Outward behaviors everyone can practice and contribute to:
Reduce and eliminate uses of fossil fuels. Support and participate in clean energy alternatives.
Reduce and eliminate non-biodegradable plastics. Support and participate in oceanic and fresh water clean ups.
Plant trees and support largescale tree planting projects. Reverse deforestation, promote reforestation.
The two main sources of oxygen on this planet come from forests and algae blooms along coral reefs. Both forests and reefs are in danger of becoming dead zones.
Plant gardens, no matter how small, and grow edible produce. Eat the food you grow. Be attentive to the growing process and life cycles of plants.
Support only political, spiritual, and economic leaders who are green to the core and crisis sensitive and committed, who do not serve their own egos and do not do biding-for-profit of special (Earth traumatizing) interests of wealth and power.
Minimize overall energy consumption and unplug yourself from extension technologies used to contain and define your identity, most to the point, the energy reduction and unplugging needed from computer, cell phone and television.
Help to create and maintain neighborhood Ecozoic Culture and Ecozophic Education Centers. Such centers can become primary places for reeducation in appropriateness and response-ability and for developing a participatory culture of ritual belonging and community recognition.
Set times for solitude in nature as vital practice. Whether this is along a seashore, at a hiking spot, in wilderness areas, or even a neighborhood park or back yard, allow your senses to fully participate in becoming acquainted with the immediate eco-system and local biotic diversity. Actualize creative, non-invasive ways to connect and express reality-grounded appreciate. This could take the form of writing a poem and reciting aloud, telling a story to the environment (and yourself) about what your senses are discovering, playing music, drumming, dancing a dance to nature and the elements, singing a song to context and its other than human inhabitants, whether the song is learned from tradition, or original and spontaneous.
Reduce consuming on all levels, from eating to gadgets, clothes and accessories.
Make it part of everyday to slow down, detox, find the way to your “grounding dimension” of breathing, heartbeat, bare feet on the ground and embracing the human gift of vision-dreaming. Let these be times for tears (sorrow and suffering are realities not to be blocked by drugs), time for laughter, not mockery or humorous cruelty, but wonderment and spontaneous delight; times for appropriate movement (the conscientiousness of carbon footprint), and times for stillness, when human porousness is most open to the euphoria and ecstasy of embracing existence-within-creation.
Invite others to practice these and related behaviors, especially those others who are not likely to do any of this without being invited. There are vast numbers who are dominated by false (unauthentic) values, who are going through life with false (unauthentic) self-images. There are many who are traumatized and go through their years in recurrent patterns, if not in permanent states of shock and numbness.
Contribute to making sustainability and stability, without exploitation, oppression, genocide or forced extinction, foundational to a global new normal.
Inward transformations toward eco-self and species maturation:
Cultivate and practice the Ecosophy (Earth Wisdom) and disciplines of letting be, letting go, appropriate and noble intention, silence and reverence for life in all of life’s Earthly aspects. Become intimate with delight, nest it in your heart and soul, practice acts of beauty, be playfully subversive before shallowness and passionately spontaneous within a culture of relationships and with education in instinct, moral character, and response-ability.
There are traits and characteristics common to human life which must be overcome or transformed (and likely more than once) for our Earth-evolved instincts and soul to be free to unite and guide life in appropriateness and visions to abiding within the realties and necessities of homecoming to this Living Earth. These negative traits include aggression, greed, disappointment, bitterness, resentment, fear, rage, boredom, violence, and the denials of betrayal.
We are all thrown into the dark abyss of history—drawn into complicity with crimes against humanity, crimes against creation. Repentance is in order. Center in your spirituality and with your identity-signature, have your repentance made tangible, visible, palpable through acts of beauty (doing what a right because it is right to do so; resisting what is wrong because it degrades and destroys). Be expressive in the delight of life, in being a conscious presence, awakened in the wonderment of creation, appropriate in affirmation and participation.
Mark out in your interior a sacred learning space attendant with quality time for education in moral character. Moral character is not reducible to adapting and adhering to any external set of principles or specific moral system. The essence of moral character is twofold. It consists of developing an integral capacity for reflection, even critical reflection, to consider the honesty of what is experienced and to examine beforehand the consequences of actions, of opinions, convictions, ideational positions, and adherences. Reflection cultivates responsibility as an ability to respond to what is true in what is given, what is necessary, and what is appropriate as a human response. Along with reflection, moral character develops a discipline of restraint to resist and counter negative impulses and reactions in one’s person and with others, which unchecked can, and too frequently do, lead to violence and injustice.
