From Daily Planet Staff Reports

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From left are conference co-organizer Patty Levesque, Cheri Britton, Starhawk and Phil Borges.

Following an address by Starhawk, she and other morning speakers on June 22 fielded questions from the audience for 30 minutes during the Time For Our Power women’s conference before a crowd of about 200 people in Asheville’s Thomas Wolfe Auditorium.
Most of the questions were directed to Starhawk, a San Francisco-based writer, activist and Witch who is widely considered one of the foremost popular voices of eco-feminism.

Besides Starhawk, the other panelists were Phil Borges, who had addressed “Stirring the Fire,” and Cheri Britton, whose presentation was titled “Power of Positive Intention.”

Immediately prior to the launch of the Q&A, conference co-organizer Patty Levesque told the audience that the speeches and workshops have been of high quality, but that the turnout had been disappointing and the first-year’s program would finish with a loss. She asked the attendees to consider for next year, “How we can fill the auditorium with 2,000 people?”

The session opened with Borges being questioned about his views on the empowerment of girls and women.

“One of the amazing things is just bringing women together” — given that they are so busy with the many roles they play — and the good result such collaboration brings, he said.

Regarding women’s empowerment, Borges said he has “seen it happen.”

Britton was asked about her response to the concern expressed by Starhawk about a possible over-emphasis on positive thinking at the conference and whether she agreed with Starkhaw that negativity and negative energy need to be considered — and, at times, even embraced. (Britton had stressed positivity in her address.)

“What we give energy to ... manifests,” Britton replied. “It’s not about always staying in our happy place ... Anger is incredibly productive ... Despair is productive ... But nothing (negative) is productive if you stay in that place. It’s looking at where you’re spending the majority of your time,” and, in her view, one should not spend it mostly in negative emotions.

A female audience member asked Starhawk, “How do you keep up?” noting that she continues her work as an activist, her Website is always bustling with her ideas, she has written 10 books and she constantly is traveling worldwide on the lecture circuit.

Smiling, Starhawk said that, to stay grounded, she “tries to spend some time each day in nature” and “goes for long walks daily.”

Regarding Britton’s response to an earlier question, Starhawk said, “I agree that, while we can value anger (and other negative energies), it’s not the place to stay too long.”

A female audience member said that “as a woman of color,” and perhaps the only one in the auditorium, she wanted to thank Starhawk for urging the women in attendance to work to earn the trust of African-Americans and other minorities in order to encourage their involvement in the movement, an apparent reference to eco-feminism.

To that end, the woman then asked the panelists if there were familiar with the book “Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome.”

None of the panelists expressed familiarity with the book.

After a pause, Starhawk said, “I think we carry wounds down through generations — and family patterns ... I’ve seen that in my own people — I’m from a Jewish family. The whole situation there is replicating the wounds of the Holocaust.”

She added, “When there’s mistrust because of both historical and current oppression, then it’s much harder to build alliances of trust.” Starhawk said trust only can be built by goodwill established over time.

Another female audience member noted that the conference’s keynote speaker, Jane Fonda, an actress, activist and workout guru, was eloquent the previous day in noting that a critical element of women’s rights is the ability to control pregnancy, including the right to abort a fetus.

Given that “there’s a great divide in this community” regarding abortion issues, the questioner asked, “How can we bridge that divide?”

Britton noted that she worked for Planned Parenthood for many years and is quite familiar with the dilemma posed by the questioner.
The issue, she said, involves confronting “one’s own biases. So for me, it was finding folks with whom we agree to disagree.”

Starhawk added, “Yeah, if you can find the common ground on which you can agree,” then progress can be made in discussions.

She said that “one of the hopeful signs is a split in the last five years among Christian evangelicals on both environmentalism and the right to universal health care, too.”

Borges said the question relates to the story he shared in his presentation about his prejudice against Christian missionaries, initially believing that they and their work were universally evil.

However, after he saw that some, if not much, of missionaries’ work was beneficial to the people they were trying to help, he no longer considers missionaries totally bad, although he still harbors big concerns about their use of envangelism an uprooting cultures in their work.

“The people on the very far ends of the (political) spectrum — usually — have trouble with shades of gray,” Borges said. “Yeah, there are shades of gray and other stories to be told.”

A female audience member noted that Borges — based on his overseas travels to developing countries — had told the conference attendees in his presentation that women raise the children, cook, manage the households, harvest the crops and oversee the livestock, among other activities.

Besides smoking and drinking, “Did the men do anything else” in the villages? the woman asked, pointedly, eliciting some cheers from the mostly female audience.

“The men were out with the animals and took them out” to the fields each day, Borges replied. “They were the warriors — and they carried the weapons.”

As some women in the crowd murmered their apparent ire over men’s status as the leaders with power despite doing little, Borges asserted, “I think it’s important to bring men into the equation” for empowering women because they are the other key variable.

At next year’s conference in Asheville, Borges said he hopes its organizers will “think of the need to appeal to men, too.” His suggestion received mild applause from a few audience members.

Appearing slightly exasperated by the tepid response, Borges added, “I find, many times, when I give these talks that I’m a male-basher — and I’m a male!”

Pausing, apparently to consider his words, Borges then said, “Men are the victims of their cultures, too ... These (women’s empowerment) programs are valuable to get different perspectives,” but should be inclusive of men so that the full spectrum of viewpoints are considered en route to a solution.” His suggestion again drew only a smattering of applause.