Circle For Original Thinking

Since tie immemorial, people have been telling stories. Storytelling has served as a way of building coherent, cohesive community. It is also a way to pass down wisdom from earlier generations for the benefit of future generations. The wisdom of storytelling could be applied to today’s ecological challenges, such as climate change. But this has not occurred often enough.

Ever since the invention of the printing press, the written word has rapidly eclipsed the voice of oral tradition— similarly, truth-telling, once the function of stories, has been largely usurped by modern science. Of course, oral storytelling has never gone away, and it continues to thrive even as it has shape-shifted into other forms, such as film, theatre, dance, hip hop, and spoken-word poetry.

When it comes to climate change, there has been a rush to rely on modern science. Science is the accepted means for predicting and controlling the weather. But the discipline of climate science has a very short history. We have been only recording daily temperatures for less than a century-and-a-half.

The oral tradition, on the other hand, has been recording changes to the climate for millennia. Virtually all cultures have flood stories that date back to the ending of the last Ice Age. Some stories date back to the Stone Age. Moreover, stories have long provided a means for living in harmony with all our relations. They teach not only by telling us what to do, but what not to do. We can learn from everyone and every creature—even if the only thing we learn is how to identify a bad example. During times of crises, the perennial wisdom of storytelling is needed more than ever. How can storytelling augment the work of climate science in understanding what is unfolding today? How can traditional stories provide the larger wisdom we need to reset our imbalance with the natural world? Join us as we explore the continuing relevance of storytelling today, with our guest storytellers Regina Ress and Valentina Ortiz.

“We are hard-wired for story. We listen to story and parts of our brain light up…”

~ Regina Ress

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“The wisdom is in the old stories. But as storytellers, we make the old new… Oral tradition is alive.”

~ Valentina Ortiz

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Glenn Aparicio Parry, PhD, of Basque, Aragon Spanish, and Jewish descent, is the author of Original Politics: Making America Sacred Again (SelectBooks, 2020) and the Nautilus award-winning Original Thinking: A Radical Revisioning of Time, Humanity, and Nature (North Atlantic Books, 2015). Parry is an educator, ecopsychologist, and political philosopher whose passion is to reform thinking and society into a coherent, cohesive, whole. The founder and past president of the SEED Institute, Parry is currently the director of a grass-roots think tank, the Circle for Original Thinking and is debuting this podcast series of the same name in conjunction with Ecology Prime. He has lived in northern New Mexico since 1994. www.originalpolitics.us

Regina Ress is a long-time resident of the fabled Greenwich Village neighborhood in New York City. Regina is an award-winning storyteller, actor, educator and author who has told stories in English and Spanish in the US, Latin America, and Europe; from schools, prisons, and parks to homeless shelters, Lincoln Center, and the White House. As an educator, she has taught at kindergartens, universities, daycare centers, nursing homes, prisons, and international storytelling conferences.  She is the recipient of National Storytelling Network’s 2003 Oracle Award for Leadership and the 2015 Oracle award for Excellence.  

As an actor, Regina has performed in national tours, regional theatre, off-Broadway, and in the all-star revival of The Women on Broadway. Regina has also been Nominated for two Carbonel Awards for acting (South Florida Theatre Critics award). Her most recent acting role was as Lettice Duffet in Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage—a role written for Maggie Smith. She is a regular contributor to the NPR affiliate WFUV-NY with her stories about New York City.  Her CD release, New York and Me: We’re in a Long Term Relationship, features stories about NY with accompaniment by musician Michael Moss; it won a 2014 Honor award from Storytelling World. 

These days she keeps busy teaching Storytelling in the Classroom and Beyond for New York University and produces the long running series, Storytelling at the Provincetown Playhouse in NYC. Regina is also on the Board of Directors of Healing Voices – Personal Stories, where she makes films to raise awareness of domestic violence. And she also finds time to be the Vice-President of the Storytellers of New Mexico.

