The familiar machinery of political scandal by Jemma Norman

There is something almost ritualistic about the way British politics devours its leaders. The details change, the names rotate, the headlines evolve but the underlying mechanism remains stubbornly intact. Prime Minister Keir Starmer now finds himself caught in that machinery, not because of a collapse in policy or governance, but because of the gravitational pull of scandal politics where association often matters more than evidence, and outrage outruns proportion.

At the center of the current storm is Peter Mandelson’s appointment and his past associations, now reframed through the toxic lens of Jeffrey Epstein. The opposition has seized the moment with predictable urgency, demanding resignation not merely as a matter of accountability, but as a political strategy. The argument is less about governance and more about perception: that proximity to controversy is itself disqualifying, regardless of context or nuance.

This is not new. British political history is littered with moments when leaders, often effective, sometimes transformative, have been brought low not by failures of statecraft, but by the slow drip of reputational damage amplified into a flood. The pattern is clear: isolate a controversy, attach it to the leader, repeat it relentlessly and allow public trust to erode under the weight of insinuation.

What makes this episode particularly striking is the asymmetry between the scale of the accusation and the scale of the response. Starmer’s government has, by most conventional measures, pursued stability in economic management, sought to rebuild trade relationships, and maintained a coherent defence posture in an increasingly volatile global landscape. These are not trivial achievements. They are the very benchmarks by which governments are supposed to be judged.

And yet, none of that seems to matter in the current climate. Instead, the political conversation has been hijacked by a narrative that thrives on outrage rather than substance. The opposition, leaning heavily into populist rhetoric, has found fertile ground in framing the issue as one of moral collapse. But beneath the indignation lies a striking absence of constructive alternatives. There is little in the way of a coherent economic vision, no detailed roadmap for trade, no serious engagement with the complexities of national security. What exists instead is a politics of reaction: loud, emotive, and strategically simplistic.

This is where the danger lies not just for Starmer but for the broader democratic culture. When political discourse becomes dominated by scandal cycles, it creates incentives that reward performance over policy. It encourages opposition parties to prioritize character attacks over constructive critique and it pressures governments to govern defensively rather than ambitiously.

There is also a deeper, more uncomfortable question at play: whether the threshold for political survival has become so fragile that any sustained controversy, regardless of its substantive merit, can trigger calls for resignation. If that is the case, then leadership itself becomes precarious, contingent not on effectiveness but on the ability to withstand the next wave of outrage.

None of this is to suggest that scrutiny is unwarranted. Accountability is a cornerstone of democratic governance, and public figures must be held to high standards. But there is a difference between scrutiny and opportunism, between legitimate concern and manufactured crisis. When that line is blurred, the result is not stronger democracy, but a more cynical and volatile political environment.

Starmer’s challenge, then, is not only to navigate the immediate controversy, but to resist being defined by it. That requires more than political survival; it requires reasserting a narrative grounded in policy, competence, and long-term vision.

Whether that will be enough is another question entirely. History suggests that once the machinery of scandal is set in motion, it is difficult to stop. But history also shows that leadership is, at times, measured by the ability to endure precisely these moments and to emerge with substance intact, even as the noise grows louder.

Subtropics #poem by Abigail George

 

Love is quiet
Quiet

Be strong heart
I’ve cried tears

that have
tasted like the rain

Woven into my tissues
are wildflowers

What are woven
into yours?

I spoke to
the person in the cell

I went to bed with storms in my head
I called it a mistake then

And much later, a lesson

a choice

It’s summer
I feel the heat

beneath my skin
under my eyelids

I feed my father's cancer
tomato sandwiches

Dark
Dark
Dark

Here they come
The waves

Fear in my heart
for every word not said
every meal not prepared
when I saw blood

on the bandage
that covered your eye

Oh, mother
will you ever forgive me

for not listening to you?
Daily I write you poems

inside my head
that turn into

hymns, psalms
the Chopin melody turns into a river

the piano into a cold leaf

Dark
Dark
Dark

Here the waves come
I am left waiting for a miracle

in the dark
a spinster

with spinster thoughts
with spinster wants, needs and desires

even these fantasies
have tested me.

When allies starting draw a line by Edoardo Moretti

There are moments in international politics when a shift is less about policy and more about perception when the language leaders choose begins to separate a government from a nation, a strategy from a people, and, ultimately, accountability from abstraction. Italy’s recent decision to suspend the renewal of its defense cooperation agreement with Israel is one of those moments.

