David went on to describe some positive trends in farming today:

• Community supported agriculture is helping thousands of consumers and farmers regain control over food. The Abazses' own CSA serves nearly 50 local families and provides nearly half of their family's income.
• While ineligible for government subsidies, small farms like theirs are up to 1,000-percent more productive per acre than most factory farms.
• Expanding markets for organically grown food and grass-fed beef are putting a lot of pressure on conventional producers to change the way they do business.

But these are hopeful signs only to the extent that we are ready and willing to help translate alternative models into global movements. We've honored our charismatic leaders and read their books. Let us now follow their examples!

David shared some the ways we can be part of this revolution—by getting organized to eat more foods in season and more foods that are grown locally, to form food-buying clubs, to start vegetably gardens on Meeting property, to join local CSAs, to patronize local farmers markets, to participate in seed-saving networks, and to use regional food banks.

Many other contemporary charismatic figures found their way into discussions as the QEW gathering at Ghost Ranch continued through the weekend—such eco-visionaries as Bill McKibben, Amory Lovins, William McDonnough, Paul Hawken, Vandana Shiva, Bill Mollison, Thom Hartmann, Matthew Fox, and Thomas Berry, to name a few.

We often invoked mentors and models of previous generations—Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Gandhi, and Jesus. We even became conscious of Ghost Ranch itself as a kind of charismatic landscape—worthy of the time and expense it took for us to sojourn there because of how it extended our perceptual horizons, quickened our spirits, and hushed us into awed silence.

Other Gathering talks

The late Jim Corbett, charismatic leader of the 1980s Sanctuary Movement, was the subject of a talk by guest speaker Daniel Baker of Cascabel, Ariz., who summarized the core message of Jim's last book, A Sanctuary for All Life:

• Jim saw the human community as imbedded in the larger Earth community, capable of existing in harmony with all life forms only through the practice of co-creation, which the ancient Hebrews called "Shaloam."
• The power of the Sanctuary Movement came from Jim's deep conviction that peace and justice apply to every one and every thing. This is not just a philosophy; it is a Torah written on the heart. "Inwardly, it is most accessible in word-free stillness; outwardly it is most accessible in wildlands." Shaloam teaches that nature is our mother and all creatures are our brothers and sisters.
• Referring to Central American refugees who were aided by the Sanctuary Movement, Jim wrote, "It is as difficult to imagine a humanity in which no one is alien as it was to imagine a civilization in which no one was a slave."
• In spite of humanity's continuing addiction to various kinds of enslavement, Jim saw hope for the future because the deep joy that comes from being a co-creator is much more powerful than such addictions.
• The Sanctuary Movement had to act through a covenant community, Jim said. "While individuals can resist injustice, only a community can do justice."
• As a "practical mystic," Jim believed that our fundamental relationship to the divine springs from our connection to the earth, and it is the loss of that connection that has allowed the human community to contract into a system of ethics that seeks only individual human redemption instead of a more universal land redemption. When we come to see how everything in the world is interconnected, religion and ecology become one and the same thing.

Daniel wrote the introduction for A Sanctuary for All Life, which can be ordered from Howling Dog Press at <www.howlingdogpress.com>.

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