Valentina Ortiz Pandolfi is an award-winning storyteller, musician, and writer. She received the Cenzontle de Oro prize for her storytelling and has taught storytelling workshops in many ...

The nation appears to be on the brink of civil war, if not already in it. With polarization as bad as at any time in our nation’s history, how can we stop the violence? Discussions about “law and order” ordinarily end up promoting division and triggering historical trauma. Is there a way to stop the cycle of violence and heal victims and perpetrators alike? Can the truth set us free? If so, how do we go about telling the story? And who gets to tell it?

As challenging as this time is, with the underbelly of America exposed, there is also an opportunity to see America as it really is. The first step in changing anything is to see it for what it is and then to create a new story that acknowledges the truth and envisions a better future.  

One obstacle to change is that systemic racism is not always easy to see, or understand. It is both complicated and deeply enmeshed in the American psyche. It is not a black and white issue (in more ways than one). Structural racism affects everyone, and prevents America from achieving its sacred purpose: unity in diversity. This purpose is enshrined in our Great Seal: E Pluribus Unum, “Out of the many, one”—a beautiful idea, but one that has yet to be realized.

There is some good news today. More and more people of all colors are coming together to speak out against racism. The other good news is that white Americans are beginning to change their thinking, and in a compressed time frame. Just months ago, two-thirds of white Americans thought that police mistreatment of people of color was only “a few bad apples.” Now, more than half of white Americans recognize that there is systemic racism in police enforcement. As volatile and ugly as today is, more people see the need for change. 

Many unanswered questions remain. Now that white America is beginning to see the extent of systemic racism, how many will act for change and how many will seek to hold onto their  privilege? Who will win the next election and how much effect will that have? In a representational republic, politicians are always a reflection of the people. Is this the time we finally make real progress? Join us as we delve into all of this with our guests Oscar Edwards and David Boje.

“When we share all our stories, they are all stories, it’s like water, it’s one, and it can flow like water. Right now we lack the collective wisdom to do that. Even though (our stories) come from different streams, it is one source.”

~ Oscar Edwards

“Why are we doing true storytelling? Because I discovered I grew up in a false history, a false narrative, of what is going on in America, and in the world”

~ David Boje

Glenn Aparicio Parry, PhD, of Basque, Aragon Spanish, and Jewish descent, is the author of Original Politics: Making America Sacred Again (SelectBooks, 2020) and the Nautilus award-winning Original Thinking: A Radical Revisioning of Time, Humanity, and Nature (North Atlantic Books, 2015). Parry is an educator, ecopsychologist, and political philosopher whose passion is to reform thinking and society into a coherent, cohesive, whole. The founder and past president of the SEED Institute, Parry is currently the director of a grass-roots think tank, the Circle for Original Thinking. He has lived in northern New Mexico since 1994. www.originalpolitics.us

Oscar Edwards is the Managing Member/CEO of Higher Growth Strategies, LLC (HGS) and also an acclaimed speaker, consultant, trainer, advisor, and business coach with the ability to make complex subjects understandable and fun. In other words, he is a good storyteller. 

Oscar goes way back with fellow guest David Boje to their days in the early 80s at the UCLA Anderson School of Management (where Oscar received his BA in Economics and an MBA in Finance & Marketing). They worked together first at the Joint Center for Community Studies with Dr. C.Z. Wilson and they also worked with the late Leroy Wells on the development of a university student quality of life index

Oscar has hands-on experience in management, business modeling, strategic planning, managerial accounting, and finance for a host of industries, including construction, sports & entertainment, media, telecom, public works, public transportation, public safety, and public health industries. He is on the finance faculty for Los Angeles City College.  He is also a curriculum designer and instructor for a number of other entrepreneurial eco-learning systems focused on women, minorities, and veterans in Southern California.

Oscar has been recognized for his work with small businesses and his community volunteerism by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, California State Assembly and Senate, the United States Congress, United Way of Los Angeles, and many other civic and community organizations. He received recognition early, winning the Outstanding Young Man in America award in 1984, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Black Business and Professional Association in 2000.

