From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
We should all send appreciations to the DDR carpetbaggers and their Big Time, high-priced, out-of-county consultants for getting out the vote! It was a masterful job!
Every phone call, every mailing! Wow! They made every dollar, and every dumb decision count! Good job!!!
63% vs 37%! And 50% voted in an off-year election!
Break out the cheers and the cheescake!
~~
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
I don’t trust Al Gore. He wrote Earth In The Balance, and then, after becoming Vice President, said and did nothing about the environment for eight long years. That doesn’t mean he is wrong. But now, working in his own investment firm, promoting the cap-and-trade scam, one must question motives and intent and be open to what other scientists are also saying before drawing one’s own personal conclusions and taking action…
Question #2: Who will make the Big Bucks from Climate Change?→
Question #3: Who are the Climate Change Deniers?→
Calling him “a wonderful, visionary professor” who was “one of the first people in the academic community to sound the alarm on global warming,” Gore thought of Dr. Revelle as his mentor and referred to him frequently, relaying his experiences as a student in his book Earth in the Balance, published in 1992. Gore’s warmth for Dr. Revelle cooled, however, when it became clear that he had misunderstood his former professor: Although Dr. Revelle recognized potential harm from global warming, he also saw potential benefits and was by no means alarmed, as seen in this 1984 interview in Omni magazine: more→
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
According to the UDJ 11/8/09: “MCT [Mendocino County Tomorrow, funded by DDR] Director Robin Collier said the organization now plans to partner with Ukiah officials to help fill vacancies in the city’s downtown, and has a particular interest in working with the Friends of the Palace, a group dedicated to restoring the historic Palace Hotel on State Street… ‘It’s my wish to see DDR keep going.’”
Sorry, Robin. Your organization cannot simultaneously work to destroy our downtown, as you did heading up the Yes On A Campaign for DDR, and also “partner with Ukiah officials” and “work with the Friends of the Palace.”
Your organization, and what it stands for, was thoroughly trounced in the recent election. In my opinion, as long as it is sponsored by DDR, MCT is a pariah. Our downtown does not need any “help” from an organization that continues to support DDR’s ambitions and methods. What part of “No” don’t you understand?
I, for one, as a downtown merchant, want no further dealings with Mendocino County Tomorrow. Please leave us alone.
~
Update (thanks Sherry Glavich)
[As of November 10th, this is the top letter MCT presents on their website. I ask you... we want "help" from this crew? Ha! Democracy lives! -Dave]
to be of use
Marge Piercy
The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
~
Final Letter to the Editor UDJ
[Of all the great letters from our community urging our No on A vote, this one from Laurel is outstanding! -DS]
From LAUREL NEAR
Ukiah
This election about whether we should host a large shopping mall has me thinking about change; the huge changes I’ve seen here in this valley over the last half a century and more. Every so often, a pinnacle decision is made that then sets the tone for the future rollout of dozens and dozens of other changes that then ripple out in the community changing life for generations to come.
And what strikes me as important about the mall vote is that we may have enough hindsight now to know that if we say yes to the mall (even if they don’t build it) life here will be different. We know that instead of simply accepting change with a shrug from the sidelines that we can be actively shaping the very changes that allow for the healthiest, happiest, most bountiful life here. And yes, sometimes that takes patience.
When I do a whirlwind rewind of my life growing up here, I recognize some of the staggering changes I have seen have been great for this small town. However other changes have not always been in alignment with promoting our very best qualities as humans and as a collective community. It doesn’t have to be that way anymore.
In 1947, my parents bought an 1,800-acre cattle ranch in Potter Valley for $30,000 on Pine Avenue. Only three deeds or so before, the land had been the home of Pomo people for thousands of years. Can we imagine no fences and no pavement anywhere? When I was little, my mother drove us without seat belts to Ukiah on a road that went through where Lake Mendocino is now. There was an outdoor roller skating rink with a huge sound system and on hot summer nights, parents would sit in their cars and watch their kids skate under the stars as they listened to Elvis, The Four Seasons and The Supremes. The Pear Tree Shopping Center was a real field of pears, the drive-in movie was in a field off of Dora Street and I pretty much knew everyone in town. There was an award winning marching band led by Roland Nielson that marched down State Street and a thriving performing arts program at the high school theater directed by Les Johnson who directed fully staged musicals of the times to packed houses.
My parents didn’t have a credit card but then they didn’t buy a lot of stuff. In the fall, we went to McNabs, The Palace Dress Shop or Irene’s, Tots to Teens to buy one new outfit and a coat for school and sometimes we bought a 45 at Hayes Music. Most parents’ quality time with their children in Potter was doing chores, going for walks, swimming in creeks, fishing, shadow tag, 4-H, family meals, square dances at the grange, looking up at the sky full of stars but not shopping. more→
From THE AUTOMATIC EARTH
Firstly, I would say that the energy prices that currently seem stubbornly high should fall substantially as the speculative premium evaporates and demand falls on a resumption of the credit crunch. The sucker rally that has spawned all the talk of green shoots is essentially over in my opinion.
The result should be a reversal of a number of trends that depend on the ebb and flow of liquidity – we should see stock markets and commodity prices fall, a significant resurgence in the US dollar and a large contraction of credit. The scale of the reversal should be substantial, as should its effects on energy demand. Demand is not what one wants, but what one is ready, willing and able to pay for, and in a severe credit crunch the capacity to pay for supplies of most things will be severely reduced.
As demand falls, and with it prices, investment in the energy sector is likely to dry up. Many projects will be uneconomic at much lower prices, meaning that the projects which might have cushioned the downslope of Hubbert’s curve (and the much steeper net energy curve), are unlikely to be developed. In this way a demand collapse sets the stage for a supply collapse that could place a hard ceiling on any prospect of economic recovery. That is a recipe for extremely high energy prices in the future…
The scale of the problem has been temporarily concealed by a market rally and the shovelling of tens of trillions of dollars of taxpayer’s money into a giant black hole of credit destruction. This has done nothing to reignite lending, but the temporary (and entirely irrational) resurgence of confidence has restored a measure of liquidity. As that confidence evaporates with the end of the rally, that liquidity will also disappear.
Deflation is ultimately psychological. Without trust we will see hoarding of the cash which will be very scarce in the absence of the credit that currently comprises the vast majority of the effective money supply. The combination of scarce cash and a very low velocity of money will be toxic.
Money is the lubricant in the economic engine and without enough of it that engine will seize up as it did in the 1930s, when farmers dumped milk they couldn’t sell into ditches while others were starving for want of the money to buy food. There was plenty of everything except money, and without money, one cannot connect buyers and sellers…
In my opinion, we stand on the brink of truly tragic circumstances.
See original article here→
Local Money Supply Solutions: Mendo Time Bank→ Mendo Moola→
~~
buh-bye…
~~
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
When the national organization of our local Chamber of Commerce takes a stand against the best interests of American citizens, it’s time to withdraw from national membership and seek the new alliances necessary to flourish in the new century.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce “faces increased opposition from its members about the Chamber’s obstructionist approach to climate change science and responsible climate/energy/green jobs policy.” (Politico)
The National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) “took a look at the Chamber’s board of directors and their public positions on global warming and gee, what we found… it turns out that the staff of the U.S. Chamber appears to be projecting the views held by a tiny sliver of its board of directors – just four out of 122 members on the board. The Chamber’s oft-stated views, which question the scientific consensus on climate change and reject the need for federal regulation to reduce global warming pollution, stand in sharp contrast to the views expressed by 19 members of the Chamber’s board that support federal regulations with goals to reduce total US global warming pollution.”
For years, the national Chamber lobby has played a key role in blocking consumer-protection legislation, a shareholder bill of rights, labor-law reform, and financial regulation. In other words, the Chamber of Commerce has worked against the people who invest in, purchase from, and make the products for, the companies they represent. That would be stupid in a small town, but arrogant transnationals don’t give a damn about anyone or anything other than growing their profits.
Its current legislative priorities include opposing a consumer financial-protection agency, opposing a shareholder bill of rights, and opposing “flawed health care proposals,” which seems to mean any health-care proposal made by a Democrat, according to The New Yorker magazine.
Apple Computer, Pacific Gas & Electric, PNM Resources, and Exelon are all leaving the Chamber, and Nike is leaving its Board of Directors, because of its public stance on climate change.
Locally, despite solid leadership of staff and its more progressive Directors, some of its members continue to rain down wing-nut wrath whenever they deem it straying from what they consider its sole mission: helping businesses make maximum profits regardless of its negative effects on local small businesses, the environment, and our citizens… otherwise known as sociopathology. Lord help us all.
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
I’ve read most of the letters to the editor that the Measure A proponents have sent in, but this one has to be either written by the DDR PR firm who brag about their abilities to “coach” letter writers, or the writer thinks that we’re a bunch of local yokels with no thinking skills: “Much has been made lately about the fact that an Ohio based corporation owns the former Masonite site and is pushing their way into our community. If we pause for a moment, and look at the other out of town corporations in our community and where we would be without them right now, it is frightening. How would our locally owned stores or other service providers fare if we did not have these employers in our community? Sure there would be less competition here locally, but the unemployment rate would be so high that nobody could afford to shop in any store. How would our city government operate without the sales tax revenues that come from these stores? Over 42 percent of our general fund budget for the city comes from sales tax revenues. What would our police and fire department look like? What kind of recreation department would we have for our youth?”
Well, first off, let’s “do the math”. If every new Big Box eliminates 1.4 jobs for every job they create, that would mean that if they never came here, we would have 1,000 jobs for every 700 they have brought us. It’s not that hard to figure out. So, if we “pause for a minute” and ask ourselves “where we would be without them right now”, the answer is we would probably have half the unemployment rate that we have now. Not so frightening!
“How would our locally owned stores or other service providers fare if we did not have these employers in our community?” Well, we would probably have twice as many locally-owned stores that would keep all of our revenue and profit dollars circulating locally instead of leaving for the headquarters of the Big Box stores. Not so frightening now, is it?
“How would our city government operate without sales tax revenues?” Much better as they would have more tax revenue without the additional costs of infrastructure and safety that Big Boxes bring.
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
A letter writer (UDJ 10/9/09) states the following: “What I have come to notice is that some in this County are against Measure A simply to be against Measure A. They do not have any factual evidence supporting any of their claims. I just wish more voters would be like me and dig a little deeper into these issues. If you are against something just because you don’t want it, then say that. Do not run a game on all of us with weak and false claims.”
OK! I’ll say it! I’m against the Monster Mall because I just don’t want it. I like our small town and the Monster Mall will ruin it. I like our small locally-owned business community, and your Monster Mall will put our downtown out of business. I just don’t want it. I’m happy that we haven’t yet been seduced by sprawl that contributes to climate change, and instead we demand smart growth, not dumb growth. I absolutely adore owning a small local business in town and I would never re-locate into a soulless Monster Mall. I just don’t want it.
I moved away from all that years ago. I’ve traveled along the freeways down south and can see what big-time mall, condo, traffic, mall, condo, traffic, mall, condo, traffic brings. It’s sprawl hell the Monster Mall is projecting onto our communities here. When I visit down there, I cannot wait to turn around and get back to small-time Mendocino County.
Really, I just don’t want the Monster Mall here. And thanks for asking.
[More Letters from the UDJ]
Monster Mall a Slick Con Game
From Edith Lucas
Owner of The Dragon’s Lair
Ukiah
I’ve been thinking a lot about Measure A and how I feel about it both as a small business owner, and as a citizen of this town. In both areas I like to apply what I call the double bottom line: what is good for the pocketbook and what is good for the soul. After much reading and thinking, I’ve decided that it is very important to vote no on A. It not only doesn’t meet the double bottom line, it could pull the bottom line right out from under us! Keep reading→
From The Guardian UK
[This third book of the trilogy by Stieg Larsson will be published in the US June 2010. Available now for rent, $5 for 2 weeks, at Mulligan Books. -DS]
A couple of years ago I was in a supermarket in Carcassonne, looking for a book to read on holiday. I noticed that something called Millennium seemed to be numbers one, two and four on the bestseller list – yet I had never heard of it. That was my introduction to Stieg Larsson’s meaty trilogy of thrillers. Now the story of the author is as well known as his characters. He died suddenly in 2004, having delivered the text of the trilogy to his publisher. Larsson was editor-in-chief of the anti-racist magazine Expo, and an expert on anti-democratic, right-wing extremist and Nazi organisations. He used this background to good effect in the creation of the campaigning fictional magazine, Millennium. He also used his knowledge of SAPO, Sweden’s secret police, and the jostling for position after the end of the cold war between Europe and Russia.
The first in the sequence, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, introduced readers to diminutive Lisbeth Salander. A brilliant computer hacker, she’s a woman prepared to use violence to achieve her ends, a vigilante with no faith in the authorities, someone who – we gradually learn – has been the victim of a colossal miscarriage of justice. She is the daughter of a brutal, psychopathic Russian defector, Zalachenko, whose perceived importance to the state and national security is deemed more significant than the fact that he is a wife-beater and abuser. At the age of 13, Salander is declared insane and locked away in a psychiatric unit in order to prevent her blowing her father’s cover. The second book in the sequence, The Girl Who Played With Fire, develops these themes of the abuse of legal power, of retribution and debts being paid, rough justice all round, and finishes with an extraordinary shoot-out during which Salander is buried alive.
Now comes The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, with Salander fighting for her life in intensive care, her father lying a few doors along the corridor as a result of wounds inflicted on him by Salander herself. Keep reading→
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
What is more important than the skills of growing your own food to feed yourself year round? I can’t think of anything other than, maybe, the skill of finding drinkable water when you’re lost in the desert.
But, like most of us, what if you don’t have the skills or land to garden year round to feed yourself? Then I’d say the skills of growing food that other people can eat would be our most important local resource.
But what if most of the food being grown is so poisoned and processed that people are dying from diabetes, cancer and heart disease by eating it, and the cheap energy being used to poison and grow our food is declining in supply? Then I would say, growing healthy food without those poisons for other people is the answer.
But if the cheap energy that grows our food has peaked in supply and will be getting extremely expensive, then the cheap energy that gets that healthy food to our tables from far away will soon shoot food costs through the roof. Well then, the most crucially important skill is growing local healthy food for other people, and the most crucially important local resource is the group of local farmers who grow food using organic and biodynamic growing methods.
But the average age of farmers in this country is 55 and they will soon be retiring.
OK, OK, OK! Our most crucially important resource is our small group of young, local, organic/biodynamic farmers.
Adam Gaska and Paula Manalo farm 4 acres in Redwood Valley. Their biodynamic farm is supported by members who invest in a share of the harvest.
You can invest in our most crucially important local resource by joining their membership for the winter season coming up and help create a sustainable resource for your family and our community… and you will be eating the healthiest food a farmer can grow that money can buy.
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
Letter to the Editor:
The latest mass mailing from the DDR Monster Mall Developers located in Ohio brings us greetings and thanks from the folks down in Sonoma County for the millions of dollars we trundle down in our SUV’s to spend there.
If Sonoma County is so fond of all the money we take there, why have they just rejected another Big Box store? According to the Press Democrat 9/3/09, “the Santa Rosa City Council voted late Tuesday to stop Lowe’s from building a big-box home improvement store on Santa Rosa Avenue, heeding the concerns of local business leaders who warned the chain store would hurt the community… Council members also worried that Lowe’s success would come at the expense of local businesses and their employees…”
Oh, now I get it. DDR wants to make us feel like fools for turning down their Monster Mall initiative, so they just make stuff up and pretend they’re somebody else.
I say it’s better to learn from others who have already made the mistakes and regret them, than believe those who will make big bucks off us making those same mistakes ourselves. Santa Rosa is confirming what we have been saying.
Thank you for voting NO ON MEASURE A to preserve our unique, locally-owned businesses, neighborly small town values, and livable human-scale communities.
~~
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
A student at Mendocino Junior College writes (Letter to the Editor UDJ 9/24/09 – see it below) in support of Monster Mall Measure A: “…we, as young people, have no options for employment in Mendocino County. I have been trying very hard and just can not find work, it is not out there. Please do not risk the youth of this County’s one opportunity for employment and experience before we enter the fast paced job market after graduation.”
A letter like this is heartbreaking. The youth of our county and our country are some of the hardest hit from this recession. It is a tragedy that is not going away soon. Both entry-level and fast-paced jobs after graduation have ground to a screeching halt.
But allowing a Monster Mall into Mendocino County will only make unemployment worse here, as it has across the country.
Fact: Independent studies show for every job the Monster Mall Big Boxes bring, 1.4 are lost. That means the 700 slave-wage jobs advertised by the Monster Mall will destroy almost 1,000 current, better-paying jobs. The reason is simple: the job losses are larger than the gains because Big Boxes accomplish the same volume of sales with fewer employees, and pay poverty-level wages. The money circulating locally from those lost jobs go somewhere else. Not only that, they have killed millions of non-retail jobs by pushing our manufacturing jobs overseas.
For the sake of our local future, and the youth growing up in our county, please Vote No On Measure A.
~
Letter to the Editor (UDJ)
I am a student at Mendocino Junior College. In addition to my academic responsibilities, I also participate in athletics for the college. If anyone goes to the college and walks around you will see that we, as young people, have no options for employment in Mendocino County. I have been trying very hard and just can not find work, it is not out there. This is why the young people of Mendocino County need Measure A to pass. Having a job and maintaining employment allows for us as young people to learn the real ways of the world. Without any type of job experience we are seriously hindered once we enter the open job market. Now is not the time to be selfish in our actions. I have asked many people why they oppose Measure A and the prevailing answer is that they want Ukiah to remain closed off to the rest of the world. Frankly, that position is one of selfishness. Keep reading→
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
To the Editors:
A letter writer in Lower Lake continues to conflate our opposition to the Monster Mall with hating corporations and capitalism (Ukiah’s an armpit, UDJ 9/20/09). Again, not so.
I, and others, want good, green, well-paying manufacturing jobs by locally-owned, cooperatives, community-friendly corporations, and companies that keep our money circulating locally… not 700 slave-wage, poverty-level jobs by Big Box Bullies who suck the financial life-blood from our communities and send it to Arkansas, exploit their workers, keep their good high-paying white collar jobs at their headquarters, send manufacturing jobs to overseas sweatshops, and bring higher levels of poverty to our county. Before we know it there will be no stores left except one gigantic Wal-Mart per community.
Not only that, but they also cheat local vendors. According to a former Wal-Mart manager quoted in the book How Wal-Mart Is Destroying America, when local vendors bill for products and services rendered, they instruct the local Wal-Mart manager to always deduct 10% from the invoice, and dare the vendor to not accept it.
Thank you for voting NO ON MEASURE A to preserve our unique, locally-owned businesses, neighborly small town values, and livable human-scale communities.
~~
From Planet Green
[Here's a way to trade on-line for local organic produce. I'm offering Mulligan Books as a centralized SAME DAY drop-off and pick-up point for goods being traded. You'll find my offer listed on the free Veggie Trader website. -Dave]
How great would it be if there were want ads in your local newspaper or on Craigslist for organic fruits and vegetables, grown in your town, by your neighbors? A new website – Veggie Trader has sprung up that offers exactly such a service–a purchasing and bartering clearinghouse for locally grown fruits and vegetables.
Veggie Trader describes itself as the “place to trade, buy or sell local homegrown produce.” The idea is simple: you register on the website and then offer to purchase, sell, or trade any manner of surplus fruits or vegetables. If you have too many tomatoes and want to see if anyone nearby has a surplus of peaches or peppers, you can log on, run a search, and find out who in the neighborhood may be willing to exchange with you.
It’s a great way to offload additional produce and exchange it for something that you might be unable to grow in your own yard, but that another gardener may specialize in growing. It’s totally free to join, and costs nothing to post an offering, or place a wanted listing.
The website only started four months ago, and is definitely still in its infancy. Despite that, they have over 6,000 people signed up so far. The folks who have registered thus far are concentrated on the U.S. West Coast in California and Oregon, but since the website is still starting out, it could very well extend to your neighborhood. You can help make the website grow by registering and offering to buy, sell, or trade for whatever produce you have or may want.
Veggie Trader has ambitions to expand to include dairy, eggs, and meat, all items that are heavily regulated. The future may hold great things for Veggie Trader, only time will tell if the site can attract enough members to gain enough momentum to make a difference in the local food movement, but we’re certainly rooting for them.
~
For organic recipes, see Organic To Be→
Now posting regularly at Mendo Moola updated blog site→
~~
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
Letter to the Editors
Time was, retail jobs were called “entry level.” Jenny would have a summer job running the cash register at the mom-and-pop so owner Mrs. Simpson could work on the bookkeeping in back. Johnny would get a job after school stocking shelves at the department store. These were healthy, local, low-wage jobs where you joked with your neighbors and learned how the world works. And then you moved on to college and a profession or learned a trade skill in manufacturing. Or if you liked retail, you stayed around, learned some small-business skills… maybe saved some money and opened a store of your own.
Not any more. Retail has evolved into dead-end, exit-level, dumb jobs in Big Box chain stores where all the well-paid smart jobs — information processing, accounting, advertising, logistics — are at a distant headquarters, and the community’s money is swept up nightly and sent there too. Your slave-wage, mind-numbing, soul-killing job is to do what the computer has programmed and spit-out on screens and work sheets. Endless lines at the cash register, move ‘em in, head ‘em out. Endless numbers of trucks to unload, stock the shelves, clean up the mess, take a break.
The people at the top are raking in millions and living in castles. You on the bottom are living a boring nightmare, and thankful for barely making it because the manufacturing jobs are now on the other side of the world, and even the good paying, white collar jobs are heading out.
DDR is touting 700 slave-wage dumb jobs at their Monster Mall. Google “New Rules Project” and you’ll find documented research that for every retail job a Big Box brings, 1.4 current jobs are lost; that as more Big Boxes come to a community, the county-wide poverty level rises; that California taxpayers were spending $86 million a year in 2004 providing healthcare and other public assistance to the state’s 44,000 Wal-Mart employees… and there are many more of those employees now.
We have one good place left for future entrepreneurial green jobs as the consumer economy gasps its last breath, and changing the zoning of the Masonite site now will kill that opportunity.
Thank you for voting NO ON MEASURE A to preserve our unique, locally-owned businesses, neighborly small town values, and livable human-scale communities.
~
This post dedicated in memory of John Milder, who worked hard, with Phyllis Curtis and others, to stop the first Wal-Mart big box store in Ukiah, but failed by one vote of the Ukiah City Council. Thanks, John. You knew. We remember.
~~
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
September 1, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California
Yes, wash hands frequently, cough into inner elbow, get plenty of exercise, eat organic food, etc.
I haven’t caught the flu for many years. Here’s my natural regimen for the coming flu season…
1. Hydrogen Peroxide: I gargle daily with 3% Hydrogen Peroxide; and if something starts not feeling right, more frequently. My throat is my weak spot because of an illness suffered as a boy. I’ve also heard it can be used in the ears. Google: Hydrogen Peroxide for colds and flu.
