By Jerome Irwin,
Sydney, Australia, that illustrious city Down Under – that some once called, “The Pearl of the South Pacific” – is rapidly becoming over-stretched and over developed beyond belief. If the Australian government, and its corporate counterpart’s, radical plan is allowed to continue to expand it into ‘two mega-Sydneytropolis’s” and a third “mega-aerotropolis”, with a second major international airport for Sydney, then say fare-thee-well to the Sydney of old. Because, at the moment, the official radical plan, that’s gloatingly called “The Great New Experiment for what the future of Sydney Might Be”, means that Sydney is going, going, gone. If, that is, the pitched battle now underway between the Nimby’s, Yimby’s and Bimby’s over what Sydney’s fate is lost to the wrong victors. If so, then, sadly, say: goodbye, aloha, ciao, bon voyage, adios, arrivederci, aufWiedersehen, au revoir, sayonara, shalom, totsiens, zaijian to the Sydney once known and admired.
Sydney, like every city in the world, has both masculine and feminine characteristics. The softer, warmer feminine qualities reflected in many different ways; especially by the curved, rounded shapes and soft designs of architecture on a small, humanistic scale that creates a certain unique charm, character, ambience, even sensual and erotic in nature, and; a smaller, more personal scale of infrastructure and organization that enhances the same qualities, that over time create a rich legacy of heritage. The more hard-edged masculine characteristics, on the other hand, generally reflect the haughty, burly, churlishness of an always more aggressive, dominating corporate world of business, finance and commerce that generally seeks to bury or eliminate these feminine aspects from every city they build on a larger, more impersonal scale. A prominent fear felt by many over the new radical, experimental plan for Sydney’s expansion is the loss of these feminine qualities to a preponderance of too much cold, bland, grey concrete, steel and right-angles; with little remaining of old Sydneytown’s charm, character, heritage and ambiance that once lost is hard if nigh impossible to ever retrieve.
What Yimby’s don’t essentially ever understand, and never will, about Nimby’s and Bimby’s is the way they feel so passionately about a city like Sydney, as if she were a beautiful woman they’re enraptured by; and when she is being violated or threatened with rape they will rush to her defense at the drop of a hat at the risk of themselves. Yimby’s can’t ever understand such passion and intimacy because their greatest passions mostly revolve instead around money, power and control over other people and so-called ‘inanimate’ things like cities that are only meant to be manipulated one way or the other for their own ends.
Which begs the question: What will every major urban center in the world like Sydney look like in the next ten, fifty or hundred years if one group or the other holds sway over their future?
Demographic experts say the cities of the world will continue to morp, with future estimated population projections, such as: Mexico City’s 20 million, in 2015, becoming 25 million by 2050; Kigali, Rwanda’s 1 million becoming 5 million within the same span of time, and; Sydney, Australia’s 2.4 million turning into 7.4 million plus. The experts still are grasping to understand what the future implications of such explosions may have on the human and natural worlds.
Whichever way Sydney and the rest of the world will go has something to do with humanity’s endless search for the so-called Good Life. But how is this never-ending search for what ’Might Be’ in the future already manifestly to be seen in places like Sydney in 2018?
The first, most immediate clue one could point to would be the growing multitudes of over-weight, drug and alcohol-ridden, stressed-out bodies of so many who live increasingly self-indulgent lifestyles, oblivious to what their lifestyles in search of ‘the Good Life’ are doing to themselves, society and the natural world around them. Another clue, and possibly the chief source of so much human angst in Sydney, as it is everywhere else in the world, could be attributed to the same dis-ease, at a societal level, of: so much out-of-control urban development and the sum total effects that high-density living environments already are having, compared to the way human beings, and especially those like the aboriginal Australian people, have normally lived for centuries.
A mass meltdown of modern human life and city-life is unquestionably underway. Its complex lifestyles exacerbated and accelerated by the extreme pressures of dysfunctional and corrupt authoritarian, dictatorial processes, that some would even call fascist in nature, that are virtually everywhere replacing one-time democratic decision-making ones, such as: many of Sydney’s and New South Wales legally-elected city councils that have been wholey terminated or amalgamated by autocratic politicians with barely a “by your leave”, while; the radical plan to split Sydney into three cities, contiguous to one another, if allowed to continue, will end up becoming the size of another New York, London or, one day, perhaps even another Beijing (“The radical plan to split Sydney into three”, 10 Apr 2018, The Guardian, Delia Falconer).
