Monday, September 28, 2020





Opinion: Breonna Taylor's death reminds me this country doesn't love me as much as I love it


Opinion by Lisa Respers France, CNN
1 hour ago


© Patrick Smith/Getty Images North America/Getty Images ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND - JULY 05: In an aerial view from a drone, a large-scale ground mural depicting Breonna Taylor with the text 'Black Lives Matter' is seen being painted at Chambers Park on July 5, 2020 in Annapolis, Maryland. The mural was organized by Future History Now in partnership with Banneker-Douglass Museum and The Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture. The painting honors Breonna Taylor, who was shot and killed by members of the Louisville Metro Police Department in March 2020. (Photo by Patrick Smith/Getty Images)


Some days I feel like a woman without a country.

The death of Breonna Taylor has been yet another painful reminder that women like me, Black women, are not safe in America.

We can be killed in our own homes by police and an officer will be charged over the bullets that missed, a charge that came only after months of calls for justice.

Make no mistake, Breonna Taylor's death wrought destruction - and not just for the family and friends who knew and loved her.

There has been constant outcry in the six months since Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician, was shot in her Louisville, Kentucky, home while police were executing a search warrant.

She is just one more Black person whose life has been overshadowed in many ways by their death and who, sadly, have become symbols of the racial inequality that has always been, and feels like it may always be.

Such discouraging thoughts have become so familiar that I fear I am becoming numb to it.

The #SayHerName and #JusticeForBreonna campaigns have kept Taylor's face ever before me on social media since her death. In that beautiful young woman's face, I have seen my sister, my nieces, my friends and myself.

I have wept for her and us, even as I have shed tears for a country where many are just now seeing its problems with systemic racism and racial injustice.

Typing that word alone will stop many people reading and to those who feel that way, it is hard to know you are tired of my and Breonna Taylor's Blackness.

Tired of hearing about it, thinking about it and feeling guilty about the disparity that it brings.

Imagine how tired we feel inhabiting these Black bodies. Because we live in a nation where being accused of racism angers people more than the fact of actual racism. A country where I am sure to be called a racist, accused of race-baiting and/or "playing the race card" for even daring to discuss our race problem.
© CNN Lisa Respers France

To that I say: White mothers, talk to me about how you prep your White children, your sons in particular, to try and handle interactions with police so they can make it home safely. All the while knowing that no matter what you tell them there is no guarantee.

White wives, have your White husbands taught themselves how to change rear light bulbs in their cars so they can avoid being stopped by police? Because my Black husband has.

These are all constant traumas that Black women like me, like Breonna Taylor and so many other Black women I could, unfortunately, name, have had to endure.

A few weeks ago, I posted to Facebook some thoughts about what is happening in America right now—how none of it is a surprise to me because I know the history.

"I'm not shocked by the cruelty & divisiveness because I have forever snapshots in my brain of White people smiling beneath the mutilated bodies of lynched Black people," I wrote. "Voter suppression doesn't surprise me because I am the descendant of those threatened, harassed and blocked from polling stations."

I pointed out that I "sprang from women whose children were ripped from their arms and sold, but those women had to keep on living and serving."

"It's why we bury our Trayvons and our Tamirs and then become activists and run for office. We give the world beauty for ashes on the daily, with food that is more flavorful because salt seasons and what's saltier than tears?," I posted. "We dance a little harder, sing a little louder and love a little deeper because we know life is fleeting and always has been. Covid kills us more, racism kills us more. Life. Kills. Us. More."

Black people as a whole have struggled to have our humanity recognized and respected, but Black women in particular have taken that fight to the polls.

According to the report "Black Girl Magic: The Power of Black Women in Elections" put out by the AFL-CIO, "Black women drive turnout for the black community and are one of the most progressive voting blocs in the country."

It continues: "They demonstrate high levels of support for progressive issues such as police reform, raising the minimum wage and protecting Social Security. Moreover, the majority of black women have an economically liberal view of government."

To possess such power and still know that the laws we have helped bring to fruition will—so often--not protect us, feels excruciating.

It also fuels the burning desire to hold America accountable to "the justice and liberty for all" it promised.

Knowing this country doesn't love me as much as I love it would seem reason enough to give up on it.

But I won't let the deaths of Taylor, George Floyd or the others who have sparked a racial reckoning in this great nation have happened in vain.

I love this country too much to not want to see it be the best that it can be.
Rio Tinto changes tack, ready for talks over Bougainville mine

© Reuters/HUMAN RIGHTS LAW CENTRE Theonila Roka Matbob stands in front of the Pangua mine in Konawiru, BougainvilleMELBOURNE

 (Reuters) - Rio Tinto Ltd said on Tuesday that it was ready to talk to stakeholders over allegations of human rights breaches at a giant copper mine in Bougainville that it formerly owned, after community members filed a complaint with the Australian government.

"We are ready to enter into discussions with the communities that have filed the complaint," it said, adding it would also speak with current mine owners as well as the Bougainville and Papua New Guinea governments.

The stance marks a change from April, when Rio rebuffed a request by the same group for a review of health and safety concerns at the mine as a starting point for discussion around compensation and remediation.

It also highlights a different approach by Rio to social responsibility, after its destruction of sacred and historically significant rockshelters for an iron ore mine in Australia in May cost its chief executive and two other executives their jobs.

Rio Tinto subsidiary Bougainville Copper (BCL) ran the Panguna copper and gold mine in Papua New Guinea from the early 1970s to 1990 when it was abandoned during a civil war that was largely fought over how mine profits should be shared.