What makes this development noteworthy is not simply the policy itself, but the framing behind it. The emphasis on “the current situation” signals something deeper, a growing willingness among Western leaders to draw a distinction that has long been politically uncomfortable, the difference between the actions of a government and the identity of a state.

For years, criticism of Israeli military operations has often been flattened into broader, less precise narratives. Governments hesitated, wary of appearing to delegitimize an entire nation or alienate a longstanding ally. But that hesitation is beginning to erode. The language is changing. And with it, the political calculus.

At the center of this shift is a recognition that the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, particularly those shaped by ultra-nationalist and far-right coalition partners, are not synonymous with Israel itself. That may seem obvious in theory, but in practice, it has taken years of escalating tensions, civilian suffering, and international unease for leaders to say it out loud, even indirectly.

This matters because words shape consequences. When governments begin to isolate responsibility, placing it squarely on leadership rather than on an entire country, they open the door to more targeted forms of pressure. Diplomatic measures, economic decisions, and defense agreements can be recalibrated without crossing into blanket condemnation. It is a more precise form of accountability and arguably a more effective one.

Italy’s move reflects a broader pattern that is slowly emerging across Europe and beyond. Allies are not necessarily abandoning Israel, but they are signaling that support is not unconditional. There is a line, however faint or inconsistently applied and some now believe it has been crossed.

Critics will argue that such distinctions are politically convenient that they allow leaders to appear principled while avoiding the harder question of what meaningful consequences should follow. That critique is not without merit. Symbolic gestures, after all, are easier than sustained policy shifts. But symbolism still carries weight, especially in diplomacy, where perception often precedes action.

What is different now is the accumulation of these signals. One government hesitates. Another recalibrates. A third begins to speak more openly. Individually, each step may seem modest. Collectively, they suggest a turning point in how Western allies engage with Israel’s current leadership.

This is not about rewriting alliances overnight. Israel remains a strategic partner to many, and those relationships are deeply embedded in security, intelligence and political frameworks. But alliances are not static. They evolve, sometimes quietly, in response to changing realities on the ground.

The real question is whether this shift in tone will translate into sustained policy changes or whether it will fade as geopolitical priorities reassert themselves. History offers examples of both outcomes. Outrage can dissipate. Lines can blur again. But once a distinction is made publicly, it is harder to fully erase.

Perhaps the most significant implication of Italy’s decision is not what it does immediately, but what it permits others to consider. It creates space, for debate, for dissent and for a more nuanced conversation about responsibility and accountability.

And in a political landscape often defined by binary choices, that space may be the most consequential development of all.

Screws & Chips #124 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

In a galaxy far, far away, intelligence demonstrated by screws and chips,
boldly gone where no robot has gone before!

For more Screws & Chips, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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Mundy and the Khyber Rifles by Rene Wadlow

He who would understand the Plains must ascend the Eternal Hills, where a man’s eyes scan Infinity.  He who would make use of understanding must descend on the Plains where Past and Future meet, and men have need of him.    - Talbut Mundy Om-The Secret of Abbor Valley

The current tensions and armed violence on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier and the Khyber Pass which links the two countries brings to mind the theosophical novel King of the Khyber Rifles (1916) written by Talbot Mundy, who birth anniversary we note on 23 April.

The novel was written by Talbot Mundy, in part, to express the workings of karma, that ancient law of individual responsibility which gives humans their dignity. “We act and react, do and leave undone, think and refuse to think, stand firm or are seduced while karma- incorruptible and inescapable –inscribes our spiritual progress on the rolls of destiny. The Law adjusts all balances and measures, the exact effort of every thought and deed, detecting each hidden motive.”

Talbot Mundy (1879-1940) was born in England as William Lancaster Gibbon but used the name Talbot Mundy when he started to be published in 1911. Probably, he also wanted to put his English past behind him as he became highly critical of British colonial policy, though he remained influence by the example and the writing style of Edward Bulwer-Lytton who tried to use the popular novel such as Zanoni (1842) as a way of shaping mass public opinion. In Zanoi, Zanoni is an immortal sage and member of a secret brotherhood dedicated to helping humanity and holding esoteric knowledge. Bulwer-Lytton was an early advocate of feminism with the idea that women are more spiritually advanced than men, a theme that Talbot Mundy develops in his books.

