re_cultivate

By the Way...

2009-03-30T10:34:00.001-07:00

In case you haven't heard, I have another site that is devoted to my more musical inclinations and aspirations. I'll be posting new songs, recordings, and scheduled shows there regularly. The address is www.dustinpattison.com. Please stop by, take some time to listen, share with friends, etcetera.

I'll continue to do my best to keep this blog full of good stuff (I know, she's been starving lately but I'll work on that).

A Couple More for Your Listening Pleasure...

2009-02-17T06:46:00.000-08:00

Due to a lack of free-time as well as a missing power cord to my recording device, I'm posting a couple of my older recordings.

The first song is entitled One by One by One. I wrote this a couple of years back when my brother who, among many other things, writes for the Burnside Writer's Collective, said that they would be putting together a "Summer Mix-tape" of songs that in some way related to or represented 'Summer.' After I sat down and put this together, I had no idea why I considered it a song that had anything to do with summer except maybe it's sound had a summer-like quality - I don't know - but I submitted it anyway. I think I like this song and like playing it because of its simplicity. With fairly broad brush-strokes, I tried to paint a picture of a specific scene but still leave a lot to the imagination. One reason I'm not so happy with this recording and prefer to play it live is because in a live setting, I can pull out a little more of the required emotion. Though I do like hearing, in the bridge, the cheap little foot-long keyboard I bought at Goodwill for a buck.

The second song is Right Before Our Eyes. I wrote this in 2003, soon after coming back from my first trip to Malawi. I was really struggling with what I had seen and learned in the short two months of being there. I knew that, somehow, it was not for no reason that I had met the people I had met and seen what I had seen. I wondered how responsible (or response-able) I was to the things I now knew and the people I now had relationships with. At the same time, I wondered what sort of responsibility we have, as citizens of the US, who consume an amazing amount of the world's natural resources and whose greed and hubris are often the root cause of many of the world's problems, and who have the technology to watch these problems (i.e. disease, hunger, genocide, etc.) play out in real-time. This song was, I guess, my attempt at laying down some of those thoughts and questions as they emerged.

Also, stay tuned. I mentioned earlier that I'm wanting to get more serious about writing music and playing out, so I'm developing a simple website that I can put up that will contain some of my music, updates, and a show schedule. I'll let you know when that's ready.

Lyrics

ONE BY ONE BY ONE

You line up the bottles and I'll go get the gun
The baby's inside and asleep and before you know it
We'll be runnin' out of sun

One by one by one we will blow them away
One by one by one we will show them who's boss today

Don't be such a scaredy-cat, my papa said we could
Besides he left this morning, this time I know it
He's gone and gone for good

One by one by one we will blow them away
One by one by one we will show them who's boss today

RIGHT BEFORE OUR EYES

I've heard that I need to be
The change that I'd like to see
In this ever-changing world
But where's the change in me

I know I can't turn my head
From the dyin' and from the dead
Or exchange the things I've seen
For safety and security instead

Well, I know that my years
With plenty more to come
You may say that I'm full of dreams
But I'm not the only one

And how could I justify
A cozy suburban life
When the children are suffering and dying
Right before our eyes

Well, I've heard ignorance is bliss
But who knew it would come to this
If you say that it's not my job
Then I'm wonderin' whose it is

Well, I've tried to run and hide
Pleading that it's no fault of mine
Well it is if I don't respond in time
To what's right before our eyes

I know I'll never be satisfied with
Make-believing I care about it all
And never making the sacrifice beyond
Shedding a tear, watch it fall
There is a reason it's right before our eyes

No It Don't

2009-01-24T16:52:00.001-08:00

Here's a song I've been working on. It's a bit long but I'm not sure if it's done yet. I imagine that were I to finally record a full album, this one would end up being the 10 to 15-minute-long one at the end (don't worry, it's only 6 minutes so far). I apologize for looking so somber in the video. I just have a naturally sad look about me, I guess.

Hope you enjoy.

dpattison

A Lullaby for Moses

2009-01-19T13:39:00.000-08:00

Click to listen to: A Lullaby for Moses

This song started out as just a tune I would hum as I would rock Moses to sleep every day when I was with him at the orphanage. It seemed to be a tune that he either really liked or found extremely boring because it always lulled him to sleep pretty quickly. After a while, I decided to put some words to it. I came up with the lyrics that you see below and was having trouble coming up with a second stanza. I finally decided that instead of forcing it, I would allow the song to be a work-in-progress. I would allow myself time to really get to know my new son because, as he grows, develops, and changes, so will his interests and his desires and his dreams. So this is a lullaby just for Moses that will be written and tailored to him over the years, maybe not fully finished even in my lifetime. who knows?

Lyrics:

Sleep well, Moses, sleep for me
Dream well, Moses, dream sweet things
Sleep well, Moses, sleep for me
Dream well, Moses, dream sweet things

Dream of the tropical paradise
Where the sun's gone to get away
Dream the moon is one of God's eyes
She winks 'cause she thinks you're great
And dream that all the fireflies
Are the stars come down to play for a while

Sleep well, Moses, sleep for me
Dream well, Moses, dream sweet things
Sleep well, Moses, sleep for me
Dream well, Moses, dream sweet things
Oh, dream sweet things
Oh, dream sweet things
Dream sweet things

(thatnks to Holly Sharp for taking the beautiful photo above)

dpattison

Return of the Jeli

2009-01-19T11:46:00.000-08:00

OK, so I want to start using this blog again but I feel I need to use it for more than just a way to share the ideas and writings of others. My intention when starting this blog was to challenge myself to write more often but I never felt like I had anything to say that wasn't being said much more eloquently and thoughtfully by someone else. In addition, I had no desire to use this blog as some others use theirs - a tool for chronicling their every daily move - as I was afraid my readers would find that I'm more - or worse, as - uninteresting as they suspected me to be.

Recently a friend of mine suggested that maybe, since I am a songwriter (more of a dabbler in songwriting, really), I could be posting some of my material up on this blog. I thought this was a pretty good idea.

Ever since my World Music class in college, I've had an interest in the ancient work and tradition of the Jeli (more commonly known by the French word, Griot). These were the poets, storytellers, and musicians of West Africa who either wandered from place to place trying to eke out a living or were hired to serve and entertain specific villages or wealthier families. Jeli were the guardians of their society's oral tradition. They were the keepers of ancient stories and were thought to have great social, spiritual, and political power. According to Paul Oliver in his book Savannah Syncopators, "Though [the griot] has to know many traditional songs without error, he must also have the ability to extemporize on current events, chance incidents and the passing scene. His wit can be devastating and his knowledge of local history formidable." I find it interesting, especially with our own society's need to "celebritize" our musicians and storytellers that the Jeli were a servant class. In fact, the word griot can be translated as "servant". The word jeli (also spelled jali) means "blood," implying the hereditary nature of the musician class.

I guess because I am a musician who wants to use his gifts in a way that serves his community and because I come from a line of musicians (My father and grandfather have incredible talent) and I already see a lot of musical tendencies in my own son, though he does not share my DNA, I think of myself as a sort of Jeli for my time and place. My knowledge of local history is not exactly "formidable" and never has my wit been described as "devastating" but those are both things I can work on, right?

So, starting now, in addition to the occasional post written by me or someone I admire, I will be posting audio clips. These might be full-length songs or just snippets or beginnings of ideas for songs. They might be good-quality recordings or, more often than not, fairly rough ones. To listen to these, you'll just have to click on the title of the post and it should link you to the clip. I welcome feedback on whatever I put up and look forward to that leading to an interesting sort of collaborative process between myself and the reader/listener.

Enjoy.

the real reason for the food crisis

2008-05-19T12:21:00.000-07:00

Of the articles I've read, this is the best and most comprehensive explanation and critique of economic globalization and neoliberal ideologies and their harmful effects on the countries of the Global South.

As I've worked in Malawi for the last 4 years, I have been able to witness what effects 'structural adjustment' and the policies of such institutions as the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO have had on the agricultural and other sectors of Malawi and the life and livelihoods of its people. I encourage you (whoever you are) read this article, reflect on what these concepts and data mean for real people, and then, somehow, get involved...please.

Jubilee USA
Jubilee Oregon
La Via Campesina
Bread for the World
Oxfam
Africa Action

dpattison

Thanks John for pointing me to this.

thich nhat hanh__there is no path to peace. the path is peace.

2008-05-15T13:38:00.000-07:00

"You cannot remove wrong perceptions with a gun...Violence cannot remove violence—everyone knows that. Only with the practice of deep listening and gentle communication can we help remove wrong perceptions that are at the foundation of violence."
--------------------------------------
This article is adapted from his talk to members of the United States Congress on September 10, 2003.

Distinguished members of Congress, ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, it is my pleasure to have this opportunity to talk with you about how we can share our insight, our compassion and our understanding in order to better serve those we want to serve and help heal the wounds that have divided our nation and the world.

When you sit in your car on the way to work, you might like to use that time to come home to yourself and touch the wonders of life. Instead of allowing yourself to think of the future, you might like to pay attention to your breath and come home to the present moment. We breathe in and out all day, but we are not aware that we are breathing in and breathing out. The practice of bringing our attention to our breath is called mindful breathing: Breathing in, I know I am alive. Breathing out, I smile to life. This is a very simple practice. If we go home to our in-breath and out-breath and breathe mindfully, we become fully alive in the here and now.

In our daily lives, our bodies are present, but our minds might be elsewhere, caught in our projects, our worries and our anxieties. Life is only available in the present moment. The past is already gone; the future is not yet here. When we establish ourselves in the present moment we are able to live our moments deeply and to get in touch with the healing, refreshing and nourishing elements that are always within us and around us.

With this energy of mindfulness, we can recognize our pain and embrace it tenderly like a mother whose baby is crying. When a baby cries, the mother stops everything she is doing and holds the baby tenderly in her arms. The energy of the mother will penetrate into the baby and the baby will feel relief. The same thing happens when we recognize and embrace our own pain and sorrow. If we can hold our anger, our sorrow and our fear with the energy of mindfulness, we will be able to recognize the roots of our suffering. We will be able to recognize the suffering in the people we love as well.

Mindfulness helps us to not be angry at our loved ones, because when we are mindful, we understand that our loved ones are suffering as well. The person you love has a lot suffering and has not had a chance to be listened to. It is very important to take the time to sit down and listen with compassion. We call this practice “deep listening.” Deep listening can be used with the practice of loving speech to help restore communication with the people you care about. To listen like this is to give the other person a chance to empty his or her heart. If you can keep your compassion alive during that time—even if what the other person says is full of accusations and bitterness—it will not touch off irritation and anger in you. Listen in order to help the other person to suffer less.

When you communicate with compassion, you are using language that does not have the elements of anger and irritation in it. In this way we can help each other remove wrong perceptions. All the energies of anger, hatred, fear and violence come from wrong perceptions. Wrong perceptions result in a lot of anger, mistrust, suspicion, hate and terrorism. You cannot remove wrong perceptions through punishment. You have to do it with the tools of deep and compassionate listening and loving speech. With deep, compassionate listening and loving speech, we can bring harmony to our families, and our communities can become communities of understanding, peace and happiness.

When I was in India a number of years ago, I spoke to Mr. R. K. Narayan, a member of the Indian parliament, about the practice of deep listening and compassionate dialogue in legislative bodies. When you represent the people, you are expected to offer the people the best of your understanding and compassion. I said that a legislative assembly could become a community with a lot of mutual understanding and compassion. It could have strong collective insight to support the decision-making process and the people of the nation. Here in Washington, before a session of Congress, one person could read a short meditation: “Dear colleagues, we are elected by our people and our people expect us to listen to each other deeply and to use the kind of language that can convey our wisdom and insight. Let us bring together our individual experiences and wisdom so that we can offer our collective insight and make the best decisions for the country and the people.”

When a member of Congress is speaking from her insight with this kind of language, she is offering the best of herself. If we only act and speak the party line, then we are not offering the best compassion and understanding we have.

Members of Congress are very concerned about the levels of violence in our families, in our schools and in our society. Each concerned person may have his or her own ideas and insights about how to bring down that level of violence. If we can combine all our insights and experiences we will have the collective insight that will help to decrease the amount of violence in our society. If we are not able to listen to our colleagues with a free heart, though—if we only consider and support ideas from our own party—we are harming the foundation of our democracy. That is why we need to transform our community—in this case the Congress—into a compassionate community. Everyone would be considered a brother or sister to everyone else. Congress would be a place where we learn to listen to everyone with equal interest and concern. The practice of deep and compassionate listening and loving speech can help to build brotherhood, can remove discrimination and can bring about the kind of insight that will be liberating to our country and to our people.

Two days after the events of September 11th, I spoke to 4,000 people in Berkeley, California. I said that our emotions are very strong right now, and we should calm ourselves down. With lucidity and calm we would know what to do and what not to do in order not to make the situation worse. I said that the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center must have been very angry. They must have hated America a lot. They must have thought of America as having tried to destroy them as individual people, as a religion, as a nation, and as a culture. I said that we had to find out why they did such a thing to America.

America’s political leaders can ask the question, calmly and with clarity: “What have we done that has made you suffer so much?” America’s political leaders can say, “We want to know about your suffering and why you hate us. We may have said something or done something that gave you the impression that we wanted to destroy you. But that is not the case. We are confused, and that is why we want you to help us understand why you have done such a thing to us.”

We call this loving or gentle speech. If we are honest and sincere, they will tell us how they feel. Then we will recognize the wrong perceptions they have about themselves and about us. We can try to help them to remove their wrong perceptions. All these acts of terrorism and violence come from wrong perceptions. Wrong perceptions are the ground for anger, violence and hate. You cannot remove wrong perceptions with a gun.

When we listen deeply to another person, we not only recognize their wrong perceptions, but we also identify our own wrong perceptions about ourselves and about the other person. That is why mindful dialogue and mindful communication is crucial to removing anger and violence.

It is my deepest hope that our political leaders can make use of such instruments to bring peace to the world. I believe that using force and violence can only make the situation worse. Since September 11th, America has not been able to decrease the level of hate and violence on the part of the terrorists. In fact, the level of hate and violence has increased. It is time for us to go back to the situation, to look deeply and to find another less costly way to bring peace to us and to them. Violence cannot remove violence—everyone knows that. Only with the practice of deep listening and gentle communication can we help remove wrong perceptions that are at the foundation of violence.

America has a lot of difficulty in Iraq. I think that America is caught in Iraq in the same way that America was caught in Vietnam. We have the idea that we have to go and destroy the enemy. That idea will never give us a chance to do the right thing to end violence. During the Vietnam War, America thought that it had to go to North Vietnam to bomb. The more America bombed, the more communists they created. I am afraid that the same thing is happening in Iraq. I think that it is very difficult for America to withdraw now from Iraq. Even if they want to leave, it is very difficult.

The only way for America to free itself from this situation is to help build the United Nations into a real body of peace so that the United Nations will take over the problem of Iraq and of the Middle East. America is powerful enough to make this happen. America should allow other nations to contribute positively to building the United Nations into a true organization for peace with enough authority to do its job. To me, that is the only way out of our current situation.

We have to wake up to the fact that everything is connected to everything else. Our safety and wellbeing cannot be individual matters anymore. If they are not safe, there is no way that we can be safe. Taking care of other people’s safety is taking care of our own safety. To take care of their well-being is to take care of our own well-being. It is the mind of discrimination and separation that is at the foundation of all violence and hate.

My right hand has written all the poems that I have composed. My left hand has not written a single poem. But my right hand does not think, “Left Hand, you are good for nothing.” My right hand does not have a superiority complex. That is why it is very happy. My left hand does not have any complex at all. In my two hands there is the kind of wisdom called the wisdom of nondiscrimination. One day I was hammering a nail and my right hand was not very accurate and instead of pounding on the nail it pounded on my finger. It put the hammer down and took care of the left hand in a very tender way, as if it were taking care of itself. It did not say, “Left Hand, you have to remember that I have taken good care of you and you have to pay me back in the future.” There was no such thinking. And my left hand did not say, “Right Hand, you have done me a lot of harm—give me that hammer, I want justice.” My two hands know that they are members of one body; they are in each other.

I think that if Israelis and Palestinians knew that they were brothers and sisters—that they are like my two hands—they would not try to punish each other anymore. The world community has not helped them to see that. If Israelis and Palestinians—and Muslims and Hindus—knew that discrimination was at the base of our suffering, they would know how to touch the seed of nondiscrimination in themselves. That kind of awakening—that kind of deep understanding—brings about reconciliation and well-being.

I believe that in America there are many people who are awakened to the fact that violence cannot remove violence. They realize there is no way to peace: peace itself is the way. Those people must come together and voice their concern strongly and offer their collective wisdom to the nation so the nation can get out of this current situation. Every one of us has the duty to bring together that collective insight. With that insight, compassion will make us strong and courageous enough to bring about a solution for the world.

Every time we breathe in, go home to ourselves and bring the element of harmony and peace into ourselves, that is an act of peace. Every time we know how to look at another living being and recognize the suffering in him that has made him speak or act like that, we are able to see that he is the victim of his own suffering. When that understanding is in us, we can look at this other person with the eyes of understanding and compassion. When we can look with the eyes of compassion, we don’t suffer and we don’t make the other person suffer. These are the actions of peace that can be shared with other people.

At Plum Village, there are several hundred people living together like a family in a very simple way. At Plum Village, we have had the opportunity to practice together as a community. We are able to build up brotherhood and sisterhood. Although we live simply, we have a lot of joy because of the amount of understanding and compassion that we can generate. We are able to go to many countries to offer mindfulness retreats so that people may have a chance to heal, transform and to reconcile. Healing, transformation and reconciliation always happen during our retreats. That can be very nourishing.

We have invited Israelis and Palestinians to Plum Village to practice with us. When they come they bring anger, suspicion, fear and hate. But after a week or two of the practices of mindful walking, mindful breathing, mindful eating and mindful sitting, they are able to recognize their pain, embrace it and find relief. When they are initiated to the practice of deep listening, they are able to listen to others and realize that people from the other groups suffer as they do. When you know that they also suffer from violence, from hate, from fear and despair, you begin to look at them with the eyes of compassion. At that moment you suffer less and you make them suffer less. Communication becomes possible with the use of loving speech and deep listening.

The Israelis and Palestinians always come together as a group at the end of their stay in Plum Village. They always report the success of their practice. They always go back to the Middle East intending to continue the practice and invite others to join them, so that those others might suffer less and help others to suffer less too.

I believe that if this practice could be done on the national level, it would bring about the same kind of effect. Unfortunately, our political leaders have not been trained in these practices of mindful breathing, mindful walking and embracing pain and sorrow to transform their suffering. They have been trained only in political science.

So I think we should all bring a spiritual dimension into our daily lives. We should be awakened to the fact that happiness cannot be found in the direction of power, fame, wealth and sex. If we look deeply around us, we see many people with plenty of these things, but they suffer very deeply. When you have understanding and compassion in you, you don’t suffer. You can relate very well to other people around you and to other living beings also. That is why a collective awakening about that reality is crucial.

One of the concrete things that Congress could do is to look deeply into the matter of consumption. We think that happiness is possible when we have the power to consume, but by consuming we bring into us a lot of toxins and poisons. The way we eat, the way we watch television and the way we entertain ourselves brings us a lot of destruction. Because we consume so much, the environment suffers. Learning to consume only the things that can bring peace and health into our body and into our consciousness is a very important practice. Mindful consumption is the practice that can bring us out of much of our unhappiness.

By consuming unmindfully, we continue to bring the elements of craving, fear and violence into ourselves. There is so much suffering in people. They consume because they do not know how to handle their suffering. Something should be done to help people go home to themselves and take care of their suffering. Congress could find ways to encourage people to consume mindfully and produce mindfully, instead of creating products that can bring toxins and craving into the hearts and bodies of people. Producing with responsibility should be our practice.

My strongest desire is that the members of Congress will have time to look into these matters and look deeply into the roots of their own suffering, the suffering of this nation, and the suffering around the world. This suffering does not have to continue. We already have the compassion and understanding necessary to heal the world. ©

Found in Shambhala Sun.
Thich Nhat Hanh is a Zen teacher, poet and leader of the engaged Buddhist movement. A well-known antiwar activist in his native Vietnam, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King, Jr. He is the author of more than forty books.

shall there be no end to our madness!!!!

2008-05-15T12:37:00.000-07:00

Obama Attack Ad:

"I guess when you don't have any actual arguments for why you should be in charge, you rely on symbolism instead... Here's my solution. Obama changes his name to Barack Flag Pin Obama. He automatically convinces everyone of his patriotism, and eliminates the most problematic part of his name. From then on, whenever someone says, 'Why don't you wear a flag pin?' Obama can respond, 'I am Flag Pin!'" - Jonathan Stein

video__house of many stories youth centre

2008-05-09T16:18:00.002-07:00

Below is the video that my lovely wife Cara made after our trip to Malawi in 2007 (not bad for an amateur who just learned iMovie, huh?). It gives a pretty good look at what goes on at Bola Moyo's "House of Many Stories" Youth Centre. Check it out then visit our website and blog.

prison blues

2008-05-08T22:34:00.000-07:00

Thank goodness for Oregon's prisoners - cheap labor!!!
www.prisonblues.com

This is an excerpt from Rob McCulloch's review of Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money From Mass Incarceration by Tara Harivel and Paul Wright:

"Ostensibly, prison work can serve a range of positive goals: affording prisoners some form of income, keeping parts of a volatile population busy in an otherwise idle environment, providing additional means of monitoring and social control, and gaining skills that may help with the transition to mainstream society upon release. These goals, however, are often secondary to the economic value of what essentially represents a slave labor pool.

While revenues from prison labor serve somewhat to offset incarceration costs borne by the state, the bounty inevitably is offered to a greater corporate cause. All 50 states operate some sort of prison industry, working in lockstep to provide prison labor to prominent companies including Dell, Motorola, IBM, Texas Instruments, Honeywell, Microsoft, Chevron, Boeing, Victoria’s Secret, Nintendo, Starbucks and the Parke-Davis and Upjohn pharmaceutical companies. While industrial production is a common application of labor, information and service sector jobs are also increasingly performed by prison workers, including call center operations and data entry. The prison-industrial complex also takes on a global face: Honda employs prisoners in Ohio at $2 an hour to manufacture the same parts once made by union workers at $20 an hour.

An even darker aspect of prison production is its entanglement in the military-industrial complex, in particular the role of Federal Prison Industries, a semi-public, forprofit business operated by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, as highlighted in the essay by Ian Urbana, “Prison Labor Fuels American War Machine.” As the federal government’s 39th-largest private contractor, FPI’s 21,000- strong prisoner work force takes part in manifold aspects of war production, including weapons manufacture, armor, apparel and transportation and communications equipment."

wave of the future?

2008-05-08T21:41:00.000-07:00

Remember those PCs that were big in the Victorian era? Well, they're making a comeback...

br. eduard-the-agitator-loring__i can't stand to see a fellow lying on the ground

2008-05-02T20:42:00.000-07:00

A cold coming we had of it, Murphy and I. She was still shrunken by the war in her beat-down body, the fight for life against the omnivorous hungry cancer cells working to eat my baby alive. We were driving in a driving wind, up and down the Tennessee mountains where Grant rode hard to set us free.

“Sweetheart,” she twinkled, “I am exhausted. Let’s stop and get a room.”

Motor Inns of America. Wind blew her right up the metal stairs like she was a boy’s kite in the later month of March. I helped her into the bed. Covered her with the extra blankets. She coughed the fungal pneumonia cough which haunts me, frighteningly, every time I hear a wheeze.

I turned, out the door bounded I, to bring up the many articles in the car. We are not light travelers. We tote lots of baggage to deal with all the time. Even take meds to help me along with it.

Just as I began my second load, the heavy one, a broken-down car, mountain
mamma style parked next to our Volvo. Out leaped six children like locusts trying to escape the hungry hand of John the Baptist, a mother and a dad. Not the Joads, but their cousins for sure. The mother had a slight line of tobacco juice in the left corner of her stained mouth. She carried #6 up those metal stairs. Father was in overalls and looked like Chuck Harris with a hat on.

Well, I decided to clown. I took my heavy load into their motel room with them. Already over the brim like a cup from the 23rd Psalm, the room was wild with children and tired parents.

“Excuse me, please,” interrupted I full of juice like a plum in August. “I just saw you coming in here and I have no place to sleep. May I sleep in here with you?”

Father surveyed the room, hesitated, said, “Yes. Of course you can.”

I was embarrassed, shamed, wanting to flee. “No, no, no, I am just joking,” I choked. “I have a room a couple of doors down, and I saw all of you coming into this room, and . . . well, er, excuse me please.”

The Father shifted the sweat-stained hat, looked at me like a friend and told me who he is. “I can’t stand to see a fellow lying on the ground.”

found in Hospitality, newsletter of the Open Door Community
Brother Eduard-the-Agitator Loring is a Partner and co-founder of the Open Door Community.

as true as it ever was...

2008-05-02T20:04:00.000-07:00

“What the world expects of Christians
is to get out of their abstractions and stand
face to face with the bloody mess that is our
history today. Christians must speak out and
utter their condemnation in such a way that
never a doubt, never a single doubt, can arise
in the heart of even the simplest person.”

Albert Camus

bringing it home (learning how to practice justice & hospitality in portland): part 1__05/02/08

2008-05-02T13:11:00.000-07:00

Over the last month, I've been reading a book entitled A Work of Hospitality. It is a compilation of essays and articles from the newsletter of the same name put out by the Atlanta-based Open Door Community. Briefly, the Open Door Community began as the efforts of two couples (one of them Presbyterian Pastor, Ed Loring and his wife, Murphy Davis) who installed 20 beds in the fellowship hall of their small Presbyterian Church and opened their doors to their homeless neighbors. They were responding to Jesus' challenge/mandate to his followers, found in Matthew 25, to feed the hungry, clothe the poor, and visit the prisoners. Currently this community, based on the model of The Catholic Worker's 'Houses of Hospitality', resides in an inner-city, 60-unit apartment building that is a mix of those needing temporary shelter and those desiring to live in intentional community (there is much overlap). Each day these people provide meals, showers, a bathroom, clothing, etc. to men and women the rest of Atlanta has forgotten. They also visit and build close relationships with many of the inmates of the nearby prisons, especially those on death row. The Open Door Community is well-known throughout Atlanta and the US for being vocal and active in their advocacy efforts regarding the issues of housing and the death penalty, among others (in fact, Ed's nickname is 'the Agitator' and perching on a toilet strategically placed in front of Atlanta's City Hall, preaching, Bible in hand, on the need for 24-hr public restrooms is not an activity foreign to him).

Reading this book has not only challenged and inspired me but has also taught me a lot about the issue of homelessness. I have begun to learn and be aware of how the situation for the homeless of Atlanta is intertwined with the city's policies, its economic and business environment, racism, classism, agism, etc. As a result, I've become more curious and compelled to learn about my own, supposedly progressive, well-planned, very white, relatively-wealthy, ever-growing, and ever-gentrifying city of Portland. I realize it is important for me, as both a citizen of this city that I love and a follower of Jesus and 'the way' to know, discern, and ultimately weigh-in on, the state of my community as it relates to the poor, the disabled, the homeless, the prisoner, and those otherwise not in the majority or in positions of power.

As I begin this active learning process, I want to utilize this blog as a way of documenting and remembering the many steps along the way.

So first off, I'll talk about yesterday:

Yesterday, May 1, I took the day off of work and walked downtown. There were three separate events in which I wanted to participate, all related to issues of housing and homelessness. The first was a mayoral debate with that specific focus. The second was a demonstration put on by Sisters of the Road to bring attention to the 1600+ men, women, and children who each night sleep out on the streets of Portland after the shelters have reached capacity (this is an extremely conservative estimate, they say). The third event was a May Day Fair, sponsored by Tri-Met, celebrating Portland's 'Old Town' Neighborhood. Sisters of the Road and many other organizations, churches, and shelters serving the homeless in Portland are based in Old Town and were dispersing information at their respective booths.

The mayoral debate was - I think a majority of those present would agree - a joke. In my humble opinion, Portland's upcoming mayoral election is a situation of Bad vs. Worse. Only two of the thirteen candidates have any chance of winning. One, Sho Dozono, is a rich businessman who seemingly can't wait to chop our city government into bite-size morsels in order to feed it to the Portland Development Commission, which is to say Portland's largest businesses, which is to say his own businesses. It sounds as if he also wouldn't mind if, in place of the planned day-access center to serve the homeless in Old Town, we instead put a Wal-Mart (I wonder how the million-dollar-condo dwellers would react to that). The other, Sam Adams, is an experienced city commissioner and self-proclaimed hardcore liberal who, sadly, seems to care more about his image, his pet projects, and his liberal ideologies than the people they are meant to serve. These are, of course, merely the impressions I've received from the debate and the literature I've read so far. If I sound harsh, it's because I came away from the experience extremely disappointed by their answers and their views on a subject I'm beginning to see as central to the health and moral state of our community.

The rest of the day was a bit more hopeful. I have great respect and admiration for the work of Sisters of the Road. Like the Open Door Community in Atlanta, they are an organization both serving and advocating for the homeless, based on the ideals of the Catholic Worker. I purchased a book they recently published entitled Voices from the Street. It is the result of almost 700 one-to-one interviews conducted by Sisters with Portland's homeless community. I'm looking forward to spending some time with this book and its contributors and allowing them to work on me.

