The Yin-Yang of Life

What could Whitney Houston and Quan Am Thi Kinh possibly have in common? These are two famous women from totally different cultures, different life experiences and different centuries. I suggest that the connections between them are based on what their life stories can teach us as fellow human beings – namely, compassion.

Whitney Houston was a pop diva and musical icon renowned internationally through the global vehicle of popular culture, and recently deceased. Quan Am Thi Kinh lived many centuries ago, and her legend as a female monk is renowned through the centuries among Buddhists and Vietnamese people.

The first factor that connects them is that both women, albeit in different circumstances, experienced unbearable suffering even while they dedicated their own lives to alleviate the suffering of other human beings, through their creative gifts and practice of compassion.

A second factor is that both women were motivated by spiritually grounded love. Their inner glow attracted and inspired others. For Whitney Houston, her childhood was influenced by a strict family home and joyful participation, through gospel singing, in the Church. For Quan Am Thi Kinh – a later name bequeathed upon a young Vietnamese woman, Kinh Tam – her family similarly was strict, and disallowed advanced schooling or any life beyond getting married and bearing children. From a very young age, regardless, Kinh Tam yearned for the monastic life, and privately studied the sutra texts of the Buddha.

Women, however, were not allowed to be Buddhist nuns in Giao Chau (the ancient name for Vietnam). Kinh Tam was forced by her parents to marry at 19, then wrongly accused by her in-laws of trying to kill their son, disgraced, and returned to her parents’ home. Her prescribed role was to help her younger brother study. She otherwise devoted herself to learning meditative practices, and soon ran away, disguised as a young man. In this disguise, she trained to become a novice in the Dharma Cloud Temple, and sought future ordination as a monk.

Again, what in heaven’s name can a historic Buddhist female monk – who chooses a life of sacrifice, spiritual retreat, and carries out humanitarian deeds as per religious custom – have in common with a contemporary American pop singer?

For contributions to the world from Whitney Houston primarily have been generated not by religious anonymity but, instead, measured in accordance with worldly achievements such as music record sales, awards, Hollywood movie successes and more awards. Indeed, always and relentlessly, Houston was expected to maintain `peak performance’ under the public gaze. Her philanthropy, meanwhile, got marginalized in the media and treated as just another expectation, given her celebrity status and wealth.

The adoring, yet notoriously fickle, public loved her when she performed as a super woman or, more accurately, when reduced to a super `commodity’ to feed the expectations and demands they foisted upon her. The public, conversely, condemned her human fragility of succumbing to addictions.

In watching a recent American TV news magazine show, that highlighted earlier TV interviews, no awareness is evident in the lines of questioning to get at the source of the addictions. In other words, no recognition is directed to the human toll paid in order to maintain the super star fantasy image that pushed Houston over the edge into substance dependencies.

Public condemnation – totally bereft of compassion – therefore, is the third factor that connects Whitney Houston and Kinh Tam, despite totally different lifestyles and how the popular media characterized Houston’s humanitarian acts, seemingly in contrast to Kinh Tam’s religiously-based tenets of life purpose.

Instead, the fourth factor connecting the two women is that their humanitarian motivations came from the same source – the human soul and desire to use their respective gifts to create a more socially just world.

Let us return to Kinh Tam’s suffering. Her new life as a novice, disguised as a man, did not spare her from further injustice. A village woman became pregnant and accused Kinh Tam of being the father. Kinh Tam was publicly and severely whipped, because she refused to confess to this false accusation. Nor did she want to reveal her true identity as a woman, which would have terminated the monastic life that she lived for.

Next, when this village woman gave birth, she abandoned her baby on the steps outside the monastery. The novice Kinh Tam chose to take responsibility for the baby’s care, despite re-igniting village rumours that she really was the father after all. Her love and compassion to save the life of this child took precedence.

Six short years later, Kinh Tam contracted pneumonia. Despite the injustices inflicted upon her, she had transcended any ill feelings towards the perpetrators. On her death bed, she composed letters of loving kindness to them, and asked her parents to adopt the child as their grandson. In a letter to the abbot, she invited him to commit to the building of the first Vietnamese Buddhist temple where women could be ordained and practice as nuns. He pledged to do so, and such a temple was built.

