Grandmother spirits hold an important place in our work. For starters, the Earth is a grandmother spirit. We recognized this for millenia, and it was only as a result of the patriarchal turn, when men replaced numerous goddess cults with monotheistic male gods in the sky, that we started rejecting our grandmother, who not only birthed us, but created the conditions for our flourishing. Even the Romans forbade mining as a sacrilege upon the living earth. By acknowledging and invoking grandmother spirits, we are trying to reverse the damaging effects of our arrogance and ignorance. Many of the thinkers and visionaries we turn to for inspiration are women. This is not an accident. Women are natural bearers of the grandmother spirit. They are part of a persecuted but robust lineage charged with keeping alive the powerful practice and wisdom of being grandmothers, of safeguarding the knowledge and values that we need to survive and flourish. Grandmothers are women who survive beyond their reproductive age, and they possess a rare wisdom that spans generations. They are natural [[time rebels]]. For example, recent studies have shown that killer whale pods that have a grandmother are much more likely to find food necessary for survival. (https://www.wildorca.org/the-grandmother-effect/). Just as we can identify a grandmother spirit, we can also identify a male warrior spirit. While we don't want to give too much weight to the patriarchal frames of identifying heroes and villains, it is useful to identify the start of the "death of nature" (as Carolyn Merchant puts it in her book of the same name) with Francis Bacon, the father of science, who described nature as a woman that had to be tortured to extract her secrets. This set in motion a more-than-500 year history of human conquest and control over nature. Similarly, we can identify the transition back to a living view of nature with James Lovelock, the scientist who came up with the Gaia hypothesis. Gaia is the Greek goddess of the earth, and the idea to call his hyopthesis Gaia was given to him by his friend, the novelist William Golding. Bacon and Lovelock are examples of the male warrior spirit employed in different ways. Bacon is an example of the male warrior turning against the healign and wisdom at the heart centre of his village. Lovelock is an example of the same warrior spirit placed in service to the grandmother. This positive expression of the male warrior spirit is a much-needed dynamic in these patriarchally unbalanced times, and we will be pointing out other examples of this throughout this manifesto.