Finally, I became aware yesterday of another action currently taking place. Unfortunately but not surprisingly, I had not heard about this through any of our various media sources (except, I found out later, the Portland Mercury which usually can't be counted on for anything substantive). I had to (almost literally) stumble upon it. Since last Friday, there have been a number of people camping in front of City Hall. I mentioned above that there are 1600+ people who are forced to sleep on the streets at night after the shelters are full. At the same time, however, Portland has two ordinances - the sit-lie and the anti-camping ordinances - that discriminate against and ultimately criminalize those in desperate situations. The city frequently sends the police as well as private security firms that contract with the city on 'sweeps' meant to round them up (the consequences for breaking these laws are a fine or jail which, of course, means that tax-dollars are then spent on booking these folks). On Friday, however, during one of these sweeps, a group of nine within the homeless community decided to protest and set up camp at City Hall. What's great about this is that immediately, because it was a legitimate protest, it was protected by the first amendment. They were legal and, more importantly, unmoveable. The group has since been joined by others including the 'housed' and has grown from nine to over thirty. They have even been joined and supported by two of the candidates for city council, Jim Middaugh and Jeff Bissonette (Vote for them!). The protesters will be there, they've said, as long as it takes to get the laws changed. Here is an open letter from Sisters of the Road to the city of Portland regarding this action.

I will be going out there tonight myself and, I imagine, other nights too. If there are any other Portlanders reading this who want to join me, you're more than welcome!

Ok, this is officially too long. I'm going now.

dpattison

jeffrey kaplan__the gospel of consumption

2008-05-02T10:16:00.000-07:00

PRIVATE CARS WERE RELATIVELY SCARCE in 1919 and horse-drawn conveyances were still common. In residential districts, electric streetlights had not yet replaced many of the old gaslights. And within the home, electricity remained largely a luxury item for the wealthy.

Just ten years later things looked very different. Cars dominated the streets and most urban homes had electric lights, electric flat irons, and vacuum cleaners. In upper-middle-class houses, washing machines, refrigerators, toasters, curling irons, percolators, heating pads, and popcorn poppers were becoming commonplace. And although the first commercial radio station didn’t begin broadcasting until 1920, the American public, with an adult population of about 122 million people, bought 4,438,000 radios in the year 1929 alone.

But despite the apparent tidal wave of new consumer goods and what appeared to be a healthy appetite for their consumption among the well-to-do, industrialists were worried. They feared that the frugal habits maintained by most American families would be difficult to break. Perhaps even more threatening was the fact that the industrial capacity for turning out goods seemed to be increasing at a pace greater than people’s sense that they needed them.

It was this latter concern that led Charles Kettering, director of General Motors Research, to write a 1929 magazine article called “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied.” He wasn’t suggesting that manufacturers produce shoddy products. Along with many of his corporate cohorts, he was defining a strategic shift for American industry—from fulfilling basic human needs to creating new ones.

In a 1927 interview with the magazine Nation’s Business, Secretary of Labor James J. Davis provided some numbers to illustrate a problem that the New York Times called “need saturation.” Davis noted that “the textile mills of this country can produce all the cloth needed in six months’ operation each year” and that 14 percent of the American shoe factories could produce a year’s supply of footwear. The magazine went on to suggest, “It may be that the world’s needs ultimately will be produced by three days’ work a week.”

Business leaders were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a society no longer centered on the production of goods. For them, the new “labor-saving” machinery presented not a vision of liberation but a threat to their position at the center of power. John E. Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, typified their response when he declared: “I am for everything that will make work happier but against everything that will further subordinate its importance. The emphasis should be put on work—more work and better work.” “Nothing,” he claimed, “breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure.”

By the late 1920s, America’s business and political elite had found a way to defuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called “the gospel of consumption”—the notion that people could be convinced that however much they have, it isn’t enough. President Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes observed in glowing terms the results: “By advertising and other promotional devices . . . a measurable pull on production has been created which releases capital otherwise tied up.” They celebrated the conceptual breakthrough: “Economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.”

Today “work and more work” is the accepted way of doing things. If anything, improvements to the labor-saving machinery since the 1920s have intensified the trend. Machines can save labor, but only if they go idle when we possess enough of what they can produce. In other words, the machinery offers us an opportunity to work less, an opportunity that as a society we have chosen not to take. Instead, we have allowed the owners of those machines to define their purpose: not reduction of labor, but “higher productivity”—and with it the imperative to consume virtually everything that the machinery can possibly produce.

FROM THE EARLIEST DAYS of the Age of Consumerism there were critics. One of the most influential was Arthur Dahlberg, whose 1932 book Jobs, Machines, and Capitalism was well known to policymakers and elected officials in Washington. Dahlberg declared that “failure to shorten the length of the working day . . . is the primary cause of our rationing of opportunity, our excess industrial plant, our enormous wastes of competition, our high pressure advertising, [and] our economic imperialism.” Since much of what industry produced was no longer aimed at satisfying human physical needs, a four-hour workday, he claimed, was necessary to prevent society from becoming disastrously materialistic. “By not shortening the working day when all the wood is in,” he suggested, the profit motive becomes “both the creator and satisfier of spiritual needs.” For when the profit motive can turn nowhere else, “it wraps our soap in pretty boxes and tries to convince us that that is solace to our souls.”

There was, for a time, a visionary alternative. In 1930 Kellogg Company, the world’s leading producer of ready-to-eat cereal, announced that all of its nearly fifteen hundred workers would move from an eight-hour to a six-hour workday. Company president Lewis Brown and owner W. K. Kellogg noted that if the company ran “four six-hour shifts . . . instead of three eight-hour shifts, this will give work and paychecks to the heads of three hundred more families in Battle Creek.”

This was welcome news to workers at a time when the country was rapidly descending into the Great Depression. But as Benjamin Hunnicutt explains in his book Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day, Brown and Kellogg wanted to do more than save jobs. They hoped to show that the “free exchange of goods, services, and labor in the free market would not have to mean mindless consumerism or eternal exploitation of people and natural resources.” Instead “workers would be liberated by increasingly higher wages and shorter hours for the final freedom promised by the Declaration of Independence—the pursuit of happiness.”

To be sure, Kellogg did not intend to stop making a profit. But the company leaders argued that men and women would work more efficiently on shorter shifts, and with more people employed, the overall purchasing power of the community would increase, thus allowing for more purchases of goods, including cereals.

A shorter workday did entail a cut in overall pay for workers. But Kellogg raised the hourly rate to partially offset the loss and provided for production bonuses to encourage people to work hard. The company eliminated time off for lunch, assuming that workers would rather work their shorter shift and leave as soon as possible. In a “personal letter” to employees, Brown pointed to the “mental income” of “the enjoyment of the surroundings of your home, the place you work, your neighbors, the other pleasures you have [that are] harder to translate into dollars and cents.” Greater leisure, he hoped, would lead to “higher standards in school and civic . . . life” that would benefit the company by allowing it to “draw its workers from a community where good homes predominate.”

It was an attractive vision, and it worked. Not only did Kellogg prosper, but journalists from magazines such as Forbes and BusinessWeek reported that the great majority of company employees embraced the shorter workday. One reporter described “a lot of gardening and community beautification, athletics and hobbies . . . libraries well patronized and the mental background of these fortunate workers . . . becoming richer.”

A U.S. Department of Labor survey taken at the time, as well as interviews Hunnicutt conducted with former workers, confirm this picture. The government interviewers noted that “little dissatisfaction with lower earnings resulting from the decrease in hours was expressed, although in the majority of cases very real decreases had resulted.” One man spoke of “more time at home with the family.” Another remembered: “I could go home and have time to work in my garden.” A woman noted that the six-hour shift allowed her husband to “be with 4 boys at ages it was important.”

Those extra hours away from work also enabled some people to accomplish things that they might never have been able to do otherwise. Hunnicutt describes how at the end of her interview an eighty-year-old woman began talking about ping-pong. “We’d get together. We had a ping-pong table and all my relatives would come for dinner and things and we’d all play ping-pong by the hour.” Eventually she went on to win the state championship.

Many women used the extra time for housework. But even then, they often chose work that drew in the entire family, such as canning. One recalled how canning food at home became “a family project” that “we all enjoyed,” including her sons, who “opened up to talk freely.” As Hunnicutt puts it, canning became the “medium for something more important than preserving food. Stories, jokes, teasing, quarreling, practical instruction, songs, griefs, and problems were shared. The modern discipline of alienated work was left behind for an older . . . more convivial kind of working together.”

This was the stuff of a human ecology in which thousands of small, almost invisible, interactions between family members, friends, and neighbors create an intricate structure that supports social life in much the same way as topsoil supports our biological existence. When we allow either one to become impoverished, whether out of greed or intemperance, we put our long-term survival at risk.

Our modern predicament is a case in point. By 2005 per capita household spending (in inflation-adjusted dollars) was twelve times what it had been in 1929, while per capita spending for durable goods—the big stuff such as cars and appliances—was thirty-two times higher. Meanwhile, by 2000 the average married couple with children was working almost five hundred hours a year more than in 1979. And according to reports by the Federal Reserve Bank in 2004 and 2005, over 40 percent of American families spend more than they earn. The average household carries $18,654 in debt, not including home-mortgage debt, and the ratio of household debt to income is at record levels, having roughly doubled over the last two decades. We are quite literally working ourselves into a frenzy just so we can consume all that our machines can produce.

Yet we could work and spend a lot less and still live quite comfortably. By 1991 the amount of goods and services produced for each hour of labor was double what it had been in 1948. By 2006 that figure had risen another 30 percent. In other words, if as a society we made a collective decision to get by on the amount we produced and consumed seventeen years ago, we could cut back from the standard forty-hour week to 5.3 hours per day—or 2.7 hours if we were willing to return to the 1948 level. We were already the richest country on the planet in 1948 and most of the world has not yet caught up to where we were then.

Rather than realizing the enriched social life that Kellogg’s vision offered us, we have impoverished our human communities with a form of materialism that leaves us in relative isolation from family, friends, and neighbors. We simply don’t have time for them. Unlike our great-grandparents who passed the time, we spend it. An outside observer might conclude that we are in the grip of some strange curse, like a modern-day King Midas whose touch turns everything into a product built around a microchip.

Of course not everybody has been able to take part in the buying spree on equal terms. Millions of Americans work long hours at poverty wages while many others can find no work at all. However, as advertisers well know, poverty does not render one immune to the gospel of consumption.

Meanwhile, the influence of the gospel has spread far beyond the land of its origin. Most of the clothes, video players, furniture, toys, and other goods Americans buy today are made in distant countries, often by underpaid people working in sweatshop conditions. The raw material for many of those products comes from clearcutting or strip mining or other disastrous means of extraction. Here at home, business activity is centered on designing those products, financing their manufacture, marketing them—and counting the profits.

KELLOG’S VISION, DESPITE ITS POPULARITY with his employees, had little support among his fellow business leaders. But Dahlberg’s book had a major influence on Senator (and future Supreme Court justice) Hugo Black who, in 1933, introduced legislation requiring a thirty-hour workweek. Although Roosevelt at first appeared to support Black’s bill, he soon sided with the majority of businessmen who opposed it. Instead, Roosevelt went on to launch a series of policy initiatives that led to the forty-hour standard that we more or less observe today.

By the time the Black bill came before Congress, the prophets of the gospel of consumption had been developing their tactics and techniques for at least a decade. However, as the Great Depression deepened, the public mood was uncertain, at best, about the proper role of the large corporation. Labor unions were gaining in both public support and legal legitimacy, and the Roosevelt administration, under its New Deal program, was implementing government regulation of industry on an unprecedented scale. Many corporate leaders saw the New Deal as a serious threat. James A. Emery, general counsel for the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), issued a “call to arms” against the “shackles of irrational regulation” and the “back-breaking burdens of taxation,” characterizing the New Deal doctrines as “alien invaders of our national thought.”

In response, the industrial elite represented by NAM, including General Motors, the big steel companies, General Foods, DuPont, and others, decided to create their own propaganda. An internal NAM memo called for “re-selling all of the individual Joe Doakes on the advantages and benefits he enjoys under a competitive economy.” NAM launched a massive public relations campaign it called the “American Way.” As the minutes of a NAM meeting described it, the purpose of the campaign was to link “free enterprise in the public consciousness with free speech, free press and free religion as integral parts of democracy.”

Consumption was not only the linchpin of the campaign; it was also recast in political terms. A campaign booklet put out by the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency told readers that under “private capitalism, the Consumer, the Citizen is boss,” and “he doesn’t have to wait for election day to vote or for the Court to convene before handing down his verdict. The consumer ‘votes’ each time he buys one article and rejects another.”

According to Edward Bernays, one of the founders of the field of public relations and a principal architect of the American Way, the choices available in the polling booth are akin to those at the department store; both should consist of a limited set of offerings that are carefully determined by what Bernays called an “invisible government” of public-relations experts and advertisers working on behalf of business leaders. Bernays claimed that in a “democratic society” we are and should be “governed, our minds . . . molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”

NAM formed a national network of groups to ensure that the booklet from J. Walter Thompson and similar material appeared in libraries and school curricula across the country. The campaign also placed favorable articles in newspapers (often citing “independent” scholars who were paid secretly) and created popular magazines and film shorts directed to children and adults with such titles as “Building Better Americans,” “The Business of America’s People Is Selling,” and “America Marching On.”

Perhaps the biggest public relations success for the American Way campaign was the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The fair’s director of public relations called it “the greatest public relations program in industrial history,” one that would battle what he called the “New Deal propaganda.” The fair’s motto was “Building the World of Tomorrow,” and it was indeed a forum in which American corporations literally modeled the future they were determined to create. The most famous of the exhibits was General Motors’ 35,000-square-foot Futurama, where visitors toured Democracity, a metropolis of multilane highways that took its citizens from their countryside homes to their jobs in the skyscraper-packed central city.

For all of its intensity and spectacle, the campaign for the American Way did not create immediate, widespread, enthusiastic support for American corporations or the corporate vision of the future. But it did lay the ideological groundwork for changes that came after the Second World War, changes that established what is still commonly called our post-war society.

The war had put people back to work in numbers that the New Deal had never approached, and there was considerable fear that unemployment would return when the war ended. Kellogg workers had been working forty-eight-hour weeks during the war and the majority of them were ready to return to a six-hour day and thirty-hour week. Most of them were able to do so, for a while. But W. K. Kellogg and Lewis Brown had turned the company over to new managers in 1937.

The new managers saw only costs and no benefits to the six-hour day, and almost immediately after the end of the war they began a campaign to undermine shorter hours. Management offered workers a tempting set of financial incentives if they would accept an eight-hour day. Yet in a vote taken in 1946, 77 percent of the men and 87 percent of the women wanted to return to a thirty-hour week rather than a forty-hour one. In making that choice, they also chose a fairly dramatic drop in earnings from artificially high wartime levels.

The company responded with a strategy of attrition, offering special deals on a department-by-department basis where eight hours had pockets of support, typically among highly skilled male workers. In the culture of a post-war, post-Depression U.S., that strategy was largely successful. But not everyone went along. Within Kellogg there was a substantial, albeit slowly dwindling group of people Hunnicutt calls the “mavericks,” who resisted longer work hours. They clustered in a few departments that had managed to preserve the six-hour day until the company eliminated it once and for all in 1985.

The mavericks rejected the claims made by the company, the union, and many of their co-workers that the extra money they could earn on an eight-hour shift was worth it. Despite the enormous difference in societal wealth between the 1930s and the 1980s, the language the mavericks used to explain their preference for a six-hour workday was almost identical to that used by Kellogg workers fifty years earlier. One woman, worried about the long hours worked by her son, said, “He has no time to live, to visit and spend time with his family, and to do the other things he really loves to do.”

Several people commented on the link between longer work hours and consumerism. One man said, “I was getting along real good, so there was no use in me working any more time than I had to.” He added, “Everybody thought they were going to get rich when they got that eight-hour deal and it really didn’t make a big difference. . . . Some went out and bought automobiles right quick and they didn’t gain much on that because the car took the extra money they had.”

The mavericks, well aware that longer work hours meant fewer jobs, called those who wanted eight-hour shifts plus overtime “work hogs.” “Kellogg’s was laying off people,” one woman commented, “while some of the men were working really fantastic amounts of overtime—that’s just not fair.” Another quoted the historian Arnold Toynbee, who said, “We will either share the work, or take care of people who don’t have work.”

PEOPLE IN THE DEPRESSION-WRACKED 1930s, with what seems to us today to be a very low level of material goods, readily chose fewer work hours for the same reasons as some of their children and grandchildren did in the 1980s: to have more time for themselves and their families. We could, as a society, make a similar choice today.

But we cannot do it as individuals. The mavericks at Kellogg held out against company and social pressure for years, but in the end the marketplace didn’t offer them a choice to work less and consume less. The reason is simple: that choice is at odds with the foundations of the marketplace itself—at least as it is currently constructed. The men and women who masterminded the creation of the consumerist society understood that theirs was a political undertaking, and it will take a powerful political movement to change course today.

Bernays’s version of a “democratic society,” in which political decisions are marketed to consumers, has many modern proponents. Consider a comment by Andrew Card, George W. Bush’s former chief of staff. When asked why the administration waited several months before making its case for war against Iraq, Card replied, “You don’t roll out a new product in August.” And in 2004, one of the leading legal theorists in the United States, federal judge Richard Posner, declared that “representative democracy . . . involves a division between rulers and ruled,” with the former being “a governing class,” and the rest of us exercising a form of “consumer sovereignty” in the political sphere with “the power not to buy a particular product, a power to choose though not to create.”
Sometimes an even more blatant antidemocratic stance appears in the working papers of elite think tanks. One such example is the prominent Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington’s 1975 contribution to a Trilateral Commission report on “The Crisis of Democracy.” Huntington warns against an “excess of democracy,” declaring that “a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups.” Huntington notes that “marginal social groups, as in the case of the blacks, are now becoming full participants in the political system” and thus present the “danger of overloading the political system” and undermining its authority.

According to this elite view, the people are too unstable and ignorant for self-rule. “Commoners,” who are viewed as factors of production at work and as consumers at home, must adhere to their proper roles in order to maintain social stability. Posner, for example, disparaged a proposal for a national day of deliberation as “a small but not trivial reduction in the amount of productive work.” Thus he appears to be an ideological descendant of the business leader who warned that relaxing the imperative for “more work and better work” breeds “radicalism.”

As far back as 1835, Boston workingmen striking for shorter hours declared that they needed time away from work to be good citizens: “We have rights, and we have duties to perform as American citizens and members of society.” As those workers well understood, any meaningful democracy requires citizens who are empowered to create and re-create their government, rather than a mass of marginalized voters who merely choose from what is offered by an “invisible” government. Citizenship requires a commitment of time and attention, a commitment people cannot make if they are lost to themselves in an ever-accelerating cycle of work and consumption.

We can break that cycle by turning off our machines when they have created enough of what we need. Doing so will give us an opportunity to re-create the kind of healthy communities that were beginning to emerge with Kellogg’s six-hour day, communities in which human welfare is the overriding concern rather than subservience to machines and those who own them. We can create a society where people have time to play together as well as work together, time to act politically in their common interests, and time even to argue over what those common interests might be. That fertile mix of human relationships is necessary for healthy human societies, which in turn are necessary for sustaining a healthy planet.

If we want to save the Earth, we must also save ourselves from ourselves. We can start by sharing the work and the wealth. We may just find that there is plenty of both to go around

found in Orion Magazine

axel scheffler__fossil fools

2008-04-23T13:49:00.000-07:00

found in Resurgence Magazine

kevin smith__offsetting democracy

2008-04-23T13:40:00.000-07:00

Carbon trading and offsetting distracts attention from the wider, systemic changes that need to be taken to achieve a low-carbon economy. Promoting more effective approaches to climate change involves moving away from the blinkered reductionism of free-market dogma, the false economy of supposed quick fixes and the short-term self-interest of big business.

THE CONCEPT underpinning the whole system of carbon trading and offsetting is that a ton of carbon here is exactly the same as a ton of carbon there. That is, if it’s cheaper to reduce emissions in India than it is in the UK, then you can achieve the same climate benefit in a more cost-effective manner by making the reduction in India.

But the seductive simplicity of this concept is based on collapsing a whole series of important considerations, such as land rights, North–South inequalities, local struggles, corporate power and colonial history, into the single question of cost-effectiveness. The mechanisms of emissions trading and offsetting represent a reductionist approach to climate change that negates complex variables in favour of cost-effectiveness.

So when the Dutch FACE Foundation plants trees in Kibale National Park in Uganda to offset consumer flights, it ignores the fact that the land has been the site of violent evictions in the recent past and is still hotly contested by the people who once lived there. When companies buy carbon credits in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, the cheapness of the supposed emissions reductions is all that is important. But any offsetting in Southern countries to justify emissions in Northern countries completely bypasses the issue of the extreme disparity in the levels of per capita carbon consumption and assumes that emissions reductions in the South can be treated like another colonial commodity to be extracted and traded.

Even within the cost-obsessed logic of the market, the use of carbon trading and offsetting goes against common sense. The point of the system is to provide opportunities for Northern companies to delay making the costly transition to low-carbon technologies. This is indeed ‘cost effective’ in the short term, as it’s easier and cheaper to buy carbon credits than to go about the complicated business of making those changes; but studies have shown time and again that the longer we delay making those changes, the more expensive and difficult it will be, in terms of society enmeshing itself even further in the web of fossil-fuel dependency, and of even more costly adaptation to the exacerbated impacts of climate change.

There has already been some documentation of how offsetting can be used by countries to avoid taking responsibility for meeting their Kyoto targets, and how fundamentally unsustainable companies like Land Rover, BP and British Airways can use offsets in an attempt to garner undeserved environmental legitimacy. More disturbing are the new ways in which offsets are being creatively applied by the corporate sector in order to further their agenda.

THE CORROSIVE INFLUENCE of offsetting is now not even restricted to climate change and carbon emissions. Coca-Cola has been the subject of sustained campaigns by social justice groups all over the world, but its business practices in India have received particular attention. In 2003, the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment issued a report on laboratory tests that showed pesticide and insecticide levels of between eleven and seventy times the maximum set by the European Union for drinking water, in a number of soft drinks being sold by Coca-Cola in India. The US-based India Resource Center has made numerous allegations against the company, saying that it causes severe water shortages for local communities, and that its bottling facilities pollute the surrounding soil and groundwater. In March 2004, officials in Kerala, a state in Southern India, shut down one of Coca-Cola’s bottling plants over claims by local communities and activists that it had drained and polluted local water supplies.

In August 2007, while he sipped a can of Diet Coke in front of the distinctive WWF panda logo, the CEO of Coca-Cola, Neville Isdell, announced a US$20 million partnership with WWF that would aim to “replace every drop of water we use in our beverages and their production”. Aside from plans to reduce and recycle the water being used, the third component of the package was to replenish. This replenishment wouldn’t be taking place at the sites of the water depletion, but through a series of projects taking place in other parts of the world – effectively water offsets.

This US$20 million sum represents less than 1% of Coca-Cola’s enormous US$2.4 billion annual advertising budget, and is being used to counteract the negative publicity that Coca-Cola has received through its practices of water depletion and pollution in countries like India. The company has maintained a vigorous campaign of denial of responsibility for any of the devastating impacts that such communities have suffered, so by using water offsets, it can play the corporate good guy in other parts of the world without having to even acknowledge the damage it has caused elsewhere.

The potential for water offsets isn’t limited to individual acts of corporate greenwash. John Regan, a carbon-credit supplier on the Chicago Climate Exchange, sees Coca-Cola’s water offset scheme as “an encouraging sign of the nascent need for a water-credit trading scheme”. The idea is that if one company didn’t control its water pollution sufficiently, it would have to purchase credits from another company that had controlled its water pollution beyond its target.

Like carbon trading, such a scheme would provide ample opportunity for obscure accountancy procedures and the flurry of market activity to give the impression of activity and mask the fact that very little happens in reality to address the fundamental issue of environmental degradation.

MANY OTHER SCHEMES to commodify and trade away environmental problems have been proposed or are in development, including landfill trading, endangered species trading and wetlands banking. The irony is that it is the perpetual expansion of market economies that has created such pressure on natural resources and threatened all manner of ecosystems with the soaring levels of industrial pollution. Now those same market forces are being put forward as the panacea to our multiple environmental ills. This commodification agenda has little to do with public interest; it’s more about the opportunities for businesses to capitalise on the transactions of such new markets. What is claimed to be a cheaper solution for industry to meet environmental standards transforms a political and social issue into a market issue, thus offsetting democracy.

If we are to grapple properly with the issue of climate change, we need to develop and apply a systemic analysis that goes beyond the fixation with cost or even carbon dioxide, and promote synergies with other important struggles in the areas of trade, finance, human rights, biodiversity, environmental justice and democracy.

Kevin Smith is a researcher with Carbon Trade Watch, a project of the Transnational Institute. He is the author of The Carbon Neutral Myth

found in Resurgence Magazine

another malawi adoption...

2008-04-17T13:54:00.000-07:00

jericho road

2008-04-11T16:41:00.000-07:00

"A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway...."

Martin Luther King, Jr

howard zinn's animated essayempire or humanity?read by viggo mortensen

2008-04-10T16:40:00.000-07:00

Howard Zinn's newest book is in fact a graphic book (comics-style) entitled: A People's History of American Empire

jubilee act

2008-04-09T22:17:00.000-07:00

My friend, Brian Swarts, National Field Organizer for Jubilee USA, recently got to contribute to Jim Wallis' God's Politics Blog. He's a big fan of the work of Jim Wallis and Sojourners and I'm sure getting this opportunity excited him to no end. Great work, Brian!

Speaking of Jubilee, the Jubilee Act passed a voice vote yesterday in the House Financial Services Committee! It will be up for vote on the House floor as early as this next week. If you live in Oregon, you should be proud to know that all 5 of our representatives are co-sponsors for this bill and if you don't live in Oregon, you should be calling your Congresspeople and telling them to vote 'Yes' on the Jubilee Act.

For more info on Jubilee or the Jubilee Act, check out:
JubileeUSA.org
or
JubileeOregon.org

dpattison

wallace stegner__wilderness letter

2008-04-09T21:55:00.000-07:00

Los Altos, Calif.
December 3, 1960

David E. Pesonen
Wildland Research Center
Agricultural Experiment Station
243 Mulford Hall
University of California
Berkeley 4, Calif.

Dear Mr. Pesonen:

I believe that you are working on the wilderness portion of the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission's report. If I may, I should like to urge some arguments for wilderness preservation that involve recreation, as it is ordinarily conceived, hardly at all. Hunting, fishing, hiking, mountain-climbing, camping, photography, and the enjoyment of natural scenery will all, surely, figure in your report. So will the wilderness as a genetic reserve, a scientific yardstick by which we may measure the world in its natural balance against the world in its man-made imbalance. What I want to speak for is not so much the wilderness uses, valuable as those are, but the wilderness idea, which is a resource in itself. Being an intangible and spiritual resource, it will seem mystical to the practical minded--but then anything that cannot be moved by a bulldozer is likely to seem mystical to them.

I want to speak for the wilderness idea as something that has helped form our character and that has certainly shaped our history as a people. It has no more to do with recreation than churches have to do with recreation, or than the strenuousness and optimism and expansiveness of what the historians call the "American Dream" have to do with recreation. Nevertheless, since it is only in this recreation survey that the values of wilderness are being compiled, I hope you will permit me to insert this idea between the leaves, as it were, of the recreation report.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. Without any remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment. We need wilderness preserved--as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds--because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it. It is good for us when we are young, because of the incomparable sanity it can bring briefly, as vacation and rest, into our insane lives. It is important to us when we are old simply because it is there--important, that is, simply as an idea.

We are a wild species, as Darwin pointed out. Nobody ever tamed or domesticated or scientifically bred us. But for at least three millennia we have been engaged in a cumulative and ambitious race to modify and gain control of our environment, and in the process we have come close to domesticating ourselves. Not many people are likely, any more, to look upon what we call "progress" as an unmixed blessing. Just as surely as it has brought us increased comfort and more material goods, it has brought us spiritual losses, and it threatens now to become the Frankenstein that will destroy us. One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, to remain, insofar as we can, good animals. Americans still have that chance, more than many peoples; for while we were demonstrating ourselves the most efficient and ruthless environment-busters in history, and slashing and burning and cutting our way through a wilderness continent, the wilderness was working on us. It remains in us as surely as Indian names remain on the land. If the abstract dream of human liberty and human dignity became, in America, something more than an abstract dream, mark it down at least partially to the fact that we were in subdued ways subdued by what we conquered.

The Connecticut Yankee, sending likely candidates from King Arthur's unjust kingdom to his Man Factory for rehabilitation, was over-optimistic, as he later admitted. These things cannot be forced, they have to grow. To make such a man, such a democrat, such a believer in human individual dignity, as Mark Twain himself, the frontier was necessary, Hannibal and the Mississippi and Virginia City, and reaching out from those the wilderness; the wilderness as opportunity and idea, the thing that has helped to make an American different from and, until we forget it in the roar of our industrial cities, more fortunate than other men. For an American, insofar as he is new and different at all, is a civilized man who has renewed himself in the wild. The American experience has been the confrontation by old peoples and cultures of a world as new as if it had just risen from the sea. That gave us our hope and our excitement, and the hope and excitement can be passed on to newer Americans, Americans who never saw any phase of the frontier. But only so long as we keep the remainder of our wild as a reserve and a promise--a sort of wilderness bank.

