kelpiewilson

An archive of articles and reports by the author of Primal Tears

This site is an archive of writing by Kelpie Wilson. You'll find dozens of magazine articles and news reports on the topics of energy, the environment, sustainable living, human evolution, eco-spirituality and women's rights. 

For my blog on green technology, visit www.greenyourhead.com.

For the latest news, reviews, rants and raves about my novel Primal Tears and a preview of the graphic novel version, visit www.primaltears.com.

Primal Tears, published in 2005 by North Atlantic Books:

"PRIMAL TEARS is a novel of tremendous power. Passionate and erotic, at times tenderly lyrical, it confronts head-on, without flinching, brutal environmental and feminist politics. Its protagonist, Sage, is unique, magical, and haunting."
-- Kate Wilhelm, author of The Unbidden Truth, Clear and Convincing Proof, and Skeletons

Read more reviews of Primal Tears here.

A Stand for a Stand

Here's some more background on the logging protest from 1987 that resulted in a SLAPP suit:

A Stand for a Stand
by Kelpie Wilson
The Progressive
March 1994

One July morning in 1987, I found myself with five new friends at a logging site in Oregon’s Siskiyou National Forest. Valerie Wade, a college student, fifth generation Oregonian, and daughter of a logger, had climbed to the top of a ninety-foot yarder spar pole to hang a banner. Chained to the bottom of the yarder, which drags felled trees up steep slopes to waiting log trucks, were Karen Wood, a Eugene computer scientist; Michele Miller, an elementary school teacher from Chico, California; Kamala Redd, a college student from New York City; James Jackson, a surveyor from Texas, and myself, a new graduate with a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Chico State, about to head off to a career in alternative energy.

What Shelley Shannon and I Have in Common

I have this very weird connection with Shelley Shannon, the woman who tried to kill Dr. Tiller back in 1993. Now one of her comrades has succeeded in killing this brave man. Shannon is a member of the American Taliban, aka the Army of God.

Blockading Logging Companies and Abortion Clinics: What Shelley Shannon and I Have in Common
by Kelpie Wilson
The Portland Alliance
May 1994

Even though I am a a pro-choice environmentalist, I have a few things in common with Shelley Shannon. She’s the woman accused of shooting abortion doctor George Tiller in Kansas last August. Only a few things—still more that I would expect to share with someone whose values are 180 degrees apart from mine.

Shannon and I are the same age and we have homes about 35 miles apart in southern Oregon We both have brown hair and wear glasses. She has been sued for Operation Rescue protests while I have been sued for an Earth First! protest. The abortion clinic suing Shannon filed an amicus brief on behalf of the logging company suing me because they wanted to apply the precedent set by my case.

My case was decided last summer when the Oregon Supreme Court determined that to allow a logging company to sue me and five others for hanging a banner on their equipment would not violate the First Amendment. Both my lawyer and Shannon’s have argued that allowing punitive damage in cases of civil disobedience would let a jury determine the degree of punishment based on the content of protester’s beliefs—an infringement of First Amendment rights.

Pro-choice IS Pro-life

In Memorium: Dr. George Tiller.

Domestic fundamentalist terrorism has cut down another friend of women, Dr. George Tiller. I can't express the sadness that I feel about this. But I will say this: Dr. Tiller was pro-life. I am pro-life, and I believe that pro-life means being pro-choice, because the purpose of life is not to maximize our numbers but to live in balance and harmony with all the other life forms that support and sustain us.

Life only survives by being part of a community of life forms known collectively as "the environment." For a human embryo, its first environment is its mother. Mother makes up both the environment and the first human relationship for all of us. It is in her role as "environment" that a woman may sometimes have to end the relationship to her embryo or fetus. She may not have the capacity to welcome a child into the world.

This may seem harsh, but this is often Nature's way. Every year, millions of human neonates die from natural causes. Most abortions are natural miscarriages of genetically malformed embryos. Ironically, the abortion services that Dr. Tiller provided were mostly concerned with those rare cases where a malformed embryo has survived past the initial stages of pregnancy, not cases where a woman "chose" to end a pregnancy because she did not want a child. In most cases, Nature would have aborted such a fetus. Dr. Tiller was able to help those women who were subject to the cruel fate of bearing a deformed child. Dr. Tiller's work was less about "choice" as we have come to think of it, than about completing work that Nature had left undone.