Something tragic happened, however, in the life of Whitney Houston, to distinguish her life path from that taken by Kinh Tam. The latter, in following her soul’s desire found a community of kindred souls who were on the same spiritual path. The former, believing God had given her an angelic voice to bring joy, beauty and love to the wider world outside the Church, stepped outside the embrace of a spiritual community of support.

The toxic blend of commerce and voracious appetites of public demand fed off Houston, psychically and viscerally, sucking the life energy out of her. In an early 1990s interview with Diane Sawyer, Whitney Houston identified her future dream ten years hence – to retire in order to focus on family and children, including grandchildren. In saying so, her face lit up, fleetingly. The sadness in her eyes, otherwise, spoke volumes, when she added that the joy she once had experienced in singing was gone. By then, throughout that decade, Houston’s immense productivity tragically tore her asunder.

Before closing this blog, I want to tell readers that I initially had intended to focus on the story of Quan Am Thi Kinh, after reading a contemporary version titled The Novice (2011) by Vietnamese Buddhist Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh – and recommend it.

But, distressed by the media focus of Whitney Houston’s passing, reduced to a story about the fall from grace by yet another pop celebrity whose life bit the dust from substance abuse, I felt compelled to address her more fully as a human being and, as well, raise a question.

When is the popular media, and the larger society, ever going to examine what our collective societal addictions to celebrity culture, and also consumer culture, inflict upon fellow human beings? We need to reflect on what we value, who we value, and why?

The Dalai Lama writes: “Genuine compassion is based not on our own projections and expectations, but rather on the rights of the other.” He points out how concern for someone we care about often is not actually `compassion,’ but instead `attachment.’ In other words, our so-called concern, more honestly, comes from our expectations and what we project through our own desires onto that other person.

He continues, “As long as that person wishes for peace and happiness and wishes to overcome suffering, then on that basis we develop a genuine concern for his or her problems. This is genuine compassion.”

Let us remember Whitney Houston through her generosity of song and humanitarian work, especially on behalf of children. We remain blessed with her music that lives on. May we wish for her, compassionately, a soul finally at peace in the world of Spirit.

Everett pushed his wheelchair up to the desk in his home studio, the chair almost swallowing up his delicate physique. A feeling of tenderness welled up inside me. As he attentively organized notepad and pencil to begin writing, I wanted to rush up to him and give him a hug.

Everett would have liked that. In fact, he occasionally had requested a hug, but I was so fearful of breaking his fragile ribs. I, instead, would gently take hold of his shoulders and give him a peck on the cheek. His response was a resigned acceptance.

In the late stages of muscular dystrophy, Everett Soop’s physical fragility was no joke. Through four years of difficult fundraising, as a filmmaker, my uppermost concern had been to complete Everett’s film story so that he could see it before his life ended. I was determined to keep my promise.

On this particular Saturday, 14 years ago, it was Valentine’s Day. The occasion was the second of two film shoots to record his life story in my documentary film Soop on Wheels. My film crew, two terrific, sensitive guys – cinematographer Winston Upshall and sound recordist Gary Bruckner – had turned the tiny room upside down, in order for us to get the camera properly positioned to shoot Everett.

As the director I remained in the background, leaning against the door frame, to watch the scene being shot. Everett was determined to light an incense stick before writing. So he did, eventually, then wafting the smoke with his eagle feather. Given his published work not just as a political cartoonist yet also as a satirical columnist, I wanted to show him writing, and had asked him to go through the actions, and jot down anything.

But, this was Everett, whose subterranean rivers of feeling I already had discovered – when given the opportunity – would rise to the surface and break your heart. Quietly writing while the camera rolled, several minutes later Everett leaned back and called me over. He presented me with the sheet. I read it, and tears rolled down my cheeks. In those few minutes, Everett had written a beautiful ode to his departed maternal grandmother, Enimaki, and the sorrow of cultural losses among his Blackfoot people. (Actress Tantoo Cardinal, in her voice-over narration, recites the poem in the film.)

Everett is the most remarkable person whom I ever met, to this day. As a truth teller, regardless, he paid the price of being ahead of his time – the story of all messengers – by experiencing a lifetime of discrimination, isolation and loneliness. Despite all of it, he never gave up trying to create a better world for both Aboriginal, and also disabled, people. As well, he cared for the young people and wanted their lives to be more hopeful.