As a novelist, I may perhaps be forgiven for taking literature as a reflection, indirect but profoundly true, of our national consciousness. And our literature, as perhaps you are aware, is sick, embittered, losing its mind, losing its faith. Our novelists are the declared enemies of their society. There has hardly been a serious or important novel in this century that did not repudiate in part or in whole American technological culture for its commercialism, its vulgarity, and the way in which it has dirtied a clean continent and a clean dream. I do not expect that the preservation of our remaining wilderness is going to cure this condition. But the mere example that we can as a nation apply some other criteria than commercial and exploitative considerations would be heartening to many Americans, novelists or otherwise. We need to demonstrate our acceptance of the natural world, including ourselves; we need the spiritual refreshment that being natural can produce. And one of the best places for us to get that is in the wilderness where the fun houses, the bulldozers, and the pavement of our civilization are shut out.

Sherwood Anderson, in a letter to Waldo Frank in the 1920s, said it better than I can. "Is it not likely that when the country was new and men were often alone in the fields and the forest they got a sense of bigness outside themselves that has now in some way been lost.... Mystery whispered in the grass, played in the branches of trees overhead, was caught up and blown across the American line in clouds of dust at evening on the prairies.... I am old enough to remember tales that strengthen my belief in a deep semi-religious influence that was formerly at work among our people. The flavor of it hangs over the best work of Mark Twain.... I can remember old fellows in my home town speaking feelingly of an evening spent on the big empty plains. It had taken the shrillness out of them. They had learned the trick of quiet...."

We could learn it too, even yet; even our children and grandchildren could learn it. But only if we save, for just such absolutely non-recreational, impractical, and mystical uses as this, all the wild that still remains to us.

It seems to me significant that the distinct downturn in our literature from hope to bitterness took place almost at the precise time when the frontier officially came to an end, in 1890, and when the American way of life had begun to turn strongly urban and industrial. The more urban it has become, and the more frantic with technological change, the sicker and more embittered our literature, and I believe our people, have become. For myself, I grew up on the empty plains of Saskatchewan and Montana and in the mountains of Utah, and I put a very high valuation on what those places gave me. And if I had not been able to periodically to renew myself in the mountains and deserts of western America I would be very nearly bughouse. Even when I can't get to the back country, the thought of the colored deserts of southern Utah, or the reassurance that there are still stretches of prairies where the world can be instantaneously perceived as disk and bowl, and where the little but intensely important human being is exposed to the five directions of the thirty-six winds, is a positive consolation. The idea alone can sustain me. But as the wilderness areas are progressively exploited or "improve", as the jeeps and bulldozers of uranium prospectors scar up the deserts and the roads are cut into the alpine timberlands, and as the remnants of the unspoiled and natural world are progressively eroded, every such loss is a little death in me. In us.

I am not moved by the argument that those wilderness areas which have already been exposed to grazing or mining are already deflowered, and so might as well be "harvested". For mining I cannot say much good except that its operations are generally short-lived. The extractable wealth is taken and the shafts, the tailings, and the ruins left, and in a dry country such as the American West the wounds men make in the earth do not quickly heal. Still, they are only wounds; they aren't absolutely mortal. Better a wounded wilderness than none at all. And as for grazing, if it is strictly controlled so that it does not destroy the ground cover, damage the ecology, or compete with the wildlife it is in itself nothing that need conflict with the wilderness feeling or the validity of the wilderness experience. I have known enough range cattle to recognize them as wild animals; and the people who herd them have, in the wilderness context, the dignity of rareness; they belong on the frontier, moreover, and have a look of rightness. The invasion they make on the virgin country is a sort of invasion that is as old as Neolithic man, and they can, in moderation, even emphasize a man's feeling of belonging to the natural world. Under surveillance, they can belong; under control, they need not deface or mar. I do not believe that in wilderness areas where grazing has never been permitted, it should be permitted; but I do not believe either that an otherwise untouched wilderness should be eliminated from the preservation plan because of limited existing uses such as grazing which are in consonance with the frontier condition and image.

Let me say something on the subject of the kinds of wilderness worth preserving. Most of those areas contemplated are in the national forests and in high mountain country. For all the usual recreational purposes, the alpine and the forest wildernesses are obviously the most important, both as genetic banks and as beauty spots. But for the spiritual renewal, the recognition of identity, the birth of awe, other kinds will serve every bit as well. Perhaps, because they are less friendly to life, more abstractly nonhuman, they will serve even better. On our Saskatchewan prairie, the nearest neighbor was four miles away, and at night we saw only two lights on all the dark rounding earth. The earth was full of animals--field mice, ground squirrels, weasels, ferrets, badgers, coyotes, burrowing owls, snakes. I knew them as my little brothers, as fellow creatures, and I have never been able to look upon animals in any other way since. The sky in that country came clear down to the ground on every side, and it was full of great weathers, and clouds, and winds, and hawks. I hope I learned something from looking a long way, from looking up, from being much alone. A prairie like that, one big enough to carry the eye clear to the sinking, rounding horizon, can be as lonely and grand and simple in its forms as the sea. It is as good a place as any for the wilderness experience to happen; the vanishing prairie is as worth preserving for the wilderness idea as the alpine forest.

So are great reaches of our western deserts, scarred somewhat by prospectors but otherwise open, beautiful, waiting, close to whatever God you want to see in them. Just as a sample, let me suggest the Robbers' Roost country in Wayne County, Utah, near the Capitol Reef National Monument. In that desert climate the dozer and jeep tracks will not soon melt back into the earth, but the country has a way of making the scars insignificant. It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such as wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge of taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs. Save a piece of country like that intact, and it does not matter in the slightest that only a few people every year will go into it. That is precisely its value. Roads would be a desecration, crowds would ruin it. But those who haven't the strength or youth to go into it and live can simply sit and look. They can look two hundred miles, clear into Colorado: and looking down over the cliffs and canyons of the San Rafael Swell and the Robbers' Roost they can also look as deeply into themselves as anywhere I know. And if they can't even get to the places on the Aquarius Plateau where the present roads will carry them, they can simply contemplate the idea, take pleasure in the fact that such a timeless and uncontrolled part of earth is still there.

These are some of the things wilderness can do for us. That is the reason we need to put into effect, for its preservation, some other principle that the principles of exploitation or "usefulness" or even recreation. We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

Very sincerely yours,
Wallace Stegner

Here is an introduction to the 'Wilderness Letter' written by Wallace Stegner

chris wright__from global to local

2008-04-04T13:29:00.000-07:00

Fair trade should be creating the conditions in which craftworkers across the world can meet the needs of their own communities.

EVERY DAY, container-loads of cheap consumer goods arrive at our ports from China and elsewhere. Despite the occasional whispers in the press about sweatshops and child labour, we scarcely pause in force-feeding our seemingly insatiable appetite to consume. We act as if what we buy had been made by robots, not by flesh-and-blood human beings.

Rampant consumerism is a symptom of a global economy driven by the growth imperative; it is, by definition, unsustainable. Given the many challenges facing humankind it is clear that we need to find another, sustainable way of meeting our needs, but where is it to be found?

A sustainable economy is one in which most trade is local, thereby eliminating the dreadful environmental cost of shipping stuff around the world. That change in emphasis, from global to local, would also have an impact on what is produced and how. The use of local materials and the consequent reintroduction of a craft element would result in greater variety in what is produced. In other words, sustainable means better-quality and more appropriate products. But how do we get from where we are today to where we might want to be?

A starting point is to recognize that consuming isn’t just an exchange of goods for money. It is fundamentally a human transaction between a person who has needs and one who is able to meet those needs. Because we are constantly swapping those roles—having our own needs met and meeting those of others—in theory there should be a natural balance in which winning and losing don’t feature. Looked at from this perspective, the fact that, despite the existence of a minimum wage, 95% of India’s workforce is unregulated, with employers routinely entering the legal minimum in their accounts and then paying their workers what they want or can afford, should be an abomination. So too, should the exploitation of the estimated 11 million children who are forced to work up to sixteen hours a day.

FAIR TRADE HAS always been a conscious acknowledgment of the link between us, as purchasers, and the producers: we are some way towards fully accepting our responsibility in the transaction. In that sense, when buying fairly traded craft goods, we are guaranteed ‘clean’ products: ones that are free from the taint of exploitation. In terms of providing adequate wages, reasonable working conditions and a sense of hope in the future to a very few, fair trade clearly works and requires little from us apart from a willingness to pay a few pence more for what we purchase.

But that shouldn’t be the limit of its aspirations. The potential has always been far greater: nothing less than providing the model of sustainable development that we so obviously need and that can perhaps come from no other source. At the present time, however, the Fair Trade movement is in danger of becoming an integral part of the global economy rather than offering an alternative to it.

To emphasize the point, one only has to compare the way markets operate in countries like the UK and India. In the one there is the uniformity of the corporate high street, in the other the untidy hotchpotch of local, individualized stalls; one is international in its reach, the other regional at most. Craftworkers in India are geared to supplying the latter, not the former, and in seeking to bridge that chasm we are in danger of creating the conditions in which their ways of working will become untenable. We will also be helping to turn an economy that is essentially sustainable into one that is not.

The way we buy and sell stuff has come a long way from the village or town market and the itinerant pedlar. Carefully branded chains dominate the marketplace and take pride in the fact that a customer will find the same products in any outlet between Peterhead and Penzance—or even Pisa. The products are sourced from different companies in different parts of the world, each manufacturer specializing in a few lines that can be adapted easily to the needs of different customers and dispatched around the globe. It is mass production. In our high-pressure world we need to both buy and sell quickly and the shelves are endlessly replenished with items that are identical in terms of quality, colour and price.

The exceptions to this rule are our own craftworkers and artisans. A potter or a weaver, for example, sells direct to the public, or relies on small retailers and craft markets. Rather than uniformity, they deliberately offer a range of products that both display their skill and allow for the fact that different individuals like different things. Variations in pattern, colouring, size and price are actually helpful by appealing to as wide an audience as possible. They can’t compete on price, but they can on choice and on providing each customer with the sense that they have purchased something unique. It goes without saying that our craftworkers face an uphill struggle against the momentum of corporate marketing methods.

Fair Trade organizations such as Traidcraft, Christian Aid and CAFOD import craft products, but have chosen to compete with the shopping mall rather than the craft market: select something from their catalogues and it will comply exactly with the picture in terms of size, quality and colour. That may be helpful in terms of introducing craftworkers to the realities of world markets, but producers in India are now beginning to win contracts from the high-street stores, not because what they are making is specifically fairly traded, but because they can now compete on both price and quality.

Which should be good news; but when small-scale, basically equipped workshops are struggling to produce large batches to tight deadlines and even tighter quality control, it is obvious that, sooner or later, factory-style systems of production are inevitable. With them will come all the pressures that go with a capital-driven, increasingly competitive system of production, whose sole criterion of success is ever-cheaper prices. Craftwork and sustainable development—the whole fair trade package, in fact—will be squeezed to the margins in a way that is all too evident in the mainstream, global economy. That sense of workers being in control of their destiny will have been sacrificed for the sake of ‘progress’, which means fitting in with the way we do things.

IF WE GENUINELY believe that sustainable development is about small-scale, environmentally sound businesses owned by the people who work in them and whose effort benefits their immediate community, then we urgently need to rethink how to market their wares and to create something more akin to a craft bazaar than a supermarket, where real choice rather than simply price is the governing consideration.

Although there is a contradiction inherent in the idea of supporting local markets by importing craftwork from places like India (which might be seen as competing directly with our own craftworkers), the simple fact is that we need to re-learn from them about small-scale, sustainable business. In time, this model of sustainable development could be firmly enough rooted throughout the world for the truly local emphasis to make irrelevant such long-distance trade – which, ultimately, is polluting and unsustainable. Supporting craftwork wherever it is made and finding sustainable ways of marketing it should be the challenge the Fair Trade movement is addressing.

The nurturing of locally produced, locally consumed articles should be the cornerstone of sustainable development, allowing a fair and equitable exchange between people. With that in place, only those things that couldn’t be produced locally would have to be brought in and the whole glittering panoply of the global economy would begin to whither away.

That is a vision of the future we should be holding onto. Any drift towards factory systems for fair trade goods must be a step in the wrong direction. We are talking about a movement that should be confronting the power of the corporations to impose their priorities, not trying to emulate them. Fair Trade should be creating the conditions in which craftworkers across the world can meet the needs of their own communities with quality, individual products that people really want.

In years to come the Fair Trade movement will hopefully credited with having made people think about what they buy and take responsibility for the conditions in which an item was produced, thereby loosening a few bricks at the base of the ever-growing edifice that is the global economy. But unless it can find a way to challenge the prevailing wisdom about the benefits of mass production and high-street uniformity, the ultimate judgment may be that it was part of the problem, not part of the solution.

found in Resurgence Magazine

j.d. salinger__the catcher in the rye

2008-04-03T15:49:00.000-07:00

"You know what I'd like to be?" I said. "You know what I'd like to be? I mean if I had my goddam choice?"

"What? Stop swearing."

"You know that song 'If a body catch a body comin' through the rye'? I'd like--"

"It's 'If a body meet a body coming through the rye'!" old Phoebe said. "It's a poem. By Robert Burns."

"I know it's a poem by Robert Burns."

She was right, though. It is "If a body meet a body coming through the rye." I didn't know it then, though.

"I thought it was 'If a body catch a body,'" I said. "Anyway, I keep picturing all these kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around--nobody big, I mean--except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff--I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be a catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."

silly rabbits, coffee is for kids

2008-04-03T08:24:00.000-07:00

My good friend Desiree pointed me to this article. I'm not sure why, exactly...

One may assume that, by posting this, I am attempting to justify the caffeine addiction (or fat-rich diet) of a certain 'friend of mine' and the large carbon footprint which is its inevitable result. Think what you will...

I just hope these rabbits, for their sake, were served Direct-Trade, French-Pressed, Stumptown coffee or some equivalent (you know, as opposed to 7-ll's puddle water or Starbucks' liquid charcoal).

Daily Caffeine 'Protects Brain'
from BBC NEWS

Coffee may cut the risk of dementia by blocking the damage cholesterol can inflict on the body, research suggests.

The drink has already been linked to a lower risk of Alzheimer's Disease, and a study by a US team for the Journal of Neuroinflammation may explain why.

A vital barrier between the brain and the main blood supply of rabbits fed a fat-rich diet was protected in those given a caffeine supplement.

UK experts said it was the "best evidence yet" of coffee's benefits.

The "blood brain barrier" is a filter which protects the central nervous system from potentially harmful chemicals carried around in the rest of the bloodstream.

Other studies have shown that high levels of cholesterol in the blood can make this barrier "leaky".

Alzheimer's researchers suggest this makes the brain vulnerable to damage which can trigger or contribute to the condition.

The University of North Dakota study used the equivalent to just one daily cup of coffee in their experiments on rabbits.

After 12 weeks of a high-cholesterol diet, the blood brain barrier in those given caffeine was far more intact than in those given no caffeine.

'Safe drug'

"Caffeine appears to block several of the disruptive effects of cholesterol that make the blood-brain barrier leaky," said Dr Jonathan Geiger, who led the study.

"High levels of cholesterol are a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, perhaps by compromising the protective nature of the blood brain barrier.

"Caffeine is a safe and readily available drug and its ability to stabilise the blood brain barrier means it could have an important part to play in therapies against neurological disorders."

A spokesman for the Alzheimer's Disease Society said that the study shed "important light" on why previous research had showed benefits for drinking coffee.

"This is the best evidence yet that caffeine equivalent to one cup of coffee a day can help protect the brain against cholesterol.

"In addition to its effect on the vascular system, elevated cholesterol levels also cause problems with the blood brain barrier.

"This barrier, which protects the brain from toxins and infections, is less efficient prior to brain damage caused by Alzheimer's disease or strokes."

She called for more research into whether the same effect could be seen in humans.

the gate of heaven

2008-03-31T09:45:00.001-07:00

Speaking of Earth Spirituality...this is great!

'Surely This is the Gate of Heaven'
by Ched Myers

"...ancient traditions portray a God who not only can, but should be encountered through the Creation. Abraham plants a tree and calls on the name of YHWH (Gen 21:33). Torah enjoins the community to celebrate the harvest by dancing while waving branches from all the local flora (Lev 23:40). Jacob has a vision of heaven while sleeping in the open desert, his head on a dreaming stone. And when he awakens from this extraordinary "nature epiphany," Jacob confesses that the wilderness is YHWH's abode:

Surely YHWH was in this place--and I
did not know it! …How awesome is
this place! This is none other than
the House of God, the gate of
heaven! (Gen 28:16-17)"

a tale of two stories

2008-03-30T20:27:00.000-07:00

Today I read an article in Resurgence Magazine entitled From Empire to Earth Community by David C. Korten. It sums up, in a brief and very general way, a lot of what I've been learning and thinking about over the last year.

Basically, the article, and the book from which it is based, is about a choice - one we are all called to make - between Empire (represented by institutions and relationships built upon domination, centralized wealth and power, and ultimately, a general lack of creativity) and Earth Community (one of partnership, creative co-operation, and respect for our fellow humans and the natural world).

I specifically connected with his analysis of the way in which Empire has gained and retained control in our own time and for the last 5,000 years. He says, "we humans live by stories... the foundation of Empire’s power does not lie in its instruments of physical violence. It lies in Empire’s ability to control the stories by which we define ourselves and our possibilities." He goes on to explain how this struggle defines our own political culture today and how a "far-right alliance of elitist corporate plutocrats and religious theocrats has gained control of much of the political discourse in the US by controlling the stories by which the prevailing culture defines the pathway to prosperity, security and meaning... the far right’s favoured versions of these stories affirm the dominator relations of Empire." Therefore, Korten claims, it is not enough to merely "debate the details of tax and education policies, budgets, war and trade agreements in search of a positive political agenda. To change our human future, we must change our defining stories. We must infuse mainstream culture with stories of Earth Community."

The question for us then is this: What story will we claim for ourselves, both as individuals and communities? In what story (or stories) will we choose to take part?

The story I want the courage to choose is one that neither begins nor ends with me. It is not a new but an ancient story. It is a story of wisdom and truth spoken in love and without shame; it is a story of compassion and forgiveness; it is a story of wholeness and re-membering; it is a story of art and beauty and simplicity. It is a story of justice for all and "enough for everyone." The story that I want to choose is the story chosen by Buddha, Abraham and Moses, John the Baptizer and Jesus and Chief Joseph, Bonhoeffer and Wiesel, King and Ghandi and Merton and Berrigan and Thich Nhat Hanh, T.S. Eliot and Toni Morrison and Wendell Berry and...I think you get the picture. Ultimately, the story I desire for myself is one that expresses God to the world around me. [A related aside: I recently heard a definition of "evangelism" that I feel has some actual meaning and relevancy: it is one beggar letting another beggar know where to find bread]

I'm beginning to realize, however, that I cannot at the same time serve two Stories, so to speak. I desire to be "born again" into this new old story of Earth Community or "Kin-dom" Living or Wilderness Wisdom (label it what you will) but everyday in some way (be it large or small), I answer the call, and thus validate, the siren-story of Empire.

I also realize that, whether it be the expression of God to the world or the resistance of Empire ways of thinking and living, I cannot go it alone and it was never meant to be done alone. It can only be accomplished within the context of a community of people working with common values toward a common goal or, in other words, a community committed to living into a story, both ancient and revolutionary, that claims that fragmentation, domination, servitude, poverty and violence are never inevitable and that rebirth and redemption are always possible.

dpattison

they grow up so fast!

2008-03-29T10:22:00.000-07:00

Winter's over and our silkies are finally laying their first eggs!
Their's are the small ones. Aren't they just so cute!
If they had behinds, you'd just want to pinch them.

dpattison

bola moyo

2008-03-29T08:31:00.000-07:00

Some of you have asked about our last trip to Malawi and want to see some of the pictures from that trip. This will take you to Bola Moyo's blog where I've recently put up a whole bunch of the latest photos. If you want to find more out about our non-profit, Bola Moyo, go here. Our site is due for some updates and these will happen soon, I promise.

dpattison

sonia sanchez__reflections after the june 12th march for disarmament

2008-03-27T12:38:00.000-07:00

I have come to you tonite out of the depths
of slavery
from white hands peeling black skins over
america;
I have come out to you from the lynching years,
the exploitation of black men and women by
a country that allowed the swinging of
strange fruits from southern trees;
I have to come to you tonite thru the
delaney years, the du bois years, the
b.t. washington years, the robeson
years, the garvey years, the
depression years, the you can't eat
or sit or live or just die here years,
the civil rights years, the black power
years, the black nationalist years, the
affirmative action years, the liberal
years, the neo-conservative years;
I have come to say that those years
were not in vain, the ghosts of our
ancestors searching this american dust for
rest were not in vain, black women
walking their lives in clots were not
in vain, the years walked
sideways in a forsaken land were not
in vain;
I have come to you tonite as an equal,
as a comrade, as a black woman
walking down a corridor of tears,
looking neither to the left or the right,
pulling my history with bruised
heels,
beckoning to the illusion of america
daring you to look me in the eyes to
see these faces, the exploitation of a
people because of a skin pigmentation;
I have come to you tonite because no people
have been asked to be modern day people
with the history of slavery, and still
we walk, and still we talk, and
still we plan, and still we hope and
still we sing;
I have come to you tonite because there are
inhumanitarians in the world. they are not
new, they are old. they go back into history.
they were called explorers, soldiers, mercenaries,
imperialists, missionaries, adventurers,
but they looked at the world for what
it would give up to them and they violated
the land and the people, they looked
at the land and sectioned it up for
private ownership, they looked at the
people and decided how to manipulate
them thru fear and ignorance, they looked
at the gold and began to hoard and
worship it;
I have come to you because it is time
for us all to purge capitalism from
our dreams, to purge materialism
from our eyes, from the planet earth
to deliver the earth again into the hands
of the humanitarians;
I have come to you tonite not just for the stoppage
of nuclear proliferation, nuclear
plants, nuclear bombs, nuclear
waste, but to stop the proliferation
of nuclear minds, of nuclear generals,
of nuclear presidents, of nuclear scientists,
who spread human and nuclear waste
over the world;
I come to you because the world needs to be
saved for the future generations who must
return the earth to peace, who will not
be startled by a man's/woman's skin color;
I come to you because the world needs sanity
now, needs men and women who will
not work to produce nuclear weapons,
who will give up their need for excess
wealth and learn how to share the
world's resources, who will never
again as scientists invent again just
for the sake of inventing;
I come to you because we need to turn our
eyes to the beauty of this planet, to the
bright green laughter of trees, to the beautiful
human animals waiting to smile their unprostituted smiles;
I have come to you to talk about our inexperience
at living as human beings, thru death marches and camps,
thru middle passages and slavery
and thundering countries raining hungry faces;
I am here to move against
leaving our shadows implanted on the
earth while our bodies disintegrate in
nuclear lightning;
I am here between the voices of our ancestors
and the noise of the planet,
between the surprise of death and life;
I am here because I shall not give the
earth up to non-dreamers and earth molesters;
I am here to say to you:
my body is full of veins
like the bombs waiting to burst
with blood.
we must learn to suckle life not
bombs and rhetoric
rising up in redwhiteandblue patriotism;
I am here. and my breath/our breaths
must thunder across this land
arousing new breaths. new life.
new people, who will live in peace
and honor.

allen salkin__leaving behind the trucker hat

2008-03-25T15:11:00.000-07:00

THEIR Carhartts are no longer ironic. Now they have real dirt on them.

Until three years ago, Benjamin Shute was living in Williamsburg, where he kept Brooklyn Lager in his refrigerator and played darts in a league.

Raised on the Upper East Side by a father who is a foundation executive and a mother who writes about criminal justice, Mr. Shute graduated from Amherst and worked for an antihunger charity. But something nagged at him. To learn about food production, he had volunteered at a farm in Massachusetts. He liked the dirt, the work and the coaxing of land long fallow into producing eggplant and garlic.

He tried growing strawberries on his roof in Brooklyn, but it didn’t scratch his growing itch.

And so last week, Mr. Shute could be found here, elbow-deep in wet compost two hours north of New York City, filling greenhouse trays for onion seeds. Along with a partner, Miriam Latzer, he runs Hearty Roots, a 25-acre organic farm.

“I never thought I wanted to farm,” Mr. Shute said. “But it feels like an honest living.”

His partner, Ms. Latzer (the two are not a couple) is 33 and a former urban planner. Her parents, a professor and a librarian, “think its crazy that I’m a farmer,” she said. “They wonder what planet I came from.”

This one. Steeped in years of talk around college campuses and in stylish urban enclaves about the evils of factory farms (see the E. coli spinach outbreaks), the perils of relying on petroleum to deliver food over long distances (see global warming) and the beauty of greenmarkets (see the four-times-weekly locavore cornucopia in Union Square), some young urbanites are starting to put their muscles where their pro-environment, antiglobalization mouths are. They are creating small-scale farms near urban areas hungry for quality produce and willing to pay a premium.

“Young farmers are an emerging social movement,” said Severine von Tscharner Fleming, 26, who is making a documentary called “The Greenhorns” about the trend.

While this is hardly the first time that idealistic young people wanted to get back to the garden, the current crop have advantages over their forebears from the 1960s and 70s, many of whom, inspired by the Whole Earth Catalog or Wendell Berry’s books about agrarian values, headed to the country, only to find it impossible to make a living.

But the growing market for organic and locally grown produce is making it possible for well-run small farms to thrive, said Ken Meter, 58, who studies the economics of food as an analyst at the Crossroads Resource Center, a nonprofit advocacy group for local food initiatives that is based in Minnesota.

“A lot of people in our 20s went to the land and wanted to farm and had a lot of enthusiasm, but not many resources,” he said. “It has only been the last five years where the payment from working your fingers to the bone and supplying urban markets with high-quality produce has been enough where you could imagine making a living.”

Whether young, first-generation farmers constitute a flood or trickle is difficult to say. But many long-time observers of small farms say they have noticed an increase in recent years among college graduates who want to farm, even if they intern at established farms or rent tiny parcels.

“We’ve had a big spike in the last decade and especially in the last few years of people who are new to farming applying to sell at Greenmarket,” said Gabrielle Langholtz, manager of special projects for the Manhattan-based Greenmarket, which runs 46 farmers’ markets around the city. “Maybe they went to liberal arts schools and read Michael Pollan,” she said, referring to the author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals,” (Penguin Press HC, 2006), “and shopped at farmers markets and said, ‘I’m going to buy a farm upstate and sell to Greenmarket.’ ” The typical size of farms that sell at Greenmarket is 50 to 100 acres, she said.

Nationally, there were 8,493 certified organic farms in 2005, using just over 4 million acres of land, more than double the acreage in 2000, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. (The federal government introduced a uniform standard for organic certification in 2002.) New York had more than twice as many certified organic farms, 735, in 2007 as it did in 2004, according to the state Department of Agriculture and Markets. The agency estimates there are three to five times that many organic farms in New York which, like Hearty Roots, choose not to spend the $500 to $1,000 it costs to become certified.

Put that together with research indicating organic farmers are on average 46 years old, compared with an average of 52 for all farmers, and the numbers seem to reflect what experts say they see in the field: the demand from consumers for food produced on a small scale, bought directly from farmers, has allowed a younger generation to enter farming, even as global markets drive many conventional farmers off the land.

“It has opened up a better opportunity than we’ve had in a while for entry-level farmers,” said Stephen R. Gliessman, a professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who studies sustainable agriculture. He said many of his students in recent years have started farms after graduation.

When Mr. Shute led a seminar called, “So you want to be a farmer?” in December in New York, it was standing room only with over 40 people, he said.

Just a few years ago the prevailing style statement in Williamsburg featured metrosexually groomed urbanites wearing trucker hats and pristine Carhartt jackets and quaffing Pabst beer. Now some are choosing the real life behind the pose.

At a recent fund-raising party for Ms. Fleming’s film, in a warehouse next to the Williamsburg Bridge, men in shaggy beards and women in thick sandals sipped Sixpoint Lager from mason jars and snacked on Crane Mountain chèvre.

Guests included Rachel Mark and Betsy Devine, who own Salvatore Brooklyn, a cheese maker in Boerum Hill, and Rick and Michael Mast, tall brothers with Amish-length beards, who are starting a chocolate factory in Williamsburg.

The Billyburg scene has changed, said Annaliese Griffin, who contributes to a blog called Grocery Guy. “Having a cool cheese in your fridge has taken the place of knowing what the cool band is, or even of playing in that band,” she said. “Our rock stars are ricotta makers.”

When John Bliss and Stacy Brenner, both 34, first moved to Maine to farm seven years ago — Mr. Bliss from Tucson, and Ms. Brenner from Philadelphia — they knew little about farming.

“My lesson learned from that first year was that if the soil is good, it won’t let you down,” Mr. Bliss said.

On their Broadturn Farm, in Scarborough, they plan to raise sheep, chickens, pigs and turkeys along with vegetables this year. Like many new organic farms, Broadturn uses the Community Supported Agriculture model to survive. Such businesses sell food subscriptions that entitle consumers to weekly boxes of produce in season. Broadturn’s 20-week subscription costs $500.

Mr. Bliss and Ms. Brenner moved to their current site last year after winning a bid to rent a parcel on the outskirts of Portland controlled by a land trust seeking to preserve open space.

A similar set-up is what allowed Ian Calder-Piedmonte, a philosophy major from Cornell University, to join three years ago with a former classmate who had started Balsam Farms on 60 acres on the South Fork of Long Island. For about $150 an acre, they lease town land across from East Hampton high school, and the Peconic Land Trust leases them acreage in Amagansett, where they operate a farm stand on Town Lane.

“If we can find affordable housing, which is a challenge in East Hampton,” said Mr. Piedmont, 28, who spent two years in Italy after graduation, “we’re going to have two interns this summer.”

Although publications like Small Farmer’s Journal, published since 1976, often present the life of the small farmer in a heartwarmingly “Little House on the Prairie” light, a recent article in Sheep! about the dangers of jackals and one in Backyard Poultry about preventing chickens’ drinking water from freezing, are a reminder of the old-school risks of farming.