Backyard Biochar

We have been having a lot of fun making charcoal. Checkout my slideshow:

re-re-thinking nukes

James Hansen got me to re-think nuclear power in light of climate change. I read up on Integral Fast Reactors (IFRs) and corresponded with some of the enthusiasts. What they said sounded good - but doesn't it always? The most appealing selling point for these reactors was the possibility of using them to help reduce the lethality of existing nuclear waste. Luckily, Energy Bulletin pointed me to this article by Amory Lovins that delves into the topic from a different, but informed view. Still, I don't know which is worse for the planet, nuclear catastrophe or the carbon bomb that could kill the oceans for millions of years.

"New" Nuclear Reactors, Same Old Story
By Amory B. Lovins

IFRs are often claimed to “burn up nuclear waste” and make its “time of concern . . . less than 500 years” rather than 10,000–100,000 years or more. That’s wrong: most of the radioactivity comes from fission products, including very-long-lived isotopes like iodine-129 and technicium-99, and their mix is broadly similar in any nuclear fuel cycle. IFRs’ wastes may contain less transuranics, but at prohibitive cost and with worse occupational exposures, routine releases, accident and terrorism risks, proliferation, and disposal needs for intermediate- and low-level wastes.

Malthus and Vice

It's taken me awhile to get this up, but here's my latest published piece:

http://www.alternet.org/environment/135518/have_we_hit_the_limits_of_human_population/

It's also at Energy Bulletin under my original title, Malthus and Vice.

Have We Hit the Limits of Human Population?

By Kelpie Wilson, AlterNet. Posted April 10, 2009.

Without growth, there would be no economy as we know it. But modern culture, by and large, doesn't see that it can exist only in the medium of ceaseless growth and expansion, because a fish doesn't see the water it swims in. Only today, in the recent, breathless moments of the greatest economic crash since the Great Depression, do we begin to perceive the waters around us.

Slowly, we are coming to realize that the last 200 years of economic growth have been based on a monumental Ponzi scheme that has pushed the final reckoning ever forward in time, until the future is now. Slowly, we are coming to realize that Thomas Malthus was right.

It was the warrior cry of the radical environmental movement in the 1980s: "Malthus Was Right!" But Malthus, a mumbling country parson with intellectual ambitions, had been transmogrified by capitalists and communists alike into a fearsome bogeyman possessed of "dangerous" ideas.

Environmentalists who invoked his name were invariably corrected by their progressive friends, who told them that excess consumption by the rich was the problem, not the reproductive profligacy of the poor.

Yet, as we drive deeper into the greenhouse world, with its crazy weather, water shortages and general degradation, more and more of us from across the political spectrum are wondering how on earth we will feed the 3 billion more people projected to arrive by 2050, or even the 6 billion or so we already have.

Women’s Café

Here in Takilma, Oregon, we have an amazing event every year on International Women’s Day called Women’s Café. Women from all over the valley get together to applaud each other's efforts at everything from poetry and music to bellydance. Barbie dolls, bible stories and excerpts from The Vagina Monologues have all shared the stage. This year, my friend Deb Murphy, who is the indefatigable organizer of this event and its terribly amusing emcee, asked me to get up and talk. Some years I yak and some years I bellydance. This was a year to talk. Here are some excerpts from my riff on “Women and the Earth,” the theme of this year's International Women's Day:

It would be nice if I could just talk about women and the earth tonight, but I can’t. I have to include a third party that keeps butting in here and that’s the economy.  I’ll start by telling you about my favorite woman economist and end with some inspirational words from the deep ecologist Joanna Macy.

Women’s concerns are very much like environmental concerns. They are continually relegated to the status of a “special interest” and placed outside the central concern of the economy which is making money. …

I quoted from an article I wrote in 2006 about Hazel Henderson, the “housewife economist” who is famous for her quip: “economics is a form of brain damage.”

Then I told the story of the women in Iceland who are not concerned with "stimulating" their economy to “rise again,” but are focused on restructuring it to work better for society.  I love their idea of doing “emotional due diligence” on the companies they invest in. Toxic corporate culture and greed have been our downfall. Let’s leave it to women to get us out the mess. I sure wish Obama would put a bunch of sharp women like that in charge of the US Treasury.

I closed with some words of encouragement from the deep ecologist Joanna Macy from our interview in Yoga Plus Joyful Living:

KW: Your book World as Lover, World as Self is subtitled Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal. Is courage what we need in these times?