Rio handed its shareholding in the mine to national and local governments in 2016.

The complaint, backed by 156 community members, was filed on Tuesday to the Australian OECD National Contact Point by Melbourne's Human Rights Law Centre. It alleges that the large volumes of mine waste left behind poisoned water sources, flooded lands and sacred sites, and caused a range of health problems.

Rio said that it was aware of the "deterioration of mining infrastructure at the site and surrounding areas, and claims of resulting adverse environmental and social, including human rights, impacts," despite not having had staff at the mine since 1990.

While global miners have not been forced to account for mines they operated in the past, or those they inherited, they have come under increased pressure from shareholders in the past few years to ensure high standards of responsible mining.The Bougainville mine - Bougainville Copper Ltd - is part listed on the Australian stock market and part-owned both by the Bougainville and PNG governments .

Bougainville, which held an election last week, is in talks with the Papua New Guinea government over its independence.

(Reporting by Melanie Burton. Editing by Jane Merriman)
Native American women shape how museums frame Indigenous culture

Understanding women’s roles in Indigenous society can help draw a line from the past to the present. An exhibition in Chicago features the contributions of Crow, or Apsáalooke, women and proclaims: We are still here.


Courtesy of the Field Museum
“Wherein Lies the Beauty of Life,” by contemporary artist Ben Pease, portrays an Apsáalooke woman in a traditional dress covered with elk teeth, holding her baby. Mr. Pease uses flowers to represent divinity and beauty.


September 25, 2020

By Richard Mertens Correspondent
CHICAGO

Growing up on the Crow reservation in Montana, Nina Sanders learned some of her most valuable lessons not in school, where the textbooks were silent on her people and she was discouraged from speaking her native language, but at home with her grandmother and great-grandmother, listening to their stories and “tearing apart sinews, washing clothes outside, picking berries.”

Now Ms. Sanders celebrates the contributions of Crow, or Apsáalooke (Ahp-SAH-luh-guh), women in a major exhibition at Chicago’s Field Museum. “Apsáalooke Women and Warriors” paints a vivid picture of Apsáalooke history and culture, drawing on the Field’s extensive collections of Indigenous objects, including 19th-century ceremonial war shields, as well as on the work of contemporary artists, like rapper and fancy dancer Supaman. The result is rich and wide-ranging and proclaims unmistakably: We are still here.

Museums are increasingly turning to Indigenous peoples to represent themselves to the world, a movement that Ms. Sanders and others call the “decolonizing” of American museums. What sets Ms. Sanders’ exhibition apart is its focus on women, portraying them as keepers of culture and celebrating their devotion to family, clan, and homeland.


“The women in my community are incredibly resilient, beautiful human beings who have managed to keep our community together in moments of devastation,” says Ms. Sanders, a guest curator at the Field and the first Native American to curate an exhibition there. “They just shine.”

Richard Mertens
Guest curator Nina Sanders (right) and one of her collaborators, JoRee LaFrance, parade down a street near the University of Chicago to celebrate the opening of a new exhibit at the Field Museum that pays homage to the role of women in Apsáalooke history and culture, March 12, 2020.

“Apsáalooke Women and Warriors,” open until July 18, 2021, and expected to travel after that, tells about the Apsáalooke through their own eyes and their own stories, beginning with their creation from the sea and continuing through their migration to the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains and eventual settlement on a reservation south of the Yellowstone River. The exhibition uses examples of Apsáalooke artistry to suggest how traditional beliefs and values have persisted and endure today. It shows the Apsáalooke reaching back to old ways of life and reinventing them in new circumstances and a new time.

The exhibition also reflects a transformation in museum practice and representation of Indigenous Americans that dates to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. That act, itself a product of decades of activism, led to the return of remains and sacred objects and a new era of collaboration between museums and Indigenous peoples. It also inspired a shift away from portraying Native Americans as a vanished people toward emphasizing their contemporary culture.

The focus on women is more recent. Among the inspirations for Ms. Sanders’ exhibits were not only her childhood memories but also a recent, groundbreaking exhibition about Indigenous women artists, called “Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists,” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Novelist Louise Erdrich said of that: “At long, long last, after centuries of erasure, Hearts of Our People celebrates the fiercely loving genius of Indigenous women.”

Paying more attention to women has highlighted underappreciated aspects of Native American culture, including the importance of communal ties, says Amanda Cobb-Greetham, a member of the Chickasaw tribe and director of the Native Nations Center at the University of Oklahoma. Ms. Cobb-Greetham, who is also a trustee of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, contrasts the idea of “repatriation”– returning Native remains and sacred objects to the tribes from which they were taken – with “rematriation,” or the restoration and reassertion of core cultural values.

“It redefines how we understand leadership, or significant achievement, and what values we want to carry forward,” she says. “That may or may not be military leader or government official. It may be something entirely different.”

John Weinstein/Courtesy of the Field Museum
The “Apsáalooke Women and Warriors” exhibition opened at the Field Museum in Chicago in March 2020 and runs until July 18, 2021. In it, rawhide war shields are displayed beneath giant images of women “to symbolically care for these shields,” an exhibition note explains.


One of the women portrayed in the Field exhibition is Sharon Stewart Peregoy, an Apsáalooke elder and Montana state representative. Though most Apsáalooke leaders have been men, including those in elected positions today, Ms. Stewart Peregoy says women have played a central role in helping the Apsáalooke endure decades of dramatic and often painful change.


