In its Fall 2004 issue, the magazine EarthLight published an interview with poet Pattiann Rogers. The interviewer, Maryanne Hannan, noted: "Whenever I begin a Pattiann Rogers poem, I know I am going on an intellectual adventure.... I am always curious where she will bring me, what intellectual surprises await me."

One of the surprises is the way Rogers merges science and spirituality into her poetry, as noted in the following excerpts from the interview.

We are physical creatures immersed in a physical world, a world we come to know through our bodies, through our senses. We were born from the Earth and have inherent connections with it, strong preverbal connections that we feel and are affected by every day. We are surrounded by and within the physical world, sunlight and shadows, wind or the still lack of it, the motion of clouds in the sky, the fragrance of rain, the silence of snow, the sound of a river, a bird calling in the background, grasses covered in frost, grasses in the wind, a fly at the windows, a flowery weed by the roadside, the outline of a familiar tree at dusk, the sound of a door slamming, a dog barking in the distance, frogs or crickets or locusts beginning their calls as night comes on.

Those living in cities are no less involved in the physical world. The city is full of life of all kinds and the energy of life. Food is obviously physical. Taking nourishment is something humans have in common with all life forms. I believe we come to know ourselves better the more we are aware of all the facets of the Earth, its life and its processes, and all the elements of the Universe that encompass us.

The more we observe, the more alert we are to the details of the physical world around us, the more we come to value and revere it. I'm curious about the history of the Earth, the origin of life on Earth, and the way those many lives maintain themselves. I'm extremely grateful for those among us who carefully study the Earth in all of its manifestations and those who study the heavens and its elements.

Many who do this work describe their discoveries as religious experiences. I remember reading a quote from an astronomer viewing the first images coming from the Hubble Space Telescope. He said, "It was like seeing the face of God." We are spiritual creatures, too. We delight, we grieve, we extol, we worship, we love. We hold to justice, honesty, compassion, grace. These are not abstractions. They are actions, states that are felt in our bodies. They are present in our blood, our pulse, our bones, our cells, our breath. We sometimes speak of them as if they had no connection with our bodies. I believe this is a mistake. The spiritual and the physical are one.

It's finally become apparent to me that science is not quite the right word to be using in regard to my poetry. I've used the word science myself for years. But science, to most people, brings to mind chemistry or biology class or perhaps Scientific American or papers in scientific journals, lots of information to try to understand, lots of facts to memorize. Science is a process, a revolutionary process in human history, a process of investigation of the physical world and a method of relating the results of that investigation to the community in a careful and controlled manner, and a process of checking the veracity of those results.

A better word and one I'm trying to use more often is cosmology. It's cosmology that's at the heart of my poetry, a vision of who and where we are and reflections on what it means to be human. All cultures have possessed a cosmology, beliefs about the Universe and the physical world, its origins, processes, and its future. Often in the past the cosmology of a culture was synonymous with its religious beliefs, one and the same, or at least the two worked closely together. Today the story of the physical Universe, our contemporary cosmology, comes from science. Our cosmology is a story, an amazing story that is still in the process of being told, a story that modifies itself and scrutinizes itself. It's a vision, and we are included in the vision.

We and our culture have assimilated this story. It is part of our being, whether we've acknowledged that or not. I know that's true because we make decisions and we act every day in accord with our cosmological story. For instance, we believe our body is made from the dust of old stars and that it is composed of tiny living cells, and we know something about how those cells function. We have seen images of blood coursing through veins, living sperm swimming toward an ovum, one reaching its goal. We've seen the bones of our own bodies in X-rays and MRIs. We've seen ultrasound images of living fetuses in the womb. These are images of our physical bodies not seen by other generations.

We believe every living creature possesses a genetic code and that we are related to all the life forms on Earth. We believe we live on a turning globe called the Earth and that our Earth revolves around our star, the Sun, along with the other planets in our solar system. We believe day and night are the results of our Earth turning on its axis. We believe the landmasses of the continents float on tectonic plates and move very slowly, sometimes encountering each other, causing mountains to rise and earthquakes to occur. We believe that the Universe contains billions of galaxies, which in turn contain billions of stars. We know we are extremely small in relation to the size of the Universe and that our sun is a very ordinary star. These are just a few of the details of our cosmological story that almost all of us accept.

This story of the physical world, as much as we know of it, is stunning, and glorious. I find it beautiful and frightening, full of wonder and mystery. I've tried to explore in poetry what the vision of our contemporary cosmology means to beauty, to the human spirit, to our spiritual needs. It seems crucial to me that this be done, not just by me but by all of us. It only weakens us to have religious beliefs that are not in accordance with the cosmology we live by. How can we endure such a split in our devotions?

Poetry is the only medium in which the language and the music of words is flexible enough to allow experimentation and hypotheses about these issues which are so important to how we define ourselves as human beings, how we imagine who we are and therefore what we value and how we act. I've made guesses in my poetry about the nature of divinity within our cosmological story, and about the nature of beauty and love, about our obligations as conscious creatures in the Universe. I don't give answers. I try to ask the right questions or to provide an evocative experience of the physical world in order to perceive it anew. Who are we in this Universe as we have come to envision and understand it? What is the creative power? What is divinity?

It seems important to me to remember that I can be both believer and seeker. I can believe and yet continue to question and search at the same time. I can believe and still be willing to modify or refine or enhance my beliefs in order to strengthen them or more exactly conform them to the truth of my experiences in the contemporary world. Belief to me does not mean rigidity, inflexibility, being static and unchanging. The Earth, the Universe, the physical world we live in is none of these things. Why should spirituality be so? If spirituality is alive and vital then it too will evolve if we allow it, always with care and circumspection. The Bible itself is a history of the evolution of a concept of God. Did that evolution really end 2000 years ago?

