11 Great Green Minds Ahead of their Time

One could argue that all our predecessors were in fact environmentalists; even humble farmers of a few generations ago lived in tune with nature and her seasons. Native Americans were the original “environmentalists”. Ancient civilizations worshipped gods and goddesses of the rain, the harvest, the sun, and fertility. The Druids celebrated the life-energy of the forests and the cycle of birth and death. In a way, to be human before the modern industrial era was to be an environmentalist. It’s illuminating to learn about historical figures who were especially sensitive to the importance of nature. Artists, scientists, philosophers and more: here are some of the most interesting throughout history.


Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau made Transcendentalism – and its reverence for the spiritual experience of nature – famous, though the great Ralph Waldo Emerson deserves much credit for his influence on the philosopher. Transcendentalism developed at the same time as the first strains of conservation were beginning in the United States, with talk of establishing national parks and not scarring the landscape in the exploitative pursuit of resources. Thoreau’s approach to “environmentalism” was not the way we think of it now, as a separate movement seeking to reconnect man to earth, but more mystical, emphasizing the inherent wisdom, healing power, and joy present in nature as it is, not as we would mold it to be. Some choice quotes:

“In wilderness is the preservation of the world.”
“If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.”

Ansel Adams

The famous photographer was profoundly reverent of nature before “treehugging” came into vogue. Previous generations didn’t see themselves as existing outside nature; all was connected and deserving of respect. “The whole world is, to me, very much ‘alive’ – all the little growing things, even the rocks. I can’t look at a swell bit of grass and earth, for instance, without feeling the essential life – the things going on within them. The same goes for a mountain, or a bit of the ocean, or a magnificent piece of old wood. It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.”

Gandhi

Gandhi’s famous respect for all life extended to the realm of plants and soil. His moral philosophy was grounded in the belief that one must consider the long-term impact of choices upon future generations, and if the choice is violent, it is inevitably wrong. “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the west… keeping the world in chains. If [our nation] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”

Thomas A. Edison

The famous inventor who didn’t actually invent the light bulb, Edison shunned religious dogma but held nature sacrosanct. “Until a man duplicates a blade of grass, Nature can laugh at his so-called scientific knowledge. Remedies from chemicals will never stand in favorable comparison with the products of Nature, the living cell of a plant, the final result of the rays of the sun, the mother of all life.”

Albert Einstein

Atheist and vegetarian, Albert Einstein loathed violence and the runaway egoic narcissism of modern society. “A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole [of] nature in its beauty.”

Khalil Gibran

One of the world’s most beloved poets taught that people are never separate from the earth; what we do to it, we do to ourselves. Yet, he was compassionate in his view of humans. He believed in the power of redemption and forgiveness.

“When the birds sing, do they call to the flowers in the fields, or are they speaking to the trees, or are they echoing the murmur of the brooks? For Man with his understanding cannot know what the bird is saying, nor what the brook is murmuring, nor what the waves whisper when they touch the beaches slowly and gently. Man with his understanding cannot know what the rain is saying when it falls upon the leaves of the trees or when it taps at the window panes. He cannot know what the breeze is saying to the flowers in the fields. But the Heart of Man can feel and grasp the meaning of these sounds that play upon his feelings. Eternal Wisdom often speaks to him in a mysterious language; Soul and Nature converse together, while Man stands speechless and bewildered. Yet has not Man wept at the sounds? And are not his tears eloquent understanding.”

Chief Seattle

Chief Seattle (or Sealth) is famous in the Northwest for his peaceful negotiations with white settlers and attempts to prevent bloodshed between the two groups of his tribe, the Suquamish and Duwamish. His wise words have endured and become a source of moral inspiration for many environmentalists in the Pacific Northwest. “Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.”

Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple

Considered a bit radical for the early 1900s, William Temple was disgusted by industrial exploitation and labor violations. “The treatment of the Earth by man the exploiter is not only imprudent, it is sacrilegious. We are unlikely to correct our hideous mistakes in this realm unless we recover the mystical sense of our oneness with nature. Many people think this is fantastic. I think it is fundamental to our Sanity.”

