Mendocino Noir – Crimes Large and Small

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From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah

July 31, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

Bruce Anderson, Editor and Publisher of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, has just published Volume Two of the Mendocino Papers, Mendocino Noir, available now at local independent bookstores.

Included stories:

•The Fort Bragg Fires
•Vincent J. Sisco: Willy Loman as arsonist
•Who Burned Fort Bragg and Why
•Killed Without Dying
•The Victim Didn’t Smoke
•Nothing Sadder Than A Young Person Dying For No Reason
•The Biggest Little Crook In Ukiah
•The Hunter As Prey
•Tree Rustling, Fort Bragg Style
•The Great Fort Bragg Witch Hunt
•Naked Woman In The Side Pocket
•The Poison Sandwich
•Dr. Wonderlick and His Lugar
•Monica’s Walk on the Wild Side
•Deputy Gander’s Halloween Party
•No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
•Where Are They, Jimmy?
•One Murder, Four Deaths
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The New Feudalism

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From Thom Hartmann
Excerpts from Threshold (just published)

July 31, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

Emerson told us, in his lecture “Angloam,” that in America “the old contest of feudalism and democracy renews itself here on a new battlefield.” Perhaps seeing our day through a crack between the skeins of time and space, Emerson concluded, “It is wonderful, with how much rancor and premeditation at this moment the fight is prepared.”

Feudalism?

Let’s be blunt. The real agenda of the new conservatives is nothing less than the destruction of democracy in the United States of America. And feudalism is one of their weapons.

Their rallying cry is that government is the enemy, and thus must be “drowned in a bathtub.” In that, they’ve mistaken our government for the former Soviet Union, or confused Ayn Rand’s fictional and disintegrating America with the real thing.

The government of the United States is us. It was designed to be a government of, by, and for We the People. It’s not an enemy to be destroyed; it’s a means by which we administer and preserve the commons that we collectively own.

Nonetheless, the new conservatives see our democratic government as the enemy. And if they plan to destroy democracy, they must have something in mind to replace it with…

What conservatives are really arguing for is a return to the three historic embodiments of tyranny

Accused of Hypocrisy – Letter to the Editors

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From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
(original letter below)

July 30, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

In a democracy, one should always appreciate opinions that engage the debate, are well articulated and offered with passion, even when in opposition to one’s own. And I do. In the July 30th issue of the UDJ, I am taken to task for being hypocritical for opposing the Masonite Monster Mall while at the same time being “in favor of the City of Ukiah spending redevelopment money to purchase the remaining acres of land out near the airport” for retail development. This, he wrote, had him “rolling on the floor in laughter.” Thereafter he went on at great length, taking up two full columns, describing my positions and how wrong all my letters to the editor are.

However, he misinterpreted a letter that simply pointed out that the argument for the Monster Mall so we could have a Costco was a false argument and took that to mean that I supported having another Big Box store. Not true. He can get up off the floor now.

He failed to include letter(s) of mine that could have saved him all that effort. For example, in response to the UDJ supporting the purchase of that land, I wrote “This seems like nothing but dumb growth based on dumb oil… which is destroying nature and community.”

The Great Game

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From JIM HOULE
Redwood Valley

July 30, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

The Editor of Obama-Watch.US, Jim Houle, spent three weeks in June and July traveling across Central Asia along the legendary Silk Road visiting Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and China’s Xinjiang Province where the Uighur (wee-gur) people predominate. These Turkic-speaking people have been the “Stopper in the Bottle” between Europe, Russia, China and India for over a thousand years. The Gateway to Elsewhere, it has seldom, at least until now, been desired for its own value but was seen as a portal to the riches of India for the Russians and to the markets of Europe for the Indians and Afghanis. In the 20th century, with the discovery of oil and gas around the Caspian Sea, the collapse of the Soviet Hegemony, the withering away of British majesty, and the United States’ global domination of world energy resources, all has changed – or has it changed at all? Perhaps the “Great Game” by Peter Hopkirk, that amazing story of the 19th century battle over these remote kingdoms stumbles on, with Putin replacing the Czar and Obama taking Queen Victoria’s role.

Obama sees Central Asia as an important element in his program to expand ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’, assure the supply of oil and gas, and the continued sustenance of the Dollar as the world reserve currency. Petroleum (oil and gas) has since 1971 replaced gold as backing for the dollar and our huge military machine has taken on the role of enforcer. Should people decide to pay for their oil barrels with some other moolah, or a ‘market basket’ of currencies, the value of the dollar would drop like a stone. Our indebtedness would soon crowd us off the world stage. We could no longer print oil-soaked dollars

Reading between the lines (with video)

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County
(video at end of article)

July 30, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

My, my, so many angry and insistent letters to editors, angry and insistent blogs. I say I don’t read or listen to the commercial media stuff anymore because it is all fluff. But, sometimes I can’t seem to stop myself. We stopped for some coffee on the way to an appointment the other day and there was a New York Times, July 22, laying waiting to fill my time. I flip through it; nothing; nothing. Then, I reach the editorial, which glares at me “Climate Loopholes.” I also subscribe to email news notifications from Mother Jones. Shortly after reading the article, that magazine pointed me to Rachel Morris’s “It’s 3 a.m. Do You Know Where Your Climate Bill Is?”.

The increasingly infamous Waxman-Markey climate change bill was approved by the House and is on its way to the much tougher Senate. Half of the electricity used in this country is generated by extremely dirty coal-fired generators. Thanks to coal-state representatives, the bill imposes no standards on existing generators and, more amazingly, removes these plants from EPA Clean Air Act oversight.

A second problem with this bill involves carbon dioxide cap and trade. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, as you may have noticed, have recently been reporting immense profits. These profits didn’t come from loans, but by selling insurance in the form of hedge funds,

365 Books Worth Reading: #1 Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals

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From Sharon Astyk
Casaubon’s Book

July 30, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

I’ve got a lot of books I’d love to review at length, but somehow there’s always something more urgent to do.  So I’ve decided that I’m going to try and post regular (I doubt it will be every day…no, I’m sure it won’t be every day) short book reviews of a paragraph or so until I’ve done 365 of them.  I know it’ll probably take me a lot longer than a year, but at least it is a way to get conversations going about my favorite books without having to take a month to write about them.

I’m not promising that every single one will be on a relevant topic to the main themes of this blog – in fact, again, I promise they won’t be.  Everyone needs good escapist or imaginative literature sometimes, or simply to learn everything they can about something interesting, even if it has no direct application.  Besides, it is very rare that I find I read something truly great and never use it again – it always shows up somewhere in my thinking.

Ok, the honor of being the very first book worth reading goes to Saul Alinsky’s superb book Rules for Radicals→ – I picked it up at my school library when I was 14,

Local Currency in Lewes, England

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From Transition Towns
Lewes, East Sussex, UK

July 29, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

The Lewes Pound is a creative yet practical way for local people to make money work for Lewes. The Lewes Pound is essentially a voucher or token that can be traded locally as a complementary currency and used alongside pounds Sterling.

Money spent locally circulates within, and benefits the local economy. Money spent in national chains doesn’t. The Lewes Pound encourages demand for local goods and services. In turn this builds resilience to the rising costs of energy, transport and food.

The Lewes Pounds is driven by three main considerations:

* Economic: According to the New Economics Foundation, money spent locally stays within the community and is re-used many times, multiplying wealth and building resilience in the local economy.
* Environmental: Supporting local businesses and goods reduces the need for transport and minimises our carbon footprint.
* Social: By spending money in local outlets we can strengthen the relationships between local shopkeepers and the community. It also supports people finding new ways to make a living initiatives

The Lewes Pound also benefits shoppers by creates stronger and more local shops, increasing a sense of pride in our community, decreasing CO2 emissions and increasing economic resilience.

From farms to Northern California hospitals: Healthier food for healthier patients

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Chef Deane Bussiere shows off the yellow squash that he and staff are growing in the quarter acre garden at the hospital on Thursday, July 16, 2009. Dominican Hospital, in Santa Cruz, is using organic, sustainably sourced foods and has a garden where it grows organic vegetables and herbs. Chef Deane Bussiere, oversees the kitchen and garden.

From San Jose Mercury News

July 29, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

Nothing spells patient satisfaction like free-range roast chicken after triple bypass surgery.

Throw some organic potatoes mashed with hormone-free milk and locally grown arugula salad onto the tray and hospital food may soon escape the culinary sneers it usually shares with TV dinners and airline meals.

Such bedside menus may not be far off for Northern California hospitals that are harnessing their buying power to demand changes in how food is grown and distributed. They’re part of a growing alliance of doctors and food advocates who say organic, fresh food is healthier, and local, sustainable food practices reduce pollution and contamination, which will ultimately lead to fewer health problems.

“What people eat is one of the most important determinants of their health,” said Dr. Preston Maring, an obstetrician at Kaiser Permanente who started the movement to put farmers markets outside the hospitals.

Keep reading at San Jose Mercury News→
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A Blog is a Little First Amendment Machine

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From Jay Rosen
The Huffington Post

July 28, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

When in the eighteenth century the press first appeared on the political stage the people on the other end of it were known as the public. Public opinion and the political press arose together. But in the age of the mass media the public got transformed into an audience.

This happened because the mass media were one way, one-to-many, and “read only.” When journalism emerged as a profession it reflected these properties of its underlying platform. But now we have the Web, which is two-way (rather than one) many-to-many (rather than one-to-many) and “read-write” rather than “read only.”

As it moves toward the Web, journalism will have to adjust to these conditions, but a professionalized press is having trouble with the shift because it still thinks of the people on the other end as an audience–an image very deeply ingrained in professional practice.

I’m going to tell you some stories that I think illustrate the disruptive effects that blogging has had, and the democratic potential it represents. But let me say at the outset that, though a blogger myself, I am not a triumphalist about blogging. I do not think that the age of fully democratic media is suddenly upon us because we have this new form. There is a long way to go if we are to make good on its potential.

Now to my five stories, which are I offer more as parables, even though they are, of course, true to the facts.

Keep reading→

The End of the Beginning of the Collapse

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From DailyKos
by mwmwm

July 28, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

The present is not what the past was; the near future is by no means what the recent present was. We have reached a tremendously complex, tremendously traumatic point in human history… I think there’s plenty of evidence that that entire community is based on a failed model: a failed economic model, a failed environmental model, a failed energy model, a failed sustainable-lifestyle model.