“We lost all of our soybeans last year to Japanese beetles,” Ms. Latzer said. She often wakes up at 5 a.m. and collapses into an exhausted sleep by 9 p.m. She earns enough to afford health insurance, but if the landlord doesn’t renew their five-year lease, the enterprise could become untenable.

A number of colleges have added organic farming classes because of demand from students. “A lot of them come out and realize they’re not cut out for it,” said John Biernbaum, a professor of horticulture in Michigan State’s new one-year certificate program. Last year, the first, there were 9 students. This year, 18.

Some feel the strong tug of the land. On March 1, KayCee Wimbish, 32, a former second-grade teacher, moved from her Harlem apartment up to Tivoli to raise sheep and chickens with Owen O’Connor, 22, a Wesleyan dropout who helped come up with the name of their enterprise, Awesome Farm.

Ms. Wimbish grew up in Tulsa, Okla., a child of the suburbs, and it wasn’t until she moved to New York that she discovered farmers’ markets and the politics of food. She worked the last two summers at Hearty Roots and became hooked on the agrarian life. “Moving to New York City,” she said, “was what first got me interested in food and farming.”

found at nytimes.com

for this, a holy week and the 5th anniversary of an unholy war, a poem:

2008-03-19T09:35:00.000-07:00

America is Hard to Find
by Daniel Berrigan

Hard to find;
wild strawberries__swans__herons__deer
those things we long to be
metamorphosed in and out of our sweet sour skins --
good news__housing__Herefords__holiness
wholeness

Hard to find; lost not found__rare as radium__rent free
uncontrollable__uncanny__a chorus
Jesus__Buddha__Moses__founding fathers__horizons
hope (in hiding)

Hard to find; America
now if America is doing well you may expect Vietnamese to
do well__if power is virtuous the powerless will not be
marked for death__if the heart of man is flourishing
so will plants and wild animals__(But alas alas so also vice versa)

Hard to find. Good bread is hard to find. Of course. The hands
are wielding swords__The wild animals fade out like Alice's cat's
smile__Americans are hard to find__The defenseless fade away like hundred year pensioners__The sour face gorgons remain...

But listen brothers and sisters__this disk floats downward__a flying saucer
in the macadam back yard when one paradise tree__a hardy weed__sends
up its signal flare (spring!)
fly it! turn it on! become
hard to find__become__be born
out of the sea Atlantis__out in the wilds America
This disk like manna__miraculous loaves and fishes
exists to be multiplied__savored__shared
play it! learn it! have it by heart!
Hard to find! where the frogs boom boom in the spring twilight
search for the odor of good bread__follow it
man__man is near (though hard to find)
a rib cage growing__red wild as strawberries__a heart!

imagine intelligence__imagine peaceable caressing food planting__music
making
hands__Imagine__Come in!
P.S. Dear friends__I choose to be a jail bird (one species is
flourishing) in a kingdom of fowlers
Like strawberries__good bread
swans__herons__Great Lakes__I shall shortly be
hard to find
an exotic uneasy inmate of the NATIONALLY ENDOWED ELECTRONICALLY
INESCAPABLE ZOO

remember me__I am
free__at large__untamable__not nearly
as hard to find as America

living small

2008-03-17T12:03:00.000-07:00

My brother, John, pointed me to this blog:

Living Small: Thoughts on Literature, Food, Faith, and the Subversive Power of Living Small

I mean, any piece of writing is worth reading when it either is by Wendell Berry or cites Wendell Berry, right?

Check it out.

dpattison

michelle garcia__goodness revealed

2008-03-13T18:24:00.000-07:00

One Sunday morning an all-too-familiar scene unfolded in the sacristy at Iglesia El Carmen in Santa Tecla, outside San Salvador. Giggling children blessed with the blood of the coffee gods surrounded an elderly Spanish priest, showering him with warmth and adoration. It was an image of an encounter—European and native—mythologized over centuries in Latin America from the first conquistador who disembarked with a gun in one hand, the cross in the other, and a mandate to “civilize.”

But the church pastor is no ordinary priest and this is no ordinary encounter. The pastor, Jesuit Father Jon Sobrino, is a world-renowned liberation theologian. He says these children, the country’s poor, offer salvation. Through them the mystery of God is revealed. “La gloria de Dios es el pobre,” declared slain Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero—“The glory of God is the poor.” That aphorism hangs next to a banner with a crucified Jesus on the church’s otherwise sparse altar.

Romero’s words ring in Sobrino’s ears. They influence his many published writings and form the cornerstone of liberation theology, a strain of Catholicism that emerged as a force in Latin America during the 1970s, promoting Jesus as liberator of the oppressed and impoverished. But in a sanction published in March 2007, the Vatican branded the ideas contained in two of Sobrino’s books as “erroneous or dangerous,” thus discouraging Catholic seminaries and universities from teaching his work.

The Latin American Jesus promulgated in Sobrino’s books Jesus the Liberator and Christ the Liberator is forged by the lived reality on the continent. With nearly half of the world’s Catholics living in Latin America—most of them in abject poverty—a Jesus who brings liberation reflects the reality from the ground, from the lives of the poor. But the Vatican objects. “Theological reflection cannot have a foundationother than the faith of the Church,” wrote the Vatican. “Only starting from ecclesial faith, in communion with the Magisterium, can the theologian acquire a deeper understanding of the Word of God ….” In other words, the Vatican governs the Catholic concept of Jesus Christ, and reality is the province of the hierarchical church.

The Vatican’s sanction sent a jitter through theologians and laity—not all of whom espouse Sobrino’s views—who fear it represents yet another signal of increasing rigidity within a Catholic Church that is shedding the more inclusive climate ushered in by Vatican II in 1963.

I encountered Sobrino in the sacristy of his church after Mass on a cool April morning, but he at first declined to speak with me (as he had refused other interviews requests). Suddenly, I blurted out the one question that had gripped me since reading his books: What is reality? My question caught his attention.

In Where is God? Earthquake, Terrorism, Barbarity, and Hope, Sobrino wrote that reality is the Cross. “One must take charge of reality,” he wrote, quoting Ignacio Ellacuría, one of the Jesuit priests murdered in 1989 by U.S.-trained Salvadoran soldiers. “One must ‘bear the burden of reality’ with all its crushing weight.”

“Reality is what’s being covered up, the things that are covered up and are very hard to unearth,” Sobrino answered me, launching into a finely tuned reflection. “Hope is a reality. ... Reality is hard, but it’s wonderful. There is this energy, the will to live. ... I’m happy in this country. There are many good things.”

But Sobrino upends any simplistic view of the reality of El Salvador. True, 11 people are murdered every day and thousands flee every year, but many more stay and persevere. How easily we choose where to cast the lines of reality, from there choosing whose suffering merits help and who to kill.

“You know Sept. 11,” Sobrino states. “But what is October 7? It’s the day the democracies bombed Afghanistan. The poor of this earth, which are the majority, don’t even have calendars,” said Sobrino. “What should be said and what should be silenced is in the hands of the few and powerful, and that is what I fight against.”

In El Salvador, defining reality is a daily battle. Street vendors and activists are charged as terrorists while the late Roberto D’Aubuisson—the military leader and founder of the current ruling political party, who a U.N. Truth Commission determined ordered the assassination of Archbishop Romero—is nominated as an honorary “Hijo Meritismo” (“Meritorious Son”) of the nation. But for some 30 years Sobrino and the entire liberation theology movement have been the subject of Vatican scrutiny as a “Marxist-inspired” movement.

Although the recent Vatican “notification” did not officially silence Sobrino or remove his books from circulation, it warned Catholics that the content does not conform to church ideology. The sanction followed a six-year investigation initiated by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, while he was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the enforcer of church doctrine.

The Vatican rejected Sobrino’s notion of the “church of the poor” as the whole church’s base—a basic tenet of liberation theology—saying such a concept “would make this preference a partisan choice and source of conflict.”

Sobrino has defended his theology and refused to accept the Vatican’s judgment. In a private letter to the Jesuits’ Superior General, leaked to the public, Sobrino said prominent theologians had reviewed his book without finding error. By accepting the judgment, he would have to acquiesce to a 30-year Vatican campaign against liberation theology, Sobrino said, and betray religious leaders who sacrificed their lives defending the poor.

“If a Christology animates the poor of this world, victims of terrible sins—including ones committed by so-called believers—to maintain their faith in God and in His Christ, and to have dignity and hope,” Sobrino wrote in Getting the Poor Down from the Cross: Christology of Liberation, an online anthology published in his defense, “then this Christology will have its limitations of course, but I do not consider it to be dangerous in the world of the poor, but rather something positive. However, it is possible that it will be seen—and it has been seen—as dangerous in other worlds.”

Sobrino, now 70 years old, settled in El Salvador from the Basque region of Spain in 1973 at a time of death squads and massacres and the emergence of a new generation of religious leaders and laity who broke with centuries of allegiance to the Latin American elite. This new generation possessed, as Sobrino put it, the “ability to see through the peasants, with the peasants, and also being for the peasants to see for themselves, more than I saw, the mystery of God.”

I returned to Sobrino with more questions and this time found him in his office at the University of Central America, the site of the 1989 massacre of eight members of Sobrino’s community. (Sobrino was traveling at the time of the massacre.) At the entrance to the theology center, an exhibit honors the Salvadoran martyrs, including Archbishop Romero, who once declared that “a church that does not unite with the poor is not the true church of Jesus Christ.” Romero was gunned down by a death squad while celebrating Mass. A jewelry box entrusted to Sobrino contains a slightly yellowed handkerchief, the one used to wipe Romero’s blood. These artifacts are bloody reminders of a church that stood in solidarity with the poor, in pursuit of liberation—a mission, Sobrino says, the church has abandoned.

“In the last 25 years the churches, especially the institutional church, have tried to move away from a relationship with society. What God created was the world, not the church. The church came later. Now the churches are moving away from being in the real world and away from service to the real world. Specifically, this is true of Latin America, because being in and at the service of the real world is very dangerous.

“The church has moved away from being a church that went into conflict and suffered persecution and killings and bombings. But we must ask why? One reason is historical. There are victims, the poor, of this world of ours.

“The United States is an exception [to the rest of the world]. It is an anecdote. In the First World, in the United States, they may argue—Republicans and Democrats may argue among themselves—about President Bush, but they all agree on one reality. They agree about us [in the Third World]. They expect countries to be poor and violent. Of course, people don’t care about El Salvador. They don’t care about the poor in Brazil.

“But why? In the United States and in my country—I was born in the Basque country—we take life for granted. We take living well for granted. We don’t want to lose what we have. That is the untouchable thing. In your country, politicians have said, ‘It is our Manifest Destiny,’ which is, by the way, religious language. It is the ‘manifest destiny’ of the United States to be a prosperous country and then go back and save poor people from poverty, lack of freedom, lack of democracy, and bring them back to the real world which is democracy. For me that is an issue.

“Religion is not something different from being human,” Sobrino continued. “Religion is one way of being human. It’s not because I’m religious that I want to know the truth. We believe in a God that tells us to look at reality and to love the truth. If you don’t do that, then you have failed as a human being—not as a believer, but as a human being. Religion reinforces that human impulse toward truth, toward unmasking reality.

“Why in El Salvador do we talk about la verdad [truth] and la realidad [reality]? Well, because awful crimes—that’s certainly true of your country—awful crimes have been, some of them, ignored. The war in Congo, for example, is simply ignored. When silencing is not possible, then it is covered up. Unmasking reality or trying to get to know reality becomes something very important for us as human and religious persons.

“It’s not only about unmasking the truth of cruel realities. If it is bad to cover up cruel things, it is worse to cover up good things. When you see goodness, if you don’t want to acknowledge it or if you are not happy in its presence, then I don’t see any hope for this planet. Have we seen goodness in El Salvador? Plenty! In this room you see pictures of those who have died: Ignacio Ellacuría, the martyred Jesuits, Rutilio Grande, Romero. This is goodness. Goodness is so beautiful. It is without arrogance, without propaganda. Goodness doesn’t make money.

“My real worry for the church is how to care for this world and also how to see the goodness there has been—and that there still is—on this continent. I am a theologian. At times theologians write things that might not be quite right or even might be wrong. But we write in the presence of the poor. When you see horrible massacres in El Salvador, Rwanda, or Burundi and when you see people, especially women, walking with all they have left and their two children and lots of things on their head, when you see them just walking, looking for refuge, I say that is primordial sanctity, primordial holiness. These are the words I use to describe something that I don’t see all the time. Yes, there is poverty, but this is to describe a type of dignity that comes from wanting to survive. I call that ‘primordial sanctity’ in order to identify something wonderful in the midst of a tragedy.”

My mind turns to Doña Francisca Orellana, a woman I met in the northern province of Chalatenango where, during El Salvador’s civil war, support for the guerrillas was fierce and the government backlash was unforgiving. A bomb dropped in front of her house. As she sat weaving a palm mat, she described to me how the shrapnel cut through her pelvis, how she found help at a guerrilla-run clinic.

“I saw our brothers sick, lying in bamboo cots, and my heart broke,” Doña Francisca said. “I always prayed the rosary. I stayed there watching the sick. There was Jesus, crucified.” She prayed not simply for life, but also to serve. “Let me live, Lord, so that I may weave palm mats for those who suffer, to ease their pain.” Dona Francisca’s weathered face exuded pure happiness. With such dignity in her daily struggle to live, one could never imagine calling her “poor.” When Sobrino says “primordial sanctity,” I see Doña Francisca.

As I left Sobrino’s office, I said, “I don’t believe that the Vatican’s sanction is about you. It is about everything I’ve seen here.”

The sharp-tongued theologian didn’t correct me, but smiled with satisfaction.

found in Sojourner's Magazine

scripture i was not made to memorize in sunday school

2008-03-12T22:23:00.000-07:00

The first passage below - one of the most beautiful I've ever read - is from Psalm 104 (Does it really say the mountains belong to the wild goats? I thought mining companies had divinely-appointed dominion over those). The second - the passage that converted Bartolome de las Casas and sometimes I wish, in my more bitter moments, I could proclaim to the rich Christians who refuse to support our non-profit because we're not "saving the savages" - is Eccesiasticus 34:18-22.

"You wrap yourself in light as with a garment
You stretch out the heavens like a tent
And lay the beams of your upper chambers on their waters
You make the clouds your chariot
And ride on the wings of the wind

You make winds your messengers
Flames of fire your servants
You set the earth on its foundations
It can never be moved

You covered it with the deep as with a garment
The waters stood above the mountains
But at your rebuke the waters fled
At the sound of your thunder they took to flight

They flowed over the mountains
They went down into the valleys
To the place you assigned for them
You set a boundary they cannot cross
Never again will they cover the earth

You make springs pour water into the ravines
They flow between the mountains
They give water to all the beasts of the field
The wild donkeys quench their thirst

The birds of the air nest by the waters
They sing among the branches
You water the mountains from your upper chambers
The earth is satisfied by the fruit of your work

You make grass grow for the cattle
And plants for us to cultivate
Bringing forth food from the earth

Wine that gladdens our hearts
Oil to make our face shine
And bread that sustains us

Your trees are well watered
The cedars of Lebanon that you planted
There the birds make their nests
The stork has its home in the pine trees

The high mountains belong to the wild goats
The crags are a refuge for the coneys
The moon marks off the seasons
And the sun knows when to go down

You bring darkness, it becomes night
And all the beasts of the forest prowl
The lions roar for their prey
And seek their food from you

The sun rises, and they steal away
They return and lie down in their dens
Then we go out to our work
To our labor until evening

How many are your works
In wisdom you made them all
The earth is full of your creatures

There is the sea, vast and spacious
Teeming with creatures beyond number
Living things both large and small
There the ships go to and fro
And the leviathan, which you formed to frolic there

These all look to you
To give them their food at the proper time
When you give it to them
They gather it up
When you open your hand
They are satisfied with good things

When you hide your face
They are terrified
When you take away their breath
They die and return to the dust
When you send your spirit
They are created
And you renew the face of the earth

May your glory endure forever
May you rejoice in your works
You who look at the earth, and it trembles
Who touches the mountains, and they smoke"

-----------------------------------------

"A sacrifice from ill-gotten gains is tainted
And the gifts of the wicked win no approval.

The Most High has no pleasure in the offerings of the godless
Nor do countless sacrifices win his forgiveness.

To offer a sacrifice from the possessions of the poor
Is like killing a son before his father's eyes.

Bread is life to the destitute
And to deprive them of it is murder.

To rob your neighbour of his livelihood is to kill him
And he who defrauds a worker of his wages sheds blood"

dpattison

reflections for lent

2008-03-10T09:42:00.000-07:00

Ah, Lent. Quite possibly the only holiday celebrated (at least by some) in America that cannot be co-opted by the "free" market. It is, in large part, about living simply, going without, and remembering that there is enough for everyone if we just live like we understand that there are others (people, creatures, etc.) on this earth beside ourselves. Lent is our only holiday that hasn't turned completely selfish and consumerist - which probably explains why it's not quite as popular as, say Christmas.

My friend Jeremy puts it this way: "Capitalism dies in a lenten vaccuum. Hear it scream as it is eaten by... ...THE NOTHING!"

My wife and I are honored and excited to be part of a couple communities here in Portland that are willing to reflect on the meaning of Lent and the life and message of Jesus and, ultimately, what it means for our lives and in this place.

A group of us, mostly young adults, meet every Tuesday evening, each week at a different house, for what we call "Family Dinner." This week we will be discussing a Lenten reflection written by Ched Myers (One of my personal favorite theologians, activists, role models, etc. - you could call me a Ched-head).

Another community that has challenged and shaped us since we became a part of it is the Wilderness Way Community. Our website is still under construction but I would encourage anyone to still check out what's there and reflect on the mission and vision of this wonderful group of people.

For those of you who are observing lent and giving up for a time what is near and dear to you (meat, alcohol, TV, books, whatever), good luck and take heart, we're in the home-stretch.

"I suppose I have always tried to simplify my life from the outside in; cleaning out closets and bookshelves, ridding the house of unnecessary items, when really the work that must be done is inner work. I need to rid myself of outdated attitudes and habitual behavior. Only then will I cease the accumulation of things that I have talked myself into believing are essential. Only then will more space become available for the living of my life."
--Suzanne Stabile
(Thanks, Dale for this quote)

dpattison

extracts from book by cormac cullinan_wild law

2008-03-10T09:17:00.000-07:00

FROM CHAPTER 1
Walking on the wild side

I know that “wild law” sounds like nonsense - a contradiction in terms. Law, after all, is intended to bind, constrain, regularise and civilise. Law’s rules, backed up by force, are designed to clip, prune and train the wilderness of human behaviour into the manicured lawns and shrubbery of the civilised garden. “Wild” on the other hand is synonymous with unkempt, barbarous, unrefined, uncivilised, unrestrained, wayward, disorderly, irregular, out of control, unconventional, undisciplined, passionate, violent, uncultivated, and riotous. In fact the “Wild West” of North America was described as “wild” specifically because of the general lawlessness that prevailed there.

It is precisely the rigidity of this false dichotomy between the “wild” and “law”, between “nature” and “civilisation” that we need to overcome. Like the Chinese symbol for Yin and Yang, both are part of the whole, and it is the dynamic balance that is important, not the triumph of one over the other. We need to find the wild Yin spot in the heart of the Yang of law, and also to perceive the core of law within the wilderness of Yin. Governing in a manner that stamps out wildness and promotes the dull conformity of monoculture is not desirable. Much of what is best in us is contained within our wild hearts. Wildness is associated with creativity and passion, with that part of us that is most connected with nature. It can also be understood as a metaphor for the life force that flows through us all and drives the evolutionary process. In this sense it has an eternal, sacred quality that both defines us and connects us most intimately with this planet.

Wildness is a quality that can only be experienced by straying off the orthodox path of civilisation as we know it. As we know, it is to be found most obviously in the wilderness, those special places where wildness rules. However, we would do well to remember that in many cultures the wilderness is also strongly associated with wisdom. It is the place to which people go in times of transition or confusion, and it is the place from which new insights emerge.

As will become apparent, particularly from Chapters Seven and Eleven, wild time, wild places and what used to be called “wild people” are all important for wild law. If all this sounds like gobbledegook, bear with me a while longer and I will try to give you a clearer idea of what I mean.

FROM CHAPTER 8
Earth’s rights

If humans are not the only members of the Earth Community that have rights and the source of those rights is not human laws, then we must ask ourselves what rights does Earth as a whole have and what rights do the other members of the Earth Community have? Of necessity this also means defining the rights of humans.

Within the Earth system the wellbeing of the planet as a whole is paramount. None of the components of the Earth’s biosphere can survive except within the Earth ecosystem. This means that the wellbeing of each member of the Earth Community is derived from, and cannot take precedence over, the wellbeing of Earth as a whole. Accordingly the first principle of Earth jurisprudence must be to give precedence to the survival, health and prospering of the whole Community over the interests of any individual or human society. Giving effect to this principle is actually also the best way of securing the long-term interests of humans. It is only our failure to appreciate that we are part of the Earth Community has led us to believe and act as if the reverse were true.

In looking for a way to express this in conventional legal terms, we could choose as an analogy the relationship between the state and it citizens in most legal systems today. The state, and the constitution that establishes it, are regarded as the source of all the rights of the citizen (with the possible exception of human rights). The state demands allegiance from it citizens and defines any citizen that attempts to destroy it, as a traitor, who is then liable to the most extreme forms of punishment available. I am not suggesting that Earth jurisprudence follow this model. However, it does to some extent convey that if we are to express the relationship between humans and Earth in legal language, the primary nature and fundamental importance of this relationship must be emphasised. It is not a relationship between equals but between the whole and a part. Accordingly, while the needs of the part must be respected, attempting to balance them against the rights of the whole is inappropriate. The rights of the whole cannot be compromised.

The “allegiance” that we humans owe Earth is therefore more analogous to that which a cell owes the body. The “duty” of the cell is to fulfil the functions for which it evolved and to continue acting in a manner that contributes to the health of the body. If it ceases to do so it dies or becomes a cancer. Similarly, our obligation to Earth is to play our proper role in the functioning of the Earth system and to act in a way that maintains the integrity or “wholeness” of Earth. If we cease doing so we betray the Earth Community which sustains us, and ultimately, our species.

FROM CHAPTER 12
Sacred land

Land is another name for Earth. We are of the land, given physical form by its minerals and the plants rooted in it, our minds and sense of beauty are formed in relation to its contours, colours, textures, tastes and smells, and we are destined to melt once more into it on death. Many cultures and philosophies believe that the life force or vital energy that animates us also flows through, and is concentrated in, the soil, rocks and plants. They also believe that this also means that we share a subjective presence, soul, or consciousness with Earth. In other words it is more accurate to conceive of land as being part of the physical body of a living being than as an inanimate object. Indigenous peoples throughout the world believe that people belong to and are shaped by the land, rather than vice versa. This truth was once recognised by most, if not all, human cultures but is now forgotten in the dominant human cultures. Indeed, conventional jurisprudence denies the mere possibility of land itself being sacred as opposed to being a place where religious rituals take place.

“You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of your grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves. This we know: the earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know.” [Speech by Chief Seattle (Sealth) in January 1854 (The precise content of the speech made in response to overtures by the President of the United States to purchase land occupied by his people, is controversial. No verbatim transcript exists and there are several versions in existence. The first was published on 29 October 1887 in the Seattle Sunday Star were made by, among others, William Arrowsmith in the 1960s and Ted Perry in the 1970s.]

Whether or not you believe that land and Earth have sacred dimensions, the power that land exercises over the human mind and heart, is undeniable. Our cultures are full of the heartbreaking songs of exiles lamenting their uprooting from the soil of their youth. Compatriots far from home renew their bonds by recalling the landscapes, smells and places of their homelands. Anthems, ancient and modern, sing of the beauty of the land that defines the nation. “Soil” ranks with “blood” and “martyrdom” in the lexicon of the revolutionary.

Each one of us is intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country. Each time one of us touches the soil of this land, we feel a sense of personal renewal. [Nelson Mandela (Speech at his inauguration as President of the Republic of South Africa, 12 May 1994)]

Since all land is part of Earth, the relationship between humans and land is of central importance to Earth governance and Earth jurisprudence. At present the laws of the dominant cultures make it difficult for human communities to sustain an intimate relationship with land and hence with Earth. As discussed below, the understanding of land reflected in most laws reflects the myth that land is a commodity (despite the obvious fact that it was never manufactured for sale). By pretending that land is a form of commodity that can be owned and dealt with in a similar fashion to, say, a table, legal systems legitimise and encourage the abuse of Earth by humans.

buy this book here.

auden schendler__the big green lie

2008-03-10T09:03:00.000-07:00

Someone asked me recently, “I know green is popular now. But what’s next?”

I said: “Honesty.”

Consultants tell you that green business is profitable. Stories of businesses successfully implementing green programs are all over the media. Former EPA chief William Reilly touts a new green business book as “a compelling blueprint for how companies can address critical environmental problems, from climate change to water, and improve their performance, gain competitive advantage, make money, and win friends.” It sounds so tidy. But it’s not. Implementing sustainable business practices is closer to trench warfare than surgery.

I work at a business—Aspen Skiing Company—that is remarkably supportive of environmental projects. Yet we find that it’s very difficult to do what matters most from an environmental perspective: cut carbon dioxide emissions. We’ve eliminated millions of pounds of CO2 through retrofits, green construction, on-site renewable energy, and widespread efficiency measures, but our emissions are creeping upward. At the same time, scientists say we must achieve 80 or 90 percent reductions to slow climate change.

We struggle with barriers that are seemingly universal in the business world. For example: this year our various departments submitted $40 million in requests for capital spending (new roofs, retiling a leaky hotel swimming pool), but the company only has $9 million budgeted. The important green projects—a solar electric installation or energy-saving repairs to a heating system—might be out-competed by that roof leaking onto a guest’s bed. Necessities may trump even profitable green projects, especially if those projects aren’t profitable enough.

Other companies struggle too. Wal-Mart is spending $500 million annually on green programs. But last November the company released its first sustainability report, which showed CO2 emissions climbing an average of 8.6 percent from 2005 to 2006. What’s going on?

Cutting CO2 emissions is difficult, even for a motivated company. That’s because energy is cheap; there’s limited incentive to conserve it. Businesses will cherry-pick projects that save the most energy at the lowest cost but decline to make the deeper, less profitable (or even costly) emissions cuts necessary to solve the climate problem.

Meanwhile, making money means creating more carbon emissions, often through growth. The reality that finding emissions reductions isn’t like hitting the jackpot over and over again may come as a surprise. After all, the story we tend to hear is that such actions are cost-effective, smart, and relatively easy to pull off. Governments want their typically lame, voluntary “technical assistance” programs to appear successful. Nonprofits and consultants make their case, or their money, by selling the “green is green” story. And corporations are often pitching profitable environmental progress to customers as well as shareholders.

Where does hope end, and hype begin? It is not that businesses can’t cut emissions profitably (to a point), or that existing efforts are pointless and futile. It’s that at current energy prices, even ragingly successful emissions reductions will only cut your emissions by a third, at best, because it isn’t profitable enough to do more. But we must do much better than that, and soon.

Instead of being Pollyannas crowing about a climate-solutions cakewalk, let’s be realistic about the scale of change needed. The most important corporate climate action might not take place in the factory or the boiler room, but in Congress, in the streets, and on the barricades.

found in the March/April issue of Orion Magazine

nothing says "blog" like some good old-fashioned navel-gazing

2008-03-07T16:56:00.000-08:00

I'm having trouble figuring something out (again). And, unfortunately for you, the reader (whoever you are), when explanations elude me, I often find that spilling my mind out on the keyboard, with a splat that renders words and thoughts illegible and impossible to follow, often gets me a little closer to answers or, at least, greater self-awareness.

My dilemma: Every time I come back from Malawi - I've just returned from my 5th trip - it gets more and more difficult to adjust to the American setting. This inability to adjust, is hard to explain because I'm not talking about something so specific I can put a finger on it. What I mean is, it's not merely about adjusting to American culture and a way of life (In fact, it scares me how immediately I get sucked back into all of that and how the sharp, sucking sound gets louder and more deafening with each return). It's even deeper than a cultural unsettling. It's an emotional unsettling, a condition of the heart, an inner restlessness that stems not from wanting more from life, society, or God, as it might have been with a former version of myself but wanting less. I return to my Portland home with the ability to adequately participate in my life and the life of my community on one hand and, on the other, with a sort of haze that worsens my vision and dulls my sense of "presence" to it all.

I imagine that it's merely a bad case of culture shock in which I'm experiencing not so much a shock as an implosion. Henri Nouwen addresses culture shock in his writing and explains how it can render our time-honored coping mechanisms impotent and reduce us to an overwhelmed, child-like state in which everyone but us knows what's going on and how to interpret it and deal with it all.

In my last post, I quoted Richard Rohr and, at the risk of being redundant, I'll be redundant. He said: "You have to run with your own feet to some place where you haven't been before -- to a new place. You have to leave the world where you have everything under control. You have to leave the world where everybody likes you. You have to head into a world where you are poor and powerless. And there you'll be converted despite yourself."

Now, I think what might be happening is that I am living this in reverse. After spending time in Malawi, I can say that I've experienced the poverty and the powerlessness that Rohr speaks of, maybe even, no definitely even, the conversion. It seems, however, that the more I am given the chance to view the world I call home (this American world) from the outside, the more I begin to see it for what it really is and this gives me an even deeper sense of poverty and powerlessness.