Talbot Mundy left home when he was 16 to go to India, then Africa, the Middle East, and finally settled in the USA. He took a different wife in each geographic area, perhaps as a way to understand better the culture. The women characters in his novels are all a doorway to deeper understanding of spiritual insights and as keepers of the best of the specific culture. He went to India first in 1899 as a relief worker in Baroda and then in 1901 to report for newspapers on the fighting on the northwest frontier, which served as background for King of the Khyber Rifles. He met his first wife, an Englishwoman living in India and married in 1903. He developed a dislike for English colonial life in India with its contempt for Indian culture. He absorbed the Indian myths of spiritual masters and secret societies that were positive agents of world events — themes that he developed especially in his The Nine Unknown (1924) — a secret society founded by the Emperor Asoka around 270 BCE and which continued to the present, helping social and political reforms but secluded from open view. It is a theme developed later in Black Light and for short stories which he wrote in the USA for Adventure, a magazine of popular fiction.

Influenced by the example of Richard Burton (1821-1890) who combined experiences in India and Africa along with an interest in sexual practices — Burton having translated and introduced to Western readers the Kama Sutra, Talbot Mundy left India for Africa, where he met the woman who became his second wife. Africa played a lesser role in his novels but served as background for many of his short stories. After his short stay in Africa, he moved to the USA, where he divorced again and married his third wife, who was a member of a religious movement with its roots in New England, Christian Science.

From his Christian Science wife, he absorbed the idea of the power of positive thinking which fitted in with the thought power of Indian yogis. Talbot Mundy became President of the Christian-Science-related Anglo-American Society Relief Effort for Palestine, a society that was focused on aid for the Armenians who had fled what had become Turkey and were now living in the Middle East, especially Lebanon and Palestine. In 1921, Mundy left the US to continue to work on  Middle East causes, both to help administer the relief efforts and to write for the Jerusalem News.

By 1922, he had again divorced and married his fourth wife, Sally, who had also been doing relief work in the Middle East. Mundy, who was already critical of British colonial policy in India, quickly came to dislike British policy in the Middle East. He wrote a series of novels and short stories with Jim Grim, an English intelligence agent, as hero and as an avenue for Mundy’s cynical views on English policy-making.

By 1924, he had moved back to the USA where he lived in San Diego, California at the Point Loma Theosophical Movement headquarters. There he wrote his best theosophical novel, Om, the Secret of Abbor Valley. For five years he was the editor of The Theosophical Path, and worked closely with Katherine Tingley (1847-1929), the head of the Point Loma movement.

In 1929, he left Point Loma for New York City, where he took rooms at the Masters Building on Riverside Drive which had been created by Nicholas Roerich as a center for interaction among all the arts — music, painting, dance — . Mundy used some of Nicholas Roerich’s experiences in Asia, especially Tibet, and Roerich’s interest in Shambhala, a hidden city from which spiritual masters would send messengers to influence positively world events. Much of the Shambhala myth is used in Mundy’s King of the World. In New York, Mundy was active in theosophical and astrological circles, though none of his New York writings matched the power of Om, which merits being discovered by those who have not read it. For his bread and butter, Mundy wrote the radio scripts for the popular youth radio program “Jack Armstrong: the All-American Boy” which continued until the late 1940s-early 1950s.Jack Armstong was the adventure side of Talbot Mundy without the spiritual dimension or the political critique.

(1) For a fuller account of his life see Peter B. Ellis The Last Adventurer: The Life of Talbot Mundy (1984)

 ******************************

Rene Wadlow, President, Association of World Citizens

Residency, reality and the courage to admit Europe needs people by Nadine Moreau

There is something almost theatrical about Europe’s current demographic anxiety, governments lament shrinking workforces, economists warn of unsustainable pension systems and hospitals quietly strain under staffing shortages, yet migration policy often remains trapped in a political time warp. Against this backdrop, Spain’s move to regularize hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants is less radical than it is honest.

Let’s be clear about what is being proposed. Granting permanent residency to migrants who have already been living in the country, contributing informally, and staying out of trouble is not an act of reckless generosity. It is a recognition of reality. These individuals are not hypothetical arrivals at the border; they are already woven, albeit invisibly, into the fabric of Spanish society. They clean homes, harvest crops, care for the elderly, and fill the kinds of jobs that aging populations increasingly depend on but native workforces often cannot or will not.

Europe’s demographic crisis is not looming; it is here. Birth rates across much of the continent are well below replacement level, and the ratio of workers to retirees is steadily declining. Without intervention, pension systems will buckle under their own weight, and public healthcare, so often cited as a cornerstone of European identity, will struggle to maintain both quality and access. The uncomfortable truth is that economic sustainability requires more workers, not fewer. And workers, in this case, are already present.