This morning, I started my day with a coffee cup and DailyKos, intrigued by the internicene conflict between the estimable bonddad (who has informed me countless times), and bobswern (who has also informed me countless times), each of whom posted diaries disagreeing with each other (Bonddad, bobswern) about whether we are seeing “the bottom” of the recession, and whether a gloomy or merely less-gloomy future awaits us).

Their analysis was fascinating; less fascinating was the implicit and explicit sniping between adherents (and authors) to the different philosophies and assumptions of the others.

But in both analyses, there was something seriously lacking.

Both presume that “the economy” is something human-created, and independent of world-scale limits. Both presume that the realities of the current mess (and implicitly, the likelihoods of the next five years) have a relationship to the past’s realities, either by their use of graphs, or their use of employment rates.

Apocalypse Then: Earth Abides – Book Review

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Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
Reviewed by Marian Powell

July 27, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

As for man, there is little reason to think that he can in the long run escape the fate of other creatures.

The quote above sounds like it was written today. Yet, it’s not from a doomsday article in a current magazine. That quote is from a novel published in 1949.

Can a novel over a half a century old speak to current concerns? The answer is yes. Earth Abides is probably more relevant now than when it was written. In 1949, a story about a new disease that wipes out the human race would have been one more science fiction story. Now, with AIDS progressing around the world and a dozen other newly discovered diseases such as Ebola lurking, ready to erupt, the idea is no longer just science fiction but a current concern. Another comment from the opening chapter is that just because something has never happened does not mean it cannot happen. In other words, just because the human race has never been wiped out by a plague, doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen tomorrow.

This may sound like the novel is a polemic or a tract. It is not. It is a good, solid end-of-the-world yarn.

Ish, a young graduate student, spends several weeks in the mountains of California, doing research for his thesis. He has deliberately cut all communication with the outside world, not even listening to the radio. He wants to focus on his work and he is a man who enjoys being alone.

The scene when he drives out of the mountains to return to San Francisco is still creepily effective. Nothing is wrong except no other car is moving on the highway and the radio picks up nothing but static.

Evil Syndicated

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From James Howard Kunstler
Author of The Long Emergency

July 27, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

By now, everyone in that fraction of the world that pays attention to something other than American Idol and their platter of TGI Friday’s loaded potato skins knows that Goldman Sachs has been caught at another racket in the stock market: front-running trades. What a clever gambit, done with the help of the markets themselves – the Nasdaq in particular – in which information on trades is held back a fraction of a second from public view, while the data is shoveled to the computers of privileged subscribers who can execute zillions of programmed micro-trades before the rest of the herd makes a move. This allows them to vacuum up hundreds of millions of dollars by doing absolutely nothing of value. The old-fashioned method used by brokers was called “churning,” in which stocks were bought and sold incessantly (by phone) from the portfolios of inattentive clients merely to generate commissions. In any sensible society – i.e. a society with an instinct for self-preservation – it would be against the law and the people doing it would be sent to prison.

I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve got to think that the actions at the Nasdaq end – shoveling the data to the privileged subscribers a fraction of a second early – is patently illegal in the first place, since the whole purpose of an exchange is to create a fair trading space. Where both parties are concerned, it should amount to a plain vanilla criminal conspiracy to commit stock trading fraud. Maybe the larger question is: since when did we become a society lacking the instinct for self-preservation – that is, a society bent on suicide? Or maybe the question is better put to Goldman Sachs’s CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

Since this racket was made public, there has been chatter all over the Web about how angry the American public is about Wall Street in general, and increasingly about Goldman Sachs in particular. Keep reading→

Contrails and Man-Made Clouds Change Climate, Harming Agriculture

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From ROSALIND PETERSON
Redwood Valley

July 27, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

It is sometimes difficult to separate out fact from fiction and beliefs. It is even more difficult when United States citizens live under a government which classifies as “secret” more and more information with each passing day. In addition, many government agencies, scientists, and researchers decide that certain information should not be given to the public because they know that the public would say “NO,” to many of their experiments or actions.

Thus, unraveling exactly why jet contrails began to abnormally persist and turn into white haze and man-made clouds, since the late 1980s, has been difficult…requiring hours of research into government documents, university studies, and following every lead to find answers to these questions. What we do know and can prove has broad implications for human health, agriculture crop production, the health of the earth’s pollinators, lack of photosynthesis (direct sunlight needed for all trees and plants to grow and produce crops), and climate change. The following is a brief history of persistent jet contrails and man-made clouds:

1 – Jet engine produced contrails now may persist and turn into white haze and man-made clouds. This change began to be noticed across the United States, in the late 1980s, when reports began to be published regarding the unusual persistence of contrails, captured in pictures and videos that began to reflect their presence. Increasingly, as time passed, more and more reports and questions regarding the number and type of jets leaving persistent jet contrails surfaced. (5)

2 – Thousands of pictures and videos were placed on the Internet and in local newspapers, with questions about the different types

The Best Place One Could Be on Earth – Alice Walker

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Alice Walker with her power plant, collard greens (from her website)

From ALICE WALKER
Anderson Valley
The Electronic Intifada
via Common Dreams

July 27, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

Last March, poet, novelist and feminist Alice Walker joined a delegation organized by Code Pink, to travel to the Gaza Strip just weeks after the 22-day Israeli bombardment and invasion. Walker, globally acclaimed for her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Color Purple, had also traveled to Rwanda, Eastern Congo and other places where she witnessed cruel and barbaric behavior that left her speechless. In an essay on her blog entitled “Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters “the horror” in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/Israel,” Walker recounts the stories of the people she met, and offers a lyrical analysis that ties their oppression and struggles to what she and her community experienced growing up in the violence and fear of the segregated American South. The excerpt below begins with her arrival in Gaza after a long overland journey through Egypt.

Coming “home” to Gaza

Rolling into Gaza I had a feeling of homecoming. There is a flavor to the ghetto. To the Bantustan. To the “rez.” To the “colored section.” In some ways it is surprisingly comforting. Because consciousness is comforting. Everyone you see has an awareness of struggle, of resistance, just as you do. The man driving the donkey cart. The woman selling vegetables. The young person arranging rugs on the sidewalk or flowers in a vase. When I lived in segregated Eatonton, Georgia I used to breathe normally only in my own neighborhood, only in the black section of town… Keep reading at The Electronic Intifada→
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Ukiah Monster Mall – A Mega Financial Fiasco

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From TOM ANDERSON
Ukiah

Letter to the Editor
Ukiah Daily Journal

July 26, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

Developers Diversified Realty didn’t show much savvy when it failed to change the Masonite site’s zoning before it closed escrow. Seasoned commercial developers would have done that; DDR did not.

Now it is stuck for the purchase price and thrashing around to fix things.

Its timing was not the best either.

“The commercial real estate bomb is ticking,” said Rep. Carolyn Mahoney (D-N.Y.), who chairs Congress’ Joint Economic Committee, in opening remarks to her panel on July 5.

Testimony to the panel was that today’s roughly $6.7-trillion commercial real estate market is crippled with about $3.5 trillion of debt. Money to pay the debt is evaporating as mall vacancy rates rise to 10 percent, the highest since 1992.

DDR’s vacancy rate this May was about 9.5 percent. (That’s why it has applied for a federal bailout.)

With many commercial properties worth one-half their peak 2006 value, banks have turned off the tap for commercial real estate refinancing.

The crisis is far from over.

Commercial real estate is “decaying and getting worse,” said Victor Canalog, a director of research for Reis, Inc., the nation’s leading commercial real estate analysis firm. Canalog said he did not “foresee a recovery in the retail sector until late 2012 at the earliest.”

“Given the depth and magnitude of the recession,” he added, “you can argue that we are facing a storm of epic proportions and we’re only at the beginning.”

Those are the mega-problems now dogging DDR’s Mendocino mega-fiasco.

The mall simply cannot and will not happen as promised.

If Proposition A passes, expect a vacant lot at the Masonite site for many years to come.

And the last thing we need is an abandoned project in our county seat and largest city.
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New, Much Better Alternatives to Dinosaur Monster Malls – Bright Green Retail

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From Worldchanging.com

July 22, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

Right now, many of us in the developed world shop by driving to large chain stores — this is especially true in North America, but has become common elsewhere too.

The problem is, this way of shopping adds an enormous ecological burden to all the goods we buy: not only do we burn gas getting to the store and back, but the building and operation of that store and its parking lot have a huge impact; the supply chain that keeps huge stores stocked with masses of various kinds of goods adds more impacts; while the packaging and sales presentation of the goods we buy tops it all off with more energy and materials waste. From the lighting to the loading docks, the freezer cases to the shopping carts, conventional retail is unsustainable.

Retail today has other costs as well. Big chain stores are not generally known for their excellent labor practices, meaning that part of the savings we get by shopping in them comes from the mistreatment of the people who serve us while we’re there. The kinds of volumes that it takes to stock big box chain stores means that these stores will only buy things in huge orders, often from the lowest-cost big provider, which often means supporting sweat shop work conditions, factory farmed food or toxic knock-off products. Furthermore, because the backstories of the objects they sell is often so atrocious, big chain stores are often at the forefront of fighting transparency and labeling laws…

Not all chains are as bad as this, of course, [b]ut there are real limits to how much the model of big box, auto-dependent chain stores can be improved…

[Instead... Webfronts; Flexible Spaces; Micro-commerce; Backstories and Display Transparency; Delivery; Drop Shops and Reverse Supply Chains]… Keep reading at Worldchanging→

Why Are We Wasting Time?

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

July 24, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

I’ve nearly given up reading news and commentary of any kind. I hardly ever visit the usual widely read Internet commentary blogs or magazines of any stripe. There are only three notable exceptions: Ukiah Blog, the Ukiah Daily Journal letters to the editor, and the Anderson Valley Advertiser for Bruce Anderson’s commentaries and to get a laugh about the latest Supervisor foibles.

Surely, then, I’m not informed? I very much disagree. If you could see the stack of books surrounding us everywhere, you would see what nonsense that is.