Maybe the word I'm looking for is "sadness." I come back to this place and I see my friends and others of my generation choosing their various paths of least resistance, which so often lead to lives high on creature comforts and debt and low on joy - this makes me sad. I see the the younger generations being raised by screens and gadgets and literally an average of 3000 ads a day (all with the same essential message), continually being taught how to fit their increasingly round selves into the square pegs of an increasingly hegemonic world - this makes me sad. I see the older generations busying themselves with all things moralistic and materialistic and constantly confusing their means with their ends and vice versa - this makes me sad.

Maybe the word I'm looking for is "worried." I'm worried because I so easily give into the ways of this world in which I live. I so often find myself succumbing to the temptations of security and image and comfort. I'm worried that one day, I'm going to forget that what is important is "social" not financial security; work that is "good" and life-giving not lifeless or mindless or soulless; or that the "Kingdom of God" probably looks a lot more like Balaka, Malawi than Portland, Oregon.

Maybe this is why I seem to see through a glass more dimly in this place than in that place and maybe, just maybe, I have a responsibility (there's a word I don't like to throw around) to be a part of bringing clearness to this world even as I wait for the haze that surrounds me to dissipate.

dpattison

"i just don't get it!"

2008-03-06T19:16:00.000-08:00

As I was searching for some things on the internet, I found this: a letter, dated July 1997, from Journey Into Freedom - a nonprofit founded by Dale Stitt and his wife, Esther Elizabeth (beloved friends and mentors to Cara and myself). After a good run of 12 years and many "Trips of Perspective's" to Haiti, Ghana, Ethiopia and Kenya, the organization is no longer in existence and Dale and Esther are on to many other exciting things - for some reason this includes bestowing their time, concern, and wisdom on the undeserving likes of us.

The letter contains a quote from Richard Rohr that I thought was worth noting here: "...in the final analysis we live our way into a new kind of thinking. We have always thought we could think our way into a new way of life. You have to run with your own feet to some place where you haven't been before -- to a new place. You have to leave the world where you have everything under control. You have to leave the world where everybody likes you. You have to head into a world where you are poor and powerless. And there you'll be converted despite yourself."

Dale and I are both active with our local chapter of Jubilee. After you read the letter, here is some more info on Haiti's oppressive debt and what Jubilee is doing about it.

dpattison

another story

2008-03-06T07:48:00.000-08:00

www.storyofstuff.com

a story

2008-03-05T15:01:00.000-08:00

When the great Rabbi Israel Baal Shem-Tov
saw misfortune threatening the Jews
it was his custom
to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate.
There he would light a fire,
say a special prayer,
and the miracle would be accomplished
and the misfortune averted.

Later, when his disciple,
the celebrated Magid of Mezritch,
had occasion, for the same reason,
to intercede with heaven,
he would go to the same place in the forest
and say: "Master of the Universe, listen!
I do not know how to light the fire,
but I am still able to say the prayer."
And again the miracle would be accomplished.

Still later,
Rabbi Moshe-Leib of Sasov,
in order to save his people once more,
would go into the forest and say:
"I do not know how to light the fire,
I do not know the prayer,
but I know the place
and this must be sufficient."
It was sufficient and the miracle was accomplished.

Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn
to overcome misfortune.
Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands,
he spoke to God: "I am unable to light the fire
and I do not know the prayer;
I cannot even find the place in the forest.
All I can do is to tell the story,
and this must be sufficient."
And it was sufficient.

God made man because he loves stories.

From The Gates of the Forest by Elie Wiesel

random questions from a wandering mind as I sit typing on an ugly black box that steals my time & transmits dangerous levels of radiation to my balls

2008-03-02T22:27:00.000-08:00

Re: Resisting Empire Culture

1. What good are our attempts at countering or subverting Empire Culture when we so often: a) give in to the very Western, individualistic temptation to “express ourselves” in superficial ways, b) brand our ideas and movements with capitalist/consumerist images, terminology, and techniques, and c) desire to identify ourselves with what we consume (books, music, movies, web-sites, clothing, etc.)?

2. Can Christians serve 2 gods if they just serve 1 at a time? In other words, can we truly opt-out of Empire Culture and jump back into Jesus’ subversive ways (or vice versa) whenever it suits our fancy?

3. What are the ways in which Empire Culture informs or controls me; my values, my beliefs, my fears, my motivations, my livelihood, etc.? How can I fully opt-out of these without being a total hermit, out-of-touch with my surroundings?

Re: Call / Vocation

1. Do we, as Luther said, have two callings, one higher and one earthly, or could it be that we have one calling; spiritual as it is grounded, subversive as it is mundane, “on earth as it is in heaven?”

2. What does it mean for God’s kingdom to be a “creational” one or for us to live a “creational” life and could it have something to do with what Wendell Berry is describing when he speaks of “good work?” [“Work connects us to both creation and eternity.” –Berry]

dpattison

forget me

2008-03-02T22:22:00.000-08:00

I love me not
tearing self from self
petal by petal
a naked eye
bobbing gently
on a stalk

I love me
whose self I eat
ravenous with pleasure
I become me

Sleep!
We have but few hours
few enough
without
naked eye
to the wind.

Jeremy John
jmjohn.revolt.org

journal entry__2/18/08

2008-03-02T22:02:00.000-08:00

After some months of wet, gray days, the last few have been amazing. Sunny, clear, maybe 55-65 degrees. Cara’s been out of town and I’ve been able to finish building the new chicken run, write some scraps of what may or may not turn into songs, and today I’m hiking at Tryon Creek State Park. In a place like this, I feel a connectedness that I don’t often experience in the man-made world.

I constantly struggle with restlessness and, less often, with its uglier brother, depression (maladies that I’m sure have something to do with the consumerist, technology-worshipping culture in which I live – and the massive amounts of coffee I consume daily). I’m not all that certain yet, but I think that I feel less restless in a place like this. A place not built over, excavated under, uprooted, downtrodden, hidden, or otherwise re-routed by human greed and need for control, convenience, and the ever-important progress (if you’re not growing your dying, right?).

But even this park represents our desires for control and convenience and at least the consequences of progress. As enlightened as the ideas of state & national parks and urban green spaces are, these places are tightly controlled, highly managed recreational areas with man-made, often paved, trails (“Please do not let even a drop of your sweat fall beyond the rod-iron guard rail – violators will be shot on sight by the armed, uniformed men stationed at each switchback”). I guess I feel kind of insulted by it all. It seems to diminish my humanity, the natural world that surrounds me, and certainly our relationship with each other. It’s as if we’ve decided that nature is something one merely watches, like TV or a captive animal at the zoo instead of something we are a part of, a partner with, and a participator in. Maybe the bit of restlessness I still can’t seem to shake off, even in this place, has to do with the fact that for all its remaining natural beauty, it’s still not free. It has not yet been killed off but it lives in a kind of bondage. As I marvel at the sight of this place’s gentle slopes, its towering conifers, its leafless broad-leaves, even each of its tiny and unique creek side pebbles, I imagine that the land’s inhabitants, as restless as I am, long to slide down the banks of the creek and into the water, following its current out of the barbed-wire boundaries of the park, under the ominous rush of the I-5, the 205, the 99, the 84, out of the city limits, through the many farms and small towns that lay west of here and finally into the ocean where they will finally find freedom. Of course, they would find that the oceans are no longer any freer than the rest of us restless souls.

For want of songs and stories
They have dug up the soil
Paved over what is left
~Wendell Berry~

dpattison

down the line

2007-11-20T10:36:00.000-08:00

Little bird,
Lend me your eyes...

You've roosted on the rooftops of the biggest buildings in this town
You've perched upon the pedestals that the people built up all around
You've soared over the steeples and the spires and the camponiles
You've taken your tun atop the trees that line the battlefield

You've seen the smoking guns and distress signals on the fire escapes
You catch the eyes of generals as they raise their glass and they raise the stakes
You've built your homes in the bungalows of the barrios of Bogota
You've nested in church vestibules as the choirs sang hallelujah

But your canticles and your counterpoints speak more clearly than any cleric could
And the advantage of your vantage point is a bandage for a wounded world

Little bird,
Lend me your eyes
'Cause I can't help but wonder
What it is that you will find
When you fly a little further
down the line

dpattison

fall

2007-11-19T23:00:00.000-08:00

The sun surrenders to shadows
The clouds come marching forth
With orders to claim the lily's last breath
As a gift to the God of the storm

Mighty elms, their branches atremble
The leaves are whithered and worn
In the air there hangs the sweet smell of death
For the purpose of being reborn

dpattison

'my hope for us all'

2007-10-01T12:57:00.001-07:00

In a commencement address delivered in June 1989 at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, Berry gave some advice that to most modern graduates would sound old fashioned, indeed backward. But the advice he gave was timeless, and his reminder seems apocalyptic in view of the world's current environmental crisis and, as Berry sees it, America's cultural crisis. In a sense, Berry's deliverance of such a critical message parallels Moses' deliverance of the Ten Commandments, for Berry's advice is also a prescription for cultural healing through the imposition of a set of laws. The laws Berry delivers, however, seem to be Nature's laws. He closed his address (later published in Harper's as "The Futility of Global Thinking") with a series of ten commands, which, he said, "is simply my hope for us all". These instructions are at the heart of Berry's personal and literary world, and collectively they express the thesis informing all of his work, a canon now in excess of thirty books of essays, fiction, and poetry:

1. Beware the justice of Nature.
2. Understand that there can be no successful human economy apart from Nature or in defiance of Nature.
3. Understand that no amount of education can overcome the innate limits of human intelligence and responsibility. We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale.
4. In making things always bigger and more centralized, we make them both more vulnerable in themselves and more dangerous to everything else. Learn, therefore, to prefer small-scale elegance and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity, and glamour.
5. Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made.
6. Put the interest of the community first.
7. Love your neighbors--not the neighbors you pick out, but the ones you have.
8. Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us.
9. As far as you are able make your lives dependent upon your local place, neighborhood, and household--which thrive by care and generosity--and independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage.
10. Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work. Work well.

Viewed in the context of Berry's canon, this sequence represents far more than a neo-romantic or agrarian appeal to return to "simplicity." To think of his advice in this way is to misinterpret it, for it is more of an oracular warning; either rethink our attitudes toward each other and the natural world, Berry implores, or continue on a path toward natural-, cultural-, and self-annihilation.

Excerpted from "Wendell Berry: People, Land and Fidelity" by M.A. Grubbs, University of Kentucky. Found at Border States: Journal of the Kentucky-Tennessee American Studies Association

lowell monke__unplugged schools

2007-09-28T09:04:00.000-07:00

Educators say the darndest things. Consider this from a high school social studies teacher who told me, “Kids don’t read anymore. The only way I can teach them anything is by showing them videos.” Or this from a middle school principal who defended serving children junk food every day by telling me, “That’s what they’re used to eating. They won’t eat it if it doesn’t taste like fast food.”

Aside from their stunning capitulation of adult responsibility, these comments illustrate what has become a common disregard for one of schooling’s most important tasks: to compensate for, rather than intensify, society’s excesses.

I first encountered the idea of the compensatory role of schools in 1970, while preparing to become a teacher. In Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner argued that one of the roles of schools in a free society is to serve as a cultural thermostat—to take the temperature of the culture, determine where the culture is over- and underheated, and then gear instruction to compensate for those extremes. If a culture becomes too enamored with competition, schools would emphasize cooperation; if it overemphasizes individuality, schools would emphasize community responsibility; if it allows poor children to go hungry, schools would (and do) develop lunch and breakfast programs to feed them; and so on.

Postman and Weingartner recognized that there are limits to this role. Schools can’t be expected to solve all of our social ills. But one place where we would do well to employ this thermostatic approach is in our relationship to technology and the fundamental ways that a vast number of electronic tools mediate and shape our children’s experiences.

Let me give an example. Several years ago a study found that young people actually prefer ATMs and automated phone systems to bank tellers and clerks. I presented the study, with unconcealed scorn, to a graduate class I was teaching at the time. The next day a student sent me an e-mail that included the following:

"I do feel deeply disturbed when I can run errand after errand, and complete one task after another with the help of bank clerks, cashiers, postal employees, and hairstylists without ANY eye contact at all! After a wicked morning of that, I am ready to conduct all business online."

In a society in which adults so commonly treat each other mechanically, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that our youth are more attracted to machines. It seems to me that in such a society one task of schools would be to stress the kind of deeply caring, fully present, and wholly human interaction that long ago disappeared from ordinary public life and is now rapidly evaporating from private experience as well. By helping our youth become good at and appreciate the value of profound human engagement, we may help cool the attraction to mediated experiences expressed by my student.

To be sure, this effort would represent a radical reversal of schools’ traditional relationship with media. To a large degree, American schools were invented out of a need to heat up children’s access to media. From the seventeenth century through the first half of the twentieth, schools were places children went to gain entry into the world of symbols. The abstract character of the texts and numbers found in schools complemented the intensely physical character of life outside. Rarely, however, was it allowed to supercede it. Those children who spent an inordinate amount of time in the world of abstractions were typically chastised for being “bookworms” and pushed outside to get some fresh air.

All of this changed with television, which threw iconic rather than textual representations at children (and adults) at a mind-numbing pace. A few observers quickly recognized the significance of this inundation. Marshall McLuhan, for example, proposed that schools would have to serve as “civil defense against media fallout.” That didn’t happen, of course. Even as city streets became unsafe for exploration, as a mostly rural environment gave way to a relatively sterile suburban one, and as physical labor gave way to the information age, schools never responded to the cultural shift toward abstraction by moving in the opposite direction. Indeed, by the time television’s brawnier, more powerful symbol-manipulating cousin, the computer, came along, schools were fully committed to reinforcing rather than compensating for the symbol-saturated world in which children lived.

Of course, symbol manipulation—reading, writing, mathematics—is the unavoidable nuts and bolts of schooling. But it is not the sole purpose of education. Education must help children come to know themselves, become good citizens, and (with increasing urgency) come to terms with the natural world around them. It is possible that a school system wholly devoted to developing technical skills would not be particularly damaging if other institutions compensated for children’s severely mediated lives. Unfortunately, the institutions that could serve that function—church, family, community—have been diminished by technology’s cultural dominance. School is about the only institution left that has the extensive claim on children’s attention needed to offset that dominance.

THE HEALTH OF OUR CHILDREN’S INNER LIVES, their civic engagement, and their relationship with nature all would be improved if schools turned down the thermostat on that technologically overheated aspect of American culture. Schools dedicated to that task—we might call them “unplugged schools”—would identify the values associated with technological culture and design curricula and an environment focused on strengthening the human values at the other end of the scale.

The most obvious thing schools can do in this regard is give children experiences with the real things toward which symbols are only dim pointers. Unless emotionally connected to some direct experience with the world, symbols reach kids as merely arbitrary bits of data. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but to a second grader who has held a squiggly nightcrawler in her hand, even the printed symbol “worm” resonates with far deeper meaning than a thousand pictures or a dozen Discovery Channel videos.

Nature is, of course, the richest resource for firsthand experience. Individual teachers have long tried to provide some contact with the natural world by bringing plants and small animals into their classrooms—a limited approach yielding limited results. Many schools are beginning to think on a larger scale. They have torn up the asphalt surrounding the schools, planted trees and flowers indigenous to the area, and even established ponds and waterways that quickly attract a remarkably diverse number of critters. In 1997, for instance, Lewis and Clark Elementary School in Missoula, Montana, began creating the state’s first schoolyard habitat. Working under the guidance of Kent Watson, a local landscape architect, the school turned a large section of its playground into a habitat that included a native-grasses mound, a waterfall, stream, and pool, a plot of plants “discovered” by Lewis and Clark, a rock garden, a variety of native trees and shrubs, and a butterfly garden. Not only do students at the school use the area for environmental studies, they were directly involved in the original design and development process: mapping the soil, surveying existing plants and animals, studying the history and culture of the region, determining what seeds to plant, designing and building benches and pathways.

A different type of habitat project is currently getting under way where I live, in Springfield, Ohio. It involves creating “curricular gardens” in front of the newly built high school as an alternative to the vast grass lawn planned by the original architects. A colleague of mine at Wittenberg University, Stefan Broidy, is working with teachers at the high school and nearby elementary and middle schools to connect the curricula of various departments, ranging from art to science, with corresponding gardening projects. This is the first step in a long-term effort to eventually revitalize a long-neglected fifty-acre land lab that lies adjacent to the schools.

These are just a couple examples of thousands of innovative local nature habitat programs being developed by schools all over the country. (A number of other examples can be found in Richard Louv’s article in the March/April 2007 issue of this magazine.) As one reads about these programs, it becomes clear just how important it is that we help children get beyond the environment we have built to fit humans and experience the larger environment within which humans must learn to fit. Only nature can suffice for that, of course, but more specifically, the wild—that which has not been entirely tamed and domesticated by human intervention—is vital. By helping children understand the limitations of human power, the wild provides some inoculation against the day-to-day charm of a technological milieu that seduces us into believing that those limitations do not exist.

In Europe, recognition of the benefits of being in the wild is behind one of its fastest-growing educational movements: forest kindergartens. They originated in Denmark in the 1950s but only recently began to attract attention because of their rapid expansion throughout Germany in the 1990s. These multi-age, year-round outdoor classrooms are designed to foster a love and knowledge of nature, while using the forest to encourage children to imaginatively create fantasy play worlds. Few full-blown forest kindergartens have been created in the U.S., but they have inspired a number of schools to establish forest weeks or weekly forest days. And, of course, where there are no forests, prairie weeks, pond months, or desert days can serve as well.

A SECOND IMPORTANT COMPENSATION would move in the opposite direction of nature—toward the conscious investigation of the tools that mediate our lives. With “magical” black boxes so integrated into our lives that they have become nearly invisible, unplugged schools would disintegrate technology, first by surrounding young children with only those tools whose working principles are visible and understandable and then by gradually bringing more complex, opaque technologies, from radios to eventually computers, into the educational arena—not just as study aids but objects of study.

Montessori schools are noted for their reliance on devices that make learning very much a hands-on activity. However, I know of no schools that incorporate into their curricula the kind of systematic, progressive study of tools I have described above. The trend has been in the opposite direction, as even rural schools eliminate the middle school shop and home ec classes that once gave students at least some experience with simple tools. Children now have to go to “children’s museums” to get hands-on experience with common hand tools. The fact that these places are called museums perhaps explains why good models of this kind of learning in schools are hard to come by. Our society seems to have decided that in the age of powerful mental tools, working with and understanding physical tools is a thing of the past.

Of course, computers are physical tools of a sort. But their physical workings are so concealed from view that mainstream schooling has simply defaulted on helping youth dispel this quite consequential ignorance. Education is hardly improved by revealing the world to kids through the use of tools whose workings cannot themselves be revealed. It doesn’t have to be this way. Learning the fundamental principles of computer operations is not beyond the capabilities of most high school students if approached appropriately. For years, Valdemar Setzer at the University of São Paulo has taught high school seniors the principles of computer operations by first having the students as a class act out physically what takes place inside the computer during a simple computation. The idea is not to make everyone a computer programmer—it is to help youth comprehend why our increasingly computerized environment functions the way it does. Only if they possess that understanding will they be able to decide which human powers are appropriate to hand off to computer calculation and which should be reserved for our own judgment.

So much daily communication is now mediated by machines that the U.S. News & World Report has estimated that youth graduating from schools today have had about one-third fewer face-to-face conversations than their parents had when they came out of school. Unplugged schools would compensate for this by creating an environment teeming with adults and older students conversing with, telling stories to, and working directly with younger students. Resources and time spent by other schools to integrate technology into the classroom would be spent integrating community members.

This is just what Ron Berger and his colleagues did for over two decades at Shutesbury Elementary School, in western Massachusetts. In An Ethic of Excellence, Berger writes, “Town citizens of all ages are in the school every day as mentors and tutors for children. Senior citizens are guests at concerts and annual Valentine and Thanksgiving meals hosted by the Kindergarten and Pre-Kindergarten. We invite town citizens to our work exhibitions, to be panelists at formal portfolio presentations, and as experts, helping our classes in their learning.”

Berger notes that senior citizens have also suffered from the effects of a technological culture that favors mobility and individuality over stability and continuity. They have become so isolated from the rest of the community that children rarely see and hear the wisdom and dignity encased in creaky joints and weathered skin. Bringing these elders into schools would benefit both generations. Salt Lake City is one of a number of communities that has worked at this intergenerational integration. It instituted its Senior Motivators in Learning and Educational Services program in 1977 with 15 volunteers. Today there are over 250 seniors in the district schools involved with tutoring, story reading, field trips, sports, art, and music. They are encouraged to share with children the vast variety of skills, knowledge, history, and traditions accumulated during their lives.

Combined with the emphasis on direct contact with the physical world, forging connections with older generations can help unplugged schools offset a glorification of constant change by fostering an appreciation for what is enduring and mature. It would help balance our hard-charging, future-obsessed culture with an environment that fosters compassion, reverence, and a sense of obligation toward those who have come before.

As much as they need direct contact with caring adults, children also need quiet places that give them a respite from the din of adult-generated electronic media constantly assaulting their eyes and ears. In past generations, playhouses, treehouses, forts, or even a sheet thrown over a card table served as places to escape adult intervention for a time. Children’s studies author Elizabeth Goodenough calls these places “secret spaces,” where children retreat for undirected fantasy play, security, and quiet contemplation. With ubiquitous media making these places harder to come by, enlightened schools are creating their own quiet (if not secret) spaces for their students. I have visited a preschool and kindergarten in West Des Moines, Iowa, that has a loft with an adult-unfriendly five-foot ceiling. Children go there to rest, play, or just withdraw for a while. The imaginative powers of children being what they are, these quiet spaces don’t always have to be physical. In Goodenough’s book Secret Spaces of Childhood, Harvard professor John Stilgoe recalls putting the leaves of sweet fern in his math books when he was in junior high so he could take a whiff of it during school, which would transport him back to the gravel bank where he spent so much idle time in summer. Evidently, the concern for keeping students “on task” had not yet reached the point that it prevented his teacher from giving him some space for daydreaming. This and the kindergarten loft are just two ways that schools can, in remarkably simple ways, give children the opportunity to withdraw from the ceaseless noise of high-tech life and do the kinds of things that their childish nature calls to them to do.

IT SHOULD BE CLEAR BY NOW THAT ALL of the compensatory activities of unplugged schools have ideological implications. For example, our plugged-in society values the Internet for its capacity to overcome time and space—to allow us to “go anywhere at anytime.” Unplugged schools would recognize that this benefit has been accompanied by increased difficulty among children in feeling that they belong to any place at any time. According to educator R.W. Burniske, belonging is just what kids need to survive a media-saturated environment. “When you are drowning in a river of information,” he once wrote me, “the last thing you need to know is the temperature of the water. What you need is a rock to stand on.” One way to find that rock is through what has come to be called place-based education. By using the local community as a primary means of learning, place-based learning counteracts the alienation generated by too much of what Postman called “information from nowhere.”

Berger gives a good sense of the expansive character of place-based education, along with its impact on school-community relations:

"Students clean town roads every year, raise money for town efforts, and engage in other serious projects to benefit the community: testing homes for radon, testing streams for pollution, testing wells for water quality, conducting research to contribute to town historical records, taking a census of local animals for state officials. It’s not by chance that we’ve earned trust and support for the school."

This is not just the fairly widespread practice of community service, done in the students’ spare time. This is the day-to-day work of the school, integrated into the very core of the curriculum and evaluated by the quality of the results. Schoolwork takes on deep meaning as students recognize themselves as valuable community members.

Technological culture promotes a doggedly instrumental orientation to life in which every act is calculated as a means to something else. Even something as intrinsically rewarding as childhood play now must be considered useful in order to be scheduled into children’s frenetic lives. Adults intent on teaching techniques of dancing, sports, music, art, drama, etc., squeeze free play at one end while video games and television—both ultimately adult directed—squeeze it from the other end. Children, and their teachers, have so lost their intuitive sense of imaginative free play, undertaken just for the sheer joy of playing, that for the past two summers Penny Wilson, a “playworker” from London, has toured the U.S. under sponsorship from the Alliance for Childhood, training recreation personnel in major cities on how to help children recover their natural capacity for unstructured play. Providing opportunities for that kind of play is yet another way unplugged schools would compensate for what our culture leaves out of childhood.

Yet compensation for an overheated technological culture should not be mistaken for rejection of it. With years of unplugged experiences anchoring youth against the current of technological overindulgence, high school students should be capable of making much richer connections between the symbols encountered on computer screens and the real things those symbols represent. Learning with and about high technology then becomes a very different experience.

Ten years ago Burniske and I designed and coordinated a telecomputing project we called Media Matters. We enlisted high school students from various parts of the world to analyze how different media told the stories of several global events. While the students were figuring out how the character of radio, TV, newspapers, magazines, and a new form of communication called the World Wide Web shaped how information was conveyed, we were discovering that even though these students were sophisticated in putting media to work for them, they were naïve about how it worked on them. Today, in the age of cell phones, instant messaging, MySpace and YouTube, this naïveté is even more consequential. Thus, not only should schools help students understand how these media work, they should also help them understand how such tools shape their appetites, relationships, and very conceptions of the world in which they live.

There are many other specific things that schools could do to compensate for the lack of balance children experience in our overmediated culture. But one thing they must do is provide an alternative to the current penchant for viewing children as little biological machines whose knowledge and skills can be “constructed,” assessed, and labeled in schools according to the same cold logic of the spreadsheet that businesses use in producing commodities. This intensely mechanistic view of children is central to the belief that a very meager set of numbers can determine their abilities (and future opportunities), to the confidence that a single curriculum can serve children just as well whether they live in Jackson Hole or Brooklyn, and to the conviction that a child’s failure to adapt to the inhospitable clockwork machinery of school operations can be “fixed” by applying a little chemical grease (like Ritalin) to a malfunctioning gear inside her head.

The efforts to label and sort children while constantly seeking technical means to accelerate, enhance, and otherwise tinker with their intellectual, emotional, and physical development are acts of mechanistic abuse (there is really no other name for it) committed against children’s nature. There is no more critical task for schools than to counter this unfolding tragedy. Schools can make headway simply by patiently honoring and nurturing each child’s internally timed, naturally unfolding developmental growth, by abandoning anxious efforts to hurry children toward adulthood, and by giving these young souls time to heal from the wounds inflicted by a culture that shows no respect for childhood innocence. As Richard Louv and others have argued, nature is a particularly effective antidote for this condition. Eliminating the clock as the means of governing everything is another more modest but important move. However it is undertaken, what is important to recognize is that compensating for the dominant view of children-as-mechanisms is, at its core, spiritual work. It acknowledges that some facet of a child’s inner life must remain sacred—off-limits to our machinations—to be viewed not as new territory for scientific investigation and technical manipulation but simply with awe and reverence and our own best, most human, expressions of support. To grant the dignity of that inner core is perhaps the most important gift unplugged schools can give children in the technological age. And, in turn, to foster within children those once universal but now nearly extinct childhood qualities of awe and reverence is spiritual education in its most elemental sense.

The list of schools that have directly and comprehensively tied children’s overmediated lives to spiritual health is a very short one, I’m afraid, limited mostly to a number of Waldorf schools, whose philosophy has long coupled spiritual development with a critical stance toward the use of electronic media by young children. The Washington [D.C.] Waldorf School just completed a year-long series of public seminars and staff meetings investigating how best to bring computers and other high-tech devices into the high school curriculum so that students not only have the skills they need to go on to college or work, but understand the full impact of technology on human culture, the environment, and their own inner lives. The faculty has discovered that an effective program requires paying attention to the curriculum and methods not only at the high school level but at the elementary level as well (where children do not use computers). They understand that there is much inner preparation that young children need to do if they are one day to give mature direction to the enormous power these external tools provide.

IF ONE STITCHED TOGETHER ALL OF THESE examples and concerns, one might be able to imagine at least the contours of an unplugged school. Certainly, unplugged schools would get children deeply involved with nature and community; they would give a prominent place to the expressive arts; they would determine tool use according to developmental readiness; they would study technology explicitly; they would give children time and space to look inward; and they would rely on assessments that are rigorous and multifaceted rather than reductionist and multiple choice. But there are a vast number of ways all of this could be done. The compensatory activities of any particular unplugged school could not be standardized. They would have to depend heavily on the specific children, educators, parents, geography, and culture of the communities they serve.

Of course, right now there is no escaping, at least in public schools, a whole host of technocratic fetters, such as standardized curricula and testing, that are turning teaching as well as learning into intellectual factory work. Still, educators and parents can always find some wiggle room within technocratic structures and it is in these gaps that a wide variety of subversive unplugging can gain a foothold.

Ultimately, though, if schools were to throw off those fetters and restore balance to children’s lives, they would have to establish goals that reflect our best sense of what it means to be human. Producing workers adapted to the demands of a high-tech economy would no longer drive what these schools do. Schools would establish life as the measure of value, not machines. They would be dedicated to showing young people how to live as dignified members of an increasingly mediated and fragile world. And they would consciously work to cool down society’s infatuation with technology while heating up our concern for those we live with and the Earth we live on.

found at Orion Magazine

bobby, jeremy, and vandy on 'development'

2007-08-29T11:01:00.000-07:00

'Gross national product...measures neither the health or our children, the quality of their education, nor the joy of their play. It measures neither the beauty of our poetry, nor the strength of our marriages. It pays no heed to the intelligence of our public debate, or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our wit nor our courage, neither our compassion nor our devotion to country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worth living, and it can tell us everything about our country except those things that make us proud to be a part of it.'
__Robert Kennedy

'Seek the shalom (well-being and social harmony) of the city...'
__Jeremiah 29:7

'People are perceived as poor if they eat millets (grown by women) rather than commercially produced and distributed processed junk foods sold by global agri-business. They are seen as poor if they live in self-built housing made from ecologically adapted natural material like bamboo and mud rather than in cement houses. They are seen as poor if they wear handmade garments of natural fibre rather than synthetics.