Such ruthless, corporate-based processes ignore the realities of such critical issues as: over-population, and; the consequent result of massive influxes of migrants and refugees that are totally disrupting once time-honoured Australian cultural mores and values.
Who is behind all these massive influxes around the world? At Sydney’s societal level, who will ultimately be the ones to finally put a stop to so many such radical imbalances in its world? Will it be those often hatefully referred to as the so-called NIMBY’s (No In My Backyard), or will it be the always more favoured YIMBY’S (Yes in my Backyard)? The NIMBY’s often the ones who are wrongly and intentionally mis-characterized as those who object to over-development occurring in their communities, and yet raise no such objections to similar developments elsewhere. When, in fact, it’s the YIMBY’s, or modern-day “YUPPY’s”, today’s pro-development advocates, who are the one’s instrumental in creating the density that is over-stretching the sustainability and viability of Sydney’s urban/city life.
In recent years the terms “Nimby’s and “Yimbys” have taken on many different meanings and definitions elsewhere in the world. In places like the City of Beverely Hills in California, over its ‘Measure R’ controversy that sought to raise, by one half-cent, sales taxes to pay for infrastructure improvements, Yimbys once became known as Devsto’s (“Developer Stooges”) or Denzo’s (“Density Zombies”); while in Manchester, England politicians once advocated, “Forget the Nimby’s and Yimbys and Bring on the Bimbys” (“Beauty in My Backyard”).
But too many Yimby’s prefer to think of themselve’s as “realists”, who’ve given up on the world’s governments ever taking any meaningful, proactive steps to curb population explosion and stop the consequent loss of beauty and ugliness that over-development is causing in everyone’s backyard. They don’t believe Australia can stay a smaller nation and punch above its weight, like New Zealand, without becoming yet another impacted Asian country. They fatalistically accept the resulting ever-greater density of humanity in all the world’s cities and urban areas that, short of some dire natural or man-made apocalyptic event, represents the only possible reality of the future. They fatalistically also accept a future of never-ending perpetual world war that creates endless numbers of refugees who all must be housed and cared for, and so are ‘dumped’ into whatever major city or urban area that will accept them, until human civilization simply becomes one massive, continuous glut of over-development. Thus they accept, as the only answer, greater density that must continue to go in the only direction it can. Beyond their sense of cynicism, they have no other solution what to do, save to bequeath to coming generations of human civilization the unsavory consequences of what will be will be.
But, in more general terms, will it simply be: We, the people, or all ‘The Big Boys’ and ‘Thugs’ who finally will put a stop to so many imbalances occurring in the urban cities and human societies in today’s topsy-turvy world? Which ones will prove to be society’s visionary healers or the perverse purveyors of yet more societal ills, distress and dis-ease?
When considering Sydney’s radical plan for over-development one must ponder what will be the single-most significant dynamic that finally tips the battle one way or the other for or against humanity and Planet Earth’s survival before everything smacks, headlong, into that unavoidable, insurmountable, fatal Supply & Demand Wall; looming somewhere terribly near or not too distant, where the supply will never be able to keep up with the demand?
Will the single-most critical, deciding factor of this cataclysmic collision in Sydney’s case end up being a: lack of fresh, clean air, pure water or healthy, nutritious foods; the elimination of the last detached single family homes, neighborhoods and disappearance of their surrounding open green spaces, replaced by ever more impacted, barren, high-rise, high-density environments? Will the deciding factor be: the lack of sunlight and views of nature’s beauty, blocked by ugly, bland concrete structures that everywhere dominate the skyline; the oppressive effects of mounting traffic congestion, gridlock and lack of parking,that daily wears upon the populace’s nerves and sense of well-being; the unaffordable reality of never being able to buy one’s own home, or the accumulative effects of instead being forced to rent from money-hungry landlords who are allowed by ‘The Big Boys’ to keep raising the rent, forcing those who can’t pay their ‘pound of flesh’ to move on to wherever society cares not? Perhaps the deciding factor will end up being the ever-dwindling source of simple building materials – such as common, ordinary sand – that’s required to make the massive amounts of concrete needed to construct what some would like to eventually see become one giant, sprawling ‘Hong Kong’ in Sydney and throughout the world? Maybe the answer is: All of The Above!
For over forty years, this writer has been traveling, to and from, Sydney, Australia, the hometown of his wife, and his own ‘hometowns’ of Vancouver, Canada and San Francisco, USA; observing and experiencing, first-hand, how each of these major urban centre’s either has consciously-chosen, or simply allowed themselves to drift towards ever more radically changed ways of life that many would argue aren’t for the better.