Two of the latest books that have come my way are “Self Organization in Biological Systems,” edited by Camazine et al and published by Princeton, and “Navigating Social-Ecological Systems: Building Resilience for Complexity and Change,” edited by Berkes et al and published by Cambridge. Each includes reports of detailed studies and assume sophisticated understanding of ecology and other areas. They have much to say regarding our situation, but I’d bet no one in a policy making context will ever read them.

I don’t write these things to put you down in any way. My purpose is to buttress my feelings that almost everything that is dumped onto us by the media, Internet blogs, corporation marketing, and especially governments of all levels is superficial tripe. If we have a feeling for history, such as Howard Zinn documented so well

The Great Tax Con Job – Thom Hartmann

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From Thom Hartmann

July 24, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

Republicans are using the T-word – taxes – to attack the Obama healthcare program. It’s a strategy based in a lie.

A very small niche of America’s uber-wealthy have pulled off what may well be the biggest con job in the history of our republic, and they did it in a startlingly brief 30 or so years. True, they spent over three billion dollars to make it happen, but the reward to them was in the hundreds of billions – and will continue to be.

As my friend and colleague Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks pointed out in a Daily Kos blog recently, billionaire Rupert Murdoch loses $50 million a year on the NY Post, billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife loses $2 to $3 million a year on the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, billionaire Philip Anschutz loses around $5 million a year on The Weekly Standard, and billionaire Sun Myung Moon has lost $2 to $3 billion on The Washington Times.

Why are these guys willing to lose so much money funding “conservative” media? Why do they bulk-buy every right-wing book that comes out to throw it to the top of the NY Times Bestseller list and then give away the copies to “subscribers” to their websites and publications? Why do they fund to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year money-hole “think tanks” like Heritage and Cato?

The answer is pretty straightforward. They do it because it buys them respectability, and gets their con job out there. Even though William Kristol’s publication is a money-losing joke (with only 85,000 subscribers!), his association with the Standard was enough to get him on TV talk shows whenever he wants, and a column with The New York Times. The Washington Times catapulted Tony Blankley to stardom.

Rural Matters

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From SHEILAH ROGERS
Redwood Valley

July 23, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

From the RUPRI Center for Rural Entrepreneurship: Regional Technology Strategies and its partner in the Alliance for Creative Advantage, Mt. Auburn Associates, has recently completed a series of reports in Arkansas, Colorado, Wyoming and North Carolina that show how creativity and creative enterprises help rural regions develop their economies more effectively.

By the creative economy, RTS strays from the pop-economic notion of the “creative class” that too often sees metropolitan areas, with their high concentration of people with advanced degrees, as the only places where creativity is taking place.  Applying the creative economy to a class of workers rather than to an actual set of industries misses a crucial component of economic development. Rather, we define “creativity” to a select group of businesses that produce and distribute goods and services and for which the aesthetic, intellectual and emotional engagement of the consumer adds value to products in the marketplace. This can range to traditional arts and crafts made by residents to high-end manufactured products that depend on design for their appeal.  In particular, we see the creative economy being made up of:
•    Individual artists who are the talent and source of creativity
•    Non-profit cultural institutions and commercial businesses that take the original ideas of these artists

and produce creative goods and services
•    The businesses and institutions that bring the creative products to the marketplace
•    The institutions and commercial businesses that depend on creative talent to survive and prosper
•    The support system that nurtures and sustains the creative economy

Ukiah Farmer’s Market Saturday 7/25/09

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Sitka, Alaska

From SCOTT CRATTY
Ukiah

July 23, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

Friends of the Farmers’ Market,

Greetings.

We should have another market not to be missed this Saturday. Don Willis will be playing.

At about 10 you will want to meet Jini and Charlie will start a shopping expedition through the market to gather ingredients for their salad dressing cooking demonstration at about 10:30. It is the perfect way to kick-off National Salad Week.

Other happenings this Saturday include a 10:30 reading for children by Ukiah Children’s Librarian Ina Gordon, a nutrition information booth by the Ukiah Unified School District, a table benefiting our local quilt guild, a table
with information about water conservation and a table at which you can get advice from our local UC Davis Master Gardeners.

I also expect at least one new vendor.

In other news, please consider attending the Fifth Annual Pure Mendocino Organic Celebration. It is the Premier Organic Food & Wine Adventure in the Known World, and it happens right here. There are two events to enjoy:

A Seminal Moment?

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From David Kurtz
TPM Blog

Just to mention something that is obvious, but hopefully not overlooked, i.e., if this country cannot pass a bill which insures that every citizen has access to medical care, which every developed country has managed to do (and got done many many years ago), there is something very fundamentally and structurally wrong with this country.

Such an event, in my mind, would confirm that we live with a completely corrupt and dysfunctional form of government. Forty nine states, each with bicameral legislative bodies, some of which have distinguished themselves recently with unabashed levels of incompetency and cluelessness. Then, graft a federal government over that, which is also bicameral, the non-representative portion of it being filled with officials who are certifiable morons and/or who are bought and sold like whores by wealthy contributors.

Talk about a Waterloo.

This is a defining moment in our history. Do we fulfill our supposed status as a “shining city on a hill” or continue our long slow decline into a second rate oligarchy?

I am not one prone to hyperbole.

I believe this to the depths of my soul.
Thanks to Janie Sheppard
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What about The Transition Initiative?

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From Orion Magazine

July 22, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

Changing the scale of change

A while ago, I heard an American scientist address an audience in Oxford, England, about his work on the climate crisis. He was precise, unemotional, rigorous, and impersonal: all strengths of a scientist.

The next day, talking informally to a small group, he pulled out of his wallet a much-loved photo of his thirteen-year-old son. He spoke as carefully as he had before, but this time his voice was sad, worried, and fatherly. His son, he said, had become so frightened about climate change that he was debilitated, depressed, and disturbed. Some might have suggested therapy, Prozac, or baseball for the child. But in this group one voice said gently, “What about the Transition Initiative?”

If the Transition Initiative were a person, you’d say he or she was charismatic, wise, practical, positive, resourceful, and very, very popular. Starting with the town of Totnes in Devon, England, in September 2006, the movement has spread like wildfire across the U.K. (delightfully wriggling its way into The Archers, Britain’s longest-running and most popular radio soap opera), and on to the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. The core purpose of the Transition Initiative is to address, at the community level, the twin issues of climate change and peak oil—the declining availability of “ancient sunlight,” as fossil fuels have been called. The initiative is set up to enable towns or neighborhoods to plan for, and move toward, a post-oil and low-carbon future: what Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Initiative, has termed “the great transition of our time, away from fossil fuels.” Part of the genius of the movement rests in its acute and kind psychology…

Keep reading at Orion Magazine→

See also Ukiah’s Transition Timeline→
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The Aim is Joy

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From GENE LOGSDON
Upper Sandusky, Ohio

July 22, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

I’ve taken lovely vacations over the years, but the latest one, at an exclusive hideaway we were lucky enough to know about, had to be the best ever.

My idea of a good vacation is one that combines natural wonders with good food (the greatest natural wonder of all), hopefully convenient to exhibitions or programs of art or history not yet widely publicized, and so removed from the possibility of crowds and traffic jams. Places that offer such a rare combination are few and far between, and simply discovering this magical retreat was a keen pleasure.

I don’t know where to begin in telling you the delights of this vacation. We awoke on Saturday morning to a pervasive silence, broken only by the song of a wood thrush outside our window. We dined on an upper deck, where a flaming orange and black Baltimore oriole scolded us from a huge oak tree whose limbs reached out almost to our table.

At one point, the blue flash of an indigo bunting streaked across the orange flame of oriole, and I jumped in delight. That so startled the lovely lady vacationing with me that she lost the strawberry she was spooning from her saucer, and the fruit bounced into the cream pitcher. Giggle, giggle. The strawberries came directly from the establishment’s own garden. Yeasty homemade bread also originated in the kitchen, and the eggs were fresh from a nearby barn—we could actually hear the hens cackling. The thick strips of drug- and hormone-free, hickory-smoked bacon came from hogs raised in that barn, too.

We decided to go bird-watching that morning, encouraged by the variety of birds we saw just from the breakfast table. We did not see the bobolinks rumored to have returned to the fields behind the hideaway, but I did spot a stocky lestes (Lestes dryas), a species of damselfly, resting in the meadow grass. Though lestes is not exactly an uncommon species in these parts, I had never seen this striking insect before.

Wait just a minute! (Answer to UDJ Letter to the Editor)

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From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah

July 21, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

Editor:

Wait just a minute!

I don’t mind being called “ignorant” or being accused of trying to scare people “just like Bush and Cheney” or that I “want to be Amish” (Letter to Editor: What’s wrong with Capitalism? UDJ 7/20/09 – see below). But when someone who lives in Lower Lake comes over here and calls Downtown Ukiah “an armpit” — that’s just going too far!

It’s especially offensive during these hot, hundred plus temperatures when everyone is doing their best to stay cool. After all, we in Mendoland don’t have the ability, like Lake County folks, to take those crisp, clean dips in Clear Lake algae water to stay freshened up and re-fragranced!

But it was only when I read on and found “please people (sic), quit whining about marijuana” that I realized the writer had mistaken the aroma of our number one crop, now maturing on the landscape and in boarded-up houses, for our personal lack of good hygiene.

Can’t we import some Monsanto scientists to genetically modify our main crop with some aromatherapy oils? It could save our personal reputations, not to mention our tourist industry… tourists must think we’re just a bunch of yokels and hippies up here who don’t bathe!

Who knew?
~

What’s wrong with capitalism?

MONDAY, JULY 20, 2009
Ukiah Daily Journal
To the Editor:

Dave Smith and all the people who think big box stores are so bad because they send local money overseas are ignorant. Let me explain the cycle of selling widgets.

Take Action! Healthcare Reform Now!

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From JANIE SHEPPARD
Ukiah Valley

July 20, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

How can we get real healthcare reform NOW?

Not next year, not in five years when the economy may have recovered, but now.  We want single payer healthcare by the end of August.

For a succinct discussion of the health care policy debate, go to Wikipedia here.

We are stuck with two reluctant reformers:  Dianne Feinstein, Senator, and Mike Thompson, Representative.  So far as I know Barbara Boxer is not a problem.

Thompson gets campaign money from the “health sector”, to the tune of $254,625 in 2008.  He does, however, profess to be in favor of the public option (second best after single payer).