Aristotle

Aristotle’s methods and theories have not all stood the test of time; yet his thoughtful exploration of such essential human concerns as friendship, morality, the meaning of life, and man’s role in his environment continue to offer insights. “All art, all education, can be merely a supplement to nature.”

Rousseau

The brilliant French philosopher believed nature was not brutish nor cruel and famously argued that humans are born innocent and good and are corrupted by society. He also believed property rights to be a ridiculous concept. His view of nature and human morality was often criticized as being too idealistic and romantic. “You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one.”

Michelangelo

The notoriously gruff Michelangelo was known for temper tantrums and feuds with his religious, wealthy Italian patrons. Though he painted the Sistine Chapel, he found spiritual refreshment in nature. “My soul can find no staircase to heaven unless it be through earth’s loveliness.”

Claude Monet

The birth of a renewed interest in humanism and the natural world – the Renaissance – was a historic and significant break from the religiously dominated Middle Ages in Europe. Artists turned their focus from religious figures and dogma to the beauty of nature and the human body. This paved the way for experimental impressionists such as Monet. In general the art of Renaissance and periods following celebrated and gloried in the beauty and richness of the real world. Said Monet: “The richness I achieve comes from Nature, the source of my inspiration.”

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was not quite the hermit or spinster people have thought her to be, though she was reclusive. She, along with other leading minds of the time (including Transcendentalists) saw nature as a deeply sacred and human experience. Her poetry reveals her true feelings about our home planet:

My best Acquaintances are those
With Whom I spoke no Word—
The Stars that stated come to Town
Esteemed Me never rude
Although to their Celestial Call
I failed to make reply—
My constant—reverential Face
Sufficient Courtesy.

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church,
I keep it staying at Home -
With a bobolink for a Chorister,
And an Orchard, for a Dome.

Who has not found the heaven below
Will fail of it above.
God’s residence is next to mine,
His furniture is love.

Read more...

11 Great Green Minds Ahead of their Time

One could argue that all our predecessors were in fact environmentalists; even humble farmers of a few generations ago lived in tune with nature and her seasons. Native Americans were the original “environmentalists”. Ancient civilizations worshipped gods and goddesses of the rain, the harvest, the sun, and fertility. The Druids celebrated the life-energy of the forests and the cycle of birth and death. In a way, to be human before the modern industrial era was to be an environmentalist. It’s illuminating to learn about historical figures who were especially sensitive to the importance of nature. Artists, scientists, philosophers and more: here are some of the most interesting throughout history.


Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau made Transcendentalism – and its reverence for the spiritual experience of nature – famous, though the great Ralph Waldo Emerson deserves much credit for his influence on the philosopher. Transcendentalism developed at the same time as the first strains of conservation were beginning in the United States, with talk of establishing national parks and not scarring the landscape in the exploitative pursuit of resources. Thoreau’s approach to “environmentalism” was not the way we think of it now, as a separate movement seeking to reconnect man to earth, but more mystical, emphasizing the inherent wisdom, healing power, and joy present in nature as it is, not as we would mold it to be. Some choice quotes:

“In wilderness is the preservation of the world.”
“If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.”

Ansel Adams

The famous photographer was profoundly reverent of nature before “treehugging” came into vogue. Previous generations didn’t see themselves as existing outside nature; all was connected and deserving of respect. “The whole world is, to me, very much ‘alive’ – all the little growing things, even the rocks. I can’t look at a swell bit of grass and earth, for instance, without feeling the essential life – the things going on within them. The same goes for a mountain, or a bit of the ocean, or a magnificent piece of old wood. It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.”

Gandhi

Gandhi’s famous respect for all life extended to the realm of plants and soil. His moral philosophy was grounded in the belief that one must consider the long-term impact of choices upon future generations, and if the choice is violent, it is inevitably wrong. “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the west… keeping the world in chains. If [our nation] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”

Thomas A. Edison

The famous inventor who didn’t actually invent the light bulb, Edison shunned religious dogma but held nature sacrosanct. “Until a man duplicates a blade of grass, Nature can laugh at his so-called scientific knowledge. Remedies from chemicals will never stand in favorable comparison with the products of Nature, the living cell of a plant, the final result of the rays of the sun, the mother of all life.”

