world's oceans. A recent scientific study predicted a world-wide fisheries collapse by 2048. The only solution is to turn back from the brink, and to begin consuming seafood in a sustainable manner. Sustainable seafood can be defined as species that are caught or farmed in a way that ensures the long-term health and stability of that species, as well as the greater marine ecosystem. Ocean Wise’s recommendations are based on 4 criteria. An Ocean Wise recommended species is: • Abundant and resilient to fishing pressures • Well managed with a comprehensive management plan based on current research • Harvested in a method that ensures limited bycatch on non-target and endangered species • Harvested in ways that limit damage to marine or aquatic habitats and negative interactions with other species. Ocean Wise’s classification system is based on two categories: sustainable or unsustainable, simply a good or bad choice for our oceans. Species are regularly updated and/or reclassified with the latest scientific information. Classifications, including changes to and Ocean Wise recommendations, are provided regularly to Ocean Wise participants.

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In The Ocean Wise Cookbook, Jane Mundy compiles together some of the most popular recipes from chefs and restaurants from all across Canada. Jane shows us that no matter what kind of seafood you need for a recipe, you can help sustain our oceans and the environment by making positive choices. Throughout her book, she illustrates which types of seafood are considered Ocean Wise, and great alternatives to eating species that have been over fished – all the while providing a host of delicious recipes for fish, scallops, prawns, crab and more, with recipes from celebrity chefs like Michael Smith from Food Network, Rob Feenie from Cactus Club, and Jamie Kennedy.

FISH CAKES WITH HORSERADISH MAYONNAISE By Jane Mundy, Vancouver, BC Recipe adapted from The Ocean Wise Cookbook

The Ocean Wise Cookbook Seafood Recipes that Are Good for the Planet Jane Mundy, Editor Whitecap Books, North Vancouver isbn: 978-1770500167 Overfishing is the greatest threat to our oceans today. The world’s marine life is quickly being depleted. An estimated 90% of all large, predatory fish are already gone from the world’s oceans. A recent scientific study predicted a world-wide fisheries collapse by 2048. The only solution is to turn back from the brink, and to begin consuming seafood in a sustainable manner. Ocean Wise recommendations are provided regularly to participants.

When I was growing up, it seemed as if my mother made fish cakes several times a week, so they didn’t get me too excited. But she probably didn’t have the ingredients to give her recipe zing. This one gets its heat from the spicy mayonnaise and is enhanced by fresh herbs. A green salad would complement this dish. I recall that at home we had butter lettuce with Crosse & Blackwell salad cream. (Not too exciting.) Makes 4 main-course or 8 appetizer servings Horseradish mayonnaise 1 cup good-quality mayonnaise 2 tbsp prepared hot horseradish Juice of 1 lemon Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste Fish cakes 1 pound russet potatoes, peeled and roughly chopped 3/4 pound cooked white fish (any variety), and/or any smoked fish fillet 1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley 1 tbsp chopped fresh dill 1 tbsp capers, drained and chopped zest of 1 lemon 2 medium egg yolks 1 tsp kosher salt, plus more if needed 1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper, plus more if needed 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil 2 tbsp all-purpose flour, for dusting the cakes

Make the horseradish mayonnaise: In a small bowl, stir together the mayonnaise, horseradish and lemon juice. Taste and add salt and pepper as needed. Cover the horseradish mayonnaise and refrigerate until you are ready to serve it. Make the fish cakes: In a large pot of boiling, salted water, cook the potatoes until tender, 15 to 20 minutes. Drain the potatoes well and return them to the pot. Mash the potatoes; transfer to a large bowl and set aside, covered.

seafood Issues Overfishing Global consumption of seafood has doubled since the 1970’s. Now, roughly 130 million tons of seafood is harvested every year. Improvements in fisheries related technology have allowed us to remove organisms from the ocean more quickly and with less effort, putting increased pressure on the oceans. With an estimated 90% of all large, predatory fish already gone from our world’s oceans since industrialized fishing began; we are now fishing the last 10% of species such as tunas, swordfish, and sharks. Quite simply our marine species can not reproduce fast enough to keep up with the hunt. Bycatch Not all marine life that is captured by fishing gear makes it to the dinner table. An estimated 25% of what is caught in commercial fisheries is unintended catch (bycatch) and discarded. Bycatch can include unmarketable species, undersized species, and endangered species. Unfortunately the majority of the animals tossed back overboard do not survive. It is important to understand how your seafood has been harvested as some fishing gear types, like pelagic or surface longlining and bottom trawling can increase the likelihood and amount of bycatch incurred. Habitat Damage Certain fishing and farming practices can have negative impacts on critical marine or aquatic habitats. With the loss of crucial habitats such as spawning, nursery, breeding or sheltering areas, many species find it challenging to survive, let alone thrive. Communities such as coral reefs, kelp forests, mangroves and wetlands provide critical habitat for a wide array of organisms and damage to these key areas can have dramatic consequences for the environment.