Our job is to turn him to single payer.  Here’s his contact information:

E-Mail Mike Thompson

WASHINGTON, DC OFFICE
231 Cannon Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
Phone: (202) 225-3311
Fax: (202) 225-4335

MENDOCINO DISTRICT OFFICE
430 North Franklin Street
PO Box 2208
Fort Bragg, CA 95437
Phone: (707) 962-0933
Fax: (707) 962-0934

Feinstein’s website tells us nothing about her position on health care.  Let’s force her to play her cards. What does the Senator think?  I asked:

Dear Senator Feinstein:

As your constituent, I would like to see your position on health care reform posted on your website.

Take Action! Training Tonight July 21 to stop the Monster Mall

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From HANNAH BIRD
Mendocino Environmental Center

July 20, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

We all want to help the environment, but it can be hard to make the time and work out the best things to do. The Mendocino Environmental Center (MEC) is a hub for local environmental advocacy, working on issues that affect Ukiah Valley residents and beyond.

Ukiah is a place blessed with stunning surroundings and varied habitats, and the MEC strives to protect this environment and work with the community to minimise our global footprint. I encourage all members of the community to join us and let us know what issues are important to you. Together we can take effect.

One of the most prominent issues currently being tackled by the MEC and other community groups is the possible re-zoning of the Masonite site which will be voted on in November. The MEC’s main concern regarding the rezoning and plan for the site is the lack of an ‘Environmental Impact Report’. It is imperative that an independent report be carried out before planning decisions are made. The methods which have taken this issue onto the ballot avoid the requirement to carry out such an EIR but we believe that the community has the right to know what environmental impacts any development may have before it is agreed. We therefore encourage voters to vote against the re-zoning in November.

MEC is encouraging all those who are against the re-zoning of the site, or who would like to learn more, to join us at a training event led by Richard Shoemaker from SOLE (Save Our Local Economy). The event will be held at the MEC, 105 West Standley Street, downtown Ukiah on Tuesday, July 21 from 6-7pm. Light refreshments will be provided.

Those wishing to attend should e-mail hannah.bird78@gmail.com to reserve a place. The event is free but donations to the MEC are gratefully appreciated.
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Why I will never buy a Kindle

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From tristero
Via Hullabaloo

July 20, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

This is why I will never, ever buy a Kindle:

On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole — by Amazon.com.

In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.

Unacceptable, and on so many levels, I don’t know where to start.

Actually, I do. I’m buying, as I have for a long time now, only from a local bookstore, and I’m buying only real books…
~

Comments…

I own a Sony ebook reader. I use it to read freely available content online. Only occasionally (when going on a vacation etc) do I actually purchase any reading content from sony. On those rare occasions I feel ripped off because I have no physical ownership of an actual book. I can buy the same book in a store and then re-sell it, lend it to anyone etc. etc. The finances behind buying ebooks is just all off. I’m also the person that owns an Ipod and love it…but I still buy my music via an actual CD that I can download on my computer and own…ie: can re-sell, lend etc.

Until ebook readers all work on the same format….offer ownership in the form of re-sell value etc. I think there will always be those hardcore book owners like myself. Come see my shelves….its far far more exciting than me handing you an electronic device and saying “you really should see my library!” What a downer that truly is….
~

…those are great points. I agree with you – as Sony Reader owner, myself. I use it when I’m traveling, especially on free e-books that can be downloaded because of expired copyrights or other freebies given away on the web.

I will never, never give up my books and will keep adding to them until the day I die, I suspect. E-books are kinda cool but they are not really books and they never will be.
~~

Ukiah’s Transition Timeline

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The Book Dealer – Larry McMurtry’s Grand Obsession

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From DANIEL BARTH
Ukiah Valley
Originally appeared in…
The Redwood Coast Review (pdf)→

July 17, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

Larry McMurtry is one of the most prolific and successful modern American writers. Primarily a novelist—The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove and twenty-seven others—he has also written eight books of essays, a biography, numerous books reviews and, by his count, 70 screenplays (most notably, with Diana Ossana, the Golden Globe and Academy Award winning Brokeback Mountain). But to hear him tell it, in Books: A Memoir, all this scribbling has been merely a sideline to his primary pursuit—the buying and selling of books.

From his early days as a graduate student at Rice University and as a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford—in the famous class with Ken Kesey, Wendell Berry, Peter Beagle and others—McMurtry was in the habit of “book scouting,” prowling local used book shops for bargains he could sell elsewhere at a profit. Malcolm Cowley, a visiting professor at Stanford in the fall of 1960, writes about this in his memoir, The Flower and the Leaf:

“It was a pretty brilliant class that year, including as it did some professional writers

How Masonite Monster Mall’s Developer DDR Treats Small Town Folks Like Us

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From Daily News of Newburyport

July 17, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

Town sued on denial of Monster Mall Plans

SEABROOK — An Ohio-based shopping center giant is suing the town over the Planning Board’s denial of its proposal to build a 500,000-square-foot retail outlet in town.

The shopping center, which planned to have a Target store as its anchor, would have been the largest in Greater Newburyport, and more than twice as large as Newburyport’s Port Plaza. It would have been located just to the northeast of the busy intersection of Routes 1 and 107.

The town was served notice of the lawsuit yesterday. The more than 60-page brief and its attachments were filed with Rockingham County Superior Court on June 17, according to the stamp on the document, within the 30-day appeal window of the Planning Board’s May 19 denial.

In the brief, Developers Diversified Realty attorney Malcolm McNeill Jr. wrote: “The Planning Board in denying (DDR’s) request for site review approval for its retail shopping center was unlawful and unreasonable and the product of bad faith by the Planning Board, and was arbitrary, capricious and confiscatory.”

Where I lived, and what I lived for – Henry David Thoreau

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From Henry David Thoreau

July 16, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.”

Keep reading at The Thoreau Reader→

The Agrarian Standard – Wendell Berry

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From Wendell Berry
Orion Magazine

July 16, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

The Unsettling of America was published twenty-five years ago; it is still in print and is still being read. As its author, I am tempted to be glad of this, and yet, if I believe what I said in that book, and I still do, then I should be anything but glad. The book would have had a far happier fate if it could have been disproved or made obsolete years ago.

It remains true because the conditions it describes and opposes, the abuses of farmland and farming people, have persisted and become worse over the last twenty-five years. In 2002 we have less than half the number of farmers in the United States that we had in 1977. Our farm communities are far worse off now than they were then. Our soil erosion rates continue to be unsustainably high. We continue to pollute our soils and streams with agricultural poisons. We continue to lose farmland to urban development of the most wasteful sort. The large agribusiness corporations that were mainly national in 1977 are now global, and are replacing the world’s agricultural diversity, which was useful primarily to farmers and local consumers, with bioengineered and patented monocultures that are merely profitable to corporations. The purpose of this now global economy, as Vandana Shiva has rightly said, is to replace “food democracy” with a worldwide “food dictatorship.”

To be an agrarian writer in such a time is an odd experience. One keeps writing essays and speeches that one would prefer not to write, that one wishes would prove unnecessary, that one hopes nobody will have any need for in twenty-five years.

Keep reading at Orion→

Death of the Category Killers

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By Stacy Mitchell
New Rules Project

July 15, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

Borders Books is on “death watch,” according to one industry observer. Virgin shut down its last U.S. record store this month. Office Depot and Staples are struggling. Circuit City is gone. Best Buy has launched a desperate ad campaign.

The specialty chains that grew so aggressively in the 1990s and early 2000s — the so-called “category killers” that bankrupted thousands of independent businesses — are now themselves rapidly losing ground to a handful of giant mass merchandisers, namely Wal-Mart, Amazon, Target, and Costco.

While the decline of independent businesses has leveled off and many are finding ways to survive and even thrive by building local business alliances and emphasizing their community roots, the rest of the retail sector is undergoing dramatic consolidation as a small number of massive companies become ever more dominant. This is an ominous trend for manufacturers and consumers, and it exposes serious flaws in U.S. antitrust policy.

Books as Loss Leaders

“For much of 2008, the industry focused its attention on the viability of the struggling Borders, but Barnes & Noble faces many of the very same issues,” wrote Peter Olson, the former CEO of Random House, earlier this year in Publishers Weekly. Olson predicts that the two chains will continue to lose ground, struggle to finance their inventories, and be forced to close outlets.

Big-box mass merchandisers, like Wal-Mart, Target, and Costco, have taken over 30 percent of the book market. These chains are now selling as many books as Barnes & Noble and Borders.

‘Localwashing’ Corporations Move to Co-opt Consumers Desire to Buy ‘Local’ & Sustainable Products & Services

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By Stacy Mitchell
New Rules Project

With Americans’ new focus on buying products made close to home, corporations are moving quickly to co-opt the term “local.” But if everything is local, is anything local?

[This is why we use the terms "locally-owned" and "independent", and why we need a local currency that circulates only in locally-owned, independent businesses. -DS]

July 15, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

HSBC calls itself “the world’s local bank,” which belies the intent of the “local” movement, a campaign to urge consumers to buy locally produced goods and support independent businesses in their hometowns.

HSBC, one of the biggest banks on the planet, has taken to calling itself “the world’s local bank.” Winn-Dixie, a 500-outlet supermarket chain, recently launched a new ad campaign under the tagline, “Local flavor since 1956.” The International Council of Shopping Centers, a global consortium of mall owners and developers, is pouring millions of dollars into television ads urging people to “Shop Local” — at their nearest mall. Even Walmart is getting in on the act, hanging bright green banners over its produce aisles that simply say “Local.”

This new variation on corporate greenwashing — localwashing — is, like the buy-local movement itself, most advanced in the context of food. Hellmann’s, the mayonnaise brand owned by the processed-food giant Unilever, is test-driving a new “Eat Real, Eat Local” initiative in Canada. The ad campaign seems aimed partly at enhancing the brand by simply associating Hellmann’s with local food.

Ukiah Farmer’s Market Saturday 7/18/09 – Food Bank Drive

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From SCOTT CRATTY
Ukiah

July 17, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

Friends of the Farmers’ Market, Greetings!

