I should finish reading Lynne Twist’s The Soul of Money today. I can’t recommend it highly enough. It will become an important adjunct for those seeking to understand GIFTegrity and the shape of a synergic future. This morning I share this interview from the  Soul of Money Website.

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An Interview with Lynne Twist

Q. Your book, THE SOUL OF MONEY, examines our relationship with money – how we earn it, how we use it, how we spend it, and how we give it away. Is money really that big of an issue for most people?

LYNNE TWIST: We all have an identifiable, though largely unexamined relationship with money that shapes our experience of life and our deepest feelings about ourselves and others. Money is the most universally motivating, maligned and misunderstood part of life. Money is how we measure our competence and self worth and whether we are rich or poor we all find ourselves in the grip of fantasies and fears about money, obsessing about it in ways that can make it a destructive power in our lives. The process of transforming our relationship with money requires that we confront our fears around money, our addiction and attachment to money as well as our guilt and hurts around money. Money drives so much about human behavior in the world today, and we can see the adverse consequences in global terms when we look at patterns of violence, oppression and other social, political and economic inequities. At a personal level, we´ve all seen the way money often undermines relationships with family, friends and work associates. Now, more than ever, it´s imperative that we understand our individual relationship with money so that we can begin to align our decisions about money with our deepest core values and highest commitments. This is what will ultimately bring us the most happiness AND make the world a better place.

Q. How can understanding our relationship with money change our lives?

LYNNE TWIST: When we are engrossed in the money game we often grow selfish, greedy, petty, fearful, or controlling. We get caught up in our fears of not having enough and become disconnected from our soul in order to ìget what´s ours” or constantly ìget more.” When we let go of the unquestioned chase for more, and ground ourselves in appreciation of what we have, we discover the wealth of our own sufficiency. We experience the prosperity of ìenough” and we find a kind of peace and freedom with money and with ourselves. When we express that by directing our money – no matter what the amount – toward things we believe in, we can discover and experience that generous, courageous and committed place in ourselves.

Q. What do you mean by learning to live with enough?

LYNNE TWIST: There comes a point where having more than we need becomes a burden. We are overcompensated, overstuffed, swimming in the excess, looking for satisfaction in more or different. We live in a world where the prevailing belief is in scarcity. We don´t believe we have enough time, enough energy, enough love, and we are all pretty certain we don´t have enough money. Those beliefs drive us to over-consume, over-spend, over-eat, always thinking we still need more. We also buy into the myths that there´s not enough to go around, more is definitely better and the resignation of ìthat´s just the way it is.” I had the good fortune to be mentored by the great futurist and humanist, R. Buckminster Fuller. He taught me that at this point in our evolution we can choose to move from a you-or-me world – a world where either you win or I win, or we can commit to a you-and-me world where all of us have enough food, enough water, enough land, enough housing and enough of the fundamental things for each one of us to live a fulfilling and productive life. This uncommon vision requires a shift in the very basis of the way we relate to one another AND the way we relate to money. Ultimately it shifts the way we relate to ourselves and the world.

Q. But isn´t scarcity a reality in third world countries?

LYNNE TWIST: I´ve spent nearly thirty years working to end world hunger and I´ve seen firsthand that brutal existence where people don´t have enough to eat. And yet, we live in a world awash with food. We currently have on earth more food than we need to feed everyone several times over. In several countries, including the U.S., farmers are paid to NOT grow food. Yet hunger persists. So the deeper issue is not scarcity of food, but rather a disastrous cycle of ineffective aid, corruption, disrupted markets, failed farming investments and other factors. That´s why just sending handouts of food or money doesn´t solve the chronic problem. The solution requires that we commit ourselves to solidarity and integrity, creating partnerships to assist people in reclaiming the power of their own self-sufficiency. I suggest there is enough in nature, in human nature and in the relationship we share with one another, to have a prosperous, fulfilling life, no matter who you are or where you are in the spectrum of resources.

Q. How does one begin to practice sufficiency?

LYNNE TWIST: Popular culture promotes owning, holding, collecting and accumulating. We become burdened by our excess; it clutters our thinking and our lives as we become attached to our possessions and identify who we are by what we have. In the practice of sufficiency, we experience wealth in the action of sharing, giving, allocating, distributing and nourishing the projects, people and purpose that we believe in and care about with the resources that flow to us and through us. Accumulation in moderation – saving money and buying things we need – is part of responsible approach to personal finances. But when ìholdings” hold us back from using money in meaningful ways, then money becomes an end in itself and an obstacle to well being. Money is only useful when it is moving and flowing, contributed and shared, directed and invested in that which is life affirming. One of my favorite sayings about this comes from Haiti: ìIf you get a piece of cake and eat the whole thing you will feel empty. If you get a piece of cake and share half of it, you will feel both full and fulfilled.” The happiest people I know are those who express themselves through channeling their resources to their highest commitments.

Q. One of the most surprising aspects of your book is when you say that excess wealth is actually an obstacle to happiness. How could this possibly be?

LYNNE TWIST: Mother Teresa taught me that wealth is no protection from human suffering, and I have seen it firsthand in my own work. Many of the world´s most wealthy people live trapped in a prison of privilege in which material comforts are plentiful, but spiritual and emotional deprivation are real and painful. Often the wealthy suffer from loneliness and isolation, especially when so many relationships are all about money and lack the genuine qualities of love or friendship. Excessive amounts of money become an obstacle to a fulfilling life unless the relationship with that money is grounded in sufficiency, and in generosity and relatedness of soul.