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Pick through the fish, removing any skin and bones. Flake the fish into chunks. In the bowl containing the mashed potatoes, add the fish, parsley, dill, capers, lemon zest, egg yolks, salt and pepper. Gently fold the ingredients to combine. Taste and adjust seasoning as needed. Shape the mixture into eight fish cakes (about the diameter of a golf ball and about 1 inch/2.5 cm thick). Cover and refrigerate for 20 minutes or overnight. In a large frying pan or sauté pan, heat the oil over medium heat. Dust the fish cakes with a little flour and, working in batches of four, fry them until golden brown, 3 to 4 minutes per side. Serve with lemon wedges and horseradish mayonnaise. h

h Underdog Inventors the neverending quest for innovation The book Mad Like Tesla tells the stories of some clean energy entrepreneurs and inventors taking huge risks and thinking outside the box to solve some of the world’s most pressing issues. Each one is at a different level of development but all face similar barriers along their journey. The stories set the stage for discussion about a specific type of clean energy, technology or field of discovery (e.g. fusion, solar, waste-heat recovery, biofuels, energy storage, biomimicry, etc.) supported by some historical context and current-day examples. Why Mad Like Tesla? That’s explained in the introduction, but in a nutshell Serbian-American engineer Nikola Tesla invented many important technologies in his lifetime. yet he faced constant struggle against naysayers and skeptics who couldn’t, at first, grasp the significance of what he was sharing with the world. Many dismissed Tesla as a mad scientist, and yet his inventions shaped the world largely for the better. If someone today is mad like Tesla, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s quite a good thing, actually – we need more of these people, for the changes necessary in our world will not come from the kind of cautious, incremental steps being taken today. A search for the contemporary Nikola Tesla fuels this analysis of climate issues, which introduces thinkers and inventors who are working to find possible ways out of the energy crisis. From Louis Michaud, a retired refinery engineer who claims we can harness the energy of man-made tornadoes, to a professor and a businessman who are running a company that genetically modifies algae so it can secrete ethanol naturally, these individuals and their unorthodox methods are profiled through firstperson interviews, exposing the social, economic, financial, and personal barriers that prevent them from making an impact with their ideas. The existing state of green energy technologies, such as solar, wind, biofuels, smart grid, and energy storage, is also explored, creating a sense of hope against a backdrop of climate dread. The book examines some of the latest, most far-out green energy innovations and the people behind them. How far-out? Take, for example, a retired engineer’s idea to produce electricity via an artificial tornado, or a plan for a space-based power station that would harvest the sun’s energy, using microwaves

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to beam it down to earth. Other gizmos and processes seem more amenable to commercial success and social acceptance: Hamilton tells of a secretive company called EEStor that claims to have made a breakthrough in energy storage, and of a team building a low-cost nuclear fusion reactor. He strikes a fine balance between hope and hard realism when considering barriers to energy transition. As the “tornado guy” says, upon considering financial and regulatory obstacles: “Holy crap, that’s a lot to get through.” Mad Like Tesla is easy to get through, even for readers with only a basic knowledge of energy issues. Hamilton makes complex technologies comprehensible, and he clearly enjoys the remarkable human stories behind the science. Many of the risk takers and visionaries portrayed are Canadian (rocker Neil Young makes a cameo appearance!), but this book’s strong appeal should transcend all borders.

Nikola Tesla, 1856-1943 Nikola Tesla, the American scientist of Serbian origin, made his greatest contribution to science and technological progress of the world as the inventor of the rotating magnetic field and of the complete system of production of

Mad Like Tesla

electrical energy (motors, generators) based on the use of

Underdog Inventors and Their

alternate currents. His name was assigned to the SI unit for

Relentless Pursuit of Clean Energy

magnetic induction (tesla). Tesla also constructed the

Tyler Hamilton

generators of high-frequency alternate currents and high-

ECW Press

voltage coreless transformer known today as the “Tesla

isbn: 978-1770410084

Coil.” Tesla was one of the greatest electrical inventors who ever lived, and was probably the first cross-over scientist. He is known and respected in scientific

Tyler Hamilton writes a weekly green

and engineering circles, but he also appeals to the general audience with no formal background

energy and technology column for the

in science. He was a contemporary of Thomas Edison and Guglielmo

Toronto Star and a popular blog called

Marconi, and these two men are frequently credited for Tesla's invention

“Clean Break.” He is also the author

of AC power transmission and radio.

of Privacy Payoff. He lives in Toronto.

Tesla was also a visionary thinker, and in his papers and interviews he anticipated the development of radio and television broadcasting, robotics, computers, faxes, and his great dream was to find the means to broadcast electrical power without wires. Like many geniuses, he was not a practical man. While others made millions with his inventions, he wound up penniless at the end of his life. Tesla was so far ahead of his time that many of his ideas are only appearing today. He has been credited for the creation of much of the technology that we now take for granted. Without the genius of Tesla we would not have radio, television, AC electricity, Tesla coil, fluorescent lighting, neon lighting, radio control devices, robotics, x-rays, radar, microwaves and dozens of other amazing inventions.

Man’s Greatest Achievement by Nikola Tesla, New York American, July 6, 1930

When a child is born its sense-organs are brought in contact with the outer world. The waves of sound, heat, and light beat upon its feeble body, its sensitive nervefibres quiver, the muscles contract and relax in obedience: a gasp, a breath, and in this act a marvelous little engine, of inconceivable delicacy and complexity of construction, unlike any on earth, is hitched to the wheel-work of the Universe.