Regularization does something that restrictive policies fail to achieve: it pulls people out of the shadows and into the tax base. Undocumented migrants, by definition, operate in informal economies where exploitation is common and contributions to public systems are minimal or indirect. Legal status changes that equation. It creates accountability, encourages integration, and transforms individuals from invisible labour into recognized participants in national life.

Critics will argue that such policies risk encouraging further migration or undermining the rule of law. These concerns are not entirely unfounded, but they are often overstated. Migration flows are driven by complex global forces, conflict, climate, inequality, not solely by the promise of legal status in one country. Meanwhile, the rule of law is not weakened by adapting policy to reality; it is strengthened when laws reflect practical, enforceable conditions rather than aspirational rigidity.

There is also a deeper, more uncomfortable layer to the debate: xenophobia dressed up as economic caution. It is easier, politically, to frame migrants as a burden than to acknowledge their necessity. Yet the evidence is visible in everyday life. Who staffs the late shifts in hospitals? Who keeps agricultural sectors afloat? Who fills the gaps in elder care as populations age? The answer, increasingly, is migrants, documented or not.

Spain’s approach implicitly challenges a broader European reluctance to confront this dependency. It asks a simple question: if these individuals are already essential, why maintain the fiction that they are outsiders? Legal recognition is not just a bureaucratic adjustment; it is a social acknowledgment that belonging can be earned through presence, contribution, and adherence to the law.

Of course, regularization is not a silver bullet. It must be paired with coherent immigration systems, labour protections, and integration policies that extend beyond paperwork. But dismissing it outright ignores the scale of the challenge Europe faces. Aging societies do not have the luxury of ideological purity; they require pragmatic solutions.

The real test is whether other countries are willing to follow this kind of pragmatic lead. Europe cannot simultaneously fear demographic decline and resist the very people who can help mitigate it. At some point, the contradiction becomes untenable.

Spain’s policy may not solve everything, but it does something more important: it replaces denial with decision. In a continent caught between nostalgia and necessity, that alone is a step forward.

Earth day in the age of drones by Virginia Robertson

International Mother Earth Day arrives each year with familiar rituals: polished speeches, curated pledges, and a fleeting wave of collective concern. Governments reaffirm commitments, corporations repackage sustainability, and social media blooms with images of forests and oceans as if reverence alone could halt their decline. Yet this year, as in many before it, the dissonance is impossible to ignore. While we celebrate the Earth, we are simultaneously tearing into it with precision, with efficiency and increasingly, with distance.

Modern warfare has perfected the art of detachment. Drones hover thousands of feet above the ground, their operators continents away, their strikes measured in coordinates rather than consequences. Bombs fall not only on strategic targets but on ecosystems that took centuries to evolve. Forests burn, soil is poisoned, rivers are choked with debris and chemicals. The victims are not just human lives, though those losses are devastating enough but entire webs of life that have no voice in our conflicts and no defense against our technologies.

There is a quiet brutality in this contradiction. On one hand, we speak of biodiversity loss, climate change, and the urgent need to protect fragile ecosystems. On the other, we normalize the destruction of those very systems in the name of security, influence or retaliation. It is as though we have created two moral frameworks: one for how we treat the Earth in times of peace, and another for how we abandon it in times of conflict.

The environmental cost of war is often treated as collateral, an unfortunate but secondary concern. But that framing is dangerously outdated. When wetlands are destroyed, they do not simply “recover” once the conflict ends. When toxins seep into groundwater, they linger for generations. When animal populations are decimated, ecosystems do not neatly reset. The damage compounds, layering crisis upon crisis in a way that no Earth Day proclamation can undo.

And then there is the psychological dimension, the way distance has reshaped our relationship with destruction. A drone operator does not hear the forest crackle as it burns or see the animals scatter in terror. The interface abstracts reality into pixels and data. This technological buffer does more than protect human operators; it dulls our collective sense of responsibility. It allows us to maintain the illusion that we are careful, controlled, even ethical, while the Earth absorbs the consequences.

International Mother Earth Day, in this context, risks becoming a performance rather than a reckoning. It is easier to plant a tree than to question the systems that make such gestures feel necessary in the first place. It is easier to celebrate small victories than to confront the scale of our contradictions. But if this day is to mean anything, it must force us to look beyond symbolism and into the uncomfortable reality of how we wield power.

