"Language of Landscape" by Anne Whiston Spirn

"Landscapes are rich with complex language, spoken and written in land, air, and water. Humans are story-telling animals, thinking in metaphors steeped in landscape: putting down roots means commitment, uprooting a traumatic event. Like a living tree rooted in place, language is rooted in landscape."

"The meanings landscapes hold are not just metaphorical and metaphysical, but real, their messages practical; understanding may spell survival or extinction. Losing, or failing to hear and read, the language of landscape threatens body and spirit, for the pragmatic and the imaginative aspects of landscape language have always coexisted. Relearning the language that holds life in place is an urgent task. This book is dedicated to its recovery and renewal." *

This eloquent and powerful book combines poetry and pragmatism to teach the language of landscape. Anne Whiston Spirn, author of the award-winning The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design, argues that the language of landscape exists with its own syntax, grammar, and metaphors, and that we imperil ourselves by failing to learn to read and speak this language. To understand the meanings of landscape, our habitat, is to see the world differently and to enable ourselves to avoid profound aesthetic and environmental mistakes.

Offering examples that range across thousands of years and five continents, Spirn examines urban, rural, and natural landscapes. She discusses the thought of renowned landscape authors—Thomas Jefferson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Law Olmsted, Lawrence Halprin—and of less well known pioneers, including Australian architect Glenn Murcutt and Danish landscape artist C. Th. Sørensen. She discusses instances of great landscape designers using landscape fluently, masterfully, and sometimes cynically. And, in a probing analysis of the many meanings of landscape, Spirn shows how one person’s ideal landscape may be another’s nightmare, how Utopian landscapes can be dark. There is danger when we lose the connection between a place and our understanding of it, Spirn warns, and she calls for change in the way we shape our environment, based on the notions of nature as a set of ideas and landscape as the expression of action and ideas in place.

Anne Whiston Spirn is professor of landscape architecture and regional planning and director of the Urban Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She is director of the West Philadelphia Landscape Project, an action-research program integrating research, teaching, and community service, and she chairs the Advisory Council to the Territorial Directorate of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris. **

334 p., 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
84 b/w illus.
ISBN: 9780300077452
ISBN-10: 0300077459

* http://www.thewolftree.com/language.html
** http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300077452

PETITION: Family-Plot Food Gardens for a Sustainable Planet

Petition Online, calling themselves "the marketplace of free ideas™", is making a powerful democratic tool available to anyone who wants to be serious about their grassroots powers to make a difference.

An example in point is one of the latest submittals, entitled UN Petition: Family-Plot Food Gardens for a Sustainable Planet, which can be accessed online by transferring their web-link into a browser window: http://www.petitiononline.com/SoLMag/petition.html . Addressed to His Excellency, Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General to the United Nations, it requests the U.N. General Assembly to help create sustainable small family-plot sized food-gardens all over the world by way of member nations dedicating unused, free government land for such purposes.

This UN Petition "sparked an enormous amount of excitement," says Dr. Regina Jensen, editor of the international Space of Love Magazine, who drafted the document in behalf of Ringing Cedars of Russia, a world-wide "green" movement originating from Russia. The signers of this petition are convinced that powerful positive change - individual, social, economic as well as ecological - can be affected through increased development of personal or government land into family food-plots and gardens. They also support the creation of eco-villages world-wide to reawaken the wholesome neighbor-to-neighbor support available in such communities. More specifically, they have great hopes that peaceful life and self-sufficiency can be created by developing hectare-size (2.5 acres) family food-gardens, especially in community, a size they believe is large enough to feed an average family and therewith protect them from survival-stress and harm under difficult economic circumstances. The petition also claims that historically, such food-producing family and community-plots have stabilized a region, state or entire country during economic and other disturbances.

Yuri Smirnov, publisher of Space of Love Magazine in Russia says: "People recover a sense of deep excitement and purpose when they re-discover the power true democracy brings. It helps all of us to come together and co-create a world that truly works for everyone. The excitement and gratitude our international magazine received upon launching the first issue last year was just astounding. It speaks for the deep hunger we all have to come back to our community roots, to Nature and its abundant nurture and to security in our own healing environment. It is contagious and exciting to return to a way of living that is joyful, peaceful and celebratory, without having to throw out the good things modern life offers. The exciting response to our joint online UN Petition seems to be another example of this hunger for a saner way of living." Although the United Nations published statements very recently in keeping with the petition's intent, if they do not respond with the urgency these world-wide issues demand, the publishers say that they will continue to present these concepts to whichever governmental organizations will be most able and committed to produce true, global change for the people they represent.