The conclusion arrived at by how much each place has since deteriorated, from a humanistic perspective, is that if one were to use, as a metaphor, a barometer, to describe any one of them, but especially Sydney now, in 2018 – as it teters on the verge of going forward, willy-nilly, with its new proposed radical plan for Sydney’s even more unimaginably-insane, excessive over development future – one would have to conclude that the barometer is now plummetting at such an alarming rate as to suggest the coming of some kind of horrific, monstrously-violent storm of epic proportions, that one-day will not only engulf cities like Sydney but all of human civilization to whatever nefarious, pitiful end.
Common sense should already be screaming at every citizen and leader in the world that the destructive, accumulative effects of all these dynamics upon the human body, mind and spirit – not to mention upon the infrastructure of every country that can barely keep up with the needs of their own people, let alone the constant, immense tsunami demands of so many unwanted newcomers – is causing a horrendous drain upon the earth’s natural, finite resources that continues to make everything so fragile and unsustainable, to the point that it’s coming down to a basic matter of trying to ‘Rob Peter to Pay Paul’. This should already be a no-brainer.
To put this crisis of modern human civilization in yet another way, one could use the metaphor of war rather than meteorology to make clearer the sheer madness of what all is going on. Sydney, for one, obviously is being ruthlessly over-run and ‘blitzkrieged’ by the world’s corporate generals who are intent upon morphing it at hyper-speed on the way to becoming yet another ‘New York’; no doubt, to one day becoming something of yet an ever more unimaginable size that will challenge the very liveability of healthy human life.
One only has to glance at the wealth of brilliant investigative articles that daily appear on the pages of local papers, like the Sydney Morning Herald, to realize the magnitude and intensity of the ‘shooting war’ that is slugging it out for the survival or demise of Sydney as it now is. The pounding salvos coming from all sides reflect the pitched battles underway between those seeking to either stop or step-up the overthrow of Sydney’s traditional, time-honoured values and sensibilities of the Australian people that originally made it one of the most unique places on earth. When asked, the average man or women on the streets of Sydney and its surrounds is as gob-smacked as he or she is aghast and aggrieved by what is being allowed to happen to their much-beloved Sydney, to New South Wales and to Australia as a whole, by too many corrupt politicians, city officials and corporate robber barons, over which the people have no control. “Not in Our Name!” could be said to be their common futile cry!
The constant roar of all their salvos, back and forth at one another, are the same as those being made about similar conflicts that are raging ‘round the world in every other major urban centre, over the same issues concerning the: peoples loss of control over the direction of their lives; chaotic housing markets, driven more and more by offshore investors, speculators and hostile governments, with an eye towards economic or actual physical invasion and takeover on their minds, or; the constant economic and physical warfare that’s causing the crunch and squeeze of human beings, caught in the no-man’s lands of the maelstrom, who are constantly being forced to flee to or flee from somewhere; searching anywhere for whatever harbour of safety or modicum of peace and stability can be found.
But, as each year passes, life increasingly seems more like a bad, if not cruel, joke. The prevailing dishonest and dishonourable practices and policies of both Western and Eastern business, corporate, financial and political forces are the same as those to wherever one tries to run; every outside interest somehow seeking to sink their claws ever-deeper into the body politic, sucking out the economic life-blood of wherever, whether it be Australia, Canada, the U.S. or every other place on the earth; sucking out the essence of what originally made each place the great and unique entity that so many have long admired and sought to emulate.
In this perpetual war underway, the Big Boys and Thugs, wherever they may be in the world, are constantly using whatever lofty platform they have at hand to brainwash the people to believe in their warped world view of life and reality that somehow always is benignly reduced down to a simple matter of Supply & Demand.
The Big Boys and Thugs simply happy to provide the wherewithal to continue the constant wars and ensuing environmental crises that supply the endless numbers of immigrants, refugees and population growth needed to continue their Machiavellian plots of domination. As the demand exponentially grows for everything, from: bullets, bombs, armaments, housing, land, infrastructure; motorways, highways; airports, cruise ships, high-tech toys or whatever, the Big Boys and Thugs simply supply whatever is needed; and, as a result, the rich get ever-richer at the expense of everyone else. The only problem is that this nefarious solution to create ‘The Good Life’ for only a select few is that it will take many more planet earth’s than just the current one we live upon to keep the whole scam going.