Oscar is currently working with many community based organizations to enhance their organization capacity, including cultural centers, churches, financial, and educational institutions. He strives to empower communities of color to be self-reliant and yet embrace the intercultural dynamic that is the norm in today’s families and households.

Under colonization, traditional forms of inclusive, consensus-based Native American governance were systematically replaced with Western forms of centralized, top-down leadership. Women, who once held an integral role in the political processes of many tribal nations, were pushed out or marginalized. Then, LaDonna Harris came along. Working with Indian societies to restore self-determination, and working with the federal government to improve the efficacy of tribal sovereignty, Harris has done much to revitalize traditional modes of tribal leadership, including for women. Harris would be the first to deflect credit away from herself, because all her work has been rooted in collaboration and any success she has achieved is because of the kinds of people she has brought together. Her work has been a model for inclusive, participatory leadership. And that model of leadership is what we will be talking about on this podcast edition of Circle for Original Thinking.

In working within and between tribes, and between tribes and the federal government, Harris has effectively collaborated with non-Natives, gaining support for important causes, beginning with her husband, Fred R. Harris, a powerful senator from Oklahoma in the 1960s and 1970s, who was chairman of the Democratic National Committee in the late 60s and a candidate for the presidency in the 1970s. LaDonna Harris went on to recruit many non-Native allies and to mentor them in Indian ways of leadership that are not only effective for Indian causes, but could be effectively utilized in mainstream politics.

Harris first met political scientist and author Stephen Sachs in 1990. Sachs was invited to her home after a political gathering and found her warmth and hospitality so intoxicating that he found it nearly impossible to leave. Reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains from Casablanca, that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship—and also the beginning of a beautiful collaboration on a wide range of issues pertaining to traditional Native American ways of building respectful relationships and its potential application to contemporary political and social issues.

Join us as we explore Native American leadership and the art of collaboration with LaDonna Harris and Stephen Sachs.

“The dictionary definition of leadership is ‘a person who has control over others.’ That’s not right…Leadership is about bringing people together so they can solve problems … then reinforcing their identity so they feel strong enough about themselves so they (the group) can make their own decisions in a collective manner” 

~ LaDonna Harris   

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Glenn Aparicio Parry, PhD, of Basque, Aragon Spanish, and Jewish descent, is the author of Original Politics: Making America Sacred Again (SelectBooks, 2020) and the Nautilus award-winning Original Thinking: A Radical Revisioning of Time, Humanity, and Nature (North Atlantic Books, 2015). Parry is an educator, ecopsychologist, and political philosopher whose passion is to reform thinking and society into a coherent, cohesive, whole. The founder and past president of the SEED Institute, Parry is currently the director of a grass-roots think tank, the Circle for Original Thinking and is debuting this podcast series of the same name in conjunction with Ecology Prime. He has lived in northern New Mexico since 1994. www.originalpolitics.us

Stephen Sachs is an applied philosopher and Professor Emeritus of Political Science, (Indiana University-Perdue University-Indianapolis) who has worked on American Indian and International Indigenous Issues since 1984 as well as other issues of participatory democracy. In 1990 he connected with LaDonna Harris, who became his friend, mentor, thinking partner and collaborator on many of the issues he was working upon, as well as his writing about them. With guidance from Harris as elder and editor/mentor, Sachs was the lead writer and coordinating editor for the book Recreating the Circle: The Renewal of American Indian Self-Determination (University of New Mexico Press, 2011, reprinted in 2020). This work was a holistic consideration of returning Indian Nations to effective sovereignty, self-sufficiency and harmony, which was the forerunner of the new book Honoring the Circle: Ongoing Learning from American Indians on Politics and Society, a collaboration with 12 different writers including Donald Grinde, Bruce Johansen, Sally Roesch Wagner, Betty Booth Donohoe, et al) soon to be released by Waterside Publications. Sachs has also been the first Coordinating Editor and now Senior Editor of the journal Indigenous Policy for 20 years, and has been the Coordinating Editor of the Nonviolent Change journal for 39 years, and he was the Coordinating Editor and Senior Editor of Workplace Democracy for about 20 years. 