In 1948 the astronomer Frederick Hoyle said, "Once a photograph of the Earth taken from outside is available, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose." Fifteen or so years later such a photograph was taken, and many more have followed. It is my opinion that this "new idea as powerful as any in history" has not, as yet, been fully expressed, a revolutionary idea of who we are, where we are, how we are to be defined as conscious creatures living on the Earth, and what constitutes divinity in this Universe as we are coming to know it. Rather than a "new idea," I would call this a "new awakening vision." It will take the honest talents of many people in many fields, the sciences, the arts, philosophy, theology, all people with open hearts, to assimilate this vision and begin to express it, celebrate it, and embrace the beauty and spirituality I believe is inherent in it.

Pattiann Rogers has published a number of books of poetry and has won numerous awards. She has been a visiting writer at the University of Texas, the University of Montana, Washington University, and the University of Arkansas, and a member of the faculty of Vermont College. The mother of two sons and two grandsons, Rogers lives with her husband, a retired geophysicist, in Colorado.

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In Addition to Faith, Hope and Charity

I'm sure there's a god
in favor of drums. Consider
their pervasiveness-the thump,
thump and slide of waves
on a stretched hide of beach,
the rising beat and slap
of their crests against shore
baffles, the rapping of otters
cracking mollusks with stones,
woodpeckers beak-banging, the beaver's
whack of his tail-paddle, the ape
playing the bam of his own chest,
the million tickering rolls
of rain off the flat-leaves
and razor-rims of the forest.

And we know the noise
of our own inventions-snare and kettle,
bongo, conga, big bass, toy tin,
timbales, tambourine, tom-tom.

But the heart must be the most
pervasive drum of all. Imagine
hearing all together every tinny
snare of every heartbeat
in every jumping mouse and harvest
mouse, sagebrush vole and least
shrew living across the paririe;
and add to that cacophony the individual
staccato tickings inside all gnatcatchers,
kingbirds, kestrels, rock doves, pine
warblers crossing, criss-crossing
each other in the sky, the sound
of their beatings overlapping
with the singular hammerings
of the hearts of cougar, coyote,
weasel, badger, pronghorn, the ponderous
bass of the black bear; and on deserts too,
all the knackings, the flutterings
inside wart snakes, whiptails, racers
and sidewinders, earless lizards, cactus
owls; plus the clamors undersea, slow
booming in the breasts of beluga
and bowhead, uniform rappings
in a passing school of cod or bib,
the thidderings of bat rays and needlefish.

Imagine the earth carrying this continuous
din, this multifarious festival of pulsing
thuds, stutters and drummings, wheeling
on and on across the universe.
This must be proof of a power existing
somewhere definitely in favor
of such a racket.

-Pattiann Rogers

Song of the World Becoming: New and Collected Poems 1981-2001 by Pattiann Rogers Milkweed Editions www.milkweed.org (800) 520-6455 $29.95.

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Strict Father, Metaphors, and Fundamentalism
An Editorial by Mac Lawrence

A painting contractor came by my house the other day to see if I needed anything done. In the course of our conversation, I was surprised that he identified himself as a religious fundamentalist. Everything in the Bible is literally true, he said, and if I believed otherwise, I would end up in Hell.

It's intriguing to meet people who think in a way totally different from one's own. How is it possible, one wonders, for two people to look at the exact same thing and see it so totally differently? Why do things like abortion, same-sex marriages, and stem-cell research rouse such passions in one person but not in another?

Interestingly, just after the encounter with the painter, I came across an article that gave some clues. The article, "Father Knows Best: Fundamentalism and our Apocalyptic Future," by Bernard Brandon Scott, appeared in the publication The Fourth R, put out by the Westar Institute, a think tank of religious scholars.

The term "Fundamentalism," Scott wrote, was coined in 1920 by a Baptist journalist "because he found 'conservative' too weak a rallying cry to those who would 'do battle royal for the Fundamentals.' " In the decades since, Fundamentalism has spread throughout the world. It can be found not only in many religions, but in the political arena, as well. For example, Scott points out, "India is governed by the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatya Janata Party, that builds its power on the rejection of Islam and plays on Hindu fears of former Islamic conquerors." Other governments he mentions in which fundamentalists play a strong role include Iran, Israel, and the U.S.

The term has even moved beyond religion, Scott says, noting that the financier George Soros refers to those who see only free market and private enterprise solutions to all economic issues as "market fundamentalists." In short, Scott sees Fundamentalism "not as an independent religious movement, but as a response to, and a product of, a larger cultural system."

Scott finds the work of George Lakoff particularly insightful. Lakoff argues that our thinking, behavior, and perception derive largely from unconscious metaphors. In his book, Moral Politics, How Liberals and Conservatives Think, Lakoff constructs a metaphorical system in which the positions of liberals and conservatives appear as common sense to themselves, and no sense or nonsense to each other.

The moral system for conservatives, Lakoff calls Strict Father. For liberals, the term is Nurturing Parent. In his article, Scott talks mostly about the Strict Father model since he sees it as being closer to a fundamentalist position than Nurturing Parent. Scott also warns the reader that to make his point he has "simplified Lakoff's analysis almost to the point of caricature."

"Essential to conservative moral systems is the existence of rules," Scott writes, and it is the Father who makes or enforces the rules. "Furthermore, the rules must be absolute, otherwise they will be difficult to enforce. Thus conservatives see relativism as immoral, since if rules are not absolute but relative, they cease to exist. Any challenge to the rules leads inevitably to chaos and immorality. It is always a slippery slope. Rules represent the natural order, the way things are. This emphasis on rules leads to either/or thinking.... You're either with us or against us. Those who break the rules must be punished. Finally, in such a black-and-white model, the world is a dangerous place. It is chaotic and we need rules and discipline to avoid degenerating into chaos.

