From Daily Planet Staff Reports

Starhawk addressed “Women Take Action: Using Insights of Feminism to Change the World” during the Time For Our Power women’s conference before a crowd of about 200 people in Asheville’s Thomas Wolfe Auditorium on June 22.

The San Francisco-based writer, activist and Witch spoke for nearly an hour and mostly good-naturedly ignored sporadic technical problems with her microphone. Internationally known, Starhawk is widely considered one of the foremost popular voices of ecofeminism.

Following her hour-long talk, she joined a panel of morning speakers who fielded questions from the audience for nearly 30 minutes. (The Q&A story appears on Page 11.)

In an introduction, eco-activist Julia Butterfly Hill praised Starhawk’s vision, especially in her 1993 book, “The Fifth Sacred Thing,” which is a post-apocalyptic novel describing a world set in the year 2048 after a catastrophe has fractured the United States into at least several nations.

Hill said “The Fifth Sacred Thing” shows Starhawk is unusually gifted at “seeing the world we want to live in — and stepping into it.” Starhawk especially  the human experiences of live  and transformation.

She said Starhawk, who has written 10 books, is a long-time activist for peace, social justice and women’s rights.

Starhawk opened her talk by noting that, “Sometimes, you wonder why are we here?”

She then offered insights on women and empowerment, claiming that, first and foremost, it is clear “women are discriminated against.”

Starhawk, who has been involved in the women’s movement since 1971, said her interest was triggered through her reading — in a Venice, Calif., youth hostel —“Sexual Politics,” a 1970 classic feminist text by Kate Millett.

She then attended her first women’s-rights meeting and emerged as the leader of a subgroup, she said with a laugh. “We formed consciousness-raising groups. Each person got 10 minutes. And out of that came the whole agenda of the women’s movement.”

“There was the mantra that ‘Everything you know is wrong ... Everything you know ... was done by men for men.’”

“Another deep insight of feminism is the telling of stories, where you start to see patterns, which can be” informative.

“Out of those insights have come women’s programs — rape crisis centers,” domestic violence shelters for women and other related programs.

 “When we got into the larger scale of things” the women saw that everything was part of an “over-arching patriarchy.”

Yet another “great” insight of feminism is that women rarely are in top leadership positions, Starhawk said.

She told of an interaction with her nine-year-old daughter in which Starhawk pointed out female leaders in California, including U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer and several others, prompting the child to say, “Do they all have to be girls” to hold office in California? The audience laughed at her recounting of her daughter’s jump to such a conclusion, when the reverse is usually true around the world.
“

The consciousness is like going down a river,” Starhawk said.

She then told the story of Doris Lessing, who talks about growing up in Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) and that nobody there s poke about apartheid ­— or spoke favorably of it, “until things shifted. Then, everybody said it was wrong.”

Starhawk later added, “Reality is defined for us by whoever happens to be at the top of the hierarchy” when history was written.
“One of the ways we can support each other is to be each others’ eyes and ears,” she said. “Sometimes, it will shake you out of your comfort zone.”

Specifically, she cited presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, whose former minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, caused a major uproar in the white community.

“For the first time, these white people heard that (some) black people don’t like them ... Well, duh!”

Further, she asserted, “I also don’t have to take that personally. If I can accept someone else’s reality, that will make me smarter, wiser” and better prepared to cope with the world’s challenges. Her comments again evoked enthusiastic applause from the audience.

“It also will lead to truth,” Starhawk said. “We’re living in a world full of a multiplicity of visions...”

A “third great insight of feminism is “learning to embrace your negative self.”

With a smile, she said, “I’d like to say a positive word about negativity. Earlier (in a morning address), we heard so much about positive thinking,” but human beings also need to be able “to embrace our anger,” although “it doesn’t mean it’s the best place to make decisions from.”

However, negativity usually constitutes “a high-energy state” and the energy is onee of compassion and love.

“That anger doesn’t have to turn to violence. That anger is a great tool for creativity” and can be used for high-energy pursuits such as political organizing. “Otherwise, we acquiesce to it.”

Starhawk observed, “Feminism enabled women to say ‘no,’” such as “‘No, I don’t want to go home with you.’” This marks a radical change because “many of us were raised to say ‘yes.’”

In 2004, Starhawk said she was on a panel with Ram Dass, a contemporary spiritual teacher who wrote the 1971 bestseller “Be Here Now.”

She credited Dass with opening “much of the Eastern energy in the West.”

