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Janet Thomas, Investigative Journalist
"Through her acute love of nature and human nature, the investigative expertise of Janet Thomas exposes the trespasses by contemporary thinking on the rights of natural systems in people and the
environment.Janet is strong and knowledgeable, a journalistic Druidic princess who, to our benefit, defends against the violation of nature within and around us. With the balanced powers of a moving glacier, her tenacity and wisdom seldom leave an illegitimate stone unturned. For this reason, David Suzuki applauds her inspiring looks at people, issues and solidarity; Vine Deloria Jr. says she creates breathtaking vision.
Stuart Townsend, writer/director of the film, The Battle in Seattle, in researching his script, says he found Janet's book on the subject "Thoughtful, and highly informative."
Janet is a critically thinking playwright, author and editor who deals with issues of abortion, abuse, nuclear war, education and environmental degradation. She's as sweet as a honeysuckle, but when she speaks her truth it is wise to listen. This may be experienced in her book The Battle in Seattle of which a chapter about connecting with nature is available online"
To accurately portray Janet Thomas and her work, reminds me of a challenge I once presented to Paul Merrill. He was a Vermont farmer I hired in 1959 to bulldoze a cow pasture level to play baseball. His experience with that field was a metaphor of how the limits of contemporary thinking impact Earth's natural systems, the perfection of the biological world within and around us. This is where Janet loves to inquire.
Mr. Merrill's skill in bulldozing a field brings to mind that people are part of nature. What we do to nature we also do to our natural selves. Today, both people and the land suffer from being excessively bulldozed by the destructive ways we have learned to think.
Most of the Vermont rocks rolled to the side of the field at the urging of Mr. Merrill's powerful John Deere blade. However, some small rocks turned out to be like icebergs of the soil. They were tips of immense glacial boulders buried deep in the ground. "No farm tractor gonna move them suckers," shrugged Merrill, "You gonna need to get some dynamite and them big construction tractors." Doing that would have brought me way over budget so we ended making the field part of a wildlife sanctuary. It began its inherent path back to becoming a maple-beech-yellow birch forest.
Twenty years later the Federal Government got into the act in the form of the National Forest Service. They helped modify the local conservation laws, blasted the boulders and bulldozed miles of beautiful, wild plateau life and land into the sterility of a golf course.
Janet Thomas is as anchored in nature as were those field boulders. She, like most of us, has been subject to the bulldozer of contemporary socialization. However out of desperation and pain, she long ago became enamored with her resilient roots, her grounding in the landscape. She nurtured those roots to survive and thereby survived. Through one crises after another she has turned to the grounded sensory boulders in her life and called upon them for help. Because her good judgment has supported these profound roots over the years, they now support her in times of need. That is how nature's renewing powers work when they have not been bulldozed into parking lots, shopping malls or buried in fear and hurt in our subconscious to avoid feeling the pain of being bulldozed.
Through her acute love of nature and human nature, Janet's expertise exposes the trespasses by contemporary thinking on the rights of natural systems in people and the environment. This may be experienced in her book "The Battle in Seattle" of which a chapter about connecting with nature is available online
Contact: (Janet Thomas) jthomas@rockisland.com
Learn more: Janet Thomas and Battle in Seattle book- Mike Cohen
INSTITUTE OF GLOBAL EDUCATION Special NGO consultant United Nations Economic and Social Council
PROJECT NATURECONNECT
Readily available, online, natural science tools
for the health of person, planet and spiritP.O. Box 1605, Friday Harbor, WA 98250
360-378-6313 <email> www.ecopsych.com
ORGANIC ADVANCED ECOPSYCHOLOGY IN ACTION
The Natural Systems Thinking Process
Dr. Michael J. Cohen, Director
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All programs start with the Orientation Course contained in the book
The Web of Life Imperative.
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