2. Vitamin D: Best natural source is, of course, the sun, but flu season is when the sun is not around as much. “Vitamin D… perhaps the single most powerful nutrient in the known universe for preventing influenza.” Arctic Cod Liver Oil. Some sushi now and then at Oco Time; also eating lower on the food chain means less mercury accumulation, though we now know that all fish are contaminated… those boneless sardines at the Co-op are my choice. Foods highest in Vitamin D here. List of sustainable fish from Seafood Watch is at Monterrey Aquarium here.
3. Green Tea: “One little known secret about preventing the flu is adding green tea to your diet. Research has shown that green tea is extremely effective at preventing the flu, when consumed regularly. One study, reported by the UK Tea Council showed that green tea can protect in two ways. First, green tea suppresses the growth of influenza cells. Secondly, green tea actually kills off the influenza cells. And, one thing that’s so great about green tea – it can protect against many strains of the flu virus. The flu vaccine each year just protects against that year’s most prevalent strain.” Organic, of course. I’m partial to Dragon Well green tea in bulk at the Co-op. No tea ball needed. Put some leaves in a clear cup, pour in the boiling water, watch the leaves dance their way down to the bottom. See story at Diamond Organics.
4. Cut out sugar. “Avoiding sugar is the single most important physical factor that you can address to avoid the flu.” Sugar suppresses the immune system. Google it.
5. Dense Nutrition: For maximum nutrition, Organic Green Smoothies.
Also, you can Google: Homeopathic remedies for the flu (especially Oscillococcinum); and Herbal remedies for the flu.
Green Tea image from Gaia Herbs
~~
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
August 31, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California
To The Editors:
I’m continually baffled by a few of the locals who are promoting the Masonite Monster Mall. When I hear them speak, in one breath they talk about how much they love living in our rural small town, and in their next breath they talk about how great it will be to have a Monster Mall here so they don’t “have to drive to Santa Rosa to shop.”
Yet, they never bridge the gap between what we have, and what we would become. They never say “I’m looking forward to the sprawl and traffic and pollution and sirens and hubbub just like they have in Santa Rosa.” Or, “I want our town to look just like all the other towns and cities south of us. Wouldn’t that be just too cool?”
Instead, I want something else entirely. And Wendell Berry says it better than I can:
“In this difficult time of failed public expectations, when thoughtful people wonder where to look for hope, I keep returning in my own mind to the thought of the renewal of the rural communities. I know that one resurrected rural community would be more convincing and more encouraging than all the government and university programs of the last fifty years, and I think that it could be the beginning of the renewal of our country, for the renewal of rural communities ultimately implies the renewal of urban ones.
“But to be authentic, a true encouragement and a true beginning, this would have to be a resurrection accomplished mainly by the community itself. It would have to be done, not from the outside by the instruction of visiting experts, but from the inside by the ancient rule of neighborliness, by the love of precious things, and by the wish to be at home.“
Is it either/or? Yes, I think it is.
Thank you for voting NO ON MEASURE A to preserve our unique, locally-owned businesses, neighborly small town values, and livable human-scale communities.
~~
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
August 24, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California
To The Editors:
Over the past 50 years, the expansion of national businesses into local domestic markets with Big Box Stores, Chain Stores, Franchises and Monster Malls has diverted and redirected local circulating money to centralized corporate coffers. There it is spent on large capital outlays, national advertising, overseas goods, executive salaries, loan repayments, and dividends to Wall Street investors.
This interception of funds has depleted local towns and cities across our nation of an important source of funds: recirculated income.
To draw attention to this problem and save their small, locally-owned businesses, towns and cities have instituted Buy Local campaigns. They have been somewhat successful, so the giant international corporations are using big buck propaganda campaigns to claim they are “local” businesses.
One of the world’s largest international banks is now claiming to be “The World’s Local Bank” and Lay’s Potato Chips is seizing on citizen’s desire for locally-grown food with a “Lay’s Local” advertising campaign.
And, sure enough, the Masonite Monster Mall folks are also claiming that passing Measure A will be supporting Buy Local. Ha! Because they say it does not make it so! The Monster Mall can mail a million pamphlets, and make a million local phone calls, but the Masonite Monster Mall with Measure A is the antithesis of buying local and will sweep up even more of our money and send it elsewhere.
Buying groceries at Ukiah Natural Foods Cooperative, locally-owned by its members, is buying local. Keep reading→
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
August 18, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California
Excerpt from The Elegance of the Hedgehog
(Author Muriel Barbery’s eagerly awaited follow-up, Gourmet Rhapsody, due in stores next week)
I open the door.
Monsieur Ozu is standing there.
“Dear lady,” he says, “I am glad that you were not displeased with my little gift.”
In shock, I cannot understand a word.
“Yes, I was,” I reply, aware that I am sweating like an ox. “Uh, uh, no.” I am pathetically slow to correct my stumbling reply. “Well, thank you, thank you very much indeed.”
He gives me a kindly smile.
“Madame Michel, I haven’t come here so that you can thank me.”
“No?” I say, adding my own brilliant rendition of “let your words die upon your lips,” the art of which I share with Phaedra, Bérénice, and poor Dido.
“I have come to ask you to have dinner with me tomorrow evening,” he says. “That way we shall have the opportunity to talk about our shared interests.”
“Euh…” A relatively brief reply.
“A neighborly dinner, a very simple affair.”
“Between neighbors? But I’m the concierge,” I plead, although whatever may be inside my head is in a state of utter confusion.
“It is possible to be both at once,” he replies.
Holy Mary Mother of God, what am I to do? Keep reading→
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
August 17, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California
The more money is used locally and kept circulating locally, the more jobs are created and the wealthier a local community becomes (see Why NOT To Shop In Santa Rosa below).
Mendo Moola is smart money… a local currency, issued by locally-owned merchants and circulated only within Mendocino County. It is accepted in payment by participating, locally-owned merchants. The first merchant to issue its own currency is Mulligan Books in downtown Ukiah using wooden coins as change for purchases, and as “gift certificates”.
By using Mendo Moola in trade – face-to-face, hand-to-hand – money does not leave our community as it does using Federal Reserve Notes and Credit/Debit Cards.
Communities across the country and around the world issue local currencies to protect themselves against “tight money” and “credit crunches” that kill jobs and local economies. See Mendo Moola website for more info and a growing list of local businesses and services accepting it.
Mendo Moola Proposed Rules:
1. Mendo Moola (MM) as a Local Currency can initially be issued by any merchant, in branded wood coins or paper, with a store front that stocks inventory. It is then backed by the full faith and credit of that particular merchant’s inventory and cash flow, and by the health of the community’s local trade. (Eventually, any business or service could issue its own currency.)
2. MM will always be redeemed for cash by the issuing merchant upon request by either customers or other merchants, although using MM to purchase products is preferred.
3. MM will only be issued into circulation as change, direct exchange for cash (not sold as a taxable product), or as “gift certificates”.
4. MM will not be issued into circulation by being “spent” by the issuing merchant for products or services, i.e. merchants will not use their own issued currency from storage to purchase products themselves. Keep reading→
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
To the Editors:
August 17, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California
It is obvious why DDR’s Measure A eliminates the requirement for the California Environmental Review Act (CEQA) that is usually an automatic requirement for a project this size. Big Box retail parking lots rank among the most harmful land uses in any watershed. During rain storms, parking lots deliver a hefty dose of toxic pollutants leaked by vehicles or deposited from the atmosphere — including phosphorous, hydrocarbons, heavy metals, herbicides and pesticides — into our nearby water bodies.
While a 200,000 square-foot mall covers 4 acres and consumes another 12 for parking, the same amount of retail spread over two floors in a Main Street-style setting with shared parking takes up only 4 acres. The Masonite Monster Mall is four times that size (800,000 square feet). In some cases, permits for big-box projects have been denied on the grounds that they would add additional pollution to a nearby river. DDR has eliminated that possibility and denied the democratic control of our own environment with Measure A.
Instead of creating more disastrous car-dependent sprawl, the solution is to revitalize what is already here — our own walkable, bikeable downtown business district. Compact downtowns that have multi-story buildings, multi-story parking, and support a mix of uses, take up far less land and create far less polluting runoff.
Measure A is an attempt by slickster outside corporations to colonize our valley and override our zoning requirements with big bucks and pretty pictures… while insisting that, somehow, their Monster Mall, full of boring Big Boxes, Corporate Chains, and Industrial Food Restaurants, just like everywhere else, will be “shopping local”. Ha! What a bad joke! Keep reading→
From Thom Hartmann
August 13, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California
Excerpted from Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture
Our best hope, both of a tolerable political harmony and of an inner peace, rests upon our ability to observe the limits of human freedom even while we responsibly exploit its creative possibilities. ~Reinhold Niebuhr, The Structure of Nations and Empires (1959)
If it’s happening in Danish politics (or, for that matter, Scandinavian or European politics), Peter Mogensen knows about it. An economist by training, he’s the chief political editor of Denmark’s second largest national newspaper, Politiken, and for four years (1997-2000) he was the right-hand man (“head of office” and “political advisor”) to Denmark’s then prime minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen. A handsome man of young middle years, he also plays in a “Bruce Springsteen look-alike” rock band, and cuts a wide swath through Danish popular society.
So it was particularly interesting to see this normally unflappable man with a slightly confused look on his face.
We were in the studios of Danish Radio (their equivalent of BBC or NPR) in downtown Copenhagen, where I was broadcasting the week of June 23-27, 2008, and I’d just asked Mogensen how many Danes experience financial distress, lose their homes, or even declare bankruptcy because of a major illness in the family.
“Why, of course …” he blinked a few times, “none.”
I explained how every year in the United States millions of families lose their jobs and their homes, Keep reading→
From The Institute for Local Self-Reliance
August 4, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California
MYTH: Big-Box Stores Create Jobs
FACT: Studies by independent economists show that big-box stores eliminate more retail jobs than they create. A recent study examined 3,094 counties across the U.S., tracking the arrival of new Wal-Mart stores between 1977 and 2002. The study, conducted by Univ. of California economist David Neumark, found that opening a Wal-Mart store led to a net loss of 150 retail jobs on average, suggesting that a new Wal- Mart job replaces approximately 1.4 workers at other stores (The Effects of Wal-Mart on Local Labor Markets, January 2007).
The reason for the overall decline is that a new Wal-Mart store does not increase the amount of money that residents have to spend. Sales gains at these stores are invariably mirrored by a drop in revenue at existing businesses, which then must down-size or close. The job losses are larger than the gains because Wal-Mart accomplishes the same volume of sales with fewer employees. Although similar studies have not been done of other big-box retailers, it’s likely that they also have either a negative or no impact on employment because the underlying dynamics (i.e., no increases in consumer spending) are the same.
MYTH: Big-Box Stores Boost Tax Revenue
FACT: The tax benefits of big-box stores are negated by the cost of providing public services to these developments and declining tax revenue from existing commercial districts. Big-box development creates substantial public costs. These sprawling stores are not efficient users of public infrastructure. Compared to traditional, compact business districts, they require longer roads, more road maintenance, additional miles of utilities, and more fire and police time. One case study in Barnstable, Mass., found that the annual cost of providing city services to traditional downtown and neighborhood business districts Keep reading→
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
~~
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.” Keep reading→
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. Keep reading→
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. Keep reading→
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
~
See also Big Box Mart cartoon→
~~
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. Keep reading→
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?
~~
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
June 30, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
Mendocino County has not yet been hurt badly by the financial crisis – for three reasons. First, because marijuana is our number one product; second, because that product, unlike timber, is bought and sold in cash; and third, we were not on the fast-track, high-growth frenzy that had captured other areas in the state south of us.
We have heard for many years the constant whining, frustration and fury by developers that it is nigh impossible to get anything through our local planning departments. We may want to stop a minute and thank our bureaucrats for being so grossly slow and inefficient.
The Monster Mall folks finally gave up and put their dumb growth project on the ballot. They’re determined to suck the lifeblood from our county and send it who knows where, to who knows who. Citizens in Windsor, San Diego, and San Joaquin Valley had very high throughput planners to help in their building frenzies and big box growth, and now they’re suffering horribly for it. They might want to send their planners up here for seminars on how to drag their feet.
But what of our local future? A slow squeeze has begun on another of our major sources of income: decent- and good-paying (thanks to Unions) local and regional jobs supported by taxes such as teaching, police and fire, public services, etc. Unless teachers get into outlaw agriculture, growing bud is not going to take up the slack. As cash becomes scarce, small businesses will suffer, local stores will close, tax income will go down further, more jobs will be lost… and we will join the death spiral that many other communities are experiencing.
Then we will start asking hard questions about why we are spending money at big box and chain stores that send our money out of our county; about why some locals would want to welcome even more occupiers in to plunder what little money we have; and how shopping local circulates our money around and around here at home, creating jobs, rather than taking leave for parts unknown.
We will also then consider creating our own local currencies, as other communities are doing, that stays local, purchasing food from our own farmers and restaurateurs; purchasing goods from our own merchants, makers and suppliers; purchasing entertainment from our own neighbors and local talents rather than watching it on the boob tube.
And you’ll be thankful you did because what you spend and send around locally, comes back to you and our community’s common wealth in so many ways.
~
See also Mendocino’s Local Economy: Weed, Wine, Wood, and Water→
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
June 28, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
In its Editorial Opinion, Sunday, June 28, 2009, the Ukiah Daily Journal calls our city’s purchase of vacant retail and commercially zoned land in the Redwood Business Park a “smart move.”
The Op-ed goes on to support the opinion by stating “The bottom line for the city’s residents is the potential for tax revenues that land represents. Vacant it represents nothing. Bundled and sold or leased for a major retail project it has the potential to increase annual property taxes by between $7 million and $11 million and bring in new sales taxes of $1.7 million… The question is whether the economy revives enough in the next couple of years to lure a major big box chain to construct a new store in Ukiah.”
This seems like nothing but dumb growth based on dumb oil, and we would expect a newspaper owned by some distant conglomerate to be supportive of the same old crap that wants to monitize every last bit of the commonwealth (“vacant it represents nothing”) which is destroying nature and community. That statement, in and of itself, pretty much sums up the moral and financial stupidity that has gotten us into the environmental disaster that we share. And despite allegedly being our source of important news, does our local newspaper know what’s really going on in the world?
We renew our call for local entrepreneurs to purchase the UDJ so it is locally-owned with responsive ownership that gives a damn for something other than its own bottom line.
Meanwhile:
Every increment of added population, and every added increment of affluence invariably destroys an increment of the remaining environment.
We hear a lot today about “smart growth,” as though “smart growth” was the magic key to the achievement of sustainability. A central ingredient in “smart growth” is regional planning; regional planning encourages more population growth, and population growth is unsustainable. It is thus clear that “smart growth” can’t solve the problems.
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
June 22, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
Open Money Manifesto
From Open Money
The problems with money stem entirely from how conventional money is normally issued – it is created by central banks in limited supply. There are three things we know about this money. We know what it does – it comes and it goes. We know what it is – it’s scarce and hard to get. And we know where it’s from – it’s from “them”, not us.
These three characteristics, common to all national currencies, determine that we constantly have to compete for a share of the limited amount of the “stuff” that makes the world go round. This money can go anywhere, and so it inevitably does, leaving the community deprived of its means of exchange.
It is simply the nature of conventional money that by its coming and going it creates conditions of competition and scarcity, within and between communities.
So we have to scramble for money to survive, we are forced to compete for it, often ruthlessly. Intent on getting the most for the least, we strive for the best bargains, as individuals, businesses, non-profits, governments, and nations.
As a society, as a generation, it seems we are determined to have everything ourselves no matter what consequences our excesses and negligence bring for others, now and in the future.
We rely on this money. It seems there isn’t much choice, despite its evident failings. Some people have little or none and cannot do what they need to live in this world – Read more→
From Dave Smith
Adapted from Whole Grain Cookery (o/p 1951)
by Stella Standard
June 16, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
Whole Wheat Muffins
1¼ cups organic whole wheat pastry flour
1 teaspoon soda
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 teaspoon salt
½ cup raisins
1¼ cups organic buttermilk or kefir
1 egg, beaten
2 tablespoons organic butter, melted
Mix the dry ingredients and stir the raisins through them. Combine with the mixed liquids, stirring as little as possible. Pour into greased muffin tins and bake in a hot oven about 20 minutes.
~
Blueberry Whole Wheat Muffins
2 cups organic whole wheat pastry flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons syrup
1 tablespoon molasses
1 organic egg, beaten
1 cup sour cream
¼ cup tepid water
wild or organic blueberries, washed and drained
Mix the dry ingredients. Beat the egg and add the sour cream, syrup, molasses and a little of the water. Combine with the dry ingredients and if the batter seems too thick, add a little more water. Stir as little as possible. Put half enough batter in each greased muffin tin, add a tablespoon of blueberries and then cover with the rest of the batter.
Bake in a hot oven about 20 to 25 minutes. 375°F. for 15 minutes and then reduce the heat to 325°F.
~
Buckwheat Muffins
1 cup organic buckwheat flour
½ cup corn meal
2½ teaspoons baking powder
¾ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon brown sugar
2 organic eggs, beaten
1¼ cups organic milk
4 tablespoons melted shortening
More→
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
June 15, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
I bought a bicycle a couple of years ago to use around town. I put a couple of saddle paniers on the back to carry my laptop to work and groceries home from the co-op. All set going green.
But I soon learned that I would rather walk. Our town is not that big, and if you live in town like I do, it doesn’t take long to get most anywhere here on foot. The only requirement is slowing down the mindset that time is of the essence and walking is a waste if you can get there a few minutes faster.
I didn’t like wearing a helmet, and I’d had a couple of close calls getting run over on the bike. The difference between the speed of a bike — even riding slowly and cautiously — and walking, was the difference between almost crashing, and simply stopping just in case the other person didn’t see me. And in inclement weather, biking is much more hazardous.
The only problem then became transport… of my laptop, books, food for dinner. So I scouted around for messenger bags, bought one, and it does the trick quite nicely. It is heavy packing the computer, but I figure it helps build strength as the daily walking to work, to the store, and back, keeps me in pretty good shape… especially when I’m also packing a thermos of green smoothie.
The bag is not big enough to carry a weekly grocery shop, but is big enough for a daily trip to the co-op on the way home. Fresher, healthier food, like the Europeans shop. Cool!
Most of the people walking our streets are street people. There are some skateboarders, kids on bikes, and dog walkers. Health walkers around Todd Park, sure. But mostly, walks around here are brief — from car to destination, and back to the car. I’ve been walking to work almost daily now, rain or shine, for almost two years. For me, definitely the way to go. More→
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
June 10, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
Back in the sixties, many of us protested the Vietnam war and various cultural suffocations by growing our hair. The Beatles (“mop-heads” was one early, affectionate term for them) may have started the trend, and sprouting long hair we did—men from our heads, cheeks and chins, women from their armpits and legs—and it was as potent a statement of protest and disgust as the middle finger salute.
But those days are long gone, replaced in the last few years by the soul-shriveling trend to conservatism, demonstrated by shaved heads and hairless chests. I am told that baldness has now even reached our nether regions, encouraged by the popularity of the porn industry. I recently observed a healthy young fellow sun-bathing on the beach in Los Angeles like a pink Chihuahua, completely hairless, apparently shaved and waxed from head to toe.
The authoritarian, buttoned-down, flag-waving war-mongers, chicken-hawks, and ditto-heads, have us just where they want us. Their co-conspirators are the corporate razor, shaver, and shaving foam pushers, who need only to trumpet their next blade addition to have us scurrying to the stores for the brand-new 10-blade model that will do you up in one fell swoop. And not one of their religious fellow travelers sports even a well-trimmed mustache.
We’re devoid of dignity like the sad, engineered, featherless chicken that made the news awhile back. We’ve been gutted, neck-tied, trussed-up, pre-scalded, and readied for the cook pot. →
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
June 9, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
From Small Is Beautiful, by E.F. Schumacher:
As Gandhi said, the poor of the world cannot be helped by mass production, only by production by the masses.
The system of mass production, based on sophisticated, highly capital-intensive, high energy-input dependent, and human labour-saving technology, presupposes that you are already rich, for a great deal of capital investment is needed to establish one single workplace. The system of production by the masses mobilizes the priceless resources which are possessed by all human beings, their clever brains and skillful hands, and supports them with first-class tools.
The technology of mass production is inherently violent, ecologically damaging, self-defeating in terms of non-renewable resources, and stultifying for the human person. The technology of production by the masses, making use of the best of modern knowledge and experience, is conducive to decentralization, compatible with the laws of ecology, gentle in its use of scarce resources, and designed to serve the human person instead of making him the servant of machines.
I have named it intermediate technology to signify that it is vastly superior to the primitive technology of bygone ages but at the same time much simpler, cheaper, and freer than the super-technology of the rich. One can also call it self-help technology, or democratic or people’s technology—a technology to which everybody can gain admittance and which is not reserved to those already rich and powerful.
~
Excerpted from The Transition Handbook – From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience, by Rob Hopkins
We need to be building the capability to produce locally those things that we can produce locally. It is, of course, easy to attack this idea by pointing out that some things, such as computers and frying pans can’t be made at a local level.
However, there are a lot of things we could produce locally: a wide range of seasonal fruit and vegetables, fresh fish, timber, mushrooms, dyes, many medicines, →
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
June 7, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
The blight of Monster Mall dumb growth, and the horror of mass mammal slaughter by Navy war games are forcing themselves on Mendocino communities. Some will shrug their shoulders in passive resignation, others will nod in welcome to a colonial economy; some will smile in anticipation of self-interested benefit, others will nod off in a non-caring stupor.
Wendell Berry:
There’s a lot of scorn now toward people who say, “Not in my backyard,” but the not-in-my-backyard sentiment is one of the most valuable that we have. If enough people said, “Not in my backyard,” these bad innovations wouldn’t be in anybody’s backyard. It’s your own backyard you’re required to protect because in doing so you’re defending everybody’s backyard. It is altogether healthy and salutary.
The environmental movement was founded and built by so-called NIMBYs, and Do-Gooders. They responded to the poisoning and destruction of our shared natural environment, first revealed by Rachel Carson in her book Silent Spring, by opposing it in their own backyards, neighborhoods, watersheds, and communities. They took personal responsibility, as good citizens and their elected representatives do in a democracy. I say good for them, good for us. If we don’t take responsibility for our own backyards and communities, who will? There are some things that should not be in any one’s backyard or neighborhood, and those who are most motivated to stop them are those who are immediately and locally affected. And when someone says that government should just get out of the way, they are saying democracy should just get out of the way. →
From Letters To The Editor
Anderson Valley Advertiser 6/3/2009
Tourist Alert
To The Editor:
To any tourists who just happens to be in Mendocino County this time of the year I say welcome to whine country. Not “wine” country as in a good grade of Ripple, but “whine” country, as in the sound made by the constantly complaining Mendocino County Progressives. I truly believe that these progressives were dyed in the wool brats who got anything and everything they wanted by continuously whining at their parents until they did, and I think they feel that this type of behavior should be just as successful for them as adults as it was when they were children.
I know that I am not the only one who is growing weary of this constant carping. But, as usual, out of adversity rises opportunity. I think I’ll go into the earplug business and I can make a bloody fortune selling plugs to others who are as fed up listening to the whining progressives as I am.