Albert Einstein

Atheist and vegetarian, Albert Einstein loathed violence and the runaway egoic narcissism of modern society. “A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole [of] nature in its beauty.”

Khalil Gibran

One of the world’s most beloved poets taught that people are never separate from the earth; what we do to it, we do to ourselves. Yet, he was compassionate in his view of humans. He believed in the power of redemption and forgiveness.

“When the birds sing, do they call to the flowers in the fields, or are they speaking to the trees, or are they echoing the murmur of the brooks? For Man with his understanding cannot know what the bird is saying, nor what the brook is murmuring, nor what the waves whisper when they touch the beaches slowly and gently. Man with his understanding cannot know what the rain is saying when it falls upon the leaves of the trees or when it taps at the window panes. He cannot know what the breeze is saying to the flowers in the fields. But the Heart of Man can feel and grasp the meaning of these sounds that play upon his feelings. Eternal Wisdom often speaks to him in a mysterious language; Soul and Nature converse together, while Man stands speechless and bewildered. Yet has not Man wept at the sounds? And are not his tears eloquent understanding.”

Chief Seattle

Chief Seattle (or Sealth) is famous in the Northwest for his peaceful negotiations with white settlers and attempts to prevent bloodshed between the two groups of his tribe, the Suquamish and Duwamish. His wise words have endured and become a source of moral inspiration for many environmentalists in the Pacific Northwest. “Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.”

Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple

Considered a bit radical for the early 1900s, William Temple was disgusted by industrial exploitation and labor violations. “The treatment of the Earth by man the exploiter is not only imprudent, it is sacrilegious. We are unlikely to correct our hideous mistakes in this realm unless we recover the mystical sense of our oneness with nature. Many people think this is fantastic. I think it is fundamental to our Sanity.”

Aristotle

Aristotle’s methods and theories have not all stood the test of time; yet his thoughtful exploration of such essential human concerns as friendship, morality, the meaning of life, and man’s role in his environment continue to offer insights. “All art, all education, can be merely a supplement to nature.”

Rousseau

The brilliant French philosopher believed nature was not brutish nor cruel and famously argued that humans are born innocent and good and are corrupted by society. He also believed property rights to be a ridiculous concept. His view of nature and human morality was often criticized as being too idealistic and romantic. “You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one.”

Michelangelo

The notoriously gruff Michelangelo was known for temper tantrums and feuds with his religious, wealthy Italian patrons. Though he painted the Sistine Chapel, he found spiritual refreshment in nature. “My soul can find no staircase to heaven unless it be through earth’s loveliness.”

Claude Monet

The birth of a renewed interest in humanism and the natural world – the Renaissance – was a historic and significant break from the religiously dominated Middle Ages in Europe. Artists turned their focus from religious figures and dogma to the beauty of nature and the human body. This paved the way for experimental impressionists such as Monet. In general the art of Renaissance and periods following celebrated and gloried in the beauty and richness of the real world. Said Monet: “The richness I achieve comes from Nature, the source of my inspiration.”

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was not quite the hermit or spinster people have thought her to be, though she was reclusive. She, along with other leading minds of the time (including Transcendentalists) saw nature as a deeply sacred and human experience. Her poetry reveals her true feelings about our home planet:

My best Acquaintances are those
With Whom I spoke no Word—
The Stars that stated come to Town
Esteemed Me never rude
Although to their Celestial Call
I failed to make reply—
My constant—reverential Face
Sufficient Courtesy.

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church,
I keep it staying at Home -
With a bobolink for a Chorister,
And an Orchard, for a Dome.

Who has not found the heaven below
Will fail of it above.
God’s residence is next to mine,
His furniture is love.

Read more...

