There’s no column this week, because the Sunday Herald doesn’t publish on Easter Sunday — so I’ve had a week off. There are some big developments coming soon on this site, though, and I’ve been working diligently — just not on a column.
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I recently interviewed David Orton, the noted deep ecology philosopher. This week’s Sunday Herald column was supposed to be about David, but I made the mistake of starting with his account of participating in a “Council of All Beings” — where he played the role of a coyote – and somehow the idea of the Council itself took over the column.
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I’ve never participated in a Council of All Beings. Not yet.
Councils of All Beings were designed by proponents of “deep ecology” to give people a direct emotional experience of their profound connection with the rest of the natural world. Deep ecology holds that the world was not made for human exploitation, that all its features have intrinsic value, and that our most urgent task is to re-discover our proper place among the life-forms that share this green and spinning planet.
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In this Canadian federal election, the major parties have connived with the national broadcasters to prevent the inclusion of Green Party leader Elizabeth May in the televised “debates” that have become such an important feature of modern elections. The official fiction is that because the Greens have no seats in Parliament, they are not a national party – though they are running candidates in every riding, and won 7% of the vote — nearly a million votes — in the last election.
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We already have plenty of reasons to send the Harper government packing. Its policies on crime, war, energy and the environment would make a brontosaurus blush. While preaching austerity to its citizens, it blows billions on planes, prisons and corporate handouts.
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In 1965, when I was a graduate student in England, my young family and I rented a “maisonette” in north London from a young anthropologist and his family. Vernon Reynolds had lived in Uganda observing chimpanzees, and he had just published a book called Budongo: A Forest and its Chimpanzees.
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