[Name witheld by UB]
~~
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
June 3, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
RESOLUTION NO. 2009-
RESOLUTION OF THE CITY COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF UKIAH STRONGLY OPPOSING THE MENDOCINO CROSSINGS MASONITE MIXED USE SPECIFIC PLAN BASED ON THE CITY COUNCIL’S CONVICTION THAT THE SPECIFIC PLAN WILL HAVE DETRIMENTAL EFFECTS ON THE CITY OF UKIAH AND THE REGION
WHEREAS a request for Ballot Title and Summary for an initiative has been filed with the Mendocino County Clerk to Amend the Mendocino County General Plan and the Inland Zoning Code of Mendocino County, and to enact the Mendocino Crossings Mixed-Use Masonite Specific Plan; and
WHEREAS the Mendocino Crossings Mixed-Use Masonite Specific Plan would allow approximately 650,000 square feet of commercial development and 150,000 square feet of residential development on approximately 74 acres north of and in close proximity to the City of Ukiah; and
WHEREAS the City of Ukiah has reviewed and discussed the Mendocino Crossings Mixed-Use Masonite Specific Plan; and concludes that build-out of the Masonite site pursuant to the provision of the Specific Plan could result in potential impacts to the City of Ukiah; and
WHEREAS the potential impacts include:
1) Traffic congestion resulting from the future connection of the Orchard Avenue Extension to proposed Valley Drive that would serve commercial and residential development rather than previously assumed industrial development;
2) Traffic congestion associated with the uncertainty of the effectiveness of the 5 additional traffic lights on North State Street proposed as part of the Specific Plan;
3) The cumulative build-out of the greater Ukiah Valley area has already negatively impacted public safety services within the City of Ukiah. The proposed project increases these negative impacts on police and fire services. These impacts include Read the rest of this entry »
From KIRKPATRICK SALE
Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision (1991)
June 3, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
Far from being deprived, far from being thus impoverished, even the most unendowed bioregion can in the long run gain in economic health with a careful and deliberate policy of self-sufficiency. The reasons are various:
1. A self-sufficient bioregion would be more economically stable, more in control of investment, production, and sales, and hence more insulated from the cycles of boom-and-bust engendered by distant market forces or remote political crises. And its people, with a full close-up knowledge of both markets and resources, would be able to allocate their products and labor in the most efficient way, to build and develop what and where they want to at the safest pace, to control their own money supply and currency value without extreme fluctuations—and to adjust all those procedures with comparative ease when necessary.
2. A self-sufficient bioregion would not be in vassalage to far-off and uncontrollable national bureaucracies or transnational corporations, at the mercy of whims or greed of politicians and plutocrats. Not caught up in the vortex of world-wide trade, it would be free from the vulnerability that always accompanies dependence in some degree or other, as the Western world discovered with considerable pain when OPEC countries quadrupled the price of the oil it depended on, as the non-Western world experiences daily.
3. A self-sufficient bioregion would be, plainly put, richer than one enmeshed in extensive trade, even when the trade balance is favorable. Partly this is because no part of the economy need be devoted to paying for imports, a burden that severely taxes even an industrial country like the United States—where, try as we might, we have not escaped a severe trade deficit in the last fifteen years—and that simply drains nations heavily dependent on imports, such as Britain, Brazil, Mexico, and most of the Read the rest of this entry »
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
Big bucks used to corrupt initiative process
June 3, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
From a local citizen: “DDR has spent $1,000,000 on marketing, legal and political services just to get this monster to market, even before the current filing. If you add in the most recent $186,336 [UDJ 5/31/09], and if DDR only needs 12,000 voters to win this election, DDR has already spent $98.86 for each one of those targeted voters – almost $100 per voter!”
From Financial Times May 29 2009:
California’s system of direct democracy, while laudable in aim, is another headache. “Ballot initiatives” were introduced in 1911 by Hiram Johnson, then governor, who wanted to curtail the influence of the mighty Southern Pacific Railroad and return power to the people. Since then, any issue can be put to a state-wide vote, provided half a million or so signatures are gathered to support a change in the law. Ballot initiatives were intended to give a voice to voters. “It was supposed to be about mom and pop talking about something around the dinner table and then getting all their friends to sign a petition,” says Dan Mitchell, professor emeritus at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and the School of Public Affairs. “But most initiatives on the ballot don’t start that way.” Instead wealthy individuals and special interest groups “pay a couple of million dollars to employ people to collect signatures outside of supermarkets”.
DDR Spokesperson response? “I don’t believe this to be buying a campaign.”
Tonight, Wednesday June 3 the Ukiah City Council will consider a resolution about Developer Diversified Realty’s (DDR) ballot measure to change the Masonite site from industrial zoning to a huge shopping mall. The item will come up early on the Council’s agenda, possibly 6:15 p.m.
~~
From Susan’s Website
People v. Inez Garcia, Monterey County Superior Court, 1977. On a self-defense theory, Inez Garcia was acquitted of killing the man who raped her.
People v. Emily Harris, U. S. District Court for the Northern District of California and Alameda County Superior Court, 1978. Involved the defense of Emily Harris, who was charged with kidnapping Patricia Hearst.
People v. Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, Alameda County Superior Court, 1990. This case, which reached only the investigation stage, focused on Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney as suspects in the bombing of their own vehicle. Defendants were not charged.
In re 1993 Superior Court Elections, Mendocino County. A highly charged ballot recount arising out of the election by a 3 vote margin of a controversial supervisor. Election results upheld.
Tamara A. v. Berkeley Unified School District, United States, District Court for the Northern District of California, 1995-96. A lawsuit on behalf of 12 minor plaintiffs and their mothers against the Berkeley Unified School District for violation of civil rights arising out of sexual molestation and sexual harassment by an elementary school teacher. Case settled.
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
May 29, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
This interactive map at Slate shows job losses by county from January 2006 to present. You can watch in horror as the careless greed of the Masters of the Universe race across the U.S. “bombing” jobs month-by-month, obliterating everything in its path.
Meanwhile, many of us here in Mendocino County have to spend our precious time fighting off the death throes of a thrashing DDR dinosaur, trying to squeeze out one last political perversion before dropping permanently into the black hole of consumerist history. Instead, we should be rebuilding our county economy, based on localizing renewable energy and organic/biodynamic agriculture.
Yesterday on Democracy Now, Eduardo Galeano, author of The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, the book Chavez gave to Obama, had this to say:
There is a new energy, which is not new at all. I think that history never ends. Some histories inside history have no happy ends, unhappy ends. But history doesn’t end. She’s a stubborn lady, and she goes on walking, sometimes crying, sometimes laughing. But it never ends. When histories say goodbye, history is really saying, “See you. See you later. See you soon.” So this is like a subterranean river, who went on flowing and nowadays is reappearing with a very important energy coming from people…
I have an engineer friend of mine who said, “Lo único que se hace desde arriba son los pozos,” “The only thing that you can make from up to down are holes.” And it’s true. All the other things are made, are created from the bottom. And that’s the way it’s going to be done, and it’s already going on in several Latin American countries, which is good news, indeed, for the world…
From Ukiah Daily Journal (5/27/09)
May 29, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
Don’t be deceived
To the Editor:
Recently I was in Chico and happened by a sad strip mall called Chico Crossings. There was a now defunct Circuit City, a Food Maxx and a number of empty buildings. I have no doubt this property is owned by the same company who is attempting to get the Masonite Property rezoned. It seems obvious to me that the rezoning is a ploy to raise the property value on the real estate prior to unloading the property.
I have no doubt that we will one day soon have a Costco, most likely in the same area they have spoken of putting it in near Friendman’s. The whole ploy of talking about a Crossings Mall reminds me of an incident which happened to my poor sister-in-law when she sold her home. The buyer kept begging her to lower the price because the buyer wanted to move in with her family and loved the home so much. My soft-hearted sister conceded, only to watch the buyer raise the price and put it back on the market when escrow closed.
With malls going out of business all over the U.S. and this company having lost substantial money on their stock value, it seems only logical that their aim is one of gaining the most money possible on the sale of the property by rezoning. Don’t be fooled by their rosy talk of Mendocino Crossings.
Unfortunately, there has been a great deal of deception, I have spoken to several people who actually signed the petition unaware that it was for the Mendocino Crossings.
M J Wilson
Potter Valley
~
DDR, good money after bad
To the Editor:
Developers’ Diversified Realty “has fallen into financial distress as it continues to refuse to widen the state highway (New Hampshire Route 1) that town officials say would assure the projects approval.”
So reported the Daily News of Newburyport, N.H., on April 6 of a DDR-financed mall project in its area (“Developer in Financial Turmoil”).
It said the publicly traded company, hit hard by the recession, is suffering from rising debt and a cash shortage. “Its stock value once at a high of $72.33 per share in February 2007,” said the News, “Opened on the stock exchange late last week at $2.39 per share.”
From Web of Debt
May 27, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
[Fiscally solvent North Dakota is doing it . . . and so can California. So can Mendocino County! So can Ukiah! And save our own economy. Seriously! Right now! -DS]
Money in a government-owned bank could give us the best of both worlds. We could have all the credit-generating advantages of private banks, without the baggage cluttering up the books of the Wall Street giants, including bad derivatives bets, unmarketable collateralized debt obligations, mark to market accounting issues, oversized CEO salaries and bonuses, and shareholders expecting a sizeable cut of the profits.
A state could deposit its vast revenues in its own state-owned bank and proceed to fan them into 8 to 10 times their face value in loans. Not only would it have its own credit machine, but it would control the loan terms. The state could lend at ½% interest to itself and to municipal governments, rolling the loans over as needed until the revenues had been generated to pay them off.
According to Professor Margrit Kennedy in her 1995 book Interest and Inflation-free Money, interest composes, on average, fully half the cost of every public project. Cutting costs by 50% could make currently-unsustainable projects such as low-cost housing, alternative energy development, and infrastructure construction not only sustainable but actually profitable for the government.
If all this seems too radical and unprecedented to venture into, consider that one state has had its own bank for 90 years; and it has not only escaped the credit crunch but is doing remarkably well . . . .
North Dakota has also managed to avoid the credit freeze, through the simple expedient of creating its own credit. It has led the nation in establishing state economic sovereignty. In California and other states, workers and factories are sitting idle because the private credit system has failed…
Keep reading at Web of Debt→
~
See also Mendo Moola→
~~
From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
May 27, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
Jack London’s Credo:
I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time.
~~Poster in rest room, Patrona Restaurant, Ukiah
Bioregionalism
From Kirkpatrick Sale
Dwellers in the Land (1991)
The issue is not one of morality but of scale. There is no very successful way to teach, or force, the moral view, or to insure correct ethical responses to anything at all. The only way people will apply “right behavior” and behave in a responsible way is if they have been persuaded to see the problem concretely and to understand their own connections to it directly—and this can be done only at a limited scale.
From Derrick Jensen
Endgame Volume II Resistance
May 22, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
It’s a beautiful day, and solitary bees are flying low to the ground, buzzing around their homes, then crawling underground to deliver food to their unhatched babies. Small black spiders scurry everywhere, and I see an ant carrying an impossibly large piece of wood from who knows where to who knows where for who knows what reason.
There’s a slight breeze, and the tips of redwood branches sway softly. A small blue butterfly lands on my elbow. I walk to the pond. Tadpoles hang beneath the surface, and if I get too close they dive and wriggle their fat bodies into the mud. Caddisfly larvae, looking for all the world like clumps of wet duff (probably because their armor is clumps of wet duff) trundle along reeds. Bright blue dragonflies dip their abdomens into the water, laying eggs, and tiny mayflies hover there, too. A couple of mayflies must have been caught earlier in spiderwebs, for now they’re motionless, suspended.
I sit cross-legged on the ground a couple of feet from the edge, and begin to edit this morning’s work. A quick movement catches me, and I see that a gray jumping spider has landed on my hand. Fearful of accidentally crushing it, I try to wipe it off on a piece of grass. It slips around my hand, always away from the grass and toward me. I let it stay.
It turns to look at me, and I look back at it. I lift my hand so I can better see its gray face and many black eyes. It shifts, too, to keep my face always in view. I shift my hand. It shifts its body. I put my hand back on my knee, and begin to write with my other. The spider moves to the edge of my right hand that is closest to my left, clearly considers the distance, and finally jumps.
It makes it. I stop writing. It peers again at my face, then walks to my wrist. I’m wearing a long-sleeved shirt, and the spider crawls in and out of the folds, stopping now and again to look up at me. It gets to my shoulder. It stops. It looks at me. I look at it, eyes straining to focus this close. I don’t know how long it stays there. Maybe five minutes. Maybe ten. Then it makes its way back down to my wrist, to my hand, and jumps off into the grass.
Life is really, really good.
~~
Spider photo from PBase.com
[With Dean Parks' gorgeous guitar backing, this song is pure heaven ... New album just out. -DS]
Instead of feelin’ bad, be glad you’ve got somewhere to go
Instead of feelin’ sad, be happy you’re not all alone
Instead of feelin’ low, get high on everything that you love
Instead of wastin’ time, feel good ’bout what you’re dreamin’ of.
Instead of tryin’ to win something you never understood
Just play the game you know, eventually you’ll love her good
It’s silly to pretend that you have something you don’t own
Just let her be your woman and you’ll be her man.
Instead of feelin’ broke, buck up and get yourself in the black
Instead of losin’ hope, touch up the things that feel out of whack
Instead of bein’ old, be young because you know you are
Instead of feelin’ cold, let sunshine into your heart.
Instead of acting crazy chasin’ things that make you mad
Keep your heart ahead, it’ll lead you back to what you have
With every step you’re closer to the place you need to be
It’s up to you to let her love you sweetly.
Instead of feelin’ bad be glad you’ve got someone to love
Instead of feelin’ sad, be happy there’s a god above
Instead of feelin’ low, remember you’re never on your own
Instead of feelin sad, be happy that she’s there at home
She’s waitin’ for you by the phone
So be glad that she is all your own.
Get happy
She’s waitin’ for you by the telephone.
So get back home.
~
Video here (but not as good as recorded version)
From King of the Hill – 1972 by A.E. Hotchner (also Paul Newman’s partner in Newman’s Own)
I tried every which way to get my mind off food. I had read all my books, so I got out the pile of old Woman’s Home Companions that my mother had stored in the back of the closet. Looking through these was how I started to eat roast beef and chocolate cake. There was this absolutely gorgeous roast-beef-and-gravy ad a whole page high with little potatoes and carrots, and I took a scissors and cut it out and began to eat it. What was amazing was how the paper actually tasted like roast beef. The same with the chocolate cake. I cut that out and then found an ice cream ad, and I put the ice cream on top of the chocolate cake and it really tasted like chocolate….
~~
Why Local Sustainable Enterprises are at Competitive Disadvantage, and What to Do About It
May 20, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
The Small-Mart Revolution
Michael Shuman
Reviewed by Dave Pollard
MICHAEL Shuman has written an excellent book diagnosing the reasons entrepreneurial businesses face an uneven playing field and an unfair competitive disadvantage versus the multinational corporatist oligopolies (MCOs). This book, The Small-Mart Revolution, also prescribes 95 ways we can help rectify this damaging distortion of the ‘market’ economy — as customers, investors, public policy-setters, community members, citizens, and entrepreneurs ourselves.
Shuman introduces a useful acronym to differentiate the types of entrepreneurial business we need to encourage and support: LOIS (local ownership & import substitution). Only when owners live and work in the communities they operate in do they really care about the people and environment in those communities, he argues. And only by replacing shoddy products and services transported half way around the globe (at enormous social and environmental cost) with goods and services produced right in the community can we hope to build strong, healthy and resilient local economies where people can both live and make a reasonable living.
The first part of the book outlines the 13 market distortions that multinational corporatist oligopolies (MCOs) have been able to create and exploit to enormous advantage, to the great detriment of entrepreneurs who actually add value to the communities in which they operate — and offer customers much greater value for their dollar:
1. Government Subsidies: More than $300B in corporate subsidies, almost all of which go to MCOs, are paid by North American and European governments each year to protect and incent these rich and powerful corporate goliaths. These subsidies are ‘purchased’ with MCO campaign donations, junkets and lobbying.
2. Access to Cheap Capital: MCOs can borrow money much cheaper and under much more favourable terms from the big financial corporations than entrepreneurs can. These rates reflect formulaic conventional lending wisdom and not actual risk.
3. Labor Negotiating Power: MCOs have the clout to smash unions and bully employees into accepting lower wages and fewer benefits, with the threat of outsourcing and offshoring jobs if the cuts are resisted.
4. Supplier/Retailer Negotiating Power: With their corner on the markets for supply (oligopoly) and big box retail distribution (oligopsony), MCOs are in a position to bully big, brand name suppliers into offering their products exclusively through the MCOs, at hugely discounted prices. These ‘deals’ force suppliers in turn to outsource and offshore their operations to afford these prices, and often force these suppliers into bankruptcy in the futile attempt to endlessly reduce costs.
5. Subsidized Transportation and Energy Infrastructure: Because the cost of gasoline is suppressed by political deals with OPEC, and energy and highway projects are heavily subsidized with tax dollars to favour long-distance transportation carriers, the true cost of imports is hugely distorted, to the advantage of MCOs.
6. Undervaluing of People’s Time: Because we are too busy to find and visit small local suppliers, and because we undervalue the time and energy it takes us to drive to big box malls, we overvalue the ’savings’ we supposedly receive from MCOs.
7. Deceptive Advertising: Huge MCO advertising and PR campaigns delude us into believing we are getting value from overpriced, poor-quality imported junk that MCOs sell us. And if you try to get your money back, the armies of ‘customer care’ and the armies of corporate lawyers are ready to dissuade you.
8. Addiction to Consumption and Debt: MCOs and their handmaidens in the lending industry and in government spend a fortune to persuade you that irresponsible spending and borrowing beyond your means is socially necessary and good for ‘the economy’. Once you’re hooked, there’s no way out — especially now bankruptcy laws have been tightened up.
9. Lack of Consumer Protection: Under the guise of ‘deregulation’ and blocking ‘frivolous’ litigation, consumer protection laws in many countries have been weakened or gutted, encouraging poor quality production and services and other irresponsible MCO practices.
10. Naive Local Planners and Zoners: Because they’re unaware of the multiplier benefits of LOIS enterprises, local zoners and planners often offer huge incentives to attract MCOs that yield little local return on that investment, and actually destroy local employment and manufacturing.
11. Oligopoly Network Power: MCOs, by striking exclusive deals with other MCOs, cut LOIS enterprises out of the bidding for major supply contracts, effectively starving them out of all distribution channels except local independents’. You won’t find small local food vendors’ products in large chain grocery stores, for example, because the Big Agribusiness producer oligopolies won’t let the chains carry small competitors’ products.
12. Lack of Environmental Regulation: Thanks to heavy ‘deregulation’ lobbying by MCOs, environmental regulations in many countries have been weakened, or are unenforced, allowing megapolluting MCOs to ‘externalize’ (pass off to taxpayers and those who have to live in the polluted communities) the heavy environmental costs of their operations.
13. Lack of Training in Entrepreneurship: As I have been harping on in these pages for years, there is little or no reasonably-priced training available to entrepreneurs on how to establish and operate a responsible independent business effectively. The consequence is huge entrepreneurial failure rates and millions of enterprises that could easily, with a bit of coaching, be much more effective, successful and happy places to work.
If these distortions could be overcome, Shuman argues, we have a lot to gain from an economy in which LOIS enterprises compete fairly and effectively with MCOs:
* LOIS enterprises are closer to the customer and hence better attuned to their needs, and able to be more innovative and adaptable to meet those needs.
* LOIS enterprises are less vulnerable to spikes in energy and transportation costs, which are certainly on the horizon (though Grist argues that this is offset by the endemic lack of infrastructure that LOIS enterprises must live with).
* LOIS enterprises are better able to customize products to meet the unique needs and opportunities that are present in each local market (One size never fits all).
* LOIS enterprises are better able to leverage virtual and peer production and distribution networks because they are less committed to and invested in older physical networks and infrastructure.
* LOIS enterprises, thanks to the personal touch and local ownership, generally have much lower turnover (and hence more knowledgeable staff) and greater employee loyalty (and hence better service) than MCOs.
* LOIS enterprises are less dependent on corporate subsidies and low interest rates, and if, as many suspect, the US dollar and economy soon tanks and interest rates spike, they will have the resilience to continue to operate when many MCOs go under.
The balance of the book prescribes the 95 actions we can take to remedy the market distortions:
* As customers — e.g. by buying local and creating local buying networks
* As investors — e.g. by investing in local enterprises and creating local investment funds, networks and capacity
* As public policy-setters — e.g. by appreciating the economic advantages of LOIS enterprises and leveling the playing field for them
* As community members — e.g. by creating local community-based economies
* As citizens — e.g. by combating the wealth and power of MCOs politically (e.g. by voting out corporatists) and economically (e.g. through boycotts)
* As entrepreneurs ourselves — e.g. by creating local Natural Enterprises and networking them with others
There are two disturbing and enduring myths about entrepreneurship:
1. That franchises are a healthy form of local entrepreneurship; and
2. That entrepreneurs need to compete on price with MCOs by offering customers the same imported, subsidized low-price crap as MCOs, instead of local, high quality, non-mass-produced (‘unaffordable’) products
Shuman tackles the first misconception well, but sidesteps the second. One of the most frustrating experiences of enlightened customers is to go into locally-owned retailers and discover everything on the shelves is imported (mostly from China) when good local sources of similar goods are available (just invisible). Or to hire a local service provider only to discover that they buy all their supplies from a wholesaler’s catalogue, most of which is imported products that by-pass local producers.
But we have to start somewhere, and this book provides a good blueprint on how to do so.
What will be even more essential than a grassroots buy local movement will be entrepreneurs and local activists researching, cataloguing and creating networks of LOIS enterprises, and acting as organizers and intermediaries to help customers in local communities become aware of, and arrange to buy from, LOIS enterprises.
Just as important will be encouraging and coaching new LOIS enterprises to get properly and sustainably established, and helping them appreciate (and explain to their customers) the benefits and value of buying the goods on their shelves, the service that support them, and replacement and supply parts and accessories, from local suppliers.
This book is the perfect antidote and response to the corporatist apologists’ argument that “no one is forcing you to buy from Wal-Mart”. It’s time for responsible, enlightened LOIS entrepreneurs to break ranks with the corporatists in chambers of commerce, the anti-Kyoto forces, and the cynical ‘deregulation’ lobby, and realize that MCOs are not their allies but their worst enemy. The Small-Mart Revolution is long overdue, and needs our support and collaboration to make it happen.
~
See also The Masonite Monster Mall series→
[Update: A good time was had by all. Language of resolution will be tweaked for sure passage next meeting. -DS]
From Save Our Local Economy (SOLE)
May 20, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
This Wednesday May 20 the Ukiah City Council will consider a resolution about Developer Diversified Realty’s (DDR) ballot measure to change the Masonite site from industrial zoning to a huge shopping mall.
One of the versions of the resolution before the Council will urge the public to vote “No” when DDR’s measure goes before the voters in November.