Ten Vacations That Changed the World

From forced exiles to country manors to motorcycle rides across South America, how a couple trips over the last seven hundred years radically reshaped history

Ibn Battuta: Traveled the World in the 1300s

He was the Rick Steves of his day, roaming the world to tell everyone what they were missing... only he did it seven hundred years ago, risking his life almost every step of the way in an age when visiting the next village made you a world traveler. Resolving "to quit all my friends and tear myself away from my home," this Arab writer left Morocco to make a pilgrimage to Mecca when he was twenty-one and didn't return home for nearly a quarter century, roaming across three continents and almost all of the major cities of the time, including Tunis, Alexandria, Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, Baghdad, Constantinople, and Hangzhou. While Marco Polo is more famous, Battuta saw a far larger chunk of the known world, which he wrote about in the book Rihla and provided one of the most complete pictures of what 14th century life was actually like.

Sir Isaac Newton: A Productive Vacation

It's strange to say that a plague had an upside, but there was one for the scientific world in 1665. When the Great Plague hit London, Isaac Newton was forced to flee Trinity College Cambridge and return to the family home of Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire. This was a great hardship for Newton, who lived for his studies — he avoided distractions so diligently it's believed he died a virgin — and doubly humiliating because he had made a point of leaving home to dodge the responsibility of managing the family estate. Nevertheless, being left entirely to his own devices proved essential to a number of his intellectual breakthroughs, as in the two years away he laid the foundations for calculus and reportedly conceived the law of gravity watching an apple fall in his orchard.

Ulysses S. Grant: Didn't Die with Lincoln

Most Confederacy-sympathizing actors would be content with assassinating a President, but not John Wilkes Booth, who tried to destabilize the entire government of the United States. Booth arranged for fellow conspirators to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward (while Johnson's assassin flaked out, Seward barely survived multiple stab wounds to the face and neck). Booth missed out on another target altogether, as Union commander General Ulysses S. Grant was supposed to share the Ford's Theatre box with Abraham Lincoln, only to back out at the last minute to visit family in Burlington. Booth would have been saddened to know that Grant would go on to be elected President and strongly defend the rights of freed blacks during his first term, though cheered as Grant's administration was overwhelmed by corruption and incompetence during his second.

Claude Monet: The Core of Impressionism

Impressionism took its name from his painting Impression, Sunrise and got many of its most revered works from the dwelling he picked up to get him out of the city. Born in Paris, Monet spotted Giverny from a train window and became obsessed with being there, purchasing a farmhouse in 1890. While Monet had traveled extensively for his art, in time he focused on creating a series of paintings of the lily pond in his garden, immortalizing his property. With its ranks including other masters like Renoir, Pissarro, and Cassatt, Impressionism remains the rare artistic movement to command universal respect from critics and still sell out museum exhibitions.

Lefty O'Doul: Popularized Pro Baseball in Japan

A washed-up starting pitcher turned outfielder, O'Doul won two batting titles, a World Series ring, and five championships as a minor league manager while mentoring Joe DiMaggio, but made his real impact outside America. After visiting Japan with a barnstorming team of all-stars in 1931, O'Doul was hooked, becoming Major League Baseball's ambassador to the Far East. He returned dozens of times, even after he retired from playing. His influence on Japan's obsession with baseball can be seen in the name of its biggest team, the Tokyo Giants, who took their moniker in honor of the former New York Giant Lefty. While Cooperstown continues to snub O'Doul — who has the fourth-highest career batting average in history — his fans can take solace in knowing Japan's Baseball Hall of Fame inducted him in 2002.

Bugsy Siegel: Made the Gambling Mecca

The brawn to fellow New York gangster Meyer Lansky's brains, Ben Siegel was sent west in 1937 to expand the mob's gambling interests in Los Angeles. He settled in Beverly Hills and promptly switched over to something approaching permanent vacation, as he partied with actresses and dreamed of his own movie stardom while narrowly dodging a murder rap. He reluctantly headed out to Las Vegas on Lansky's request and instantly was smitten. While William Wilkerson provided the vision for Vegas' first proper hotel/casino, the Flamingo, Siegel made it happen, procuring building materials despite post-World War II shortages. Having paved the way for the City of Sin to flourish, his murder just months after the Flamingo's opening prevented him from witnessing it personally.