Sachs received his MA and PhD in Political Science at the University of Chicago. In the 1980s, he began to be pulled into certain American Indian spiritual ways and ceremonies. This and other cross-cultural interests led to his meeting with Harris and their continuing collaboration.

LaDonna Harris has been a catalyst in the development of Indian affairs for the past five decades. Her career began in her native state of Oklahoma, where in 1965, she brought together over 500 Native Americans from across the state to address the salient issues in their communities. Out of that seminal meeting, Oklahomans for Indian Opportunity (OIO) was formed and Harris was elected president along with 41 directors that read like a roll call of Oklahoma tribes. 

E Pluribus Unum–from the many to the one—seemingly describes a republic based on unity in diversity. Yet Thomas Jefferson, the same person who wrote “All men are created equal,” owned 600 slaves during his lifetime. How can we reconcile such incongruence? In previous podcasts we provided some clues, including the little known fact that the high-minded values of liberty, equality, and natural rights were influenced by, and often directly appropriated from, Native American societies that were truly egalitarian. But the founding fathers only appropriated what they understood or wanted to include. Specifically, they left out women and people of color—in so doing, they created an American shadow. A significant part of our history has been repressed or marginalized as a way of protecting white male privilege, a history we are only beginning to face. Strangely enough, we can thank the Donald Trump presidency for acting as a catalyst in revealing this American shadow. This has been dangerous because it has given license to previously suppressed forces to openly hate, but it has also been an opportunity to see America as it really is—and maybe to change.  

Three and a half years into the Trump administration, the Black Lives Matter movement surpassed the Women’s March to become the largest movement in world history. And while BLM has a much longer history, predating the Trump administration, it has now garnered a record number of allies to the cause. Is White America finally waking up?

To discuss this and more, we are joined today by two creative men who have breathed new life into the concept of liberty and artistic expression. Through the merging of music, poetry, and social activism, they are making an impact in shifting the consciousness of America away from the politics of intolerance and exclusion toward the politics of love and inclusion. Ron Crowder and Hakim Bellamy teamed together on a video version of the song “Liberty” that graces the opening of each and every Circle for Original Thinking podcast. They are here to talk about that, BLM, unity in diversity, and much more. 

“America is going through a reckoning now. Forty-nine to fifty-one percent of the country wants to admit we’re racist and proceed with the remedy. The other half are like, nah, it’s serving me well. Let’s keep doing what we are doing.”

~ Hakim Bellamy

“This is no ordinary time; this is no ordinary world we live in, no ordinary life, one thought could change the world but will it change our minds?
All that we can ever know could unwind, collapse and then explode. This is the moment – one chance to be alive. This is the moment, it’s time to realize who we are.”   

~ Ron Crowder from his song “This is the Moment”

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Thank you to our generous sponsors!

Glenn Aparicio Parry, PhD, of Basque, Aragon Spanish, and Jewish descent, is the author of Original Politics: Making America Sacred Again (SelectBooks, 2020) and the Nautilus award-winning Original Thinking: A Radical Revisioning of Time, Humanity, and Nature (North Atlantic Books, 2015). Parry is an educator, ecopsychologist, and political philosopher whose passion is to reform thinking and society into a coherent, cohesive, whole. The founder and past president of the SEED Institute, Parry is currently the director of a grass-roots think tank, the Circle for Original Thinking and is debuting this podcast series of the same name in conjunction with Ecology Prime. He has lived in northern New Mexico since 1994. www.originalpolitics.us

Ron Crowder was already an award-winning audio engineer, producer, and session player long before he started composing, recording, and performing his own songs. Since then, he has achieved similar success writing and performing his own music. Ron won the award for Best Song at the 2018 NM Music Awards, along with his co-writers, Jim Casey and Danny Casey, for their song, “Liberty,” the title track from the EP of the same name. Crowder followed that with a new song “This is the Moment,” a timely and prescient song that won the award for Best song at the 2020 NM Music Awards. Crowder is donating net proceeds from the sales of “This is the Moment” to the Navajo-Hopi Covid-19 Relief Fund. 