“Through the transitions, especially with Native women and Crow women,” she says, “there was a need for everyone – and still today – to pull together, to participate, and with the ending of nomadic life and making the change to being put on the reservation, to be able to undergird our men, our warriors, quietly, not so quietly in some ways, but to get them to have hope again. That way of life died. But the woman says no, we can inspire to be more.”

Courtesy of the Field Museum
A photograph of Apsáalooke woman Jordynn Paz by Adam Sings In The Timber. The exhibition at the Field Museum portrays women as keepers of culture and celebrates their devotion to family, clan, and homeland.

Ben Pease is an Apsáalooke artist who contributed paintings and other works to the exhibition, including an oil painting that shows a procession of women on horseback, each wearing a gold halo. “We do believe as Apsáalooke people that women are holy and sacred beings,” Mr. Pease says. “They have the ability to give life and save culture and perpetuate culture into the future.”


Mr. Pease grew up in Lodge Grass, Montana, reared by “mothers and aunts and grandmothers,” he says.

“I learned the strength of women early on, and the role they play. In an underresourced and underrepresented community, they lead and are the great leaders to help us step into the future – but also to preserve the past, to be keepers of medicine and knowledge.”

The Field exhibition portrays the Apsáalooke as matriarchal and egalitarian. In one of the tribe’s stories, man and woman are created at the same moment. Rawhide war shields, decorated with owl feathers and dried bird heads, are displayed beneath giant images of women “to symbolically care for these shields,” a note says.


And yet beyond this, Ms. Sanders and her Apsáalooke collaborators invite viewers to reimagine what it means to be a warrior today and to perform the acts of bravery that traditionally distinguished the greatest Apsáalooke fighters. They pay homage to past warriors and leaders like Plenty Coups, Spotted Tail, and Joe Medicine Crow, an author and decorated veteran of World War II. But they also celebrate women – and men – who have become scholars, artists, and teachers.

“Nina tries to present a contemporary interpretation of what a warrior is,” says Ms. Stewart Peregoy. “That’s the idea – to get our young people to reawaken to their Native self, to their Crow self, and to what they can aspire to.”

John Weinstein/Courtesy of The Field Museum
A war shield made and owned by Crazy Sister-in-Law. This war shield is made of buffalo hide, parts of a burrowing owl, and natural earth clay pigments. Crazy Sister-in-Law was a male warrior and one of the most respected leaders of his time during the early 1800s.

“Apsáalooke Women and Warriors” opened in Chicago in March with a gesture to the past: a traditional Crow parade in which scores of Apsáalooke visitors, mostly women, walked in a line down city streets, some on horseback, and many more on foot, to the accompaniment of Apsáalooke singing and drumming. Ms. Sanders’ grandmother, Margo Real Bird, was among them. At a ceremony afterward, the pair stood arm-in-arm, a reminder of the bonds between past and present that Ms. Sanders wants to honor.

“It’s love,” she says. “It’s what transmits culture across time.”

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The Sudbury model: How one of the world’s major polluters went green

Volunteers have worked for decades in Sudbury, Ontario, to restore the land in the once-polluted mining town. They say their work holds lessons for breaking the endless cycle of conflict between industry and environmentalists.


Laura Cluthé
Houses line a street in Sudbury, Ontario, where they can see the Superstack, a symbol of the city’s gritty past that is being replaced with two smaller stacks.


September 24, 2020



By Sara Miller Llana Staff writer
@sarallana

GREATER SUDBURY, ONTARIO

When the Superstack was constructed in 1972, it was the tallest structure in Canada – and the tallest smokestack in the world. At 1,250 feet, it’s visible from every vantage point in the area. It can be seen from the bustling streets of downtown to the quiet cul-de-sacs of residential neighborhoods. It looms large in the distance from highways that feed into a city that is home to one of the largest mining complexes in the world.

Built by Canadian company Inco before it was purchased by Vale, the Superstack has long stood as a reminder of the environmental devastation that mining wrought here. But this year the chimney is being fully decommissioned.

Residents of Sudbury harbor mixed feelings about the Superstack. Some see it as a memorial to their rise as a center of nickel and copper mining globally. Others see it simply as a familiar landmark that signals they are home. Gisele Lavigne lives in the Copper Cliff neighborhood at the Superstack’s base. She spends her evenings looking at the towering structure from her yard, and likes it when the stack disappears behind a heavy fog. “And when it rains, you’ll see half a stack, depending on which way the wind blows,” says her partner, John Leach, who works in the mining industry doing sand and high-pressure water blasting.


Others see the Superstack as a relic of an era of polluting that doesn’t fit with the current ethos of Sudbury. One leading scientist here, John Gunn, believes the concrete shell should be “blown up.”

Whether or not the structure remains a fixture on the skyline when it’s taken out of operation, it tells a powerful tale of renewal. The stack was built as part of an industrial complex that denuded the land here of any kind of vegetation, leaving blackened rocks and lakes without fish. The landscape drew comparisons to moonscapes and barren Martian worlds. At one time the smelters in Sudbury were the largest point source of sulfur dioxide in the world.

Laura Cluthé
“When one speaks of the Sudbury story, it somehow seems local and isolated, and it’s not local and isolated. It’s an example of what we need to modify in order to be able to live alongside a thriving environment.” – David Pearson, an earth scientist who has been instrumental in the city’s green revival

It got so bad that scientists, politicians, industry officials, and the community finally came together to halt the pollution, replant the trees, and restock the lakes. It has been 40 years of toil and triumph, and the story is not over yet. But today Sudbury enjoys some of the cleanest air quality in Ontario. Residents swim and fish in the 330 lakes inside the city’s boundaries. And those here say the community of 165,000, at the gateway of northern Ontario, offers a lesson in how to break the cycle of conflict that the current climate crisis often creates, pitting industry against the environment.