Many of the individuals signing the UN Petition, says editor Jensen, "have already been inspired by a specific global vision for healing, offered by the Ringing Cedars of Russia material, via re-connection with nature and a personal plot of land and the powers of an eco-village type of neighborly support for modern times." Some of the sample comments, she shares, are: "We are all one. What affects one affects us all. It is time to move into cooperation and real relationship with the earth and each other." "This is the path for a bright future for our children and their children." "This is essential to recovery from the global economic crisis and climate change." "We are responsible for how we treat the Earth and feed ourselves." "This is the most important thing we can do to save our species upon this planet." People are encouraged to enforce their voice and participate by signing at: http://www.petitiononline.com/SoLMag/petition.html or check with www.ringingcedarsofrussia.com and www.spaceoflovemagazine.com

CLICK HERE TO SIGN THE PETITION ONLINE

The Quiet Evolution of Trees

The Quiet Evolution of Trees

by Eric McLamb
with Special Contributions from Dr. Jack C. Hall

Long before trees appeared on Earth, animals and other land plants were scattered among the land masses. And before land plants came the land animals. How did it all happen, and where did they all come from?

Trees evolved from the oceans in a string of plant evolution, but they did not just start growing on the shorelines. They evolved quietly millions of years after the first plants emerged from their aquatic origins. (UK Photo, Hampshire County Council)

They came from the oceans, where just a few billion years earlier the first animal life evolved followed by plants. So, you see, the occurrence of trees was quite full of twists and turns and came about quietly long after land plants had struggled to rise from the oceans. Yet, their existence is the essence of all life on the planet.

There was a time about 550 million years ago when life "exploded" on the planet. Animal life. Nearly all of the animal groups in existence today -- as well as many that no longer exist -- first appeared on Earth during this time. It was the Cambrian Period, and this time of tumultuous and colossal animal diversity is called the Cambrian Explosion.

Land plants evolved a little more quietly about 90 million years later, with trees evolving some 100 million years after the first land plants began to emerge from their oceanic origins. But neither animals nor plants could have evolved were it not for the protection and nurturing of the ocean.

According to the fossil record -- about 3.5 billion years ago -- the first preserved life are found in the form of bacteria. They appeared in the oceans after the surface (crust) began to cool and stabilize, the land masses began to take shape, and clouds formed to produce massive volumes of rainwater that created the seas. The atmosphere was much different than today and the surface was unprotected from the Sun. This period is known as the Pre-Cambrian, the time that immediately followed the formative, molten and gaseous stage of Earth as it and the rest of the solar system started to come together -- or coalesce.

...some 470 million years ago, Earth would seem lifeless, inhospitable and very barren. For one thing, no trees -- no plants at all -- lived on the land! (NASA photo of Mars surface)

The first plants on Earth were a form of blue-green algae which appeared and lived in the oceans about 3.4 billion years ago according to the fossil record, protected from the harmful high energy radiation of the Sun. In the oceans, these plants were able to grow and photosynthesize as this high energy radiation was absorbed by the water. Now, to be perfectly clear about it, the first true algae (the kingdom protoctista) most likely made their first appearance about 2.4 billion years ago, but for sure by 1.8 billion years ago as the first acritarchs.

Although animals were the first life forms on Earth, it was plants that paved the way for land animals to evolve. Plants did this by simultaneously increasing the percentage of oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere and decreasing the percentage of carbon dioxide, a powerful greenhouse gas (Journal Science, August 2001).

Still, if you were to travel back about some 470 million years ago, Earth would seem lifeless, inhospitable and very barren. For one thing, no trees -- no plants at all -- lived on the land !

The first land plants made their appearance way before trees started driving their roots into the hard crust of Earth's surface, about 460 million years ago in the Ordovician period. Algae were the first land plants, moving from their aquatic origins to marshy and wet environments on land. It took consistent growth and diversification of land plants -- including the eventual evolution of trees -- to help break up the mostly iron-clad surface of the Earth.

http://ecology.com/features/quietevolutiontrees/quietevolutiontrees.html

The Bee Project

The bee project is dedicated to informing the community about the global crisis of the honey bee population.

The honey bees are stressed and dying in massive numbers. This is an environmental, ecological, and global issue with serious consequences for us all.

Mission: To raise awareness of the planet-wide environmental and ecological importance of the honeybee. To create, implement and participate in educational and artistic programs and events for live presentation, electronic and print media that inform the public of conditions that threaten honeybee existence. To communicate actions the public can take on behalf of the honeybee population.


For more info about The Bee Project, visit : http://www.thebeeproject.org

Earth Vision Books

EARTH VISION presents spiritual ecology through explorations of nature and soul.
In addition to addressing current emvironmental issues (a new issue every season), five volumes delve into the wilderness within, an eco-spirituality of extensive proportions.

The Earth Vision travelogue visits animals, landscapes, and nature spirits across North America.

A Calendar of Nature and Soul explores eco-spiritual aspects through the seasons.

Gaia Sojourn crosses boundaries of time and culture on a global scale through re-incarnation and spiritual ecology.

The Earth Vision Gallery offered as a free introductory e-book, presents an art exhibit that explores nature, color theory, and spiritual ecology. http://www.evbooks.net/earth_vision_005.htm

Hebert Returns to America is a gallery of humor with its artwork hung off the wall, as Hebert Flabeau takes on modern life in America.

It is the premise of Earth Vision that in order for humanity to cherish nature, humanity must first recognize nature as a reflection of the very soul of its own being.

More information can be found at http://www.evbooks.net