Weather and Gaia and Planet Waves — oh my!

by Amanda Painter

On Democracy Now! two days ago, I was struck by Amy Goodman’s summary of 2010 in terms of ‘extreme weather’ (as well as the mainstream media’s refusal to make the connection to climate change, in an interview with Dr. Paul Epstein, associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School). In fact, I almost can’t believe how many natural disasters got packed into 2010, keeping the Planet Waves team on its toes. All the activity is testament, I suppose, to an untenable confluence of intense astrology (cardinal grand cross/Aries Point activity and more) and the cumulative demands human development has placed on our home planet over the decades.

We’re about two weeks away from the one-year anniversary of the earthquake that devastated Haiti — an event Eric covered in real time here on the blog as well as in a subscriber issue. Just over a month later, an even larger quake rocked Chile, though thankfully with a lower degree of catastrophe.

And then a couple months after that, Gaia decided to shift gears to ‘expulsion mode’, with an Icelandic volcano spewing enough volcanic ash to halt European air travel for days (also here).

In late summer, Fe Bongolan began connecting the climate-change-and-media dots on this very issue with her post titled “Ohh, the water” in August. She mentions the rampant forest fires in Russia and the other disasters that marked the first half of 2010, but the article’s primary focus the massive flooding in Pakistan. She writes:

Yet it’s so odd that there isn’t the same media circus we’ve come to expect of our disaster coverage for this disaster. Is it because a flood is not as instantaneous a disaster as a volcano that disrupts international airspace or the flattening of a country by massive earthquake? Is it because we’ve reached the limit of so many disasters in one year that we’re feeling relief fatigue?

Perhaps driving the point home even further is the fact that Fe’s article is the only one I saw in my search of Planet Waves dealing specifically with the Pakistani floods. Fe continues:

We mark this week feeling our bodies, as Len, Eric, the cardinal cross and the T-square would have us do. Not just our own physical human bodies, but the body of our mother planet as she goes through yet another shock to the system. This time, she’s being pulled from all four corners: elements of earth, water, air and fire all active, powerful, contentious, wounding and stretching her and her children to the max.

It was a year that stretched Eric and the whole Planet Waves team for sure, as we scrambled to cover each new pressing development in our world, serving as ‘psychic bomb shelter’ and safe haven for expression for our readers; trying our damnedest to keep our own pace of growth in sync with the demands of our time.

As Amy Goodman noted at the opening of Tuesday’s show, the huge blizzard that shut down much of the eastern coast of the U.S. “was a grimly fitting end to 2010, which was characterized by extreme weather from start to finish, with earthquakes, heat waves, floods, volcanoes, super typhoons, blizzards, landslides and droughts. . . . Meanwhile, preliminary data show that 18 countries broke their records for the hottest day ever. In fact, 2010 may go down as the hottest on record worldwide, this according to the World Meteorological Organization.”

A viewer wrote in to her questioning why Democracy Now! was covering the weather, asking “What’s next? Traffic and sports?” Amy’s response was to say, “But the weather is news, if the newscasters on television took it on by talking about the issue of global warming — you know, what people can do about this.”

And that’s why we take on these events at Planet Waves, too — as well as natural disasters with a clearly direct human cause (the BP oil spill) and political/cultural events (see Eric’s earlier roundup of favorite articles here). Astrology, used carefully with discernment and a sense that we’re all here right now with creative purpose, is a pretty unique language for its ability to describe how we fit into this larger whole — and what we, as individuals on this big blue marble, can do about this. Let’s skim back through this story of 2010 and see how actively we can write our individual and collective narratives for 2011 — whatever the weather.