Yet because of a wide-held belief in Sydney, as it is everywhere else in the world, in the absurd concept of perpetual growth and expansion, that could be characterized, planetary-wide, as ‘a quasi-religious belief’, it seemingly constitutes the sole answer that every government has to give for every human and societal problem. Consequently, every urban centre in the world thereby is virtually kept under perpetual siege, forced to forever totally transform itself into something entirely different again than what it was, and perhaps never wanted to actually become. Like a mad man feverishly pedalling his bike faster and faster for fear of falling over if he ever stopped and all would be doomed; these endless ‘growth solutions’ destroy what human beings perpetually long for, are fighting for, and yet losing every day as time goes by.
As one example, the Australian press is filled every day with one ‘leaked’ confidential file after another that uncovers yet another twist of how all the bastards – the Chinese Communist Government, for one – obsessively and ruthlessly continue to pour obscene amounts of money into Australia’s ever-greedier governmental coffers, through one proxy investor or dummy corporation after another, to eventually take over everything for themselves. In the end, history will eventually characterize these new Genghis Khan’s as ‘piker’s’ by comparison.
But the same is the case with every country – be it manifested through their Reserve Banks, Corporate Think Tank Institutes, Business Councils or Chambers of Commerce, who all subscribe to the same world view, and work diligently 24/7, 365 days of the year to promote it – who each have their own platform in every mainstream corporate press. Their platforms constantly pound the people every which they turn with fake news and fake truths about everything. Without ever seeking the tacit consent and voting approval of the citizenry, and more often than not even against their will, these platforms daily set priorities and make critical, sweeping, unilateral decisions about humankind’s future; a future they expect every government and their brainwashed minions to duly adhere to and obediently profess, as if was the gospel being preached to sycophants, over such matters as: necessary urban growth, land values; housing speculation; re-zoning regulations; refugee-immigrant quotas and policies, and; infrastructure development, no matter how excessive or sweeping in scope.
This reality was recently made patently clear by two articles that appeared on the same day in the Sydney Morning Herald. Both articles typical of the times in which the world, as a whole, now lives and the kind of sweeping broadsides that are daily fired, as warnings and directives, across the bow of every ship of state, large or small, from the giant metropolis to the tiny city council, to dutifully toe the party-line and give no quarter whatsoever to whatever different world view of life to which NIMBY’s and their BIMBY allies may ever dare to aspire.
One article in question, (“New homeowners locked out by zoning”, 9 March, 2018, SMH, Eryk Bagshaw), called attention to a so-called ‘research paper’ that was put out by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), that asserts it’s the development restrictions, created by recalcitrant city councils and the NIMBY’s who have banded together to try to slow down: the allowed numbers of incoming immigrants and refugees; stop or reduce the unwanted effects of population explosion, and consequent increased demand for ever more endless infrastructure projects, or; put a stop to the consequent ever-denser, more concretized, less green, neighborhoods and communities that are already being planned and set in stone for the future. It’s the same monotonous refrain to be heard uttered everywhere in the world’s corporate press.
According to the RBA’s so-called ‘research’, it’s these same ‘bad guys’ who are always interfering with ‘progress’, destroying the Big Boys Supply and Demand formula and, consequently, locking out many of those unfortunate ones who will never be able to afford to ever become a home owner and contributor to the so-called general prosperity of society.
A similar article with yet the same meta-message also simultaneously came out in the Sydney Morning Herald that provided an analysis of a report put out, this time by Australia’s Grattan Institute, that gave a slightly different take on the issue of affordability of housing in the greater Sydney region of New South Wales. It called attention to the long-standing battle that has traditionally pitted: NIMBY’s versus YIMBY’s; home owners versus home buyers, and; developers versus city councils; yet the same ‘YIMBY double speak’ of the Grattan Report was that its futile to resist what is inevitable because once the non-home owners and frustrated home buyers become the majority of the voting population they, and their anti-democratic, development-minded allies in the corporate and city planning realms, will win the battle and, thus, the war to eliminate the last of the detached single family homes and neighbourhood hold-outs; to be duly replaced by medium density communities that, in turn, will be replaced by ever-higher, every-denser ‘Hong Kong-style’ developments; that will become the norm in the corporate-development community’s envisioned Brave New World scenario that lies ahead for the entire human race. (“Zoned Out, Sydney’s sprawl has reached breaking point”, 9 March, 2018, SMH, Chris Kohler).
