Old Weapons, New Tools
Contributed by Josh Stearns

I want to share this short excerpt from an article I read recently. It is from an article, originally published in Orion Magazine on crafts people in Laos who are literally turning modern day swords into plowshares:

From Bombs to Hoes: Making Plowshares from America’s War in Laos, by Karen Coates

An American bomb detonates on Laotian soil; 30 years later, a villager exhumes the pieces. He delivers them to a scrap-metal yard. There they sit in a heap until one day, a Hmong man named Lee Moua plunks down a little money for a mangled chunk of that bomb.

He takes the metal to his homespun blacksmith shop in a parched backyard among pineapples and sugarcane. He fires a bed of coals, working beneath a rusty roof on a bamboo frame. His bellows are made from a parachute flare canister – more war scrap; his anvil, an artillery shell driven into a stump. Lee Moua heats and pounds his bomb fragment into shape, toiling most of a sweltering afternoon.

And when he’s done, we have a garden hoe… he hands us the silvery object, straight from a blistering fire. Its blade is wicked-sharp, capable of practical things. The transformation has taken about three hours — from a sorry piece of bomb scrap to a useful new tool.

Coates reports in her piece that “Between 1964 and 1973, the United States pummeled Laos with bombs: 4 billion pounds of bombs, 580,000 sorties, one raid every eight minutes for nine years.” She continues, “And 30 years on, people still die every week. Up to 30 percent of those bombs never detonated, and they remain embedded in Laotian soil. Every week, farmers die while plowing their fields. Women die while tending their yards. Children die while playing with little objects they pluck from the ground…”

This story still, even after so many readings, leaves me breathless and haunted. The story comes from Karen J. Coates, and a version of it is reprinted on the website she and her husband have created for their beautiful book, Cambodia Now: Life in the Wake of War. Please visit the website [http://redcoates.net] to read more and see the stunning pictures of the land and people in Cambodia today.

Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, by Bill McKibben

Just published on March 7th, this is McKibben’s latest book, on the general topic of having more time for community and human connections as a result leading a more simple life. We’ll review it soon, unless one of our readers wants to take that on. Has anyone already read it?

McKibben is the force behind StepItUp2007.org and the author of The End of Nature. He was also SCA’s Commencement Speaker in 2006.

The Spell of the Sensuous, Perception and Language in a More than Human World, by David Abram.

I am halfway through this one, and promise a brief review when I finish it. This is not an easy read, but it’s well worth the effort. The contrast between the poetic language of Abram’s stories and the precise and abstract language of the academic philosophical inquiry seem to mirror the split in our collective consciousness that is the subject of the book.

The author is an ecologist, anthropologist, and philosopher interested in “bettering relations between humans and the more than human world.” A bioregional activist and a central figure in the deep ecology movement, he is also an accomplished sleight-of-hand magician and has lived and traded magic with indigenous magicians in Indonesia, Nepal, and the Americas. (from his Omega Institute profile.)

(Here is the link to my “review”.)

 

Pinhook, Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land, by Janisse Ray This book “…is a meditation on our fragmented wilderness, the power of wild places, and the ways we can begin to repair the damage we’ve done to the land and to ourselves.” (from Chelsea Green Publishing.)

Ray is the author of Wild Card Quilt and Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, which won the American Book Award, as well as the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, Southeastern Booksellers Association Award for Nonfiction, and the Southern Environmental Law Center Award.

 

The Myth of Progress: Toward a Sustainable Future, by Tom Wessels

Wessels is a professor of ecology and the founding director of the master’s degree program in conservation biology at Antioch New England Graduate School. His books include Untamed Vermont, The Granite Landscape: A Natural History of America’s Mountain Domes from Acadia to Yosemite, and Reading the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New England.