(((☼~LIVING HERO~☼)))
environment
Episodes
Monday Apr 07, 2014
Monday Apr 07, 2014
In this interview, Derrick Jensen discusses his own healing path, the essence of his vision and motivation, and his suggested actions for the time ahead.Click here for the interview.
Wednesday Mar 20, 2013
Living on Air and Truth: Ken Rose & the What Now Show
Wednesday Mar 20, 2013
Wednesday Mar 20, 2013
"The cream of human intelligence is maybe our best chance of responding to this [global] crisis." ~ Ken Rose The Living Hero show is pleased to present an interview with fellow progressive radio host, Ken Rose, originator of the What Now show, based in Occidental, California. What Now presents "extended interviews with accomplished thinkers, writers, artists, farmers and scientists addressing the global crisis." What Now aired on 107.3 KOWS-FM for several years in Sonoma County, California. Show archives are available at whatnowsolutions.org. Photo credit: Metroactive
Thursday Mar 07, 2013
Solastalgia and Creative Response
Thursday Mar 07, 2013
Thursday Mar 07, 2013
Solastalgia is homesickness when you haven't gone anywhere; it happens when your home environment or habitat changes drastically and you lose your beloved familiar place called home. All over the world human beings and other creatures are suffering from solastalgia. This show is about the nature of care and the care of nature, about how sensitivity, aesthetics, emotions, mental health, societal health and activism come together in the understandings of these aesthetic philosophers who have the big picture in mind while staying in touch with their own deep humanity and interconnectedness with all of life. Enjoy this holistic exploration!
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Angela Manno is an internationally exhibited visionary artist who has been exploring the pattern that connects personal and planetary healing for over 30 years. Her award-winning art in a variety of ancient and contemporary media emphasizes the beauty and integrity of the human, natural and spiritual world. Her work is in private collections throughout Europe, the Americas and the Middle East and in the permanent fine art collections of NASA and the Smithsonian Institution.
Angela's teaching, writing and activism aim at cultivating a benign human relationship with the planet. Her courses blend cosmology with instruction in applying the creative process to this critical work. Her articles on art, non-violent direct action and ecological consciousness have appeared in The Ecozoic Reader, Befriending Creation and Friends Journal. Visit her websites: School of Living Arts and her fine art site AngelaManno.com
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Glenn Albrecht is a researcher, professor and director of the Institute of Sustainability and Technology Policy at Murdoch University in Western Australia.
He is a transdisciplinary philosopher with both theoretical and applied interests in the relationship between ecosystem and human health. He has pioneered the research domain of 'psychoterratic' or earth related mental health conditions with the concept of 'solastalgia' or the lived experience of negative environmental change. He also has publications in the field of animal ethics including the ethics of relocating endangered species in the face of climate change pressures.
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Suzi Gablik is an artist, writer, and teacher. She studied with Robert Motherwell, lived with the Magritte family, and hung out with Jasper Johns. In 1966, Suzi Gablik had a one-woman show of her collage paintings exhibited and catalogued in New York. She later brought a prodigious and caring voice to art criticism, as a respected reviewer of art in London for Art in America, and authored her engaging trilogy of scholarly writings on art and culture Has Modernism Failed?, The Reenchantment of Art, and Progress in Art. She also wrote Magritte, Conversations Before the End of Time, and her memoir Living the Magical Life. Currently, Suzi Gablik hosts a blog featuring her latest cultural and political essays at virgilspeaks.blogspot.com
Monday Feb 18, 2013
Living Within Means
Monday Feb 18, 2013
Monday Feb 18, 2013
This show presents “Living Within Means,” an essay and live presentation by Jari Chevalier with short clips from interviews with Morris Berman and from Scott Baum in the first half hour, followed by a live phone conversation with special guests Jim Stoner and Doug Cohen.
From Living Within Means: “Composition is a language of sensitivity and subtlety, a vehicle that takes us down into our inner world where we truly live; it is a code of nuances, translated between artist and audience.
And we are not fully alive inside without this activation of our capacity to communicate in the codes of metaphor. These capacities are so terribly undervalued and stunted in the population at large now. Our human pattern-seeing, pattern-sensing, pattern-generating capacities have been ritually suppressed in the compulsory school system and in our workplaces in industrial society.
This is tragic, as “living within” becomes more and more suppressed and suffocated at the very time that we have so much emotion and deep concern about what is going on in our world to metabolize and communicate.”