JM: Yeah. I’m a sucker for courage. We are naturally courageous because we naturally love life, just as we thirst for water to drink, air to breathe. We have a battery of senses with which to engage our world. We have minds that can choose, and we want to be alive. Life wants to go on, and so we can feel the currents of life carrying us into fresh, original, unexpected paths of healing, if we’re not closed down. To overcome fear you have to look at what you’re afraid to see.

In central myths of our world’s traditions, the journey of the hero is to go down into the dark and face the monster, face what he doesn’t want to see and then, breaking through that, realize that he is strong enough to face what has appeared so terrifying to him. Then, he comes into his full magnitude and power of being.

Courage Of The Shambhala Warrior

KW: When you recover this courage—is that when you become what you call the Shambhala Warrior?

JM: I use that metaphor from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. We need to find and we can find those qualities of the warrior within us, the courage. I’m not afraid to use warrior language because it summons up keen attention and strong will and spunk and passion for life. We’re much tougher than we think.

A Freudian Take on "Pro-Life" Power Trips

A fellow named Chuck Gregory contacted me with a link to his site where he says he exposes "the aborticentric nature of the 'pro-life' movement."

Chuck had some interesting insight into one of the comments posted to the Alternet article, Why Are Even Smart, Liberal Men Freaked Out by Abortion?, by Anonymous. Someone who calls himself Caleb Darkstar wrote:

What freaks me out is the power given to a woman to so easily change the end result of a bad decision. She has made a mistake that holds the potential to change her entire life, and yet she can abort much more than a fetus. She can abort an entire future that lays in store for her. That powerful, it’s like nothing else I can compare.

I on the other hand, (being a male), would like to have a little of this power. If I get a woman pregnant why can't I claim "Sperm donor status"? Why can't I have a magic place to go to that would free ME from all the obligations, trials and tribulations that go along with parenting and supporting a child for life if she decides to keep it.

WHERE IS MINE?

Chuck Gregory's insight is this:

That "powerlessness" you speak of has an awful lot to do with aborticentrism, and of course it is not impotence about keeping a woman from having an abortion; the real powerlessness is in the face of an eventual and certain death.  Anti-abortionism is the allegorical struggle in which he overpowers death by "rescuing" an idealized version of himself.

It's very Freudian, and 'pro-lifers' are going to try dismiss it as psychobabble, but they can't dismiss their disregard for real and really needy human life.

I think Chuck is on to something.

Another Great Response to Monbiot's Population Blind Spot

I found a really excellent response to an earlier Monbiot column dismissing population growth at a blog called Zone 5 - the edge between nature and culture. Here's a quote, but read the whole thing. It's really good:

Playing around with statistics to show that consumption is the real problem, not population, as Monbiot does, again fails to see that the two issues are inextricably linked. For example, it is often said, if we all become vegetarian, the world could support a bigger population. But what happens then if we achieve this and the population continues to grow?

Presumably, the response to those who try to raise the issue of population control will once again be:

“Ah, yes, but if we all just live on one bowl of rice a day and huddle round a single light bulb the world could support twice the current population! Let’s have 10 billion! Let’s have 20 billion!”

George Monbiot's Shallow View of Overpopulation

When I was writing my environment column for Truthout, I often looked to George Monbiot at the Guardian as a writer who embraced integrated, big-picture thinking and was not afraid of solutions that might appear "radical" or "socialist." I have admired much of his work. But in a recent column on population growth, he displays quite a shallow view of the population problem and even sees fit to insult those who are concerned with it. That's a shame. I expected better from him. Here is my response from the comments section:

Dear George Monbiot,

The frustration you feel at the "old white men" who always bring up population growth is an interesting contrast to the frustration I (a middle-aged white woman) feel when people like you, who are often white men, refuse to focus on population growth as a key issue.

The fact is, population growth is not something "natural." White men such as yourself often have trouble acknowledging the current and historical impact of the pro-natalist policies of patriarchal empires. Women are not free. My contention is that if women were free to make their reproductive choices, we would reach a stable population much sooner. You seem to think this will automatically happen when population reaches 9 billion. However, 9 billion is a very damaging level of population for the planet to support at any level of consumption. I believe we can and must make every effort to stabilize population at a lower level than that. That means addressing it head on. Addressing it head on means we need to talk about it, which is difficult when otherwise progressive thinkers such as yourself try to slam the door every time the topic comes up.