He loved the women in his family, and they loved him. He loved the animals, the birds, the wide open sky and fields of the Alberta plains. He loved his house plants. Indeed, he cherished life itself. In his cartoons and writings he strongly attacked the forces, outside and within, destroying the integrity and spiritual values of Aboriginal culture.

Our friendship had been evolving for several years before I decided to do the film. In fact, we had written on our hearts a compact of trust that carried us both forward, at a time when identity politics got very ugly, and “white” people like me were supposed to back off from supposedly telling someone else’s story. Yet I simply was the conduit. Meanwhile, people around Everett were totally indifferent to his story getting told at all.

He and I transcended these regrettable barriers – of anger, resentment, prejudice, fear, jealousy, and being stuck in unspeakable grief – all reactions to life’s injustices that diminish our human understanding of each other. We simply were two human beings on a journey trying to make meaning of life’s injustices.

Love has many expressions. Everett and I understood love at a soul level. I had discovered a beautiful Celtic term that I felt characterized our friendship – anam cara – meaning `soul friend.’ Everett felt the same.

He even referred to my love for him as `agape.’ Psychoanalyst Rollo May, in his classic book Love and Will (1969), describes agape as: “the love which is devoted to the welfare of the other, the prototype of which is the love of God for man” [p. 38, 39]. Later in his book, May cautions: “Agape always carries with it the risk of playing God. But this is a risk we need to take and can take” [p. 319].

God was very important to Everett, for he believed in a loving God/Creator/Spirit, and that, ultimately, the world of Spirit would offer solace that had been difficult to attain on Earth. I think that I did try, inadvertently, to play God for while, until Everett taught me – unknowingly as my spiritual mentor – where to draw the line between well-intentioned `rescuer’ trying to change another person’s circumstances and the much more effective role of `compassionate witness’ who pays attention, supportively, to how another individual is negotiating their own reality.

In June 1998, before delivering the film to broadcasters, I brought the rough cut to Everett for approval. He wept. For what I saw in Everett he had not seen – his deep capacity for love. Before the film, he believed that his life had been a failure. My gift of love to Everett was not only making it possible for him to relate his truth to the wider world. Moreover, serendipitously, doing so provided a pathway for him to recognize his own inner beauty.

Everett’s life illustrates the timeless and universal hero’s journey, in a film story that has resonated with audiences at nine film festivals, television viewers, and still sells internationally today. To see a six-minute trailer, that includes the incense-burning scene, go to my Canadian distributor McNabb Connolly. For sales outside Canada, please go to Filmakers Library.

Spellbound, I froze and clutched my writing pad and pen to my bosom, as the fawn came closer. I did not want to startle her. The doe, ears up like flags as soon as she spotted me across the marsh pond, had fled into the wood.

The fawn, so new to the world, was barely able to stagger upright on her fragile legs. Regardless, she slowly, and serendipitously, tottered around the pond in my direction, sniffing and chewing delicacies en route, sensually attentive in each step and innocently embracing all that life presented.

Awestruck simply in the gift of witnessing this exquisite creature exploring her newly discovered world, I had believed her instincts would deter her from approaching a human. However, her angelic trust apparently was all-encompassing, so that the onus was on me to do no harm, nor otherwise take advantage of her vulnerability. Never was I so humbled as in this magic encounter.

‘Magical’ is a word that has several meanings, among them, mystic, enchanting and mysterious. But dictionary definitions are so limited in describing the special moments in life that transport us from the mundane to the sacred or holy – namely, an awakened reverence for life.

Such unexpected encounters are opportunities that can signify deep meaning, if we pay attention. Alternatively, we can choose to disregard such an event, frivolously tossing it aside. A shallow, fleeting glance, for example, might scan the fawn’s surface physicality of Bambi-like cuteness, before moving on, oblivious to any appreciation of such a rare encounter in the wild and without reflection about what we can learn.

The fawn, eventually, arrived at my side, fully exercising the quality of inquisitiveness for which deer are renowned. Her nose rubbed against my jeans as as she sniffed the strange, tall, two-legged creature. I had almost stopped breathing from sheer panic that if my human scent later would be detected, the fawn’s mother would reject her. For that reason, golly, did I ever have to restrain myself from the temptation to reach out and gently stroke her beautiful, soft, dappled body.

The dainty creature then continued on her way, in no hurry, while she minutely examined the wealth of her surroundings, particularly in their olfactory and edible delights. I remained still until she disappeared, the wonder and joy of her brief companionship washing over me.