Moral character is strength of person and inner resource, not excusing and not denying. It will not diminish the spontaneities of delight but provide a defense to that which is most human and universal.
Consider: If one of us with a gun can kill a huge bear or even a bigger elephant (if a few of us with guns on trains could have decimated enormous herds of buffalo for no purpose other than a cruel sport of species removal), if a small crew on a ship can kill a whale, why not accept that billions of us constantly and selfishly exploiting and devouring via our technologies can kill a planet? Systems disruptions are prelude to chaos and collapse. Mass extinctions are prelude to our self-made species suicide.
Moral character, rising against human hubris, instills in life dignity, respect, reverence, and freedom of conscience. Moral character is a keystone process in human spiritual evolution, to mature and be worthy, to be appropriately participatory members within the Living Earth.
Make appreciation the center of your prosperity. Learning to sing the world, as light aware of darkness, as a manifestation of sentient presence, wealthy from inclusiveness and with passionate/compassionate embrace.
Above all, in the inward journey, work at this: the justice of inclusiveness, peace of commensality and emergence along the way of everyday lives, through openness and acts of beauty, into avatars of relationships.
Friend, you have read the list, add to it and share with others. The life of the planet is being decided. Procrastination is a choice for destruction.
*Ecozoic Era, a developing age when the destructive history of humanity is reversed and replaced by human responsibility. This begins by changing the content of the day, and by each and everyday being an Earth day.
David Sparenberg is a world citizen, environmental & peace advocate & activist, actor, poet-playwright, storyteller, teacher and author.
Houthis launched their first attack on Marib on February 7, 2021. The battle was fought along three frontlines. In the north, fighting broke out in Al-Yatma, in neighboring Al-Jawf governorate near the Saudi-Yemeni border while clashes in the south centered in Marib’s Al-Abdiyah district. The main thrust of the offensive was in Sirwah, western Marib, where Houthi forces advanced to Kofal camp, the most important military base of the Hadi government in the district.
From there, the Houthi forces pushed forward to the borders of Al-Zour. However, the Houthis had not been able to secure the right flank at Kofal camp. Government forces retained control of these regions, from which they targeted Houthi fighters near Kofal camp, and the area up until the borders with Al-Zour. The Houthis also failed to seize the strategic Al-Kasara area to the north despite increased attacks.
Amid the renewed conflict in Marib, US Special Envoy for Yemen Tim Lenderking has been spouting hackneyed imperialist fabrications. On April 21, 2021, he said, “Iran’s support to the Houthis is quite significant, and it’s lethal.” “What I see is continued aiding and abetting an army of Houthis by the Iranians so that they can continue attacking Saudi Arabia, and unfortunately those attacks have risen quite strongly in the last couple of months.”
Lenderking’s statement may seem superficially plausible because it neatly ignores the historical context to the rise of Houthis. Far from being mere “proxies”, the Houthi movement is an instance of anti-imperialist resistance against the murderous machinations of the American empire and its reactionary stooges.
Furthermore, Al-Monitor news on December 5, 2019, quoted Gerald Feierstein, former US Ambassador to Yemen under Barack Obama, saying, “The Houthis have never been proxies of Iran. They never followed Iranian leadership guidance.”
Arab Spring
In 2011, slogans of Arab Spring reverberated loudly in the streets of Yemen. Protests in the country initially focused on the country’s economic situation and high levels of unemployment. But following the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, the demonstrations grew to encompass a wider sense of anger and frustration with the 33 year reign of the country’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was widely believed to be preparing to hand power over to his son, Ahmed Abdullah Saleh.
Under Saleh, the Yemeni state increasingly became an institutional mechanism used to strengthen his extended family’s wealth and power. Saleh family members ran key army and security units, held important ministerial posts, and controlled major shares in a network of the country’s largest business firms, including petroleum, agricultural, and trading enterprises.
As this control over the country’s political and economic levers expanded, particularly in a context of declining oil production since 2001, rival families (notably the al-Ahmar family) and important sections of the country’s two largest tribal federations (the Hashed and Baqil) felt increasingly excluded from accumulation opportunities in Yemen.
By the end of February 2011, many of these different groups had come together in protests numbering over one hundred thousand Through March and April, Saleh responded to the growing mobilizations with violence – including unleashing pro-government militias that shot dead at least forty-five people at a demonstration on March 18.