The presence of those of us who oppose DDR will be essential. Please attend if you can.
The item will come up early on the Council’s agenda, possibly 6:15 to 6:30 p.m.
[I didn't move to this beautiful valley to shop. -Guiness McFadden]
The economic structure that mega-retailers are propagating represents a modern variation on the old European colonial system, which was designed not to build economically viable and self-reliant communities, but to extract their wealth and resources. Yet many cities eagerly usher in these corporate colonizers.
Some envision a tax windfall, only to discover that these sprawling stores impose a significant burden on public infrastructure and services. Or worse, after their local economies have been bulldozed, they find that they are utterly dependent on a few big boxes that might raise prices, lay off employees, or threaten to move to a neighboring town if they don’t receive a tax break…
As retail sprawls outward, running errands entails more driving. The 1990s saw a jump of more than 40 percent in the number of miles driven by the average household for shopping—which translates into an increase of almost 95 billion miles a year for the country as a whole. Mega-retailers are thus fueling smog, acid rain, and global warming. Retail sprawl has also emerged as a top threat to our rivers, lakes, and estuaries…
Keep reading Big Box Swindle→
From Save Our Local Economy (SOLE)
May 19, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
• What it does
The ballot measure would amend the County General Plan and zoning code to adopt a Specific Plan covering DDR’s 76-acre Masonite site. The Specific Plan was written for DDR by an Orange County consultant and is 310 pages long.
It allows DDR to build “Mendocino Crossings” with any combination it wants of big box retail stores, residences and other facilities. The limit for big box stores is 800,000 square feet [B-41], which would make Mendocino Crossings a tie with Coddingtown Mall in Santa Rosa as the largest shopping mall on the North Coast. The parking lot would hold more than 3,000 cars.
The Specific Plan would also allow DDR to build up to 150 residences. Although the Specific Plan provides 3 different “Conceptual Plans” of how the shopping center might look, it also states that “The exhibits shown are conceptual and do not reflect what may actually be constructed on the site. The actual development of the site is subject to change based on market and regional demands.” [B-42]
• Could the Specific Plan ever be amended?
Only by another ballot measure [Initiative text, Section 8]. Once adopted, the Specific Plan is law and the County’s elected officials would have no control over what DDR does with the property, within the broad limits established by the Specific Plan.
• How does the Initiative affect the County General Plan?
If enacted, the Initiative would require that everything else in the County General Plan would have to be revised to eliminate any inconsistency with DDR’s Specific Plan [Initiative, Section 5-B].
• Will there be an Environmental Impact Report?
No. Rezonings that are put on the ballot by petition are exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), since there is no public agency which is responsible for approving the project [B-228].
• How did DDR qualify the Initiative for the ballot?
DDR, under the name “Mendocino County Tomorrow,” hired a professional signature-gathering company, H&H Petitions, which brought approximately 20 signature gatherers here from out-of-county, beginning April 9, 2009. They were paid $2 per valid signature. According to numerous citizen reports, the petitioners mostly told the public that the petition was to “clean up the Masonite site.” There were 4 letters to the editor in the Ukiah Daily Journal from different individuals who stated that they had been misled in this way, and 82 people who had been misled by the signature-gatherers sent letters to the County Clerk asking that their names be removed from the petition. Nevertheless, DDR was successful in submitting its petition to the county on April 29, 2009, claiming it had sufficient signatures to force a special election in November on its Initiative.
• What is the history of the property?
The site is zoned for industry and was used by Masonite Corporation for 50 years. DDR bought the site in 2005 and demolished the plant facilities, despite appeals to save it for new industrial uses. The 76-acre property is the largest industrial parcel in the inland county and has rail access and other features that make it ideal for new industrial development.
• Why should the site stay in industrial zoning?
Because industrial employers offer better wages and benefits than the minimum-wage jobs offered by big box stores. Also, industry creates a stronger local economy because it brings money into the area, instead of draining it out like big box stores do. There is good potential for future industrial use of the Masonite site, if it stays in industrial zoning. About 27 acres of new industrial buildings have gone up just north of the Masonite property just since 2001, showing the demand for industrial property. Many timber industry officials believe that the regrowth of the county’s forests will create a need for a new wood byproducts facility.
• How would DDR’s mall affect traffic?
The County’s draft Ukiah Valley Area Plan found that major traffic improvements are needed if there is more development around the Masonite site, including a new north-south road and a new freeway access off Brush Street. But DDR’s Specific Plan doesn’t include any of these new roads. Instead, the Specific Plan dictates that North State Street will bear all of the burden. DDR’s Specific Plan specifies 5 new traffic lights on North State Street, bringing the total to 7 traffic lights in the ½ mile stretch from Orr Springs Road to Ford Road [B-65]. While this forest of red lights will make North State Street a nightmare for thru-traffic, DDR apparently figures that it can still get shoppers off and on the freeway.
• Besides North State Street, would DDR pay for other off-site road improvements?
Almost certainly not. The Specific Plan says DDR will pay for the new traffic lights and road widenings it wants on North State Street. Beyond that, the County must prove by a “nexus report” that any fees imposed on the project are justified by impacts created by the project, AND THEN, whatever DDR has paid for the North State Street alterations will be DEDUCTED from those fees [B-223].
• How would it affect the water shortage?
DDR says that it would meet the large new water demand for the shopping mall from an existing well (Masonite well #6) near the Russian River [B-73]. How this pumping would affect the total demand on the river and on Lake Mendocino isn’t clear, since DDR is circumventing the requirement for an Environmental Impact Report.
• What development standards would apply to the project?
Only what DDR has written into the Specific Plan, which substitutes for all County Zoning regulations [Initiative, Section 3]. In other words, DDR has written its own rules. Not surprisingly, these conflict with the existing limits and aesthetic standards that are common in Mendocino County. For example, DDR gives itself the right to erect a 100-foot tall lighted sign next to the freeway, four times taller and eight times larger in area than allowed by County zoning [B-124]. Signs on the stores themselves can be up to 500 square feet, three times larger than allowed by County zoning. [B-120]. There is no provision whatsoever for design review by the County of the buildings or other features.
• How can this area support such a huge shopping mall?
Only by capturing the lion’s share of all retail business in Mendocino County. With about 12 big box stores and numerous smaller shops, the development would be designed to be a “magnet” destination sufficiently compelling to attract shoppers and keep them on site for most of their shopping needs. The impact on downtowns and existing shopping districts throughout Mendocino County is obvious. An economic study commissioned by the county in 2007 concluded, “The prospects for new regional retail [center] depend on its ability to capture expenditures from a trade area larger than the Ukiah Valley.” [“Ukiah Valley Area Plan Economic Background,” Economic & Planning Systems, Inc., p. 37] DDR claims that its shopping mall would create hundreds of new jobs, but there is every reason to believe that these new jobs would be offset by lost jobs at existing stores in Mendocino and Lake counties.
• But don’t we need DDR’s shopping mall to get a Costco store?
No. Costco was in advanced negotiations to build a store in Ukiah’s Redwood Business Park and detailed site plans had been submitted to the city in both 2003 and 2007 for a 15-acre parcel. As soon as it bought the Masonite site in 2005, DDR went to work to persuade Costco to give up on the City of Ukiah site. Finally DDR succeeded, and Costco suddenly stopped talking to the city in June, 2007. But when DDR’s ballot initiative is defeated, Costco can still build on the original City of Ukiah site if it still believes the local market will support its store. The City of Ukiah has 95 acres of vacant land zoned for retail.
• DDR is experiencing financial distress. How could DDR build a new shopping mall when it is trying to sell property to raise cash?
It’s true that DDR is shaky. Last year its stock plunged to only $2 a share, and its debt was recently reduced to junk bond status by the rating agencies. But the ballot measure is a potentially lucrative speculation for DDR, even if the election campaign costs $1 million. A rezoning could increase the market value of the DDR property by as much as $30 million. Then DDR could sell it to another developer.
• But isn’t it the democratic way to let the voters decide?
Only if there is full information fairly presented to the voters. As DDR showed in the signature-gathering campaign, lies succeed when they are aggressively disseminated without opposing information. DDR figures it can spend so much money painting a one-sided picture of the Initiative that it can drown out all opposition. Even before the Initiative drive, DDR mailed 5 fancy brochures to all county voters, projected a false image of their plans. DDR will circumvent the normal requirement for an Environmental Impact Report, which is an essential source of objective analysis on any project. DDR seeks to lock its 310-page Specific Plan into law and prohibit any public hearings or review by our elected officials. This can’t be described as democratic. It’s more like direct corporate rule.
~
Go to Save Our Local Economy→
See also The Masonite Monster Mall series→
~~
From The Shadow of the Wind (2005)
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
May 19, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
The man called Isaac nodded and invited us in. A blue-tinted gloom obscured the sinuous contours of a marble staircase and a gallery of frescoes peopled with angels and fabulous creatures. We followed our host through a palatial corridor and arrived at a sprawling round hall, a virtual basilica of shadows spiraling up under a high glass dome, its dimness pierced by shafts of light that stabbed from above. A labyrinth of passageways and crammed bookshelves rose from base to pinnacle like a beehive woven with tunnels, steps, platforms, and bridges that presaged an immense library of seemingly impossible geometry. I looked at my father, stunned. He smiled at me and winked.
“Welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Daniel.”
I could make out about a dozen human figures scattered among the library’s corridors and platforms. Some of them turned to greet me from afar, and I recognized the faces of various colleagues of my father’s, fellows of the secondhand booksellers’ guild. To my ten-year-old eyes, they looked like a brotherhood of alchemists in furtive study. My father knelt next to me and, with his eyes fixed on mine, addressed me in the hushed voice he reserved for promises and secrets.
“This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. This place was already ancient when my father brought me here for the first time, many years ago. Perhaps as old as the city itself. Nobody knows for certain how long it has existed, or who created it. I will tell you what my father told me, though. When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here.
In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader’s hands. In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth, books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend. Now they have only us, Daniel…”
~~
From DAVE SMITH
May 18, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
Editor:
A recent letter to the Ukiah Daily Journal 5/15/09 decries the “lack of logic” and “emotional arguments” of anti-Monster Mall citizens, saying that “All these objections disappear when the same stores are proposed inside Ukiah’s City Limits and are not objectionable at all. Pure hypocrisy.”
Citizens oppose bad projects for many different reasons. Some of us oppose any big-box or chain store to save our local economy and downtown merchants; others oppose the Monster Mall at the Masonite site to save our best industrial land for good-paying jobs; and still others oppose it because there is land already set aside for retail stores in town.
As a self-described, life-long developer, the letter writer knows perfectly well that our opposition is by a united coalition of diverse interests.
Nothing at all hypocritical about that.
~~
From DAVE SMITH
May 15, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
Thanks to Darca Nicholson, you can support the fight to stop the Masonite Monster Mall by having the above machine-embroidered on t-shirts and other pieces of clothing.
Take them to Jana at Encore Fashions, 109 W Church St in Ukiah (707) 463-5590, along with a suggested donation of $25 each to Save Our Local Economy (SOLE).
Thanks!!
~~
From Tom Greco
Author of The End of Money and the Future of Civilization
May 12, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
Because of legal tender laws, the “dollar” has come to have two meanings — (1) as a medium of exchange or payment (a currency), and (2) as the standard of value measurement or pricing unit.
An alternative currency must eventually decouple from both “dollars” but the more urgent need by far is decoupling from the dollar as a means of payment.
As I’ve pointed out in my books, an alternative currency that is issued on the basis of a national currency paid in (e.g., sold for dollars), amounts to a “gift certificate” or localized “traveler’s check.” (See Money Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender, Chapter 14, pp 145-163). It essentially amounts to prepayment for the goods or services offered by the accepting merchants. As such, it substitutes a local, limited use currency for a national, universal currency.
That approach provides some limited utility in encouraging the holder of the currency to buy locally, but the option of redeeming the currency back into dollars without penalty raises the question of how many times it will mediate local trades before being redeemed and leaking back to the outside world.
To truly empower a local community, a currency should be issued on the basis of goods and services changing hands, i.e., it should be “spent into circulation” by local business entities and/or individuals who are able to redeem it by providing goods or services that are in everyday demand by local consumers. Such a currency amounts to an i.o.u. of the issuer, an i.o.u. that is voluntarily accepted by some other provider of goods and services (like an employee or supplier), then circulated, then eventually redeemed, not in cash, but “in kind.” In this way, community members “monetize” the value of their own production, just as banks monetize the value of collateral assets when they make a loan, except in this case, it is done by the community members themselves based on their own values and criteria, without the “help” or involvement of any government, bank, or ordinary financial institution, and without the need to have any official money to begin with.
This is what I mean when I talk about liberating the exchange process and restoring (some part of) the “credit commons” and bringing it under local control. In this way, the community gains a measure of independence from the supply of official money (dollars) and the policies and decisions of the central bank (which in the US is the Federal Reserve) and the banking cartel. That is the primary mission that needs to be accomplished if we are to transcend the destructive effects of the global monetary and banking regime, devolve power to the local level, and build sustainable, economic democracy.
Keep reading Fundamentals of Alternative Currency at Tom Greco’s website→
See also Mendo Moola→
… and Mendo Time Bank→
~~
From Fatal Harvest
The Seven Myths of Industrial Agriculture
5/12/09 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
The Truth
New biotech crops will not solve industrial agriculture’s problems, but will compound them and consolidate control of the world’s food supply in the hands of a few large corporations. Biotechnology will destroy biodiversity and food security, and drive self-sufficient farmers off their land.
The myths of industrial agriculture share one underlying and interwoven concept-they demand that we accept that technology always equals progress. This blind belief has often shielded us from the consequences of many farming technologies. Now, however, many are asking the logical questions of technology: A given technology may be progress, but progress toward what? What future will that technology bring us? We see that pesticide technology is bringing us a future of cancer epidemics, toxic water and air, and the widespread destruction of biodiversity. We see that nuclear technology, made part of our food through irradiation, is bringing us a future of undisposable nuclear waste, massive clean-up expenses, and again multiple threats to human and environmental health. As a growing portion of society realizes that pesticides, fertilizers, monoculturing, and factory farming are little more than a fatal harvest, even the major agribusiness corporations are starting to admit that some problems exist. Their solution to the damage caused by the previous generation of agricultural technologies is-you guessed it-more technology. “Better” technology, biotechnology, a technology that will fix the problems caused by chemically intensive agriculture. In short, the mythmakers are back at work. But looking past the rhetoric, a careful examination of the new claims about genetic engineering reveals that instead of solving the problems of modern agriculture, biotechnology only makes them worse.
Will Biotechnology Feed The World?
In an attempt to convince consumers to accept food biotechnology, the industry has relentlessly pushed the myth that biotechnology will conquer world hunger. This claim rests on two fallacies: first that people are hungry because there is not enough food produced in the world, and second that genetic engineering increases food productivity.
In reality, the world produces more than enough to feed the current population. The hunger problem lies not with the amount of food being produced, but rather with how this food is distributed. Too many people are simply too poor to buy the food that is available, and too few people have the land or the financial capability to grow food for themselves. The result is starvation. If biotech corporations really wanted to feed the hungry, they would encourage land reform, which puts farmers back on the land, and push for wealth redistribution, which would allow the poor to buy food.
The second fallacy is that genetic engineering boosts food production. Currently there are two principal types of biotechnology seeds in production: herbicide resistant and “pest” resistant. Monsanto makes “Roundup Ready” seeds, which are engineered to withstand its herbicide, Roundup. The seeds-usually soybeans, cotton, or canola-allow farmers to apply this herbicide in ever greater amounts without killing the crops. Monsanto and other companies also produce “Bt” seeds-usually corn, potatoes, and cotton-that are engineered so that each plant produces its own insecticide.
From Dave Smith
5/11/09 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
If you’re an old timer around these parts, you know the Ford family, and the four Ford boys, Steve, Patrick, Robben, and Mark. The brothers are locals and have played music around here and elsewhere since high school under the names of The Charles Ford Band, and The Ford Blues Band, among others, and travel the world playing music together and separately. They most recently played here in Ukiah at Sundays In The Park this past summer, 2008.
When he’s not on the road, touring America and Europe with his band, Patrick runs his record company Blue Rock’It Records in Redwood Valley where you can buy their own albums on-line along with his other recording artists. Robben’s website is here; and, hopefully, Mark will be the subject of a future feature.
(See links to rest of the story below)
~
That last tour with Charlie Musslewhite was pretty brutal. Sharon and I wanted to have kids, and this is where we wanted to have them, so we moved back home to Ukiah in 1974.
I kicked around for awhile trying to figure out what to do. I liked gardening and was knowledgeable in the area, so I went to one of the nurseries and the owner picked me up as a landscape maintenance guy. In about a year, Gabriel was born, and I was getting a little bored with my job. I liked the gig, but I had been playing music for a lot of years at that point and I was getting anxious… I needed something more exciting than maintaining PG&E’s landscaping.
At one point, because we were really in trouble for money, I had to sell my drum set to a friend down in the Bay Area who had always wanted it. To this day, it makes Sharon so sad when she remembers watching from the window at my folk’s house, loading up my drum kit on a friend’s truck and the look on my face as the truck rolled off down the street. She had told me not to do it, but I said we were out of money. That carried us for a couple of months between jobs.
Bartlett Flats crew, Pat on left
Anyway, I was getting antsy and I saw an ad in the back of the Journal (UDJ) that the US Forest Service needed fire fighters. It was Fall and their seasonal employees were going back to college. I went over to Upper Lake and signed up. I got stuck out in Bartlett Flats in Lake County, about an hour on this dirt road from Nice. It was hot and miserable and pretty funky there in a quonset hut. Chester, my foreman, was this American Indian who was just the sweetest, most wonderful guy… the greatest to get for my first boss. He put me to work learning to drive one of these little pumper units, fire techniques, and how to operate a chainsaw. He took me under his wing and was very patient when I would screw up.
From DAVE SMITH
May 8, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
One of our letter-to-the-editor writers (UDJ 5/08/09) asks: … “rather then waving your banner of ‘corporate conspiracy,’ why don’t you take your own advice and recognize this petition as part of that ‘democratic process’ that you are so fond of?”
Here’s why. Our nation was founded on one person, one vote… not one dollar, one vote. We the citizens of Mendocino County won Measure H against GMO pollution of our food supply despite being outspent by corporations $500,000 to $100,000. How is that lopsided amount of available money from outsiders, against the citizens of a poor rural county, fair? How is that democratic?
Why should an outside corporation worth billions of dollars be allowed to fund an initiative process that overruns all the local laws set in place by those who live here? How is that fair? How is that democratic?
Corporations have their place and are valuable in many ways. I’ve created and run several myself. But they must get behind the constitution. With their wealth and monopoly power, they are plundering our commons and buying off the democratic process. Please read Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights by Thom Hartmann, and The Divine Right of Capital by Marjorie Kelly.
Once you’ve educated yourself, come back and defend your charge: “Your attempts to marginalize this process, is in effect a way of saying that democracy is defined as anything that supports your views, if not, then it’s a conspiracy.” Really… it’s just us citizens trying to protect and defend ourselves against overwhelming power and money.
Your leadership stated that you have “had enough of our local government not acting in our best interest.” Our local government is elected democratically by our citizens. They represent our majority interests. Since you tried and failed to buy our County Supervisors off and we defeated you at the polls, now you’re trying an “end-around” the democratic process. How is that fair? How is that democratic?
It isn’t. But we will defeat you once again, because we don’t want your Monster Mall in our place, and we are more determined to stop it than you are to foist it upon us.
~~
From DAVE SMITH
Letters To The Editors
May 8, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
Editor:
As regards the Masonite Monster Mall debate in local letters to the editors, first we had the “Vote to clean up the Masonite site” canard, misleading citizens about what the initiative really is about. Then we had the Costco canard, where the argument that we could have Costco if we voted in the Monster Mall was shown to be false.
Now we have a “straw man” argument where citizens who are against the Monster Mall are labeled “hippies”, and then we are told that hippies are a minority in our county… implying that a majority will vote for the Monster Mall.
I like hippies. Some of my best friends are hippies. But the majority in this county who will defeat this initiative are citizens. This is a sad continuation of the culture wars.
We’ve heard all this before during the Measure H campaign where we defeated big corporate interests who wanted to poison our county with genetically modified organisms. We beat the big bucks that time. We’ll beat them again this time, and save our local economy from outside occupiers.
by George Monbiot
Journalists – they’re never around when you want one. Two weeks ago a momentous event occurred: the beginning of the world’s first evacuation of an entire people as a result of manmade global warming. It has been marked so far by one blog post for the Ecologist and an article in the Solomon Times*. Where is everyone?
The Carteret Islands are off the coast of Bougainville, which, in turn, is off the coast of Papua New Guinea. They are small coral atolls on which 2,600 people live. Though not for much longer.
As the Ecologist’s blogger Dan Box witnessed, the first five families have moved to Bougainville to prepare the ground for full evacuation. There are compounding factors – the removal of mangrove forests and some local volcanic activity – but the main problem appears to be rising sea levels. The highest point of the islands is 170cm above the sea. Over the past few years they have been repeatedly inundated by spring tides, wiping out the islanders’ vegetable and fruit gardens, destroying their subsistence and making their lives impossible…
~~
We are ‘We the People.’
We must write the laws.
We must enforce them.
There is no one else.
Organizing Communities to Govern Cartel Retailing Empires like Wal-Mart
Many communities are frantically trying to resist the encroachment of giant retail merchandising corporations and the economic and environmental injuries that those corporations inflict on locally owned businesses, community character, and workers.
Past efforts to control the amount of harm inflicted by these corporations have resulted in increased environmental and land-use regulation, but there has been a marked failure to secure local authority over whether those corporations will be allowed to operate by the communities that they impact.
In recent years, organizations, communities, and community leaders working on a range of other “single” issues have begun to question why their industrious enforcement of zoning laws, environmental regulations, environmental impact studies and other legal land-use tools have failed to protect the natural environment, create an improved quality of life, or increase community control over corporations. As some community leaders have learned, available legal regulatory remedies are drawn from a “stacked deck” of sorts. Created to enable communities to make it more expensive for corporations to site or operate in a particular location, those regulations maintain the illusion that the community has fundamental decision-making authority over how, or whether, the corporation will operate within the community.
Over the years, activists and communities have struggled to correct the symptoms of corporate control through their use of the regulatory system – a system that, in effect, serves as nothing more than an “energy sink” for activists. Indeed, regulations aimed at lessening corporate harms may actually serve to work against that goal. So often the temporary, regulatory “wins” of activists merely codify specific levels of permissible harm that corporations may legally inflict on people and communities.
Unless these communities, groups, and municipal governments shift their focus from regulating corporate behavior (seeking to lessen corporate harms) to asserting local, democratic control over corporations, attempts to build sustainable communities and protect the natural environment will fail.
Keep reading Organizing Communities to Govern Cartel Retailing Empires like Wal Mart at CELDF.org→
~~
From Salon
…At honest moments, though, I suspected my reluctance to seek out organic rutabagas was more lazy than practical. So last year, when global food prices began to soar, I devised an experiment: My husband and I would eat conscientiously for a month, not just on our regular grocery allotment but on the government-defined, food-stamp minimum: $248 for two people in our hometown of New Haven, Conn.