Nothing much is ever made in the majority of such articles released in the corporate press about who the real culprits always are in this scenario and what is constantly being manipulated behind the scenes between the minions of: investors, speculators, politicians, developers, city planners, architects, schools of business and real estate industry; who seldom consider in their massive urban projects the people’s own desire for, perhaps, yet a different, slower, softer way of life, say, with more affordable housing that’s smaller, more economical, and environmentally-sensitive; built solely with recycled materials that conserve the earth’s ever-receding finite natural resources. The same goes with those who manufacture ever bigger, more powerful SUV’s and the complex, archaic, 60’s-style highway systems needed to convey them to and from these massive developments. But then this is what is part and parcel of the conspiratorial world view that forever continues to be the engine that drives everything ever-forward; while convincing the masses to believe in their flawed vision of the future to the point where it becomes impossible to know what came first: the Chicken or the Egg!
Sydney’s current, almost unimaginably-large, mega-urban development plan now underway – variously called the West & North Connex Motorway, Sydney’s second International airport at Badgery’s Creek, and its new ‘Tri-City Western Suburbs’ project – already is creating a giant new highway toll system required to link all these projects together over the some 50-60 kilometers from Sydney’s inner CBD to the hinterlands in the West. This supra-metropolis in the making continues to destructively plow through Sydney’s historic neighbourhoods, demolishing the charm, character and heritage of each, in spite of the numbers of irate citizens, foaming-at-the-mouth, desperately flinging their bodies in every which way in protest, trying to stop all the devastation to the human and natural landscapes around them.
Once completed, the ensuing 45 billion dollar toll road scam of public funds for private gain, that will take some 40 years of taxpayers monies to pay off, will force even more people into cars, leading to even further air pollution, development and unwanted change. Future related mega-highway infrastructure projects – like the Rozelle Interchange, Iron Cove Tunnel & Western Harbour Tunnel – will end up further releasing even more toxic, cancer-causing materials throughout Sydney’s world-famous inner harbour; not to mention the round-the-clock dredging of cancerous toxic materials, and their removal by heavy trucks and trailers that, in the process, will not only rob for years the surrounding residents of their sleep, peace of mind and the tranquility of their communities, but will lead to even more “Trojan Horse” development projects that will foster further compulsory acquisition and demolition of still more historic homes, businesses, community facilities and amenities. In the end, whatever Sydney may gain, it will lose the very qualities and characteristics that once made it the singular unique place on earth that it still is but soon may not be.
The utter madness of such grandiose, radical urban development will also cause the historic city of Parramatta, on Sydney’s western edges, to become another huge, high-rise, sprawling urban centre the size of a ‘second Sydney’; with yet a third planned massive amalgamation of surrounding rural ‘Badgery’s Creek’ townships, that formerly provided the market gardens that fed Sydney, to, in turn, become one, vast, continuous aerotropolis the size of the current city of Adelaide that, in order to survive, will have to import all its food stuffs from elsewhere in the world. It’s what the YIMBY’s call ‘Progress’.
Clearly, the Big Boys and Thugs have already made the unilateral, undemocratic decision to press forward with their so-called “Great New Experiment for Sydney’s Future” – irrespective of whatever the different dreams and will of the people may be – to explode the population and urban development whether it be in Sydney, Melbourne, New South Wales or Australia; and that’s that! Those who don’t like it: “Stiff cheese”, as the old Aussie saying goes.
But the world’s YIMBY’s, as silent, passive actors in this modern drama play of human civilization’s evolution or devolution, are culpable, as well. Similar insane, sweeping urban developments are being allowed to occur everywhere on the globe because the world’s affluent masses have all Drunk the Spiked Cool-Aid that’s been carefully prepared and scripted for them. The majority no longer believe in nor care about the possibilities of such viable, alternative realities as smaller, sustainable cities with more economical, smaller dwellings, open green spaces and the low-key, more stable-state lifestyles that go with them. They’re willing to look the other way and simply accept the: impacted, toxic inner-city living environments, massive congestion of automobiles; long commutes, on archaic 1960’s-style motorways; the on-going violent overthrow of former traditional ways of life, while; encouraging the glut of excessive, un-sustainable affluent lifestyles that go with their overthrow.