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Apples and Oranges

The little engine labors and grows, performs more and more involved operations, becomes sensitive to ever subtler influences and now there manifests itself in the fully developed being – Man – a desire mysterious, inscrutable and irresistible: to imitate nature, to create, to work himself the wonders he perceives. Inspired in this task he searches, discovers and invents, designs and constructs, and enriches with monuments of beauty, grandeur and awe, the star of his birth. He descends into the bowels of the globe to bring forth its hidden treasures and to unlock its immense imprisoned energies for its use. He invades the dark depths of the ocean and the azure regions of the sky. He peers into the innermost nooks and recesses of molecular structure and lays bare to his gaze worlds infinitely remote. He subdues and puts to his service the fierce, devastating spark of Prometheus, the titanic forces of the waterfall, the wind and the tide. He tames the thundering bolt of Jove and annihilates time and space. He makes the great Sun itself his obedient toiling slave. Such is the power and might that the heavens reverberate and the whole earth trembles by the mere sound of his voice. What has the future in store for this strange being, born of a breath, of perishable tissue, yet immortal, with his powers fearful and divine? What magic will be wrought by him in the end? What is to be his greatest deed, his crowning achievement? Long ago he recognized that all perceptible matter comes from a primary substance, of a tenuity beyond conception and filling all space - the Akasha or luminiferous ether – which is acted upon by the life-giving Prana or creative force, calling into existence, in never ending cycles, all things and phenomena. The primary substance, thrown into infinitesimal whirls of prodigious velocity, becomes gross matter; the force subsiding, the motion ceases and matter disappears, reverting to the primary substance. Can Man control this grandest, most awe-inspiring of all processes in nature? Can he harness her inexhaustible energies to perform all their functions at his bidding, more still – can he so refine his means of control as to put them in operation simply by the force of his will? If he could do this he would have powers almost unlimited and supernatural. At his command, with but a slight effort on his part, old worlds would disappear and new ones of his planning would spring into being. He could fix, solidify and preserve the ethereal shapes of his imagining, the fleeting visions of his dreams. He could express all the creations of his mind, on any scale, in forms concrete and imperishable. He could alter the size of this planet, control its seasons, guide it along any path he might choose through the depths of the Universe. He could make planets collide and produce his suns and stars, his heat and light. He could originate and develop life in all its infinite forms. To create and annihilate material substance, cause it to aggregate in forms according to his desire, would be the supreme manifestation of the power of Man’s mind, his most complete triumph over the physical world, his crowning achievement which would place him beside his Creator and fulfill his ultimate destiny. h

A Comparison, by Scott A. Sandford, NASA Ames Research Center, from Annals of Improbable Research, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1995 We have all been present at discussions (or arguments) in which one of the combatants attempts to clarify or strengthen a point by comparing the subject at hand with another item or situation more familiar to the audience or opponent. More often than not, this stratagem instantly results in the protest that “you’re comparing apples and oranges!” This is generally perceived as being a telling blow to the analogy, since it is generally understood that apples and oranges cannot be compared. However, after being the recipient of just such an accusation, it occurred to me that there are several problems with dismissing analogies with the comparing apples and oranges defense. First, the statement that something is like comparing apples and oranges is a kind of analogy itself. That is, denigrating an analogy by accusing it of comparing apples and oranges is, in and of itself, comparing apples and oranges. More importantly, it is not difficult to demonstrate that apples and oranges can, in fact, be compared. Materials and Methods Both samples were prepared by gently desiccating them in a convection oven at low temperature over the course of several days. The dried samples were then mixed with potassium bromide and ground in a small ball-bearing mill for two minutes. One hundred milligrams of each of the resulting powders were then pressed into a circular pellet having a diameter of 1 cm and a thickness of approximately 1 mm. Spectra were taken at a resolution of 1 cm-1 using a Nicolet 740 FTIR spectrometer. A comparison was made of the 4000-400 cm-1 (2.5-25 mm) infrared transmission spectra of a Granny Smith apple and a Sunkist Navel orange. Conclusions Not only was this comparison easy to make, but it is apparent that apples and oranges are very similar. Thus, it would appear that the comparing apples and oranges defense should no longer be considered valid. This is a somewhat startling revelation. It can be anticipated to have a dramatic effect on the strategies used in arguments and discussions in the future.

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Reclaiming Childhood a guide for readers

To be a child today, even in affluent countries like ours, is no longer a time of innocence, idyll and discovery. david suzuki

h The Unnatural Child Saving Children from Nature Deficit Disorder Last Child in the Woods is an influential work about the staggering divide between children and the outdoors by child advocate Richard Louv. It directly links the lack of

nature in the lives of today’s wired generation – he calls it nature-deficit – to some of the most disturbing childhood trends, such as the rises in obesity, attention disorders, and depression. Last Child in the Woods is the first book to bring together a new and growing body of research indicating that direct exposure to nature is essential for healthy childhood development and for the physical and emotional health of children and adults. More than just raising an alarm, Louv offers practical solutions and simple ways to heal the broken bond—and many are right in our own backyards. The book includes 100 actions you can take to create change in your community, school, and family; 35 discussion points to inspire people of all ages to talk about the importance of nature in their lives; research confirming that direct exposure to nature is essential for the physical and emotional health of children and adults. At the very moment that the bond is breaking between the young and the natural world, a growing body of research links our mental, physical, and spiritual health directly to our association with nature – in positive ways. Several of these studies suggest that thoughtful exposure of youngsters to nature can even be a powerful form of therapy for attention-deficit disorders and other maladies. As one sci-

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entist puts it, we can now assume that just as children need good nutrition and adequate sleep, they may very well need contact with nature. Reducing that deficit – healing the broken bond between our young and nature – is in our self-interest, not only because aesthetics or justice demands it, but also because our mental, physical, and spiritual health depends upon it. The health of the earth is at stake as well. How the young respond to nature, and how they raise their own children, will shape the configurations and conditions of our cities, homes – our daily lives. Last Child in the Woods explores an alternative path to the future, including some of the most innovative environment-based school programs; a reimagining and redesign of the urban environment-what one theorist calls the coming “zoopolis”; ways of addressing the challenges besetting environmental groups; and ways that faith-based organizations can help reclaim nature as part of the spiritual development of children. Parents, children, grandparents, teachers, scientists, religious leaders, environmentalists, and researchers from across the nation speak in the pages. They recognize the transformation that is occurring. Some of them paint another future, in which children and nature are reunited – and the natural world is more deeply valued and protected.