Features music by Thievery Corporation.
CLICK FOR INFO About Professor Jim Stoner, Chair of Global Sustainability, Graduate School of Management, Fordham University
About Douglas Cohen, from The Solutions Journal
Aired on WGDR-WGDH radio on 2.9.13.
Image: Soaring Bird by Sara Cole
©2013 Jari Chevalier
Sunday Nov 21, 2010
Host Jari Chevalier Interviewed on What Now Show
Sunday Nov 21, 2010
Sunday Nov 21, 2010
Host of Living Hero, Jari Chevalier, speaks about her work as a multidisciplinary artist, on the What Now show with Ken Rose, KOWS Radio, November 1, 2010.
Link to the interview.
The recurring theme of this relaxed, off-the-cuff discussion was uncertainty and the unknown. Acknowledging our true position in our collective uncertainty can bring empathy, clarity, and equality like nothing else. We also talked about personal change and disengaging from the culture of machines.
Image: American Legacy, inlaid paper collage and acrylic on canvas. Part of the Mathematics of Ecstasy show. See the full set of images at jariart.com.
Enjoy Ken Rose's full list of interviews at pantedmonkey.org.
Friday Oct 01, 2010
Conference Report:: Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics
Friday Oct 01, 2010
Friday Oct 01, 2010
Several hundred people gathered for the 4th annual Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics conference at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square South on September 24-26.
This conference surveys the current research and social issues in the field of psychedelics. Readings by John Perry Barlow from Birth of a Psychedelic Culture and Don Lattin, author of The Harvard Psychedelic Club, provided historical context and Cosmo D set the atmosphere with a performance of textured cello improvisation over original electronic rhythms to open the weekend.
Why has psychedelic research been discriminated against in academia? Dr. Torsten Passie took us through the reasons. He showed slides of tribal people lying back all together with their eyes closed: not very productive! A Western capitalist worldview, which requires relations with nature to be utilitarian and depth of feeling to be kept private is not likely to embrace the potential value of trance states, the sharing of dreams, or the hallucinogenic experience.
Furthermore, ecstatic experience through psychedelics can engender direct, unmediated experience of the divine in oneself and in all of nature. This does not comport particularly well with the teachings of the Christian church, which holds forth that each and every one of us needs Jesus Christ to mediate our salvation.
Psychedelics deconceptualize and deconstruct entrenched value systems and, therefore, authority over truth is destabilized. So let's add that those who socially engineer and control populations don’t much care for that sort of thing. It becomes a real problem for those in power when people tap into a larger, more satisfying and holistic sense of reality, endemic to their own true natures, accessed intuitively.
Dr. Passie does not expect interest in psychedelics to spread beyond a small, secret society in the foreseeable future.
Dr. Jeffrey Guss, who heads up a current study at NYU on psychedelics in the reduction of cancer anxiety with very positive psychospiritual results, agrees with Dr. Passie that psychedelics will not become mainstream in society and he doesn’t believe that they should, that they are not for everyone.
But, standing in disagreement with these men on this point is independent Manhattan and Sag Harbor-based psychologist in private practice, Neal Goldsmith, PhD. Along with organizer Kevin Balktic, Dr. Goldsmith facilitates the conference. His sense is that to move into an age beyond post-modernism, one integrating the Cartesian split, psychedelics may play an important role.
He speaks of his own transformation through psychedelic experiences and how it altered his personality theory and views on personal growth and change. He describes a step-wise developmental process with dramatic growth to a new level of development after periods on a plateau. In essence, he says the issue is not to change a pathology, but to form genuine trusting relationships through which his clients can re-identify with their core selves. The person you were born, before you “punted” to a compensatory Plan B, personality, to get by in early childhood, is who you really are. Healing is getting back to that core self.
He's seen that transformative developmental change takes a long time and is very difficult to sustain in this culture. A combination of transcendent and cathartic approaches are most effective, and in this, psychedelics can be catalysts to insight, although insight alone, he says, only goes so far.
The large-scale collective process of what he calls psyche-ology, the study and healing of soul, is really concerned now with successfully joining mechanistic, scientific and technological knowledge with the realities of human psychosocial needs.
Eric Davis, a current PhD candidate, author, speaker and radio host discussed inner and outer Cartesian dualities by way of a metaphor, a mobius strip on which the material at some point turns over into the spiritual, the secular into the sacred and vice versa, in a flow.