Hakim Bellamy has been called a civic catalyst, a culture change agent, and a gardener for democracy; he is also a poet, musician, and peace ambassador. Hakim burst onto the Albuquerque scene just over a decade ago and shortly thereafter became the inaugural Poet Laureate of Albuquerque, NM (from 2012-2014). Hakim is a national and regional Poetry Slam Champion and holds three consecutive collegiate poetry slam titles at the University of New Mexico. His poetry has been published in numerous anthologies across the globe, and can be seen adorning such public spaces as the Albuquerque Convention Center, a public library, and in inner-city buses. In 2013 he was awarded the Emerging Creative Bravos Award by Creative Albuquerque and was named a W. K. Kellogg Foundation Fellow as well as a Food Justice Resident Artist at Santa Fe Art Institute in 2014. Bellamy was named “Best Poet” in the Weekly Alibi’s annual Best of Burque poll every year from 2010 to 2017. His first book, SWEAR (...

To recreate a whole and sacred America, it is important to piece together the forgotten fragments of history that are currently keeping the country divided. The most significant forgotten piece is the profound effect Native America had on the founding values of this nation.

Join Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation, author of Exiled in the Land of the Free: Democracy, Indian Nations, and the US Constitution, and Bruce Johansen, author of Forgotten Founders: How the American Indian Helped Shape Democracy, for a scintillating peak into the true history of America.

Dear listener, due to some noise on the phone lines, the sound quality on this episode has been somewhat compromised. We hope this will not prevent you from enjoying this fascination discussion.

“It’s about time that people in our country woke up to who was doing what to whom.”

~Bruce Johansen

“The American public has been deliberately kept ignorant of the real history of this nation…Let’s have a real talk, not an I’m sorry talk. That doesn’t cut it. How do you reconcile that the greatest genocide at the time took place right here on this continent after Columbus arrived”

~ Oren Lyons

Glenn Aparicio Parry, PhD, of Basque, Aragon Spanish, and Jewish descent, is the author of Original Politics: Making America Sacred Again (SelectBooks, 2020) and the Nautilus award-winning Original Thinking: A Radical Revisioning of Time, Humanity, and Nature (North Atlantic Books, 2015). Parry is an educator, ecopsychologist, and political philosopher whose passion is to reform thinking and society into a coherent, cohesive, whole. The founder and past president of the SEED Institute, Parry is currently the director of a grass-roots think tank, the Circle for Original Thinking and is debuting this podcast series of the same name in conjunction with Ecology Prime. He has lived in northern New Mexico since 1994. www.originalpolitics.us

Oren Lyons is Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga nation, and his history as an advocate for Indigenous and environmental justice goes back to the Red Power movement of the 1960s. Oren went on to become a leader in Native American right movements in the 1970s, including his important role in the Trail of Broken Treaties caravan which marched on Washington in 1972. He helped establish the United Nations working group on Indigenous rights and is the recipient of many honors, including the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, the National Audubon Society’s Audubon medal, The Earth Day International Award of the United Nations, and the Elder and Wiser Award from the Rosa Parks Institute for Human Rights.

Oren served as Professor of American Studies and Director of the Native American Studies program at the State University of New York-Buffalo for more than three decades. He has authored many books and articles, and was the editor for Exiled in the Land of the Free, a 1992 book that made the case for the influence of the ideas and values of the Iroquois Confederacy on American democracy and the Constitution. 