Last Child in the Woods Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder Richard Louv Thomas Allen, Algonquin isbn: 978-1565126053 Richard Louv is a journalist and author of eight books about the connections between family, nature and community. His newest book is The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder, which offers a new vision of the future, in which our lives are as immersed in nature as they are in technology. This future, available to all of us right now, offers better psychological, physical and spiritual health for people of every age. He coined the term NatureDeficit Disorder which has become the defining phrase of this important issue.

Nature Activities for Kids and Families Parents, grandparents, and other relatives are the first responders, but they cannot resolve society’s nature-deficit disorder by themselves. Educators, health care professionals, policymakers, business people, urban designers – all must lend a hand. Many of the activities presented here and in the book are adult-supervised, but it’s important to remember that one of the most important goals is for our children to experience joy and wonder everyday, and for them to be encouraged to create their own nature experiences. As they grow older they will expand the boundaries of their exploration. Here are a few suggestions that may stimulate our own creativity: • Invite native flora and fauna into your life. Maintain a birdbath. Replace part of your lawn with native plants. Build a bat house. • View nature as an antidote to stress. All the health benefits that come to a child come to the adult who takes that child into nature. Children and parents feel better after spending time in the natural world-even if it’s in their own backyard. • Help your child discover a hidden universe. Find a scrap board and place it on bare dirt. Come back in a day or two, lift the board, and see how many species have found shelter there.

Last Child in the Woods has been translated into 10 languages and published in 15 countries, and has stimulated an international conversation about the relationship between children and nature among educators, health professionals, parents, developers and conservationists. This is a book that will change the way you think about your future and the future of your children.

Identify these creatures with the help of a field guide. Return to this universe once a month, lift the board and discover who’s new. • Revive old traditions. Collect lightning bugs at dusk, release them at dawn. Make a leaf collection. Keep a terrarium or aquarium. • Encourage your kids to go camping in the backyard. Buy them a tent or help them make a canvas tepee, and leave it up all summer. Join the NWF’s Great American Backyard Campout. • Be a cloudspotter; build a backyard weather station. No special shoes or drive to the soccer field is required for “clouding.” A young person just needs a view of the sky (even if it’s from a bedroom window) and a guidebook. Cirrostratus, cumulonimbus, or lenticularis, shaped like flying saucers, “come to remind us that the clouds are Nature’s poetry, spoken in a whisper in the rarefied air between crest and crag,” writes Gavin Pretor-Pinney in his wonderful book The Cloudspotter’s Guide. To build a backyard weather station, read The Kid’s Book of Weather Forecasting, by Mark Breen, Kathleen Friestad, and Michael Kline.

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harold rhenisch

What You Do To Apples, You Also Do To Men.

Caraway and Pippins More than four centuries ago, the justice of the peace Robert Shallow had an orchard of pippins, and offered them with caraway to his guest, Sir John Falstaff. These two men

lived in one of the plays about kingship that Shakespeare wrote while trying to get history to come out right. It didn’t. There are still pippins in the world, or apples as we call them today, but the sharp acids of true pippins are gone. Tastes run to sweet Royal Galas now, not hard, scabbed wild fruit that you have to gnaw at like blocks of wood. A true pippin comes from a pip – a seed. It sprouts. It grows secretly for a few years. Birds nest in it. Then one spring it has white blossoms, and in autumn apples pulling its limb to the grass. A man walks by. He stops. He reaches out. Long ago, I believed that Shakespeare’s pippins were Newtown Pippins, with their waxy green skins speckled with white stars. A friend had told me that they had been mentioned in a gardening book in 1620. Twenty years later, I was picking Newtowns in Black Sage, from one of the last pippin trees in British Columbia. Bears wandered past into the peach trees. Antelope brush scented the cool dark with creosote. Coyotes came down nightly to take the farmyard dogs away. Each fall for years I drove off the plateau to haul my Newtowns back up the long grade through the pines to sudden sky and aspens dropping their yellow leaves into the wind. I had got up above the top of the world in that country, and to me each of those pippins in their boxes behind me was a tiny earth, a green planet that I was carrying into the winter and through it into the spring. Biting into them was like mashing the wood of a branch to suck out its richest honey. That was an apple, I used to say, that tasted like a sweet lemon when you picked it, then ripened on your front porch as the leaves