"Liberals," Scott continues, "often wonder how conservatives can be pro-life and yet favor the death penalty. What to a liberal is inconsistent, to a conservative is common sense. The rule says Thou shalt not kill. Those who break the rule must be punished or the rule will be ineffective. So those who perform abortions are murderers, and those who murder someone should be subject to the death penalty.

"Liberal common sense, of course, sees the matter quite differently. It does no good to argue because we are arguing about common sense, something that is so obviously right that it needs no argument...and so we throw slogans at each other.

"The Strict Father model has several important entailments. It is inherently patriarchal and hierarchical, since moral order legitimates a natural order of leadership. Human beings are subject to God, women to men, children to parents, nature to human beings. The system presupposes an order of subjection, the so-called great chain of being.

"To enforce the system, the father must be strong and encourage self-discipline in his children....Above all else, the father has a moral duty to defend the system....Those who attack the system disrupt the moral order, must be fought and condemned as evil." Connecting this mode of thinking to national politics, Scott notes that there is a common understanding that the nation is a family. "Our problem in the U.S. is that we emulate competing models of family structure-strict father and nurturing parent."

Christianity, Scott says, encourages this by its insistence that God is our father. In the church family, the bishop plays the role of the head of the household. Things are changing in the church, however. Advances in science like Darwinism, and social sciences like sociology and psychology have weakened the role of the Strict Father model and split Christianity into two camps, Scott notes, one which follows the Strict Father model; the other, Nurturing Parent.

Concludes Scott: "Recognizing Fundamentalism as a religious version of the Strict Father metaphorical system...explains Fundamentalism's continuing viability...and makes clear the reason for Fundamentalism's ability to build political alliances with other conservatives."

Understanding how people think- particularly those one does not agree with- can only encourage dialogue, understanding, and acceptance, and hopefully lead to a lessening of tensions in this increasingly tense world.

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Corporations as a Force for Good
Book Review by Walt Hays

Are corporations inherently evil, as portrayed in the movie "The Corporation," or can they be a vital force in solving environmental and social problems? As indicated in the title of the book, What Matters Most: How A Small Group of Pioneers Is Teaching Social Responsibility to Big Business, and Why Big Business Is Listening, the authors, Jeffrey Hollender and Stephen Fenichell, come down strongly on the side of business' positive potential. In so doing, they offer fascinating mini-histories of how many companies, large and small, have struggled with the issue and launched a "broad social movement, centered on the corporation much as the antiwar movement of the 1960s was centered on college campuses."

Jeffrey Hollender is President and CEO of the Vermont-based corporation Seventh Generation, which sells items like unbleached (nonchlorine) napkins, paper towels, and bathroom tissue made from 100 percent post-consumer recycled fiber. The name comes from the Great Law of Peace of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy, which holds that "in our every deliberation we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations." Since the book is written in the first person of Hollender, it appears that as a journalist, Fenichell's role was to help him write it.

Reading the book is like having a conversation with Hollender, starting with a surfing metaphor in the Preface. He was on a surfing vacation when the first news of corporate scandals broke loose. Society, he says, appeared to be surfing a wave that had run aground on a sandbar because of "infectious greed." Upon reflection, however, he began to think that the scandals might lead to "one of the greatest opportunities of the new century," where a new look at business could lead it to play a key role in building a better world.

Free enterprise, Hollender declares, presents the "largest force truly capable of providing workable solutions, not just to business problems, but to the daunting social and environmental challenges facing our planet." And in the absence of government-sponsored reform, corporations are responding to those challenges with a new business paradigm, which Hollender calls the "next wave."

In the old business paradigm, the sole legal and moral purpose of a corporation is to generate profits for its shareholders. The new one shifts the focus to benefiting its stakeholders-employees, the community, and the environment-and in so doing paradoxically often earns greater profits than before. Another term for this shift is Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), for which Hollender quotes the definition in Business: The Ultimate Resource: "...an ongoing commitment by business to behave ethically and contribute to economic development when demonstrating respect for people, communities, society at large, and the environment. In short, CSR marries the concepts of global citizenship with environmental stewardship and sustainable development."

In the first chapter, entitled "The Making of a Movement," Hollender profiles Wayne Silby, who founded the Calvert Investment Group and made a lot of money in the traditional way. He then attended a 1979 Buddhist conference on "Right Livelihood," which he said "turned my life around 180 degrees." Overruling his colleagues, he renamed his group the Calvert Social Investment Fund, and became one of the first modern funds to screen out stock in companies dealing with sectors such as defense or South Africa, and those involved in environmental degradation or violations of human or indigenous rights. While he was a pioneer, his work has now led to a surge of socially responsible investing, so that today an investor can choose among 230 of such funds, and more than 800 independent asset managers oversee socially responsible portfolios, with the total assets so managed estimated at $2 trillion.

Silby and soulmate Joshua Milman later launched the Social Venture Network (SVN), which morphed into a networking entity for the "small group of pioneers" referred to in the title—people like Hollender, Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's, and many of the other entrepreneurs profiled in the book.

SVN in turn spawned other similar groups, the largest of which is Businesses for Social Responsibility, founded in 1992, whose 700 corporate members employ six million people and have combined revenues of over $2 trillion. However, that exponential growth raised an issue to which Hollender returns throughout the book; namely, is it even possible for large, publicly held corporations to be socially responsible, and if they purport to do so, is it only "greenwashing"?