Q: In your book you advocate a new context for philanthropy which you call Committed Philanthropy. Please explain.

LYNNE TWIST: You do not need to be wealthy to be a philanthropist, in fact, 88% of the money given to charities in the U.S. comes from individuals, not corporations. And, surprisingly, of this group 75% of these people make less than $150,000 dollars a year. And, philanthropy is not just about cold hard cash. Committed philanthropy enables people to invest their wealth, not only in dollar amounts but also with the energy of their intention, their resources and/or assets. Sometimes those resources are financial. Sometimes they are sweat equity and sometimes it´s one person´s devotion and passion to hold a vision for what´s possible.

Q. You have said fundraising is sacred work. How so?

LYNNE TWIST: Fundraising offers a powerful and privileged opportunity to be in intimate conversation with another person about the nature of their highest commitments and values. Fundraising is all about money´s flow – freeing it, inviting it, channeling it and enabling people to experience themselves in the nourishment of that flow. In philanthropic interaction we can return to the heart and soul of money: money as energy and money as a currency for love, commitment and service, money as an opportunity to give back.

Q. In conclusion, what is the message about money you most want to convey?

LYNNE TWIST: When the use of money is consistent with our core values, it strengthens the quality of our commitment and our accountability for it. It has a powerful impact on our ethical and moral fiber. We can begin by turning our attention to making a conscious effort to use our money with life-affirming purpose, to nurture those people, organizations, projects and products that represent our most soulful interests. And we can stop the flow of money toward those that debilitate or demean life, or drag us down. We can be more financially generous with organizations and individuals doing good work that we want to support. Some of us may devote ourselves to public service or become advocates for socially responsible public spending on health, education, safety and government. The mindset of scarcity and the longing for ìmore” will begin to lose its grip when we begin to make different choices. We each have the power to arrange life to take a stand with our money and our life. Every moment of every day we can bring this consciousness to our choices about our money, our time and our talents to take a stand for what we believe in. We have the capacity for much greater lives than just ìgetting and ìhaving.” I invite you to take a stand. I invite you to separate yourself from the prevailing winds of scarcity, greed and accumulation and use the opportunity that we each have to explore sufficiency and enough –the true portal to prosperity . I invite you to deepen your values and to live in a new freedom and power in your relationship with money and life.

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Visit the Soul of Money Website.

Google Lynne Twist.

I am still reading The Soul of Money. This is an important book, well worth the time and cost. I am apparently in good company with my high opinion. In a recent interview Dr. Depaak Chopra shared these thoughts on The Soul of Money, ìThe sentiments in this book could change the world if they were read by everyone. Affluence, unboundedness, and abundance are our natural state. We just need to restore the memory of what we already know. Money is life energy that we exchange and use as a result of the service we provide to the universe. And in order to keep it coming to us, we must keep it circulating. Lynne Twist so clearly explains the connection between money and spirituality and then helps us to understand our personal and individual relationship with money so that we can begin to align our decisions about money with our deepest core values and highest commitments. This process will ultimately bring us the most happiness AND make the world a better place.”  The following essay, written in 1999, is reposted from CIIS. 

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Ancient Wisdom for a New Millennium

Lynne Twist

 

There is an ancient and sacred prophecy in South America called the prophecy of the eagle and the condor. This prophecy foretells of a time when the people of the eagle and the people of the condor will fly together-wing to wing-in the same sky, and the world will come into balance.

The people of the eagle are the people of the intellect and aesthetic-the people on earth who will have developed technology to such an extraordinary level that it will have brought them material wealth beyond their wildest dreams. They will also find themselves spiritually impoverished to their peril.

At the same time in history, the people of the condor, people who live from their heart and experience live through their five senses, will have an unparalleled depth of intuition, spirit and wisdom that is an expression of the profound integrity of the natural world. Those people will be spiritually rich beyond their imagination, but materially impoverished to their peril.

The people of the eagle represent those of us living in the modern, technological world. The people of the condor represent the indigenous people of the world living close to the land with the heart and wisdom that come being attuned to the natural world.

Lynne Twist, one of the founding executives of The Hunger Project, vice-chair of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and trustee of Fetzer Institute, is also the co-founder with her husband of The Pachamama Alliance, an organization dedicated to the fulfillment of this prophecy. (Pacha means Earth or nature, and Mama is the nurturing Goddess of wisdom and spirit). The Alliance is dedicated to preserving the Earth’s tropical rainforests and its indigenous cultures, and to the creation of a new global vision of sustainability for us all.

Lynne says, “I am privileged to work with indigenous people and modern-world people in the fulfillment of this great prophecy. I believe that new and profound wisdom is available to be heard as never before-wisdom that heals the wounds of the modern world and complements our extraordinary knowledge. In parallel, the nearly unbounded technological knowledge of the modern world is critical to indigenous people in complementing the extraordinary depth of their ancient wisdom. This is a time of great transformation, possibility, and truth. This is the time of the fulfillment of the prophecy. This is the time for the eagle and the condor to fly together in the same sky, wing to wing.”

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Visit the Soul of Money Website.

Google Lynne Twist.

I am currently reading a new book by the following author. Titled The Soul of Money, I highly recommend it. The following two essays are reposted from Yes! Magazine. The first was written in 1997, the second in 1999.

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Gifts of Self

Lynne Twist

We far too often look at life from a perspective of scarcity. We go through each day feeling that there isn´t enough, and that we aren´t enough.