Jungian analyst/author Linda Schierse Leonard mentions that Jung characterized the spiritual plight of Western civilization as the result of its alienation from the rest of the world. I agree, and add, that it is through close encounters in Nature, entered upon with the humility and intentionality to learn rather than with the self-serving arrogance to exploit, where each and every human being can restore any misplaced sense of reverence.

Spiritually-grounded messengers have reminded us of this fact through the ages. Leonard writes, in Creation’s Heartbeat, Following the Reindeer Spirit:

“Prophets, poets and other visionaries have always known that it is in the wilderness that we find spirit. Christ, Buddha, and Mohammed went alone to the desert, the forest, or the mountains to pray and ask for vision and enlightenment. They travelled inward to the interior wilderness as well, finding renewed strength and inspiration” [Leonard, 1996, p. 37].

Indeed, the world of Nature has bountiful gifts and teachings, which expand and deepen our minds and hearts to appreciate the multitude of ways in which human life is interrelated with all nonhuman life. The gifts are the magical moments of encounter, and the teachings awaken our higher qualities and elevate our state of mind to a holistic level of appreciating life itself, interconnecting mind, body, heart and soul. In that regard, I considered the fawn a messenger as well.

For such magical encounters offer numinous experiences, where Nature and Spirit intersect. My encounter many years ago on the trails of Ganondagan – a historic site dedicated by the State of New York to honour Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) history, culture and living traditions – offered one such transformative moment in my life.

Go to http://www.ganondagan.org, and other site pages, to read about the Haudenosaunee. Scroll down the hiking page, to click `Thanksgiving Address,’ or go to www.nativevillage.org/Inspiration-/iroquois_thanksgiving_address.htm. Here is an eloquent prayer that exemplifies the Indigenous appreciation for Creation, this particular prayer still recited today at the opening of all formal Haudenosaunee gatherings.

In the distance two Inuit hunters called out a warning for us to return to shore. They could hear the ice cracking. I was not even aware that we had been walking offshore. In the heart of winter on Baffin Island (now called Nunavut), the snow-covered land, jagged with inland rock and ice, looked no different to me from the frozen sea. Inuit photographer Jimmy Manning guided me back to shore, where we hopped on his snowmobile and headed back to his home community, Cape Dorset.

On that day 25 years ago, Jimmy was ‘hunting’ with his camera, following in the tradition of his grandfather. Peter Pitseolak had been a historian and writer, and one of Canada’s first Aboriginal photographers to document the life of his people, the Inuit. Jimmy worked, until recent years, for more than three decades as manager of what today is called Kinngait Studios, originally known as West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative.

A 2010 Canadian documentary film Kinngait: Riding Light into the World maps the successive generations of Cape Dorset-based Inuit artists who illustrate their ever-changing way of life. One of the most significant roles of these artists is the role that is timeless and universal – to bear witness to authentic reality and the inevitable tides of change and how they impact upon life. But, regrettably, Inuit prints and carvings today are becoming ever more visibly altered by art market influences from southern and international buyers. They too often prefer more ‘pastoral’ images to artistic insights on how modern technologies are altering Inuit day-to-day lifestyle and perspectives. This unhappy scenario is examined in Etched in Stone, a 2010 CBC radio documentary.

But, while commerce trumps authenticity in the ‘art world,’ the human heart’s perennial quest for truth telling, – as well as creative storytelling that depicts the larger and deeper truths – ultimately, trump the goals of commerce. For the latter’s dark side seeks to reduce everyone and everything alive on this planet to consumers, commodities and marketplaces. The perennial quest, therefore, and the capacity of caring collaboration across cultures, infuses humanity’s hope.

Despite its bone-chilling title Cold, Clear and Deadly, such a media project is in progress, outlined at http://eria.info/coldcleardeadly/clearcolddeadly.pdf. Presented here is an insightful 15-page description, with images, about the life-threatening issue of ‘persistent organic pollutants’ (POPs), scientifically analyzed from Lake Superior north to Arctic waters, in a 2007 book by the same name. Such airborne industrial pollutants arrive from around the world, attracted to cold waters and climes, where they settle in water, micro-organisms, plants, shellfish, fish and mammals. PCBs, in fact, first were reported as far back as the 1980s, discovered in the breast milk of Inuit women. Today, PCBs and other toxins are becoming even more virulent and cancerous. The Inuit of the Canadian north, and also Greenland, are the most vulnerable in regard to increasing ocean contamination from the highest concentrations of POPs.