“That’s what we need to take from the Sudbury story, and we need to apply it to today,” says David Pearson, an earth scientist and driving force in turning around Sudbury.

“When one speaks of the Sudbury story,” he says, “it somehow seems local and isolated, and it’s not local and isolated. It’s an example of what we need to modify in order to be able to live alongside a thriving environment.”

***

This area was once called Ste. Anne of the Pines for the old-growth forest that flourished here. Later, after the logging industry moved in, lumber harvested from the prized trees was shipped far and wide – including to Chicago to help rebuild after the Great Fire of 1871.


Environmental devastation accelerated after the 1880s when metal deposits were found along a crater formed by a prehistoric meteorite impact. The deposits, discovered during the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, represented one of the largest concentrations of sulfide ore in the world. The metals forged in huge foundries here were used to build armaments during both world wars. Early methods of roasting the ore polluted the landscape locally, while later smelting techniques expanded the damage regionally. Dr. Pearson, who arrived from a coal mining town in northern England, remembers distinctly how bad the air smelled one day in 1969. “It was perhaps humid, and [the plume] came down to ground level,” he says. “And I parked in the parking lot, and I had to run in order to be able to hold my breath long enough to get into a building because the smell of the sulfur dioxide was so powerful even in my car. ... I had never experienced anything nearly as penetrating a pollution as this.”

Laura Cluthé
“Looking up and seeing a green patch emerging from the dead earth was nothing short of a miracle.” – Dave Courtemanche, recalling how he and his fifth grade classmates, in 1975, got grass to grow in a barren part of the Sudbury landscape as a school experiment.

For a child in Sudbury back then, fun didn’t involve climbing trees or playing hide-and-seek in the forest. Young people like Dave Courtemanche, who went on to become mayor, clambered over rocks. There was no greenery to be found in his neighborhood or at his school, which directly faced the mining slags. One day in 1975, a university professor came to Dave’s fifth grade class to propose an experiment: Let’s see if we can get grass to sprout in the barren landscape.

On a hillside, he and classmates carved out an acre of land and limed and fertilized it. As tufts of grass began to poke through, he recalls a feeling that might be comparable to children of the tropics seeing their first snowflakes. “Looking up and seeing a green patch emerging from the dead earth was nothing short of a miracle,” he says from that old school building today, which looks out onto woods and grassy fields. Mr. Courtemanche was unwittingly among the first volunteers in one of the largest regreening efforts in Canadian history.

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Sudbury was a company town. At its peak, 20,000 miners worked underground – the ebbs and flows of the city defined by worker shifts. No one dared speak out against the industry.


But then Laurentian University was established in 1960. “Nobody was going to say anything against the company, essentially,” says Peter Beckett, an ecologist at the university and chair of the city’s advisory panel on regreening. “And so the university was kind of the first independent thing in the town, and people started asking questions: ‘Can one do anything about the landscape?’”

As it turns out, they could. Biologists at both the university and at Inco had been experimenting with regreening, first potting plants and then moving to plots outside. By 1975, the “Sudbury recipe” was created – the basis for a massive liming project that would neutralize the soil and allow for replanting.

Laura Cluthé
The old Creighton nickel mine, which was closed in the 1980s, houses an underground research facility where scientists study neutrinos.

The effort coincided with a downturn in the nickel industry and worries on the part of local politicians that the town wasn’t going to survive unless it reinvented itself. Regreening became a communitywide endeavor. Unemployed miners and student volunteers alike wielded lime sacks and scattered seed. Dr. Beckett remembers the first year in 1978, when the community landscapers would scour their Garden of Eden for the first shoots. “After the Aug. 15 [heavy rains] that first year, every member of the committee was out every day looking constantly at the same area to see if any green fuzz was coming up,” he says. “And then one day, about a week later, everybody just shouted, ‘eureka,’ just like the Greeks.”

On a hillside overlooking Kelly Lake, Dr. Beckett and Graeme Spiers, another scientist from Laurentian University, show how the landscape would have looked if no replanting had taken place. They point to a sickly birch tree surrounded by a few mounds of metal-tolerant hair grass.


Nearby stands a lush forest. It’s one of the replanted parcels. Overall, locals have created a forest of about 10 million trees and shrubs. Since 2010 they have focused on replanting native species, about 80 different types, and they are working on measuring carbon capture that will help the city meet its goals to be carbon neutral by 2050. After 40 years and $33.5 million (Canadian; U.S.$25.4 million), they are about halfway through the recovery of 200,000 acres of land.

Yet the effort is about more than fixing a lost landscape. “If you improve the environment, you attract people and suddenly your community starts feeling better about itself,” says Dr. Spiers.

The two have traveled the world delivering that message – to Australia and South Africa, Peru and Poland, Chile and China. Their roadshow is called “Sudbury, 40+ Years of Healing.”

Laura Cluthé
“If you improve the environment, you attract people and suddenly your community starts feeling better about itself.” – Graeme Spiers, a scientist from Laurentian University in Sudbury (left) with Peter Beckett, a Laurentian ecologist

***


None of this would have been possible without tough regulations, though. When the Superstack was built, mining’s motto for the era was “Dilution is the solution to pollution.” New technology and evolving processes helped reduce emissions in Greater Sudbury, but the Superstack dispersed them further afield, to neighboring provinces, and as far as the United States and Greenland. It essentially turned a local problem into an international one.