There is a hunger in our culture (with its resistance to all things mystical) for the ritual and ceremonial context in which the hallucinogen Ayahuasca is taken by tribal peoples from the rain forests of South America; and this is likely why Ayahuasca has become so popular in North America in recent years.
Davis also pointed to Roland Griffiths’ 2008 Johns Hopkins study which proved that the use of psychedelics gives rise to religious experience (“No shit, Sherlock,” he said, “we knew that!”) And so the open question is: what does a secular, materialistic research model do with this scientific confirmation? And does moving the psychedelic experience into the psychopharmaceutical, clinical environment of the lab, perhaps diminish its potential for healing self and society?
The scientific approach is valuable, Davis upholds, because of the nagging questions it prompts us to ask about the brain. For instance, if you’re going to coin terms like “neurotheology” as a way to account for the experience of God, then you must also account for déjà vu, clairvoyance, and many other experiences of the mind.
For scientists to be seriously engaged in psychedelic research they eventually must take the psychedelics themselves. And that could just stimulate changes in the scientific approach itself. We may find ourselves up against our culture’s addictions to limiting ideas.
Psychedelic use for the treatment of addiction was reported on by researchers Matthew Johnson and Mary Cosimano of Johns Hopkins University who are currently investigating psilocybin in the treatment of nicotine dependence.
Most striking was the presentation by Clare Wilkins, director of Pangea Biomedics in Tijuana, Mexico on the remarkable properties of Ibogaine, a hallucinogenic root from Gabon, Africa that reverses addictions to opiates; such as heroine and methadone, as well as to cocaine, methamphetamine, alcohol, nicotine, and all manner of addictive behaviors and neurotic thoughts.
Ninety-two percent of clients who enter the clinic leave free of their chemical dependency, and without any withdrawal symptoms. Eighteen percent are still living without their drug of choice after six months, and this is a remarkable liberation rate. The hallucinogen gives addicts a real chance at choice. While exactly how ibogaine works is still unknown, there is clearly repair to brain receptors and an adjustment in neurochemistry.
She describes Ibogaine as a “relationship interrupter,” accomplishing “shame washing, empowerment, and the reawakening of the body’s intelligence.” Ibogaine “enables you to look at your life and eliminate anything that is not serving you.” Self-harm becomes self-care. “You fall back in love with yourself, with others and with life. It brings love back into the equation.”
Several of the non-academic speakers praised visionary experience and its influence on art, music, fashion, film, eco-consciousness and the integration of Eastern and Western mysticism. Annie Oak spoke about her grant-making organization, the Women’s Visionary Congress, and how this multigenerational community of “psychedelic women” support one another in their ongoing catalytic work as artists, healers, activists and visionaries.
But some brought up the dark side and limitations of psychedelics. Associate producer of the annual Bioneers conference, J.P. Harpignies, reminded us that in the 60s many a psych-ward and hospital was packed with LSD casualties. And poet, Dale Pendell, while acknowledging that we have yet to complete the psychedelic revolution, that the Earth is in need of a deep and radical cure, also cautioned us to consider that psychedelics are not effective on narcissism. In fact, with their tendency to stimulate messianic fantasies in some people, psychedelics may have contributed to the rapid rise of Me-ism in society.
Jill Harris of the Drug Policy Alliance urged the Horizons audience to come out about their psychedelic experiences, to break the taboo and share stories. “They have been important to us; they have mattered.” Let’s be vocal about how transformative these drugs can be and about the fact that prohibition doesn’t work. At the 40th anniversary of the War on Drugs, “it’s time to set the exit strategy.”
Heading home through Washington Square park at twilight, the great stone arch with its bold, engraved quotation was all lit up:
“Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God.”
Washington spoke those words to inspire his delegates to aim high in the writing of the Constitution of the United States. It was crafted, in this spirit, over the next 17 weeks.
And I thought, yes, here it is, the time Washington expected for the wise and honest to repair to those standards. And it will be, indeed, up to the wise and the honest to do the job.
“There are methods for changing social policies,” Neal Goldsmith tells us, “and we’ve got to power through, shoulder to the wheel, and do the work.”
©2010 Jari Chevalier
Wednesday Aug 18, 2010
The Power of Wisdom -- In This Regard special program
Wednesday Aug 18, 2010
Wednesday Aug 18, 2010
"My sister and I will be with the Sisters of Earth, the radical nuns, in New York in July," Vandana Shiva told me, before she and I hung up the phone, just after recording our Living Hero interview this past winter.