One entrepreneur who adamantly maintains that it is not possible is Judy Wicks, founder of the White Dog Cafe in Philadelphia and a long-time SVN board member. In one of Hollender's delightful biographical sketches, he describes how Wicks started in 1983 as a "tiny, walk-in, take-out muffin shop," and built her business into a restaurant that seats more than 100 people and grosses $5 million a year. Still feeling small, she met David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World, who affirmed her small-is-beautiful approach and described it as the "Judy Economy," a term Hollender uses throughout the book to describe the scale favored by small entrepreneurs who resist selling to big companies.

On the other side of the issue, Hollender introduces Gary Hirshberg, founder of Stonyfield Farms and another SVN board member, who having built a successful organic yogurt business, sold it to the corporate giant Group Danone. Although Judy Wicks is a friend of Hirshberg, she called that move "selling out"— i.e., cashing in, knowing that his principles would be compromised by the larger company. Hirshberg, however, arguing that a big company "can make more of a difference with one purchase" than his small one could in a lifetime, believes that in being acquired, smaller companies can convert the larger ones to social responsibility. While Hollender admires people like Wicks and raises questions about the commitment of companies like Danone, he agrees with Hirshberg that large companies need to be converted, and that one way for that to happen is for the smaller companies they acquire to nudge them in that direction.

Traditionally, large corporations like Philip Morris have fulfilled whatever social obligations they felt through corporate philanthropy, mainly as a matter of public relations. The obligations of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), however, are "immeasurably broader," as illustrated by the following quote from Sarah Severn, Vice President of CSR for Nike:

[Today, when you buy a pair of Nike running shoes, you aren't just buying shoes], "you are buying a product based on your knowledge of the people who made them, how much they were paid, how clean was the factory, how many toxic chemicals they were exposed to, what processes were used to make them, and what they will do to the air if they're incinerated, or to the soil or groundwater if they're buried in a landfill."

The difference in approaches lies in how companies deal with what economists call "externalities," i.e., social and environmental impacts not counted in the traditional profit and loss statement. Traditional corporations, focussed solely on short-term profits, try to foist as many such impacts as possible on society. CSR, in contrast, strives to reduce or eliminate them.

Except for the last chapter, in which Hollender describes the evolution of his own career and company, the rest of the book deals in greater detail with the various aspects of CSR. In the chapter on "Reputation," for example, he notes that in today's world, intangible assets like reputation are often the most valuable in the company. To illustrate, he recounts one of the most dramatic examples in the book, the Tylenol crisis of 1987. When an anonymous individual adulterated batches of capsules, causing seven deaths, Johnson & Johnson CEO James Burke, recognizing that trust was the company's most valuable asset, spent over $100 million recalling every capsule in the country. Hollender also relates other dramatic examples, such as the experiences of Royal Dutch Shell in Nigeria and Intel in New Mexico.

In the chapter on "Sustainability," Hollender tells the story of Ray Anderson of Interface Carpet, who on recognizing the environmental damage being done by his business, committed to move as far as possible toward sustainability, through such innovations as leasing carpet tiles and recycling them instead of selling them and letting worn ones go to landfills. One source of Anderson's inspiration was the 1987 UN Report Our Common Future, which under the leadership of Norway's Gro Harlem Brundtland, coined the phrase "sustainable development," and defined it as meeting the needs of the present without compromising those of the future. Hollender calls that report the public policy equivalent of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. He also gives brief accounts of such sustainability leaders as architect William McDonough and Dr. Karl-Henrik Rob€rt of The Natural Step.

The chapter on "Accountability" presents a brief history of Starbucks, which from the beginning was renowned for fairness to its employees, but has struggled, with the collapse of coffee prices, on the issue of the extent of its responsibility for the welfare of coffee producers. Similarly, he traces the evolution of Chiquita Bananas, from the exploitive and destructive United Fruit Company to a corporation that takes pride in its environmental and personnel practices. He also touches on the explosive issue of "e-trash," the shipping of discarded computers full of toxic chemicals to places like China to be dismantled, and describes the efforts of companies like Hewlett-Packard (HP) to define the extent of their accountability.

To Hollender, "transparency" requires full and candid reporting on failings as well as successes. He describes pioneering efforts in this regard by Ben & Jerry's, as well as Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop. He also presents a frank discussion of cases where his own company wrestled with whether to disclose the existence of tiny amounts of chlorine in one of his products, providing in the process an interesting mini-history of the development of chlorine compounds by Dow Chemical.

Attempts to develop standards for such reporting led in 1997 to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), a voluntary set of standards for environmental and social reporting. The drive for transparency has since progressed to the point where in 2002, an estimated 2500 companies around the world produced some kind of CSR report, with more than 200 done in accordance with GRI standards. And such reports have served as drivers for change, as companies work to fix identified problems.

The chapter on "Responsibility" offers three more fascinating capsules of corporate history-in this case how companies like Microsoft, Nike, and HP have responded to pressures from the public and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to become more socially responsible. The case of Nike raises the issues of globalization and outsourcing: Is it wrong per se for companies to outsource their manufacturing to low-wage workers in other countries, or can those companies be a force for raising standards? Again, Hollender believes the latter, stating that just as President Franklin D. Roosevelt saved capitalism by regulating it, CSR offers the best prospect for saving globalization from its excesses.

In "Ownership and Social Responsibility," Hollender traces the history of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream and analyzes in detail their decision to sell to megacorporation Unilever, raising again the arguments about selling out. Needing money to expand, they eschewed venture capital, for fear that the investors would ignore the company's social objectives in order to cash out. To avoid that result, they sold shares to a small community of people who shared their values. But these people eventually sold to others who were more interested in profits, and as profits diminished, the company became vulnerable to a takeover. In that dilemma, the founders considered accepting a lower bid from one company that shared their values, but soon found themselves sued by some shareholders for not taking the highest bid.