We would choose the SOLE-est products available — that is, the sustainable, organic, local or ethical alternative. We would start from a bare pantry, shop only at places that took food stamps and could be reached on foot, and use only basic appliances. The test would mean some painful changes; gone was my husband’s customary breakfast of Honey Nut Cheerios and our favorite dinner of pepperoni pizza. But it would answer that nagging question: When shopping for food, did I have to choose between my budget and my beliefs?
Challenges began on my first grocery trip, where staples required some massive outlays of cash. It was anxiety-inducing to shell out $4 a jar for organic spices, even after I pared down my shelf to salt, pepper, oregano, basil, curry, cumin, chili and cinnamon. (I also bought some garlic, soy sauce and red wine vinegar, though these were non-local organic; I justified the carbon footprint — not to mention the price — with the thought that cheap eaters need to fill up on flavor.) It was frightening to spend $7 on a small bottle of organic olive oil in hopes it would last all month. The costliest decision was meat; I didn’t want to impose a completely vegetarian diet on my carnivorous husband or on-and-off-carnivorous self, but the frozen slabs of grass-fed steak at the farmers’ market seemed tough to manage. Instead, I bought a small free-range chicken for about $9 and a scant pound of local ground beef for about $6, knowing that this, along with some sustainable canned fish, was our allotment of animal flesh for four weeks. Even less expensive purchases demanded worry and adjustments; the price difference between organic fruits and vegetables, for example, prompted me to switch apples for carrots in my packed lunch.
The real work began when I lugged my haul home. The chicken had to go far: After roasting my scrawny-looking bird in the most basic way — a smear of oil across the skin, a sprinkle of salt and pepper — I sliced, hacked and pulled every piece of meat I could find off the bones and then simmered the carcass in a pot for basic stock. (I saved the fat for cooking.) Along with the meat, this broth was divided into meal-size portions and stored in my freezer for soups, sandwiches and dinners to come.
For complete article go to Can we afford to eat ethically at Salon→
Hat tip Dave Pollard
Image credit: Globally Green Living
See also Organic Prices – Are They Prohibitive? at Organic To Be→
~~
From DAVE SMITH
[Talk I gave at Mendo Time Bank organizing meeting, May 4, 2009, Ukiah, California]
Why are you here… in this life?
Why are we here… in this time and place together?
I believe we are here to be useful, that we have a greater purpose than to just fulfill our own little selfish wants on our own little island of stuff, and that our greatest usefulness comes in serving others.
There are certainly many paying jobs that serve others selflessly… teachers, fire fighters, etc. And many of us who support families are certainly serving others.
But in a culture and economy based on consumption, and our consumption based on things way beyond basic, simple needs, we may not be feeling very useful and fulfilled in our regular work lives.
Or, we may be unemployed and therefore feel useless.
Internationally renowned psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who endured years of unspeakable horror in Nazi death camps, wrote this in his ground breaking book Man’s Search For Meaning:
I published a study devoted to a specific type of depression I had diagnosed in cases of young patients suffering from what I called “unemployment neurosis.” And I could show that this neurosis really originated in a twofold erroneous identification: being jobless was equated with being useless, and being useless was equated with having a meaningless life. Consequently, whenever I succeeded in persuading the patients to volunteer in youth organizations, adult education, public libraries, and the like – in other words, as soon as they could fill their abundant free time with some sort of unpaid but meaningful activity – their depressio disappeared although their economic situation had not changed and their hunger was the same.
Frankel developed “logotherapy.” Logos is a Greek word that denotes “meaning,” and his therapy was based on the “striving to find a meaning in one’s life,” which he felt was “the primary motivational force in man.” What matters is “not the meaning of life in general, but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment… Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.”
From JANIE SHEPPARD
5/4/09 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
Alternative to rezoning Masonite
In a letter to the Ukiah Daily Journal (5/3/09), two Manchester residents said they would love to see a Costco in Ukiah. Now, when they go to Costco in Santa Rosa they said they also shop at Friedman’s, Home Depot and Wal-Mart. Their shopping does not benefit Mendocino County, but it could.
They would do their shopping in Ukiah, they wrote, if there was a Costco.
What if Costco located in the current Airport commercial mall, with Friedman’s, Wal-Mart and with Home Depot close by?
Costco, the City of Ukiah, and the owner of the Airport commercial mall could work this out to benefit not only themselves but all county shoppers. Furthermore, that’s good planning because it would use the existing commercially zoned land. The Masonite site could remain zoned for industry.
Why not do it?
~
From DAVE SMITH
Masonite Not About Costco
Julie Simental in her letter to the editor (UDJ 4/20 responding to my letter against the Masonite Monster Mall) has either not done her homework, or is purposefully misleading citizens. By hanging her argument for supporting the mall around “we could have a Costco right here in Ukiah,” she does a disservice to our community.
In numerous letters to the editor and opinions in the UDJ, it has been well-documented that Costco was about to close a deal with the City of Ukiah for building on land already designated for retail in the city. Costco withdrew their plan when they were offered a deal by DDR to build on the Masonite site, even though that site is not zoned for retail. I daresay walls would already be going up for a Costco store in Ukiah by now if that had not happened.
Personally, I do not support any more big box stores in our area for all the reasons I’ve stated [in other letters]. But, please. Can we put the Costco canard to rest?
~~
by Christopher J. Ryan, AICP
The model of land development practiced today will surely be the scavenged ruins of tomorrow. Peak oil will guarantee this outcome…
Up until World War II, most communities developed according to a model of interconnected streets, small lots with homes build close to the sidewalk, and front porches oriented to the street to facilitate and encourage social interaction between neighbors, pedestrians, and home occupants. To be a pedestrian in this environment is a noble thing and contributed to the spirit of living and socializing.
The pedestrian in a contemporary development is converging on the forlorn version so presciently written about by Ray Bradbury in his short story The Pedestrian or notable and eerily clairvoyant novel Fahrenheit 451.
In traditional communities, blocks were short and navigable, retail and services in compatible and attractive corner stores within easy walking distance, and other destinations like schools and libraries easily walkable as well. Critics suggest that this model is outdated and no longer desired. Yet research suggests that most people when offered the option will choose the new urbanist model. This explains the wild popularity of communities like Celebration and Kentlands and visits to theme parks with Main Streets and Frontiertowns.
People are longing for a simpler, more community-oriented way of life but in most cases do not realize that is can be available again if only the majority of developers would build it, if municipalities would allow it in the zoning, if bankers would lend money to fund it, and if engineers and public safety officials would find acceptable infrastructure models to re-adapt to it. The examples are out there and should be aggressively distributed and posted for any community to use as a model. The use of form-based zoning codes championed by the Congress for New Urbanism offers a ready means to shape urban design in this manner.
But that’s not enough. The current sprawl model should not be allowed anymore and the neo-traditional model should be required. There should be no choice in the matter. There are fiscal, social, environmental, energy, safety, and psychological arguments favoring the neo-traditional model. The old model contributes to waste in every sense of the word and cannot be sustained. Any building or development utilizing the sprawl model is a bad investment both individually and for the community. Short-term investment timelines still in vogue may offer gains as before but any longer-term investors will be left holding the bag and local governments will go broke extending and maintaining the infrastructure.
For complete article go to Taking control at The Localizer→
Hat tip Energy Bulletin
~~
From Fatal Harvest
The Seven Myths of Industrial Agriculture
5/2/09 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
The Truth
Industrial agriculture is the largest single threat to the earth’s biodiversity. Fence-row-to-fence-row plowing, planting, and harvesting techniques decimate wildlife habitats, while massive chemical use poisons the soil and water, and kills off countless plant and animal communities.
Industrial agriculture’s mythmakers have been so successful in their efforts to shape opinion that they must believe we’ll swallow just about anything. They now assure us that intensive farming methods that rely on chemicals and biotechnology somehow protect the environment. This myth, as illogical as it may sound to an informed reader, is increasingly widespread in America today and is increasingly accepted as valid. What’s worse, agribusiness is saturating the media with misleading reports of the purported ecological risks of organic and other environmentally sustainable agricultural practices.
A typical claim of the industrial apologists is that the industrial style of agriculture has prevented some 15 million square miles of wildlands from being plowed under for “low-yield” food production. They continuously assert that the biggest challenge of the 21st century is to increase food yields through modern advances in agricultural science, which include the genetic engineering of commercial food crops. They also claim that if the world does not fully embrace industrial agriculture, hundreds of thousands of wildlife species will be lost to low-yield crops and ranging livestock.
There is a plethora of evidence that busts this myth. At the outset, the idea that sustainable agriculture is low-yield and would result in plowing under millions of square miles of wildlands is simply wrong. Relatively smaller farm sizes are much more productive per unit acre—in fact 2 to 10 times more productive—than larger ones, according to numerous government studies. In fact, the smallest farms, those of 27 acres or less, are more than ten times as productive (in terms of dollar output per acre) than large farms (6,000 acres or more), and extremely small farms (4 acres or less) can be over a hundred times as productive.
From Organic Consumers Association
Dear Friends,
We, the undersigned, call on ethically responsible people across the world to Break the Chains of self-destructive consumerism by boycotting Wal-Mart and other national and international chain stores, fast food restaurants, corporate coffeehouses, and products bearing the logos of the multinational Brand Name Bullies.
Wal-Mart and the multinational chains are colonizing our communities and our minds, North & South, East & West, rural and urban, killing off small businesses, exploiting workers and farmers, devastating the environment, and sowing a toxic culture of cheap goods and social unaccountability. Unless we stop this Wal-Martization of our communities, we can say goodbye to Fair Trade, family farms, independent businesses, workers rights, and environmental sustainability.
From Manhattan to Mexico, from China to Chile, farmers, consumers and independent businesses are resisting the invasion of Wal-Mart and the Corporate Chain stores and building grassroots power through local, green, and just commerce. The answer to Wal-Martization and so-called “Free Trade” is ethical consumer purchasing and political action–building and supporting local and community-based producers and businesses through solidarity, collective purchasing power, and mutual aid. Fair Trade, not Free Trade, must become the global norm, with organic and sustainable production leading the way. Local and community control over essential goods and services provides the only solid foundation for economic democracy, a sustainable environment, and public health.
Help us mark the beginning of the end for Wal-Mart and the Corporate Chains. Please join us as we step up the pace to re-localize and green a just global economy. Consumers of the world unite! We have nothing to lose but our chains!
In Solidarity,
["Rockpile Lifestyle Center" returning to just a pile of rocks. -DS]
They fought long, hard, and at great expense to build a “lifestyle center” atop the “Rockpile” in town. Now it appears that bad timing and a sluggish economy have caught up with Developers Diversified Realty Corporation (DDR) of Ohio.
According to DDR Senior Executive Vice President of Leasing and Development Paul Freddo, construction of the 150,000 square foot, $37 million retail center called Guilford Commons has stopped, for the interim, he says.
“For now, Developers Diversified’s Guilford Commons, a 26-acre lifestyle center development, has suspended further construction,” stated Freddo. “We view the suspension as a temporary delay.”
Not surprisingly, Freddo said that current economic conditions, including shrinking consumer confidence and poor retail sales, have caused retailers who prefer the lifestyle center format to slow their expansion plans on a national level.
In many of its presentations to the community, DDR indicated that tenants such as Talbots, Ann Taylor Loft, Banana Republic, Chico’s, Coldwater Creek, and Panera Bread Company would most likely be part of their “lifestyle center” family…
The developer has four other projects in Connecticut in Manchester, Plainville, Waterbury, and Windsor.
Go to Recession Hits the ‘Rockpile’→
Thanks to SHERRY GLAVICH
~~
From Transition Culture UK
A useful place to start in an exploration of what exactly is happening to the global economy, in particular in the light of how it relates to peak oil and climate change, is with a look at what are the assumptions we have made thus far about the economy. Do they still hold after the events of recent months? Did they ever actually make sense in the first place? What are the assumptions about the economy and the financial system, as well as about the basic resources, both natural and cultural, on which we have based our decisions for the last 50 years – are they still valid? Chris Martenson, author of the Crash Course, puts it thus;
“Here’s how it all sums up. There are some knowns. We know that energy is the cause for all growth and complexity. We know that surplus energy is shrinking. We know that the age of cheap oil is over. And we know that because of this, oil costs will consume an ever-greater proportion of our total budget. And because of these knowns, there are some risks. There is the risk that our exponential money system will cease to operate in a world of declining energy surplus. It might simply not be suited to the task. And there is the risk that our society will be forced to become less complex. If you really think about it, that is a very loaded sentence right there.”
Chris Martenson http://www.chrismartenson.com/
Our assumptions, in brief, have been as follows;
Clearly these assumptions are now highly questionable.
Keep reading Economies in Transition→
See also Richard Heinberg interview→
Hat tip Energy Bulletin
~~
From SUSAN B. JORDAN
April 28, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
First, the history. On the campaign trail, then candidate Obama announced that raiding medical marijuana dispensaries was not going to be a priority for his administration. Within weeks of moving to the White House, he seemed to be keeping to this promise and word began emanating from the White House through aides that the president believes that “federal resources should not be used to circumvent state laws.”
Medical marijuana advocacy groups, NORML, and defendants facing many years in federal prison for operating medical marijuana dispensaries were for the first time in years jubilant that a sane marijuana policy might begin to take shape within the Justice Department and the DEA.
For over 10 years, the federal government has conducted a relentless war against the operation of California’s proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act. The government has closed down local medical marijuana dispensaries (one of the first being the here in Ukiah in 1998); it has tried to stop doctors from writing prescriptions for medical marijuana (they lost this one in the Supreme Court); it won a ruling from the Supreme Court that says that there is no constitutional right to have access to medical marijuana, even if your life is endangered without it; it has gone after landlords renting to medical marijuana dispensaries; and it has imprisoned, for long prison terms, individuals operating collectives and dispensaries.
When, in February the new Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the DEA would no longer raid retail medical marijuana outlets, it seemed that this bad chapter of federal muscle flexing might be over. Was a new and sane marijuana era coming into being?
Tom Ammiano, California State Assembly person from San Francisco, wrote a bill to legalize marijuana. Betty Yee, Chairperson of the Board of Equalization, whose agency currently collects $18 million in sales taxes from dispensaries, said that a regulated marijuana industry would bring in $1.3 billion. Unfortunately, the Ammiano bill died in committee.
It’s not time to celebrate yet. Far from it in fact.
Almost immediately after Holder’s announcement, the DEA began to undercut the change they saw coming. Several raids on medical marijuana dispensaries have been conducted in California since the February announcement, four on the very day of the announcement. Backtracking, spokespeople for the administration started to talk about no raids, only “if the dispensaries were in compliance with state law.” Until this moment, the federal government took the position that whatever state law was, it didn’t matter. They could ignore state law. It’s justification for busting dispensaries was, that they, like any ordinary dope dealers, were distributing marijuana. Now, it was state law that was being violated.
Suddenly, it seemed we are going to have the DEA in charge of deciding who is complying with state law. The smallest real or imagined failure to comply with state law will now do to justify a raid: one of the recent raids occurred apparently because the woman who ran the dispensary was late on her payment to the BOE.
From John E. Ikerd
Professor Emeritus of Agricultural Economics
University of Missouri Columbia
College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources
“Perhaps people who have money can eat like that, but what about poor people?” I hear comments such as this in nearly every discussion of the growing opportunities for people to eat more locally grown, sustainably produced foods. My typical response is that just about anyone anywhere can find good locally grown food these days and just about anyone can afford it.
Locally grown foods, particularly meat, milk, and eggs, are probably going to cost a good bit more than comparable items in the supermarkets. But most people, even those with modest incomes, can afford to buy good local foods, simply by spending a bit less on other things that add less to their health and happiness. As I have written before, costs of good local foods tend to be higher because local sustainable producers pay the full cost of production; they don’t pollute the environment or exploit other people in the production process. Once people understand the differences between typical industrially produced foods and local sustainably produced foods – in terms of freshness, flavor, wholesomeness, and nutrition, as well as social and ethical integrity – good local food acquires a priority that makes it seem easily affordable.
The average American family spends only about a dime out of each dollar of disposable income for food. So, spending ten or even twenty percent more for good food only requires spending one or two percent more of the typical family’s income for food, rather than for some other discretionary budget item. In some cases, good food may not require actually giving up anything else. For example, the average American family today spends about fifteen percent of their income for health care, and as we learn more about the linkages of diet with health, it’s becoming evident that spending a bit more for good food could result in spending a lot less for healthcare.
From DAVE SMITH
Excerpted from To Be Of Use -
The Seven Seeds of Meaningful Work (2005)
Once upon a time, members of my generation broke free and created what was labeled a “counter culture.” Because the surrounding culture was not living up to our young ideals, we began creating our own work, our own services, our own communities. I prefer to call what many of us were doing a “parallel culture,” as my experience was more about building something new rather than countering or opposing.
Between the straight culture and the anticulture, we chose to be part of a third way, seeking to build something positive out of the chaos rather than just spending all our time protesting and demonstrating. We chose to compose new social and workplace structures and relationships, practicing and feeling them, discovering how to make them meaningful and how to restore a measure of love and joy and amazing grace to our daily work. Instead of remaining within rigid hierarchies and stratified gender roles, we were all in it together. Sure, we made mistakes, but we were willing to fail young rather than take our assigned places and nod off into the ethical and moral wasteland we found around us.
Those times in the sixties and seventies mean different things to different people, and our memories of that time are most often associated with events and places. One image we have is Woodstock: free lovin’, dope smokin’, skinny dippin’, screw-it-all, hippie heaven. Another is Berkeley: radical, peacenik, burn-it-down, anti-war, anti-nuke, anti-everything. Another is the summer of love in the Haight-Ashbury of San Francisco in 1967. At the time, I was coming of age in the center of it all, in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I migrated after having grown up in South Florida, a land of racial segregation with its separate schools, separate restaurants, and separate public water fountains marked “Colored” and “White.”
Along with many others, I had responded to John F. Kennedy’s call to service. We believed we could and would change the world, and we did. Along with our protests and marches for civil rights, farmworker’s contracts, and the environment, we organized free universities, cooperative food stores, and small alternative community businesses. Our memories of that time are overwhelmingly positive. We had passionate faith in the future and look back now with pride at our accomplishments.
We stopped a war. We put civil rights into law. We shut down the building of new nuclear plants. We passed the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act — every one of them now being chipped away by the culture that was then being countered.
We created movements built around human potential, women’s rights, the environment, alternative health, and natural foods. Many of the positive results have by now been diffused into the overall culture as part of our everyday lives. One of many examples is the market for organic foods. The demand for healthy foods germinated in the fifties through vitamin-centered health food stores and a few scattered organic farms and took root in the sixties through hippie cooperative buying clubs and the popularity of Asian diets. The organic food market has now been growing over 20 percent per year and has gone mainstream.
By Glenda Anderson
The Press Democrat
The future is green in the Ukiah Valley, where city officials have joined with the Solar Living Institute to train workers for an anticipated new age of alternative energy. “It’s economic development,” Ukiah City Councilwoman Mari Rodin said of the two-year pilot project, dubbed Ukiah Greenworks.
The program is aimed both at providing workers with job skills and luring green energy businesses with the promise of a skilled work force.
It also will boost the local economy by attracting visiting students from throughout the country, said Erica Cooperrider, the institute’s marketing and workshop coordinator.
Ukiah will contribute $30,000 in redevelopment funds to the program and will provide classroom space and equipment for the alternative energy workshops, Rodin said.
A green jobs conference in Ukiah on May 5 will kick off the classes.
The first Ukiah class is scheduled for June 10, said Cathleen Moller, Ukiah’s economic development manager.
The weeklong course focuses on photovoltaic systems, from safety to mechanical design and performance analysis.
Typically, Solar Living Institute one-day workshops cost up to $150 and weeklong courses cost about $900, Cooperrider said.
The city and the Institute are investigating funding opportunities for people who are unemployed or low income.
If successful, the Ukiah training center is expected to become permanent.
Keep reading Ukiah trains for the future at the PD→
For more info and signup at Solar Living Institute→
~
Thanks to MARI RODIN
~~
From Amy Goodman
Democracy Now (video version)→
4/21/09
AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of issues in the community, I wanted to turn now to a coalition of community activists, union members and environmental groups that are here in the Spokane area that have begun gathering signatures to get a number of wide-ranging changes to the Spokane City Charter on the November 2009 general election ballot.
The changes are part of a proposed “Community Bill of Rights” drafted in a series of workshops and town hall meetings over the last year by a group called Envision Spokane. The changes include giving greater control to neighborhoods over new development, creating legally enforceable rights for the protection of the Spokane River, and guaranteeing access to affordable preventive healthcare.
Supporters must gather 2,700 valid signatures from registered city voters by July 6th to get it placed on the general election ballot. Then a majority of voters have to approve the entire package in a straight up or down vote.
Thomas Linzey is also with us. He’s an attorney serving as an adviser to Envision Spokane, joining us here at KSPS PBS studio.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
THOMAS LINZEY: Thanks for having us, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: So what is this plan that you have?
THOMAS LINZEY: Well, some folks would not probably normally think of Spokane as being a cutting-edge place for activism, but this, these twenty-four different groups that have come together, these labor union locals, environmental organizations and neighborhood councils for—in Spokane have actually come together to model a Community Bill of Rights, which deals with a bunch of different issues, from healthcare to housing to unionization to protecting the Spokane River to a greater extent from the pollution that it’s been subjected to over the past couple decades.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain the Community Bill of Rights.
THOMAS LINZEY: It’s actually—Spokane operates under a city home rule charter. Some cities in the United States operate under those. It’s basically a local constitution for the city. And citizens can come together to actually petition to change that home rule charter. And the idea about driving in a bill of rights was to say to folks in Spokane and these groups that came forward to work on this project, to say what aren’t we getting over the past couple decades of our work, because it seemed to some people that our conventional, traditional activism was failing—in other words, writing letters to congressmen and doing what we perceived as traditional activism in terms of protesting and soliciting comments at regulatory hearings and those types of things—that folks have increasingly felt a need to seize their local government entities to actually begin to build their values into those frameworks of law, rather than simply waiting for other people to come and save us, to do that work themselves. And so, these folks have stepped forward to actually drive their values into the city home rule charter here.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re a part of this whole corporate charter movement. Explain what that is.
From Vandana Shiva
The Indian peasantry, the largest body of surviving small farmers in the world, today faces a crisis of extinction.
Two thirds of India makes its living from the land. The earth is the most generous employer in this country of a billion, that has farmed this land for more than 5000 years.
However, as farming is delinked from the earth, the soil, the biodiversity, and the climate, and linked to global corporations and global markets, and the generosity of the earth is replaced by the greed of corporations, the viability of small farmers and small farms is destroyed. Farmers suicides are the most tragic and dramatic symptom of the crisis of survival faced by Indian peasants.