The Inaugural Comet-1 Passengers: Ushered in Modernity

The Wright Brothers may have been the first to lift off in 1903 (assuming Gustave Whitehead didn't beat them to it in 1901), but it wasn't until May 2, 1952 that air travel really began to soar, when thirty-six paying passengers sat inside De Havilland's Comet-1 on the first commercial jet airliner flight. This flight to Johannesburg, South Africa radically altered the next fifty years, ushering in a Jet Age where just-in-time manufacturing changed the economic relationship between the first and third worlds, people of all income levels could travel the globe and exchange ideas, and terrifying new diseases like SARS and swine flu can become global epidemics almost before anyone knows they exist.

Che Guevara: ¡Viva La Revolucion!

Long before he met Fidel Castro, Ernesto Guevara did what any medical student would do with his free time: he went on spring break, driving across South America with a buddy on a motorcycle trip. While the journey involved some behavior typical of your average Spring Breaker (there was drinking), the poverty Che observed led him to join a revolution in Cuba and, far less successfully, one in Bolivia that led to his execution. He wrote about his experiences in The Motorcycle Diaries and ultimately became a symbol for everyone from idealists fighting for the downtrodden to vendors looking for an easy way to sell T-shirts to college kids.

Malcolm McLaren: Punk Rock Prosthelytizer

"I didn't have a reason to even be there," McLaren says of his time in New York in the 1970s, when he fled London to take a break from the fashion biz. He stumbled into managing the iconic but heroin-addicted band the New York Dolls and returned to England with a new understanding of the music business (he also got crabs). Things went better with his second group, the Sex Pistols, who flamed out fast like the Dolls... but first offended Britain so deeply with the song "God Save the Queen" that the charts refused to acknowledge when it topped them. The band hit #1 with the album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, inspiring the formation of thousands of bands ranging from The Clash to The Pogues and generally shaking up the world so thoroughly that to this day when any work of art rocks the status quo it's said to be punk.

Gaetan Dugas: Patient Zero of the Pandemic

He was a flight attendant. He was also identified in Randy Shilts's And The Band Played On as Patient Zero in the AIDS epidemic, with links to forty of the first 248 AIDS patients discovered in America. With his airline passes, he traveled constantly and by his estimation had 250 sexual partners a year. While experts now believe his role in the spread of AIDS may have been exaggerated, the fact remains he developed Kaposi's sarcoma in 1980 (a skin cancer frequently found among AIDS patients) and still continued his prolific lifestyle until his death in 1984, spreading the disease to countless other people who spread it to countless more.

Read more...

Ten Vacations That Changed the World

From forced exiles to country manors to motorcycle rides across South America, how a couple trips over the last seven hundred years radically reshaped history

Ibn Battuta: Traveled the World in the 1300s

He was the Rick Steves of his day, roaming the world to tell everyone what they were missing... only he did it seven hundred years ago, risking his life almost every step of the way in an age when visiting the next village made you a world traveler. Resolving "to quit all my friends and tear myself away from my home," this Arab writer left Morocco to make a pilgrimage to Mecca when he was twenty-one and didn't return home for nearly a quarter century, roaming across three continents and almost all of the major cities of the time, including Tunis, Alexandria, Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, Baghdad, Constantinople, and Hangzhou. While Marco Polo is more famous, Battuta saw a far larger chunk of the known world, which he wrote about in the book Rihla and provided one of the most complete pictures of what 14th century life was actually like.