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[ image opposite ]

drifted from the sumacs, softened ever so slightly, and then one day tasted like a whole year of leaf and tree and sun at once. As snow drifted through those winters, I cooked Newtowns into pancakes and served them to my children with whipped cream and brown sugar. They tasted like honey. The pancakes were rich with buttery sun, amid clouds of eggs and flour those mornings, while the blue plateau light flowed over the ice and snow outside as if it were water falling off the edge of the world. It could well be that it did, but I had the pippins. I didn’t care. Years before, I had grafted Newtowns in the desert sun as coyotes howled from Daly Mountain. I had held the land with great care then, so I could pass it on untouched to those who followed – or I thought I had. I grafted thousands of trees to the Newtown’s greener sisters from Australia, the Granny Smiths, before I learned that in this country Grannies taste like water that has been in a refrigerator too long, and turn pink in the desert sun, and have to be grafted again or simply pulled out by the roots. Originally, there were two varieties of Newtowns – Yellow and Green. They were carefully propagated and sold separately for a century, but it’s a strange thing: when a yellow pippin’s fruit is hidden by leaves from the sun, it grows as tart as limes that you suck through your teeth; when a green pippin grows with the sun on its angular shoulders, it is yellow with sweet honey and crumbling cell walls. Such double identity would have suited Shakespeare’s purposes in training his audiences to recognize kingship within the love of a prince for his friends, but he didn’t live long enough, because neither Yellow nor Green Newtowns were Shakespeare’s pippins. Newtowns were discovered in 1820, in an orchard in New York. I was off by 200 years. Still, thirty years ago in a root cellar cut into a soapstone cliff under the big sage and prickly pears above his orchard in Cawston, John Hutchinson used to brew a traditional Lancashire cider from Newtowns, or rather John used to brew it from sweet Spartans and Golden Delicious, with a final addition of 10% Newtown juice, with its complex tannic acids, to clear the must and give it a hint of wild pippins plucked from a hedge, slipped frozen into a pocket, and rattled through the fingers as a man walked on his way home. John’s cider sat there among turnips and potatoes and turned yellow in its green jugs in the dark. Once he closed the foot-thick door behind us, and we sat with the cider for awhile, before going back out into the world. Maybe there was no longer a commercial market for Newtowns, but they were still a part of a culture, a horticulture, a tradition of human relationships that went back in an unbroken line all the way through Shakespeare to the apples with caraway that he must have remembered when he wrote King Henry IV Part II. The libraries of this culture are in human memory. Nick Kolmann used to grow Newtowns, too, on his steep dwarf orchard on the clay cliffs above Okanagan Lake at Naramata. For decades, he pruned them back to stubs to keep them from falling off the cliffside, although the style of the age – the 1970s – was to let apple branches grow long and weepy and hang down into the weeds. Those trees never returned much economically, but when Nick picked them in late November they filled the bins in the orchard rows with their white shoulders and leaf-green mouths the colour of summer cabbage. Farther out, halfway to Paradise Ranch, John Bibby used to grow Newtowns on Languedoc Road. He grew them in the late 1930s and through the 1940s, on big trees planted in the gullies in 1908 – the first generation on the land. Farms like that were too steep for horse-drawn wooden tanks of chemicals, so the arsenic of lead, lime-sulphur, dormant oil, and nicotine that kept pests down were pumped through irrigation lines. John dressed

The Apple Pickers Sculpture by George Wallace. Photo by Jim Chambers. The Apple Pickers portrays Adam and Eve in the act of harvesting the forbidden fruit that led to mankind’s fall from grace. Eve is capable of reaching the apple of her eye only by standing on Adam’s shoulders, which Adam, his arms spread like a martyr, allows her to do. This may be the sculptor’s nod of recognition to the important women’s movement of the past decade. In the Biblical account of our Genesis, God’s commandment to Adam that he was not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was made before the creation of the woman. It may be that the admission is long overdue that man deserves a more fundamental role than woman in original sin. In Wallace’s account of this most decisive moment for human destiny, Adam cannot blame his downfall on the woman for he is voluntarily making it possible by lifting her. Likewise, the woman cannot blame the serpent who is nowhere to be seen. All the responsibility for our misfortunes, however, does not stop with Adam and Eve. Just as Eve relies on Adams support, Adam is lifted off the ground by standing on a triangular beam. (The triangle is suggestive of the Trinity, the Christian Godhead.) Adam and Eve’s risky performance on the Straight and Narrow requires a skilful and experienced sense of balance. They look good for now but they are due for a fall. From An Introduction to the Sculpture of George Wallace by Robert Clark Yates .www.tinyurl.com/ 6ddgpeg