When you wake up in the morning, the first thought you may have is ìI didn´t get enough sleep,” or ìI won´t have enough time to get to work on time.” Later in the day you may think ìWe don´t have enough money to do the things we want,” or, if you´re running a volunteer organization, ìthere aren´t enough volunteers,” or if you´re running a profit-making organization, ìWe aren´t making enough money.”

Over-consumption is the flip side of scarcity. We are bombarded with messages telling us that we´re not whole until we buy this product, that we´re not beautiful until we use this on our hair – we´re not complete, we´re not sufficient. When we acquire things we don´t need in an attempt to feel more whole, we end up devoting considerable time to maintaining, storing, upgrading, and protecting these belongings. We begin to believe that we are our home or our car. Caught up in the vicious cycle of time and money scarcity, over-consumption, and emptiness, we feel incomplete while driving the whole planet down an unsustainable track.

I have found that this cycle of wealth and over-consumption is as intractable as the cycle of poverty. Yet we have the opporunity to live in a place of sufficiency – that is to have exactly what we need; to have and to be enough.

I´ve noticed that if we let go of trying to get more of what we don´t really need, we free up oceans of energy to make a difference with what we already have. And when we do that, what we already have expands – it means more. This not only frees up our personal energy, it frees up the resources of the planet to be used where they´re really needed. In a time of unprecedented challenges to our living environment and to our sense of wholeness and well-being, a great many people are beginning to create a context of sufficiency and integrity.

One way of expressing this value is to use our time and money to reflect our highest ideals. When we invest in things that will leave the planet better than we found it, we are no longer simply spending time or money. We are, in fact, discovering our own wealth and wholeness through our gifts.

One of my goals as a fund-raiser is to enable people to assign their money (and their time) as a way to fulfill their highest commitments to change, to transformation, and to a more loving, peaceful, and sustainable world.

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Find a Place to Stand

Lynne Twist

Over two thousand years ago, the mathematician Archimedes said, ìGive me a place to stand, and I´ll move the world.” Taking a stand is a way of living and being that draws on a place within yourself that is at the very heart of who you are. When you take a stand, you find your place in the universe, and you have the capacity to move the world.

Stand-takers have lived in every era of history. Many of them never held public office, but they changed history through the sheer power, integrity, and authenticity of who they became as a result of the stand they took. Remarkable human beings such as Mother Theresa, Dr. Jane Goodall, Marion Wright Edelman, President Nelson Mandela, and President Vaclav Havel lived their lives from stands they took that transcended their identities or their personal opinions.

Anyone who has the courage to take a stand with their life joins these remarkable figures. You may not become famous or win the Nobel Prize. Your work may be centered on raising children or any of the other tasks that contribute to the evolution of humanity. Whatever you do, your stand gives you a kind of authenticity, power, and clarity.

I had the privilege to be in South Africa during the final days of apartheid. It was clear that apartheid was composed of a multitude of ìpositions.” When people take a position, it immediately creates an opposition, just as left creates right, up creates down, right creates wrong, bad creates good. That positionality itself can create a strained environment flooded with force, opinions, anger, resentment, prejudice, and even hatred.

In South Africa, the environment was shut down almost intractable. Then, while he was still in prison, Nelson Mandela took a stand; he came to the realization that in any liberation movement, it is as important to liberate the oppressors as it is to liberate the oppressed. The oppressors have to shut down their hearts, their access to their own spirit, and their own humanity in order to hate. And because of that, they are as much in prison as the oppressed.

At a luncheon, following his inauguration as president, Mandela said that he came to understand that his jailers were also trapped. He took a stand for the liberation of all races, all people.

When Mandela took this stand, he created an environment that elevated everyone´s thinking and action. Even President F.W. De Klerk, his former enemy, opened up to profound dialogue. This shift from an environment caught up in ìpositions” to one inspired by a ìstand” was central to the miracle of the end of apartheid.

A stand such as Mandela´s is almost like a magnetic field for greatness and for truth. In the presence of someone who has taken a powerful stand with their life, new qualities, new visions, and new clarity become accessible to everyone.

When you have taken a stand with your life, you see the world as the remarkable, unlimited, boundless possibility that it is. And people see themselves through your eyes in new ways; they become more authentic in your presence because they know you see them for who they really are. The negativity, the dysfunction, the positionality begin to fall away and they feel ìgotten,” heard, or known.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu speaks about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which he chaired. During the commission´s sessions, people had the courage to forgive the person who murdered their daughter, or amputated the arms and legs of their son. They forgave horrible atrocities and rose above the sea of hatred and entered a new place where they could take a stand for life. In the presence of a stand such as we witnessed in South Africa, positionality dissolves and people find a place in their hearts and souls for forgiveness.

Buckminster Fuller once said, ìWhen you discover the truth, it is always beautiful, and beautiful for everyone with no one left out.” This is also true of taking a stand.

Taking a position does not create an environment of inclusiveness and tolerance; instead, it creates even greater levels of entrenchment, often by insisting that for me to be right, you must be wrong.

Taking a stand does not preclude you from taking a position. One needs to take a position from time to time to get things done or to make a point. But when a stand is taken it inspires everyone. It elevates the quality of the dialogue and engenders integrity, alignment, and deep trust. Taking a stand can shape a person´s life and actions and give them access to profound truths that can empower the emergence of new paradigms and a shift in the course of history

 

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Lynne Twist, global activist, fundraiser, speaker, author, teacher, mentor and counselor, has devoted her life to service in support of global sustainability and security, human rights, economic integrity and spiritual authenticity. Lynne has raised millions of dollars, and trained other fundraisers to be more effective in their work, for organizations that serve the best instincts of all of us – to end world hunger, empower women, nurture children and youth, and preserve the natural heritage of our planet.