Sudbury’s reputation was already suffering. In 1971 and 1972, NASA sent astronauts to the city ahead of the Apollo moon missions to study the geology of the crater basin. It was the second-largest impact crater in the world, and they wanted to prepare for similar sites they might see on the moon.

But instead of lauding Sudbury as a lunar training ground, the press came up with another moniker for the city: a moonscape. The city’s image took a severe hit.


It didn’t help that emissions from the Sudbury smelters had affected an estimated 7,000 lakes in the region. Declining populations of lake trout, which thrive in Canada’s cold, clear northern waters, became a symbol of the environmental degradation, similar to what the polar bear is today for a warming Arctic.

Dr. Gunn, director of the Vale Living With Lakes Centre in Sudbury, recalls attending his first international science conference in Ithaca, New York, in 1980 and learning that his peers were using the name Sudbury as a unit of pollution – “How many ‘Sudburys’ does your country represent?” He says he has since devoted his entire career to make the term Sudbury known as a “unit of restoration.”

Sudbury’s pollution even sullied relations between the U.S. and Canada, as acid rain emerged as a significant environmental issue. “I traveled to Washington, New York City, and a couple of other places in the United States and tried to persuade them to cut their emissions. And when I would go down to lecture them on their problems, the first word that would come out was Inco,” says Jim Bradley, who was Ontario’s environmental minister at the time and grew up in Sudbury. “Inco was the largest single emitter of sulfur dioxide in North America at the time.”

Laura Cluthé
The “Under ground,” a mural that is part of a campaign by artists in Sudbury to beautify buildings, celebrates women who worked in local mines.

So the provincial government developed the Countdown Acid Rain program, which forced Inco and other major polluters in 1985 to cut emissions by more than 60% in under a decade. The companies balked at first. But Mr. Bradley remembers the exact moment he knew they had changed.


“Three years later, they came down to Toronto and had a press conference, with the word Inco in green,” he says. “And there they announced that they would not only be complying with the regulation that we were forcing on them, but that they would be exceeding the provisions of it and that they would be making a profit of 19% on one aspect of it and 6% on another aspect.”

Part of the shift was driven by the changing politics of the environment. The Superstack had become a rallying point for activists in both North America and Europe. “The [company] didn’t want a dirty reputation,” says Dr. Gunn. “Senior executives admitted that their kids gave them [trouble] at home.”

Today, Dr. Gunn stands at the edge of Silver Lake, which he once documented in a book as being one of the most acid- and metal-contaminated bodies of water in the world. Kids are jumping off rocks. A dog paddles furiously in the water.


The whole cleanup, local organizers say, is a testament to how the community came together. “There’s no question, of course there was finger-pointing, but it was not the dominant mood at the time,” says Dr. Pearson, the earth scientist. “You have to remember that the city was very defensive, very self-conscious. ... So when there were glimmers of an opportunity to repair the landscape and improve the image of the community, people got together without pointing fingers. It was a ‘let’s get on with this’ kind of attitude.”

Everyone, young and old, got involved. “It was such a powerful experience for our children because now they were part of the solution,” says Mr. Courtemanche. “I would argue that you can’t be part of the solution until you see yourself as part of the problem. So we were all part of the problem here. We let the landscape perpetuate the way it was until folks realized they could come together and effect phenomenal change.”

Laura Cluthé
Canada’s first transcontinental railway runs through downtown Sudbury. Workers discovered vast nickel deposits in the area when the rail line was being built in the 1880s, spawning a thriving mining industry.

That, he believes, is a lesson urgently needed today. “This idea that you have to take sides, that these types of major issues are political and polarizing, I think is fundamentally wrong. People just need to show up and say, ‘I’m going to be part of the solution.’ And quite frankly, I think the world needs more Sudburys if we’re going to tackle some of these major issues facing society, whether we’re talking about climate change or COVID.”

***


Sudbury is still very much a mining town. There are 7 to 11 mines operating at any given time, says Jennifer Beaudry, the senior manager at Dynamic Earth, a mining museum. It’s just that mining looks very different than it once did.

The Superstack is part of that evolution. The mining company Vale finished the final steps to take it out of service in July, replacing the towering structure with two smaller stacks that require far less energy to operate and will reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the smelter by approximately 40%. The move is symbolic of how technology is advancing, and the city has become a research hub for new mining techniques.

“It’s not shovels and pickaxes [anymore],” says Ms. Beaudry.

The narrative is not unblemished, though. Some locals think the mining companies, for all the profits they dug out of the ground here, should have done more – earlier – to help both workers and the town.

Laura Cluthé
Young people in Sudbury, Ontario, jump off rocks into Silver Lake, once one of the most polluted bodies of water in the world.

Yet the overwhelming feeling seems to be one of pride in the city’s restoration. In 2015, Canada’s statistics agency polled urbanites nationwide and found Sudbury’s residents to be the happiest in the country. Tourists no longer come to see the slurry in the city’s big smelters run like hot lava. Instead they head to Dynamic Earth to go on an underground tour, or visit Science North, the city’s renowned science museum. More students are flocking here, too.

“No, this is not a mining town, at least not anymore,” says Vinay Balineni, a student from India who is working on a business degree.

Pride in the city’s new environmental ethos is even reflected in local art. Muralists paint building facades with scenes that celebrate natural resources. “There’s been not just transformation of the environment but transformation of the mentality of why it’s important to create opportunities for environmental consciousness and conservation,” says Johanna Westby, a muralist and graphic designer whose works depict lakes, trees, water, and birds.

