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Siberia's Lake Baikal is one of nature's most magnificent creations, the largest and deepest body of fresh water in the world. And yet it is nearly unknown outside of Russia. In Sacred Sea--the first major journalistic examination of Baikal in English--veteran environmental writer Peter Thomson and his younger brother undertake a kind of pilgrimage, journeying 25,000 miles by land and sea to reach this extraordinary lake. At Baikal they find a place of sublime beauty, deep history, and immense natural power. But they also find ominous signs that this perfect eco-system--containing one-fifth of earth's fresh water and said to possess a mythical ability to cleanse itself--could yet succumb to the even more powerful forces of human hubris, carelessness, and ignorance. Ultimately, they help us see that despite its isolation, Baikal is connected to everything else on Earth, and that it will need the love and devotion of people around the world to protect it.
The 1990 journey of Matthiessen, Paul Winter and a group of Russian environmentalists who traveled around Siberia's Lake Baikal, the world's oldest and deepest lake, containing one-fifth of the planet's fresh water, is chronicled in diary form. Norton's 50 color photos enhance the text. A portion of the royalties go to Baikal Watch. Map.
"Civil society" is a loaded concept in Russia; during the Soviet period, the voices that heralded civil society were the same ones that demanded the Union's dissolution. So, for the Kremlin, civil society is not the guarantor of democracy, but a force that has the power to end governments. This book looks at how civil society negotiates power on a global stage, under Russia's authoritarian regime, and in a particularly isolated and remote part of the world: within environmental activism around Lake Baikal in Siberia. More than a mile deep, Lake Baikal is the oldest, deepest, and most voluminous lake on the Earth, and home to thousands of endemic species. It is also ecologically unique in that it is oxygenated to its maximum depth and supports life even at the lake floor -- a phenomenon occurring nowhere else on the planet. The lake is not just a natural wonder, but home to a strong environmentalist community that works tirelessly to protect the lake from human harm. Environmentalism at Baikal began in the late 1950s, eventually igniting the first national protest in the USSR. They have remained active in some form ever since, across the years of chaos, instability, and crisis, from the opening of Russia to the forces of globalization to the authoritarianism of Putin in the present. This book examines the struggle of Baikal environmentalists to develop a new understanding of civil society under conditions of globalization and authoritarianism. Through extended, historically-informed ethnographic analysis, Kate Pride Brown argues that civil society is engaged with political and economic elites in a dynamic struggle within a field of power. Understanding the field of power helps to explain a number of contradictions. For example, why does civil society seem to both bolster democracy and threaten it? Why do capitalist corporations and environmental organizations form partnerships despite their general hostility toward each other? And why has democracy proven to be so elusive in Russia? The field of power posits new answers to these questions, as Baikal environmental activists struggle to protect and save their Sacred Sea.
The Sea and the Sacred in Japan is the first book to focus on the role of the sea in Japanese religions. While many leading Shinto deities tend to be understood today as unrelated to the sea, and mountains are considered the privileged sites of sacredness, this book provides new ways to understand Japanese religious culture and history. Scholars from North America, Japan and Europe explore the sea and the sacred in relation to history, culture, politics, geography, worldviews and cosmology, space and borders, and ritual practices and doctrines. Examples include Japanese indigenous conceptualizations of the sea from the Middle Ages to the 20th century; ancient sea myths and rituals; sea deities and sea cults; the role of the sea in Buddhist cosmology; and the international dimension of Japanese Buddhism and its maritime imaginary.