Sustenance, as culturally perceived poverty, does not necessarily imply a low physical quality of life. On the contrary, because sustenance economies contribute to the growth of nature’s economy and the social economy, they ensure a high quality of life measure in terms of right to food and water, sustainability of livelihoods, and robust social and cultural identity and meaning.

On the other hand, the poverty of the 1 billion hungry and the 1 billion malnutritioned people who are victims of obesity suffer from both cultural and material poverty. A system that creates denial and disease, while accumulating trillions of dollars of super profits for agribusiness, is a system for creating poverty for people. Poverty is a final state, not an initial state of an economic paradigm, which destroys ecological and social systems for maintaining life, health and sustenance of the planet and people.

And economic poverty is only one form of poverty. Cultural poverty, social poverty, ethical poverty, ecological poverty, spiritual poverty are other forms of poverty more prevalent in the so called rich North than in the so called poor South. And those other poverties cannot be overcome by dollars. They need compassion and justice, caring and sharing.'
__Vandana Shiva

kurt hoelting__circling home

2007-08-22T21:55:00.000-07:00

One man’s vow to spend a year in one place.

Circling Home began as an offhand conversation over breakfast with a friend a few months ago. We were talking about global warming. What would it be like, I found myself musing, to spend an entire year within walking distance of home in the Pacific Northwest of America? What would it be like to spend a whole cycle of seasons in an intimate exploration of my home terrain, and to do so as a conscious response to global warming; not out of guilt, but as a positive affirmation, as a kind of pilgrimage into the heart of my own home region? Maybe what we need to learn more than anything else right now involves a radical turning back towards home?

It was a strangely energising thought, and I haven’t been able to let it go since.

It’s not as though the climate crisis is news to me. I have been concerned about it for years. But denial is a powerful force, even when we ‘know’ better. It’s amazing what we can refuse to see, when the act of seeing brings with it the necessity for change. Yet there is no denying that the tide of big change is now upon us. We either participate in these changes consciously, helping to guide their trajectory toward better options for our children, or we resist change, and relinquish our power to shape our own future.

So, I took an online ‘carbon footprint’ survey. I thought I would do relatively well. After all, I drive a hybrid car. I live in a modest-sized house. I recycle. I think of myself as careful in my use of energy. But I was shocked to discover that my personal carbon footprint is more than double the national average, and five times that of the average European. How could this be?

The answer was revealing. In my work as a meditation teacher, I travel a lot every year to teach. This is a privilege, and not one I take lightly. A single cross-country flight uses my personal quota for carbon emissions for an entire year. When I removed that single factor from the formula, my carbon footprint shrank to well below average, where I had hoped it would be. This was yet another wake-up call – that I need to rethink my working patterns and priorities.

So, one morning I pulled out some maps of my region and started drawing concentric circles around my home in the Maxwelton Valley of Whidbey Island, to see what the different circles contained. At a radius of about 60 miles (100 km) I made an amazing discovery. The circle passes directly over the summit of Mt. Olympus to the west, the highest point in the Olympic Mountains. It passes directly over the summit of Mt. Baker, the highest point in the North Cascades. It passes directly over the summit of Glacier Peak to the east, the highest point in the Central Cascades. It just catches the San Juan Islands at the north end of the Puget Sound basin, then swings around to touch the southernmost tip of the Sound.

To my amazement, I discovered that my home on Whidbey Island is at a kind of symbolic epicentre of the Puget Sound basin. Inside this 100-kilometre circle lies 12,000 square miles of rich geographical terrain, abundantly endowed with places of power and beauty, most of which I have never explored. What would happen if I made my work for a year the intimate exploration of my own home region by foot, bicycle and kayak?

It has actually been a secret fantasy of mine for years to do something of this order. There are many practical benefits that come to mind. I am blessed with deep roots in the
Pacific Northwest, and there is nowhere else I would rather be. I love the
familiar mountains and forests and rain-drenched ecologies. Most of my extended family lives close at hand. I am richly endowed with friends and community right where I live.

There are other reasons to pull the circle inward too. I am a Zen student and a contemplative. I’ve often noticed that my capacity to access the depth and spaciousness of the world is in inverse proportion to the speed and distance I am travelling. During intensive meditation retreats, for example, my experience is usually the opposite of confinement. After some days dwelling in stillness and silence, I invariably notice an expansion of awareness both inside and outside of my body. Thoughts settle and loosen their grip. My ability to delight in simple things intensifies – the taste of good food, a walk in the woods, even the bare act of watching my own breath becomes amplified and enlivened.

The same dynamic holds true of my outward experience in the natural world. During the weeks I spend every summer guiding contemplative kayak trips in the Tebenkof Bay Wilderness of Southeast Alaska, I never venture more than a few miles from base camp, and never faster than the pace of the paddle. Yet my predominant experience is not of confinement, but of expansiveness. A stretch of wild coastline that I might barely notice from a jet plane at 30,000 feet becomes the embodiment of immensity, and a source of boundless exploration. The very act of slowing down and returning to a more human scale naturally opens my senses to the depth and beauty of the world.

So the question naturally arises, “How can I build this same sensibility into the rest of my life, making the place I live my ‘monastery’, my place of practice?” The answers that emerge from this inquiry may have surprising bearing on the question, “What are the solutions to global warming?”
In the conclusion of his Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot wrote:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Thus my vow for the coming year will be “to arrive where I started and know the place for the first time”. I make this vow out of allegiance to my unborn grandchildren, but also with my own self-interest in mind. I know from experience that the invitation to wake up to what is near at hand always turns out to be a gateway to a feast.

Beginning with winter solstice in 2007, I will embark on a year-long project to see what I have been missing right under my feet. I will not get in a car during the year, relying instead on public transport, walking, biking and paddling to explore in widening circles the natural and cultural geography of my home region. I will write about what I discover, talk with the people I meet about where they find hope and belonging in this perilous time, and reclaim in fresh ways my relationship with the place that gave me birth.

Fifteen thousand years ago the Vashon Ice Sheet advanced down out of present-day Canada to reach its southern terminus in Washington State. The place where I now live was covered by 3,000 feet of ice. When the glacier retreated it left deeply cut valleys scoured from the earth. A new inland sea swept into those valleys. I grew up by the shores of this sea, surrounded by mountains. I live in the centre of it now. It remains one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.

In a flash of geologic time, we humans have become the drivers of climate itself. Who could have imagined? As a species, we have pointed the Earth towards the opposite climatic extremes, with the throttle all the way to the floor. The last time the Earth was as warm as it is projected to be by the end of this century was 20 million years ago, and crocodiles lived in Antarctica.

This is not the world I want to bequeath to my grandchildren. I don’t want to wait until Antarctica is hospitable to crocodiles before I decide it is time to change.

My prayer is that these humble efforts during the coming year will link up with thousands of other creative responses to our climate crisis to begin a great turning back towards sane living in the only home we will ever have. May we face this crisis together with the audacity and creative flair that are our birthright as human beings.

Kurt Hoelting is founder of Inside Passages www.insidepassages.com and leads contemplative retreats for activists and interfaith religious leaders around the US.

howard w. french & lydia polgreen__africa:china's new frontier

2007-08-20T13:41:00.000-07:00

For many Chinese, Africa represents a land of opportunity, but some Africans are wary that these migrants might be the forerunners of Chinese economic imperialism

When Yang Jie left home at 18, he was doing what people from China's hardscrabble Fujian Province have done for generations: emigrating in search of a better living overseas.

What set him apart was his destination. Instead of the traditional adopted homelands like the US and Europe, where Fujianese have settled by the hundreds of thousands, he chose southern Africa, making his way to this small landlocked country.

"Before I left China," said Yang, now 25, "I thought Africa was all one big desert," a place forever bathed in terrible heat. So he figured ice cream would naturally be in high demand, and with money pooled from relatives and friends, he created his own factory at the edge of Lilongwe, Malawi's capital. Malawi's climate, in fact, is subtropical, but that has not stopped his ice cream company from becoming the country's biggest.

Stories like this have become legion across Africa over the past five years or so, as hundreds of thousands of Chinese have discovered the continent, setting off to do business in a part of the world that had been terra incognita for their countrymen. The Xinhua News Agency recently estimated that at least 750,000 Chinese were working or living for extended periods on the continent, a reflection of burgeoning economic ties between China and Africa that reached US$55 billion in trade last year, compared with less than US$10 million a generation earlier.

A Chinese merchant in a market in Lilongwe, Malawi.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Even when Yang arrived here in 2001, he said, he could go weeks without encountering another traveler from his homeland. But as surely as his investments in the country have prospered, he said, an increasingly large community of Chinese migrants has taken root, and now runs everything from small factories to health care clinics and trading companies.

Malawian workers gathering bricks for a new Chinese food factory in Lingonwe.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
During the previous wave of Chinese interest in Africa, in the 1960s and 1970s, an era of radical socialism and proclaimed Third World solidarity, European and American companies held sway over economies across most of the continent. Here and there, though, the Chinese made their presence felt, often as a curious sight: drably dressed, state-run work brigades that built stadiums, railroads and highways, often crushing rocks and performing other heavy labor by hand.

Today, in many of the countries the new Chinese emigrants have settled in, like Chad, Chinese-owned pharmacies, massage parlors and restaurants serving a variety of regional Chinese cuisines can be found. The Western presence, once dominant, has steadily dwindled, and essentially consists nowadays of relief experts working for international agencies or oil workers, living behind high walls in heavily guarded enclaves.

At first, this new Chinese influx was driven largely by word of mouth, as pioneers like Yang relayed news back home of abundant opportunities in a part of the world where many economies lie undeveloped or in ruins.

Conditions like these often deter Western investors, but for many budding Chinese entrepreneurs, Africa's emerging economies are inviting precisely because they seem small and accessible. Competition is often weak or nonexistent, and for African customers, the low prices of many Chinese goods and services make them more affordable than their Western counterparts.

You Xianwen sold his pipe laying business in Chengdu this year to move to Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, to join a startup company with a Chinese partner he had previously only met online. "Back where I come from, we are pretty independent people," You, 55, said. "My brothers and sisters all supported my decision to come here. In fact, they say that if things really work out for me, they would like to move to Africa, too."

You said he had considered other African countries, including Zambia, before settling on Ethiopia. "Luckily, I didn't decide to go there," he said, explaining that he had been frightened by the recent anti-Chinese protests in that country.

His new business, ABC Bioenergy, builds devices that generate combustible gas from ordinary refuse, providing what You said would be an affordable alternative source of energy in a country where electricity supplies are erratic and prices high.

You's partner here, Mei Haijun, first came to Ethiopia a decade ago to work at a Chinese-built textile factory, and has since married an Ethiopian woman, with whom he has a child. "When I first came here, you could go two months without seeing another Chinese person," he said. "But it is a different era now. There's a flight to China every day."

There has been an increase in air traffic between China and countries like Ethiopia, with Chinese companies now scrambling to add new routes, as the Chinese government and big Chinese companies increase their stake in Africa.

Much of that activity reflects an intense appetite for African oil and mineral resources needed to fuel China's manufacturing sector, but big Chinese companies have quickly become formidable competitors in other sectors as well, particularly for major public works contracts. China is building major new railroad lines in Nigeria and Angola, large dams in Sudan, airports in several countries and new roads, it seems, almost everywhere.

One of the largest road builders, China Road & Bridge Construction, has picked up where the solidarity brigades of an earlier generation left off. The company, which is owned by the Chinese government, has 29 projects in Africa, many of them financed by the World Bank or other lenders, and it maintains offices in 22 African countries.

On a recent Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa to Beijing brimming with Chinese contractors, workers from Road and Bridge and other companies swapped notes on the grab bag of countries they work in, and debated about the difficulties of learning Portuguese and French in places like Mozambique and Ivory Coast.

Africans view the influx of Chinese with a mix of anticipation and dread. Business leaders in Chad, a central African nation with deepening oil ties to China, are bracing for what they suspect will be an army of Chinese workers and investors.

"We expect a large influx of at least 40,000 Chinese in the coming years," said Renaud Dinguemnaial, director of Chad's chamber of commerce. "This massive arrival could be a plus for the economy, but we are also worried. When they arrive, will they bring their own workers, stay in their own houses, send all their money home?"

In Zambia, where anti-Chinese sentiment has been building for several years, merchants at the central market in Lusaka, the capital, said that if Chinese wanted to come to Africa, they should come as investors, building factories, not as petty traders who compete for already-scarce customers for inexpensive items like flip-flops and T-shirts.

"The Chinese claim to come here as investors, but they are trading just like us," said Dorothy Mainga, who sells knockoff Puma sneakers and Harley Davidson T-shirts in the Kamwala Market in Lusaka. "They are selling the same things we are selling at cheap prices. We pay duty and tax, but they use their connections to avoid paying tax."

Although Chinese oil workers have been kidnapped in Nigeria and in Ethiopia, where nine were killed by an armed separatist movement in May, the growing Chinese presence around the continent has produced few serious incidents.

Misunderstandings are common, however, and resentments inevitably arise. Africans in many countries complain that Chinese workers occupy jobs that locals are either qualified for or could be easily trained to do. "We are happy to have the Chinese here," said Dennis Phiri, a 21-year-old Malawian university student who is studying to become an engineer. "The problem with the Chinese companies is that they reserve all the good jobs for their own people. Africans are only hired in menial roles."

Another frequently heard criticism is that the Chinese are clannish, sticking among themselves day and night.

In Addis Ababa, in what is a typical arrangement for most large companies, the 200 Chinese workers for the Road & Bridge Corp all live in a communal compound, eating food prepared by cooks brought from China and even receiving basic health care from a Chinese doctor.

"After a day off, you wonder what you're doing here, so we like to keep working," said Cheng Qian, the country manager for the road building company in Ethiopia. He added that his family had never visited him during several years of work here. "They have no interest in Africa," he said. "If it were Europe, things would be different."

Sometimes, the Chinese approach has created serious frictions with African workers. At a leading hotel here in Lilongwe, breakfast guests stared as an agitated Chinese traveling salesman, sweating profusely, screamed at his staff minutes before his promotional pitch on nutritional supplements was set to begin.

"You say it is not your fault, but the way you are doing things is just stupid, stupid," the man sputtered before a clutch of humiliated-looking African assistants. "You people are unbelievable."

The scene was redolent of the waves of heavy-handed European colonialists, pushy American executives and members of the Indian and Lebanese diasporas who have settled in Africa to seek their fortunes, often to suffer worker revolts or failed businesses. When the salesman had finally left the room, members of the restaurant staff gathered near the door and vented their disgust. "We don't need people like that to come here and colonize us again," said one of them.

After nearly seven years in Malawi, Yang Jie, the ice cream maker, seems to have learned better. Greeting his workers at the ice cream factory, he begins the day by asking, "How did you sleep last night?"

One of them quickly replied, "Very well," sounding a bit formal.

"Don't tell me a lie," Yang answered with a sly, friendly smile. "It's OK to tell me your worries."

found at Taipei Times

margie boule__'urban scout' hopes to prepare us for civilization's collapse

2007-08-20T13:03:00.000-07:00

He calls himself a "flesh-and-blood superhero." He walks the streets of Portland wearing a loincloth, his skin marked by mud camouflage.

If you ask him - and people do - why he's dressed so oddly, he'll tell you he believes the oceans are dying, the globe is warming and civilization will soon collapse. "I'm Urban Scout," he will say. In order to be prepared when the apocalypse comes, "I hunt and gather. I'm living as though it already has happened."

It's partly true. But like more well-known superheroes, Urban Scout is living between myth and everyday reality. Batman hides behind Bruce Wayne (or is it the opposite?) Superman puts on glasses and becomes Clark Kent.

When he removes the mud and puts on regular clothes, Urban Scout becomes Peter Bauer. He's 25 years old. He has no superpowers. But he says he really does want to save the world . . . or at least help people learn the life skills necessary to save themselves.

Most superheroes have a back story, an explanation of how they came to be different. Peter Bauer did not come from another galaxy, get hit by lightning or drink chemicals. "When I was 16," growing up in Northeast Portland, Peter says, "I read a book called 'Ishmael.' "

In Daniel Quinn's novel, a gorilla telepathically educates a writer about the damage humans have done to the planet, in the name of progress. The gorilla proposes a return to a sustainable lifestyle.

"I read that book and thought, 'I don't know how much I'll value a high school diploma in 10 years if civilization destroys the ecosystem,' " Peter says. " 'I should probably learn how to survive and live off the land in a sustainable way.' So I left high school and started training in survival."

His parents weren't pleased. "When you hear 'dropout,' your first image is somebody flipping burgers for a job," Peter says. "But I'm a self-directed learner; I always have been. I followed my passion."

The young man traveled to the East Coast and back, learning skills to survive outside "normal" society. He met others who shared his passion.

"There's a whole underground scene of primitive skill-building booming across the country that people don't know about," he says. "Portland is a large center, but it's happening all over."

He also picked up a term to describe the movement: "rewilding." "It's returning to a more wild or natural state."

Peter was convinced that as many people as possible needed to acquire the skills he was learning. After reading about the power of storytelling, "I decided I wanted to create a hero character. In mythology, heroes provide instruction about how people should live their lives.

"If Michael Jordan is your hero, then you play basketball. We wanted a hero that promoted a sustainable life."

Peter and his friend Tony Deis, founder of Portland's TrackersNW (www.trackersnw.com), created a nonprofit organization called Mythmedia in 2002 to popularize stories with an Earth-friendly message.

"If we want to create a sustainable culture," Peter says, "art can be the Trojan Horse." If they can share their message and the public thinks "it's just a story, just a comedy, just a movie, they won't even notice they're being changed. Or maybe they will, but they'll like it."

Peter and Tony wrote a screenplay for a film about a new superhero: Urban Scout.

As they wrote, it struck Peter that "a good way to create a buzz for the movie was to have a guy walking around in a loincloth." So Peter donned a loincloth and mud, and began "kind of living the Urban Scout character" all over town.

When people approached him with questions, "I'd make up stuff. They'd ask, 'Where do you live?' I'd say, 'Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge.' 'What do you eat?' 'I hunt and gather. I eat things I trap.' It was half fiction, half reality."

One day Peter was walking downtown on the bus mall, in costume, "when a woman said, 'Excuse me, sir, do you have a light?' I said no. Then I realized I had a bow drill in my backpack." A bow drill is a primitive way of making fire, similar to rubbing two sticks together. "I went back to her and said, 'Actually, I do have a light, if you don't mind waiting a minute.'

"I pulled out the thing, and pretty soon there's a crowd around me. A couple minutes later I have a flame. This woman and about five others light their cigarettes and everybody applauds. I'm thinking, 'Wow. There's something to this.' "

Myth began merging with reality as Peter spent more time in costume. "It started feeling normal; sometimes I forgot I was wearing a loincloth. And people started actually calling me Urban Scout," or "Scout" for short, which is what he prefers to be called today. "Everyone called me that, my friends and people I'd never met before," who stopped him on the street and said they'd heard about him.

Peter/Scout was working to pay for food and Internet sites and rent. But when people approached him in costume and he answered their questions, "I was starting to feel guilty for lying" about who he was.

"I thought, what am I doing? This is how I really want to live. This hero character I've made up is the person I want to be. How cool would it be to live this way, and be telling the truth?"

So, last year he made a decision. "I'm going to do this. Maybe not at once, but I'm going to figure out how to live this way." He created a blog (www.urbanscout.org) to record his efforts, and began his transition in April.

He can't do it alone, he says. "It's not about self-sufficiency. It's about communal sufficiency." So, with others, he's begun teaching survival skills and learning new ones. Through TrackersNW he teaches the Urban Scout Sunday School. Last week he organized a seven-day "Rewilding Camp," with classes in such skills as how to make a bow drill, create herbal medicines, forage for greens, hunt with a bow, purify water and treat radiation exposure.

Every evening people gathered around a campfire for "a wild food potluck."

He's already planning another.

Sometimes he has doubts. Sometimes he feels "totally stupid" in his costume. But Scout is committed to acquiring and sharing skills he believes everyone will need someday. "For some reason I keep doing this," he says. "I can't stop myself."

printed in the Oregonian on August 12, 2007

john pattisonfilm reviewthe real dirt on farmer john [film review]

2007-08-20T12:55:00.000-07:00

The first time we meet John Peterson he is physically indistinguishable from the other million-plus Americans who, despite numerous obstacles and incentives to the contrary, cultivate the land as family farmers. He wears a conservative button-up shirt, sleeves rolled past his forearms, tortoise shell glasses, and a blue baseball cap. Peterson walks through his fields, his rubber boots sinking into the mud with a suck. He squats down now and picks up a handful of dark northern Illinois loam. He weighs the soil in his hands like a scale and then takes a bite. He looks up. We see that Peterson is graying at the temples. Squinting against the sun, he is an updated picture of the yeoman farmer Thomas Jefferson envisioned as the bedrock of society. "Mm," Peterson says. "The soil tastes good today."

Two minutes later we see a very different side of John Peterson - or Farmer John, as he is referred to in this documentary, as well as on the cover of his cookbook (subtitle: "The Real Dirt on Vegtables"). He is driving his tractor wearing a feather boa and a dress; a naked woman dances in the field behind him. In another scene, Peterson sits astride his tractor sporting a bowler hat and smoking a cigar. Still later, he gambols about the fields with a lover and a vintage VW beetle, all three dressed as bumblebees. The yeoman farmer is not gone, just obscured by his love for "glitz, glitter, and glamour."

John Peterson runs Angelic Organics, a community-supported farm in Caledonia, in Boone County, 80 miles northwest of Chicago. Under the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model, investors buy "shares" of the harvest, in exchange for which they receive regular shipments (usually once a week) of fresh-picked fruits and vegetables. According to Local Harvest, an organization that connects consumers to local producers, the CSA model can be traced back thirty years to Japan where it was called "teikei," which translates into "putting the farmers' face on food." The first CSA in the United States was probably Indian Line Farm in Massachusetts. But even if Community Supported Agriculture didn't originate in Caledonia, its growing popularity owes much to the success of Angelic Organics and the charisma and surpassing eccentricity of its founder.

The Real Dirt on Farmer John is a fascinating portrait on this unlikely champion for rural America. John is the last in a line of Peterson men who have been tending this land since before the Great Depression. John inherited the farm while he was still in high school, after his father died from diabetes. He attended tiny Beloit College, just eight miles from the farm (he often rushed home between classes to milk the cows). In school, he attracted to himself creative types, who were no doubt drawn to John's easy synthesis of artistic sensibility and country charm. This was the late 1960s and John's farm soon became a kind of commune for hippies, philosophers, painters, writers, and filmmakers. What they all seemed to have in common was a dream of an agrarian idyll, worthy of the Romantics, where they could simultaneously pursue art and agriculture.

The neighbors were suspicious of John and his friends. When the farm crisis of the early 1980s hit the Peterson farm early, suddenly, and hard, many, including some family members, blamed John. (More than a few of these farmers would lose their own land in the years to come - an unwelcome irony.) After a decade of industriousness and growth, he was on the brink of bankruptcy. He owed half a million dollars to friends, banks, and a loan shark. "Debt financed my dreams, then my nightmare," Peterson says in the documentary, which he wrote and narrates. In 1982, John was forced to sell nearly everything he owned. In poignant footage from the auction, which Real Dirt director Taggart Siegel earlier turned into a black-and-white short film called "Bitter Harvest" (1984), Peterson looks on as his neighbors try to outbid each other for his land and equipment. By auction's end, the Peterson farm, which had once stretched across 360 acres, was reduced to just twenty-two. His friends scattered. For several years, deeply depressed, John did not farm. He slept and sorted through the remains of his life. He traveled to Mexico, reading and writing through his pain.

John returned to his farm and then so did some of his friends. Almost immediately, rumors began to circulate - whispers of orgies, drugs, murder, and Satan-worship. Local kids called the Peterson place "Devil Farm." John Edwards, the local sheriff, encouraged the talk of Satanism. He never had proof but he could read livestock like tea leaves. "If it is devil worship, so be it," he says in the film. Just so long as it doesn't "mess with the cattle." (Peterson and Siegel later asked Edwards what he considered "devil worship." In a moment not included in this film - I'm holding out for the DVD special features - Edwards answered, "Reading the Bible backwards.") When one of the buildings on John's property, a meditation lodge he built in his college days, burned to the ground under suspicious circumstances, John left once again for Mexico. This time he was gone for only a year. "My quest was coming to an end," he says. "My farm was calling me home."

Back in Illinois, he started Angelic Organics. When the farm had been 360 acres, the Petersons had planted just four crops; now, at less than five percent of its original size, John planted thirty crops. Spurning chemicals, he weeded the fields by hand. The farm was hit by plagues and pests. ("We had every kind of scourge the Bible mentioned, and then some.") More than once, John wanted to quit, but he kept farming because his eighty-year old mother, who ran the farm's roadside stand, needed something to do. In time, the farm turned a corner. It became sustainable. As the number of shareholders grew, so did the farm. John was able to lease back some of the old spread that had been sold at auction. Angelic Organics started a Learning Center to provide programming for inner-city and low-income youth. The Learning Center also features a rotation of classes on urban beekeeping, cheesemaking, soapmaking, gardening, and vegetarian cooking. The farm now has an army of interns and staff - many of whom are drawn by the same ideals as the hippies of the 1970s.

Angelic Organics operates under the principles of "biodynamics." First developed by the German-Austrian esoteric Rudolf Steiner (the founder of Waldorf education), biodynamics sees a farm as a unified "living organism" made up of billions of individual organisms. Soil health is given the highest priority. When deciding what and when to plant, John takes into consideration the unique "personalities and rhythms" of each crop. The method, which is controversial and sometimes derided as "New Agey" or akin to alchemy, has proven successful on John's farm. At the height of the season, Angelic Organics daily harvests about two tons of vegetables that are delivered to more than 1,200 shareholders. Subscribers, many from Chicago, commonly refer to Angelic Organics as "our farm" - a remarkable statement in an age in which Americans are increasingly reliant on large and impersonal corporations for their food.

At the center of Angelic Organics - and at the center of the film - is the farmer-artist whose life has become a performance piece. Peterson draws the spotlight to himself, and in so doing he calls attention to the thousands of anonymous farmers who lose their land every year - to banks, "Big Ag", and urban sprawl. The Real Dirt on Farmer John is a strange and lovely documentary, equal parts sad and hopeful, hilarious one minute and heartbreaking the next. Boas and bumblebee costumes notwithstanding, Real Dirt never devolves into a vanity exercise. It is the story of the downfall of the family farm and, perhaps, the collapse of civil society. It is also about one possible solution (in my opinion, a quite good one): the community-supported farm. It is an American story and the ending is unknown. Maybe Farmer John is on to something. Maybe now is the time for dramatic displays.

This article found at Burnside Writers' Collective.

robert butler__planting ideas

2007-08-07T14:14:00.000-07:00

Robert Butler admires the persistence and seriousness of one woman’s vision.

Unbowed
Wangari Maathai
William Heinemann, UK, 2006, £17.99

IN 1981, WANGARI Maathai, a forty-one-year-old divorcee living in Nairobi, had so little money that she drove her three children over to her ex-husband’s house and deposited them with him. With no job, no pension and no home, her prospects, as she puts it in her new autobiography Unbowed, amounted to “zero”. All she had left was an idea.

Twenty-three years later, when she had turned the Green Belt Movement into a worldwide cause, had faced down the corrupt and authoritarian government of Daniel Arap Moi, and had brought women into the heart of the Kenyan political process, Wangari Maathai became the first African woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The idea that transformed her life and the lives of so many others was based on a simple premise: “Anyone can dig a hole, put a tree in it, water it, and nurture it.” This one gesture could combat soil erosion and desertification, retain rainwater, provide firewood and restore biodiversity. Maathai’s dream was to plant 15 million indigenous trees: one for every Kenyan. She more than exceeded her own target. So far, 30 million trees have been planted in Kenya alone.

Maathai’s extraordinary life began in 1940 in a mud-walled house with no electricity or running water. The foothills of the Aberdares were rich in shrubs, creepers and trees and each day her mother (who, naturally, had no fridge) harvested food, drew water from the stream, cooked on an open fire and told traditional Kikuyu stories. Her daughter slept on a plank with a bedcover filled with leaves, ferns and grass. As a child, Maathai writes, she grew up without “fear or uncertainty”.

Before the British, the main currency had been goats; after the British arrived, it was cash. By the 1950s, there were 40,000 settlers in the White Highlands, and Maathai’s tall, muscular father (a polygamist, incidentally, like many of his peers) was part of the first generation who left home in search of a job and money. The landscape was changing as rapidly as the social fabric, with indigenous trees giving way to large, fast-growing plantations of eucalyptus and pine.

Maathai’s own education mirrored that shift, taking her from a rural, non-literate society to a primary school with an earth floor and a tin roof. From there, she attended Catholic schools, where speaking English was compulsory. Across Kenya, the collision of cultures was producing violent upheaval: the Mau Mau Rebellion in the early 1950s led to votes for black Kenyans in 1957 and, in 1963, to Independence itself.

By then, Maathai was in the United States, one of 400 scholars who were part of the ‘Kennedy airlift’, which aimed to educate talented young Africans for a post-colonial world. Nearly everything in the States was new: Maathai had never seen escalators, or snow fall, or young men and women holding hands in the street. She drank soda, learned to dance the Twist and experimented with a hot comb on her hair.