Ms. Twist, an original staff member of The Hunger Project in 1977, served as a leader of that international initiative for 20 years, including responsibility for raising the money necessary to support it and its programs. In that capacity, Lynne traveled the world, developing a keen understanding of the relationship of people to money, the psychology of scarcity and the psychology of sufficiency. Lynne Twist shares compelling stories and insights from those experiences in The Soul of Money: Transforming your Relationship with Money and Life.

Visit the Soul of Money Website.

Google Lynne Twist.

Reposted from Orion Magazine. This article has been abridged for the web. To read the full article, Click Here to receive a Free Trial copy of the current issue of Orion magazine.

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CHARLES WOHLFORTH On Thin Ice Like canaries in a coal mine, our northernmost Americans are the first to face the alarming challenges of global warming THE BRINK OF THE SHOREFAST SEA ICE cut the water like the edge of a swimming pool. A white canvas tent, several snowmachines and big wooden sleds, and a sealskin umiaq whale boat waited like poolside furniture on the blue-white surface of the ice. Gentle puffs rippled the open water a foot or two below, except near the edge, where a fragile skin of new ice stilled the surface. Sun in the north reached from the far side of the lead, backlighting the water and highlighting the imperfections in this clear, newborn ice with a contrast of yellow-orange and royal blue. It was after midnight on May 6, 2002, three miles offshore from the NAPA auto parts store in Barrow, Alaska. A fox ran past the camp, beyond the ice edge, danced as it ran upon that new skin of ice floating on the indigo water. An hour or two earlier there had been no ice there at all and now it looked no thicker than a crust of bread. The fox used tiny, rapid steps. Its feet disappeared in motion. Its back arched high and its tail pulled up tall, as if strings were helping suspend it on that insubstantial film of hardened water. Somehow it knew how much weight a brand new sheen of ice could hold, and knew how to calibrate each step within that limit. The IÒupiaq whalers of Oliver Leavitt’s crew watched and muttered with admiration as the fox pranced out of sight. All were experienced hunters, but they were impressed by this skill. This animal knew something valuable. A thousand years of hunting the bowhead whale from floating ice had instilled in the IÒupiat both a profound understanding of this environment and a special ability to perceive its changes. Whalers seek out multiyear ice because it provides a strong platform for pulling up whales and it anchors the shorefast ice in place with its great mass. In the winter of 2001 — 2002, however, as for several years prior, little multiyear ice appeared at Barrow. The shore ice didn’t form as solidly as it should, and it lacked the big, solid anchors that multiyear ice, or even new ice with large pressure ridges, would have provided. And on March 18, something strange and unsettling had happened. The ice went out, leaving open water right up to the beach in front of Oliver Leavitt’s house. No one could remember the ice going out that early. Normally, it goes out in July. A dozen seal hunters floated out to sea on the ice. Search and Rescue helicopters went out to find them and bring them home. Some didn’t know they were floating off into the Arctic Ocean until the helicopter showed up. You can’t tell you’re moving when your whole world starts to drift away. Later, ice returned and refroze to the shore, but it wasn’t sturdy ice and it still lacked good anchors. As whaling season began, a strong west wind pushed the ice against the shore for several days, then a strong east wind tested it and cleared away some of the junk ice. Oliver’s theory now was that these events had cemented the ice adequately for safe whaling. He had chosen a flat area of ice with a color and height above the water that told him it was strong enough to pull up a whale. But every so often he sent someone to look at the watery crack that was a little behind us, or to check the dark ice — weak, brand new ice — that lay a mile or two back between us and dry land. Morning came (not dawn, for the sun had rolled lazily along the northern horizon all night instead of setting) and Oliver sat, as he had since the previous day, on a long wooden sled next to his thermos and VHF marine radio, silently gazing on the water and the ice chunks and bergs drifting by slowly on the calm surface. Besides the danger of breaking off, another threat occupied his mind: a big mass of ice we could see across the lead, which was moving very slowly by toward the southwest, but also seemed to be getting closer at an imperceptible pace. Oliver said, “That’s the dangerous ice. If people start noticing it’s coming in, we’ll be out of here in five minutes flat.” Photograph ¦ Chuck Davis (detail) The momentum behind an ice floe, even if moving only slowly, is stupendous; when it hits the unmoving shore ice, the collision can be like an immense, mountain-building earthquake, a terrifying event called an ivu. Oliver was young at the time of the big ivu in 1957, but he remembered how the ice went crazy, with big multiyear flows standing up on end and shattering far from the edge, forcing the crews to scramble for their lives over miles of cracking, piling ice, leaving camps, boats, and dog teams behind — their entire means of supporting their families. He had told such cautionary stories to the younger members of his crew, including his harpooner son, Billy Jens Leavitt. That morning we saw only one whale, a far-off black back rolling across the surface, and heard another, a roaring blowhole exhalation from somewhere we could not see. Normally at this time of year, a crew would be seeing whales every few minutes. Crews farther down the lead were paddling in search of one, thinking the migration might be passing by on the other side of big ice across the lead. IÒupiaq chatter on the marine VHF radio began to flow with comments from nervous captains up and down the lead. They saw the big pressure ridges across the open water growing noticeably closer. Oliver uttered a few words of IÒupiaq on the radio and the discussion stopped. “You got to talk to them quick before they scare themselves,” he said. Each captain’s experience and expertise were well known, an important factor in how whalers evaluated conditions and safety. Oliver Leavitt’s name carried unquestioned authority. AS AFTERNOON PROGRESSED the sun was bright and unseasonably warm. The ice reflected brilliantly while the deep, dark water swallowed light. The details of the pressure ridge mountains across the lead were clearly visible. The radio grew lively again. Oliver stood and watched the ice across the water intently. Everyone else stood too, waiting for what he would say. Then, calmly, “We better start packing up.” The younger men began by emptying the tent. Oliver worked on disabling the weapons and putting away the radio. Now you could see the ice moving through the water directly toward us. Everyone knew his job without a word, but Oliver said, “Better hurry up, Billy.” When speaking to the younger part of the crew, he addressed only Billy Jens, like an officer giving orders to a sergeant. Things not fitting in right, the boys started throwing stuff on the sleds haphazardly. “Better hurry up, Billy,” the tone this time a little higher. As I was jerked into motion behind a snowmachine, I could see the collision begin. The glassy film of new ice from each side made contact and the delicate tracery that had supported the fox shattered and disappeared into the ocean. Photograph ¦ Luciana Whitaker/Accent Alaska (detail) We bounced wildly down the ice road, the boats pitching up to crazy angles on their sleds before they topped the ridges and raced down behind the snowmachines. Then we stopped on a big flat pan of ice near