[Sdpg] [starhawk] From Starhawk--A vision and an appeal

Sun Dec 9 18:11:13 PST 2007

Dear friends,

Many years ago, I wrote a book called The Fifth 
Sacred Thing, that envisioned a transformed, 
diverse and green San Francisco in a world 
divided by war and ecological collapse.  I go 
back to that story a lot, these days, as both the 
worst and some of the best aspects of it seem to be coming true.

That San Francisco of the future is a place where 
streams flow freely through garden streets lined 
with fruit trees, where celebrations and rituals 
honor a multiplicity of cultures, where humans 
have learned to heal and live in harmony with nature.

Now, I spend a lot of my time not just writing 
about that vision, but trying to make it a 
reality by teaching the skills of ecological 
design.  In 2002, together with Penny 
Livingston-Stark, I began teaching Earth Activist 
Trainings, because I saw so many enthusiastic, 
deeply committed people on fire with the desire 
to change the world, but often without a clear sense of what the solutions are.

Over the last six years, Earth Activist Trainings 
have loosed hundreds of fired-up permie 
potentizers onto the world, seeding communities 
across the globe with the skills and knowledge of 
regenerative design.  Here’s just a few of the things they’ve done:

Disaster Relief and Bioremediation:

In New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, EAT 
alumni became core organizers of the grassroots 
Common Ground Relief efforts, ran the trauma 
support and counseling program at the clinic, and 
started a bioremediaiton project to clean toxins 
from soil using microorganisms, plants and fungi.

Sustainable Development in the Third World:

Rainwater catchment in Bolivia, a model 
permaculture farm in Brazil, community 
development and tsunami relief in south Indian 
fishing villages, sustainability programs in the 
rural Phillipines, women’s programs in a 
permaculture institute in the West Bank of Palestine.

Urban Permaculture;

Rejuvenating a community garden in the Bayview, 
the poorest area of San Francisco; living and 
working in the L.A. Ecohouse, growing food in the 
projects of Miami, transforming intersections 
into gathering places in Portland; model backyard 
gardens and community power-down programs in Iowa 
City; youth programs in poverty stricken downtown Detroit.

And much, much more than we can fit on this 
page.  You know as well as I do that the world is 
at a crucial turning point right now. Finally, 
the general public gets it that climate change is 
happening and the waters are rising around us. 
But we still haven’t begun to make changes on the 
scale and with the speed that’s needed. The media 
is full of green news and the stores are full of 
green products, but we can’t buy our way out of 
looming ecological collapse.  No one technology or technique can save us.

That’s where we come in.  There’s a pressing need 
to train people in the art of designing flows, 
links and connections, creating systems that meet 
human needs while healing and regenerating the 
environment around us.  And that’s just what we do.

Please help us continue this work.  We have three 
residential courses planned for 2008, an Urban 
Permaculture course over a series of six 
weekends, a new Youth Course, and a Sustainable 
Skills Tour with our newly built EAT bus.

To do all this, we need your help.  EAT has had 
generous funding which has allowed us, in turn, 
to be generous with financial aid. For each of 
our courses we’ve provided ten to twenty thousand 
dollars of work trade and scholarships, which in 
turn makes it possible for activists and 
low-income students to attend.  But that funding 
is now at the end of its cycle, and we need help 
from new sources to continue being able to say 
‘yes’, not ‘no’, to those who want this training.

Many of you are out there, right now, doing your 
regenerative activism on a daily basis. (Thanks!) 
And you may not have a lot of financial wealth to 
share. But, please, think about the value of 
Earth Activist Training. And think about how 
desperately we need more activists of this 
caliber. Then, give whatever you can. The results 
of even a small pledge of $10/month will be 
exponentially effective in the big picture. 
Because every dollar you donate will help train 
more passionate, intelligent people to cleanse 
the soil, heal the water, share their skills, and 
restore the balance – in countless and priceless ways.

Please consider a donation right now of:

$1700  (provides one full scholarship for a two week course.)

$800   (subsidizes one work trader)

$100 - $250 (provides some hands-on supplies for a course)

Just to be clear, we welcome donations of every 
size and kind. Large. Small. One-time. Quarterly. 
Annual. Sporadic. We gratefully accept it all. 
Make a monthly pledge for exponential impact. 
Join the EAT Mycelium Fund Monthly Giving Circle.

And now we invite you to choose the way you will 
contribute to this most necessary educational endeavor.

Donate online at 
http://earthactivisttraining.org/donate.html 
<http://earthactivisttraining.org/donate.html>

or send checks to

Earth Activist Training
POB 251
Sierraville CA 96126

Thanks!  Your generosity is a crucial part of the solution.

Starhawk

Earth Actiist Trainings

www.earthactivisttraining.org
www.starhawk.org

P.S.  Don’t worryI haven’t stopped writing.  In 
fact, my holiday gift to you is an expanded, 
updated vision of San Francisco of The Fifth 
Sacred Thing.  It’s too long to send, but you can 
find it at www.starhawk.org/ 
<http://www.starhawk.org/> .   Look on the left sidebar for “Latest Essay”.

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Starhawk is a lifelong activist in peace and 
global justice movements, a leader in the 
feminist and earth-based spirituality movements, 
author or coauthor of ten books, including The 
Spiral Dance, The Fifth Sacred Thing, Webs of 
Power: Notes from the Global Uprising, and her latest, The Earth Path.

Starhawk's website is www.starhawk.org, and more 
of her writings and information on her schedule 
and activities can be found there.
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