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Earth Speaks

After working for 35 years internationally, I decided that since the U.S. is the worst climate culprit, I should turn my time and attention to my home town, Brick, New Jersey. We had our first Climate Cafe on September 18, 2024 and I started a slightly different newspaper with a new name. It still contains international news, but there is a heavy front page dedicated to how things are going in Brick. Now I am convinced that saving existing trees and forests is the BEST way to fight climate chaos. I used to be an avid proponent of solar and wind but those technologies still result in the destruction of Earth; ditto for EVs and other new products people are creating. It’s fine to plant trees but saving already existing trees is better. Please join me and my friends in switching your efforts to “nature-based solutions” as promoted by global conferences on the environment. Try to ignore the rush to save civilization and work hard to protect whatever natural resources surround you and bring you peace and joy.

Earth Speaks #1

Earth Speaks #2

To My TreeHuggers Readers

Thank you for being there as recipients of the good and sometimes not-good stories I collect for you. I’m even more grateful for the stories you submit to me. Although I create these newspapers for you, they have turned out to be primarily for me, to keep my spirits up in the face of ever-increasing calamities cause by us humans and the ungodly consequences of global warming, or more currently called global boiling. Everything is getting hotter and more disastrous by the day. You know that as well as I do; we just respond differently. You do your work and I do mine.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to David Pinto of Jersey in the UK for creating the design of this website and giving me lots of help in organizing it. It’s not easy working with me because I’m not very tech savvy but he was extremely patient. I guess the best thing about him is that he believes in my Wycliffe/Violence book, which brought us together in the first place in the Deep Transformation Network website. David is the author of Fulcrum: Generational World Transformation and co-founder of Ecological Economics Ecosquared at https://ecosquared.co.uk. Thank you, so much, David!

YOU, however, help keep me going when you send encouraging emails. I know you also struggle with despair and frustration and those of you in Africa have to deal with so much harder situations than we here in America do. For you, just keeping alive can be its own challenge whether from lack of food or civil war or from the powerful backlash corporate and government “employees” hoist upon people who protest peacefully or criticize their merciless, ruthless ways to steal our/ your resources.

I’ve been thinking a lot about violence recently and will be studying its roots so that I can, in the end, do my best to formulate a strategy for helping us dig deeper into the causes and work to prevent them. Preventing violence complements our efforts to stop the destruction of our planet. It’s all tied together. If we can work to bring hope, respect, and love to others who are different from us perhaps we will play a small role in guaranteeing the survival of all life.

As I type this, I think of the wonderfully different personalities and activities of my readers. Each one of you is precious to me whether you know it or not.

And so, I keep going because I care deeply about the fate of the Earth and our shared destiny. I’ll be taking a 3-month break from publishing so that I can work on this while I’m taking Derrick Jensen’s 3-month writing class, hoping to come back stronger.

Love, Iona

TreeHuggers United = Invincible! newspaper, 2023

TreeHuggers United = Invincible! newspaper was born on March 1, 2023 with the realization that our planet needs healthy, large trees and forests more than it needs solar, wind, electric vehicles or other technological “fixes,” all of which contribute to the continuing destruction of the Earth in order to create, run, and dispose of these so-called “sustainable” energy products.

At the United Nations COP27 meeting in November 2022, nature-based solutions were stressed as one of the best ways to fight global warming and climate chaos. TreeHuggers includes topics related to other forms of natural solutions and people on our email list receive occasional Action Alerts from Rainforest Action Network.

For a few months, I was the Ocean County (New Jersey) Coordinator for the Old-Growth Forest Network. I didn’t find an old-growth forest to save from logging so I started a new phase of my global warming newspaper focused on forests and trees this time. I created 14 issues before deciding to write a book on violence to help me understand why the world is such a mess. I’m putting these in backwards order chronologically. Please click on the links to see each newspaper in its full glory. I always tried to make each paper beautiful and colorful.

Grassroots Coalition News (GCN)

By issue #82 (October 17, 2021) we had a new name, a new website (created by an amazing African activist in Cameroon), and a new logo (also created by him). I published that until #91 on January 14, 2023. From 2021 to 2023, my newspaper was called Grassroots Coalition News (GCN). I was running the Grassroots Coalition for Environmental and Economic Justice by myself after John died in 2019.