Radical nuns, hmm, I was intrigued and also excited about the prospect of meeting Vandana in person and spending a few days with her and Mira Shiva.
A short time later, I was a newly minted member of the Sisters of Earth and was signed up to attend the 9th biennial Sisters of Earth conference on a press pass.
The conference was held at The Passionist Retreat Center in Riverdale, New York, along the East bank of the Hudson River. Listen, if you've never been in a room with 160 powerful, educated, purposeful, spiritually mature, and actively engaged women, you have missed the effect of an incomparable force-field. Not your average crowd!
This special report on the Sisters of Earth conference will give a hint at the depth and breadth of conversation and ceremony, and hopefully, too, a taste of the uplifting energy and heartfelt concern we experienced as a group. This vital network of women religious and lay women is working to foster widespread adoption of eco-spiritual values in the United States and around the world.
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Thanks for listening!
--Jari Chevalier
Listen at your convenience!
Monday May 03, 2010
Interview with Gabor Maté
Monday May 03, 2010
Monday May 03, 2010
"We used to have wisdom without science; now . . . we have science without wisdom."
—Dr. Gabor Maté
Physician, activist, author, educator and public speaker, Gabor Maté, MD, is widely recognized for his contributions to the field of mind-body medicine. He has eloquently and persuasively called for a reevaluation of our most pervasive and debilitating ills in light of whole-systems stressors so often borne in utero, infancy and early childhood and the attendant, recurrent patterns of suppressing emotions of hurt and anger into adulthood. Gabor Maté is a compassionate doctor whose 20-year career as a family physician and his current work with HIV-positive addicts in Vancouver, BC, equips him with direct knowledge and empathic experience. He is the author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction, When the Body Says No: Understanding The Stress-Disease Connection and Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates And What You Can Do About It.
We talked about:
Whole person nourishment and attunement ● Why early life quality is so critical to society ● Stressed parents, emotional repression and disease ● What is the role of addiction? ● The mind-body supersystem and why modern medicine won’t recognize it ● Maté’s definition of addiction ● Free will and free won’t ● Denial and our addicted society ● Consciousness-raising and the miracle of a healing path ● The divine feminine and gut feelings ● Sensitivity and resilience or hardening and rigidity ● The Bully Syndrome and the truth about bullies ● Stuck where our needs were not met ● Ayahuasca and the swift road to healing and liberation ●
Enjoy the show! (The interview is about 46 minutes.)
Listen at your convenience!
Click through to buy Gabor Maté's books right from this site in the Amazon sidebar widget to the left.
Visit:
Dr. Maté's website.
Saturday Apr 17, 2010
Cove Director Louie Psihoyos at The Asia Society
Saturday Apr 17, 2010
Saturday Apr 17, 2010
On March 9th, just two days after The Cove won the Oscar for best feature documentary, the plush theater at The Asia Society in New York was packed with eager New Yorkers waiting to see The Cove, followed by a discussion between the film’s director, Louie Psihoyos, and environmental journalist, Andrew Revkin.
The Cove opens with an extrasensory montage; infrared images of oil derricks, factories, and the heavy machinery of industry, a “Twilight Zone” world—contemporary industrial society—perhaps as perceived by special sensitivities; its underlying mechanisms and menacing absurdities; its inhumanity.
Suddenly, like a birth, we land in the technicolor world of the film’s primary crime scene, Taiji, Japan, as Louie Psihoyos, as narrator, introduces us to the film’s principle player, activist Ric O’Barry.
Psihoyos contacted O’Barry after attending a Reefs Conference where O’Barry was scheduled to speak, but was then pulled from the program by the conference’s sponsor, Sea World, an organization O’Barry opposes at every turn.
O’Barry sent Psihoyos a short video he’d made, entitled Welcome to Taiji, documenting the annual killing of over 23,000 dolphins in Taiji dolphin. Although O’Barry has been devoted to dolphin activism for over forty years, in his own words “I’m like a monomaniac about this one cove, the size of a football field, in Taiji.”
Days later, Psihoyos flew to Taiji to meet O’Barry and shoot footage for what would later become The Cove, nature photographer Psihoyos’ first film. “I was called do this,” he told me during the Asia Society reception. “I’m not that much of a spiritual type, but the universe had a hand in this. . . let’s just say I was not planning to get into film before this.”
