From Creating the Work You Love by Rick Jarow: Questions to ask yourself:
What am I concerned about, and how much is this concern worth to me?Three of us were talking about our answers to these questions recently. I made the comment that I felt that I didn't have much passion for much. One of them reminded me of my enjoyment of watching birds and the other mentioned other things that I had seemed to evince passion about.
What are the passions that rule me?
Who are the gods and goddesses at whose altar I sacrifice my time and energy?
What is really important in terms of how I spend my days and nights?
Then I said that my trouble was, I could feel passionate about a cause, for instance, but if I let it rest for a day or so, it would dissipate into my forgetfulness. But I think this discussion, this focusing on what I do feel passionate about, may be starting to churn in my subconscious.
Two days ago, I was visiting one of those friends who happened to have started a subscription to The Sun Magazine, which I've run across and read in years past. (For a year, I had an invitation to subscribe sitting in the drawer with my regular bills, but just never did it.) The issue, which she had recently received, had a lead article of an interview with a Dr. Epstein, who discussed the incestuous relationship between the national nonprofit cancer organizations and the petrochemical industry and consequent focusing of research on "cures" rather than prevention.
It resonated strongly with me. It aroused my passion to do something. Then, I begin to toss around ideas, and that is where I fall flat. If well-known and well-credentialed scientists can't get action…can't be heard above the clamor of well-paid lobbyists for the petrochemical industry (including Monsanto), then who is going to listen to anything I would say?
I think back to when I was 15 and read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson and how angered I was by her description of the arrogance of that burgeoning toxic industry. Here it is 35 years later, and deadly dioxin is found in animal fat all over the world. The constant battles to bring justice to all the survivors of the "Love Canals" of the world is overwhelming.
The High Country News (a bi-weekly western newspaper) just published an article on a town in Montana where the sole industry was to mine vermiculite. Unfortunately, the veins of vermiculite intermixed with veins of asbestos, and the rate of asbestosis has reached some 90% in the miners themselves, and their families…children and grandchildren…have been also substantially sickened by the dust carried home. And the company knew thirty years ago that the miners' lungs were being affected…was taking x-rays that showed lung changes, but refused to tell the miners, and continues to fight court cases brought by its former workers.
I felt that I was with the marchers in Seattle in spirit, but I think it's time to actually put my own self on the line of what I believe in. I've always drawn back, always been afraid of how it would affect my children if, for instance, I got arrested. But then I read Starhawk's description of being in jail in Seattle and thought, yeah, it's time for this raging granny to come out.
Truly and not so peacefully,
Cherie
Editor
Visit The Sun Magazine
Drop in on what's happening in the west, environmentally, at High Country News
To get an excellent first-person story on the demonstration at the WTO meeting in Seattle, visit Paul Hawken's column written for the Global Renaissance Alliance
And a column I wrote in October 1997 on Living Downstream by Sandra Steingraber