For ‘humanity’s hope’ is integrally connected with one essential fact. We need to take responsibility to better inform ourselves about the grim reality that faces the human family. By doing so, we then know why and how we need to respond, for example, taking measures to ban the production of these global pollutants. The future is not hopeless but rather hopeful, in accordance with the degree of caring and collaboration that we exercise in the pursuit of ecological literacy.

In my latest investigations, I also stumbled upon website http://www.restco.ca. It illustrates human collaboration wonderfully in the wealth of resources compiled by a small group of scientists and engineers – passionate about sustainable energy systems – coming together to work with “remote (off-grid) communities, notably in the Canadian Arctic and Boreal regions, to reduce the vulnerability of their energy systems.” Their company is called Remote Energy Security Technologies Collaborative (RESTCo). Fortified with well-researched facts, they communicate a rigorous critique of Arctic offshore drilling and challenge the findings published by the oil industry.

The Inuit, meanwhile, continue to rely on the health and presence of the caribou. For their ‘traditional environmental knowledge’ (TEK) experientially informs them that the caribou help to maintain the natural balance in ecosystems, and provide a significant nutritious food source, generate income from various economic activities and, last but not least, symbolically represent and sustain cultural pride and spiritual values.

Such symbolism exists globally among Indigenous peoples whose lives are interwoven with migrating herds of caribou and reindeer in the northern hemisphere. Jungian analyst and author Linda Schierse Leonard visited diverse Indigenous peoples, including the Sami of Lapland and the Even people of Siberia. She eloquently describes their reverence for the sacredness of life, and the central role of the reindeer.

In her book Creation’s Heartbeat, Following the Reindeer Spirit (1996), she also identifies a significant factor beyond ecological literacy that profoundly impacts on humanity’s hope. She suggests something that I have characterized for many years as the fractured consciousness and collective soul woundedness of Euro-western culture.

Leonard suggests: “Western humans tend to be locked into a manner of calculative thinking that reduces relationships to ‘I-It’ – an objectified alliance constructed out of a need for power and control… [W]e lose our spirituality, our sense of there being something greater than ourselves, greater than a desire for power.” She cites philosopher-theologian Martin Buber who identified the ‘I-Thou’ relationship – a soul-to-soul connection with other people, animals, Nature, and all beings”[p. 35].

In other words, Western culture needs to restore the innate human capacity to revitalize soulful awareness, and integrate holistic thinking and practices across all sectors of society. Through awakening our emotional and spiritual consciousness, and understanding our energetic interconnections with all planetary life, the foundation of humanity’s hope becomes established.

This enterprising Tlingit trapper built a raft to transport his new 1928 Chevrolet Sedan by river from Whitehorse to his home community of Teslin, in the Yukon. No roads yet existed in the bush, but George Johnston was going to change that. He requested his maternal nephews to dig out a mile long road in Teslin, and charged a dollar a ride to anyone who dared to take a chance. For George Johnston taught himself how to drive.

Johnston’s many accomplishments are legendary among his people, not least of which was becoming one of the first Aboriginal photographers in Canada. His outstanding images illustrate the authentic lifestyle of early 20th century Tlingit adapting elements from two cultural worlds, while still retaining their traditions and self-sufficient way of life.

In 1987, while researching the life of George Johnston, I met several contemporary and similarly enterprising Tlingit, very informed on world affairs yet making certain that the younger generation learned hunting and trapping survival skills. As one Tlingit traditional teacher told me, we will continue to know how to survive if an economic crisis in the larger world ever happens.

As a fulltime freelance journalist in those days, I tried to get Canadian mainstream magazine editors interested in these profiles of accomplished Aboriginal (First Nation, Metis and Inuit) people whom I met, in the Yukon and across Canada, with minimal success. Worse, despite receiving a Canada Council travel grant to gather firsthand interviews from Aboriginal (Native) photographers and find out why photography held such high value in every community, more rejections followed, this time from major Canadian publishers.