Perhaps more important for the future, a new generation of environmental activists is taking root in Sudbury. Jane Walker, Maggie Fu, and Sophia Mathur epitomize the trend. The three teens, who just started eighth grade, recently participated in virtual climate training with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.

Sophia is often called Canada’s first climate striker, joining Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg and youths around the world in skipping classes every Friday to demonstrate on behalf of the environment. She is also the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the Ontario provincial government for weakening its climate targets. The 13-year-old infuses her words with passion, eloquently talking about the intersection of social and climate justice.


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“I think Sudbury’s regreening showed everyone [here], and the world, that with our community working together, we can make a difference,” she says.

It’s a story of inspiration the three teens hold close to them while they carry out their strikes, which they do virtually these days because of the pandemic. Says Jane: “If we can do all this [transformation] in the community, well, then we can do anything to try and help our environment.”

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Tracking down the origins of ‘witch hunt’

I was hearing “witch hunt” so often that a few weeks ago I experienced semantic satiation, in which repetition causes a phrase to lose meaning and be perceived as nothing but empty sounds.


Evan Vucci/AP
President Trump speaks to reporters about border security in the briefing room of the White House, Jan. 3, 2019, in Washington. Mr. Trump has repeatedly used the phrase "witch hunt," but where did it originate?



January 10, 2019

By Melissa Mohr

President Trump tweeted about a witch hunt more than a hundred times last year. It is debated in the news and across social media: Is the Russia investigation a witch hunt or is it not a witch hunt? I was hearing “witch hunt” so often that a few weeks ago I experienced semantic satiation, in which repetition causes a phrase to lose meaning and be perceived as nothing but empty sounds. Then I began to wonder, what is Mr. Trump actually saying when he uses those words?

Obviously, the term refers to real, historical hunts for witches that occurred sporadically across Europe and later in America from the 15th to 18th centuries. Like wildfires, anxieties about witches would flare up in this period, following a rough pattern. Misfortunes would happen in a village, and some women on the fringes of society – an old herbalist who lived alone; in Salem, Mass., the slave Tituba – would be accused of causing them through magic. These women would be imprisoned, sometimes tortured, and asked to name their accomplices. Sometimes they could prove their innocence by undergoing a “trial by ordeal” – being thrown into a pond to see if they sank (innocent) or floated (guilty) – but often they were executed without opportunity to refute the charges against them.

The self-proclaimed witchfinder general of England, Matthew Hopkins, was responsible for one of the largest witch hunts, executing more than 300 suspects in the 1640s. He preferred to say that he “discovered” witches, however, and witch hunt only became the term of choice in the late 19th century.


George Orwell, author of “1984,” was one of the first to use the term metaphorically: In the 1930s, he called “trumped up accusations” by one group of communists against another a witch hunt. The idea of political witch hunts spread quickly in the 1950s. Investigations by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and others to discover secret communists in the US government, in Hollywood, and at universities were frequently denounced as witch hunts. Use of the term implied that the fear of communism in the United States was in fact hysterical and overblown, and that, like alleged witches in the past, suspected communists were unjustly accused, unable to defend themselves fully, and forced under great pressure to reveal the identities of others.

Is the Russia investigation a witch hunt? Is the metaphor appropriate? In a sense it doesn’t matter. Sometimes hearing words over and over doesn’t turn them into meaningless syllables, as with semantic satiation. Instead, it makes them seem true, a phenomenon known as “the illusory truth effect.” The more the president repeats “witch hunt,” the more likely it sounds, whatever the facts.
 Christianity and the Global Mystical Societies
September 25, 2020




By Tunji Olaopa NIGERIA

It should be clear to my readers by now, that my dimensioned exploration of Christianity in this series is a journey propelled by an intellectual search for meaning on defining issues that tend to create contention in conversations on the Christian faith and the growth of the Church of Christ. And this had entailed exploring domains of knowledge that ordinarily will be considered weird, and this contribution is one of such. And so, I find myself contending with the fact that, at its core, Christianity is a mystical religion. It indeed embodies several mystical elements that gives it an aura of curiosity and awe. It was also one of the bases for its persecution in time past. It was difficult, for instance, for many non-adherents to come to terms with the idea of the trinity, of the three-in-one God, or of the mystery of salvation. It was even more baffling to contemplate the idea of the Holy Communion and what it signifies. The Bible records, in Matthew chapter 26, and verse 26, Jesus instructed to eat the bread and drink the wine as indicators of his body and his blood. Catholics, in taking the Eucharist, believe that the bread and the wine signify the literal body and blood of Christ; the water and wine are transubstantiated when eaten into the body and blood of Jesus.

One can imagine the shock-effect of this dogma on a cultural context like the ancient Roman society. Under Emperor Diocletian and Galerius, Christians faced enormous persecution, especially during the Great Persecution of 303, when they were accused of cannibalism which the belief in the Eucharist generated. Christianity’s relationship with mysticism and the mystical experience began with Catholicism. One of the sources of the mystical union with God is in the supposed transformation of the Eucharist into the body and the blood of Christ. The mystical is so easy to relate to any religion, given the dynamics of hidden rituals and the relation with the mysterious which is what makes religion essentially what it is. Scriptures, for instance, have often been seen as not having literal meanings. When the Bible says, in Deuteronomy 29:29, that “secret things belong to God,” it alludes to the mystical dimension of scriptures that must be ferret out for understanding.