Sir Isaac Newton: A Productive Vacation

It's strange to say that a plague had an upside, but there was one for the scientific world in 1665. When the Great Plague hit London, Isaac Newton was forced to flee Trinity College Cambridge and return to the family home of Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire. This was a great hardship for Newton, who lived for his studies — he avoided distractions so diligently it's believed he died a virgin — and doubly humiliating because he had made a point of leaving home to dodge the responsibility of managing the family estate. Nevertheless, being left entirely to his own devices proved essential to a number of his intellectual breakthroughs, as in the two years away he laid the foundations for calculus and reportedly conceived the law of gravity watching an apple fall in his orchard.

Ulysses S. Grant: Didn't Die with Lincoln

Most Confederacy-sympathizing actors would be content with assassinating a President, but not John Wilkes Booth, who tried to destabilize the entire government of the United States. Booth arranged for fellow conspirators to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward (while Johnson's assassin flaked out, Seward barely survived multiple stab wounds to the face and neck). Booth missed out on another target altogether, as Union commander General Ulysses S. Grant was supposed to share the Ford's Theatre box with Abraham Lincoln, only to back out at the last minute to visit family in Burlington. Booth would have been saddened to know that Grant would go on to be elected President and strongly defend the rights of freed blacks during his first term, though cheered as Grant's administration was overwhelmed by corruption and incompetence during his second.

Claude Monet: The Core of Impressionism

Impressionism took its name from his painting Impression, Sunrise and got many of its most revered works from the dwelling he picked up to get him out of the city. Born in Paris, Monet spotted Giverny from a train window and became obsessed with being there, purchasing a farmhouse in 1890. While Monet had traveled extensively for his art, in time he focused on creating a series of paintings of the lily pond in his garden, immortalizing his property. With its ranks including other masters like Renoir, Pissarro, and Cassatt, Impressionism remains the rare artistic movement to command universal respect from critics and still sell out museum exhibitions.

Lefty O'Doul: Popularized Pro Baseball in Japan

A washed-up starting pitcher turned outfielder, O'Doul won two batting titles, a World Series ring, and five championships as a minor league manager while mentoring Joe DiMaggio, but made his real impact outside America. After visiting Japan with a barnstorming team of all-stars in 1931, O'Doul was hooked, becoming Major League Baseball's ambassador to the Far East. He returned dozens of times, even after he retired from playing. His influence on Japan's obsession with baseball can be seen in the name of its biggest team, the Tokyo Giants, who took their moniker in honor of the former New York Giant Lefty. While Cooperstown continues to snub O'Doul — who has the fourth-highest career batting average in history — his fans can take solace in knowing Japan's Baseball Hall of Fame inducted him in 2002.

Bugsy Siegel: Made the Gambling Mecca

The brawn to fellow New York gangster Meyer Lansky's brains, Ben Siegel was sent west in 1937 to expand the mob's gambling interests in Los Angeles. He settled in Beverly Hills and promptly switched over to something approaching permanent vacation, as he partied with actresses and dreamed of his own movie stardom while narrowly dodging a murder rap. He reluctantly headed out to Las Vegas on Lansky's request and instantly was smitten. While William Wilkerson provided the vision for Vegas' first proper hotel/casino, the Flamingo, Siegel made it happen, procuring building materials despite post-World War II shortages. Having paved the way for the City of Sin to flourish, his murder just months after the Flamingo's opening prevented him from witnessing it personally.

The Inaugural Comet-1 Passengers: Ushered in Modernity

The Wright Brothers may have been the first to lift off in 1903 (assuming Gustave Whitehead didn't beat them to it in 1901), but it wasn't until May 2, 1952 that air travel really began to soar, when thirty-six paying passengers sat inside De Havilland's Comet-1 on the first commercial jet airliner flight. This flight to Johannesburg, South Africa radically altered the next fifty years, ushering in a Jet Age where just-in-time manufacturing changed the economic relationship between the first and third worlds, people of all income levels could travel the globe and exchange ideas, and terrifying new diseases like SARS and swine flu can become global epidemics almost before anyone knows they exist.

Che Guevara: ¡Viva La Revolucion!