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in an oilskin (no doubt the same that navy men were wearing on convoy patrol in the dark of the North Atlantic), connected a high pressure hose to an irrigation connection, opened the brass firehose nozzle, and sprayed up into the branches. In all of that, the one thing that was most doused with spray was John, as he soaked the black twigs, then sprayed the first green buds as they opened like birds on the branches, then the blossoms, each with a pink smudge of lipstick, and then the small, green apples, and again and again as they grew and the branches swung lightly with their weight in the wind. They all dripped back on his face. What with all of the connections of spray hoses, then sprinklers, then spray hoses again, and all of the snapping together and apart of brass fittings and pressure nozzles and hoses, it was like farming in a submarine. The water came from lakes in the high country, soaked with trout, black spruce, snow, and starlight, and siphoned down through pipes built of staves wrapped with a continuous spiral of 3/8-inch iron wire, like long wooden barrels. Chemicals were added to this mountain water in big concrete tanks, and from there it was sprayed onto the codling moths and mites and scale of those trees. As John put it, everybody got such a dose of nicotine in those orchards that they shook with it. What trees they were, though! Each one produced eighty bushels of apples. To pick one tree was a dayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work. Hour by hour, you moved higher and higher into the light, setting the green apples into the canvas picking bag strapped over your shoulders, then carrying the sky down thirty-five pounds at a time. You could be a bird for a day in the crown of one of those trees, and could spend hours hauling those boxes up to the road in the dusk, and somewhere in all that you could slip a couple boxes into your root cellar. At Christmas, you could go in there, when the snow was a foot thick and the creek that ran through the cottonwoods on the edge of the gully was frozen in its bed. You could lift an apple out of the damp darkness and carry it up to the house, polish it slowly with a cloth, cut a sliver out of it with a jack-knife, as John liked to do, and bring it to your mouth and taste the world. On this earth, we get what we imagine and what we put into things. If we put such physical attention into the growing of fruit, it is physical attention we get back. If you had cut an apple open in those days with a simple knife in a simple kitchen, as John loved to do, you likely dreamed of revolution and of your brothers in Russia cutting open apples like that then going out to fight the fascists. You did it with care. An apple like that tastes like leaves in the wind. There was nothing about it that you couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t love, as red polls picked through the winter rosebush outside the window and the grey lake lay still below the thick, grey skies of winter, and all the cities of the world were far away. You were building a new civilization there, one you thought had found balance at last. Unknown to you, though, it had two failings: first, fifty years later farmers would be fighting to get any trees at all to grow on those benchland farms, because the arsenic you sprayed had locked up all the nutrients; second, your life among apples was sustained economically by wartime price controls; when they were lifted in 1947, the long journey from horticulture into industrial farming and the simpler sweetness of Royal Galas began. If you were John Bibby, and saw your ability to pay your workers a fair wage about to erode, you gave it up out of a sense of honour and solidarity with your brothers in Russia, as John told me, fifty-five years after he started farming his pippins, when I used to eat Newtowns with him in the blizzards of winter evenings and talked about politics and soil and memory, which are all the same thing.

Harold Rhenisch was born three months early, in a blizzard, on January 5, 1958, and grew up on an orchard in Cawston, in the Similkameen Valley, the second son of German immigrant Hans Rhenisch and second generation Canadian Dorothy Leipe. He started writing poetry when he was 15, under the dramatist Bill Greenland. From 1976-1980 he studied Creative Writing at the University of Victoria. From 1981-1992 Rhenisch worked in the vineyards and orchards of the Okanagan and the Similkameen, eventually running his own pruning, grafting, and nursery business. In 1992 he moved to the Cariboo plateau, and in 2007 to Campbell River on Northern Vancouver Island. He currently lives in Vernon. Rhenisch’s poetry explores the land on which he lives and where he grew up in an immigrant culture developing orchards and vineyards in the fertile Okanagan Valley. In the juxtaposition of new European cultures and an ancient land, Rhenisch sees again the Kenya of the 1920s portrayed by Karen Blixen in Out of Africa. After waiting in vain for a V.S. Naipaul to write of the colonial plantation cultures of the Okanagan, Rhenisch turned his sense of the land into a vehicle capable of speaking for a complex contemporary world: the autobiographical fiction of Out of the Interior: The Lost Country. For over thirty years, Rhenisch has striven to create an authentic literature for the silent rural parts of Canada, to place their images and dialects on an equal footing with those of the modern urban world. At the same time, he has been a student of Ezra Pound, post-modern German literature, and trickster mythology. For Rhenisch, the work of starting a new literature is paramount, centred in the workings of consciousness, place and mythology. His The Wolves at Evelyn won the George Ryga Prize for Social Responsibility in British Columbia Literature in 2007. He has taught the writing of fiction, nonfiction and poetry at Vancouver Island University and North Island College, and has conducted workshops for teachers and elementary and secondary school students throughout British Columbia. He actively mentors and edits writers from across North America.

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Two hours to the north, Hugh Dendy used to grow spur-type Macintosh in the 1980s, soft apples with a thin, watery flavour ripened with hormones, on land rented for ten years, because that’s where the money was. Among them, though, there was one Newtown, bent by the heat, shallowly-rooted in the East Kelowna gravel, that was the reason he kept farming. It was like the flowers that the New England fruit farmer turned poet Robert Frost refused to mow one day when he was scything grass. Of Frost’s country, Henry David Thoreau had already written – long before Frost’s time – that as soon as all wild apples had been corralled into ordered, grafted orchards there would be no democracy and no free men left in the world. I suspect he would not have been adverse to a slow roast of pork with caraway and apples and cream, or spiced sausage with sauerkraut and apple and caraway, stirred in a pan and flooding the house with the scent of stones baking in the sun. Brian Mennell used to grow Newtowns at Similkameen Station, in the heavy soil that took the frost badly. On the flood plain below, giant cottonwoods planted 120 years before at the entrance to one of North America’s first cattle ranches, took the lightning. When I came in from long days picking Delicious along Blind Creek, where long yellow leaves clung to the fruit and stars rose up through the air at 4:30 in the evening, with my face sticky with sugar and the buzz of wasps still circling me, I walked out into the dark and picked the Newtowns by feel. They tasted like frost and stars. Later, in the winter, old apple trees burned behind Brian’s fireplace glass as he cracked heartnuts with an anvil and a hammer in the light of the flames. He stopped to bring a box of Newtowns up from the black widows of his basement. They tasted like shortbread: butter, sun and flour. His wife stirred a soup pot on the stove. Like a fool, I thought it would last forever. Tim Clarke used to grow Newtowns, under his grandfather’s watertower on the outwash gravels of South Keremeos, where a glacial river had once dropped its weight into deep, cold water. This was British Columbia’s last commercial Newtown block, and a promise Tim had made to his father: he would keep the farm going that had been in the family since England’s middle class abandoned the Cotswolds for the plantations of the Empire. Tim’s Newtowns were wild and wind-whipped and laden with fruit, because although Tim was temperamentally unsuited to farming in Canada, which is a business of bankers, wholesalers, and raw deals, he understood trees unlike any other farmer in the valleys of the Interior. From Tim I learned that a Newtown will produce unprecedented volumes of fruit just as soon as you leave it completely alone, that these trees are suited to old forms of horticulture; they prefer to grow in cascading umbrellas, with the sweet fruit on the outside and the pie fruit in the centre, with ladders laid against the wall of fruit and apples hauled away by horses. Tim was philosophical about his Newtowns. Each fall they hung on their limbs until their cores bloomed with stars of sweet watercore and were no longer candidates for cold storage. Then he picked them, when they were no longer commercially sound. He trucked them to the packinghouse, and watched his returns deteriorate year by year, until one year he went out in the morning with a shotgun and like the Newtowns did not return. I don’t know if Tim thought the problem with growing Newtowns was his own. I hope he knew it was ours. If you want to know the health of a society, look to how it raises its apples. If you want to know the health of the soil, look to how a society arranges its commercial and political systems. They take each others’ measure, and with them we take our own. What you do to apples, you also do to men. In my country, citizenship is measured in pippins. U