1997 witnessed the first emergence of farm suicides in India. A rapid increase in indebtedness, was at the root of farmers taking their lives. Debt is a reflection of a negative economy, a loosing economy. Two factors have transformed the positive economy of agriculture into a negative economy for peasants – the rising costs of production and the falling prices of farm commodities. Both these factors are rooted in the policies of trade liberalization and corporate globalisation.
In 1998, the World Bank’s structural adjustment policies forced India to open up its seed sector to global corporations like Cargill, Monsanto, and Syngenta. The global corporations changed the input economy overnight. Farm saved seeds were replaced by corporate seeds which needed fertilizers and pesticides and could not be saved.
As seed saving is prevented by patents as well as by the engineering of seeds with non-renewable traits, seed has to be bought for every planting season by poor peasants. A free resource available on farms became a commodity which farmers were forced to buy every year. This increases poverty and leads to indebtedness.
As debts increase and become unpayable, farmers are compelled to sell kidneys or even commit suicide. More than 25,000 peasants in India have taken their lives since 1997 when the practice of seed saving was transformed under globalisation pressures and multinational seed corporations started to take control of the seed supply. Seed saving gives farmers life. Seed monopolies rob farmers of life.
The shift from farm saved seed to corporate monopolies of the seed supply is also a shift from biodiversity to monocultures in agriculture. The District of Warangal in Andhra Pradesh used to grow diverse legumes, millet, and oilseeds. Seed monopolies created crop monocultures of cotton, leading to disappearance of millions of products of nature’s evolution and farmer’s breeding.
Monocultures and uniformity increase the risks of crop failure as diverse seeds adapted to diverse ecosystems are replaced by rushed introduction of unadapted and often untested seeds into the market. When Monsanto first introduced Bt Cotton in India in 2002, the farmers lost Rs. 1 billion due to crop failure. Instead of 1,500 Kg / acre as promised by the company, the harvest was as low as 200 kg. Instead of increased incomes of Rs. 10,000 / acre, farmers ran into losses of Rs. 6400 / acre.
In the state of Bihar, when farm saved corn seed was displaced by Monsanto’s hybrid corn, the entire crop failed creating Rs. 4 billion losses and increased poverty for already desperately poor farmers. Poor peasants of the South cannot survive seed monopolies.
And the crisis of suicides shows how the survival of small farmers is incompatible with the seed monopolies of global corporations.
From Fatal Harvest
The Seven Myths of Industrial Agriculture
4/20/09 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
The Truth
What the consumer actually gets in the supermarket is an illusion of choice. Food labeling does not even tell us what pesticides are on our food or what products have been genetically engineered. Most importantly, the myth of choice masks the tragic loss of tens of thousands of crop varieties caused by industrial agriculture.
A persistent myth created and sustained by food manufacturers is that only industrial production could provide consumers with the wide variety of food choices available today. Industrial farming and processing, so the myth goes, have broken down limitations on food choices imposed by growing seasons, plants’ geographical ranges, and crop failures. Wandering the aisles of a 40,000-square-foot supermarket, we may be readily taken in by the myth. The breakfast cereal section, for example, may contain upwards of 50 different brand names, each one uniquely packaged and presented. Take a minute, however, and try to find a variety made primarily of a grain other than corn, rice, wheat, or oats. For an equally daunting challenge, try to find a box that does not list sugar and salt among the leading ingredients.
With one simple test, the myth of industrial food variety begins to break down. We begin to see that despite clever packaging and constant advertising blitzes, much of what is presented to us as variety is actually little more the repackaging of extremely similar products. Meanwhile, most of the vastly diverse foods available to humanity since the beginning of agricultural history have been virtually eradicated, never making their way to modern supermarket shelves.
The Loss of Diversity
A seldom-mentioned impact of industrial agriculture is that it deprives consumers of real choice by favoring only a few varieties of crops that allow efficient harvesting, processing, and packaging. Consider the apple. It is true that without industrial processes we might not be able to eat a “fresh” Red Delicious apple 365 days a year. However, we would be able to enjoy many of the thousands of varieties grown in this country during the last century that have now all but disappeared. Because of the industrial agriculture system, the majority of those varieties are extinct today; two varieties alone account for more than 50 percent of the current apple market. Similarly, in 2000, 73 percent of all the lettuce grown in the United States was iceberg. This relatively bland variety is often the only choice consumers have. Meanwhile, we have lost hundreds of varieties of lettuce with flavors ranging from bitter to sweet and colors from dark purple to light green. The monoculture of industrial agriculture has similarly reduced the natural diversity of nearly every major food crop in terms of varieties grown, color, size, and flavor.
From DAVE SMITH
Update 4/28 – We had pulled even in the counts when they took it off their site, and it’s not the 100th day yet. We’ll see how they use it. Thanks, and way to go! They had a huge head start on us, but we caught them and were headed to a win. ~DS
4/20/09 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
MSNBC has a poll up about the President’s job so far for the first 100 days. Take a look. The opposition is flooding it with “F” votes. You go vote:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29493093/
Send this link to everyone you can. Our President needs our help. His 100 day mark is approaching fast.
Despite my own questions about some of his decisions, I’m supporting the guy 100%.
It is up to us, the grassroots, to support him while letting him know what we like and don’t like about his choices, and put the pressure on him and our representatives in this imperfect democracy that we have. If you think he’s given the technocrats enough time to fix the banks, tell him that the financial clowns have run their course, that the hard choices they are trying to avoid have got to be made, and to get people in there who can do it or do it himself.
It’s so easy to stand back and take pot shots when he doesn’t do everything as we had hoped… but he’s doing some pretty amazing things, and when he needs our support, like this — even when it’s a bullshit poll meaning nothing — we need to give it to him.
C’mon! Flood that sucker with A’s!!
~
Update 4/27/09
Neck and neck!!!!!!!!!!!!
We’ve made up a lot of ground! Now let’s pull ahead! GObama GO!!!
You can vote once PER COMPUTER.
Keep them A’s coming!!!
~
Thanks to HAL BENNETT
~
See also Is Obama Selling Out? at The Daily Beast→
…and Mr. Manners at Huffington Post→
… and Steady in Tough Times at The Atlantic→
~~
From Dave Smith
Ukiah
Apr 13, 2009, Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
I’m not a raw foodist or diet nut. But the more raw fruit and vegetables I eat — especially dark green leafy vegetables — the better I feel… and, I believe, the healthier I’ll be.
Problem: have you tried drinking wheat grass juice? Ugh! How about carrot juice? Much better, but if you do it at home, cleaning that juicer is a pain, and root vegetables are not the most nutritions foods available. Eat lots of salads? Good! How about kale, chard, dandelion greens? Not so much, huh? Feels like more of a duty than pleasurable eating… Mom shaking her finger “eat your vegetables!” Even though they are the most nutritious plants on earth, dark green leafy veggies are very tough to eat raw… and steaming them, according to some, destroys much of the vital nutrients. What to do?
There is a lot of info on the internet by googling “green smoothies” and in books by Victoria Boutenko and others if you need convincing about health results. This approach feels like a real health breakthrough because it’s fast, easy to make and clean up, easy to digest, are complete foods, will get lots of vital chlorophyll and fiber into your body …and tastes terrific!
Try it:
Apple-Kale-Lemon Smoothie
In your blender,
3 organic apples
1 organic banana
1/2 organic lemon (juice only) or piece of ginger root peeled and chopped
5 leaves organic kale (remove white stems), or other green, leafy veggie
2 cups water
Blend until smooth.
Every morning for a week or two, adjusting ingredients to taste, is all I ask. You’ll be glad you did, and it may change your life.
~~
By Michael Phillips
The Briarpatch Book (1978)
The Briarpatch Network
Right Livelihood is one of the hottest issues I’ve seen lately. Talks and workshops on the subject are on a “standing room only” basis. I think there has been a significant shift in work values. In the past it was considered reasonable for people to develop a marketable skill and pursue a career that would earn them enough money to do the things they really wanted to do. People worked at their jobs so they could do the things they wanted on weekends, go where they wanted on vacations and in some cases earn enough to retire “early” and then do what they wanted. Now our peers are saying, “That’s nonsense; why should I do something I don’t like 70% of my life so I can do what I want 30%?” They want to combine what they enjoy doing with their livelihood.
The Tough Question
Now that more people are thinking about doing, working at, and being what they want, the really tough question becomes, “What do I want?” The person who goes camping every weekend doesn’t necessarily want to be a forest ranger, nor does the weekend sailor want to be in the merchant marines. Hobbies, interests, and avocations don’t always translate directly into full-time activity. Finding right livelihood is difficult and takes plenty of time, often many years. Right livelihood is a concept found in Buddhism (one of the eight-fold paths), Sufism, and early Christianity. It is part of a whole view, part of being a whole person. It is a fundamental element in the Briarpatch. We want people to enjoy what they are doing fully, and to do it for the intrinsic rewards.
From Fatal Harvest
The Seven Myths of Industrial Agriculture
4/6/09 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
The Truth
Small farms produce more agricultural output per unit area than large farms. Moreover, larger, less diverse farms require far more mechanical and chemical inputs. These ever increasing inputs are devastating to the environment and make these farms far less efficient than smaller, more sustainable farms.
Proponents of industrial agriculture claim that ”bigger is better” when it comes to food production. They argue that the larger the farm, the more efficient it is. They admit that these huge corporate farms mean the loss of family farms and rural communities, but they maintain that this is simply the inevitable cost of efficient food production. And agribusiness advocates don’t just promote big farms; they also push big technology. They typically ridicule small-scale farm technology as grossly inefficient, while heralding intensive use of chemicals, massive machinery, computerization, and genetic engineering — whose affordability and implementation are only feasible on large farms. The marriage of huge farms with ”mega-technology” is sold to the public as the basic requirement for efficient food production. Argue against size and technology — the two staples of modern agriculture — and, they insist, you’re undermining production efficiency and endangering the world’s food supply.
From Dave Smith
5/6/09 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
At Sprawl-Busters.com you will find a list of 395 communities who have beaten a big box store in their community at least once, or pressured a developer to withdraw.
At NewRules.org you will find these victories over the forces of dumb, unsustainable growth:
Voters in Agawam, Mass soundly rejected two ballot measures that would have allowed National Realty & Development Corporation to build a 563,000-square-foot shopping center (about ten football fields, plus another 25 football fields worth of parking). Although NRDC did not name tenants, the project likely would have included two or more big-box stores and numerous mid-sized and smaller chain retailers.
Voters in the small town of Damariscotta, Maine, overwhelming approved a local law barring stores over 35,000 square feet (about the size of a medium grocery store). The vote puts an end to Wal-Mart’s plans to build a 187,000-square-foot supercenter in this village of just 2,000 people.
Voters in Frisco, Colorado, resoundingly defeated a plan to develop a Home Depot superstore.
The City Council of Santa Maria, California, voted unanimously to deny Wal-Mart’s request to rezone land for a supercenter. The vote took place before an overflow crowd of more than 200 citizens. Nearly forty people spoke at the hearing.
By Dave Pollard
I’m asking you to do more than just freeing yourself from a life of grinding, miserable, meaningless work by creating your own “Natural Enterprise.”
The following is an open letter from Dave Pollard to the readers of his book, Finding the Sweet Spot: The Natural Entrepreneur’s Guide to Responsible, Sustainable, Joyful Work. It has been adapted for the web.
In our modern society, we rely on the education system to teach us what we need to know to live and make a living.
That system has let us down badly. It is in the interest of those who control the current economic system, those with the established wealth and power, that we not know that there is a better way to make a living than working for them, doing meaningless work as wage slaves, just to buy ourselves some leisure time to do what has meaning for us.
We each need, personally, to rediscover the joy and meaning of natural work, of Natural Entrepreneurship. Finding the Sweet Spot is an attempt to get you started on that journey.
We need a blossoming of millions of Natural Enterprises, connected and collaborating and supporting each other as part of a dynamic Natural Economy.
But what we also need, collectively, as a society, is a blossoming of thousands, millions of Natural Enterprises, connected and collaborating and supporting each other generously as part of a dynamic new Natural Economy. Is such a thing possible?
Keep reading Creating a Natural Economy at Alternet→
See also my Foreword in Dave Pollard’s book [DS]→
~~
By Richard Heinberg and Michael Bomford, Ph.D.
Summary
The American food system rests on an unstable foundation of massive fossil fuel inputs. It must be reinvented in the face of declining fuel stocks. The new food system will use less energy, and the energy it uses will come from renewable sources. We can begin the transition to the new system immediately through a process of planned, graduated, rapid change. The unplanned alternative-reconstruction from scratch after collapse-would be chaotic and tragic.
The seeds of the new food system have already been planted. America’s farmers have been reducing their energy use for decades. They are using less fertilizer and pesticide. The number of organic farms, farmers’ markets, and CSA operations is growing rapidly. More people are thinking about where their food comes from.
These are important building blocks, but much remains to be done. Our new food system will require more farmers, smaller and more diversified farms, less processed and packaged food, and less long-distance hauling of food. Governments, communities, businesses, and families each have important parts to play in reinventing a food system that functions with limited renewable energy resources to feed our population for the long term.
Initiative Measure to Be Submitted Directly to the Voters
The County Counsel has prepared the following title and summary of the chief purpose and points of the proposed measure:
Petition to enact a general plan and zoning code amendment, and mixed-use specific plan for the former site of the Masonite facility.
The ballot title is as follows:
AN INITATIVE TO ENACT A GENERAL PLAN AND ZONING CODE AMENDMENT, AND MIXED-USE SPECIFIC PLAN FOR THE FORMER SITE OF THE MASONITE FACILITY
The purpose of this Initiative is to amend the Mendocino County General Plan and Inland Zoning Code and to enact the Mendocino Crossings Mixed-Use Masonite Specific Plan for the former site of the Masonite facility. The proposed amendment to the General Plan is attached to the Petition as Exhibit A and the Specific Plan is attached to the Petition as Exhibit B.
The former Masonite site is located in unincorporated Mendocino County and consists of approximately 76 acres. The site is bounded on the west by North State Street, on the South by State Highway 101, on the east by the Northwest Pacific Railroad tracks, and on the north by Masonite Road. In the current General Plan, the site is designated as Industrial and it is zoned as I-1 (Limited Industrial) and I-2 (General Industrial) for industrial use.
This Initiative would modify the existing land use designation of the site from Industrial to “Mixed-Use Specific Plan”. This Mixed-Use Specific Plan designation will allow for a variety of uses including light industrial, retail, commercial, residential, office, hotel, entertainment, educational, public facilities, utility installations, parking lots and structures, and open space.
The proposed Specific Plan contains a conceptual land use plan, development standards, design and landscape guidelines, circulation and infrastructure plan, and project mitigation measures to mitigate potential impacts to the community and the environment. The actual development of the site is subject to change based on market and regional demands. The Specific Plan also states that water will be supplied to the site by the same well that serviced the area when the former Masonite facility was operating there. Because the Specific Plan would be enacted by initiative, under the law it is not subject to the procedures under the California Environmental Quality Act (“CEQA”).
This Initiative must be adopted by a majority of the voters. The Initiative also states that, in the event there is a competing measure on the ballot relating to a general plan designation, zoning, or permitted uses on the site of the former Masonite facility, or any other measure that seeks to amend or limit any provision of this Initiative or allow uses incompatible with this Initiative, those measures shall be deemed to conflict with the entire cohesive scheme adopted. Because of this conflict, if this Initiative, and any such other measure, receives a majority of the votes at the election, the measure receiving the most votes shall prevail.
Dated: April 1, 2009
JEANINE B. NADEL
County Counsel
County of Mendocino
[Thanks to Janie Sheppard -DS]
~~
From Rosalind Creasy
4/2/09 Ukiah, North California
Who says money doesn’t grow on trees? Homeowners expect their yards to cost them money. Few ever consider the possibility that instead of costing money, a yard actually can help save money.
The average yard in this country consumes money in three major ways. First, hundreds of dollars are wasted because few yards are planned to take advantage of solar heating or basic cooling techniques for the house. Second, yards that have large lawns, particularly in the arid West, where constant watering is necessary, often have high maintenance costs. And, finally, few yards are designed to cut food and gift-giving expenses.
Heating and cooling experts estimate that up to 20 percent of air-conditioning bills and 20 to 30 percent of heating bills for residences can be cut by proper placement of landscaping elements. The larger your yard, the more savings you can realize by strategically placing trees and shrubs. Well-placed evergreen shrubs and trees help cut down the effects of winter winds against the house; by removing evergreen shrubs and trees near the south-facing wall, the homeowner allows the winter sun to warm the wall. Conversely, in the summer, deciduous trees, shrubs, and vines can shade the south and west walls, preventing the heat from building up in the house.
Lawn, the Great Money Sink
I’ve seen it happen time and time again. People who are on a tight budget think they cannot afford to spend a lot of money on the landscaping; so they go to the nursery, buy a package of grass seed, and turn most of their yard into a large lawn. There are few things you can do, particularly in the West, that will cost you more over the long run. A lawn will nickel and dime you to death. Lawn mower, gas for the mower, lawn-mower maintenance, edger, water, sprinkler repairs, fertilizer, herbicides, fungicides, vacation maintenance: all for just a humdrum lawn. And a show-place lawn can cost you many hundreds of dollars a year. A well-maintained lawn needs to be aerated, thatched, reseeded, and top dressed every year. All of those expenses are just the tip of the iceberg. They don’t even take into account that the lawn area could be covered with money-saving plants that would provide food for the table.
Keep reading More Food, Less Lawn at OrganicToBe.org→
~
“Faced with the real threat of climate change, economic decline and peak oil (the point when cheap and abundant oil ends) they’re ripping up their grass lawns for edible gardens, installing rainwater collection barrels under roof gutters, and forming coalitions to transition their communities to a local and low-energy lifestyle.
See also Life After Oil at Whole Life Times→
“As we hit climate chaos, as we hit peak oil, assuming that you can get your food from far away and use fossil-fuel-intensive systems to produce food is totally not sustainable. Bringing food security close to home will have to be the project of the future.”
…and Vandana Shiva interview at UrbaniteBaltimore.com→
Thanks to Energy Bulletin
~~
The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses
4/1/09 Ukiah, North California
Excerpts from the Introduction
[I didn't move to this beautiful valley to shop. -Guiness McFadden]
The economic structure that mega-retailers are propagating represents a modern variation on the old European colonial system, which was designed not to build economically viable and self-reliant communities, but to extract their wealth and resources. Yet many cities eagerly usher in these corporate colonizers.
Some envision a tax windfall, only to discover that these sprawling stores impose a significant burden on public infrastructure and services. Or worse, after their local economies have been bulldozed, they find that they are utterly dependent on a few big boxes that might raise prices, lay off employees, or threaten to move to a neighboring town if they don’t receive a tax break…
As retail sprawls outward, running errands entails more driving. The 1990s saw a jump of more than 40 percent in the number of miles driven by the average household for shopping—which translates into an increase of almost 95 billion miles a year for the country as a whole. Mega-retailers are thus fueling smog, acid rain, and global warming. Retail sprawl has also emerged as a top threat to our rivers, lakes, and estuaries. The specific culprit is pavement, which does not allow rain to soak into the ground, but sends it, loaded with oils and other pollutants, rushing into nearby bodies of water. No other category of land use creates more pavement and polluted runoff than big-box stores and shopping centers…
Local retailers breathe life into our downtowns and neighborhood business districts. They provide a setting for casual socializing with our neighbors—standing in line at the bakery or walking along the sidewalk—which builds a sense of camaraderie and responsibility for one another. This kind of informal interaction has a tangible impact on community health. Studies show that people who live in places where a larger share of the economy is in the hands of locally owned businesses take a more active role in civic affairs. These communities come out ahead on various measures of social well-being. They have lower rates of poverty, crime, and infant mortality, and are more resilient in times of adversity. Their citizens are far more likely to attend public meetings, volunteer, and even vote than those living in areas dominated by big corporate chains…
From Dave Smith
4/1/09 Ukiah, North California
One of my dearest friends, Charles Martin, an organic/biodynamic farmer, is a lean, spry youngster of seventy-seven years with a twinkle in his eye and some thoughts about farming, food, and health that are definitely not mainstream. For many years he and his wife, Catherine, ran a small biodynamic/organic farm in Comptche, here in Mendocino County near the coast, supplying their neighbors and local restaurants. They also operated a nonprofit health foundation. Charles co-founded the Ecology Action/Golden Rule Bio-Intensive Intern/Apprentice training program with John Jeavons, and was active as Vice-President and Farm Reviewer for the Mendocino Renegade eco-label program of the Mendocino Organic Network. They now live in a very active retirement near Willits, California.
Charles tells their story:
As a boy growing up in Whittier, in southern California, Charles was interested in gardening and farming, and in high school he had a job milking cows on a dairy farm. Inducted into the Korean War, he was seriously injured. The drugs and antibiotics administered to him for his injury further damaged his health. After graduating from mechanical engineering school and going to work for Boeing in Seattle, he began exploring his health problems and was advised by a homeopathic specialist in degenerative diseases that he needed to “get back to nature, get off all refined foods, grow your own organic produce, get your water from clean springs, buy a juicer, grind your own flour, and eat naturally.” The doctor told him that his body could gradually repair itself over time if it was fed properly. That advice changed his life. I stopped by to see Charles awhile back, and as we chatted about his farm and about health in general, I asked him what he had learned from changing his diet so many years ago.
I’m convinced that health comes from the soil, from what we eat and the quality of what we eat. I had kidney problems, backaches, ulcers, you name it. By my late twenties, eating mostly from our backyard organic garden, I was back in very good shape.
From Fatal Harvest
The Seven Myths of Industrial Agriculture
3/31/09 Ukiah, North California
The Truth If you added the real cost of industrial food—its health, environmental, and social costs—to the current supermarket price, not even our wealthiest citizens could afford to buy it.
In America, politicians, business leaders, and the media continue to reassure us that our food is the cheapest in the world. They repeat their mantra that the more we apply chemicals and technology to agriculture, the more food will be produced and the lower the price will be to the consumer. This myth of cheap food is routinely used by agribusiness as a kind of economic blackmail against any who point out the devastating impacts of modern food production. Get rid of the industrial system, we are told, and you won’t be able to afford food. Using this “big lie,” the industry has even succeeded in portraying supporters of organic food production as wealthy elitists who don’t care about how much the poor will have to pay for food.
Under closer analysis, our supposedly cheap food supply becomes monumentally expensive. The myth of cheapness completely ignores the staggering externalized costs of our food, costs that do not appear on our grocery checkout receipts. Conventional analyses of the cost of food completely ignore the exponentially increasing social and environmental costs customers are currently paying and will have to pay in the future. We expend tens of billions of dollars in taxes, medical expenses, toxic clean-ups, insurance premiums, and other pass-along costs to subsidize industrial food producers. Given the ever-increasing health, environmental, and social destruction involved in industrial agriculture, the real price of this food production for future generations is incalculable.
Environmental Costs
Industrial agriculture’s most significant external cost is its widespread destruction of the environment. Intensive use of pesticides and fertilizers seriously pollutes our water, soil, and air. This pollution problem grows worse over time, as pests become immune to the chemicals and more and more poisons are required. Meanwhile, our animal factories produce 1.3 billion tons of manure each year. Laden with chemicals, antibiotics, and hormones, the manure leaches into rivers and water tables, polluting drinking supplies and causing fish kills in the tens of millions.