This weekend is the Saturday Farmers’ Market week to adopt the Ukiah Food Bank. Community group Yes, We Can! is pitching in to help get the word out and will be collecting donations under the pavilion along Clay St.  Please consider buying a bit extra to donate or bringing along a can of veggies that you can live without.  Tough times are made a bit easier when we share the load. Please pitch in and come find out about Yes, We Can!  Spread the word.

New hot food vendor Harbor Lights from Lake Co didn’t quite make it last week, but they are planning to join us this weekend with Native American fry bread (with various toppings), fruit cups, clam chowder and fried cinnamon roll surprise.

Anyone in the area growing excess greens?  The Westside Renaissance Market is looking for a local supplier of lettuce and/or salad mix. Now, for your reading pleasure, the Lazy Gardener Blog→
~~

Forget Shorter Showers: Why Personal Change Does Not Equal Political Change – Derrick Jensen

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From ANNIE ESPOSITO
Ukiah

July 15, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

[We often hear about change starting from within.  We change ourselves and it manifests outward in ripples that begin change for the world.  But the reality is that no matter how virtuous we are as individuals, or think we are, effective change needs to be systemic.  Ecologist Derrick Jensen is circulating an essay making that point - we need to go after corporate power to create real change.  And it's dangerous, but necessary. -AE]

[Todd Walton and Annie exchange comments about this article in the Comments section below. Your thoughts? -DS]
~

Would any sane person think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?

Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption

Small Scale Grain Raising: Revisiting a Classic

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From GENE LOGSDON

July 14, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

Not many writers get a chance to revise a book that they wrote thirty years earlier. There’s an eeriness to it. I feel like Rip Van Winkle—like I fell asleep out in my corn patch and, when I woke up, things looked about like always, but it wasn’t even the same century anymore.

The satisfying part of this eerie feeling is that much of what I said on the subject of small-scale grain raising thirty years ago is more current now than it was then. The pancake patch has come of age. If that sounds like a brag, I’ll not apologize. To all those agribusiness experts who ridiculed my call to garden grains thirty years ago, I now draw myself up in pompous self-righteousness, stick out my tongue, and gloat as sickeningly as possible.

Seriously, though, I have little justification for gloating. Much of the credit goes to an editor and dear friend whom I worked under at Rodale Press, Jerry Goldstein. A book about garden grains was more his idea than mine. Although I was already doing most of the things I would write about in the book, I did not think very many other people were that crazy. I was raised up in the generation that decided farmers had to get big or get out, that local gristmills like the water-powered “Indian Mill” of my boyhood, had faded away into ancient history (it’s actually a museum now), and that local bakeries like Neumeisters’ in my hometown were gone for good. One of the fond memories of my youth was fishing below the dam at Indian Mill and being in town about four o’clock in the afternoon when the bread was coming out of Neumeisters’ ovens. That heavenly smell would float all over the village. Made me weak in the knees.

There’s only one: Authentically unique Ukiah

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by LOUISA ARONOW
Redwood Valley
Ukiah Daily Journal 7/12/09

July 14, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

In the summer of 2002 my family and I took a car trip from Massachusetts to California. I was curious to see how the many towns and cities we visited along the way might reflect the incredible beauty of the vast and varied landscapes we passed through, so I decided to search for those elements that make a place authentically unique. I wondered what features might distinguish one town from others. Were there interesting restaurants, architecture, stores, parks, historical places, vegetation, or anything special I wouldn’t see in other regions of the USA? How does a town represent its inhabitants and the land from which it grew?

My entertaining investigation became sadder and sadder and we visited more small cities and found nothing authentically unique. Most cities consisted of the same franchise businesses by the highways or interstates, and a depleted downtown. Sometimes the downtown included city and county offices, but all included many empty buildings.

One small city we stopped in was a rural county seat; I wondered if it would be similar to Ukiah. The downtown had many elegant old three-story buildings, with copper trim and sculptures, but it seemed to be a ghost town. In the late afternoon, no humans were in sight and our footsteps echoed in the canyon-like streets. I felt that the heart and guts had been ripped out of the city. There was activity in the chain stores and restaurants by the interstate exit, but the shopping center included nothing authentically unique.

The few exceptions were the places that had preserved a bit of history to attract tourists. It was interesting to learn a few tidbits of history across the US (especially the sod house in Kansas), but it didn’t seem that the attractions were interesting for local people.

Monster Mall Ukiah: Another Snake Oil Letter to the Editor

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From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah

July 13, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

Editor – Ukiah Daily Journal:

In her letter to the editor titled Still Shopping in Santa Rosa (UDJ Sunday, July 12) a writer asks “Why is Ukiah so afraid of allowing this town to grow?” and then proceeds to cheer the Masonite Monster Mall Big Box Stores. She states “If we don’t let a few of them in, then we will have to go to Santa Rosa to shop and spend our hard earned money, it won’t be spent in Ukiah.” This argument continues to be put forward in the paper even though it continues to be countered with facts. This is the old Big Lie tactic of repeating falsities over and over, hoping to win over those who are not paying close attention.

OK, I’ll counter it again. The City of Ukiah is not afraid of growing. It has set aside properly zoned land in the City for more retail stores. They recently purchased even more land for retail. That is where retail for Ukiah and the surrounding area belongs, with its appropriate requirements of environmental, design, and traffic impact reviews and requirements. The Masonite site should not be rezoned for retail because it is properly zoned for green industrial, better-paying jobs, which the Obama administration is intent on helping us create.

Just the facts, ma’am.
Image Credit: Evan Johnson
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See also Big Box Mart cartoon→
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Book Reviews: The Delights of Rural Life

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By Jane Ciabattari
TruthDig

June 13, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

As Alice Waters hovers in the wings as a muse for the Obama era, inspiring the White House garden and healthy school lunches, the fantasy of a pastoral life far from derivatives and emissions and other excreta of our times abounds. Right on track are these two memoirs—journalist Jonah Raskin’s “Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating, and Drinking Wine in California,” an account of organic farming in Sonoma County, and novelist Brad Kessler’s “Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, a Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese,” a chronicle of learning to raise goats and make cheese on a farm in Vermont.

Each provides vicarious and delicious adventures for those of us more likely to buy locally at farm stands or plant a garden patch than respond to the call of the land at full bore.

In the process of writing these memoirs, both Raskin and Kessler made drastic shifts in daily routine, and followed an imperative to digest a universe of new information, much of it nonverbal. Paramount for each was a personal quest—for healthier living, for connection to the land, for simplicity—or, possibly, simply for peace and quiet.

Raskin, author of “The Radical Jack London” and “American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation,” sketches Northern California’s organic farming lineage quickly, beginning with Jack and Charmian London, who settled in Sonoma’s legendary Valley of the Moon in 1906 and grew much of their own food. He includes Warren Weber of Marin County’s Star Route Farm, and makes it clear that Sonoma County’s farms have supplied Alice Waters’ restaurant kitchen for decades and impressed Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food movement…

Keep reading at TruthDig→
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Prince Charles: Just 96 months to save the world

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By Robert Verkaik
The Independent

July 13, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

The price of capitalism and consumerism is just too high, he tells industrialists

Capitalism and consumerism have brought the world to the brink of economic and environmental collapse, the Prince of Wales has warned in a grandstand speech which set out his concerns for the future of the planet.

The heir to the throne told an audience of industrialists and environmentalists at St James’s Palace last night that he had calculated that we have just 96 months left to save the world.

And in a searing indictment on capitalist society, Charles said we can no longer afford consumerism and that the “age of convenience” was over.

The Prince, who has spoken passionately about the environment before, said that if the world failed to heed his warnings then we all faced the “nightmare that for so many of us now looms on the horizon”.

Charles’s speech was described as his first attempt to present a coherent philosophy in which he placed the threat to the environment in the context of a failing economic system.

The Prince, who is advised by the leading environmentalists Jonathon Porritt and Tony Juniper, said that even the economist Adam Smith, father of modern capitalism, had been aware of the short-comings of unfettered materialism.

Keep reading at The Independent→
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Some Choice Words for the ‘Select Few’

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by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
Common Dreams

July 11, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

If you want to know what really matters in Washington, don’t go to Capitol Hill for one of those hearings, or pay attention to those staged White House “town meetings.” They’re just for show. What really happens — the serious business of Washington — happens in the shadows, out of sight, off the record. Only occasionally — and usually only because someone high up stumbles — do we get a glimpse of just how pervasive the corruption has become.

Case in point: Katharine Weymouth, the publisher of The Washington Post — one of the most powerful people in DC — invited top officials from the White House, the Cabinet and Congress to her home for an intimate, off-the-record dinner to discuss health care reform with some of her reporters and editors covering the story.

But CEO’s and lobbyists from the health care industry were invited, too, provided they forked over $25,000 a head — or up to a quarter of a million if they want to sponsor a whole series of these cozy get-togethers. And what is the inducement offered? Nothing less, the invitation read, than “an exclusive opportunity to participate in the health-care reform debate among the select few who will get it done.”

The invitation reminds the CEO’s and lobbyists that they will be buying access to “those powerful few in business and policy making who are forwarding, legislating and reporting on the issues…

“Spirited? Yes. Confrontational? No.” The invitation promises this private, intimate and off-the-record dinner is an extension “of The Washington Post brand of journalistic inquiry into the issues, a unique opportunity for stakeholders to hear and be heard.”

Let that sink in. In this case, the “stakeholders” in health care reform do not include the rabble… Keep reading at Common Dreams→

Dollars with Good Sense: DIY Cash

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From Yes! Magazine→
by Judith Schwartz

July 10, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

Local currencies value time, build community, and keep business moving even when credit dries up.

Total dependence on one currency is like total dependence on one crop, or, for that matter, a single energy source: there’s always the risk that crop failure or a cutoff in supply will topple the whole system. This is the scenario we’re seeing now—credit has dried up and unemployment is soaring. In small pockets throughout the world, in rural areas and inner cities, and spots as far-flung as Bavaria and Thailand to Massachusetts and Michigan, people are responding by launching their own currencies. Such monetary renegades are not simply thumbing their noses at the dollar (or the yen, or the euro, or the baht…) They are making a carefully considered choice to promote the well-being of their communities.