The high bidder was Unilever, and while the founders extracted promises from it to continue their CSR policies, Cohen later became openly disillusioned over actions such as laying off 20 percent of loyal employees. Only later did he learn that Vermont had a law—as do several other states— that allows corporate boards to accept a lower bid in consideration of stakeholder values.

Seventh Generation, having gone public at one stage, avoided the sellout issue by returning to private ownership. Since that option is not available to most companies, Hollender's final take is that the only viable solution is to persuade the big corporations that buy small ones committed to stakeholder values that in the long run, CSR pays.

The final chapter, with the twin titles of "Epilogue" and "Next," starts with an intimate account of Hollender's own career, leading up to being CEO of Seventh Generation. He then gives his assessment of the overall progress of CSR, and concludes that there is no doubt that it has gone mainstream. Terms like sustainability, stakeholder, and transparency are now being taught in business schools. And a 2003 study by Innovest Strategic Value Advisors concluded that "global food companies [including Danone and Unilever] with an above average commitment to sustainable development outperformed their peers...by more than 30 percent over the past three years."

Based on these trends, Hollender closes the book on an optimistic note:

"We can all make a difference. Whether as employees, managers, consumers, activists, regulators, parents, teachers, or students—the future lies in our hands. Our greatest peril is that we lose sight of our own power and responsibility. In this dance into the future we all have our parts to play."

What Matters Most: How a Small Group of Pioneers Is Teaching Social Responsibility to Big Business, and Why Big Business Is Listening by Jeffrey Hollender and Stephen Fenichell. Basic Books, a Member of the Perseus Books Group. 2004. $26.00.

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Find Your Way Home
A Personal Perspective by Sarah Marquess

One of the programs the Foundation for Global Community focuses on is Hooked on Nature. The essay which appears here, written by Sarah Marquess, captures the essence of the Hooked on Nature concept.

You're eight years old.

You're a good kid; you love fireworks and roller coasters and baseball and movies about aliens. You like history more than math, and you adore your third-grade teacher because he sets aside an hour every afternoon to tell the class stories. You come home from school and eat graham crackers, stain your hands with orange peels. You're not allowed to watch television on weeknights, except for the Simpsons on Sunday nights and the reruns of MacGuyver, because those are your Dad's favorite shows, too. Your life makes a lot of sense, but this isn't something that you're really consciously aware of.

There's a system of creeks that runs through your hometown. Behind your elementary school, along the edge of the fields where your AYSO team practices, in concrete tunnels under the streets, and with overgrown licorice plants sneaking out onto the asphalt.

Because you're eight years old, you're convinced that the creeks are, in fact, singular and continuous, a corkscrewing circle through the town, and that if you just start walking in one direction, you'll eventually end up back where you started. Maybe this will take days, weeks of exploration, but you know you could do it. You'll pack a backpack with juice boxes and cellophane-wrapped sandwiches, comic books and candy and other supplies. You'll bring a flashlight and wear your bright-red rain boots. You'll see the whole town on this trip, and when you tell your parents about it over dinner, they'll be proud that they raised such a brave kid as you.

But for now, you don't need to stage any grand expeditions. Just playing in the creek is enough. You climb down to the bottom with vines wrapped around your hands, your sneakers sliding on the loose dirt. You make a fort in the hollowed-out trunk of a tree, hiding various kid-treasures in there. You use knobby sticks as swords and have vast and intricate duels with invisible enemies. There are whole kingdoms down here, medieval and fantastic, and you are the ruler of all that you survey.

You scramble up trees, swing by one arm from thick branches, hooting like a monkey. You study the little skimming bugs that dart along the surface of the water, and you can tell the squirrels apart. That's Napoleon, with the reddish fur. That one with the white patch on his tail, that's Mr. Fantasmo. The scrawny one that tries to hog all the nuts, you call him the Greed Machine. There are birds with brown and gray feathers, and when the acrid smell of skunk ambushes you from around a corner, you climb to the highest branch and hover suspiciously until the scent is gone. Once, you crouched perfectly still and wide-eyed on the short sandy bank, watching a neon-green garter snake slink by in the water, its tail flicking a small wake behind it.
The creek's your favorite place, because the upper world is sticky hot, but down here it's dark and cool and quiet. There's always something new to see down here, a new story to narrate to yourself. As far as you're concerned, it's not a successful day unless there are grass stains on your knees and elbows by the end of it, smears of dust on your cheeks and forehead.

Your parents pretend not to recognize you when you tumble into the house in a shower of dry leaves and soaked cuffs. They say, "Who is this strange dirty child, no child of ours would ever be so dirty," and then your mom wipes off your face with a wet washcloth and feigns overjoyed surprise at your reappearance, you giggling and squirming and not allowed on the furniture until you change your clothes.

The creeks are peaceful and you will have this with you always. The memories of these long early-summer days, your tiny eight-year old hands scrabbling for purchase, your sneakered feet kicking up against the royal blue sky. When you grow up, maybe you'll live somewhere urban and unfathomable, traffic lights and skyscrapers and trees with wrought-iron cages around their trunks, but it'll be okay, because down deep in your heart you're still just a kid, planning the day when you'll follow the creek as far as it can take you, the day when the end of your journey will be the same well-worn place that you started from.

And you'll remember a bunch of stuff from this careful time in your life. You'll remember how you were clever and sharp because you've learned the shortcuts and can see the patterns in the trees, the water. You'll remember being kind and generous, knowing all the animals by their first names, sharing sandwich crusts with them. You'll remember feeling safe, knowing your parents expect you home before dark, knowing that they're waiting for you. You'll remember feeling well looked-after even when you're alone down there, waving to the people on bikes on the paths, the grandparent couples strolling slowly by and smiling at your face peering up from the brush. You'll remember becoming so close to the place where you live, a kind of attachment you did not realize you were old enough to feel for something other than your family.