Clashes continued through May and June between opposing army factions, tribal groups, and protesters – culminating in an assassination attempt on Saleh on June 3 that left the president severely injured and forced to fly to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia for treatment.
Despite much speculation that he would step down, Saleh eventually returned to Yemen in late September. Following two more months of mass protests, armed rebellions, and defections from the military and his ruling party, Saleh agreed on November 23 to transfer power to his vice president, Hadi, in return for immunity. The end of Saleh’s rule, however, did little to seriously address the problems faced by the country.
Unlike in Tunisia and Egypt, where mass protests had left leaders with little choice but to relinquish power, the political transition in Yemen was largely steered through a deal brokered by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) with the country’s elite. Saudi Arabia, which negotiated with Saleh and his supporters, and Qatar, which has a strong relationship with the country’s main opposition party known as the Islah Party, both hold a major influence over the country’s politics.
As a result of the deal, Yemen’s elite remained largely unchanged, with the same few families and tribal groups controlling the country’s resources, patronage networks, and political structures. Prominent military leaders of the Saleh regime continued to hold the same positions under the new regime, including the former leader’s son, Ahmed Saleh.
Moreover, the US used the transition to deepen its military alliance with the Yemeni government; US drone strikes killed more than 110 people in Yemen in March 2012, the month following the election of al-Hadi. The essential continuity in the regime’s foreign alliances and political structures drew the battle lines for Yemen’s social movements.
As soon as Hadi assumed power, he began implementing a neoliberal agenda. In the 2012–2014 period, he implemented unpopular International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank austerity programmes, tore apart previous leases benefiting United Arab Emirates (UAE)-based companies and granted new ones to Saudi and Qatari companies instead.
Hadi and his American/Saudi/Qatar benefactors gave free reign to armed groups linked to Muslim Brotherhood affiliates. Partnering with trusted members of the US-trained special units in the Yemeni army, foreign fighters and local loyalists actively chased down and murdered Yemeni leaders hostile to the imperialist project they and Hadi’s government were charged to impose.
Taking advantage of popular discontent with the Hadi government’s neoliberal economic policies and its inability to affect any significant societal changes during the period of transition, the Houthis stormed the country’s capital in September 2014.
Hadi fled to Aden and appealed to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi for military assistance. Saudis and Emiratis assembled an alliance of Middle Eastern and African states acting in the name of Hadi’s government – exiled in Riyadh. The first Saudi air strikes were launched on 26 March, 2015.
For Saudi Arabia and its allies, the destruction of the Houthi-led movement was necessary in order to dominate Yemen’s natural resources, and control its strategically important locations. The resistance of the people of Yemen to structural adjustment, austerity and subjugation to the imperialist financial system could not be tolerated.
Whilst different class interests are lined up behind the Houthi banner, the movement is made up of Yemenis refusing to accept foreign domination and occupation, and is currently united in the fight for national sovereignty.
Western Support
The US and the European Union (EU) wanted to keep the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in Yemen open for oil transit since millions of barrels pass through it daily. Thus, they made a deal with the Saudis to lead a fraudulent coalition to fight the war for them, showering military advice, intelligence support, and precision-guided armaments on their forces.
The majority of the human misery in Yemen results from the actions of the Western-backed Saudi-led coalition. Every conceivable aspect of food production, storage and water treatment has been targeted by fighter jets, tanks and armored vehicles marked with the Saudi flag but manufactured in America, UK and Canada.
In hypocritically denouncing the Houthis, Lenderking forgets that Saudi pilots trained by Americans fly American aircraft and drop American bombs, while American technicians service and keep the planes in the air. American contractors also upgrade the classified software on the planes, including the targeting software.
Saudi Arabia would be unable to launch air assaults on Yemen without American support and cooperation. The level of Saudi dependence on Western weaponry and maintenance makes the continuation of the war, to a large extent, an American decision.
Since the beginning of the conflict in Yemen, the US has provided Saudi Arabia with intelligence, refueling sites for Saudi warplanes and weapons. In 2018, 40 children on their way to a school field trip were killed by a Saudi airstrike. The bomb used in the airstrike was supplied by the American military-industrial giant Lockheed Martin.
Before performing his role as an imperialist prevaricator, Lenderking should try to reflect on the fact that 25% of the casualties in the past three years of the war in Yemen have been children. The need of the hour is to bring an immediate halt to the destruction of Yemeni lives. Unfortunately, Lenderking has failed to understand this.
Yanis Iqbal is an independent researcher and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India and can be contacted at yanisiqbal@gmail.com.
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