Psihoyos has an enduring passion for the oceans and ocean creatures. He directs the Oceanic Preservation Society, a non-profit organization. He considers the moratorium on whaling “the greatest psychological achievement of the last century.”
The Cove received major funding from Jim Clark, Psihoyos’ long-time billionaire friend. Once they’d reviewed and discussed the initial footage, a feature-length production was underway. “I started to get creative in a way I never thought possible. . . . . I wanted this film to inspire a legion of activists. . . . We made this film to give the oceans a voice. All the oceans are in peril.”
Both Psihoyos and O’Barry are confident that the film and its associated campaigns will effectively end the slaughter in Taiji. They explain that it will not be stopped on an animal rights issue, nor an environmental issue, but on the human health issue, because human beings are consuming mercury laden dolphin meat, sometimes falsely labeled and sold as tuna or some other fish. Psihoyos said a doctor explained to him that Mercury poisoning erases what it means to be human. You lose your senses; you lose your memory. But, he explains, it seems too controversial a subject to report on in the press.
The Cove crew took great personal risks to bring the film’s messages to the world. Tenderness for dolphins and other creatures is behind this courage and the strategic persistence necessary in any activist struggle. “This movie is a love letter,” Psihoyos tells his audiences.
In winning the Oscar for The Cove, Psihoyos “hit a home run the first time up at bat,” in the words of Ric O'Barry. Revkin asked, “Do I sense a sequel?” Psihoyos is now at work on his next film, a documentary about the Holocene extinction, the massive planetary loss of species and biodiversity that is manmade and continually exacerbated by human behavior.
Psihoyos calls upon his audiences to act, “once you have this information, what are you going to do with it?” In an interview with Amy Kaufman of the L.A. Times on Oscar night, he said, “The Cove is a microcosm of this 5-alarm disaster that’s facing all marine life. Through pollution and plundering and acidication, we’re doing what no wild animal would do: we’re fouling our own nest. It’s a microcosm of this much bigger issue.”
I was reminded of a brief scene in The Cove in which it was said that O’Barry once rescued two dolphins from a small concrete pool filled with their own excrement. Perhaps this is an image for us to keep in mind.
©Jari Chevalier
Listen to the April 1 Living Hero podcast for our Interview with Ric O'Barry.
Watch the Asia Society video here.
The Oceanic Preservation Society site.
Thursday Apr 01, 2010
Interview with Ric O'Barry
Thursday Apr 01, 2010
Thursday Apr 01, 2010
"We never heard of another wild animal coming out of the jungle and saving a life of a human. But there are many stories of dolphins doing that. That's communication. That is communication. That is altruism."
—Ric O'Barry
Ric has devoted the last 40 years of his life to freeing dolphins from captivity and to educating people throughout the world about these highly conscious, intelligent, and emotional creatures. Most recently his campaign to end the annual dolphin hunt and slaughter in Taiji, Japan, became the subject of The Cove, a brilliant film that won the Oscar for best feature documentary this year.
As a young man, O'Barry captured, trained, and lived with the dolphins who played Flipper in the popular TV series. He experienced a powerful epiphany when the lead dolphin died in his arms. Ever since that day in 1970, he has been arrested many times and risked his life in his quest to protect dolphins from hunters and to release captive dolphins back into the wild. He is author of To Save a Dolphin and Behind the Dolphin Smile. I urge you to listen to this amazing man!
We talked about:
Dolphins in the wild and in captivity ● A man in a tank and living with Flipper ● Communicating with dolphins ● Flipper's death and Ric's epiphany ● Going to jail for liberating dolphins ● The Big Lie and the Schizophrenic Cove ● Why the slaughter? ● Toxic dolphin meat and contaminated oceans ● Rehabilitating dolphins (or not) ● Dolphin trauma and madness ● Making The Cove documentary ● The Japanese cover-up and the power of "Gaiatsu" ● Activism: what works? ● How can we listeners help stop the slaughter? ●
Enjoy the show! (The interview is about 46 minutes.)
Listen at your convenience!
Click through to buy Ric O'Barry's books right from this site in the Amazon sidebar widget to the left.
Visit:
SaveJapanDolphins.org;
dolphinproject.org;
Earth Island Institute;
The Cove movie site;
The Oceanic Preservation Society
Read a great article on Ric here.