From Wendell Berry
Interview mashup
3/20/09 Ukiah, North California
People need to live from their local landscape and their local countryside as much as they possibly can, as much as they reasonably can… The idea that a city surrounded by fertile farmland that’s well-watered should be importing food 2,500 miles away is preposterous. It drives the cost up and it removes from the consumers all the powers of choice, of knowledge and of judgment. The consumers who import foods from long distances eat what they’re given to eat, what they’re sold. Many things would improve if they ate closer to home, including the local farm economy.
It would be wonderful because the quality of our food would go up. As the distance that it’s transported decreased, the quality would go up, and it would also go up as it came more and more under the influence of the consumers. Consumers don’t eat hard, tasteless, characterless tomatoes because they choose to. They eat those tomatoes because those are the only tomatoes they’re offered…
If you’re talking about a local food economy or any other kind of local economy, you’re talking about an economy that’s going to have to run a considerable extent on cooperation, not on competition between consumers and producers. You’re talking about an atmosphere of good feeling in which people try to find out what they can do well for one another. The local consumer is going to have to be concerned that the local producer have a livable income. The local consumers want the best products possible and the local producers are going to have to be interested in supplying the most desirable products possible to the local consumers. So if you’re going to succeed, it can’t be a situation in which everybody is in an economic war against everybody. That’s a description of the global economy.
The advantage of the local economy is you can secede from the global economy, which permits the exploitation of everybody and everything for the benefit of relatively few.
There’s a lot of scorn now toward people who say, “Not in my backyard,” but the “not-in-my-backyard” sentiment is one of the most valuable that we have. If enough people said, “Not in my backyard,” these bad innovations [big box malls] wouldn’t be in anybody’s backyard. It’s your own backyard you’re required to protect because in doing so you’re defending everybody’s backyard. It is an altogether healthy and salutary.
However, a community has to understand that if it refuses the proposal, then it has to come up with something better. And if a corporation comes in and says, “We want you to have this obnoxious installation because it will employ your people; it will bring jobs,” then the community has to have an answer to the question: “Where are we going to find jobs?” Sometimes it won’t be an easy question. Sometimes it will be a devastating question, but the community nevertheless has to begin to look to itself for the answers, not to the government—and not to these corporations that come in posing as saviors of the local community, because they don’t come in to save the local community.
So the community has to begin to ask what they need that can be produced locally, by local people and from the local landscape, and how it can be produced in a way that doesn’t damage the local landscape or the local community. You have to realize that people are working very hard to remove the choice between an economy of grace, based on generosity, and in an economy of scarcity based on acquisition. They can remove that choice simply by making it impossible for small economic enterprises to survive.
A community, for one thing, is an economy. And if you have a community but no local economy your community is seriously impaired. It becomes a thing of feeling only. And you can’t exclude any members from the community. If a community becomes false, it becomes artificial, and is in danger the way all false things are. A community can’t exclude the nonhuman creatures, for instance, if it hopes to last. It can’t exclude its climate. It can’t exclude the air. All these, in a real community, are members. So if you are careful enough in defining a community, you see that it’s a pattern of practical relationships. It’s also, of course, a pattern of loyalties and it’s an emotional pattern.
~~
From Dave Smith
My Foreword to Finding The Sweet Spot by Dave Pollard
[To counter the efforts of those who would foist The Masonite Monster Mall on our community, we need young entrepreneurs to galvanize new local businesses at the potential Masonite Transition Park. The intended gathering of Big Box Dinosaurs and other chain and franchise stores to force their way in, feed at our community trough, and leak their ill-gained revenues and profits to parts unknown, rather than allow small locally-owned businesses to thrive and re-circulate our money locally, will leave our community with lasting scars. If they overrule local citizens and government through their big bucks purchase of the initiative process, and the zoning of the Masonite site is changed adding $30 million to its value, then you can kiss local small business opportunities here goodbye for a generation at least. It's highly doubtful, for many reasons, that a mall will ever be built. But by keeping the zoning industrial, we will keep the property price within reach of local appropriate technology startups, with good paying jobs, rather than having some retail monstrosity imposed on us from outsiders. Recessions, with great changes upon us, are opportune times to help create the next world of business. Because credit and investment capital is tight or non-existent, businesses will have to be started on shoestrings. This is good. It focuses attention and requires great tenacity. The choice is ours. This book is a key business how-to manual from Dave Pollard for budding entrepreneurs. And here is my Foreword. -DS]
3/27/09 Ukiah, North California
A couple of stories, one a “business failure”, the other a “business success.”
During the seventies, with high unemployment and energy shortages a fact of daily life, some friends and I started and ran a very successful natural food cooperative in Menlo Park, California called Briarpatch Natural Foods. It was created to fill a real community need, following the age-old business adage of “find a need and fill it.” People had time on their hands, and natural foods were expensive, so by working 8 hours every three months, members were able to purchase healthy foods for at least 30% less. Three of us co-managed the store, and the work of unloading trucks, stocking shelves, buying fresh produce at the produce terminal, running the cash registers, and everything else needed to operate a small grocery store was done by members. At one point, there were over 350 families on the waiting list.
Because labor is, by far, the largest expense of doing business, taking most of that cost out of the expense statement created not only cheaper food but an enormous forgiveness for the obvious inefficiencies of volunteer, untrained labor and the lack of basic business skills by its enthusiastic and smart, but woefully unskilled management. What fun we had playing store!
It eventually proved to be unsustainable long-term for the simple fact that business is cyclical and when Silicon Valley exploded into runaway growth and success, no-one had time to play store, and the store didn’t adapt quickly enough to the rapidly changing times that did it in. All vendors were fully paid, all member investments were fully returned, and the graceful ending of a beautiful success left us only fond memories. By our current business standards, it was a failure because it didn’t grow and make its “investors” a ton of money. By those of us most intimately involved in the daily business of running a community cooperative, it was one of our most beautiful, successful business experiences.
On the other hand, Smith & Hawken, the $100 million garden company I co-founded is considered an enduring entrepreneurial success. I disagree, and here’s why.
From Fatal Harvest
The Seven Myths of Industrial Agriculture
3/27/09 Ukiah, North California
The Truth
Industrial agriculture contaminates our vegetables and fruits with pesticides, slips dangerous bacteria into our lettuce, and puts genetically engineered growth hormones into our milk. It is not surprising that cancer, food-borne illnesses, and obesity are at an all-time high.
A modern supermarket produce aisle presents a perfect illusion of food safety. Consistency is a hallmark. Dozens of apples are on display, waxed and polished to a uniform luster, few if any bearing a bruise or dent or other distinguishing characteristics. Nearby sit stacked pyramids of oranges dyed an exact hue to connote ripeness. Perhaps we find a shopper comparing two perfectly similar cellophane-wrapped heads of lettuce, as if trying to distinguish between a set of identical twins. Elsewhere, throughout the store, processed foods sit front and center on perfectly spaced shelves, their bright, attractive cans, jars, and boxes bearing colorful photographs of exquisitely prepared and presented foods. They all look unthreatening, perfectly safe, even good for you. And for decades, agribusiness, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have proclaimed boldly that the United States has the safest food supply in the world.
As with all the myths of industrial agriculture, things are not exactly as they appear. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report that between 1970 and 1999, food-borne illnesses increased more than tenfold. And according to the FDA, at least 53 pesticides classified as carcinogenic are presently applied in massive amounts to our major food crops. While the industrialization of the food supply progresses, we are witnessing an explosion in human health risks and a significant decrease in the nutritional value of our meals.
Increased Cancer Risk
A central component of the industrialized food system is the large-scale introduction of toxic chemicals. This toxic contamination of our food shows no signs of decreasing. Since 1989, overall pesticide use has risen by about 8 percent, or 60 million pounds. The use of pesticides that leave residues on food has increased even more. Additionally, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports that more than 1 million Americans drink water laced with pesticide runoff from industrial farms. Our increasing use of these chemicals has been paralleled by an exponential growth in health risks, to both farmers and consumers.
The primary concern associated with this toxic dependency is cancer. The EPA has already identified more than 165 pesticides as potentially carcinogenic, with numerous chemical mixtures remaining untested. Residues from potentially carcinogenic pesticides are left behind on some of our favorite fruits and vegetables. In 1998, the FDA found pesticide residues in over 35 percent of the food tested. Many U.S. products have tested as being more toxic than those from other countries. What’s worse, current standards for pesticides in food do not yet include specific protections for fetuses, infants, or young children, despite major changes to federal pesticide laws in 1996 requiring such reforms. Many scientists believe that pesticides play a major role in the current cancer “epidemic” among children. And the cancer risk does not just affect consumers; it also imperils tens of thousands of farmers, field hands, and migrant laborers. A National Cancer Institute study found that farmers who used industrial herbicides were six times more likely than non-farmers to develop non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of cancer. Along with their cancer risk, pesticides can cause myriad other health problems, especially for young people. For example, exposure to neurotoxic compounds like PCBs and organophosphate insecticides during critical periods of development can cause permanent, long-term damage to the brain, nervous, and reproductive systems.
[The car-centric dinosaur Masonite Monster Mall feeds the Climate Change disaster rather than alleviating it. We need transitions to inviting, walkable, bikable, sustainable, small towns run with renewable energy systems... with jobs based on organic farming and localized, appropriate technology. -DS]
Yes, windmills and dams deface the landscape but the climate crisis demands immediate action
Don’t be too “Canadian” about the backlash – this is no time for Mr. Nice Guy
Watching the backlash against clean energy projects build in Canada has moved me to think about what Americans have learned from facing this same problem. I have been thinking and writing for several years about overcoming conflict-avoidance and the importance of standing up for “Big Truths” even at the price of criticizing fellow environmentalists.
It’s not that I’ve developed a mean streak. It’s that the environmental movement has reached an important point of division, between those who truly get global warming, and those who don’t.
By get, I don’t mean understanding the chemistry of carbon dioxide, or the importance of the Kyoto Protocol, or those kinds of things – pretty much everyone who thinks of themselves as an environmentalist has reached that point. By get, I mean understanding that the question is of transcending urgency, that it represents the one overarching global civilizational challenge that humans have ever faced.
In the U.S., there are all manner of fights to stop or delay every imaginable low-carbon technology. Wind, solar, run-of-river hydro – these are precisely the kinds of renewable energy that every Earth Day speech since 1970 has trumpeted. But now they are finally here – now that we’re talking about particular projects in particular places – people aren’t so keen.
Opponents of renewable energy projects point out (correctly) that they have impacts – there are (overstated) risks to birds from wind turbines, to fish from run-of-river hydro, that the projects mean “development” somewhere there was none and transmission lines where there were none before.
They point out (again correctly) that the developers are private interests, rushing to develop a resource that, in fact, they do not own, and without waiting for the government to come up with a set of rules and processes for siting such installations.
The critics also insist that there’s a “better” site somewhere – and again they’re probably right. There’s almost always a better site for anything. The whole business is messy, imperfect.
If we had decades to burn, then perhaps the opponents would be right that there’s a better site, and a nicer developer. There’s always a better site and a nicer developer. But in the real world, we have at most 10 years to reverse the fossil fuel economy. Which means we have to do everything quickly – conservation and plug-in cars and solar panels and compact fluorescents and 100-mile food and tree planting. And windmills, windmills everywhere there is wind, just like off the shores of Europe.
Keep reading The Fierce Urgency of Now at The Toronto Star via Common Dreams→
~~
From Brenda Ueland
Excerpted from If You Want To Write (1939)
Still in print
If you read the letters of the painter Van Gogh you will see what his creative impulse was. It was just this: he loved something—the sky, say. He loved human beings. He wanted to show human beings how beautiful the sky was. So he painted it for them. And that was all there was to it.
When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. He sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lampost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: “It is so beautiful I must show you how it looks.” And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it.
When I read this letter of Van Gogh’s it comforted me very much and seemed to throw clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I had thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about design and balance and getting interesting planes into your painting, and avoided, with the most stringent severity, showing the faintest academical tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and on.
But the moment I read Van Gogh’s letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.
From Fatal Harvest
The Seven Myths of Industrial Agriculture
3/23/09 Ukiah, North California
The Truth
World hunger is not created by lack of food but by poverty and landlessness, which deny people access to food. Industrial agriculture actually increases hunger by raising the cost of farming, by forcing tens of millions of farmers off the land, and by growing primarily high-profit export and luxury crops.
There is no myth about the existence of hunger. It is estimated that nearly 800 million people go hungry each day. And millions live on the brink of disaster, as malnutrition and related illnesses kill as many as 12 million children per year. Famine continues in the 21st century, though few of us are aware of the truly global nature of the problem. In Brazil, 70 million people cannot afford enough to eat, and in India, 200 million go hungry every day. Even in the United States, the world’s number one exporter of food, 33 million men, women, and children are considered among the world’s hungry.
There is, however, a myth about what is causing this tragic hunger epidemic and what it will take to alleviate it. Industrial agriculture proponents spend millions on advertising campaigns each year claiming that people are starving because there is not enough food to feed the current population, much less a continually growing one. “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? 10 billion by 2030″ proclaimed an old headline on Monsanto’s Web page. The company warns of the “growing pressures on the Earth’s natural resources to feed more people” and claims that low-technology agriculture “will not produce sufficient crop yield increases to feed the world’s burgeoning population.” Their answer is pesticide- and technology-intensive agriculture that will produce the maximum output from the land in the shortest amount of time. Global food corporations, they say, will have to serve as “saviors” of the world’s hungry.
From Fatal Harvest
The Seven Myths of Industrial Agriculture
3/17/09 Ukiah, North California
Industrial agriculture is devastating our land, water, and air, and is now threatening the sustainability of the biosphere. Its massive chemical and biological inputs cause widespread environmental havoc as well as human disease and death. Its monoculturing reduces the diversity of our plants and animals. Its habitat destruction endangers wildlife. Its factory farming practices cause untold animal suffering. Its centralized corporate ownership destroys farm communities around the world, leading to mass poverty and hunger. The industrial agriculture system is clearly unsustainable. It has truly become a fatal harvest.
However, despite these devastating impacts, the industrial paradigm in agriculture still gets a free ride from our media and policy makers. It is rare to hear questioning, much less a call for the overthrow, of this increasingly catastrophic food production system. This troubling quiescence can be attributed, in part, to the enormous success that agribusiness has had in utilizing the ”big lie,” a technique familiar to all purveyors of propaganda. Corporate agriculture has flooded, and continues to inundate the public with self-serving myths about modern food production. For decades, the industry has effectively countered virtually every critique of industrial agriculture with the ”big lie” strategy.
These agribusiness myths have become all too familiar. Most farmers, activists, and policy makers who question the industrial food paradigm know the litany of lies by heart: industrial agriculture is necessary to feed the world, to provide us with safe, nutritious, cheap food, to produce food more efficiently, to offer us more choices, and, of all things, to save the environment. Additionally, when confronted with the indisputable environmental and health impacts of industrial agriculture, the industry immediately points to technological advances, especially recent achievements in biotechnology, as the panacea that will solve all problems. These claims are broadcast far and wide by way of industry lobbying efforts, product promotions, and multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns, including television, newspaper, magazine, farm journal, and radio ads. Moreover, as the industry becomes more consolidated-with biotech companies owning the seed and chemical businesses and a handful of companies controlling a majority of seeds and food brands — the strategies for promulgating these myths become ever more concerted and the messages ever more honed. Archer Daniels Midland is now known to us all as the ”supermarket to the world,” while Monsanto offers us ”Food, Health, Hope.”
These myths about industrial agriculture have been, and are being, repeated so often that they are taken as virtually unassailable. A central goal of [these essays] is to conceptually debunk the myths that have for too long been used to promote and defend industrial agriculture. This myth busting is an essential step in exposing the impacts of current agriculture practices and educating the public about the realities of the food they are consuming.
We identify the seven central myths of industrial agriculture, note their assumptions and dangers, and provide direct and clear refutations. This is specifically designed to provide consumers, activists, and policy makers with clear, compact, and concise answers to counter the industry’s well-funded misinformation campaigns about the benefits of industrial agriculture. We encourage you to utilize these seven short essays whenever you are faced with the ”big lies” being used by corporate agribusiness to hide the true effects of their fatal harvest.
Intro→
Myth One – Industrial Agriculture Will Feed The World→
Myth Two – Industrial Food Is Safe, Healthy and Nutritious→
Myth Three – Industrial Food Is Cheap→
Myth Four - Industrial Agriculture Is Efficient→
Myth Five - Industrial Food Offers More Choices→
Myth Six – Industrial Agriculture Benefits the Environment and Wildlife→
Myth Seven – Biotechnology Will Solve the Problems of Industrial Agriculture→
Excerpted with permission
Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture
Edited by Andrew Kimbrell
Published by Island Press
~
See also Ingredients of Kraft Guacamole→
…and We Will Need Fifty Million Farmers→
~~
From Gene Logsdon
Garden Farm Skills
As far back into childhood as I can remember, every morning and every evening I went to the barn to “do chores.” “Chores” on the farm then (and now) meant feeding the chickens and livestock, gathering the eggs, and milking the cows. This work must be done every day come hell or high water—- especially come hell or high water. I did chores even in seminary college— I much preferred being in the barn than in chapel. That’s how it finally dawned on me that the priestly life was not for me, so I can say with all honesty that doing chores guided me to my true place in life. I am still doing chores although I have bowed to age and given up everything except sheep and chickens.
In childhood, I didn’t always go to the barn happily, but now, except in the coldest weather, I still prefer my barn to any church or any public meetinghouse. Farm animals are so appreciative of getting fed and watered and when you get to know them well, they make good company. They are always glad to see me and do not try to tell me how to vote or pray. If you have only a few of each, they become your friends or at least your close acquaintances, each with his or her own personality. When I shell a little corn off the cob by hand to feed to the hens, one of them, always the same one, parks herself right between my feet to get the first kernels that fall. More than once I have stumbled on her. Our golden-feathered rooster is so utterly vainglorious that when I watch him strut about the barnyard, I can’t help but think of Donald Trump.
Keep reading Chore Time at OrganicToBe.org→
““We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. … Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me. And I welcome their hatred!”
From Dave Smith
3/15/09 Ukiah, North California
Letter To The Editors
Our community is gearing up once again to keep the Masonite site available for living-wage jobs as a light industrial site, rather than permitting DDR to change its zoning so they can impose a Monster Mall on our citizens, colonizing our county, sucking revenue and profits out to distant absentee owners from our small towns and communities, devastating our locally-owned, independent businesses, crushing our small business entrepreneurial spirit, and reducing our job seekers to non-living wages with no benefits. Two County Supervisors have lost their jobs, and several City Council candidates were defeated, for supporting this travesty. What part of our resounding NO don’t DDR, and its local enabler Ruff and Associates, understand?
Corporate retailers have so eroded our sense of community that they think they can sell it back to us in the form of superficial design concepts. To overcome opposition on the part of city planners and elected officials, DDR has made a big show of redesigning their original Monster Mall plans “to better fit the community” by adding amenities, like pockets of “green space” and pedestrian walkways that snake alongside parking lots to add a suggestion of walkability to their project built entirely for cars, and solar powered parking lots. This is standard operating procedure that mall builders have used to hoodwink communities for many years.
These revisions are presented to us as major concessions and meant to make county planners feel as though they are doing their jobs by holding a tough line with the developer and even forging a legitimate compromise with citizens who oppose their project. But they are obscuring the real issues by putting lipstick on the pig. You can’t put cosmetics on a bad concept and expect it to work. It won’t work, and we’re not going to allow the project.
Another common ruse is to depict themselves as responsible and involved members of the community by donating to various local causes and charities, then manipulate the publicity to further the corporation’s goals. One community charity in another town celebrated with one of those blown-up checks from Wal-Mart for $500. That Wal-Mart store was doing upwards of $100 million in sales, a big chunk of it stolen from downtown merchants.
The most critical question about corporate retailers charitable giving, rarely asked, is whether their donations actually make up for the contributions lost when locally owned businesses close in their wake. WalMart donated $170 million in 2004, which actually works out to less than one-tenth of 1 percent of revenue, the equivalent of someone who earns $35,000 a year giving $21 to charity. Why did Target, with no local presence, recently donate to a local charity?
We will vote NO on any initiatives DDR puts on the ballot to change the zoning on the Masonite property. History has moved on, malls are dinosaurs, and our community will defend itself and create its own unique future.
[Thanks to Big Box Swindle for some of the above info. -DS]
~
See also The Mall Man’s Dreams For Ukiah at The AVA→
…and More Big Box Marts Coming To Ukiah?→
…and The Wal-Mart Dilemma→
…and Muy Mall Meltdown→
…and DeadMalls.com→
…and what about the malls here soon to be abandoned?
The Parable of the Shopping Mall (Alexander Cockburn) at Creators.com→
Hat tip Jim Houle
Images Credit: Evan Johnson
~~
We got preachers dealing in politics and diamond mines
and their speech is growing increasingly unkind
They say they are Christ’s disciples
but they don’t look like Jesus to me
and it feels like I am living in the wasteland of the free
We got politicians running races on corporate cash
Now don’t tell me they don’t turn around and kiss them peoples’ ass
You may call me old-fashioned
but that don’t fit my picture of a true democracy
and it feels like I am living in the wasteland of the free
We got CEO’s making two hundred times the workers’ pay
but they’ll fight like hell against raising the minimum wage
and If you don’t like it, mister, they’ll ship your job
to some third-world country ‘cross the sea
and it feels like I am living in the wasteland of the free
Living in the wasteland of the free
where the poor have now become the enemy
Let’s blame our troubles on the weak ones
Sounds like some kind of Hitler remedy
Living in the wasteland of the free
We got little kids with guns fighting inner city wars
So what do we do, we put these little kids behind prison doors
and we call ourselves the advanced civilization
that sounds like crap to me
and it feels like I am living in the wasteland of the free
We got high-school kids running ’round in Calvin Klein and Guess
who cannot pass a sixth-grade written test
but if you ask them, they can tell you
the name of every crotch on MTV
and it feels like I am living in the wasteland of the free
We kill for oil, then we throw a party when we win
Some guy refuses to fight, and we call that the sin
but he’s standing up for what he believes in
and that seems pretty damned American to me
and it feels like I am living in the wasteland of the free
Living in the wasteland of the free
where the poor have now become the enemy
Let’s blame our troubles on the weak ones
Sounds like some kind of Hitler remedy
Living in the wasteland of the free
While we sit gloating in our greatness
justice is sinking to the bottom of the sea
Living in the wasteland of the free
~
Our Town
And ya know the sun’s settin’ fast
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts
Go on now and kiss it goodbye
But hold on to your lover ’cause your heart’s bound to die
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town
Goodnight.
Our Town – Iris Dement on YouTube→
~~
From Vandana Shiva
Excerpted from a lecture
to the Soil Association conference,
One Planet Agriculture, England
There is increasingly reference to the Carbon Economy and I kind of shudder when carbon is addressed because carbon is what we eat also. I’d rather talk and differentiate between the fossil fuel existence of carbon and the renewable existence of carbon in embodied sunshine transformed into all the edible matter we have.
