Tuesday, March 2, 2021

FALLEN LEAVES. An Autumn Chronicle (Issue I)


The full PDF of Autumn Leaves. An Autumn Chronicle (Issue I) can be accessed here.

Each of us carries particular gifts. Times of high civilisation offer a rare opportunity for us to develop and express those gifts. We take freedom of belief, freedom of choice, freedom of action and freedom of thought for granted. Yet historically, such freedoms are not givens, but have been available only to the few. The fruitful exercise of these freedoms turns on the degree to which we are informed in those areas from which we draw our sense of identity. True freedom presupposes a deep and intimate knowledge of the issues that are central to our lives, and the forces and influences to which they are subject.

Each edition of Fallen Leaves. An Autumn Chronicle will hopefully serve to provide a considered and reflective commentary on both the practical and the philosophical dimensions of our present circumstances. This and subsequent editions of Fallen Leaves will explore the idealisms, the cynicisms and the pragmatisms inherent in this time as our sense of certainty begins to fail. These explorations may help to clarify the nature of the inner attributes and the outer forces that shape our experience during this time of growing troubles. Between the lines, these explorations may help to broaden our perception of the nature of the influences that contribute to the creation of both harmony and of strife.

Fallen Leaves offers an ongoing extension of one of the primary principles underlying Holism and Complementary Medicine published in 2006. That principle was clearly stated by eco-theologian Thomas Berry in his Schumacher Society Lecture of 1991:

It should be especially clear in medicine that we cannot have well humans on a sick planet. Medicine must first turn its attention to protecting the health and well-being of the Earth before there can be any effective human health.

Contrary to the progressivist fantasy held by so many, it becomes increasingly obvious that we are not on the cusp of a bright and equitable age of universal peace, freedom and abundance for all. It is equally clear that we can no longer depend on a continuation of those rhythms and patterns that perennially sustained earlier civilisations.

This first edition of Fallen Leaves includes critical and interpretive reflections on the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the phenomenon of Colony Collapse Disorder that caused the death of hundreds of billions of bees in the US and Europe between 2006 and 2008, the hidden human consequences of US and NATO air strikes in Afghanistan, and a number of other issues.

Fallen Leaves I concludes with a substantive review of the ideas presented by environmental historian Colin Duncan in his seminal 2007 essay, The Practical Equivalence of War? which addresses the approaching curtailment of taken-for-granted freedoms that we are collectively facing as climate change and its effects begin to gather momentum.

 
Below is a listing of the Contents of Fallen Leaves I:

1.  A Minor Manifesto
2.  Remembering Hiroshima
3.  The Slow Awakening
4.  The Rising Dragon
5.  By Hook or by Crook
6.  From Silent Spring to Seedless Summer
7.  Dressing Mammon's Wounds
8.  There Are No Good Wars
9.  The Great Bear Awakens
10. Wounding Further the Already Wounded
11. The Inevitable Fall
12. This Peculiar Moment

The full text of Fallen Leaves I can be viewed and/or downloaded as a PDF from: https://archive.org/details/fallen-leaves-i

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