Fifteen thousand years before Europeans stepped foot in the Americas, people had already spread from tip to tip and coast to coast. Like all humans, these Native Americans sought to understand their place in the universe, the nature of their relationship with the divine, and the origin of the world into which their ancestors had emerged. The answers lay in their sacred stories. Author María García Esperón, illustrator Amanda Mijangos, and translator David Bowles have gifted us a treasure. Their talents have woven this collection of stories from nations and cultures across our two continents—the Sea-Ringed World, as the Aztecs called it—from the edge of Argentina all the way up to Alaska. The Em Querido list seeks to introduce the finest books in translation from around the world to an American audience. We feel lucky to be bringing you this book on our inaugural list, which we hope will be a true window and mirror
A hands-on method to heal the waters of Gaia using powerful elixirs created with a sacred altar and consecrated crystals • Reveals, step by step, the shamanic rituals and techniques to prepare crystal homeopathic elixirs to heal the waters of the Earth • Explains how to create a sacred water altar in your home for elixir preparation as well as program the crystals used with healing intentions • Includes shamanic journey meditations to connect with ancient water spirits and infuse your water-healing work with sacred intention When Hurricane Floyd ravaged the North Carolina coast in 1999, Kathryn Ravenwood--living thousands of miles away in Seattle--was called by Spirit to help heal the toxic waters left behind. Combining her longtime devotion to sacred altars with her newfound connection to crystals, she developed a process to make crystal homeopathic elixirs to cleanse bodies of water both near and far. Sharing her journey of spiritual calling and discovery, Ravenwood explains how to create crystal homeopathic elixirs using a sacred water altar and attuned crystals. Detailing how to create a personal altar in your home, the crystals most suitable for this work (such as amethyst and selenite), as well as how to program them with your healing intentions, she describes the month-long cycle--from full moon to full moon--of ritual and prayer at the core of the process that infuses the elixirs with their cleansing and healing powers. Ravenwood provides shamanic journey meditations based on Native American and Egyptian traditions to help you connect with ancient water spirits and guides and instill your water-healing work with sacred purpose. She explains how to ceremonially apply an elixir to a body of water and how the remedy will propagate outward to the ocean, bringing healing to the waters it spans as well as to the animals it encounters. Bringing spirituality into physicality and providing a practical application for the work of Dr. Masaru Emoto, this hands-on shamanic method enables each of us to take part in transforming our planet as well as our selves--for the health of Gaia and our own bodies is directly tied to the health of the waters that surround and are within us.
Dirty, Sacred Rivers explores South Asia's increasingly urgent water crisis, taking readers on a journey through North India, Nepal and Bangladesh, from the Himalaya to the Bay of Bengal. The book shows how rivers, traditionally revered by the people of the Indian subcontinent, have in recent decades deteriorated dramatically due to economic progress and gross mismanagement. Dams and ill-advised embankments strangle the Ganges and its sacred tributaries. Rivers have become sewage channels for a burgeoning population. To tell the story of this enormous river basin, environmental journalist Cheryl Colopy treks to high mountain glaciers with hydrologists; bumps around the rough embankments of India's poorest state in a jeep with social workers; and takes a boat excursion through the Sundarbans, the mangrove forests at the end of the Ganges watershed. She lingers in key places and hot spots in the debate over water: the megacity Delhi, a paradigm of water mismanagement; Bihar, India's poorest, most crime-ridden state, thanks largely to the blunders of engineers who tried to tame powerful Himalayan rivers with embankments but instead created annual floods; and Kathmandu, the home of one of the most elegant and ancient traditional water systems on the subcontinent, now the site of a water-development boondoggle. Colopy's vivid first-person narrative brings exotic places and complex issues to life, introducing the reader to a memorable cast of characters, ranging from the most humble members of South Asian society to engineers and former ministers. Here we find real-life heroes, bucking current trends, trying to find rational ways to manage rivers and water. They are reviving ingenious methods of water management that thrived for centuries in South Asia and may point the way to water sustainability and healthy rivers.
This book is the first published statement of the fruits of some years' work of a largely philological nature. It presents a new appreciation of the relationship of the languages of the ancient world and the implication of this advance for our understanding of the Bible and of the origins of Christianity.
Lake BaikalSiberias immense and threatened Sacred Seais the magnet that draws a veteran environmental journalist and his brother around the world and back by train and boat. On this classic journey of discovery, the author takes the measure of the planet, humanity, Russia and his own self as reflected in the worlds greatest lake.