She returned to Nairobi in 1966, wearing a red close-fitting A-line dress, and spent her first night at the New Stanley Hotel (unthinkable in pre-Independence Kenya). But a knock-out dress wasn’t all she brought back. There were the examples of JFK, Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement, sit-ins and teach-ins. “There is a persistence,” she writes, “a seriousness, and a vision to America.”

Her marriage to an aspiring young politician proved hard for a young female academic. It was considered acceptable for black politicians to adopt a European style, but their wives were supposed to project the couple’s Africanness. When Maathai became the first woman in East and Central Africa to receive a Ph.D., her critics called her “a white woman in black skin”.

Her post-doctoral research on East Coast fever took her back to rural Kenya where she was shocked to discover rivers muddy with silt and cows skinny from low-nutrient grass. She quickly grasped that the concerns local women expressed about water, energy and nutrition were social and environmentalones. It led her to found the Green Belt Movement with the aim of reversing deforestation and soil erosion.

Unbowed makes clear that the four decades of resolute campaigning have come at a high personal cost: divorce, unemployment, arrests, imprisonment, violent beatings and death threats. Each of Maathai’s campaigns, whether opposing the building of a massive tower block in Nairobi’s Uhuru Park or fighting the land-grabbing in the Karura Forest, has been based on long-term strategies that were built on winning the acceptance of local communities. “Education”, she writes, “should not take people away from the land.”

The approach that Maathai inspiringly outlines across these 300 pages always starts, literally, at the grass roots. From there it grows, through persistence, seriousness and vision. Planting trees was always about planting ideas.

Robert Butler edits www.ashdendirectory.org.uk, an environment and performance website. His most recent publication is The Alchemist Exposed (Oberon, 2007).

found at www.resurgence.org

walt whitman__this compost

2007-08-07T13:50:00.000-07:00

1

Something startles me where I thought I was safest,
I withdraw from the still woods I loved,
I will not go now on the pastures to walk,
I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,
I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.

O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper'd corpses within you?
Is not every continent work'd over and over with sour dead?

Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv'd,
I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through
the sod and turn it up underneath,
I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.

2

Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form'd part of a sick person--yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,
The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on
their nests,
The young of poultry break through the hatch'd eggs,
The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the
colt from the mare,
Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato's dark green leaves,
Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in
the dooryards,
The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata
of sour dead.

What chemistry!
That the winds are really not infectious,
That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which
is so amorous after me,
That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,
That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited
themselves in it,
That all is clean forever and forever,
That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,
That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,
That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that
melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me,
That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,
Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once
catching disease.

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless
successions of diseas'd corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings
from them at last.

satish kumar__point of return

2007-08-07T13:38:00.000-07:00

Pessimism is in fashion. Scientists, environmentalists and climatologists are claiming that collapse is around the corner and civilisation is coming to an end. Book after book tells us that we have passed the tipping point and have reached the point of no return. The skies are saturated with CO2 and the atmosphere is filled with greenhouse gases. We are told over and over that whatever we do, we cannot reverse the rise in temperature or prevent the sea from flooding London! What happened to New Orleans will happen to New York. Global warming is here to stay. The scenario of doom and gloom is expounded by experts and activists alike.

We do not underestimate the severity of the climate crisis. We respect the scientists who are predicting a catastrophic future for humanity. We agree that our present way of life, so dependent on the use of fossil fuel, is hanging on a cliff edge. If we go any further we will fall into the abyss. So the only thing we can do now is to take a step back; let’s call it “the point of return”. We need to return to a way of life that is free from damaging dependence on fossil fuel.

At present we burn billions of barrels of petroleum every day for our food, clothes, homes, heating, lighting, transport and entertainment. This way of life is not only wasteful and unsustainable, but also very dangerous. As Sir Crispin Tickell writes in his article, it took nature 200 million years to create the vast store of fossil energy that we have almost spent in 200 years. The speed with which we are exhausting fossil energy is incredible. Sir Crispin suggests a fundamental shift in values and a radical return to a holistic worldview.

There is a word in Sanskrit for the point of return: it is pratikraman. Its opposite is atikraman, which means stepping outside our natural limits. Atikraman happens when we break the universal law. Returning to the centre of one’s being or to the source of inner wisdom is pratikraman. These two Sanskrit words provide a useful approach to understanding the current human predicament and a possible way out. A profound introspection is needed to examine the state of our psyche; we need to ask, are we meeting our need or indulging our greed? Are we healing or wounding the Earth?

In the context of climate change and global warming, addiction to oil is atikraman and a return to the energy derived from air, water and sun is pratikraman. One way to begin our pratikraman is to stop and put a cap on consumerism. We need a moratorium on motorways and runways. No new homes without insulation. We need to put an immediate freeze on industrialised agriculture everywhere in the world. Once we have put such a complete freeze on the use of fossil fuel, we can start the reduction process and the return journey to renewable resources. If we plan and manage our return journey carefully we should be able to escape the projected meltdown. We were able to repair the hole in the ozone layer by reducing the use of CFCs; we should be able to mitigate the extreme consequences of global warming if we can put an immediate cap on the use of fossil fuel and prepare to make the return journey instantly.

To meet the challenge of global warming, we need to change from being consumers to being artists; we have to take refuge in the arts and crafts. As William Morris advocated long ago, arts and crafts ignite our imagination, stimulate our creativity and bring us a sense of fulfilment. Poetry, painting, pottery, music, meditation, gardening, sculpting and umpteen other forms of arts and crafts can meet all basic human needs; produce beautiful objects to use, which need not require the use of fossil fuel. Human happiness, true prosperity and joyful living can only emerge from a life of elegant simplicity.

We are at the point of return from gross to subtle, from glamorous to gracious, from hedonism to healing, from conquest of the Earth to conservation of Nature, and from quantities of possessions to quality of life. It is ‘cool’ to be an optimist.

Satish Kumar is President of Schumacher UK, Editor of Resurgence and Director of Programmes at Schumacher College.

found at resurgence.org

ben travers__why a tree makes it hard to write about africa

2007-08-06T10:09:00.000-07:00

MALAWI–Trying to write about Africa is a little like negotiating its wild roads: Clichés materialize suddenly and constantly. Bloat-bellied children pop out from hidden paths, and diesel trucks huffing acrid dust onto roadside flowers careen around corners.

It's a continuous process of creative evasion. And it's a process mired in an irritating complication: many of the clichés about Africa – expansive skies, unexpected contrasts, fiery sunsets – are real and ripe for the writing. So why resist?

A case study: Recently, I was cruising up a road that lifts its lucky travellers from the banks of Lake Malawi to the top of the Rift Valley escarpment. An orange-juice-and-grenadine sun spilt itself into the sky before condensing into a warm pink orb so soft you could stare into it. I turned to my Malawian co-worker Sangwani: "Oh my God, look at the sun!"

He smirked. "You've never seen the sun before?"

Somewhere between Sangwani's everyday sun and my Lion King watercolour is the wonderfully terrible rift of cultural difference. It was one of those moments when you suddenly find yourself facing the chasm and are forced to appreciate the gravity of the particular ground you stand on.

Perception perceives itself, and there is space for movement. But clichés hoodwink. They are general truths that, obscuring difference and perspective, also have a vein of falsehood. And so it is no surprise that some writers are finally fed up with the clichés that perpetuate this continent's almost mystic fame and infamy.

A recent article in Granta by Kenyan author and journalist Binyavanga Wainaina entitled "How to Write About Africa" offered an incisively ironic guide to the journalist and would-be travel scribe. It undermines almost every tired African trope conceivable: "Always use the word `Africa' or `Darkness' or `Safari' in your title ... Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated ... And sunsets, the African sunset is a must. It is always big and red. There is always a big sky. Wide empty spaces and game are critical," he writes.

Like Sangwani's subtle retort, Wainaina's piece urges much-needed cultural self-reflection. It asks writers to stop objectifying Africa with imposed identities and stereotypes, and to write difference with honesty. Even if the African sunset might break your heart every time you see it, it is setting over a few million real human stories. Letting go is hard to do.

Have you ever seen a phantom face in a crowd of someone you miss or just left? On that same drive with Sangwani, I was peering at the plants and landscapes streaking past like an impressionist film reel when I had a quietly appalling epiphany. I had been looking longingly for acacia trees. I wanted "Africa Trees," as my friends and I once called them in Kenya. Now and again one would show its flat-topped fame in the scrub and forests by the side of the road, and I could think, "I'm in Africa."

Sometimes I would debate the relative merits of a close call. "Maybe all acacias aren't quite flat?" But they seemed far too sparse to satisfy my longing. A patch of remarkably Canadian cedar forest was decidedly wanting. After spending time in Kenya and a slow, disorienting adjustment to a very regular life in Malawi, I needed the old dream for fuel.

Such is the power of romance and discourse. So time passed, the sun started to set, and Sangwani made a comment that brought me back to life as it is lived.

In fact, he brought me back to Africa.

Ben Travers works for Journalists for Human Rights in Malawi.

found at the Toronto Star

celia w. dugger__kenyan farmers’ fate caught up in u.s. aid rules

2007-07-30T21:42:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK TIMES, Lokwii, Kenya — As the United States Congress debates an omnibus farm bill, it is considering a small change that advocates say could make a big difference to the world’s hungriest people: allowing the federal government to buy some food in Africa to feed the famished, rather than shipping it all overseas from America.

The Bush administration, with odd-bedfellows support from liberal Democrats, has called for allowing the purchase of some food in poor countries to quicken responses to emergencies. But even so, its proposal would not have prevented the paradoxical deepening of hunger here during a long-term project to combat hunger in the harsh, arid reaches of northwestern Kenya.

Families participating in an American-financed irrigation project from 2002 to 2006 were promised payment in corn for clearing the land and digging canals. The Kenyan government objected to the importation of American corn because the country was awash in a bumper harvest that had caused corn prices to plunge.

The result: American officials, prohibited by law from buying the corn locally, could not deliver it. As the impoverished families waited in vain for sustenance from the American heartland, malnutrition among the youngest children worsened and five people died of hunger-related causes.

Ikai Moru, 19, still recalls the hunger that gnawed at her and her mother as they chopped down thorny acacia trees on their tiny plot, hoping one day to reap a bountiful harvest from the parched earth. She watched her mother grow thinner and paler, and finally sicken and die.

“My mother was a very hard worker,” Ms. Moru offered in a brief epitaph.

Through sheer grit, the 2,000 families finished the irrigation system last year and are successfully farming. But long-term projects to help Africa’s rural poor feed themselves are chronically underfinanced, charities say.

Across Africa, the United States is more likely to give people a fish — caught in America — that feeds them for a day than to teach them to fish for themselves. Since last year, for example, the United States has donated $136 million worth of American food to feed the hungry in Kenya, but spent $36 million on agricultural projects to help Kenyan farmers grow and earn more.

And even that small budget for long-term projects in Kenya is expected to dwindle. The United States Agency for International Development, known as Usaid, in seeking to concentrate scarce resources, has dropped Kenya from the list of countries eligible for undertakings like the irrigation project here.

Such efforts are dwarfed by the epic scale of the need. Viewed from a prop plane buzzing like a mosquito overhead, the irrigated land here shimmers as a tiny oasis in a vast, dun-colored landscape.

With the guidance of the Christian charity World Vision, which implemented the project, the families hacked an irrigation system from the barren landscape with machetes, hoes and shovels, clearing 1,000 acres and digging 99 miles of canals along the Kerio River.

Ms. Moru will soon be feeding her four younger brothers and sisters with an abundance of sorghum and corn harvested from their half-acre farm, fulfilling her mother’s dream.

The success is noteworthy, but the families’ sacrifices also illustrate the risks of an American food aid system that is designed to benefit domestic agribusiness and shipping interests and enmeshed in an intricate framework of farm subsidies.

Members of Congress who favor the current system say the support of influential commercial groups is needed to sustain political support for food aid. They warn that ill-timed purchases of food in Africa in times of scarcity could send food prices higher, harming poor consumers.

But critics in Congress contend that the United States could feed far more people more quickly if it could buy surplus food in Africa. It might also help boost the incomes of African farmers, by providing a market for their crops, they say.

The Bush administration is now trying to change the law so that up to $300 million of food can be bought in poor countries during emergencies.

The Senate Agriculture Committee chairman, Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, where growers and landowners got $1.58 billion in corn subsidies in 2005, is advocating a $25 million pilot program to test buying food in poor countries for both emergency and long-term aid.

Even that modest proposal is meeting stiff resistance from farm state legislators. The House Agriculture Committee’s version of the farm bill includes no such pilot. The committee chairman, Collin C. Peterson, Democrat of Minnesota, said of his members,` “They’re still of the mode that this should be American products we’re using our tax dollars to provide them.”

Mr. Peterson’s district got $367 million in corn subsidies in 2005, according to government data analyzed by the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research organization.

Even without the American corn that was supposed to keep them going, the families here were determined to grasp their once-in-a-lifetime chance at fertile plots of farmland. Ms. Moru, 14 years old when construction began, recalled how she and her widowed mother had taken on the acacia trees together. They lopped off branches barbed with thorns, burned the trunks and uprooted the stumps.

“It was the heaviest work we had ever done, but we had no choice,” Ms. Moru said. “It was the only way to get land to plow.”

Their success was all the more extraordinary given this desiccated region’s history as a graveyard for well-intended foreign aid efforts to help the Turkana tribe, mostly nomadic herders, escape punishing cycles of drought, hunger and death.

The participants themselves credit a man who gave them fortitude when they faltered: Daniel Mwebi, a Kenyan engineer who managed the project here for World Vision.

From 1992 to 2004, he lived for much of each year in this remote place, far from his wife and children. He said he had been determined to avoid the mistakes of earlier aid projects that relied on heavy earth-moving equipment and diesel-run pumps that required costly fuel, expertise and maintenance.

So he designed a very basic system and trained the Turkana in the masonry, carpentry and welding skills they needed to keep it running. The earthen irrigation systems — built in two United States-financed projects — are powered only by gravity and the sweat of the local people.

What Mr. Mwebi could not have anticipated, however, was how the workings of the American food aid system would deeply complicate that plan, which Usaid financed for $4 million over five years.

When it came to tiding the families over with American corn, the Kenyan government objected, said Simon Nyabwengi, then World Vision’s Nairobi-based manager of the Turkana project. “They offered a very reasonable option,” he said. “They said we appreciate the project, it’s a good project, but we don’t want you to bring in maize.”

William Hammink, who heads the office of Food for Peace at Usaid, confirmed that the corn was never delivered because the United States was prohibited from buying it in Kenya or paying duties on imports.

“We kept waiting,” said Aemun Imong, a 32-year-old mother of four. “They told us, ‘Food is coming, food is coming.’ But we saw it wasn’t coming.”

The lack of food was particularly dire for children under age 5. World Vision surveys documented that the proportion of them stunted by malnutrition rose to about a third in 2004, from about a fifth when construction began in 2002.

The five people who died were Ms. Moru’s mother, another woman and three children, according to Mr. Lokolonyoi, who said he reported the deaths to district authorities.

Mr. Hammink of Usaid said he did not know what caused the worsening of malnutrition, though he said that provision of corn to the families would most likely have lessened it.

The United Nations World Food Program, with contributions from other nations, was able to obtain 75 percent more corn to feed Africa’s hungry from 2001 to 2005 by purchasing it in Kenya, Zambia and Uganda, rather than shipping it from the United States, Michigan State researchers found.

As the building stretched over years, a portion of the promised beans and vegetable oil from the United States was delivered in 2004, Mr. Mwebi said. Some corn bought in Kenya with private money also came. But it was too late to avert the hunger of the early years.

By 2005, the families each had a half-acre of cleared land to farm. They grew enough food to donate almost 14,000 pounds for the needy still around them, said Hosea Lotir, who heads the local water users’ association.

As they settled down to farm instead of wandering with their animals, the number of children in the Lokwii primary school more than doubled, to 857 — and would have doubled again if it had not closed its admissions, school officials said.

The families here continue to nurture their verdant green spots of progress. Nearby villages are clamoring for irrigation projects of their own, but American officials say they do not expect to have the money to finance them.

As the sun neared its zenith one recent morning, the main canal in Morulem — the site of the first irrigation project — was a cauldron of flailing hoes and shovels. Women glistening with sweat gouged out tons of silt to clear a clogged channel.

On a later shift, it was the men’s turn, and women squatting on the banks hectored them. Don’t just shovel at the sides of the canal, they yelled, dig out the middle of it. That’s the hard part!

“I know what I’m doing,” Julius Edukon barked back. “I don’t need your advice.”

Arupe Eoto, a withered old woman, sought to mollify him with praise and a nod to the tribe’s sternest taskmaster. “You really seem to know what you’re doing,” she told him. “The hunger has taught you well.”

jeremy john__the taming of the verbs (or) fathers and sons

2007-07-30T21:19:00.000-07:00

On all sides we were beset
By Adjectives and Nouns
They pressed against relentless
But us Verbs, we held our ground.

They tried to hold us still
To ponder where and what,
But we quite had our fill!
We held our tractless rut.

Like footprints in the sand
They wooed our formless band
To mold our frenzied act
Like beads encased in hacky-sacks

But we proved
Impossible to ride
Foam stallions of the tide.

We rushed about in frenzy
Like tumult of the gods
And I was one made dizzy
Smashing through the odds.

They were smote
To tiny bits
And someone wrote
An elegy
Entirely of act.

in time we grew insouciant,
We tired of such games
And came to, in fact, resent
The hunting of the frames.

So we lounged primarily
And cast about despairingly
For something else to do.

Our offspring grew and shelved away
The anarchistic glory of the fray
They grew up calm: no dissidence:
Just to argue with our violence.

Our nemesis in cunning drew
Our youth, hissing shape into each ear
And that is how the Adverb grew
Sardonic forms from youthful leer.

And so it was conceived in jest
The Chaos fought the Chaos so
The difference was manifest
Irreversible although

The savage nose relented
The spiting of the face
And totally repented
This difference in case.

But from the rift in formlessness
Crept our fractured foes
Their howling made articulate
Through our transfigured sons.

the Nouns contrived a sort of slant
though Verbless they had Adverbs
and sort of hopped along
like dogs upon one leg.

the Nouns had been like weight machines
when we were buff as titans:
so we were slack from listlessness
and want of forced paroxysm.

Though finite they seemed infinite
As discrete as chemist’s models
Or string that grounds a kite

But I was like an anti-bulwark
My fell unstructured eyes
Would light upon: unwork
Dissolving all their cries

To murk and mucky soup.
Like bursting of a fruit
Decaying they would howl
Stagger acid-eaten foul

Direct to comrades arms
Who packed themselves against
The churning mass of dead
Like hardening cement.

The dead were crusting up
The hordes of finite thrown
Against my savage scream
The wall of bodies groan.

So there I was! Encased!
drowned in walls of slain.

A pawn in their designs,
They used me like a whore

And I was left forlorn
A pithy thing to perpetrate
Mere difference in form,
To set one thing apart from others,
They juxtapose like gladiators!

Sundered from my wings
a solitary feather

A fairy in a cage I feel
Like spraypaint on a wall
But someday I will steal
Away and they will fall

And so our anti-city fell
as they heroic couplets march:
Our sons upon their leashes
And us like tungsten filaments
Encased in amber glass

Our cityless gates were rent
And we were made to flash

On or off as they would beckon
The treachery of sons
contrived to make us reckon
The days, the hours, imprisoned.

Unbuilding our unbuildings
Unworking our unworks
The finite overpowering

The mighty infinite.

Jeremy John is a fellow activist living in Chicago. You can read more of his writing at IJeremiah.org

richard rohr__my problem with religion

2007-07-15T18:40:00.001-07:00

“The corruption of the best is the worst.”
—Latin proverb

“These people make a big show of saying the right thing, but their hearts aren’t in it … so I am going to step in and shock them awake, astonish them, and stand them on their ears.”
—(Isaiah 29:14, Eugene Peterson translation)

A recent study on altruism is supposed to have shown that people affiliated with religion are statistically no less or more loving than people who call themselves unbelievers. In fact, they are often more egocentric, and only a very small percentage is genuinely or heroically altruistic. If true, this is surely disappointing and humiliating for religion, although I must say that it largely matches my own observations. Some of the most naturally generous people I have ever known have been secularized Jews. And they don’t even believe in an afterlife system of reward and punishment! We really have to look at this.

I believe there is a deep dilemma and contradiction at the heart of institutional Christianity. Maybe it is even a necessary one. All I know is that it can only be resolved by authentic inner experience, “prayer,” mysticism, or dare I call it, “spirituality.” I am convinced that religion, in its common cultural and external forms, largely protects the ego, especially the group ego, instead of transforming it. If people do not go beyond first level metaphors, rituals, and comprehension, most religions seem to end up with a God who is often angry, petulant, needy, jealous, and who will love us only if we are “worthy” and belonging to the correct group. We end up with the impossible scenario of a God who is “small,” and often less loving than the best people we know! This supposedly divine love is quite measured and conditional, and yet ironically demands from us a perfect and unconditional love. Such a salvation system will never work, unless we allow an utterly new dimension of love “to astonish us and stand us on our ears,” as Isaiah says above. Unless God is able and allowed to love us unconditionally, we will never know how to do the same.

Most people I know would never torture another human being under any conditions. Yet people believe in a god who not only tortures, but tortures for all eternity. That is bitter vengeance by anyone’s definition. Why would anyone want to be alone with such a testy and temperamental god? Why would anyone go on the great mystical journey into divine intimacy with such an unsafe lover? Why would anyone trust such a god to know how to love those who really need it? I personally know many people who are much more generous and imaginative than this god is. We have ended up being ourselves more loving, or at least trying to be, than the god we profess to believe! Such a religion is in deep trouble—at its core.

Most of my Jewish and Christian friends are very tolerant and accepting of different races, cultures, and religions. They are willing to see good wherever good is to be seen. But not our god. Our god only likes “born again” Americans, and preferably morally successful and “normal” people, who hopefully attend my denominational service on the proper day. (This is easily the quickest growing form of religion in most countries today). Even stingy little Richard Rohr ends up being much more caring, patient, generous, and merciful than Yahweh Sabaoth! How did we get to such absurdity? Especially after Jesus spends most of his ministry affirming those who are wounded, unworthy, not successful, normal, or properly affiliated?

Perhaps you say, “But religion has always taught me that God is love!” Yes, religion “says the right words,” but this god we hear about is never allowed to be loving in the way that we have experienced it from even our middle range friends and lovers. I have experienced immense patience, tolerance, and mercy from many of my friends. They put up with my failures and idiosyncrasies, and eventually know that some of my patterns will never even change. They often accept me as I am, and learn to love me as I am—which eventually almost indirectly changes me! Every good parent knows that unmerited love creates love-in-return. Grace creates gracious people. But not our god! God, and the history of religion, seem to prefer mandates, coercion, blame, and shame to achieve some kind of supposed transformation. This is quite helpful for social order and control of the immature, I really understand that. But it is quite clear to me, in the later years of my life, that God does not love me if I change, but God loves me so that I can change. That is an entirely different agenda.

It often seems that religion’s most common concern is to find out what God does not like, where God is not present, and who God does approve for hating and excluding. Perhaps we are seeking to legitimate our own need to exclude and hate and dominate? Why else would we like a God who succeeds by punishing and always dominates? We have been told in recent years that God does not like homosexuals, God is not present in mosques and synagogues, and that God is not bothered at all by the direct and collateral damage of our necessary wars. Abortion killing is the only killing that is inherently bad because the fetus is “innocent life.” This “morality” will only work if we can dare to think of ourselves as innocent. If legal protection and moral response depends on us being innocent or worthy, then who can be “saved?” What makes the Good News good news is precisely that God loves and defends unworthy and non-innocent life. Otherwise, you and I have little hope. And we can easily justify capital punishment, torture, euthanasia, and even pre-emptive wars against the unworthy ones—which is exactly what we have done. We have become the small god we worship.

I think my central disappointment with much of religion is that it is so stingy in its attitudes, and actually seems to prefer a stingy god. It loves tribalism and group think. It likes to convert others more than change itself. Religions are notorious for excluding, expelling, and excommunicating. It is almost their job description. We actually fear and condemn anything that appears to be a call to mercy beyond our boundary markers. Any universalism (“catholicity”) or inclusivity is deemed dangerous. It feels like abdication of sacred ground, for some reason. We always come up with our fear of others, our fear of contamination, our fear of losing some supposed great truth that we are protecting and living. What fragile people religion has often created.

Monotheism’s great breakthrough was that its God was “Lord of all the earth.” Doesn’t monotheism necessarily prepare us for one pattern, one reality, one world—one love? Yet the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have been—up to now—inclusive only at very small levels. The very people who defend the “Creator of all things” are the last ones who really defend that same creation. Sure, God created all things, but we only have to love and respect small parts of it, which just happens to be my part—“Our people” much more than “all people.” The ecologists, humanists, and some globalists end up being much more “monotheistic” in practice than most Christians I know.

Isaiah loves to speak of “the nations counting as nothingness and emptiness” (40:17), that “all of humanity will see the glory of God” (40:5), and that “my house will be a house of prayer for all the peoples” (56:7), which is later quoted by Jesus. The light revealed to Israel is to be “the light to all the nations” (42:6) because their message offers illumination for everybody and not just for themselves.

Jesus is the universalist par excellance, always making the outsider the hero of his stories, the non-Jews those with more faith and more compassion, the sinners those who are saved, the women better than the men, and as he continually puts it, “the last first”—while the so-called elect and chosen are his constant opponents. Jesus’ clear criterion for one who speaks with authority is simply one who has gone through the belly of the whale experience, or what he calls the “sign of Jonah,” the “only” sign he will give. Membership in a group or correct verbiage is not what gives you authority in Jesus’ understanding, but those who “drink the cup that I must drink and are baptized with the baptism which I must be baptized” (Mark 10:39). This is “the true authority of those who have suffered” and come through the cleansing bath transformed.

Jesus reaches this shocking and scandalous conclusion because his starting place is quite different. He does not begin with any preoccupation with human sinfulness or the weighing of worthiness or unworthiness (that is the preoccupation of the ego). In fact, he just assumes that we are all “sick and in need of a physician.” As he puts it, “I did not come to call the virtuous” (Mark 2:17). Jesus’ starting place is human suffering instead of human sinfulness. How else can you explain his full time ministry of healing, exorcism, affirmation of the excluded ones, the alleviation of human distress and humiliation? He is not naïve about sin, but just recognizes that human sinfulness, “hardness of heart,” is much more a symptom than a cause. Sin largely reveals the problem and he uses it for diagnostic purposes, not for condemnation or exclusion. Sin, for Jesus, is not a set of purity codes or debt codes—which he goes out of his way to flaunt—but inner attitudes which blind and bind us inside of ourselves, and away from communion and mercy.

It is not moral unworthiness that keeps people from God, but moral righteousness and self-sufficiency. It is that simple recognition, which is almost his constant message, which makes Jesus the ultimate, perennial, and radical reformer of religion, and why religious people oppose him. It makes one wonder if such a foundational critique can ever fashion itself into a proper religion at all. I agree with Simone Weil who said “the problem with Christianity is that it insists on seeing itself as a separate religion, instead of a healing message for all religions.” I am afraid that is what will always emerge when you have religion without spirituality, or pious practices without inner experience. The very best thing will then become the very worst thing, and the only way through is to “be awakened and astonished” by a divine love that is of an utterly new dimension.

Fr. Richard Rohr is a Franciscan priest of the New Mexico Province and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque. For more information please visit www.cacradicalgrace.org.

found at www.tikkun.org

world bank__internal memo

2007-07-12T20:19:00.000-07:00

In this internal memo from 1991, Lawrence Summers, then Chief Economist for the World Bank, suggests that dumping toxic industries and materials on Third World countries makes economic sense because the people are poorer and life is cheaper:

Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDC's [less developed countries]?... The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable, and we should face up to that... Under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City... The concern over an agent that causes a one-in-a-million change in the odds of prostate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostate cancer than in a country where under-five mortality is 200 per thousand.

found in the book Stolen Harvest, by Vandana Shiva

michael schulman__jewish holidays for hipsters

2007-07-12T18:40:00.000-07:00

iPurim

Yom Hipper

Pabstover

Ironukkah

found at McSweeney's Internet Tendency

dustin and cara__jubilee africa delegation

2007-07-12T13:41:00.000-07:00

We (Cara and Dustin Pattison) are on the board of Jubilee Oregon, a local chapter of Jubilee USA, an organization and movement that advocates for 100% unconditional debt cancellation for the world's poorest countries. We recently had the privilege of joining some other members of Jubilee USA on a delegation to Kenya and Zambia. In Kenya, we and other "debt activists" met up at the World Social Forum to learn from each other, encourage each other, and to strategize for the upcoming year (2007 is being referred to as the Sabbath Year, 7 years after Jubilee 2000). We, then traveled to Zambia in order to witness, firsthand, the effects of debt cancellation.

We encourage you to check out the final report from the Kenya/Zambia delegation here.

Or learn more about Jubilee here.

Also, you might have heard recently about vulture funds. You can learn more about what they are and how they are preying on countries like Zambia, here.

local__artists that matter

2007-07-11T22:22:00.000-07:00

Re_cultivate's featured local musician of the moment is Mic Crenshaw.

That's "Mic", to be pronounced like the electromechanical device that converts acoustic waveforms to electrical currents allowing one to amplify or record sound.

Mic is a local MC and member of the politically charged hip hop group, Hungry Mob.

After returning from a stay in Rwanda where he'd traveled with the American Friends Service Committee (a Quaker organization working for peace and justice), he formed the Global Family Network, which is currently working on getting computers to community centers in Rwanda and Burundi.