town. No fear, no sense of relief. These days, with the bad ice and warm weather, an escape like this was routine. SCIENTISTS PREDICTED that global climate change would come first and strongest in the Arctic. They went there to learn how the sky, ice, snow, water, and tundra interact to drive changes in the world’s environment. Scientists have measured Barrow more extensively than any other Arctic research site in the world. You can hardly turn around without bumping into a science project. Fascinating discoveries accumulated along that path. But the IÒupiat already knew the patterns in the system and how they changed through time. Arnold Brower, Sr., one of Barrow’s most successful whaling captains, now in his eighties, had watched as the Arctic climate changed. “Unusually changed,” he said. “And the pattern of animals, as to how they behave, like caribou and the fish, the seasons of spawning and seasons of ice forming on the surface. Whaling captain Harry Brower, Jr., said, “It’s hard to find a place to pull up the whale. If you have this first-year ice, it’s not really thick enough to hold the whale, pulling it out of the water. Elder Thomas Itta, Sr., saw many differences while hunting, ranging far afield from the village of Atqasuk on his snowmachine. Hunting was no longer possible in June and July because the weather was too warm to keep the meat from spoiling. Far more sea gulls and jaegers were flying in the area, and hawks appeared for the first time. Even the snow had changed. The snow on the tundra was thin and hard but in the bushy willows it built into soft, deep drifts, as deep as six feet. There never used to be so many willows. “They started growing here, there, and all over now,” Thomas said. Oliver Leavitt took longer to convince than some others that the climate had warmed. He kept hoping the difference lay in the way people were perceiving the weather, or that the changes were part of a cycle that would finally swing back to normal. But if it was a cycle, it was such a long one that no one could remember conditions like these. The IÒupiat had developed a collective body of knowledge over a thousand years of subsisting from their environment. They were trained observers and they knew how to process their disparate observations into useful information for making decisions. In a language perfectly suited to the problems it addressed, they held long talks that synthesized what many people had seen over broad spans of time and space. One whaling captain’s intuitive understanding of the ice was the product of many minds over many centuries. But the word intuition could get you in trouble. Oliver Leavitt went out of his way to say intuition had nothing to do with how he handled himself on the ice. His skills were based on experience. I think he was responding to a pseudospiritual use of the word. But even without drawing on the supernatural, the success of the IÒupiat in their environment did suggest a spiritual foundation. “The biggest connection between traditional knowledge and the spiritual way of life is about respect; respecting the environment, respecting the land, respecting the animals,” said Oliver’s friend Richard Glenn. A geologist by training, Richard had grown up in California but decided to take his place among his mother’s people in Barrow. Now he was co-captain of a whaling crew. “Traditional knowledge to me is centuries of trial and error. So what looks like an elegant solution is something that has only been learned because we’ve tried to do it in the wrong way in the past and this way works better. And that is also built around respect. Safety is built around respect. Survival is built around respect. You think you’re better than the weather? Let’s see what the weather has got in store for you.” ON MAY 8, 2002, Oliver Leavitt’s crew went on the ice again. The ice collision that had prompted our escape had not caused an ivu, and the campsite was intact. The sun blazed, surrounded by sun dogs, and the temperature was too warm for parkas, up to thirty-four degrees. The snow was melting and water stood in puddles in dips all over the sea ice.. As the evening wore on, Billy Jens checked the ice crack behind us. He prepared to pack up for a quick escape. At 1 a.m., the entire ice sheet we were sitting on dropped a little with a jolt. Soon the camp was packed again and we were retreating, back down the trail with the sleds bouncing, crashing, and splashing over pressure ridges and through the slush and expanding pools. The following day was warm again. The water was bright and motionless. The ice pack had receded dozens of miles from the shorefast ice. Many whalers on our part of the lead had given up. At 5:15 p.m. a prayer of thanksgiving came over the VHF, the harpooner of George Ahmaogak’s crew thanking God for a safe and successful hunt — they had killed a whale from their aluminum boat far to the north. The prayer came through the little radio with a tone as thin as wrinkled paper. It concluded, “In Jesus’ name.” Then a cheer came up from their boat, so many miles away across the water. In accordance with tradition, the prayer not only announced the kill, it alerted everyone in town to come help pull the animal up with block and tackle and butcher it. All the whaling crews and the entire community would converge on the ice for a task that would take eighteen hours of continuous labor. Everyone helping would receive a share of the whale, as would elders and the infirm in town, and anyone who attended a public banquet at the captain’s house or at the summertime Nalukataq festival, as well as relatives far away, who would get theirs in packages through the mail. A captain and crew win honor and respect for a successful hunt, but no one can own a whale. Clouds blanketed the sky as night fell. It began to rain. The crew put a tarp over Oliver’s seating area on the sled. Oliver was disgusted. He recalled as a young man wearing two pairs of snow pants for spring whaling, standing night watch in temperatures twenty degrees below zero. “Here’s your global warming,” he said. “It never rains this time of year. It melts the snow real fast.” On May 10, not long after the rain, the Barrow meteorologist announced in disbelief, “There is officially no snow on the ground.” A foot-deep snow pack had disappeared in three days. Since 1940, Barrow’s snowmelt had come ever earlier on an accelerating line. Adjusting for the human-caused changes around the weather station (road dust in town enhances snowmelt) and using conservative statistical analysis, scientists estimated that the snowmelt had gotten eight days earlier, moving from about June 18 to June 10. Snowmelt on May 10 was off the charts. Normally whaling goes on into June and the ice doesn’t go out until July. The season’s total catch of only three whales was far too little to sate the community’s appetite; some years, they brought in twenty or more. Photograph ¦ Michael Sewell (detail) “If we start losing the spring season we have to totally rethink ice safety. The rules change…. Things that were true for fathers won’t be true for sons, and so it will always be experiencing something new,” Richard Glenn told me. “That’s kind of been the case for the last 150 years anyway,” I said. “Oh yes, the culture has changed, always. But there have always been some things: the ice on the lake will get five to six feet thick every year. Or ice that’s accreted to the shoreline with enough pressure ridges is probably going to stick around. Those kinds of things, those little rules of thumb, are going to change. And that will change how you travel, how you hunt, how you stay alive.” Climate change that happens gradually is difficult for people to perceive. Even in Barrow, where the IÒupiat depend on wildlife, ice, and the timing of the seasons for their livelihood, some hunters fought the realization until faced with the terrible spring whaling season of 2002. By then, the ice, the Earth, and the elders were all telling the same story.