“From the beginning we had two objectives—to promote the region and promote local charities,” says Christian Gelleri. In 2003, Gelleri and a group of his students at a Waldorf School developed the Chiemgauer currency in the Lake Chiemsee region of Bavaria, Germany. Since then, some 3 million Chiemgauer notes (equivalent in value to the euro) have been placed in circulation. The currency, accepted by 600 businesses in the region, typically is spent and spent again 18 times a year, three times more than the Euro. This means that the currency is encouraging trade and cooperation in the region, which keeps the shops and restaurants

Busted: 9 Economy Myths

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From Yes! Magazine→

July 10, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

Reinflate the old economy? Get Real!

NEW ECONOMY, NEW WAYS TO DO MONEY

	The measure of a healthy economy is a growing GDP.
		A healthy economy meets real needs within ecological limits.
	All you need is money.
		You can’t eat money. What we need is healthy families, communities, and ecosystems.
	Booms and busts are inevitable in a modern economy.
		The boom/bust cycle is a result of letting banks create money.

Ukiah Farmer’s Market Saturday 7/11/09

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Yoshiki Sakane, owner of Oco Time in Ukiah, and his new solar car

From SCOTT CRATTY
Ukiah

July 8, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

Friends of the Market

Greetings!  Another action-packed market this weekend.

For starters, I expect two all-new vendors. Amanda Lilikoi will be trying to tempt you with her plant starts and early veggies.  Also, Harbor Lights from Lake Co will be trying their luck at the market with some hot food items.  Their menu plan includes Native American fry bread (with various toppings), fruit cups, clam chowder and fried cinnamon roll surprise.  Now there’s something a bit different.  Lorena Caldrea will also be returning to the market for the 1st time this season with her Talmage-grown produce. After two weeks off both John Ford Ranch and Mendocino Organics will be back with beef and chicken, respectively.

At Saturday’s farmers’ market we have, as usual, lots going on.  For starters, just a bit after 10 am we will have the second in this season’s series of Ukiah Natural Foods Co-op sponsored cooking demonstrations.  Come and meet Julia Kendrick Conway of Assaggiare Mendocino, which supports real food for real people.  Plus, Diamond Edge Sharpening will be on hand at the market. Bring your knives, scissors and tools (but no saws, please),

At about 10:30 we will have the next installment of A Child, A Dog and A Good Book,

FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights

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From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah

July 9, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

Excerpt from January 11, 1944 message to Congress on the State of the Union

It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.

People Power Pushed the New Deal

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by Sarah Anderson
Yes Magazine

July 9, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

Roosevelt didn’t come up with all those progressive programs on his own.

During the Great Depression, my grandfather ran a butter creamery in rural Minnesota. Growing up, I heard how a group of farmers stormed in one day and threatened to burn the place down if he didn’t stop production. I had no idea who those farmers were or why they had done that—it was just a colorful story.

Now I know that they were with the Farmers’ Holiday Association, a protest movement that flourished in the Midwest in 1932 and 1933. They were best known for organizing “penny auctions,” where hundreds of farmers would show up at a foreclosure sale, intimidate potential bidders, buy the farm themselves for a pittance, and return it to the original owner (see photo above where farmers crowd around the auctioneer at a foreclosure sale in Nebraska.)

The action in my grandfather’s creamery was part of a withholding strike. By choking off delivery and processing of food, the Farmers’ Holiday Association aimed to boost pressure for legislation to ensure that farmers would make a reasonable profit for their goods. Prices were so low that farmers were dumping milk and burning corn for fuel or leaving it in the field.

Book Review of Telex From Cuba

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From New York Times
Author is daughter of locals Peter and Pinky Kushner
Now Available in Paperback

July 8, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

In the early 1950s, a doll called Scribbles shook up the toy industry. Her face had no features of its own but could be sketched on with a special marker, washed clean and drawn on again. Creepy as this may sound, she’s a handy metaphor for creating a self in an uncertain environment like the one in Rachel Kushner’s multilayered and absorbing first novel, “Telex From Cuba.” Here a little American girl plays with her Scribbles the way Madame Defarge knits, while the international drifters around her settle in to bury pasts that include murder, adultery and neurotic meltdown. Meanwhile, Cuba itself is being remade; President Prio is replaced by the Americans’ favorite, Batista, and the Castro brothers gather revolutionaries in the hills of Oriente Province.

For the last half-century, Cuba has been America’s cultural Other, a nearby example of what capitalists dread most (Communism! revolution! beards!). But before that, it was America’s outpost. Most of Kushner’s story takes place in the sweltering canebrakes and comfortable homes

The Local Multiplier Effect

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Take Action! Boycott the Shameless Seven – Organic Outlaws Labeling Factory Farm Milk as ‘USDA Organic’

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From Organic Consumers Association

July 7, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

While USDA bureaucrats drag their feet on closing key loopholes in national organic organic standards, retailers, wholesalers and major “organic” brands are continuing to sell milk and dairy products labeled as “USDA Organic, even though most or all of their milk is coming from factory farm feedlots where the animals have been brought in from conventional farms and are kept in intensive confinement, with little or no access to pasture.

The Organic Consumers Association is expanding its boycott of Horizon and Aurora organic dairy products to include five national “private label” organic milk brands supplied by Aurora, as well as two leading organic soy products, Silk and White Wave, owned by Horizon’s parent company, Dean Foods. Its time to turn up the heat on the “Shameless Seven.

While thousands of organic consumers and a number of natural food stores and cooperatives have joined the boycott, major national large grocery retailers have ignored the boycott.

Aurora Organic supplies milk for several private label organic milk brands,

Ron Lippert: The Monster Mall’s Worst Nightmare

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From JANIE SHEPPARD
Mendocino County

July 7, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

In its campaign to make the idea of a mega mall on the old Masonite site attractive to county voters, DDR (Developers Diversified Realty) didn’t count on Ron Lippert. Turning up at a focus group, Wednesday, July 1, in Ukiah at the Hampton Inn, Lippert and 11 other gentlemen were paid $50 each to let Nichols Research, Inc., a Fresno-based research outfit, pick their brains and shape their opinions.

In a phone conversation with Lippert, he told me how it unfolded. For starters, 9 participants initially favored DDR’s plan for the mega mall, 2 were neutral, and 1 (Lippert) was opposed.

The process began with the participants registering their awareness of local institutions and personalities by using a hand held device akin to a game boy toy. The results are revealing. A third did not recognize the names of the members of the Board of Supervisors.

Monster Mall Letter to the Editors

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From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah

July 6, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

Editor:

In his diatribe against our Ukiah City Councilors who dared vote 5-0 opposing the Masonite Monster Mall, the letter writer (UDJ July 6) asks “why there is this vehement opposition” and “how arrogant is it for an elected body to pass a resolution opposing something that was (sic) passed by popular vote?”

Well, sir, it is the arrogance of democracy and the law. Elected officials are voted by the populace to represent and lead their community. And the reason there is vehement opposition is because the initiative process, bought and paid for by a huge outside corporation, bypasses the legal zoning rights and environmental reviews required by local zoning ordinances democratically set up by our community of citizens to protect ourselves.

You go on to suggest that they should come up with a “plan to patrol” the project, rather than oppose it. Having just chastised our officials for wanting to enforce local laws, one wonders what silly, powerless patrols you would suggest?
~~

Janie attends the Fourth of July Parade in Mendocino and brings back photos

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From JANIE SHEPPARD
Mendocino County

July 6, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

Sitting at the intersection of Lansing and Lake Streets in Mendocino, Bill, dogs Heidi and Jerry, and I watched the Fourth of July parade in Mendocino.  Here are some of the photos…

Art Activist

Banana Slug For Peace

There’s No Such Thing as Local vs. Organic Food

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By Timothy J. LaSalle
Rodale Institute
Via Organic Consumers Association

July 6, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

Let’s clear up one issue: There is no such thing as local vs. organic. When it comes to consumer choice, we should be buying local and organic, though for mostly different reasons.

Why We Should Buy Local
Local is really important as a deep investment into your local economy and developing a relationship with the person who produces your food. Not only do local businesses generate more local income, jobs, and tax receipts, but they also tend to utilize advertizing, banks, and services in the local community. In fact, a dollar spent at a local business turns over seven times in that community; while the same dollar spent at a box store or chain only turns over 2.5 times.

Buying locally builds a healthy community on many levels. (For case studies on the economic, social, and environmental impacts of buying local visit the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies). Not only can you support the economic health of your community and offer security to your hardworking neighbors, but you can eliminate the uncertainties of agribusiness by talking to your farmer and seeing first-hand how your food is produced.

It is also helpful in being able to purchase food that is often fresher. What’s more is buying local can create local food security, which may become more and more important in the near future. We at Rodale Institute couldn’t be more enthusiastic about local.

Considering the Carbon Footprint of Food
In this conversation, food carbon footprint often arises. However, the most carbon intensive portion of food production and consumption, outside of driving to the store and putting the food in your refrigerator, is the farming methods. The amount of carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere varies widely with regard to the manner in which the food is grown. Because the manufacture of chemical fertilizers and other conventional farming inputs are reliant upon vast amounts of fossil fuel, the food you eat (local or not) can account for huge levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) releases. According to a recent New York Times article about Tropicana orange juice, fertilizers alone contribute to nearly 60% of the CO2 emitted in production. Conventional chemical-based agriculture is a net emitter of CO2 and by some estimates contributes between 9 – 20% of our total greenhouse gases in the U.S.

On the other hand, non-chemical organic farming will pull carbon dioxide right out of the atmosphere and hold it in the soil for decades. As a matter of fact, research at Rodale Institute that has now been replicated at several land grant universities, shows that over 3.5 tons of CO2 can be sequestered on well-managed organic soils using compost and no chemical inputs. Synthetic fertilizers and many pesticides used in conventional farming inhibit the biological factors that build soil carbon, which adds to the long-term destruction of soils.

Why We Should Buy Organic
If we converted all tillable acres globally to organic practices, we could sequester up to 40% of all the world’s carbon emissions. This is the single largest strategy for mitigating carbon dioxide. There is nothing more significant to help us in our crisis with climate. In the U.S. alone,

Goldman Sachs owns our government and we’re the suckers

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From Rolling Stone Magazine

Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression

[...] What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They’ve been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they’re preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet…

Goldman’s role in the sweeping global disaster that was the housing bubble is not hard to trace. Here again, the basic trick was a decline in underwriting standards, although in this case the standards weren’t in IPOs but in mortgages. By now almost everyone knows that for decades mortgage dealers insisted that home buyers be able to produce a down payment of 10 percent or more, show a steady income and good credit rating, and possess a real first and last name. Then, at the dawn of the new millennium, they suddenly threw all that shit out the window and started writing mortgages on the backs of napkins to cocktail waitresses and ex-cons carrying five bucks and a Snickers bar.