Bruce E. Johansen is a Frederick W. Kayser Research Professor emeritus of Communication and Native American Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

In the late 1970s, Bruce wrote his doctoral dissertation on the influence of Native America on the founding of the United States. This research would lead to the publication of Forgotten Founders (Harvard Common Press, 1982). He has since authored dozens of books, including Global Warming in the 21st Century (Praeger, 2006), The Global Warming Desk Reference (Greenwood Press, 2001), The Dirty Dozen: Toxic Chemicals and the Earth’s Future (Praeger, 2003), Indigenous Peoples and Environmental Issues (Greenwood Press, 2003), and Silenced! Academic Freedom, Scientific Inquiry, and the First Amendment under Siege in America (Praeger, 2007) and Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy (co-authored with Donald Grinde; UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 1991)

Exemplar of Liberty made such a strong impression on Bill Clinton that the President bought 535 copies of the book and distributed one to every member of Congress. The book is now out of print but available for free on line.  

Traditional native flute music by Orlando Secatero from Pathways CD.
Liberty song by Ron Crowder, Jim Casey and Danny Casey

Composite image of Full Moon and American Flag, source photos courtesy of Pexels

The post Native American Contributions to the Founding Values of the Nation – Part 2 appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.

To recreate a whole and sacred America, it is important to piece together the forgotten fragments of history that are currently keeping the country divided. The most significant forgotten piece is the profound effect Native America had on the founding values of this nation.

Join Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation, author of Exiled in the Land of the Free: Democracy, Indian Nations, and the US Constitution, and Bruce Johansen, author of Forgotten Founders: How the American Indian Helped Shape Democracy, for a scintillating peak into the true history of America.

“It’s about time that people in our country woke up to who was doing what to whom.”

~Bruce Johansen

“The American public has been deliberately kept ignorant of the real history of this nation…Let’s have a real talk, not an I’m sorry talk. That doesn’t cut it. How do you reconcile that the greatest genocide at the time took place right here on this continent after Columbus arrived”

~ Oren Lyons

Glenn Aparicio Parry, PhD, of Basque, Aragon Spanish, and Jewish descent, is the author of Original Politics: Making America Sacred Again (SelectBooks, 2020) and the Nautilus award-winning Original Thinking: A Radical Revisioning of Time, Humanity, and Nature (North Atlantic Books, 2015). Parry is an educator, ecopsychologist, and political philosopher whose passion is to reform thinking and society into a coherent, cohesive, whole. The founder and past president of the SEED Institute, Parry is currently the director of a grass-roots think tank, the Circle for Original Thinking and is debuting this podcast series of the same name in conjunction with Ecology Prime. He has lived in northern New Mexico since 1994. www.originalpolitics.us

Oren Lyons is Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga nation, and his history as an advocate for Indigenous and environmental justice goes back to the Red Power movement of the 1960s. Oren went on to become a leader in Native American right movements in the 1970s, including his important role in the Trail of Broken Treaties caravan which marched on Washington in 1972. He helped establish the United Nations working group on Indigenous rights and is the recipient of many honors, including the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, the National Audubon Society’s Audubon medal, The Earth Day International Award of the United Nations, and the Elder and Wiser Award from the Rosa Parks Institute for Human Rights.

Oren served as Professor of American Studies and Director of the Native American Studies program at the State University of New York-Buffalo for more than three decades. He has authored many books and articles, and was the editor for Exiled in the Land of the Free, a 1992 book that made the case for the influence of the ideas and values of the Iroquois Confederacy on American democracy and the Constitution. 