Copyright 2004 The Orion Society. 

Reposted from Orion Magazine. This article has been abridged for the web. To read the full article, Click Here to receive a Free Trial copy of the current issue of Orion magazine.

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I’VE LOST COUNTof the times I’ve driven lush, rolling Iowa hills to go to see how the local nuclear power plant responds to terrorist threats or Homeland Security’s latest “orange alert.” The front entrance has been altered since my first investigation. Now, instead of two lanes of vehicles passing easily through open gates, portable concrete medians channel traffic into a single lane. At a small wooden building in front of the open gates, a middle-aged man checks the identification of plant workers. I wonder if he ever notices me, slowly turning the car around and circling the plant on a county road edged in cornfields. I turn onto gravel, wind past small acreages of retired farmers in their new houses. I turn again, onto a lonely service road. Over and over since September 2001, I’ve been astonished to find this back entrance to the Duane Arnold Energy Center unguarded. The chain link gates blocking the road are usually padlocked. But all they do is span the road; on either side there’s nothing but a farmer’s barbed-wire fence.

Today though, construction crews are reworking the road’s surface and the gates stand wide open. I drive my rusting Taurus onto the property, twist among the working vehicles, pull over, park, and watch the men work. I stay there for an hour, and no one approaches and asks, “What’re you doing sitting alone in that car within firing distance of a nuclear reactor?”

Like most Americans, I hadn’t thought much about Chernobyl since the spring of 1986. Slowly the name “Chernobyl” became just another echo of the horrible nuclear events in recent memory, an anniversary sound bite, the subject of an occasional documentary.

Then in the fall of 2000, the Frankfurt International School, where I was teaching, asked if I’d join a delegation to Cherikov, a small town in southeastern Belarus.

“Belarus?” I asked. “What’s Belarus?”

“I thought that was Ukraine,” I said.

She sighed, “Most Americans seem to.”

I REMEMBERED Edward Teller’s response to the news about Chernobyl: “The chances of a real calamity at a nuclear power station are infinitesimally small,” he said on the “ABC Evening News” in late April 1986. “But should it happen, the consequences are impossible to imagine.”

Twenty-three percent of Belarus was contaminated with Chernobyl’s fallout, 32,592 square miles, more land than six eastern states combined. But it isn’t a solid swath of land, nor neat concentric circles emanating from Ukraine. On maps the contamination looks like rusty puddles and large tannin-stained lakes. Color variations denote concentration levels of the radioactive isotope mapped most clearly, cesium-137.

The average level of contamination on the polluted territories, thirty-seven curies (Ci) per square kilometer, is notated scientifically as 37Ci/km2. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) set the “safe for residency limit” at a maximum of 5Ci/km2. Eighty-eight percent of contaminated Belarus is 111 to 370 times more contaminated than that. Two million people still live on that land.