The Gnostics, of the first century AD, emphasized gnosis—or personal spiritual knowledge and experience of the Divine, over tradition and authority of the Church. This rendering of the idea of the mystical relationship with God brings Christianity very close to Greek philosophy, and especially the emergence and consolidation of Neoplatonism, and the understanding of the beauty of the human contemplation of the Logos or the Word. This is the foundation of the Gospel according to John: In the beginning was the Word. From Clement of Alexandria and his mystical theology, it was a short distance to the development of monasticism and asceticism, the experience in the desert that is supposed to mark a great turning point in the soul’s union with God through the defeat of the self’s demons. While the pre-13th century Christian mysticism denoted Christ as the medium in the union between God and the soul, the 13th century mystical writings, especially of Meister Eckhart, obviated the need for such a medium—God and the soul becomes indistinguishably one in union. This mysticism declared irrelevant the significance of religious life and practices, and rather advocated a radical aloofness that is a precursor to achieving the presence of God.

It is easy to see how Eckhart’s mysticism would serve as heretical to the teaching of the church about the connection between the sacraments the church offers, and salvation. Meister Eckhart was therefore condemned by the Pope in 1329. And the 14th century was the beginning of the Church’s acute reaction, through the Council of Vienne, against mysticism. But by the twentieth century, Christianity’s connection with the mystical has gone beyond the theological to the historical, with regard to several mystical societies that were, rightly or wrongly, regarded as having some intimate relationship with Christianity. Almost everyone is familiar with the Reformed Ogboni Fraternity (ROF) in Nigeria, and the Rosicrucian Order in the West. Both are in some sense connected or seek to be connected with Christianity as a defining brand. Indeed, both emerged from some understanding of what Christianity is and how it could be reformed or integrated with some theological or cultural beliefs. The Ogboni was a renowned traditional secret society in the traditional Yoruba society, and yet the ROF chose that framework as the core of its rehabilitation of African Christianity.

The case of Rosicrucianism is even more instructive. It emerged, in the 17th century, around the figure of a mystic philosopher and doctor, Christian Rosenkreuz (where the Order derived its name, Rosy-cross), and his knowledge of an esoteric order and knowledge, derived from Christian mysticism and even the Judaic Kabbalah. The Rosicrucians believed that the mysteries are what Jesus referred to in Matthew chapter 13 and verse 11 (“…it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven”). Similar to the vision, in Revelation, about the twenty-four elders kneeling before the throne of God, one of the iterations of the vision behind Rosicrucianism is that of twelve enlightened and exalted beings that surround a thirteenth who is Rosenkreuz. The mission of these beings, as well as all those who would accept the Order and its message, is to reform the entire mankind through the unveiling of the inner spiritual capacities which will allow humans to live in altruism.

However, the consciousness of these mystical societies was awakened most shockingly by Dan Brown, and his popular fictions, from the Da Vinci Code to Angels and Demons. From these popular novels, the world seemed to wake up to the reality of other frightening effusion of Christianity like the Illuminati, the Opus Dei, the Freemasons, and the Knights Templar. All these societies are often represented as being the secret custodians of gnostic knowledge about Christianity or certain hidden mysteries in the word of God. And around them have sprung up all manners of conspiracy theories around, for instance, the Holy Grail, the shroud that wrapped Jesus after his death, or a bit of the cross). Their relationship with Christianity is however caught in the conflicting dynamics of history and speculation that is very difficult to unravel.

One fundamental fact about these societies and orders is that they were generated by presumed or real connectedness with Christianity as grand and compelling growing brand. Most of them emerged by reason of historical circumstances or theological dynamics. The Knight Templars, for instance, came into existence mainly as a result of the Crusades which popes and kings in Europe convoke between the 11th and the 13th centuries. The objective of the Crusades was to dislodge Islam from the Holy Land. By the end of the fourteenth century, the Templars’ reputation as a monastic order and a military wing was at an end. While Pope Clement revoked its recognition by the Catholic Church in 1312, it was brutally suppressed by King Philip IV of France. Part of King Philip’s excuse in suppressing the Templars has to do with their secret initiation ceremony, and the distrust it bred. And this led to further conspiracy as to its ancient ties with the establishment of Freemasonry. The same can be said about the Opus Dei. Founded by Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, a Catholic priest, Opus Dei came into existence after the priest claimed to have seen a vision of “opus dei” (or “Work of God”). It grew substantially after it received papal commendation in 1947 and 1950. However, despite the growth and strength of the Order, its papal approval and the canonization of Escriva, Opus Dei has not been able to escape the speculation about its mystical antecedents, and the danger it poses to the Church. Again, its secret recruitment dynamics fueled the rumor about its cult status.

Perhaps the most famous of all the global mystical societies is the Illuminati. Unlike the other societies, the Illuminati is the one famous group without a fundamental connection to the Church but to Christianity. However, like others, from the Reformed Ogboni Fraternity to the Opus Dei, the organizational dynamics of the Illuminati is equally shrouded in secrecy. Essentially, like the others too, the original Illuminati recruited Christians and specifically excluded Jews and pagans. Founded in May, 1776 in Bavaria by Adam Weishaupt (hence the society’s original name of the Bavarian Illuminati), the Illuminati’s original objective, paradoxically, was meant to serve the purpose of pushing the boundaries of the Enlightenment ideals, and standing against superstitions, injustices, clerical excesses. Weishaupt was a professor at a university run by Jesuits who waged war against non-clerical members of staff. This was one of his motivations for forming the group. The key to understanding the organizational framework of the Iluminati lies in the fact that Weishaupt modeled his own society on the ranking and grading systems employed by the Freemasons, considered to be the largest secret society in the world. Both are significantly anticlerical, and even though both have been persecuted by the Church, they both draw on Christians and Christian values as major parts of their frameworks.