Dass, who has suffered in recent years from a stroke, now finds it a struggle to speak, so Starhawk said she felt “really honored to be able to dialogue with him” on the panel.

To that end, she said she occasionally is asked whether individuals should be sending love and healing to President George W. Bush, noting that she learned from Dass that he has a picture of Bush “on his altar, next to a picture of his guru.”

While she feels that Dass is secure in his spirituality, Starhawk said she thinks about the so-called Stockholm Syndrome when people ask her about praying for Bush. The syndrome theorizes that prisoners make friends with their guards because it a tendency of human beings to seek security from those who have life or death power over them.

“I think the most loving thing we could do with President Bush is to take his power away from him!” Starhawk declared, as the crowd enthusiastically applauded and cheered her words.

Aside from Bush, Starhawk said, “What we say is you send out healing energy ­— and it returns three times over.”

“With President Bush, what you’re sending out isn’t really healing. He’s given every indication that he doesn’t want to change.”

A fourth “great” insight involves eco-feminism, she said, noting that “what the patriarchy thinks about women is the way we treat the earth.”

“Right now, we’re at a level of self-care, where we badly need to do earth-care, or self-care for the earth.”

She asserted that men have long said that a woman’s body is, naturally, dirty. For instance, Starhawk said, men have contended that “our menstrual blood is yucky,” as is the process of bringing a baby into the world.

Among the repercussions, she said, is “it creates a situation of we don’t value the dirt under our feet. We value fertilizer ....”

By extension, Starhawk noted that early theologians, especially St. Augustine, “saw women’s bodies only as a vessel for men’s seed ... Women are seen as lesser forms.”

She reiterated, “When we deny (aspects) in this world, then we don’t take care of it.”

Starhawk then said, “We’ve been talking this morning of how things need to change ... That time is now! We’re already in environmental collapse!”

Jim Henson, whom she termed “the leading environmental expert,” has said the world will have reached “the tipping point for the environment” when carbon measures 400 parts per million — and “it’s now 376 parts per million.”

Henson has since revised the tipping point to 350 parts per million, meaning the world is in a dire state, she said.

“The United States is the top emitter of pollution,” Starhawk claimed, adding that America also “is the country doing the least about it.”

However, she noted that “the importance of despair” is that it generates negative energy that can be harnessed to fuel “improvement work.”

Among the areas needing change, in her view, are energy use and agricultural practices “and we need to do it in the next 10 years ... That’s where the positive power needs to come back in.”

In speaking of “what we need to do,” Starhawk, listed the following:
• Return “home” to “our own communities.”
• Relocalize economics and food production.
• Re-envision wealth — “and not just more stuff, but relationships ... that’s where women can help. That’s what women are really good at,” she said in reference to connecting and building relationships.

“Oil, eventually, is going to reach its limits, so we need to make the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy,” Starhawk said.

“How do we get organized around those visions?” she asked, rhetorically. “Sheer necessity.”
Starhawk added that women “are the ones who do bring life into the world” and, therefore, they are in a position to effect needed change.

“I believe that we all actually came into life right now to be part of this transition ... And maybe we’re the sort of people who don’t want to miss the climax of the movie,” she quipped, prompting laughter from the audience.

In offering what she termed “an insight,” Starhawk asserted, “That soil that we have so despised is alive. It’s not only able to grow things, but to break down toxins ... The trees in the forest actually feed each other ... We have allies in each other and in the realm of the sacred ... So there’s an ancient mystical teaching — ‘We have allies around us, but they need to be asked.’” In addition, she said, “We need to ask for that help from each other.”

“The other thing is to show up,” she told the conference attendees. At the many similar conferences she has attended around the U.S., she has found that the attendees are “mostly white women — privileged white women. And efforts I’ve seen to change that have not, for the most part, worked.” Still, Starhawk said, “We can (continue to) try to change that.”

For instance, she said, “There’s issues in the black community that we could show up for. And if do, you start to build trust.

“We can also hold a vision ... We have the power to say ‘no.’ We can harness anger,” noting that such negative energy can be channeled for positive purposes.

“Find your vision and live it,” Starhawk urged. “Take the necessary steps to make it real. My vision is all forms of oppression are interrelated — and they can be worked on in pieces.”

In conclusion, she asserted, “We can honor the earth ... We can start eating better food.” Women need to take steps to build their visions, using allies, to “make it real” and “transform everything.”

“Then we actually have the values of women — nurturing, compassion and love — and take them beyond the abstract and make them real!” Starhawk said.