sage-ing with creative spirit, grace & gratitude

A Journal of the Arts & Aging Edited by Karen Close & Carolyn Cowan

number 1, autumn 2011

SAGE-ING WITH CREATIVE SPIRIT, GRACE & GRATITUDE

a publication of the okanagan institute available online at www.sage-ing.com

sage-ing with creative spirit, grace & gratitude

SAGE-ING IS SEEKING Sage-ing is about seeking – satisfying inner gnawing and transforming it to knowing. Aging can be alchemy when one allows

Elgin Marble from the top of the Acropolis, Athens, Greece. Painting by Karen Close.

the realisation that to Know Thyself and contribute that knowing to our culture is indeed our highest purpose. That knowing brings the gratitude, grace and integrity that a life deserves. The roots of sage-ing are deep. Know Thyself is carved in the gate to the Delphic Oracle. The site dates back to the 5th century BC in Classical Greece. The shrine was sacred to Apollo, guardian of spiritual clarity. Greek mythology is rich with riddles and discrepancies, but a favourite recording I discovered says that in ancient times woman over fifty were the oracles at this site answering human’s spiritual questions. The first seeds for my journey of karensageing were planted just before my fiftieth birthday. Now fifteen years later I want to reach out and, in the way of the Greeks, create a band of revellers sharing and celebrating the incredible process of opening to spiritual maturity, creativity and wisdom. The Greek god Dionysus and his band of revellers travelled about pricking the imaginations of mortals and inspiring them to create, as well as initiating them into the mysteries of fermentation and alchemy. The wild and daring side of Dionysus was feared by the other gods and they sought to destroy him. Times have not changed much. Dionysus was dismembered and the pieces burned, but as a son of Zeus, he possessed deep resources of wisdom and the power to resurrect himself each spring. His rebirth is said to offer hope because after his dismemberment he returned stronger than before. The Greeks believed humanity was created from his ashes. Reclaiming his wisdom and power is the gift I imagine being offered to each of us who chooses to join in Sage-ing With Creative Spirit, Grace and Gratitude. Just before the firestorm of 2003, I moved to the Okanagan, British Columbia. I perceive a metaphor in that tragedy suffered in this wine growing region. It is growing to have proportionately Canada’s largest senior population. I began to look for others who, having chosen to mature in this valley, might also want to embrace the aging process cognisant of its rich local and mythological legacy. Let each man exercise the art he knows, proclaimed the Greek dramatist, Aristophanes, rebel and a champion of the Dionysian spirit. Indeed, I believe a rebellious spirit is just what’s needed to begin to Know Thyself and Sage or as psychologist Carl Jung described it individuate. Describing this process in his book Finding Meaning In The Second Half of Life, James Hollis Ph.D, notes: Your Self is seeking itself, so to speak, through the realisation of the possibilities inherent in you... If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. This is the essence of what

a journal of the arts & aging

The Okanagan Revellers. The Greeks believed humanity was created from his ashes. Reclaiming his wisdom and power is the gift I imagine being offered to each of us who chooses to join in Sage-ing With Creative Spirit, Grace and Gratitude.

Jung means by individuation. It is a service not to the ego but to what wishes to live through us. While the ego may fear this overthrow, our greatest freedom is found paradoxically, in surrender to that which seeks fuller expression through us. Jung also asserts the importance of individuating in community: as the individual is not just a single, separate being, but by his very existence presupposes a collective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must lead to more intense and broader collective relationships and not to isolation. Enter the evolution of the World Wide Web and social networking in the twenty-first century. From my home on the shoreline of Lake Okanagan, I can share with you and urge you to join in community with me. I can look down the lake at the sculptural rock formation of Okanagan Mountain, right to where the fire started. I imagine baptism by fire and the ashes of Dionysus. I choose to absorb the power I see in those now exposed and vulnerable muscled volcanic forms - they strengthen my soul, calling directly to my inner being and the courage to create. Since moving here I have been drawn to others of all ages who like me are seeking fuller expression and deeper self awareness through their creative voices. This magazine will bring you their voices exercising the language of the art or arts they have chosen. We are becoming a loose band of revellers who have chosen to take pleasure and delight in knowing ourselves and each other through creative expression. We speak to how we can build a better world. We invite you to join us. Share, in whatever format you might devise. Speak from the heART of your spirit. Voice your experience. Karen Close karensageing@gmail.com

