i like to think of myself as an activist. i'm not but i like to think of myself that way.

an activist, as the root of the word suggests, acts as his passions and principles. he puts work to words and hopes that change and understanding will come about because of his efforts.

what i do is talk.

i'm not sure you've noticed, but i'm fairly good at rambling on about pretty much any topic. i can write pages on anything from the relationships with my friends to my love of cheese. it's a gift.

don't get me wrong, i am very passionate about things. i have issues on which i'd gladly give time and effort to. gay marriage is one (i'm strongly for it), recycling is another (gawd, it's so easy to do it, how can you not?), and patience, while not exactly an issue, is something i really feel we could all do with a whole lot more of. given a subject, it is more than likely i will have a very strong opinion, and be willing to do something about it.

all of this is really just an introduction to two things that have piqued my interest recently. one is pure activism, the other is an abrupt change in thinking.

i was browsing Craig's List the other day and came across a posting decrying the abuse of sled dogs in the Iditarod, that 1000+ mile race run yearly in the cold north to commemorate a vaccine run in the early part of the 1900s. i furrowed my brow, "sled dogs? what kind of silly cause is this? someone obviously has too much time on his hands."

then i started reading.

when i was growing up, i had a beautiful husky-wolf mix named "Strider" after a character in the Lord of the Rings. he was beautiful, majestic, loving, and died rather tragically (a story i'll tell another time). so i'll warn you that i feel a closeness to sled dogs and may be somewhat biased.

that said, what goes on in this race is foul. at first visit to the Sled Dog Action Coalition, i saw a picture of a dog being dragged in line, either dead or unconscious. i read stories about dogs being beaten, dogs' injuries going unchecked, overworking dogs, and the ultimate life of a dog meant to run and play spent instead chained with a four-foot length of chain to a small box called his home.

this isn't Iron Will, a Disney movie about heart and respect for the dogs. this is money. this is abuse of a species for profit. this is gross.

the fact that stands out the most to me is that this race has most recently been won in just over nine days, less than half the time spent to win the first race in the 70s with little to no changes in the way it's run. to go faster with the same number of dogs on the same sled, you only can run the dogs faster. twice as fast.

and i wonder how many human participants have died in this race compared to the 114 dogs? how many people have died in other sports? how can this be considered human achievement when it is won on the legs, and the lives, of so many dogs?

read for yourself. act as you feel necessary.

i was reading the Utne Reader (a magazine i highly recommend) this morning, and came across a conversation with Rubert Sheldrake. he's a biologist-type guy with interesting and somewhat controversial ideas.

controversial? i don't particularly care for that word. it conjures up images of abortion debates and protests against violence on TV. it trivializes complex issues into yet another game of us-versus-them politics. the potential of a multi-chromatic heart-felt discussion becomes washed by a black-and-white argument of right and wrong.

semantics aside, the reason his ideas have drummed up so much commotion is they challenge the very fundamentals of modern scientific investigation and call into question assumptions on which we base most of our "enlightened" scientific knowledge.

nothing new there. it's happened over and over again throughout human history. smart guy declares something that redesigns the foundations of communal thought and the holders of commonly accepted knowledge cry foul (and sometimes kill off the smart guy to make things better). looking back on this history, why do we still feel so threatened by a radically new idea? because that's what we do. we repeat the past. we put a fresh coat of paint on it, but it's still the past and we're still repeating it.

anyways, it's not the repetition of what came before that caught my attention -- although it certainly was so obvious as to be very amusing to me -- it was the idea itself.

"morphogenetic fields" he calls them and i know only what very little i gleamed from a single article. what i understand of them so far is that they determine how nature takes its shapes. from the Utne Reader:

"These fields shape everything, from atoms and molecules to hurricanes and jaguars. How a jaguar looks and behaves, for instance, is not so much about its genes as about the memory of jaguarness carried in its morphic. Rather than being encoded with certain traits, genes may be tuned, like transistors, to the jaguar channel -- all jaguar, all the time." (67, jan/feb 2001)

considering the Human Genome Project, you can see why big science dislikes the idea. it contradicts, or at least adds a whole lot more depth to, a good portion of what modern science has considered holy.

the article i read, and the accompanying excerpt from an interview with Sheldrake, explained everything from evolution to ESP to ghosts to reincarnation through his theory. and what i liked most about what i read was the humble sense of not knowing and continual investigation that came from Sheldrake. i've always thought science was more about disapproving a theory than proving it and that knowledge was only temporary until a better idea came along. i feel that Sheldrake gets this.

i'm failing here at giving you a better explanation of Sheldrake's theories but i'm worried i'd only smudge them and make them sound hokey. i really suggest you pick up one of Sheldrake's books or read the article in the Utne Reader. the theory may ultimately be wrong but thinking about the universe differently can be very refreshing.