Groundswell News Journal

I invented another new name, Groundswell News, which morphed into Groundswell News Journal and published those from 2018 to 2020. During these years, I published news of Greta Thunberg and her ignition of the youth movement fighting the climate emergency and my September 2019 issue was a tribute to John, my husband of 30 years and a revolutionary champion of justice.

In 2021, I created another Special Edition (#81) with the Student Action Guides several brilliant high school students and I had created back in 1992 with a grant from the Maryland Department of Education. These were published officially by Sheed and Ward and were beautiful because the kids did most of the work; I simply organized them and gave them ideas and experiences which they could write about like putting on vegetarian dinners to raise money for rainforests or getting the county government to create an ordinance banning the use of rainforest wood in their purchases. Plus, many of them were artistic so they drew some of the pictures. It was an amazing project for us all.

After John died and I was running the Grassroots Coalition alone, I made the nonprofit a much stronger organization with an international Board of Directors and Advisory Council with many new members from Africa. We had our first official Zoom Board meeting on May Day, 2020. At that point, I changed the name of my newspaper again to Grassroots Coalition News.

The Go-Back Club

There is a gap between 2008 and 2012 and I came back in 2013 with an electronic version and a new name, The Go-Back Club, which I published until 2018 calling it a “Newsbooklet (sic, a name I invented) of the Simple-Living Brigade.” I was keenly aware that Americans are the worst causes of climate chaos because of their (our) outrageous consumer habits/addictions. I hoped that if “simple living” could go viral, we as a nation could help bring down carbon dioxide levels while also save natural resources, which wouldn’t be needed to produce crappy products made from mining, logging, and toxic chemicals.

In 2014 I had an invitation to fly to South Korea as the sole foreign correspondent to cover the 7th International Nature Loving Festival and Nature and Humanity Seminar. During my Public Health and Environmental Law course at Rutgers, I had met an amazing Korean doctor who became my Brother in the Universe. He arranged for my free trip and deluxe accommodations. It was a phenomenal experience and I created a special edition in September showcasing each of the dance troupes from 26 countries. I loved every minute of that trip.

In October 2018, I published another special edition containing information and charts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a page devoted to our friend and my Board member, Dr. Michael Mann, probably the most widely known, highly respected, and most vilified by climate deniers of any climate scientist in the world.

The Order of the Earth

The Order of the Earth was first published as a tabloid and shortly thereafter I found another printer who would be able to print my newspaper as a broadsheet, which I preferred.

A new friend was a graphic artist and she created two sample newspapers in 2007 as I was learning how to use publishing software. As we got closer to our launch date of January 1, 2008, two old friends played such important roles that my dream might not have come to life. One of them worked for a newspaper and knew how to lay out pages and the other one had gotten an inheritance and donated $1,000 to pay for the first 16-page, full-color print run!

One of the workers at the Herald-Mail in Hagerstown, where I had also gotten lots of coaching on how to prepare my first “real” paper, took a photo of me in my dress sitting on top of the 2,000 newspapers before we loaded them into our Ford Escort. That picture and the story below were published in a Herald-Mail women’s magazine shortly afterwards. It’s important to remember that I had no official training in design or publishing other than how to use basic publishing software when I was working part-time in a federal program to train elderly people how to boost whatever skills they had so they could find jobs. I was tutored for free at a local college.

I pretty much freaked out when we brought all those newspapers into my basement office because I had not thought of a distribution plan. Over the next few weeks, I got a few paid subscriptions but mostly bundled up packs of 100 and shipped them off to friends to give away wherever they went. Since most of my friends were also activists, I knew they would have events and meetings at which to pass them out.

I had to work full-time in a sewing factory to earn $1,000 a month to cover the printing and postage costs. I did that for four years and worked afternoons, evenings, and weekends on the newspaper. After four years, I was exhausted and took a break. During that time I failed to save electronic copies as I did in the first two years but in 2024, an angel with whom I had worked on Green Party things with, sent me links to about two dozen newspapers he had put on his website so all I had to do was download them and upload them here, which I just did today, October 19, 2024. A few of them I already had but now I feel that this section is done. Thank you, my angel friend, Matt!