Winona LaDuke at SF Green Fest...

Another really amazing speaker from the SF Green Festival was Winona LaDuke, a Native American activist, environmentalist, economist, and writer. She is a beautiful, powerful woman, and I was left really inspired by here words.

Her talk was entitled "Food Security and Seed Sovereignty into the Next Millenium" and I will post the video on here when it is available in 2 weeks. It dealt with the environmental issues and "positive window shopping for your future," which is the question of what we want our future to look like and who is in charge of that, and how we can actualize what we want our world to look like. Making that future is not a spectator sport, and neither is democracy. She said that voting is not enough, and to make our future and create something that is sustainable and nurturing to humans, we have to take control over our destiny, think hard, put our hard work and our spirit into it. America is supposed to be a place full of choices, but our choices need to be about more than what you can choose to buy or how many things you own. Our choices need to be about what is meaningful to us, and what we value, not just what kind of cereal to buy. Empires are no sustainable by their very definition. We need to look for solutions.

The whole talk was beautiful, meaningful and got down to the root of humanity and how we botch things up and figuring out if we have the commitment and courage to fix them. This is definitely something that applies to our health as well as the state of the world, and I believe that with health, comes happiness, which is part of why going raw made so much sense to me. When you understand that illness is caused by imbalance in your body, you can work on restoring balance and getting healthy, and the results are numerous and impact every area of your life. Living in harmony with the earth, and the other people in it is vital. We are all related, we are all in this together, and it's not just us in this world, but it is up to all of us to come to terms with our own issues so we can have a healthier world as a whole. Life is life. It in interdependent and we are all part of this system. Everything is about relationships, whether it be human to human, human to animal, animal to plant, moon to ocean. Man's laws are not higher than nature's laws, and this misconception is part of why we have been so destructive. There are larger issues than we choose to deal with. We need to change our perceptions to change our world, and it is a beautiful one worth restoring and preserving.

For more information on Winona LaDuke check out Native Harvest/The White Earth Land Recovery Project and Honor The Earth.