You'll grow up well-intentioned, good-hearted, with bad posture and complicated grammar infesting your conversation, and should you find yourself lost somewhere in the distant future, you won't be scared, because you've been lost in the creeks a dozen times, and you always found your way out.

Sarah Marquess is currently attending the George Washington University in Washington, D.C., majoring in political science.

Hooked on Nature

Human life is intimately intertwined with all life, the Hooked on Nature program emphasizes. Nature has the power to heal, the power to inspire, the power to empower. Nature demonstrates the beauty of differences, the strength of diversity, and the possibilities for cooperation every day. In a world divided, we have at least one thing in common-our connection to nature. It is at the core of being human.

Hooked on Nature is a network of individuals and organizations dedicated to instilling children with a love and respect for the Earth.

Through education initiatives, mentor-training, and hands-on experiences, we are giving kids a foundation for the rest of their lives-an understanding of nature as an always-available restorative environment to help them deal with times of distress, and an everyday awareness of the wonder and awe of the world around them.

To find out how you can help connect kids in your own community, contact: Avery Cleary, Executive Director 222 High Street Palo Alto, CA 94301 650 328 7756 ext. 627. acleary@globalcommunity.org, www.hookedonnature.org

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Limits to Growth-Thirty Years Later
An Editorial by Elizabeth Sawin

Pick up the newspaper on any day and you are likely to find plenty of bad news about humanity's impact on the Earth. From the global to the regional to the local, if you are feeling pessimistic you can find all sorts of "proof" that humanity is well on the way to self-destruction.

If you keep looking, beyond the bad news you will find good news as well-although usually not on the front page. Some fisheries are being managed sustainably and have been for decades. Production of organic food is rising. The ozone layer is stabilizing. Communities are preserving land and building bike paths and setting their own greenhouse gas emission goals. New technologies and the evolution of old ones could make feeding, transporting, sheltering, and cleaning up after ourselves much more efficient. Based on all this good news, an optimist might say that all we need is more of the same to glide in to a secure future.

It can be tempting to try to figure who's right—the optimists or the pessimists. But that whole question can also be a distraction, like trying to puzzle out whether the boat you are paddling through rushing water is doomed or safe instead of concentrating on reading the current and paddling with as much power and sense of direction as you can muster.

If you're willing to leave the pessimists and the optimists to their arguments and instead are looking for a guide to paddling our particular river, our moment in time with its mixture of troubling trends and hopeful developments, then seek out the newly published, thirty year update to Limits to Growth, a book first published in 1972 (Limits to Growth- The 30 Year Update by Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows, published by Chelsea Green Press). It won't settle the argument between the pessimists and the optimists, but it does help explain how our global society has ended up beyond the carrying capacity of the Earth's systems and what it will take to ease down below the limits.

The book reports on the lessons from a computer simulation model first built by the authors and other young researchers at MIT in the early 1970s when they were trying to understand the dynamics of a growing human society's approach to the carrying capacity of the planet. Why and how was the system approaching the carrying capacity in the first place? And what sort of outcomes might be expected if society did in fact reach or exceed some of those limits?

To build their model the researchers made four critical assumptions, descriptions of which I have copied from an unpublished piece Donella Meadows wrote about the modeling work:

• Growth is inherent to the present human value system, and growth of both the population and the economy, when it does occur, is exponential.

• There are physical limits to the planetary sources of materials and energy that sustain the human population and economy, and there are limits to the planetary sinks that absorb the waste products of human activity.

• The growing population and economy receive signals about physical limits that are distorted and delayed. The human response to those signals is also delayed.

• The planetary limits are not only finite, but erodable when they are overstressed or overused.

These four assumptions are enough to produce, in the simulated computer "world," the same patterns of behavior that we see in our real world, patterns to which we tend to give labels such as climate change, or Gulf Hypoxia, or fishery crashes.

In the model runs presented in the book (which are updated from the 1970s version), without anyone "intending it," the growing population and economy drain down resources and produce wastes at a growing rate. Because the consequences of these falling resources and rising wastes don't immediately influence the growth rate of the population/economy system, that system continues to grow and "overshoots" the limit, just as has happened for CO2 in the atmosphere, nitrogen in the Gulf of Mexico, cod fishing in Georges Bank, and dozens of other examples.

The authors report on what it takes in their simulated world to recover from overshoot and avoid collapse—a combination of constraints on growth and adoption of more efficient technologies, and they suggest the kinds of work this will require in the real world, including:

• Extend the planning horizon

• Improve the signals

• Speed up response time

• Minimize the use of nonrenewable resources

• Prevent the erosion of renewable resources

• Use all resources with maximum efficiency

• Slow and eventually stop exponential growth of population and physical capital.

There's much more in the book, of course— useful data and clear graphics, and, in the final chapter, thoughts about the attitude and skills it will take to pull off the work of easing down below the limits. These features are reason enough to read the book, but there is another, more important reason, as well.

For the thirty years that this book and others with similar messages have been in existence, the world's leaders have been slow to acknowledge limits to growth and slow to take action based on those limits. That puts the burden of learning from Limits to Growth back on the rest of us. If the idea that we have overshot the limits and must now ease down from them fits with your experience of the world, then read the book, take from it what you can, and put it to use, in your life, your conversations, and your strategizing for the future.

Beth Sawin is a mother, biologist, and systems analyst who lives in Hartland, Vermont, and works at Sustainability Institute <www.sustainer.org>. Contact her at bethsawin@vermontel.net to receive a monthly column on systems and sustainability.