What would it mean to take the Earth seriously, not just as a resource or a backdrop, but as a shared foundation for all life? It would mean acknowledging that environmental destruction is not separate from human conflict; it is deeply intertwined with it. It would mean treating ecological damage as a central cost of war, not an afterthought. And it would mean resisting the seductive convenience of technologies that make destruction feel distant and therefore acceptable.

There is no neat resolution to this tension. The world is complex, and conflicts do not vanish with good intentions. But clarity is not the same as simplicity. We can recognize the necessity of security while still questioning the methods that erode the very ground beneath us, literally and figuratively.

Earth Day should not reassure us. It should unsettle us. It should remind us that our greatest innovations have not freed us from responsibility; they have expanded its reach. The question is not whether we can continue as we are, we clearly can, at least for a time. The question is what kind of world will remain when we do.

And whether, by then, there will be anything left to celebrate.

Selective fear in a nuclear age by Dag Hansen

There is something unsettling about the way the world chooses its anxieties. Not the existence of threats that part is constant but the uneven attention we grant them, the selective urgency that says more about politics than about danger. Today, nowhere is that imbalance more glaring than in the contrast between the alarm directed at Iran’s potential nuclear ambitions and the relative quiet surrounding North Korea’s very real, very advanced arsenal.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency has issued a stark warning: North Korea has made “very serious” advances in its nuclear weapons program. Not hypothetical advances. Not speculative ambitions. Real progress, likely including a new uranium-enrichment facility. This is not a country inching toward capability; it is one that already possesses it. Analysts believe Pyongyang holds several dozen nuclear warheads. Several dozen. That is not a threshold. That is an arsenal.

And yet, the global conversation, especially in Washington, feels oddly muted. Instead, political energy continues to swirl around Iran, a country whose nuclear trajectory, while concerning, remains constrained, monitored, and contested through diplomatic channels. The fear is framed in the future tense: what Iran might become, what it could one day possess, what it might choose to do. With North Korea, there is no need for hypothetical language. The future has already arrived.

So why the disparity? Part of the answer lies in familiarity. North Korea has long occupied a strange place in the geopolitical imagination: isolated, unpredictable, but somehow contained. Its provocations, missile tests, fiery rhetoric, have become almost ritualized. There is a dangerous comfort in routine, even when that routine involves weapons capable of catastrophic destruction.

Another part lies in political narrative. Iran fits neatly into existing frameworks of rivalry and suspicion in American foreign policy. It is woven into alliances, regional tensions, and domestic debates in a way that keeps it perpetually at the forefront. North Korea, by contrast, is geographically distant from the United States and politically inconvenient to confront. Addressing its nuclear status requires acknowledging a reality that offers no easy solutions.

Then there is the peculiar dynamic between leadership figures. The notion, sometimes joked about, sometimes hinted at, that Washington and Pyongyang share a kind of mutual understanding is not entirely baseless. Personal diplomacy, however unconventional, has replaced sustained strategic pressure at times. The optics of “getting along” have, in certain moments, overshadowed the substance of the threat itself.

But nuclear weapons are not impressed by optics. For North Korea’s neighbors, South Korea and Japan in particular, the danger is not abstract. It is immediate, measurable and growing. Every advancement in enrichment capability, every refinement in missile technology, shifts the balance of power in a region already fraught with historical tension. The margin for miscalculation narrows with each step forward.

The troubling question is not whether the international community recognizes the threat. It does. The question is whether recognition translates into action or whether it is quietly filed away beneath more politically expedient concerns.

Selective fear is a luxury the nuclear age does not afford. Prioritizing one threat over another may serve short-term political narratives, but it does little to enhance long-term security. In fact, it risks normalizing what should never be normalized, the steady expansion of a nuclear arsenal in one of the world’s most opaque regimes.

There is no strategic logic in worrying more about the weapons that might exist tomorrow than the ones that already exist today. Yet that is precisely the imbalance we are witnessing.

And imbalance, in matters of nuclear security, is rarely benign. It is, more often, the prelude to surprise.

Puppi & Caesar #43 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Another cartoon with a mean and know-all of a bully cat, Puppi and her intellectual, pompous companion categorically-I-know-all, Caesar the squirrel!  

For more Puppi & Caesar, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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A Day of Mother Earth: Living in Harmony with Nature by Rene Wadlow

 

International Mother Earth Day on 22 April each year was established by the United Nations General Assembly in 2009.  Its aim is to promote living in harmony with Nature and to achieve a just balance among the economic, social and environmental needs of present and future generations.  The concept of living in harmony with Nature was seen by the U.N. delegates as a way "to improve the ethical basis of the relationship between humankind and our planet."