And what caused the huge spike in oil prices? Take a wild guess. Obviously Goldman had help — there were other players in the physical-commodities market — but the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors determined to turn the once-solid market into a speculative casino. Goldman did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures — agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date. The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed…

Fast-forward to today. It’s early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs — its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign — sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs…

How Wal-Mart Screws Its Employees and Why They Need The Employee Free Choice Act

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From In These Times

July 4, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

Since liberal Democrats and their labor supporters introduced the Employee Free Choice Act into Congress earlier this year, opposition to the legislation has reached a fever pitch.

The main line of attack from corporations and business trade associations zeroes in on EFCA’s “card check” provision, which would give union advocates the option of avoiding a contentious and often employer-dominated National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election. The provision would allow a majority of workers in any given workplace to enroll in a union via a simple card-signing.

A typical corporate response to the bill–which remains in committee in both the House and the Senate–came from Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest company. The proposed labor law would “effectively eliminate freedom of choice and the right to a secret-ballot election,” Wal-Mart spokeswoman Daphne Moore said in March, a few days after the bill was introduced. “We believe every associate or employee should have the right to make a private and informed decision regarding union representation.”

So Wal-Mart champions worker freedom. To get a sense of that company’s Orwellian definition of the concept it is useful to revisit the scene of a union organizing effort at Wal-Mart’s Kingman, Ariz. discount store. One might well look at dozens of other failed organizing attempts at Wal-Mart, but this campaign in the late summer of 2000 was exceptionally well-documented. The account that follows is based not only on NLRB reports and opinions, but on an authoritative Human Rights Watch report and internal company documents that were put in the public domain after litigation before the labor board and the federal courts.

Summers are hot in Arizona, and the young men who work in Wal-Mart’s Tire and Lube Express (TLE) department get their hands dirty, have few prospects for promotion and are well aware that similar blue collar jobs in garages and car dealerships pay a lot more. Such was the case in Kingman where an otherwise humane manager, under corporate pressure to keep labor and maintenance costs down, refused to spend the $200 needed to repair an air-cooling system essential in the 110 degree heat. So the TLE workers got in touch with the United Food and Commercial Workers, which on August 28, 2000, filed a petition with the nearby Phoenix office of the NLRB to represent as many as 18 automotive service technicians.

The reaction from Wal-Mart managers, both at the Kingman store and at corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., was virtually instantaneous. Within 24 hours a Bentonville-based “labor team” had flown into Kingman, where they joined a growing cadre of district and regional managers from Arizona and Nevada. In all more than 20 outside executives flooded the store. Wal-Mart replaced the Tire and Lube department manager with a high-level personnel executive, untutored in changing oil or tires but well-versed in the corporation’s union avoidance program. Loss prevention–the company’s shoplifting police–got busy as well, training a new set of cameras on work areas in the tire and lube shop. “I had so many bosses around me, I couldn’t believe it,” rememberes Larry Adams, a union supporter who worked in the TLE at that time. “They weren’t there to help me. They were there to bug me. It was very intimidating.”

Ukiah! Invest Locally: Put Your Money Where Your Life Is

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by Michael Shuman
Yes Magazine

July 4, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

Americans want to invest locally: here’s how.

The Obama Administration believes that the best way to repair our financial system after the Great Crash of 2008 is to improve the performance and oversight of global banks and investment firms. A growing number of Americans, however, would prefer to pull their retirement savings out of these high financial fliers altogether. They would rather invest in their communities.

The problem is, they can’t. Outdated federal securities laws have left Main Street dangerously dependent on Wall Street, and overhauling these regulations turns out to be a hidden key to economic revitalization. There are two reasons Americans increasingly wish to invest in locally owned businesses. First, they understand that these businesses are the real pillars of a prosperous, sustainable economy. A growing body of evidence suggests that every dollar spent at a locally owned business generates two to four times more economic benefit—measured in income, wealth, jobs, and tax revenue—than a dollar spent at a globally owned business. That’s because locally owned businesses spend more of their money locally and thereby pump up the so-called economic multiplier. Other studies suggest that local businesses are critical for tourism, walkable communities, entrepreneurship, social equality, civil society, charitable giving, revitalized downtowns, and even political participation.

Second, many Americans no longer believe Wall Street’s assertions that a global, publicly traded corporation is the safest place to invest their savings. According to data in Statistical Abstract, sole proprietorships (the legal structures chosen by most first-stage small businesses) are nearly three times more profitable than C-corporations (the structures of choice for global businesses). Moreover, a bunch of global trends, like rising energy prices and the falling dollar, are making local businesses increasingly competitive. Meanwhile, Americans are shifting their spending from goods to services, a trend that promises to expand the local business sector, since most services depend on direct, personal, and, ultimately, local relationships.

Locally owned businesses currently generate half of the private economy, in terms of output and jobs. Add in other place-based institutions—nonprofits, co-ops, and the public secto—and we’re talking about 58 percent of all economic activity. So in a well-functioning financial system, we’d invest roughly 58 percent of our retirement funds in place-based enterprises. Yet local businesses receive none of our pension savings. Nor do they receive any investment capital from mutual, venture, or hedge funds. The result is that all of us, even stalwart advocates of community development, overinvest in the Fortune 500 companies we distrust and underinvest in the local businesses we know are essential for local vitality. This situation represents a colossal market failure.

The good news is that much of the problem could be solved by modernizing securities laws. Today these laws place huge restrictions on the investment choices of small, “unaccredited”investors—a category in Securities and Exchange Commission vernacular that includes all but the richest 2 percent of Americans. The regulations prohibit the average American from investing in any small business, unless the business is willing to spend $50,000 to $100,000 on lawyers to prepare private placement memoranda or public offerings—thick documents

Rural Matters

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From SHEILAH ROGERS
Redwood Valley

July 2, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

From the Intuit – IFTF Future of Small Business Project/Third Installment: The New Artisan Economy:

The next ten years will see a re-emergence of artisans as an economic force. Like their medieval predecessors in pre-Industrial Europe and Asia, these next-generation artisans will ply their trade outside the walls of big business, making a living with their craftsmanship and knowledge. But there will also be marked differences.  In many cases, brain will blend with brawns as software and technology replace hard iron and hard labor. Yet in many respects, the result will be the same as it was centuries ago; artisans will craft not only their goods, but shape the economy with an effect reaching far beyond their neighborhoods, even their nations.

Historically, artisans – valued for both their craftsmanship and knowledge – succeeded with skilled hands and savvy mercantilism. Not only did they assemble finished products, they also knew how to put together suppliers, other craftsmen, and ultimately customers. Long before “outsourcing” became popularized, they would turn to others to support parts of their labors. A carriage maker, for example, might purchase wheels from a wheelwright who, in turn, might receive iron rims from a blacksmith.  Much of this outsourced work was done in homes or small, shared shops…………

The new generation of artisans will be amplified versions of their medieval counterparts. They’ll be equipped with advanced technology, able to access global local business partners and customers, and will be capable of competing in any industry. Their firms will be agile, flexible, and will often partner with larger firms to accomplish their business goals. Most will be knowledge artisans, relying on human capital to solve complex problems and develop new ideas, products, services, and business models. These artisans will attract and retain highly skilled and creative talent by offering freedom and flexibility and, in many cases, highly competitive compensation.

Editorial/Connecting the Dots Comment:

Mendocino County is home to many artisans. Some of them already operate as described in the above projection… others will do so, as they spot new opportunities to ‘partner’ with suppliers, investors, new markets… West Company has worked with artisans in Mendocino County from Covelo to Laytonville to Hopland to Ukiah to Boonville to Point Arena to Mendocino to Fort Bragg since 1989, and can concur, that this is one of Mendocino County’s economic engines… it is one that embraces heritage and culture, eco and geo-tourism, and includes a range of small businesses and nonprofits that create individual and family income and jobs for crafters, fine artists, gallery owners, retail shops, wholesalers, exporters, performing artists.

From CAMEO, the California Association for MicroEnterprise Opportunity:  July is declared by the California State Legislature as MicroEnterprise Month in California… let’s celebrate and be customers of our locally owned micro and small businesses that operate in industries that include the arts; diversified health care; organic agriculture, food and beverages; building and systems construction and maintenance – those identified as the North Coast’s Targets of Opportunity for business growth and job opportunity as some of Mendocino County’s best opportunities for good paying jobs.
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Book Review: Future Scenarios — How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change — David Holmgren

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By Mark Archambault
Special Guest Contributor to The Localizer
Via Energy Bulletin

David Holmgren, one of the originators of the permaculture concept, has recently written what I believe is one of the best books on the societal implications of peak oil and climate change to be published over the last several years. His book “Future Scenarios, How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change” (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008), is a concise, well-written exploration of a range of possible futures facing humanity given certain assumptions about the interplay between the key variables of peak oil and climate change over the next few decades.

One of the most thought provoking and I believe useful observations he makes in the book is the distinction between energy descent and collapse, which I will relate shortly after exploring his main scenarios.

The author considers energy–and more importantly whether future energy supplies will likely increase, remain stable, or decrease–to be the most important variable in assessing potential futures. In the book, he first considers four meta-level energy-driven scenarios for the long-term future, these being ‘techno-explosion’, ‘techno-stability’, ‘energy descent’ and ‘collapse’.

‘Techno-explosion’ can be thought of as the science fiction future of continual growth made possible by energy breakthroughs such as nuclear fusion and free energy from the vacuum of space. Humanity is able to transcend the limits to growth on a finite planet through continual technological innovation and space colonization. The amount of energy available to mankind increases steadily over time, with no end in sight to available energy and the economic and population growth this makes possible. Though this scenario may have looked like the potential future when Arthur C. Clarke wrote the classic “2001, A Space Odyssey”, most policy makers now seem willing to concede that the odds of it coming to pass are vanishing more rapidly than the dwindling oil reserves of Mexico’s Canterell field.