Bruce E. Johansen is a Frederick W. Kayser Research Professor emeritus of Communication and Native American Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

In the late 1970s, Bruce wrote his doctoral dissertation on the influence of Native America on the founding of the United States. This research would lead to the publication of Forgotten Founders (Harvard Common Press, 1982). He has since authored dozens of books, including Global Warming in the 21st Century (Praeger, 2006), The Global Warming Desk Reference (Greenwood Press, 2001), The Dirty Dozen: Toxic Chemicals and the Earth’s Future (Praeger, 2003), Indigenous Peoples and Environmental Issues (Greenwood Press, 2003), and Silenced! Academic Freedom, Scientific Inquiry, and the First Amendment under Siege in America (Praeger, 2007) and Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy (co-authored with Donald Grinde; UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 1991)

Exemplar of Liberty made such a strong impression on Bill Clinton that the President bought 535 copies of the book and distributed one to every member of Congress. The book is now out of print but available for free on line.  

Traditional native flute music by Orlando Secatero from Pathways CD.
Liberty song by Ron Crowder, Jim Casey and Danny Casey

Composite image of Full Moon and American Flag, source photos courtesy of Pexels

The post Native American Contribution to the Founding Values of the Nation appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.

The problem with modern politics is that it excludes nature in its planning. Then, nature imposes her will—as she is doing now with the COVID-19 outbreak. What is the message and the learning in the emergence of the virus at this time? The spiritual elders of Colombia, the Mamos, are some of the few people who address the underlying causes to today’s crisis. What does the virus mean not just in terms of the survival of the human species, but for all of nature? Mamo Daiwiku will be joined by Dr. Amanda Bernal-Carlo, a biologist who works closely with the Mamos, and Susan Kaiulani Stanton (Haudenosaunee/Native Hawaiian), founder of Grandmothers Circle the Earth Foundation, for an enlightening big picture overview.

Glenn Aparicio Parry, PhD, of Basque, Aragon Spanish, and Jewish descent, is the author of Original Politics: Making America Sacred Again (SelectBooks, 2020) and the Nautilus award-winning Original Thinking: A Radical Revisioning of Time, Humanity, and Nature (North Atlantic Books, 2015). Parry is an educator, ecopsychologist, and political philosopher whose passion is to reform thinking and society into a coherent, cohesive, whole. The founder and past president of the SEED Institute, Parry is currently the director of a grass-roots think tank, the Circle for Original Thinking and is debuting this podcast series of the same name in conjunction with Ecology Prime. He has lived in northern New Mexico since 1994. www.originalpolitics.us

Mamo Daiwiku is a Colombian Arhuaco Mamo (one of the spiritual elders) from the High Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains, the tallest coastal mountain range in the world, source of 35 major rivers and over 200 tributaries, considered the Heart of the World by the Arhuaco, Kogi, Wiwa, and Kankuamo Indigenous peoples who live there.  

Amanda Bernal-Carlo is originally from Colombia where for several years she studied the ecology of the Andean Forest and the Paramos. She is a scholar of Biogeography, Ecology and Medicinal Plants, and the President of The Great Balance. In 1989, while carrying out research on the biogeography of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia, she became involved in the study of the Kogi Indians, their philosophy of life, and their traditional healing. For several years she collaborated with the Fundacion Pro-Sierra, an NGO supporting these Indigenous communities. In 1996, she received the First National Research Prize from the Colombian government for the work she accomplished on the Colombian Andean Mountains.

Susan Kaiulani Stanton (Mohawk/Native Hawaiian) is the Founder and Senior Grandmother of Grandmothers Circle the Earth Foundation, an international organization that travels the world in service of Mother Earth and future generations, giving birth to new Grandmother councils all over the planet. Susan is Vice-President of the Great Balance, bi-located in the United States and Colombia with a focus on building a culturally appropriate university and the planting of one million trees to protect and perpetuate the culture and sacred land of the mamos, the Indigenous People of the beautiful Sierra Nevadas de Santa Marta. She is a delegate with the International Public Policy Institute to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.

Traditional native flute music by Orlando Secatero from Pathways CD.
Liberty song by Ron Crowder, Jim Casey and Danny Casey

Photo of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano in Colombia, by U.S. Geological Survey, Public Domain

For Mamo Daiwiko’s full Spanish version Listen Here.

The post COVID 19: The Big Ecological Picture appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.