Dearest Regenerative School Community,
It is with a heavy heart that we write today’s newsletter. There is so much going on. Too much, really. So much suffering, so much pain, so much grief. So much persecution and harm. So much disinformation, destruction, and damage. Too much loss. Too much.
We can’t seem to think straight. We have been lighting candles for all of humanity. Sending ease and peace, safety and refuge to as many corners as we can reach. To our friends in Afghanistan reeling from the latest earthquake, Libyans still swamped by the floods, Greeks and Hawaiians by fires. Our sisters in Türkiye, brothers in Morocco. Ukraine. Syria. Sudan. Nigeria. Ethiopia. Venezuela. Yemen. Armenians of Artsakh. Israeli and Jewish civilians. Palestinian Civilians. The list is too long. It’s too much.
It’s too much.
For five minutes of grounding wherever and however you find yourself today, we recommend this meditation video. For our promised mid-October reading recommendations, keep scrolling.
Take care of yourself.
All of our love,
The Rē Team
For those interested in knowing more about the heart-breaking, gut-wrenching situation unfolding between Israeli and Palestinian borders, we recommend The Washington Post’s The Israeli-Palestinian conflict: A Chronology. We also appreciated Isaac Chotiner’s New Yorker interview with Tareq Baconi, president of the board of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. The latest news is that Israel’s military has called for all northern Palestinians to relocate south ahead of a possible ground assault. The UN has warned this is “impossible.”
Also related, N+1 published David Klion’s essay Have We Learned Nothing? this week. If you feel like shaking your head and sighing out loud, this one is for you.The 2021 book, A Land With a People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism, has been recommended a lot this week. It is a collection of personal stories, history, poetry, and art which elevates rarely heard Palestinian and Jewish voices and visions. We want to sit with this, maybe you do too.
The New York Times, BBC News, and AP News have all thoughtfully covered the damage wrought by the latest of the Afghanistan’s six earthquakes in the last week. According to the UN, more than 90% of people killed by the quakes were women and children, as many men were out at work. Click here to read more about the gendered destruction and repercussions.
Some good news (PLEASE): Atmos’ Nic Rodway reported this week on how the Mediterranean Conservation Society (Akdeniz Koruma Derneği, AKD) is bringing life back to Türkiye’s Coast by working with local fishing communities. In “Winning the “Green Nobel Prize” for Community-Based Conservation,” Funda Kök, General Director of AKD, explains that the nonprofit use radical listening and holistic approaches to help local fishers produce and implement solutions! Click here to read on.
In IWGIA’s “Protected areas and Indigenous territories: a problematic coexistence,” René Kuppe explains how the current biodiversity crisis is not caused by the invasion of pristine natural habitats but by the destruction of culturally rich landscapes inhabited by Indigenous communities. The “expansion of protected areas” has displaced indigenous guardians, annihilated their systems of organization, and eroded their ancestral knowledge and practices. Click here for this thought-provoking piece.
Regarding September’s heatwave, we recommend Inside Climate News’ “Scientists Disagree About Drivers of September’s Global Temperature Spike, but It Has Most of Them Worried.” The graph above looks insane, Bob Berwyn breaks it down.
We smiled reading Alice Toomer-McAlpine’s “Immigrants facing gentrification in Boston speak the language of co-ops” for Co-op News. “My father was part of a co-operative in Colombia and I grew up in that system,” says Luz Zambrano, co-founder of the Cooperative Center for Development and Solidarity (CCDS). “We had education and health and everything through the co-op. My father was able to buy a house because the co-op loaned him the money for that. And so we had an incredible life growing up.” Click here to learn how Zambrano is passing opportunities forward with the help of co-op in the Northeast.
Did you know the biggest source of global waste pollution is rivers? Hungarian volunteers gather once a year for an annual “Plastic Cup competition” to collect as much waste as possible from the Tisza and other Hungarian waterways. So far, volunteers have gathered more than 330 tons (around 727,000 pounds). Click here to learn more about this incredible 10-day ecological effort.
Not a story but Green 2.0 Environmental Experts of Color Database is a cool new project that features more than 150 people of color who are experts on environmental topics in an effort to address the lack of diversity in Congressional expert testimony! Love it!
We have been loving and learning so much from Dr. Amanda Kemp’s podcast “Mother Tree Network.” In this 2022 episode with Native Artist Jennifer Folayan, Dr. Kemp and Folayan discuss Indigenous People's Day, Synchronicity, the Turtle Island Origin Story, and Holding Trauma and Joy. Click here to listen.
That’s all for this week. We will see you on Friday, October 27th with some Rē School updates and offerings.
What have you been reading? What have you been listening to? Write to us at admin@regenerativeschool.org and let us know.
Stay grounded. Be well. Deep breaths.