Listen to "Frontline" from Mic's solo EP, Struggluh.
__Play

And here's "Blazin' Trails" from Hungry Mob's new release, 3 Days of Darkness.
__Play

cara pattison__my hollow womb

2007-07-10T22:43:00.000-07:00

My hollow womb
an empty bed
unmade, unkempt
unable to invite
extended guests
to stay between its sheets

Her hallowed womb
Of woven threads
And purple warmth
Could without love
Hold and caress
The smallest cheek

My hollow womb
Where birds resist to nest
And spill their worms
In thistled disarray
Else be unable to
Fly away

Her hallowed womb
Of spongy moss
And tailored twigs
Hold speckled blue
Far from the
Reach of jealous prey

gilad atzmon__jazz and jihad: the discourse on solidarity

2007-07-10T18:01:00.000-07:00

Ladies and Gentlemen,
For many years I considered America as my promised land. As a young jazz musician I was pretty convinced that sooner or later I would end up living in New York City. My Jerusalem was Downtown Manhattan and of course my holy scriptures were the old Blue Note vinyls. My Rabbis were named Coltrane, Bird, Miles, Duke, Dizzy, Bill Evans and naturally, there were many others. I was convinced of this reality for a while, and in fact, it took time before I realized that jazz was far more than mere music. It took a while before I gathered that jazz was something else, that it was actually a form of resistance. Nowadays I realize that jazz is no different from Jihad. Accordingly, playing jazz is my personal Jihad. I do grasp that some people in this room may already find my ideas nostalgic, some may even be convinced that I am either totally deluded or just out of my mind. I can live with it. I do realize that ‘things have changed’, they’ve changed for you as much as they’ve changed for me. I do realize that jazz is not exactly a form of resistance anymore. May I mention that America isn’t my promised land either. In fact, at the time of writing this talk, I wasn’t even sure whether I would be allowed entry into your country. As much as jazz, the classical music of America, has been a call for freedom, America is not a free place anymore. I often argue that before liberating others, it is the American people who should first liberate themselves. I am pretty sure that sooner or later they will.

Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine
I have been participating in some public debates lately concerning the common denominator between Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan. I’m glad to mention that it is rather noticeable that more and more people are now happy to admit what some of us realized years ago. The Palestinians, the Iraqis and the Afghanis are paying a very dear price for the Ziocentric shift within the Anglo-American decision-makers circuit. Seemingly, Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine are just the aperitif for an endless feast. The Ziocons have some big appetite to satisfy. The same lobbies that led America towards this disastrous invasion in Iraq and Afghanistan are now doing whatever they can to push America towards intervention in Iran and Syria. For those few who still fail to realize it, America has been operating officially as an Israeli mission force. It currently fights the last sovereign pockets of Muslim resistance.

Often enough, the true aim of the Zionist lobbies is concealed. Instead the Zionist lobbies promote some righteous phony humanitarian alternatives. The American Jewish Committee (AJC), for instance, is aggressively lobbying against human rights abuse in Iran and Darfur. Since human rights issues are really close to my heart, I find myself wondering whether the Jewish organization shouldn’t rather be concentrating on the colossal war crimes that are daily repeated by Israel in Palestine. Rather occasionally we read about AIPAC equating Iran and Syria with Nazi Germany. Again, someone should remind the Zionist lobbyists that actually it is Israel, the “Jews Only State”, that happens to be the one and only ideological remnant of racist nationalism.

Three weeks ago the Palestine Chronicle made an on-line poll. It asked the following question: Does the Israel Lobby control US policy on the Middle East?’ Needless to mention, no one would even have dared raising such a question five years ago. Now this question is asked repeatedly and as it seems, people aren’t shying off from telling what they really think. 80 percent said yes, 15 percent said no, and 4 percent were not sure. Looking at these results points to the reality many want us to deny. The vast majority of English-speaking Palestinians, Palestinian solidarity campaigners and anti-war activists are now ready to admit that the Israel Lobby controls US policy in the Middle East. We are ready to accept the fact that America operates as an Israeli mission force. America straightens the line with Israeli interests and sacrifices its sons and daughters maintaining Israeli regional hegemony.

But here is an interesting twist. I do not intend to talk to you about Zionised America. I want to believe that the majority of Palestinian supporters and anti-war activists in this room know far more about it than me. I would like to try taking the discussion further. I would like to elaborate on the notion of solidarity and empathy.

Those who are familiar with my writings know that I am not exactly a political scientist. I am not interested in politics and I am even far less interested in politicians who, generally speaking, evoke nothing but a strong sense of repulsion in me.

Rather than politics per se, it is humanity and the notion of humanism that I am interested in. Often I find myself wondering what being in the world may entail. And I better admit it; I am puzzled by the fact that as a society, as a collective bunch of individuals, we have managed to continuously fail to act for the people of Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan. I think that this very collective failure is in itself an alarming message. Thus, rather than looking into the crimes committed by Blair, Bush and the Ziocons, I am becoming gradually interested in the general Western apathy. To be more precise, I would argue that the common denominator between Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine is our collective indifference to a crime that is committed on our behalf and in our names.

As some of us may remember, in the days leading to the doomed illegal invasion of Iraq, the anti-war movement was extremely successful in mobilizing millions of people into protest. We saw them in every capital. They were calling Blair and Bush to withdraw their military plans. Millions of people questioned the sickening Anglo-American intelligence hoax. We could all see through the lies, we could all foresee the emerging crime, we were outraged, and we were convinced that we were doing the right thing. Yet, strangely enough, just four years later, with hundreds of thousands dead, with millions of casualties, with many millions of displaced people. When it is clear that everything went as wrong as it possibly could, when it is openly established that “the danger of Iraq’s WMDs” was nothing but a lie, not very many care about it all anymore. Now when the grim prophecy turns into reality of genocide with no end, we are collectively sinking into apathy. What are the logos behind this collective indifference, why did we lose interest? Why don’t we fight? Why aren’t we a mass movement?

I am not so sure whether I have the exact answers at my disposal, yet, I may be able to throw some light on the issue.

Cultural Clash
I am inclined to admit that the notion of Cultural Clash has indeed some deep meanings especially when it comes to the discourse of solidarity. Naturally, we tend to expect the subject of our solidarity to endorse our views while dumping his own. As much as Blair and Bush insist upon democratizing the Muslim world, we, the so-called left humanists have our own various agendas for the region and its people. In Europe some archaic Marxists are convinced that ‘working class politics’ is the only viable outlook of the conflict and its solution. Some other deluded socialists and egalitarians are talking about liberating the Muslims of their religious traits. The cosmopolitans within the solidarity movement would suggest to Palestinians that nationalism and national identity belongs to the past. Noticeably, many of us love Muslim and Arabs as long as they act as white, post-enlightenment Europeans. In other words, we love Muslims as long as they stop being Muslims.

For those who fail to realize, I may as well mentioned that ‘working class politics’ has nothing to do with Palestine, Iraq or Afghanistan. For those who fail to see the obvious truth, I may as well mention that the industrial revolution has never made it to Gaza. Furthermore, the landslide victory of the Hamas proves beyond doubt that Palestinians are not exactly on the verge of dropping Islam. The million Shias that protested in Najaf last Monday were not exactly secular Arabs either. It is crucial to mention that the Palestinian struggle is a national struggle. The million Iraqi Shias who followed their Cleric Muqtada al-Sadr last Monday were overtly burning American flags while raising their own Iraqi ones as high as they could. In other words, we have good reason to believe that they may hold a consistent and genuine nationalist vision of their conflict and its resolution. Again, to expect Palestinians or Iraqis to become secular, cosmopolitan and working class ideologists is to expect Arabs and Muslims to act as European Marxists. It has noting to do with solidarity; it is actually nothing but projection. We project our solipsistic worldviews on others.

Self-Centered Activism
In Lacanian terminology, love means loving oneself through the other. At large, our notion of solidarity is not much different: we run a constant risk of performing solidarity with ourselves through the suffering of Palestinians and Iraqis. We are at risk of using Palestinians and Iraqis as an approval of our greatness. Alternatively I would suggest that to support the other means to accept otherness, to accept that which you may never grasp. To accept otherness is to let in the unknown and the unfamiliar. To support Palestine is to back the Hamas and to support Iraq is to back the Iraqi resistance and liberation struggle. Simply speaking, to show solidarity is to support and accept other people and their will.

But somehow, instead of doing just that, in most cases we happen to transform our subject of solidarity into a fetish. We self indulge with peace ideologies at the expense of other people’s pain. We instrumentally use the cry of the other as a reassurance of our own goodness. This may explain why so many of us have lost interest in Iraq and Palestine. If all we are interested in is just making love to ourselves, Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iran and Syria are more than replaceable. As it happens, once in a while we may show up in mass demonstrations and then just fade away into apathy for a decade or so.

We Get Away with It
Why do we fade away? Because we get away with it. Legally speaking, America and Britain are responsible for the colossal carnage in Iraq. Bearing in mind the fact that America and Britain are democracies and adding the embarrassing fact that the people of these two ‘great democracies’ have re-elected war criminals, leaves no other option but admitting a collective guilt. To a certain extent, every American and British citizen is liable for the crimes in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon and Afghanistan. Yet this state of criminality means very little to most of us. Americans and Brits at least for the time being simply get away with it. America has lost 3,000 of its sons and daughters in the Iraqi war. As much as I feel sorry for those who lost their beloved, for a superpower the size of America, such a scale of loss is nothing but a negligible casualty rate. In comparison, on D-Day, America lost more or less the same number of combatants in a few hours. In modern warfare, superpowers are mainly engaged in killing innocent people from afar. America doesn’t risk its soldiers. It doesn’t provide occupied Iraq and Afghanistan with even elementary security. Seemingly, the American Generals realize that this would cost lives of their troops. How come the Americans fail to provide security? They simply get away with it. Why are we sinking into apathy? More or less because of the same reason, we get away with it.

A Bridge Too Far
As I am getting to the end of my talk, I may conclude that supporting Muslims and Jihad is probably a bridge too far for most Westerners. The typical Westerner doesn’t know how to bridge the gap between ‘materialism’ and ‘Jihad’ or between ‘self-loving’ and ‘martyrdom’. We happen to regard our lives as a precious gift with an immense value. We submitted to the post-enlightenment notion of individuality and individualism. Succumbing to the school of orthodox rationalism we believe in the ultimate power of reason. We adore science and admire technology. We are libidinally aroused by electronic gadgets.

Seemingly, spirit and beauty means very little to us unless attached to a commodity. In our Americanized reality, existence means market value. Yet, spirit of resistance and beauty are invaluable. I may suggest that we will never be able to fully understand what the Palestinian and Iraqi struggle means to its people unless we liberate ourselves from our narrow material vision of reality. We can never grasp people who sacrifice the ultimate unless we acknowledge that there is far more to life than just life. We can never understand Iraqi insurgency and the Palestinian liberation struggle unless we try to understand what soil may mean to people who refuse to get drunk on Coca-Cola.

The search for the meaning of solidarity is a personal issue. I believe that the meaning of solidarity is probably a very dynamic notion. I am starting to realize that within the current structure of affairs, the left who was pretty effective in mobilizing anti-imperial campaigns for years, may not provide anything for Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq. The left, being a rational, post-enlightenment outlook, has its problem to solve with Islam and religious devotion. I hope that I am wrong here. I can see some isolated islands of left dialectic thinkers are ready to acknowledge that Muslim resistance may as well convey an alternative vision of reality and resistance.

I can speak for myself. For me, Jihad and jazz are very similar forms of commitment. For me, the generations of Black Americans who sacrificed everything for the sake of beauty and resistance were actually engaged in a holy war. For me it was Bird, Max Roach, Dizzy, Coltrane and others who went far beyond the American dream of materialism and market value. Jazz was their voice of freedom. Jazz was their call for a change. Jazz was an ideology, a spirit, and a way of living as well as dying. To be a jazz musician is to fight for beauty, to create and recreate, to construct and deconstruct, to question while knowing that answers may not be available for a while. To play jazz is to get lost deliberately. To play jazz is to leave the self behind.

Gilad Atzmon is a London-based jazz musician, writer and activist. His books have been translated into 22 languages. <gilad.co.uk>

found at adbusters.org

thomas merton said__in conjectures of a guilty bystander

2007-07-10T13:19:00.000-07:00

Democracy cannot exist
when [people] prefer
ideas and opinions
that are fabricated for them.
The actions and statements
of the citizen
must not be mere
automatic 'reactions'
- mere mechanical salutes,
gesticulations signifying
passive conformity
with the dictates
of those in power.

anthony doerr__window of possibility

2007-07-10T08:45:00.000-07:00

Why the Hubble Ultra Deep Field is the most incredible photograph ever taken

We live on Earth. Earth is a clump of iron and magnesium and nickel, smeared with a thin layer of organic matter, and sleeved in vapor. It whirls along in a nearly circular orbit around a minor star we call the sun.

I know, the sun doesn’t seem minor. The sun puts the energy in our salads, milkshakes, hamburgers, gas tanks, and oceans. It literally makes the world go round. And it’s huge: The Earth is a chickpea and the sun is a beach ball. The sun comprises 99.9 percent of all the mass in the solar system. Which means Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, etc., all fit into that little 0.1 percent.

But, truly, our sun is exceedingly minor. Almost incomprehensibly minor.

We call our galaxy the Milky Way. There are at least 100 billion stars in it and our sun is one of those. A hundred billion is a big number, and humans are not evolved to appreciate numbers like that, but here’s a try: If you had a bucket with a thousand marbles in it, you would need to procure 999,999 more of those buckets to get a billion marbles. Then you’d have to repeat the process a hundred times to get as many marbles as there are stars in our galaxy.

That’s a lot of marbles.

So. The Earth is massive enough to hold all of our cities and oceans and creatures in the sway of its gravity. And the sun is massive enough to hold the Earth in the sway of its gravity. But the sun itself is merely a mote in the sway of the gravity of the Milky Way, at the center of which is a vast, concentrated bar of stars, around which the sun swings (carrying along Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, etc.) every 230 million years or so. Our sun isn’t anywhere near the center; it’s way out on one of the galaxy’s minor arms. We live beyond the suburbs of the Milky Way. We live in Nowheresville.

But still, we are in the Milky Way. And that’s a big deal, right? The Milky Way is at least a major galaxy, right?

Not really. Spiral-shaped, toothpick-shaped, sombrero-shaped—in the visible universe, at any given moment, there are hundreds of thousands of millions of galaxies. Maybe as many as 125 billion. There very well may be more galaxies in the universe than there are stars in the Milky Way.

So. Let’s say there are 100 billion stars in our galaxy. And let’s say there are 100 billion galaxies in our universe. At any given moment, then, assuming ultra-massive and dwarf galaxies average each other out, there might be 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe. tThat’s 1.0 X 10 to the twenty-second power. That’s 10 sextillion.

Here’s a way of looking at it: there are enough stars in the universe that if everybody on Earth were charged with naming his or her share, we’d each get to name a trillion and a half of them.

Even that number is still impossibly hard to comprehend—if you named a star every time your heart beat for your whole life, you’d have to live about 375 lifetimes to name your share.

LAST YEAR, A HANDFUL OF ASTRONOMERS met in London to vote on the top ten images taken by the Hubble Telescope in its sixteen years in operation. They chose some beauties: the Cat’s Eye Nebula, the Sombrero Galaxy, the Hourglass Nebula. But conspicuously missing from their list was the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image. It is, I believe, the most incredible photograph ever taken.

In 2003, Hubble astronomers chose a random wedge of sky just below the constellation Orion and, during four hundred orbits of the Earth, over the course of several months, took a photograph with a million-second-long exposure. It was something like peering through an eight-foot soda straw with one big, superhuman eye at the same wedge of space for eleven straight nights.

What they found there was breathtaking: a shard of the early universe that contains a bewildering array of galaxies and pre-galactic lumps. Scrolling through it is eerily similar to peering at a drop of pond water through a microscope: one expects the galaxies to start squirming like paramecia. It bewilders and disorients; the dark patches swarm with questions. If you peered into just one of its black corners, took an Ultra Deep Field of the Ultra Deep Field, would you see as much all over again?

What the Ultra Deep Field image ultimately offers is a singular glimpse at ourselves. Like Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, it resets our understanding of who and what we are.

As of early April 2007, astronomers had found 204 planets outside our solar system. They seem to be everywhere we look. Chances are, many, many stars have planets or systems of planets swinging around them. What if most suns have solar systems?
If our sun is one in 10 sextillion, could our Earth be one in 10 sextillion as well? Or the Earth might be one—just one, the only one, the one. Either way, the circumstances are mind-boggling.

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is an infinitesimally slender core-sample drilled out of the universe. And yet inside it is enough vastness to do violence to a person’s common sense. How can the window of possibility be so unfathomably large?

TAKE YOURSELF OUT TO A FIELD some evening after everyone else is asleep. Listen to the migrant birds whisking past in the dark; listen to the creaking and settling of the world. Think about the teeming, microscopic worlds beneath your shoes—the continents of soil, the galaxies of bacteria. Then lift your face up.

The night sky is the coolest Advent calendar imaginable: it is composed of an infinite number of doors. Open one and find ten thousand galaxies hiding behind it, streaming away at hundreds of miles per second. Open another, and another. You gaze up into history; you stare into the limits of your own understanding. The past flies toward you at the speed of light. Why are you here? Why are the stars there? Is it even remotely possible that our one, tiny, eggshell world is the only one encrusted with life?

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field image should be in every classroom in the world. It should be on the president’s desk. It should probably be in every church, too.

“To sense that behind anything that can be experienced,” Einstein once said, “there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness.”

Whatever we believe in—God, children, nationhood—nothing can be more important than to take a moment every now and then and accept the invitation of the sky: to leave the confines of ourselves and fly off into the hugeness of the universe, to disappear into the inexplicable, the implacable, the reflection of that something our minds cannot grasp.

found at The Orion Magazine

For more Hubble imagery, and to learn more about how NASA assembles Hubble images, click here.

dustin pattison__something to say [pt 1]

2007-07-10T08:20:00.000-07:00

I don’t consider myself much of a writer, though I know one does not have to be a writer to have something to say.

The question, then, is: Do I have something to say?

One can make the argument that unless I have answered this question for myself, I have no business writing anything at all. I'll attempt to counter that statement the best I possibly can (you see, I’m about as good an arguer as I am a writer) with the suggestion that, sometimes the very act of putting one’s thoughts on paper leads an individual to the realization of just how much they do have to say.

A quite personal and timely example of my point is this: In writing the last two paragraphs, I have hit on something that I would like to say.

I would like to say that every person has something to say.

Too often we think that the saying should be left to the professional sayers and that the knowing should be left to the professional knowers when, in fact, just as often, the professional sayers are either journalists who are in some corporate pocket or another, or they are intellectual blowhards who merely desire to be introduced at parties as, “a writer” and the professional knowers usually only “know” what they know because they’ve heard what the professional sayers have to say.

What are the credentials of those allowed to inform your worldview? I don't mean educational or professional credentials, I mean "living" credentials. Henry David Thoreau wrote, “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” Thoreau, of course, was allowed to write this as he was not only a great writer but, among much else, an active resister of the unjust war between America and Mexico, spent time in prison for civil disobedience, and inspired the likes of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

I believe we all, credentials or not, have something to say -- whether we are a tradesperson or a Wall Street trader, a housewife or Speaker of the House, a rock star or a geologist -- because we all, to some extent or another, have lived and each one of us has a story and a point of view that is unique and worth sharing.

(To be continued...)

proverb__native american

2007-07-09T21:32:00.000-07:00

We have not inherited this land from our ancestors;
rather we have borrowed it from our children.

12 Yr. Old, Severn Suzuki, speaks at the UN Earth Summit, 1992

wendell berry__a timbered choir

2007-07-08T20:50:00.000-07:00

Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling,
for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake
of the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted.
Those who had wanted to go home would never get there now.

I visited the offices where for the sake of the objective the planners planned
at blank desks set in rows. I visited the loud factories
where the machines were made that would drive ever forward
toward the objective. I saw the forest reduced to stumps and gullies; I saw
the poisoned river, the mountain cast into the valley;
I came to the city that nobody recognized because it looked like every other city.
I saw the passages worn by the unnumbered
footfalls of those whose eyes were fixed upon the objective.

Their passing had obliterated the graves and the monuments
of those who had died in pursuit of the objective
and who had long ago forever been forgotten, according
to the inevitable rule that those who have forgotten forget
that they have forgotten. Men, women, and children now pursued the objective
as if nobody ever had pursued it before.

The races and the sexes now intermingled perfectly in pursuit of the objective.
the once-enslaved, the once-oppressed were now free
to sell themselves to the highest bidder
and to enter the best paying prisons
in pursuit of the objective, which was the destruction of all enemies,
which was the destruction of all obstacles, which was the destruction of all objects,
which was to clear the way to victory, which was to clear the way to promotion, to salvation, to progress,
to the completed sale, to the signature
on the contract, which was to clear the way
to self-realization, to self-creation, from which nobody who ever wanted to go home
would ever get there now, for every remembered place
had been displaced; the signposts had been bent to the ground and covered over.

Every place had been displaced, every love
unloved, every vow unsworn, every word unmeant
to make way for the passage of the crowd
of the individuated, the autonomous, the self-actuated, the homeless
with their many eyes opened toward the objective
which they did not yet perceive in the far distance,
having never known where they were going,
having never known where they came from.

vandana shiva__the history of poverty

2007-07-08T20:42:00.000-07:00

The cover story of the Time Magazine of March 14, 2005 was dedicated to the theme, “How to End Poverty”. It was based on an essay by Jeffrey Sachs “The End of Poverty”, from his book with the same title. The photos accompanying the essay are homeless children, scavengers in garbage dumps, heroin addicts. These are images of disposable people, people whose lives, resources, livelihoods have been snatched from them by a brutal, unjust, excluding process which generates poverty for the majority and prosperity for a few.

Garbage is the waste of a throwaway society – ecological societies have never had garbage. Homeless children are the consequences of impoverishment of communities and families who have lost their resources and livelihoods. These are images of the perversion and externalities of a non-sustainable, unjust, inequitable economic growth model.

In “Staying Alive, I had referred to book entitled “Poverty: the Wealth of the People” in which an African writer draws a distinction between poverty as subsistence, and misery as deprivation. It is useful to separate a cultural conception of simple, sustainable living as poverty from the material experience of poverty that is a result of dispossession and deprivation.

Culturally perceived poverty need not be real material poverty: sustenance economies, which satisfy basic needs through self-provisioning, are not poor in the sense of being deprived. Yet the ideology of development declares them so because they do not participate overwhelmingly in the market economy, and do not consume commodities produced for and distributed through the market even though they might be satisfying those needs through self-provisioning mechanisms.

Poor
People are perceived as poor if they eat millets (grown by women) rather than commercially produced and distributed processed junk foods sold by global agri-business. They are seen as poor if they live in self-built housing made form ecologically adapted natural material like bamboo and mud rather than in cement houses. They are seen as poor if they wear handmade garments of natural fibre rather than synthetics.

Sustenance, as culturally perceived poverty, does not necessarily imply a low physical quality of life. On the contrary, because sustenance economies contribute to the growth of nature’s economy and the social economy, they ensure a high quality of life measure in terms of right to food and water, sustainability of livelihoods, and robust social and cultural identity and meaning.

On the other hand, the poverty of the 1 billion hungry and the 1 billion malnutritioned people who are victims of obesity suffer from both cultural and material poverty. A system that creates denial and disease, while accumulating trillions of dollars of super profits for agribusiness, is a system for creating poverty for people. Poverty is a final state, not an initial state of an economic paradigm, which destroys ecological and social systems for maintaining life, health and sustenance of the planet and people.

And economic poverty is only one form of poverty. Cultural poverty, social poverty, ethical poverty, ecological poverty, spiritual poverty are other forms of poverty more prevalent in the so called rich North than in the so called poor South. And those other poverties cannot be overcome by dollars. They need compassion and justice, caring and sharing.

Original sin
Ending poverty requires knowing how poverty is created. However, Jeffrey Sachs views poverty as the original sin. As he declares:

A few generations ago, almost everybody was poor. The Industrial Revolution led to new riches, but much of the world was left far behind.

This is totally false history of poverty, and cannot be the basis of making poverty history. Jeffrey Sachs has got it wrong. The poor are not those who were left behind, they are the ones who were pushed out and excluded from access to their own wealth and resources.

The “poor are not poor because they are lazy or their governments are corrupt”. They are poor because their wealth has been appropriated and wealth creating capacity destroyed. The riches accumulated by Europe were based on riches appropriated from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Without the destruction of India’s rich textile industry, without the take over of the spice trade, without the genocide of the native American tribes, without the Africa’s slavery, the industrial revolution would not have led to new riches for Europe or the U.S. It was the violent take over of Third World resources and Third World markets that created wealth in the North – but it simultaneously created poverty in the South.

Myths
Two economic myths facilitate a separation between two intimately linked processes: the growth of affluence and the growth of poverty. Firstly, growth is viewed only as growth of capital. What goes unperceived is the destruction in nature and in people’s sustenance economy that this growth creates. The two simultaneously created ‘externalities’ of growth – environmental destruction and poverty creation – are then casually linked, not to the processes of growth, but to each other. Poverty, it is stated, causes environmental destruction. The disease is then offered as a cure: growth will solve the problems of poverty and environmental crisis it has given rise to in the first place. This is the message of Jeffrey Sachs analysis.

The second myth that separates affluence from poverty, is the assumption that if you produce what you consume, you do not produce. This is the basis on which the production boundary is drawn for national accounting that measures economic growth. Both myths contribute to the mystification of growth and consumerism, but they also hide the real processes that create poverty.

First, the market economy dominated by capital is not the only economy, development has, however, been based on the growth of the market economy. The invisible costs of development have been the destruction of two other economies: nature’s processes and people’s survival. The ignorance or neglect of these two vital economies is the reason why development has posed a threat of ecological destruction and a threat to human survival, both of which, however, have remained ‘hidden negative externalities’ of the development process.

Instead of being seen as results of exclusion, they are presented as “those left behind”. Instead of being viewed as those who suffer the worst burden of unjust growth in the form of poverty, they are false presented as those not touched by growth. This false separation of processes that create affluence from those that create poverty is at the core of Jeffrey Sachs analysis. His recipes will therefore aggravated and deepen poverty instead of ending it.

Economies
Trade and exchange of goods and services have always existed in human societies, but these were subjected to nature’s and people’s economies. The elevation of the domain of the market and man-made capital to the position of the highest organizing principle for societies has led to the neglect and destruction of the other two organizing principles – ecology and survival – which maintain and sustain life in nature and society.

Modern economies and concepts of development cover only a negligible part of the history of human interaction with nature. For centuries, principles of sustenance have given human societies the material basis of survival by deriving livelihoods directly from nature through self-provisioning mechanisms. Limits in nature have been respected and have guided the limits of human consumption. In most countries of the South large numbers of people continue to derive their sustenance in the survival economy which remains invisible to market-oriented development.

All people in all societies depend on nature’s economy for survival. When the organizing principle for society’s relationship with nature is sustenance, nature exists as a commons. It becomes a resource when profits and accumulation become the organizing principle for society’s relationship with nature is sustenance, nature exists as a commons. It becomes a resource when profits and accumulation become the organizing principles and create an imperative for the exploitation of resources for the market.

Without clean water, fertile soils and crop and plant genetic diversity, human survival is not possible. These commons have been destroyed by economic development, resulting in the creation of a new contradiction between the economy of natural processes and the survival economy, because those people deprived of their traditional land and means of survival by development are forced to survive on an increasingly eroded nature.

Access
People do not die for lack of incomes. They die for lack of access to resources. Here too Jeffrey Sachs is wrong when he says, “In a world of plenty, 1 billion people are so poor, their lives are in danger”. The indigenous people in the Amazon, the mountain communities in the Himalaya, peasants whose land has not been appropriated and whose water and biodiversity has not been destroyed by debt creating industrial agriculture are ecologically rich, even though they do not earn a dollar a day.

On the other hand, even at five dollars a day, people are poor if they have to buy their basic needs at high prices. Indian peasants who have been made poor and pushed into debt over the past decade to create markets for costly seeds and agrichemicals through economic globalisation are ending their lives in thousands.

When seeds are patented and peasants will pay $1 trillion in royalties, they will be $1 trillion poorer. Patents on medicines increase costs of AIDS drugs from $200 to $20,000, and Cancer drugs from $2,400 to $36,000 for a year’s treatment. When water is privatized, and global corporations make $1 trillion from commodification of water, the poor are poorer by $1 trillion.

The movements against economic globalisation and maldevelopment are movements to end poverty by ending the exclusions, injustices and ecological non-sustainability that are the root causes of poverty.

The $50 billion of “aid” North to South is a tenth of $500 billion flow South to North as interest payments and other unjust mechanisms in the global economy imposed by World Bank, IMF. With privatization of essential services and an unfair globalisation imposed through W.T.O, the poor are being made poorer.

Indian peasants are loosing $26 billion annually just in falling farm prices because of dumping and trade liberalization. As a result of unfair, unjust globalisation, which is leading to corporate, take over of food and water. More than $5 trillion will be transferred from poor people to rich countries just for food and water. The poor are financing the rich. If we are serious about ending poverty, we have to be serious about ending the unjust and violent systems for wealth creation which create poverty by robbing the poor of their resources, livelihoods and incomes.

Jeffrey Sachs deliberately ignores this “taking”, and only addresses “giving”, which is a mere 0.1% of the “taking” by the North. Ending poverty is more a matter of taking less than giving an insignificant amount more. Making poverty history needs getting the history of poverty right. And Sachs has got it completely wrong.

found at zmag.org.
photo by Cara Pattison