Selected Articles
This article was invited by the art critic Eleanor Heartney for the Critics Page section of the February 2025 issue of The Brooklyn Rail, which she was asked to curate and for which she invited articles from ten artists and writers. Her theme was "The Return of the Goddess," concerning rising interest among various artists today in Goddess studies. I open my article with the impetus for my writing Lost Goddesses of Early Greece (1978) at the beginning of the Women's Spirituality movement. Then I discuss the work of the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, whose conclusion that the Indo-European tribes must have come into Neolthic "Old Europe" in three waves from the steppes has now been proven repeatedly in historical genome mapping research at numerous universities. Her books featuring the art and artifacts of "Old Europe" have been influential for many artists. The closing section, "Our Times," is about our situation now that the anti-climate-action pushback by the fossil fuel corporations in recent years has been successful in many directions, assuring that the level of carbon and methane emissions will continue to rise, not fall, every year. As a particularly relevant goddess for these times, especially for the readership of BR in New York, I suggest "The Sacred Manic Goddess Makes Tracks" (1978), a photograph by the late artist Mary Beth Edelson. I also note that the folklorist, curator, and performance artist Kay Turner makes a strong case for the goddess Hekate as a wise guide for our passage into the worsening climate crisis. Oh, yes.
In addition to reducing carbon dioxide and methane emissions while building out a clean-energy economy, we need to think about how people will fare in their communities as extreme weather events escalate in intensity and frequency. Numerous recent discoveries in human biology are relevant to this challenge. We can now apply informed relational thinking in essential areas. This article was invited by the European Journal of Ecopsychology and was published in 2023.
Charlene Spretnak wrote this essay after the town where she lives almost burned down in the Thomas fire in December 2017. A new possibility for talking about climate-change action with climate-change deniers is proposed in the wake of the many extreme weather events that year. This article was published on the FeminismAndReligion.com site on 21 February 2018.
This op-ed piece (San Francisco Chronicle, 19 November 2000) identified the puzzling decision Al Gore and his campaign staff made that caused them to fail to pick up needed Green votes in the final two weeks of the 2000 campaign: they decided not to make public concessions to to the Green Party platform (which would not have required negotiating a deal with Ralph Nader). This is what liberal parties in many countries do when it's clear that they cannot win without the votes of Greens or other minority parties: they publicly promise to take several policy actions advocated by the Greens that are not in the liberal party's platform.