These publishers felt that cultural identity was not important. Instead, they wanted a scholarly interpretation of Aboriginal art, based on the classic Euro-western perspective of `art for art’s sake.’ The intention of these Native photographers, however, was precisely to illustrate their own cultural identity. My pursuit, therefore, was to give voice to Aboriginal people and their lives from their own cultural perspectives. The photo images eloquently demonstrated their capabilities in negotiating two cultural worlds, wherever they still were grounded in spiritual values and practices that recognize the sacredness of all life.

Most Native newspapers in Canada, and a couple of Native American magazines, bought my articles regularly, particularly the interviews. But getting positive profiles of Native achievers published in mainstream media was almost impossible, so systemically stuck were the editors on cultural stereotypes. That mindset is what I call ‘cultural racism.’ It is the more insidious face of racism, because it is invisibly embedded in every system and institution of mainstream Euro-western culture, through the gaze upon itself as superior to non-Western cultures.

That arrogance and disregard for the wisdom of Indigenous, land-based peoples globally is a significant component of the threat to civilization as we know it, if we continue on the path of misguided and undemocratic industrial capitalism focused on ever larger industrial projects that are destroying the planetary life support system.

We cannot rely only on mainstream news coverage that too often reduces important environment issues to a focus on adversarial political rhetoric. Regardless, such news does perform a useful role in exposing the incredible lack of regard by Canada’s federal government for the environmental future, not limited to Canada yet beyond as well.

The Alberta tar sands, for example, are an abomination, as are the industrial projects affiliated with them. Together with the disruption to First Nations’ way of life, threatened species include the woodland caribou. Federal Minister of Environment Peter Kent has refused to recommend emergency protection of critical habitat, ignoring scientific evidence.

Affiliated industrial projects include not just the Keystone pipeline expansion proposed through environmentally-sensitive areas in the United States yet also, more recently, the highly controversial Northern Gateway pipeline and proposed oil tankers along the British Columbia coast for shipments to Asia. Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper bluntly stated on CBC-TV’s Mansbridge One on One: “the fundamental basis of our energy policy in this country is essentially market-driven.”

The biosphere of the planet and the bioregions of North America are not defined by human-created political boundaries. But federal Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver labels protestors as radicals with ideological agendas and “foreigners” who have no business in funding opposition to the Northern Gateway pipeline. Most of the protestors though are First Nations and other citizens of British Columbia and across Canada.

The hypocrisy and double standard are incredible regarding what apparently is the largest industrial project in the world at this time, and receiving billions of dollars from “foreign, that is, international, support, including China, a significant beneficiary of Canada’s oil.

Oliver’s distorted references, in fact, target intelligent, environmentally-informed fellow human beings that include those Americans who recognize the peril that we confront in creating – for short term monetary profits that benefit a very few people – further inevitable environmental devastation.

Meanwhile, fellow Canadians, be vigilant! Two threats to our freedom of expression have been indicated, both by Oliver and Harper. One threat is the possible federal attempt to remove the charitable status of environmental organizations who receive “foreign” funding. The second is to shorten the regulatory process, as per the Northern Gateway hearings, with the excuse that doing so will shut out so-called radical groups who send in numerous people to recite “studied lines” repeatedly. That excuse is an insult to the more than 5,000 people who have come forward to exercise their democratic right to participate.

I cite this pipeline example not just as a Canadian yet, moreover, as a planetary citizen who is illustrating one of the foremost challenges of this historic moment – for humanity to awaken consciousness, to become appropriately informed about what sustains life on this planet and what genuinely threatens it. The human family is called, as never before wherever you live, to step forward and speak out to protect the place you call home and/or be active in restoring a healthy and safe environment for our children and the generations to come.

Author and Jungian analyst Linda Schierse Leonard, in her book Creation’s Heartbeat, Following the Reindeer Spirit, suggests that “the planet is enveloped in the Dark Night of the Soul.” She also suggests that in such a time of transition, we have choices in regard to future directions and outcomes. In my fourth and final blog in this series, subtitled “Humanity’s Hope,” I will address her book’s inspiring message.

For those of you who prefer hard science to be convinced about humanity’s peril, I recommend a rigorous study titled “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?” in The Open Atmospheric Science Journal, 2008, 2, 217-231. In its closing statements: “…decision-makers do not appreciate the gravity of the situation. We must begin to move now toward the era beyond fossil fuels… The stakes, for all life on the planet, surpass those of any previous crisis. The greatest danger is continued ignorance and denial, which could make tragic consequences unavoidable.”