I’VE BEEN TOLD VAGUELY to “try to avoid” eating dairy products, fish, local produce, or “forest gifts.” I’ve read that when the radiological community began to study the effects of Chernobyl’s pollution on Belarus, one of the most disturbing discoveries was that grains and legumes absorb and accumulate cesium-137 much more quickly and in much greater quantities than was predicted. But I’m the guest of a schoolteacher and her truck driver husband, full-time workers earning less than $80 a month between them, and paying $2.50 a liter for uncontaminated drinking water for their six-year-old daughter, Olya. When they proudly spread a meal before me, I receive a whole paper napkin while Irene and her husband, Sasha, split one.

“It looks lovely,” I say, accepting a glass of garnet-colored wine they handle like gold. Irene translates for her Belarusan husband. The big, pale-skinned man smiles shyly.

“My husband has made it,” Irene explains. “Yesterday, all afternoon, he picked the mushrooms from the woods. Eat, please, eat.”

According to the Belarusan Ministry of Emergencies’ report, “Belarus and Chernobyl: The Second Decade,” 2,500 square miles of Belarus have plutonium levels three times higher than the IAEA considers safe for human habitation. No one argues with the fact that a particle of plutonium absorbed by the lung will eventually cause cancer. But, I reason, studying the colorful food Sasha has prepared, I’m not likely to breath plutonium from this meal. Tomorrow maybe, as we walk down the packed-dirt roads of a village on the edge of an evacuated zone, but not here, tonight.

Cesium-137 and strontium-90, on the other hand, are quite likely to be stewing in the rich brown mushrooms. The Kulbakinas and their friends live, work, and garden in a village where the level of cesium-137 is thirty-seven times above the IAEA’s maximum safe-limit. I help myself to small servings of several of the dishes, and my host’s face falls. “Can we get you something else?” Irene asks.

“No, no,” I say, “let me go slowly so I can taste everything. Tell me what I’m eating.”

Scientists do not dispute that once ingested, long-lived radionuclides, and many of the chemical progeny produced as they decay, remain in the body, irradiating tissues they’ve nestled into. (Nor does the irradiation stop when the host dies.)

Some radionuclides find their way from soil to plant to herbivore and carnivore. They accumulate in particular organs. Thousands of Belarusan autopsies already show that cesium settles in heart and optical muscles, speeding their degeneration. Strontium-90 likes teeth and snuggles into bone marrow, irradiating the stem cells responsible for our blood and immune systems.

TEN MINUTES FROM CHERIKOV, a thousand-square-mile “alienation zone” is posted with large white billboards warning the trespasser in Russian that she’ll be fined ten months’ salary if caught inside. The zone isn’t fenced. For miles it looks like a normal coniferous forest opening onto green pastures that flow into ancient orchards. But there are freshly cut tree stumps, wet and golden in the weak sunlight. On the edge of the timber a crane loads tree trunks onto a flatbed lumber truck.

“Milling wood doesn’t prevent it from emitting radioactivity, does it?” I ask our van driver and translator, Mikhail Koslovski, a representative of With Hope for the Future, one of the many projects that have stepped into the post-Soviet funding vacuum to aid victims of Chernobyl.

“No,” he answers, meeting my eyes in the rearview mirror.

“Then what are they doing?”

“Belarus is poor, Hope,” he says. “It goes to Minsk to be made into furniture.”

I want to make sure I’ve understood him. “People in Minsk make furniture out of radioactive trees and then sell it to unsuspecting buyers?”

“Da,” he says quietly.

We move from the forest to an enormous open prairie, so flat, the uninterrupted grasses so tall, that I can’t see the road anywhere on the horizon. The van slows and makes a right-angle turn. At first I’m puzzled, and then I realize that the road’s precise geometry is all that speaks of a settlement. After the accident that “could never happen here,” Belarusan conscripts dug holes and buried the village that once stood in this spot. They did the same with over a hundred other settlements. To prevent surface contamination from leaching into groundwater, they backed cement trucks up to village wells and filled them to the brim with concrete.

Still, under a clump of trees in the distance, houses hunker behind wooden fences. When we get closer, I see a man, his chapped hands ungloved, his feet wrapped in pig hide tied below his knees, standing beside an ancient wooden wagon to which he has harnessed a lean Holstein milk cow.

“Samosely?” I ask Mikhail, using the term for the old people who have returned without permission to their confiscated homes.

“Refusniks,” he replies. “The old women said, ‘We survived starvation and Hitler and starvation and Stalin, and now you tell us something invisible will kill us? We will die here.’”

Watching the huddle of houses recede, I connect the sweet odor of the village with smoke from a chimney. “Is it peat they’re burning?” I ask, imagining the plutonium coming out of that chimney. “Peat dug here in the alienation zone?”

“Da,” he says again.

More miles of undulating prairie, and then swamps with trees burned from the top down. “The Swedes said 3,000 curies here,” Mikhail explains. “It is not safe for more than five minutes.” We’re 150 miles from Chernobyl. I don’t want to know 3,000 curies of what; I want him to keep driving.

Ten miles later, he slows down. On our right is an empty, long-weathered village. “This village is relocated,” Mikhail says, irony overriding the Russian accent in his German. “The village is relocated there.” He points to a set of five-story apartment buildings on our left, nearly new, and abandoned, curtains blowing through broken windows. “When Lukashenko [president of Belarus since 1994] had to show that he was doing something, this he did. Television cameras showed people moving into their new homes. They did not turn around to show that the people came only across the field.”