The term "Mother Earth" is an expression used in different cultures to symbolize the inseparable bonds between humans and Nature.   Pachamama is the term used in the Andean cultures of South America.  The Earth and the ecosystem is our home.  We need to care for it as a mother is supposed to care for her children and the children to show love and gratitude in return.  However, we know from all the folk tales of the evil stepmother as well as the records of psychoanalytic sessions that mother-children relations are not always relations of love, care and gratitude.  Thus to really live in harmony with Nature requires deep shifts in values and attitudes, not just "sustainable development" projects.

The United Nations began its focus on ecological issues with the preparations for the 1972 Conference in Stockholm and has continued with the 1992 Rio Declaration followed by the Rio plus 20 conference 20 years later.  However the concept of living in harmony with Nature is relatively new as a U.N. political concept. Yet it is likely to be increasingly a theme for both governmental policy making and individual action.

As Rodney Collin wrote in a letter "It is extraordinary how the key-word of harmony occurs everywhere now, comes intuitively to everyone's lips when they wish to express  what they hope for.  But I feel that we have hardly yet begun to study its real meaning. Harmony is not an emotion, an effect.  It is a whole elaborate science, which for some reason has only been fully developed in the realm of sound.  Science, psychology and even religion are barely touching it as yet."  (1)

Resolutions in the U.N. General Assembly can give a sense of direction.  They indicate that certain ideas and concepts are ready to be discussed at the level of governments.  However, a resolution is not yet a program of action or even a detailed framework for discussion.  "Living in harmony with Nature" is at that stage on the world agenda.  Since the start of the yearly observation of Mother Earth Day in 2010, there have been useful projects proposed around a yearly theme.  The 2018 theme is to reduce pollution from plastics.  The exponential growth of plastics is now a real threat by injuring marine life, littering beaches and landfills and clogging waste systems.  There is a need to reduce the single use of plastic objects by reusing and recycling plastic  objects.

However reducing pollution from plastic objects, while useful, is not yet living in harmony with Nature.  There is still efforts to be made to spell out the ethical base and the necessary shifts in attitudes and actions.

 ************************************

Notes

1) His letters have been assembled after his death by his wife into a book:
    Rodney Collin. The Theory of Conscious Harmony  (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1958)

 ************************************

Rene Wadlow, President, Association of World Citizens

Day of Mother Earth by Rene Wadlow

 

The United Nations General Assembly in 2009 through resolution A/RES/63/278, under the leadership of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, designated 22 April as the International Mother Earth Day. The Day recognizes a collective responsibility, set out in the 1992 Rio Declaration, to promote harmony with Nature so as to achieve a just balance among economic, social and ecological needs of the present and future generations.

In traditional Indian culture, according to texts as early as the Vedas, the Earth is home to all living species that inhabit it and must not be excluded as they all contribute to the planet's welfare and preservation.  Therefore, human beings must contribute to the web of life of which they are a part and find ways of using the elements to produce food without damaging other life forms as far as possible.

World Citizens stress that Earth is our common home and that we must protect it together.  Loss of biodiversity, desertification, and soil loss - all are signs that there must be renewed efforts to develop socio-economic patterns that are in harmony with Nature.

World Citizens highlight that the protection of Mother Earth is a task in which each of us must participate.  However, there have always been traditions that stressed that a more enlightened group of humans would come to show the way.  One tradition was among the Natives of North America.  The more enlightened were thought of as "The Rainbow Warriors" - the warrior being one who protects rather than one who goes abroad to attack others. Nicola Beechsquirrel recalls this tradition in her poem, a tribute to Mother Earth.

The Rainbow Warriors - Nicola Beechsquirrel

Come, all who ever loved our Earth
Who lived in peace amongst her creatures
Gentle, loving, caring folk
With healing hands, and wisdom in your souls.
Come, incarnate once more
Come to Earth in her greatest need.
Help us rid her of her burdens
Cleanse her of all poisons
Close up the deep sores on her sacred body
And cover it once more in soft green.
Walk amongst us again
That we may relearn ancient skills
And long-forgotten wisdom
And tread lightly upon our Mother Earth
Taking from her only what we need
Living her ways in love and joy
Treating her creatures as equals.
Teach us how to reach those who exploit her
How to open their souls to the beauty of Life
That they may destroy no longer.
Come to us, Rainbow Warriors
Share with us your wisdom
For we have great need of it.

 *************************************

Rene Wadlow, President, Association of World Citizens