Long before he met Fidel Castro, Ernesto Guevara did what any medical student would do with his free time: he went on spring break, driving across South America with a buddy on a motorcycle trip. While the journey involved some behavior typical of your average Spring Breaker (there was drinking), the poverty Che observed led him to join a revolution in Cuba and, far less successfully, one in Bolivia that led to his execution. He wrote about his experiences in The Motorcycle Diaries and ultimately became a symbol for everyone from idealists fighting for the downtrodden to vendors looking for an easy way to sell T-shirts to college kids.

Malcolm McLaren: Punk Rock Prosthelytizer

"I didn't have a reason to even be there," McLaren says of his time in New York in the 1970s, when he fled London to take a break from the fashion biz. He stumbled into managing the iconic but heroin-addicted band the New York Dolls and returned to England with a new understanding of the music business (he also got crabs). Things went better with his second group, the Sex Pistols, who flamed out fast like the Dolls... but first offended Britain so deeply with the song "God Save the Queen" that the charts refused to acknowledge when it topped them. The band hit #1 with the album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, inspiring the formation of thousands of bands ranging from The Clash to The Pogues and generally shaking up the world so thoroughly that to this day when any work of art rocks the status quo it's said to be punk.

Gaetan Dugas: Patient Zero of the Pandemic

He was a flight attendant. He was also identified in Randy Shilts's And The Band Played On as Patient Zero in the AIDS epidemic, with links to forty of the first 248 AIDS patients discovered in America. With his airline passes, he traveled constantly and by his estimation had 250 sexual partners a year. While experts now believe his role in the spread of AIDS may have been exaggerated, the fact remains he developed Kaposi's sarcoma in 1980 (a skin cancer frequently found among AIDS patients) and still continued his prolific lifestyle until his death in 1984, spreading the disease to countless other people who spread it to countless more.

Read more...

10 Greatest Leaders of the World

Winston Churchill

Churchill arrives at St. Paul's Cathedral in London to attend thanksgiving services for the May 1945 World War II victory in Europe.

The master statesman stood alone against fascism and renewed the world's faith in the superiority of democracy

Muhammad Ali Jinnah

Muhammad Ali Jinnah was a muslim politician and leader of the All India Muslim League who founded Pakistan and served as its first Governor-General. He is officially known in Pakistan as Quaid-e-Azam ("Great Leader") he envisioned a secular state for Pakistan.

Mohandas Gandhi

Gandhi at home next to a spinning wheel, which looms in the foreground as a symbol of India's struggle for independence. His philosophy of nonviolence and his passion for independence began a drive for freedom that doomed colonialism

Adolf Hitler

Hitler gestures during a speech in May 1937
The avatar of fascism posed the century's greatest threat to democracy and redefined the meaning of evil forever


Martin Luther King

King announces on April 25, 1967, that he would not be a candidate for the president of the United States .He led a mass struggle for racial equality that doomed segregation and changed America forever

Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini

Khomeini in 1979 returning to Tehran, Iran Brazenly defying the West, he revived Islam's faithful and authored a new form of religious government. The prescriptions were often chilling .

V.I. Lenin

Lenin in 1918, the year he split with the Left Social Revolutionaries and renamed the Bolsheviks the Russian Communist Party .Driven by ideological zeal, he reshaped Russia and made communism into a potent global force

Nelson Mandela

Mandela was a TIME Man of the Year in 1993 As the world's most famous prisoner and, now, his country's leader, he exemplifies a moral integrity that shines far beyond South Africa

Pope John Paul II

Pope John Paul II waves to pilgrims in September 1989

The most tireless moral voice of a secular age, he reminded humankind of the worth of individuals in the modern world

Ho Chi Minh

founder and president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Communist North.
He married nationalism to communism and perfected the deadly art of guerrilla warfare

Read more...

Words To Live By?

Words To Live By?

Watching the news the other day, it occurred to me that people who have "words to live by" often begin to attack and even kill others. I thought back to my own angry youth, when I could easily use words to justify violent thoughts which might have become violent actions. Words are tools, and yet it seems that they can be more dangerous than gunpowder.