I ponder the impossibility of resettling two million people. I begin to understand what Ivan Kenik, Belarus’s Minister for Extraordinary Situations and Protection of the Population from the Consequences of the Chernobyl Catastrophe, was trying to convey. In March 1995 in the magazine Sovetskaya Belorussiya, he warned that the cost of his country’s Chernobyl mitigation would amount to thirty-two times his country’s annual budget through 2015. No one from any government or international organization contested his claim.

But there were Chernobyl-related arguments going on in the nuclear and radiological communities, as Western authorities refused to believe reports of illnesses appearing in Belarus much earlier than anyone had predicted. Among the first radionuclide assaults after a nuclear explosion is iodine-131, which our thyroids mistake for stable iodine and readily absorb. During the week after what Belarusans have come to call simply “the catastrophe,” all ten million citizens were exposed to untold amounts of it.

Western predictions of Chernobyl’s consequences were based on Hiroshima-Nagasaki data, and on the then-current belief that iodine-131 had a low carcinogenic potential. But within a year after the accident, Belarusan scientists reported an increase in a rare childhood thyroid cancer to 5,000 times its spontaneous occurrence in “clean” countries.

On a sidewalk in Cherikov, I watch a crying woman plead with Svetlana Vladimirovna, the director of the local kindergarten. The woman wants the nonexistent orphanage opened — now! Fourteen parentless children have been waiting for months. She’s just discovered five more, siblings, the oldest age twelve, in a barn on the edge of town, feeding themselves on stolen eggs and radioactive apples. “Their parents?” I ask.

Lovely Svetlana looks at me sadly. “Dead,” she says, “dying.”

“Why?” I ask.

She shrugs. “Chernobyl. Vodka. Chernobyl.”

According to the 2000 report on Minsk’s United Nations Development Program (UNDP), life expectancy in Belarus in the 1960s was almost level with that in Western Europe. By 1999, thirteen years after Chernobyl, it had fallen 12 to 14 years for men and 7 to 9 years for women. A baby boy born in rural Belarus today can expect to live 59 years.

But they may be very hard years. Nearly half of Belarus’s teenagers have serious health problems. Forty-five to 47 percent of those graduating from high school have physical disorders like gastro-intestinal anomalies, weakened hearts, and cataracts; 40 percent of them have chronic “blood disorders” and malfunctioning thyroids. The number of handicapped adolescents has trebled in the last decade.
On my first trip, in November 2000, I spent three days touring schools in Cherikov and the even more contaminated areas of the Mogilev district. Then we traveled to children’s hospitals in Minsk. What I saw there still shows up in nightmares: children with eyes in the sides of their heads, and children with no eyes at all, children with fingers that look like toes, and children whose genitals are so poorly formed one can’t determine their sex. Those nightmares are audible with infant wails like the cries of wounded wild animals.

STILL, IT’S NOT THAT BELARUS HASN’T TRIED to take care of its own. According to the Ministry of Emergencies, they decontaminated 500 settlements. Sixty percent of those they decontaminated two or three times. They removed 7,300,000 cubic meters of topsoil and buried it, but could either find or afford only 1,570,000 cubic meters to replace it. They asphalted dirt roads, streets, and sidewalks so that radioactive particles were not sent swirling in dust that would find its way into human lungs. They dismantled objects, removed roofs, and buried them. They shattered contaminated stones and bricks into powder so that no one could carry them away to use again.

But eventually the ministry admitted defeat, declaring, “it proved unreal [sic] to fully decontaminate settlements, agricultural and industrial facilities with a view to creating normal living and working conditions, since needs significantly exceed opportunities and resources.”

But by 1998, twelve years after the catastrophe, the Belarusans had resettled only 260,000 of the 2.2 million people living on contaminated land. They had built schools with places for 33,700 students (130,000 had been displaced), preschools with 11,500 places, hospitals with 3,500 beds, and dozens of outpatient health clinics for treating a population that develops more radiation-related illnesses each day. In many places, they provided electricity, water, sewage, heat, natural gas, roads, and transportation systems, but not in all. They just couldn’t afford it.

“COULD IT HAPPEN HERE?” I asked a nuclear engineer in Iowa shortly after September 11, 2001.

“Depends upon what you mean by ‘it,’” he said. “It wouldn’t be exactly like Chernobyl. But if you mean, would a disaster at an American plant something like the explosion at Chernobyl contaminate as much land, contaminate it with the same kinds of radioactivity — yeah, it could happen here.”

“Let’s say,” I postulated, “that I disconnect the moderating rods from the source of electricity and blow up the back-up generators?”

He looked at me for a quiet moment. “Yeah,” he said, “you could make it happen here.”

At home, I get out an atlas and look at my country. Mentally, I draw 155-mile-radius circles around some of the 104 nuclear reactors sprinkled around the map. I consider the prevailing wind directions and imagine the inhabitants who would be living under those air currents. I wonder how the wealthiest nation on the face of the Earth would ever cope with such a disaster, not why the Belarusans can’t.

Recently a letter came from Irene. “We have been informed that now, suddenly, we live on a clean territory,” she wrote. “Can you imagine such a thing? We are not paid for radiation anymore, and all government aid stops.”

The radiation counter that stood in the middle of Cherikov like some nightmare version of a time and temperature clock disappeared the day after the announcement. Would that the radionuclides could so easily be removed.

Copyright 2004 The Orion Society.