This journal is grateful to the inspiration gained from these sources: AGING INTO SAGE-ING: A PROFOUND NEW VISION OF GROWING OLDER by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, 1997 THE CREATIVE AGE: AWAKENING HUMAN POTENTIAL IN THE SECOND HALF OF LIFE by Gene D. Cohen, M.D., Ph.D, 2000. There is no denying the problems that accompany aging. But what has been universally denied is the potential. The ultimate expression of potential is creativity.

sage-ing with creative spirit, grace & gratitude

THE GODS, THEY DO CONSPIRE! Ruth Bieber We pose questions with the dumb hope that there may be gods that exist in the silence of time who in their own inscrutable ways will respond secretly and cunningly to our most honest expressions, assuring us that the ideas that riddle and beguile us are true and beautiful and worthy of our attention. – Jack Mathews "To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." – Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the spring of 2008, three events occurred in my life which created a window of opportunity; a huge window, which upon frequent reflection consistently leaves me in a state of gratitude and complete awe. The three events include: the death of my

Mother (I became an orphan, thank God), the independence of my two sons (I became an empty nester, thank God) and the departure from my beloved creation, InsideOut Theatre, (after 17 years, it was time, and yes, thank God!). So, there I was, an unemployed, empty nested orphan; the liberation was palatable! The question was what to do, and where to do it? I had always wanted to live in New York, and so off I went. The logical activity for a theatre artist was to write plays, so that is what I did. When I wasn’t working on one play or another, I focussed on a couple of book projects I had on the back burner. You might say I was a freelance writer in New York City. This I did for the better part of two years, and it was a blast. I love New York! Here is where the Gods conspire yet again. My two secret passions beyond theatre, were Shamanism, and the visual arts. In fact, during my final years as artistic director of the InsideOut Theatre, I attended a two year Shaman training program, as well as secretly harbouring a deep desire to become a visual artist. Guess what? New York hosts a rich and alive network of Shaman, as well as a project called Art Beyond Sight. Naturally, I became involved deeply in both, and vowed to bring the riches of each back to Canada with me. Although I have been legally blind since the age of seven, I knew I wanted to paint. The paintings you see here are my own, but I must give many thanks to Karen Close and her HeArt Fit project, It provided me with the opportunity to paint. Also, many thanks to the Kelowna Art Gallery for enthusiastically agreeing to host Canada’s first art gallery tours for people who are sight impaired. Finally, eternal gratitude to my New York ayllu for welcoming me into their Shamanic circle. The Gods, they do conspire!

a journal of the arts & aging

Mind’s I Mind’s I is my first painting. I rarely knew which colour I was finger painting with, at least, not until one of my painting companions would stop by to remark from a visual perspective. Such a beautiful green, or this looks very atmospheric, were common types of comments I would hear. The painting is acrylic, with quite a lot of modeling paste and other bits of stuff, including airplane shavings, which build up the surface, and make the piece interesting to the touch and pleasing to the eye. The ever so fun story behind this painting, hence its title, relates to my initial inspiration. I told Karen I had a deep desire to paint what I see behind closed eyes, you might say; a world full of beautiful colour and dancing geometric shapes, accented by sparkling pin pricks of light. “Never mind that for the moment,” was Karen’s advice. So, I never “minded,” and just painted from the heart. Now, I ask you to look closely, and tell me what you see.

Step Mother When I began my second piece, I had no idea what it was all about. That is the beauty of the process I use; the painting tells me what it is all about. As a freelance writer, I had just begun writing a memoir, which oddly wasn’t including anything about the 30 years of my step family phenomenon; odd yes, but true. As the painting evolved, it became increasingly obvious to me, that the message was one of needing to include my step family experience in my memoir; at least my relationship with my step Mother. The painting is in her honour. Ironically, my original intent with this painting was to invite a bit more control, by self determining the three colours I would use, as well as step away from finger painting only. As much as this was the case, my desire for some control was nevertheless superseded by the free flow of my subconscious, rendering the process yet again out of my control.

next okanagan making sense of change

Making Sense of Change The Real Challenge The Damage Report First Things First A Forest of Blue Conflict Water Transits: Walking into Wilderness Voxpop: Stewardship Consuming Green Servitude Defined Rise and Spread A Charter of Care Growing Illusion The Terminator Bug Sustainable Seafood Underdog Inventors Reclaiming Childhood The Territories of Hope The Green Grass of Home The Creative Revolution Only the Poets Can Save Us Now Caraway and Pippens Discovery of Wet Lands Bee Here Now On Mind Bending The Diaper Dilemma Getting a Green Job Urban Hen 101 Making a Difference Why Local is Logical Butterfly Dreams Plus: Sage-ing Insert

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NextOkanagan QREiUgDxFrHnKqsBR iEIBsvUQDxFrHnKq Next Okanagan is your local information

is not being told by our media. It is the story of

source, documenting and interpreting the events and trends in the Okanagan, covering the story of our collective response to the extraordinary challenges and opportunities we face, and the story of the emergence of a smart and progressive culture of local resilience.

the relocalization process that has been precipitated by necessity and possibility. It represents the beginning of a change towards a balanced and thoughtful approach to the business of life, and the life of business. Together we face a convergence of interrelated global challenges

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