Imagine two men facing each other, pointing past one another. One is pointing at a tornado that is coming, and the other at a raging fire headed towards them. Each sees their own truth and is angry at the sight of the other's hand. Each feels that the other's hand is "wrong." This may seem silly, but replace the tornado and fire with any modern issues, and the hands with words, and this scene describes how we often try to communicate.

We point past each other with our words, arguing as though we are looking at the same facts and experiences. We want to prove our words are the right ones, instead of learning to look at what the other's words are pointing at. Words are seductive, and for all their undeniable usefulness, they also can lead us away from understanding when we focus on them, when we make them more important than the truth they are meant to point at.

There Are No Words To Live By

This isn't just about communication with others. We focus on, and get trapped in a net of words that we use to explain the world to ourselves. We call things "right" or "wrong" for example, according to how they compare to our "definitions." Unlike mathematics, though, word formulas and definitions can never be so precise. They cannot encompass the whole truth of reality. For example, with the least effort, you can create a circumstance where "stealing" would be right, and "helping" someone wrong.

This isn't an argument against using language or logic. It is just that both only go so far. Like a car that takes you across the country or world, they are useful, but like a car, they are only useful in certain ways, and you have to get out of them when you arrive at your various destinations. Taking a car to the lake isn't a problem, but taking it into the lake is. This is what we do when our words and logic take us to dangerous situations.

Can having words to live by be dangerous, though? Absolutely. I once heard an otherwise compassionate person say he was against animal cruelty laws because he couldn't find a logical and defensible set of words to defend them. If he saw a new machine, would he refuse to believe it existed until he could explain it and describe it? Reality, and the reality of right and wrong exist outside of words - they are not the words themselves.

I watched a man say on the evening news that we have the right to drop a nuclear bomb on Iraq, and that we should. As he explained why, you could see that whatever compassionate impulses he had, they were over-ruled by his total allegiance to his words, logic, and where these take him. It never occurred to him that maybe there is truth outside of his words and logic.

It's great to have guidelines, like "don't lie," or "we have the right to defend ourselves." It is even better to remember that these rules will someday fail us, and we will have to make new ones. Words are just tools. There are words to die by, but there are no words to live by.

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When the Morning Dawns

When the Morning Dawns

The following article covers a topic that has recently moved to center stage--at least it seems that way. If you've been thinking you need to know more about unconditional love, here's your opportunity.

When darkness turns to day, the sun moves over the horizon and touches everything in sight. This movement across the landscape brightens everything. Such an illumination awakens us all. We rise with energy moving in and through us allowing us to create a new day. A day unique from all the rest and creatively woven into our soul.

This is the landscape of our soul. As you can see, nature has a way of showing us just how powerful we are. The same power that created the moon and the stars and the movement of all space and time lies within the human heart. It is the heart of creation itself, and perhaps, the heart of our Creator.

Human beings are fortunate to be able to be aware of our awareness. This awareness gives us an opportunity to reflect on our soul and find blessing in being alive. Our consciousness of a creative force inside us guiding us into this world, through it, and eventually to our eternal home allows us to fulfill a purpose on this earth.

Such a purpose is beyond our own ability to really know. Yet, we can open our heart enough to allow our purpose to find us. This is done by recognizing that the things in life that really matter ARE the things in life that isn't matter.

Yes, it is our soul's longing to fulfill the purpose for which we came to earth for. No one really knows how a baby is conceived totally. Science and human understanding still hasn't been able to fully comprehend such a force of nature. We can only embrace what is beyond us and find a way to bring into being forces of nature such as a tiny child.

When a child is born, we are in awe. The miracle of birth creates something inside us all. It is the remembrance that life does not come from us. Instead, life comes through us. As such, we are living in a dream come true. All of us are probably living our soul's purpose more than we know, and even, can know. It is the mystery of all mysteries.

This does not explain why some of us find peace and other's find pain. But, such a philosophy will enable us all to find grace in knowing our lives create in our world facets of ourselves we all are a part of. An understanding of such grace gives every one of us a chance to find mercy and grace and the same unconditional love we came into the world with when we were born.

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