Ever-bigger and ever-flashier are the operative deregueur language of a civilization that has simply gone mad and no longer knows where it’s going. It’s a civilization that demands of all its followers an abiding belief in the madness of their leaders who demand ever-bigger everything, with more and more high-tech flash, and whatever violence and steam-rolling over democratic processes are required to realize them.
So this is the on-going state of the so-called modern world that won’t do anything different other than what it has been doing, and where it has been heading, for centuries. The common, unified message of those like the Reserve Bank of Australia, Grattan Institute, and all their economic-financial-political-corporate counterparts throughout the world, to all those who may disagree with them, is one and the same: it’s shut up, get out of the way, and allow us ‘Big Boys & Thugs’ to have our way, ostensibly for the benefit of all concerned. Which, of course, it won’t, but then this is always part and parcel of the colossal ruse of their conspiratorial world view.
For years, this writer has answered the challenge to confront this dystopian view of life, drawn his own pen like a proverbial sword, and engaged in hand-to-hand combat; authoring any number of companion articles, each of which attempts to present, as a foil, a diametrically-different world view that attempts to turn the NIMBY Vs. YIMBY Vs BIMBY argument completely on its head. Each article throwing out the same challenge, over and over again, for local governments everywhere to consider the critical importance of undertaking a meaningful Reconciliation between what are the two main, opposing, world views that exist today between Western and Eastern governments and their aboriginal-indigenous peoples.
One of the basic arguments put forth in such a Reconciliation process is that the YIMBY’s are always the first who will object most loudly to allow in their own backyards the kind of ugliness they’re always so readily prepared to dump into someone else’s backyard. These same YIMBY’s, if they happen to receive some windfall or win the lottery, are among the first to opt for themselves and their family some bucolic, idyllic setting with the very qualities and aspects they’re so readily prepared to eliminate for untold others. They’re the same ones who also are never satisfied with a simpler lifestyle, but instead, whenever they get the chance, opt for, say, an ever-larger mortgage to step-up to an ever-larger, flashier dwelling and everything that make larger and larger footprints on the earth. It’s what they commonly refer to as “Making It”, while living out a fantasy of ‘the Good Life’, say, on some luxury European river cruise or South Pacific jaunt on an opulent cruise ship; imagining, for a brief moment, as if they are to be counted among the feted elite and royalty of the world.
But, so far, the only pathetic way that Sydney’s corporate-politico-city planners have chosen to reconcile their radical growth plan with the local aboriginal peoples relationships to the land they call “Connecting with Country”, is to applaud themselves for having cynically redrawn the boundaries of their plan through the use of such local aboriginal terminology as “saltwater country”, “muddy river country” and “running water country” to describe their megalomaniacal plan for a new “Eastern Harbour City”, “Central River City”, and “Western Parkland City”. Boy, that’s really ‘Connecting with Country’, alright. It’s as sad as it is sick, really!
Yet the question remains, what still further “compulsory acquisitions” by Sydney’s planners and politico’s – the dickheads as some old-time Aussies would call them – awaits the Australian people before their radical “Reconciliation” plan for “Connecting with Country” might become Sydney’s reality of tomorrow? Towards what fateful direction will still other ‘dickheads’ in the world similarly point other cities? Will it be the Nimby’s, Yimby’s or Bimby’s who decide?
If Beauty is to be the chief deciding factor – rather than money, power and control – than the feminine characteristics that make Sydney the unique place that it is, with all its charm, character and heritage, then the Nimby’s and Bimbys will be the ones who decide. But if the Yimby’s are the ones to decide, than all the money, power and control will again win the day and be the same ones who will point everything towards the same direction as things always have been heading, UNTIL FINALLY….?
And so goes what appears to be at the moment an ever-deteriorating state of the human mind-body-spirit, civilization and Planet Earth in 2018 and beyond.
Jerome Irwin is a freelance writer and author of “The Wild Gentle Ones; A Turtle Island Odyssey” (www.turtle-island-odyssey.com), a three volume account of his travels as a spiritual sojourner, during the 1960’s, 70’s & 80’s, among Native American & First Nation peoples in North America. It encompasses the Indigenous Spiritual Renaissance & Liberation Movements that emerged throughout North America during the civil rights era. In addition to being a long-time activist and political organizer among his community of Lower Capilano, on the North Shores of Vancouver, British Columbia, Irwin has authored over the years a number of environmental, political, cultural, spiritual articles with a special focus on Native Americans, First Nations, Australian aboriginals, Israel, Gaza, Palestine and Syria. Irwin also is the publisher of The Wild Gentle Press.