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Good Listening
An Article by Margaret Wheatley

One of the easiest human acts is also the most healing. Listening to someone. Simply listening. Not advising or coaching, but silently and fully listening.

Whatever life we have experienced, if we can tell someone our story, we find it easier to deal with our circumstances. I have seen the great healing power of good listening so often that I wonder if you've noticed it also. There may have been a time when a friend was telling you such a painful story that you became speechless. You couldn't think of anything to say, so you just sat there, listening closely, but not saying a word. And what was the result of your heartfelt silence, of your listening?

A young, black South African woman taught some of my friends the healing power of listening. She was sitting in a circle of women from many nations, and each woman had the chance to tell a story from her life. When her turn came, she began to quietly tell a story of true horror—of how she had found her grandparents slaughtered in their village. Many of the women were Westerners, and in the presence of such pain they instinctively wanted to do something. They wanted to fix it, to make it better—anything to remove the pain of this tragedy from such a young life. The young woman felt their compassion, but also felt them closing in. She put her hands up, as if to push back their desire to help. She said: "I don't need you to fix me. I just need you to listen to me."

She taught many women that day that being listened to is enough. If we can speak our story, and know that others hear it, we are somehow healed by that. During the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in South Africa, many of those who testified to the atrocities they had endured under apartheid would speak of being healed by their own testimony. They knew that many people were listening to their story. One young man who had been blinded when a policeman shot him in the face at close range said: "I feel what...has brought my eyesight back is to come here and tell the story. I feel what has been making me sick all the time is the fact that I couldn't tell my story. But now...it feels like I've got my sight back by coming here and telling you the story."

Why is being heard so healing? I don't know the full answer to that question, but I do know it has something to do with the fact that listening creates relationship. We know from science that nothing in the universe exists as an isolated or independent entity. Everything takes form from relationships, be it subatomic particles sharing energy or ecosystems sharing food. In the web of life, nothing living lives alone.

Our natural state is to be together. Though we keep moving away from each other, we haven't lost the need to be in relationship. Everybody has a story, and everybody wants to tell their story in order to connect. If no one listens, we tell it to ourselves and then we go mad. In the English language, the word for health comes from the same root as the word for whole. We can't be healthy if we're not in relationship. And whole is from the same root word as holy.

Listening moves us closer; it helps us become more whole, more healthy, more holy. Not listening creates fragmentation, and fragmentation always causes more suffering. How many teenagers today, in many lands, state that no one listens to them? They feel ignored and discounted, and in pain they turn to each other to create their own subcultures. I've heard two great teachers—Malidoma Somé from Burkina Faso in West Africa, and Parker Palmer from the United States—both make this comment: "You can tell a culture is in trouble when its elders walk across the street to avoid meeting its youth." It is impossible to create a healthy culture if we refuse to meet, and if we refuse to listen. But if we meet, and when we listen, we reweave the world into wholeness. And holiness.

This is a very noisy era. I believe the volume is directly related to our need to be listened to. In public places, in the media, we reward the loudest and most outrageous. People are literally clamoring for attention, and they'll do whatever it takes to be noticed. Things will only get louder until we figure out how to sit down and listen. Most of us would welcome things quieting down. We can do our part to begin lowering the volume by our own willingness to listen.

A school teacher told me how one day a sixteen-year-old became disruptive—shouting angrily, threatening her verbally. She could have called the authorities— there were laws to protect her from such abuse. Instead, she sat down and asked the student to talk to her. It took some time for him to quiet down; he was very agitated and kept pacing the room. But finally he walked over to her and began talking about his life. She just listened. No one had listened to him in a long time. Her attentive silence gave him space to see himself, to hear himself. She didn't offer advice. She couldn't figure out his life, and she didn't have to. He could do it himself because she had listened.

I love the biblical passage: "Whenever two or more are gathered, I am there." It describes for me the holiness of moments of real listening. The health, wholeness, holiness of a new relationship forming. I have a T-shirt from one conference that reads: "You can't hate someone whose story you know." You don't have to like the story, or even the person telling you their story. But listening creates a relationship. We move closer to one another.

Margaret Wheatley is president of The Berkana Institute, a charitable global foundation serving life-affirming leaders around the world. She writes, teaches, and speaks about new practices and ideas on how we can live together harmoniously, and has been an organizational consultant for many years. This article is adapted from her book Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future. Her new book, Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time, will be released in January.

This article appeared in IONS Noetic Sciences Review, Issue No. 60, June-August 2002, and is reprinted by permission of the author and the Institute of Noetic Sciences. www.noetic.org (c) 2002 by IONS, all rights reserved.

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Sharing Space and Spirit
A Personal Perspective by Christine Henneberg

Deep in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas, an ancient fortress towers over the tiny town of Kangra. It looks like something from a movie: Leaves sprout from gaps in stone walls. Hidden rooms hold carvings of deities and decorative figurines. Spider webs the size of serving platters stretch across empty doorways. The silence among the ruins is pierced only by the sudden flutter of birds' wings or the chattering of monkeys in the forested mountains.

The Kangra Fort was built sometime around the ninth century CE at the confluence of the Banganga and Manjhi rivers. Despite a massive 1905 earthquake that shook several walls into piles of rubble, the fort remains intact enough to transport an imaginative visitor to another time. Because the site is almost entirely unsupervised by a few drowsy security guards, visitors are free to climb the walls and explore every concealed chamber.

I visited the Kangra Fort several times during a trip to India last year, where I had come to teach English in a rural primary school. My first visit to the Fort was with a small group of other American teachers and our friend Ambika, a young Indian woman who lived with us and was acting as our informal guide that day. She had never been to the Fort before either, having grown up in a village some ten hours away; still she could explain some features of the architecture and the significance of sculptures that were entirely unfamiliar to us.