The critical question this reflection instigates is: why was it possible for Christianity to generate so much mystical and secret societies that flourished under its umbrella or took up its values and ethos (before some were actively suppressed)? One immediate answer, as we hinted at the beginning, is that Christianity itself lends itself to mystical interpretations of its mysteries. Christianity itself is founded on a fundamental dynamic of relationship between humans and God, the ultimate mystery. And this divine relationship is further made complex by series of mysteries, dogmas and sacraments that are meant to facilitate the capacity of humans to achieve oneness with God. We can then conclude that while there is a specific essence of Christianity—a set of minimum spiritual and dogmatic imperatives—no one can adequately monitor the heretical and fundamentalist interpretations that they could be subjected to. The point remains that humans can go to any extent to find God.

*Prof. Tunji Olaopa is a retired Federal Permanent Secretary & Directing Staff, National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), Kuru, Jos (tolaopa2003@gmail.com tolaopa@isgpp.com.ng)

NOW YOU UNDERSTAND WHY CONSPIRACY THEORIES ARE THE NORM IN NIGERIA AND WEST AFRICA

 

'Waking up to our power': witchcraft gets political

This article is more than 10 months old

One eve of Witchfest event, radicals say they believe magic and occult are natural extensions of feminism and eco activism

Grace Gottardello, 27, is a self-described witch. Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi/The Guardian
Aamna Mohdin

The south London borough of Croydon, often derided as the capital’s most unloved suburb, is the birthplace of dubstep and London’s modern tram network. But the area now lays claim to a new title: the UK’s witch capital.

On Saturday, about 4,000 pagans and witches will descend on Croydon to delve further into the occult. While many are simply drawn to the aesthetics of being a witch, there are a growing number of radicals in the country who believe witchcraft and magic are natural extensions of their feminist and environmental activism.

Witchfest, organised by Children of Artemis, a membership organisation open to witches and pagans, will include workshops on finding the new forest coven, moon magic, and wands. Organisers claim it is the largest witchcraft festival in the world.

The event comes as witches emerge from broom closets across the UK to take over the popular imagination. As well as the reboot of cult TV shows such as Sabrina, the Teenage Witch (remade as the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina for Netflix) and Charmed, there are witches making podcasts and sharing tips under the hashtag #witchesofinstagram, which boasts more than 3m posts. And so many books have been written that Publishers Weekly has declared a “season of the witch”.

Activists have marched with placards that call on people to “hex the patriarchy”; there is a subgroup of Extinction Rebellion for druids, witches and pagans; and self-defence classes are offered to help witches protect their minds, bodies and souls.

Ayesha Tan-Jones, 26, who cofounded Shadow Sistxrs Fight Club as a self-defence class for female, non-binary, and queer witches, said there is something inherently political in describing yourself as a witch.

“It’s about taking control of your power and taking control of owning your destiny, and owning your magic. We live in a society that is constantly bombarding us with thoughts that we are not good enough or that we need a material thing.

“In a way, we’ve lost our magic and this new awakening is about us waking up to our power. And it’s an urgent time to wake up.”

Melissa Joan Hart as Sabrina, the Teenage Witch (1996-2003). Photograph: WB/Everett/Rex

Combining Brazilian jujitsu with magical and medicinal herbalism, past classes have made herbal pepper spray, protection amulets and keyrings.

Tan-Jones admits this might appear strange to the uninitiated. “We didn’t know that there was someone doing counselling in the building we were having a class in and he kept coming round and staring at us. He must have been thinking ‘what are you doing’?’”

Christina Oakley Harrington, proprietor of Treadwell’s, a bookshop in London that specialises in the occult, said: “People who get interested in witchcraft are not the most insecure and anxious people, their desire to learn magic is very much tied up with their feeling that the world is in need of a desperate change.”

For these activists, the identity of the witch is “an empowering cloak” that gives them the power and strength to take a stand, Harrington added.

Merlyn Hern, a spokesman for Children of Artemis, said people were drawn to Wicca and witchcraft because it is more personal than what is offered by mainstream religion.

“It is more about the individual than, say, a prayer, which is very hands-off. You pray to a higher authority to make something happen, whereas a spell is totally personal and down to the individual to make sure it’s right.”

Hern said there was also a greater diversity of people embracing witchcraft. Back in the 2000s, Witchfest was largely attended by white Europeans, but the demographic has shifted in recent years. “It’s people who are more second or third or fourth generation who are breaking away,” Hern said.

Grace Gottardello, who describes herself as a “community witch,” said for people of colour, witchcraft was just as much about reconnecting with their ancestral roots and building a community as it was about reclaiming power.

Gottardello, who moved to the UK when she was 18, likens her childhood in northern Italy as a bit like Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. She learned about herbalism, new moon ceremonies and tarot reading from her aunts.

But apart from these familial rituals, Gottardello describes growing up in her village as a black woman as largely an isolating and painful experience. The town was incredibly racist, she said, and the word witch was not ever really spoken aloud.

It was only when she lived in the UK that she was able to build a community and reconnect with herself. “I was recovering my identity, recovering my connection to my mum’s tradition and recovering my blackness.

“Witchcraft is much more than tarot challenges and astrology memes. Don’t get me wrong, I love astrology memes, but witchcraft is also a tool for a community to protect ourselves.”