In ‘Techno-stability’ he envisions “a seamless conversion from material growth based on depleting fossil energy to a steady-state in consumption of resources and population, if not economic activity.” This seems to be the scenario envisioned by politicians and corporations promoting the conversion to a ‘green economy’, yet who do not realize or acknowledge that no combination of renewable energy resources will enable industrial society to run as it has been running on fossil fuels, as repeatedly emphasized by James H. Kunstler.

In Techno-stability the amount of energy available to humanity may fall a bit during the transition, but will stabilize thereafter allowing for a newer, greener business as usual economy. Later in the book, however, he acknowledges the “small problem of reforming the monetary system away from dependence on perpetual growth without inducing financial collapse”. Or, as Michael Ruppert puts it, “until you change the way money works, you change nothing”.

Holmgren echoes the opinion of such researchers as Robert Hirsh in stating that a smooth transition away from an economy based on fossil fuels to one based on renewable energy is unlikely this late in the game without severe economic and geo-political crises. Hirsh, in a recent study prepared for the US Department of Energy, found that industrial societies will require at least a decade

The coming great cook-out? Part 4 of 4

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

July 2, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

George Was Right!

On June 22, Sonja Sharp reported on Mother Jones that the far northern Siberian town Oymyakon was undergoing an unprecedented heat wave. The previous day temperatures were recorded at just under 32 C, or nearly 90 degrees F (32.6 C is the highest ever recorded temperature), with weekend temperatures in the high 80s. This past winter, temperatures twice dropped to -60.2 C, or nearly -86 F, marking one of the coldest winters the village of once-nomadic reindeer herders has suffered in nearly a century.

At the moment, we appear to be experiencing a duel between a cool sun and a warming atmosphere. The sun has been warming, with short respites, for millions of years, as astrophysicists assure us it will continue to do. So, I know how I’m betting.

I often wonder why I’m bothering to write these, especially given the doubts I have that we humans can get our heads out of pails filled with meaningless distractions. Oh, my, Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett died, as headlines informed us. I’m sure this caused distress for some. How many others died as they did? Do you know of any who haven’t or won’t? How many will die if we cook the Earth? How many will die if we exhaust the Earth’s productive soils and fresh water, as we are doing, and food production collapses.

Let’s not talk about such depressing things, it is too distressing. Let’s leave it to the experts to save us, those engineers who created all those wonderful electronic devices that we must have. Let’s go shopping, which is always fun.

Funny thing, I’m unafraid to look these concerns and the pending failure of the capitalist economy in the face, and I’m still the happiest I’ve ever been as I live in the moment. It is a astoundingly beautiful world, perpetually wondrous, perpetually changing. I don’t mean here the world of the big box stores, fast food outlets, and filling stations, indistinguishable wherever found in the country and increasingly the world. I’m speaking of, for example, a tree in my backyard.

Every leaf on that tree is unique as even a simple examination will discover; it never existed previously and shall never again. No two trees, no two blades of grass, no two sparrows are identical, even to themselves moment to moment. Everywhere in the natural world, I see such uniqueness, such amazing beauty and complexity, trillions of cells working cooperatively. Who could be bored, if they are aware? I am in such awe and so thankful of having had the opportunity to have such experiences.

My overwhelming concern is that we may destroy these gifts. In fact, all over the Earth we are doing so – in order to construct, duplicate, more cars, more televisions, more computers, more fashionable clothing, and more “educated” children who can plug into the corporate workplace. All of these soon become old and new better products are ever coming that we must have. I find this so sad, as I hope you do.

What Employment Opportunities Arise from Embracing Transition?

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From Transition Culture→

July 1, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

As part of the Totnes EDAP, we are creating this table (below), by way of illustrating the wealth of new employment possibilities that could be created in a community that seriously embraces the potential of Transition. There will of course be hundreds of things we have neglected to include. In the light of the continued ’sharp contraction’ of the UK economy, we are arguing that the only way the area can revive its fortunes will be via. the Transition approach…

Employment Opportunities for a Post-Peak Oil Totnes and District
Employment Sector	Industry Type	Opportunities for Economic Development
Food Production/Land Use	Organic Farming	Farm workers, research and innovation, value adding and processing, retail, Community Supported Agriculture initiatives
	Textile Production	Farming, processing, manufacturing
	Organic Food Production	Training, freshwater aquaculture, organic gourmet mushroom production for food and medicines, intensive market gardening
	Forestry	Timber for construction and a variety of uses, sawdust for mushroom cultivation, charcoal, wood gasification, coppice products, saps, tannin, bark mulch, education, training, food crops, fibre
	Urban Agriculture	Co-ordination, land access provision, edible landscaping consultancy, online tools for linking growers and consumers, large potential for commercial production, plant nurseries and propagation
	Gleaning	Apple harvesting and pressing, hedgerow drinks and other products, education
	Agroforestry systems	Design consultancy, planting and ongoing management, selling of wide range of produce, long term enhanced timber value, courses, publications, research
	Schools	Edible landscaping, teaching, Education for Sustainable Development, food growing training, apprenticeships, bespoke Transition training programmes
Manufacturing and Processing	Recycling	Salvaging building materials, processing and reclaiming materials (bricks, timber etc), making insulation from waste paper, glass bottles into insulation
	Sustainable Industry	Renewable energy technologies manufacturing and installing, technology systems,
	Repair	Extending the life of machinery, building for durability
	Fabric	Processing of locally produced fabric, hemp, flax etc, making a range of clothing for retail, and repairs
	Scavenging	Materials reuse, refurbishing, resale to low-income families
Services	Healthcare	Holistic healthcare, research into effective herbal medicines, local herb growing and processing, training for doctors, apothecaries, nutritional advice
	Energy	Home insulation advice, energy monitoring, energy efficient devices, investment co-ordinators, sale of energy to grid or decentralised energy systems, producing wood chip/pellets for boilers, Energy Resilience Analyses for businesses
	Compost Management	Collecting, Managing, Training, Distribution, Education, potential links to urban food production
	Information Technology	Creation of effective software systems for energy management, carbon footprinting and much more
	Hospice services / bereavement	Hospice services, supporting families who keep relatives at home, green burials
	Financial Investment	Credit Unions, local currencies, mechanisms whereby people can invest with confidence into their community, Green Bonds, crowd funding
Government	Councils	Opportunity to organise efforts throughout region, and parishes
	Researchers	Opportunity to gather information from the many projects and enterprises underway.
Education and Design	Educators	Wide range of opportunities for supporting ‘The Great Reskilling’, developing Distance Learning programmes, training for professionals
	Sustainable Designers	Landscape architects specialising in edible landscaping, zero carbon buildings
	The Arts	Art projects documenting the Transition, installations, exhibitions, public art workshops, local recording studios, storytelling
	Transition Consulting	Working with businesses on energy audits, resilience plans, a range of future-proofing strategies
Personal / Group Support	Counselling	Personal ‘Transition Counselling’, group support, community processes
	Citizens Advice	Debt advice, housing advice, financial management skills, debt scheduling
	Outplacement/Redundancy Support	Support, retraining, ongoing support and training
Media	Print media	Local newspapers, small print run books on different aspects of the Transition
	Internet	Online retailing systems for local markets
	Film media	Online TV channels documenting inspiring examples of Transition in Action
Construction	Reskilling	Retraining builders to use local materials and green building techniques, improving awareness around energy efficiency in building, setting up local construction companies
	Materials	Creating local natural building materials, clay plasters, timber, lime, straw, hemp etc. Growing, processing, distribution, retail etc. Locally made wallpaper.
	Architects	Specialists in passiv haus building, local materials, retrofit advice
Transportation	Low energy vehicle fleets	Marketing, maintaining, renting, chauffeuring
	Bicycles	Selling, servicing, maintenance training, rental
	Rickshaws	Importing, servicing, taxi service, weddings etc.
	Biodiesel	Sourcing, processing, selling, training and advice
	Biomethane/Electric vehicles	Fleet management, sales, leasing, car clubs

This chart is based on and expanded from Chen, Y., Deines, M., Fleischmann,H., Reed, S. & Swick, I. (2007) Transforming Urban Environments for a Post-Peak Oil Future: a vision plan for the city of San Buenaventura. City of San Buenaventura.
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See also Transition Ukiah→
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Dave Pollard: 12 Things You Can Do To Make The World A Better Place

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From Dave Pollard
How To Save The World Blog→

July 1, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

[Nested within a longer post, Four World Changing Questions (well worth the read), this is an update on a Pollard classic. -DS]

Knowing and Learning:

1. Understand What’s Happening: Before you can engage others and act purposefully and effectively you need to understand how the world really works (not what they tell you in school or in the media about how it works). The world is complex, and understanding and embracing complexity is a challenge to our culture’s predilection for oversimplification and dichotomy.

2. Imagine What’s Possible: Next, you need to be able to imagine a better world, one that is not addicted to growth and consumption. If you can’t imagine it, you will never be able to decide how to achieve it.

3. Be Pragmatic and Realistic: There are many things you can do, and many wonderful-sounding but unenforced, unenforceable and/or ineffective regulations and actions, so you need to learn what actions actually work. This takes a lot of time and energy, and to do it you need to stop doing some other things you are doing that are distracting you from learning these important truths.

4. Know Yourself: Then, to assess what you can do about all this, you need to know yourself, which means giving yourself the time and space to discover who you really are, what your true gifts, passions and purpose are, and therefore what you’re meant to do.

5. Build Personal Capacity: And finally, once you’ve learned all this, you need to discover and acquire the additional capacities you need to be effective at bringing about change in the world. This doesn’t entail changing yourself to be what you’re not, but just learning some new skills and abilities that will equip you to accomplish more with less effort.

Most of us never have the opportunity to do any of this, so we end up doing ill-informed, half-hearted, non-time-consuming, and largely ineffective things. We complain, we sign a few petitions, we feel guilty, but none of that gets us anywhere. We say we’re doing our best given the other commitments on our time, resources and energies, but are we? Until we have done these five knowing and learning steps, we can’t possibly know.

Teaching and Sharing:

6. Converse and Tell Stories: Once we have learned these things, we can start to engage others. Conversation, discussion, talking, explaining, showing — these aren’t ‘doing’ actions, but they are essential. Until we engage others in meaningful dialogue, our efforts are atomized, fragmented, isolated.