As we wandered among the ruins, Ambika and I ended up in a raised courtyard with temples along the periphery. In India hardly any temple, no matter how old or small or decrepit, falls out of use. Even at these crumbling shrines in the forgotten Kangra Fort, worshippers had tied pieces of crimson ribbon to the gates that protected their deities, and marigolds had been scattered at the gods' feet. Ambika told me that these were Jain temples, erected long before Muslim Mughals captured the fort and took it for their own. The original statues inside are likenesses of Jain gods.

A few minutes later as we were preparing to leave, I glanced back and saw Ambika kneeling at one of the temples, her forehead to the ground, her dupatta (scarf) draped over her head, and her lips moving silently in prayer. Ambika, I knew, is a Hindu. She doesn't worship Jain gods. But when she rose from her knees and joined me to leave, I could see how devotedly she had been praying—her eyes were damp with tears.

We descended the steps from the courtyard, and I asked her why, if she is a Hindu, she had prayed in the Jain temple. "Even though I do not believe in the Jain gods, I believe that the power of God is in any temple," she replied. "It is a place of worship. If someone believes that the power of God is there, then it is, and I can pray there."

This incident took place within the first few days of my stay. I spent four months in India, and by the end, I had learned to find God nearly everywhere, as Ambika did. Every bus, shop, and home contained some place of worship whether it was a prayer rug, a Buddha figurine, or a stick of smoking incense.

The complex fabric of faiths and cultural traditions is tightly woven in India. And for all the bad press surrounding India's Hindu-Muslim riots and other episodes of religious violence, these truly are isolated episodes—the exception, rather than the norm. In a country of so many diverse groups of people living close together—often under horribly trying conditions—what struck me was the level of tolerance that Indians show for the wide range of beliefs and cultures within the country. They acknowledge that there is limited space to be shared amongst many, and seem determined to share it peaceably.

In my final visit to the Kangra Fort, this time without Ambika, I knelt alone at one of the Jain temples and prayed. During my months in India I prayed at Hindu and Buddhist temples, at mosques and churches, at the Ganges in Varanasi and at the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Maybe it was easy for me because I never had a particularly strong sense of who or what I was praying to. I simply enjoyed feeling, as Ambika said, "the power of God." But Ambika's silent prayer in the Kangra Fort is more significant. I cannot think of a better illustration of global community than this young woman, raised so completely and devoutly in a religious tradition thousands of years old, humbly bowing her head and encountering God in an ancient ruined temple. Whether she knew it or not, the world was in her prayers.

Christine Henneberg is a senior at Pomona College in Claremont, CA, and was in India with a program called Cross-Cultural Solutions.

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Emilia Lindeman Rathbun

Emilia Rathbun, who, with her husband Harry, founded the organizations that preceded the Foundation for Global Community, died peacefully in her sleep on October 6. She was 98.

Emilia devoted her entire adult life to leading seminars and discussion groups on the meaning and purpose of life, a work she continued with groups meeting in her living room until shortly before her death.

In a Timeline interview a few years ago, Mrs. Rathbun said, "I've lived almost a century and what a marvelous, fulfilling, fast life it has been. I lived on a hacienda, had tutors, rode horseback and in carriages, and sailed on ships whenever we came to America."

Mrs. Rathbun was born on New Year's Day, 1906, in Colima, Mexico. Her father, an American citizen, was a civil engineer who built railroads and harbors in Mexico and married the daughter of a wealthy Mexican family. Emilia was the eldest in a family that included a brother and three sisters. I led a privileged life, she said, adding, "I was taught that privilege is a responsibility and your purpose is to help and serve—a wonderful heritage."

The family moved to San Jose, California, in 1922. She received her teaching credential from San Jose State University and for a number of years taught first grade in Palo Alto. In 1928, Emilia was chosen Rose Queen of San Jose's "Fiesta de las Rosas."

In 1931, Emilia married Harry J. Rathbun, a professor of law at Stanford University, and together they embarked on a life-long journey of helping others. In the early 1950s, they founded Sequoia Seminar, an educational retreat center in the Santa Cruz Mountains and for more than 40 years led seminars based on the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

The Rathbuns are perhaps best known as the leaders of Creative Initiative, a nonprofit educational foundation which was based in Palo Alto and, at one time, involved several thousand members throughout the United States. In the 1980s, Creative Initiative became the Beyond War movement, a worldwide effort to communicate that nuclear weapons had made all war obsolete and it was time to build a world beyond war. The Beyond War Award was presented in a global televised "spacebridge" ceremony each year to world leaders such as Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia, Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union, Rajiv Gandhi of India, and Olaf Palme of Sweden.

Mrs. Rathbun is survived by her son, Richard, who continues to play a leading role in the Foundation; her daughter, Juana Mueller, of Huntington Beach; and four grandchildren.

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TIMELINE (ISSN 1061-2734) is published bimonthly by the Foundation for Global Community 222 High Street, Palo Alto, CA 94301-1097

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A print edition of Timeline with photographs and artwork is available for a subscription price of $15 per year (six issues). This is pretty much what it costs us to produce and mail Timeline since our writers are all volunteers and we have no editorial expenses. But we do have overhead costs for our building, computers, etc. So if you feel Timeline and the other work our Foundation does are valuable and you want to help keep us going, please consider making a tax-free donation to Foundation for Global Community. Be sure to indicate that it is for Timeline E-mail Edition -- otherwise our subscription people will automatically send you the printed edition, and the whole idea of saving natural resources is down the tubes. Thanks!

Palo Alto, California
November 2003