I differentiate between the fossil fuel economy of agriculture and the biodiversity economy of agriculture. One is a killing economy and one is a living economy. Interestingly the word ‘carbon’ is increasingly used as an equivalence term across the board and then everyone is being made afraid of every form of carbon, including living carbon.
If we add up the amount of fossil fuels that are going into food; take production, Pimentel has done all the calculations. We are using 10 times more calories in production of food than we get out as food. And there was a Danish study done some years ago. I remember I was at the conference where the environment minister laid out these figures. For a kilogram of food traveling around the world, it’s omitting 10 kilograms of carbon dioxide. So you are wasting a 10-fold amount in the production and then generating a 10-fold amount of carbon dioxide, all of it totally avoidable because better food is produced when you throw the chemicals out…
The part of GATT that really troubled me was something called TRIPS within it – the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement – basically an agreement forcing every country to patent life. To me it was a scandal so I went back and started to save seeds and have ended up doing a lot of the work as a result of just, in a way, keeping seed free and in farmers’ hands and not transformed into the property of giant corporations like Monsanto. But even I could not have imagined what we would go through in the decade to come.
One of the things that has taken us totally by surprise is a new epidemic of farmers’ suicides. Indian peasants have been so resilient. I’ve been in villages after disasters of floods and droughts and hurricanes, you have one season of a loss of agriculture, one season of having to struggle, and you are right back again. You rebuild your hut and you’re back on the field and you borrowed some seeds from somewhere and you’re farming again.
But the new industrialised globalised agriculture is doing something different, because it’s not like a natural disaster which you know will not be there in a permanent way. The first step in the globalised agriculture is dependency on what I call non-renewable seed. We’ve even made seed the very embodiment of life and its renewability behave like non-renewable fossil fuel – once and no more. When non-renewable seeds have to be bought each year, that’s a higher cost. Then they are sold as a monopoly with intellectual property royalties linked to it. The genetically engineered BT cotton, for example, costs about 2-300 rupees for a kilogram to produce. But when Monsanto sells it for 4,000 rupees a kilogram the rest is all royalty payment.
The seeds aren’t tested, they aren’t adapted, the same seeds are sold across different climate zones, they obviously don’t perform well. Instead of 1,500 kilograms per acre, farmers get 200, 300, sometimes total failure; add to this the fact that even if they have 300 kilograms of a bad cotton variety because its fiber is of a very inferior quality. And new studies that we have done are showing that there are huge allergies linked to it because what is BT cotton but toxic? 1,800 sheep died last year feeding on the plants. Anyone working in a mill where this Bt cotton is being used is getting allergies. Farmers who are collecting the cotton ball are getting allergies.
Linked to the fact that this is inferior cotton is the fact that in the United States there are $4 billion of subsidies linked to cotton, and now with these so-called ‘open markets’ the price has started to come down. In India, they’ve dropped to half. So your costs of production have gone up two, three, four times, sometimes 10 times, sometimes 100 times depending on what you were farming, and meantime what you are earning at the end of it has fallen to a third.
It’s a negative economy. Farmers get into debt, it’s unpayable debt. The people giving them the credit are the same as the salesmen and the agents at the local level. I don’t know how many of you read the Economist – it has a special article on the farmers’ suicides in India. We have been doing reports since the first farm suicide happened in ‘97. The first report was a 10 pager because only one farmer has killed himself, now there’s 150,000 farmers.
From Dave Smith
Don’t let the lightweight title, cover, and page-count fool you. This is a breakthrough book, and not just another self-help, happy-talk rip-off. This book can stand proudly next to the most academic 500-page Psychology tome, and replace much of the pop Psychology pap moldering on our bookshelves.
To be open to something so important, one first has to know who the author is, what he stands for, and why he can be trusted. I’ve read several of Thom Hartmann’s books, and listened to his daily progressive radio program numerous times. I can only state emphatically: This is a gifted man we can trust. No woo-woo here. He’s the real deal.
The basics of the book are these:
1. Our bodies are self-healing if we feed it the right food and exercise it properly under the right conditions. Shouldn’t our minds and emotions also be self-healing?
2. Rhythmic, bilateral movement is the way we’ve healed ourselves from traumatic, psychological wounds for hundreds of thousands of years. But until now, we didn’t know how it worked.
3. Quote: “Bilaterality is the ability to have the right and left hemispheres of the brain fully functional and communicating with each other.”
4. Freud’s early, very successful work was based on Bilaterality techniques, but after some unfortunate, sensationalistic historical events, as detailed here, he was forced to abandon it for mostly unsuccessful “talk-therapy” methods. Freud tried, but failed, for years to find an equally-successful technique. This history is crucial to our understanding of why psychotherapy evolved the way it did.
5. Devastating events can haunt a person’s every waking moment for years. Some suffer war-caused “post traumatic stress disorders,” or allow a loved-one’s untimely death to ruin their lives… while others are able to move on. Just as we’ve learned to transform our physical health by eating organic food, exercising, and drinking pure water, now we know how to consciously bring ourselves back to a healthy mental state.
6. This discovery comes from Hartmann’s own training, observations and experiments, with dramatic results illustrated by case studies and testimonials.
7. Hartmann details a simple, five step self-therapy technique to use while walking.
8. Bilateral therapy has also been used by humans for less-traumatic problem solving, creativity, and motivation. Now we can train ourselves to use it consciously.
This book deserves a wide readership and word-of-mouth advocacy… especially to those whose lives have been darkened by tragedy.
~~
from Richard B. Anderson
At the heart of the modern age is a core of grief.
At some level, we’re aware that something terrible is happening, that we humans are laying waste to our natural inheritance. A great sorrow arises as we witness the changes in the atmosphere, the waste of resources and the consequent pollution, the ongoing deforestation and destruction of fisheries, the rapidly spreading deserts and the mass extinction of species.
All these changes signal a turning point in human history, and the outlook is not particularly bright. The anger, irritability, frustration and intolerance that increasingly pervade our common life are symptoms associated with grief. The pervasive sense of helplessness and numbness that surrounds us, and the frantic search for meaning and questioning of religion and philosophy of life, are likewise often seen among those who must deal with overwhelming sorrow.
Grief is a natural reaction to calamity, and the stages of grief are visible in our reaction to the rapid decline of the natural world. There are a number of steps that people go through in the grief process. The first stage is often denial: “This can’t really be happening,” a feeling common among millions of Americans. Eighty percent of American adults say they are concerned about the environment, and there is some awareness of the gravity of our situation, yet a widespread awareness has yet to be felt in practical terms. We know the facts, but we’re ignoring in the interests of emotional survival.
The second stage of grief is often anger. We go into the “I’ll fight it” mode. Many environmental thinkers and activists put a lot of grief energy into constructive work. That energy is a factor in the undeniable successes of environmentalism, yet it is a sign of suffering and is probably a constraint on the intellectual vitality of the movement.
The third stage in the grief process is often despair. We feel that “no matter what I do, it’s still happening.” Because the planetary future seems so grim, it’s likely that many Americans have despaired, turning away from the quest for a meaningful solution.
The final stage of the grieving process, for those who can achieve it, often brings a more hopeful state of acceptance, even serenity. When we emerge from the bottom of despair, we may find the inner strength for a peaceful accommodation to reality. We can continue to take positive actions, but we are no longer in denial, rage or despair.
Even if we face the consequences of our assault on the natural environment, we may still find that the problems are too big, that there’s not much we can do. Yet those of us who feel this sorrow cannot forever deny it without suffering inexplicable disturbances in our own lives. It’s necessary to face our fear and our pain and to go through the process of grieving because the alternative is a sorrow deeper still: the loss of meaning. To live authentically in this time, we must allow ourselves to feel the magnitude of our human predicament.
~~
Image: Bleeding Heart Dove (endangered)
From Grist
Mall-operating behemoth General Growth Properties plunges in value
Here’s a name that deserves a bit more attention in this financial meltdown: General Growth Properties, which owns, manages, or has interests in more than 200 shopping malls in 45 states. Staggering under a massive debt load and battered by the bad economy, General Growth looks headed for bankruptcy or a fire sale. As recently as last June, its shares fetched $40. Today, you can snap one up for less than 40 cents.
Does General Growth’s plight augur the un-malling of America? Maybe. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that:
Last year, [mall-based] retail sales on a per-square-foot basis in the top 54 U.S. markets declined by their greatest extent since the 1990-91 recession…. Vacancy rates at U.S. malls climbed to 7.1% in the fourth quarter, the highest rate since real estate research firm Reis Inc. started tracking the figure in 2000. And average rents have started to decline.
The mall industry, like so many industries in the modern global economy, thrives on rapid growth fueled by easy credit. Now credit has dried up, debt needs to be repaid, and sales growth has gone into reverse.
Time to start thinking about other economic models?
See also The Mall To Nowhere→
From Dave Pollard
Keep reading Why Insurance Makes No Sense…→
From Dave Smith
3/6/09 Ukiah, North California
If you’re an old timer around these parts, you know the Ford family, and the four Ford boys, Steve, Patrick, Robben, and Mark. The brothers are locals and have played music around here and elsewhere since high school under the names of The Charles Ford Band, and The Ford Blues Band, among others, and travel the world playing music together and separately. They most recently played here in Ukiah at Sundays In The Park this past summer, 2008.
When he’s not on the road, touring America and Europe with his band, Patrick runs his record company Blue Rock’It Records in Redwood Valley where you can buy their own albums on-line along with his other recording artists. Robben’s website is here; and, hopefully, Mark will be the subject of a future feature.
(See links to rest of the story below)
~
When I was four, my parents gave me a toy drum kit, and then later in second grade I took piano lessons for awhile, then along about 6th grade I started really getting interested in drums. I played in the school band in Junior High School, but I didn’t dig it.
Then the surfing thing hit, big time, and I loved that. My friends and I decided we had to start a band, and my parents bought me a real Ludwig 4-piece drum starter kit, and in 8th grade we had a band called The High Fives, and we just started going from there. Our parents were always supportive, but never forced music on us.
When we were freshmen in High School, my brother Robben, who was in 6th grade, came to see us play at the fair grounds, and thought that was just the coolest thing, and he wanted to start a band with his friends. So Robben started his own band in 7th grade. By the time I was a senior and Robben was a freshman, he had developed into a really good guitar player… and he was possessed by music… listening, playing and practicing all the time. He has said that he can’t keep music out of his head. He was great really quick, so I told the guys that we needed Robben in our band.
My band in high school was always able to play most weekends, sometimes both nights, around Mendocino and Lake counties. Sock Hops had been the norm up until then, so to be able to have a live band for dances was a big deal. As we were one of the few bands around, we got lots of work. We did so well I was able to quit picking pears in the summer. I had done it for three summers and that was hard work. I needed the money to get “cool” school clothes. You know kids don’t do that kind of work anymore. It’s too bad. It was not only a good physical work out, but also it gave you real respect for the Mexican workers who did that kind of work for a living. They were so good at it, fast, they were real pros at their gig.
We came into music when it was blossoming on a major level. Everyone was experimenting, trying different things. Robben and I would comb through the record bins and listen to the radio, always trying to find music that nobody else was doing, always trying to make music be something special that would work in our band, which was great fun.
It was a great time to be into music. We had moved from surfing music, to being a Top 40 band, then followed the music into being a bluesy Rhythm and Blues band, then the English thing hit… you could be listening to the Beach Boys, who I loved, and the Beatles, and the Kinks’ hard-edged rock, and The Who… taking the music to all these different levels… to something pretty, like Maryanne Faithful, and the Trio acts came on big… Hendrix, Cream… so we became a hard rock trio with guitar, bass and drums. At the same time we would also have these jazz trios or quartets playing standards… the jazz thing started with me getting Dave Brubeck’s album, Take Five, which to this day is one of the greatest albums ever made. I got it from a friend of mine.
We would go to shows at The Fillmore in San Francisco, and you would see Richie Havens doing his solo act, which was always great, then you would see Ravi Shankar doing a totally off the wall thing, then followed by the Byrds. It was this unbelievable mixture of people: James Cotton, Cream, and Blood, Sweat and Tears… what an incredible bill!… and a free apple and poster, for 3 bucks! And they all were just great! When we saw Hendrix do his first show at Winterland… I will never forget.. .at one point he walked up to the mic, started tuning his guitar, and said “I’m a little out of tune, but I’m coming to get you anyway.” Then the stage exploded! To this day, those of us who were there, talk about it with reverence, like seeing some spiritual guru guy. It was all good. It was all fun.
Then, one day Robben and I were looking through the records at Hayes Music, which was at the corner of State Street and Church, and came across this blues record by The Paul Butterfield Blues Band that changed everything. We had been doing some Stones stuff, and Animals stuff, not because we wanted to do blues, but because we liked the tunes. But here was a band that was doing blues music because they liked it. They were called a “blues band” because they loved that genre. We took that record home and overnight our whole musical world turned upside down.
In 1969, Robben and I were sleeping on a friends floor in San Francisco trying to find gigs. Rolling Stone magazine was new, and there was an ad: “Help. Stuck in Sunnyvale. Harp player who digs Little Walter, Applejack, Charlie Musslewhite. Get me out of here.” We called, not having any luck in the city, drummer and guitar player looking for a band, and went down there to a jam they were having. Gary Smith was the real deal Chicago kind of harp player, and the bass player was adequate, and we brought another Ukiah boy, Mike Osborn down to play rhythm guitar, and we started a band we named The Charles Ford Band after my dad.
We started playing around the South Bay for a few months, then we opened for Charlie Musslewhite at the Lion’s Share in San Rafael. Charlie’s drummer sucked and he asked me to join his band. I didn’t want to leave my brother, but this was the real deal. Charlie had albums out and was one of our idols, and he was getting ready to do a tour. So I spent the next couple of months playing with Charlie in a four-piece band – drums, piano, bass, and harp – and bugging him saying he really needed Robben, who could play sax and lead guitar, but Charlie said he “played way too much.” Finally he said Robben could play sax half the night, and guitar half the night on one of our gigs, he passed the audition, and then came into the band. We spent the next year on the road with Charlie. It was a great experience, but hellacious. Charlie was drinking, we weren’t getting paid much, sleeping in funky hotel rooms in Chicago, just awful. We met some great guys, like Luther Tucker, Mississippi Fred McDowell, John Lee Hooker, James Cotton, but we decided we needed to start our own band. By that time Mark was almost 16 in high school but not liking it at all.
Mark was getting into a bit of trouble, cutting school and stuff, so I convinced Mom and Dad he would be better off with Robben and I, and he was rapidly becoming a great harp player. So they let him move down to the Bay Area, and along with Stan Poplin on bass, also from Ukiah, we reformed The Charles Ford Band. That was one great little band, and though it only lasted about a year, it still has a cult following and the recording we did for Arhoolie a few months after breaking up is still a classic piece of modern blues and still sells. Then Mark quit, and Robben decided to go to L.A. and play with Jimmie Whitherspoon. I didn’t want to go to L.A., so I joined back up with Charlie.
And through all my adventures, I’ve had Sharon with me. She’s put up with an incredible amount. She did two long tours with us, three months each, back and forth across the U.S. and Canada. Pretty brutal.
All in all, it’s been a pretty good run for us. When Sharon and I decided to have kids, we moved back here to Ukiah. We were lucky to have such a supportive unit. Lots of family. We could always find work around when we needed it, but it was a different time.
~
Chapter 1 – The first longhair in town→
Chapter 2 – Playing the blues→
Chapter 3 – Fighting fire with fire→
Chapter 4 – Preaching the truth
~~
From Jason Bradford
Willits Economic Localization
3/5/09 Ukiah, North California
As a kid did you ever fantasize about Monopoly game money becoming real? I know I did. Perhaps that’s why I left the printer shop the other day with a sense of bemusement. I had just designed and printed $6000 of money called Mendo Credits. I felt confident that people would accept it, and I also proudly considered that Ben Bernanke doesn’t make money as good as this.
Now before you call the Treasury Department to report me, listen to my story. It may sound funny, but the reality of money is deadly serious. This is perfectly legal and I want you to play copy cat…
Historically in the United States and elsewhere, local currencies are known to stabilize local economies when national currencies are troubled, such as bouts of hyper inflation or deflation and joblessness. This works because those accepting local money are also likely to seek out others who accept it too, creating a social dynamic that forms new, local economic associations. As these strengthen, the flow of local money picks up and work can get done even in the face of economic disaster outside the community. Because they can only be spent locally, profits on economic transactions done with a local currency remain in the community and spur more local investment. Local governments, regional business associations, community banks, and worker cooperatives are examples of the kinds of institutions who tend to successfully issue local currency. They have the social capital to be broadly accepted, and the capacity to manage the task of issuing and redeeming money…
Mendo Credits are backed by a tangible asset. In other words, Mendo Credits are a “reserve currency” as opposed to a “fiat currency” like Federal Reserve dollars. Many people are familiar with money backed by gold, which was once the case with U.S. dollars, but Mendo Credits are backed by reserves of stored food. Our reserve currency has a number of desirable properties at this time in history…
Keep reading Food-Backed Local Money at The Oil Drum→
See also Scenario 2020: The Future of Food in Mendocino County→
and Introducing Mendo Time Bank→
and Mendo Moola→
Hat tip Linda Gray and Annie Esposito
From Gene Logsdon
One of the greatest mysteries of life for me is society’s ambivalence about the naked human body. People line up by the hundreds every day to get a look at Michelangelo’s anatomically-correct statue of David. But if a real live David were to stand naked beside that statue, the sex police would haul him away, even in Italy where nude statues are as common as pizza.
I once did a lot of “research” into the subject of outdoor nudity. Research for a writer means I “asked around.” What gives here, anyway?
You’d be amazed. Actually most of you would not be amazed because what I found out was that most people, given their druthers, would not wear clothes in their back yards or even front yards, if they could get away with it, at least not when the weather is nice. People I asked drew the line only at going beyond the home environment unclothed or where the environment inclined excessively to poison ivy and mosquitoes. One person put it this way: “If everyone took their clothes off while they mowed the lawn, in twenty minutes no one would take a second look. If the nude person was as ugly as I am, no one would take a first look.”
I have a hunch that there are plenty of backyard swimming pools whose waters reflect bare backsides more than they do swimsuits. For sure what passes for a swimsuit in many of them would make a typical thong look kind of klutzy. But people also expressed a yen, if they trusted that I was not going to name names, for gardening in the nude. In fact the practice has been sanctified into folk tradition, at least in the Ozarks. According to folklorist Vance Randolph, writing in the 1930s and 40s, the spring planting ritual in the hills involved a sort of celebratory session of love making on the soft, loamy, newly-planted soil to insure a good crop. Some fifty years later, I asked an Ozarkian if people still did that. “Wellllll” (long pause). “Welllll” (another long pause). “Yes.” Did Ozarkians believe that such activity would enhance crop production? He smiled. “Oh, they just use that for an excuse.”
Keep reading Gardening In The Nude at OrganicToBe→
From Daily Kos→
Key quote:
* the FBI accurately described mortgage fraud as “epidemic”
* nonprime lenders are overwhelmingly responsible for the epidemic
* the fraud was so endemic that it would have been easy to spot if anyone looked
* the lenders, the banks that created nonprime derivatives, the rating agencies, and the buyers all operated on a “don’t ask; don’t tell” policy
* willful blindness was essential to originate, sell, pool and resell the loans
* willful blindness was the pretext for not posting loss reserves
* both forms of blindness made high (fictional) profits certain when the bubble was expanding rapidly and massive (real) losses certain when it collapsed
* the worse the nonprime loan quality the higher the fees and interest rates, and the faster the growth in nonprime lending and pooling the greater the immediate fictional profits and (eventual) real losses
* the greater the destruction of wealth, the greater the (fictional) profits, bonuses, and stock appreciation
* many of the big banks are deeply insolvent due to severe credit losses
* those big banks and Treasury don’t know how insolvent they are because they didn’t even have the loan files
* a “stress test” can’t remedy the banks’ problem — they do not have the loan files
Keep reading The Two Documents… at Huffington Post→
Key quote: the “Lean Energy Sequence”
Keep reading Powerdown Tool Kit: Rethinking Energy at Zone5→
Images: GreenRoofs.com
Hat tip Energy Bulletin
By Brenda Ueland
October 24, 1891 – March 5, 1985
It is through this creative process that we at once love and are loved
I want to write about the great and powerful thing that listening is. And how we forget it. And how we don’t listen to our children, or those we love. And least of all – which is so important, too – to those we do not love. But we should. Because listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. Think how the friends that really listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius as though it did us good, like ultraviolet rays.
This is the reason: When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life. You know how if a person laughs at your jokes you become funnier and funnier, and if he does not, every tiny little joke in you weakens up and dies. Well, that is the principle of it. It makes people happy and free when they are listened to. And if you are a listener, it is the secret of having a good time in society (because everybody around you becomes lively and interesting), of comforting people, of doing them good.
Who are the people, for example, to whom you go for advice? Not to the hard, practical ones who can tell you exactly what to do, but to the listeners; that is, the kindest, least censorious, least bossy people you know. It is because by pouring out your problem to them, you then know what to do about it yourself.
When we listen to people there is an alternating current that recharges us so we never get tired of each other. We are constantly being re-created.
Now, there are brilliant people who cannot listen much. They have no ingoing wires on their apparatus. They are entertaining, but exhausting, too.
I think it is because these lecturers, these brilliant performers, by not giving us a chance to talk, do not let this little creative fountain inside us begin to spring and cast up new thoughts and unexpected laughter and wisdom. That is why, when someone has listened to you, you go home rested and lighthearted.
When people listen, creative waters flow
Now this little creative fountain is in us all. It is the spirit, or the intelligence, or the imagination – whatever you want to call it. If you are very tired, strained, have no solitude, run too many errands, talk to too many people, drink too many cocktails, this little fountain is muddied over and covered with a lot of debris. The result is you stop living from the center, the creative fountain, and you live from the periphery, from externals. That is, you go along on mere willpower without imagination. It is when people really listen to us, with quiet, fascinated attention, that the little fountain begins to work again, to accelerate in the most surprising way. I discovered all this about three years ago, and truly it made a revolutionary change in my life. Before that, when I went to a party, I would think anxiously: “Now try hard. Be lively. Say bright things. Talk. Don’t let down.” And when tired, I would have to drink a lot of coffee to keep this up.
Now before going to a party, I just tell myself to listen with affection to anyone who talks to me, to be in their shoes when they talk; to try to know them without my mind pressing against theirs, or arguing, or changing the subject.
Sometimes, of course, I cannot listen as well as others. But when I have this listening power, people crowd around and their heads keep turning to me as though irresistibly pulled. By listening I have started up their creative fountain. I do them good.
Now why does it do them good? I have a kind of mystical notion about this. I think it is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come. It is so in writing. You are taught in school to put down on paper only the bright things. Wrong. Pour out the dull things on paper too – you can tear them up afterward – for only then do the bright ones come. If you hold back the dull things, you are certain to hold back what is clear and beautiful and true and lively.
[Lord knows we already have too many Big Boxes here that will be going belly-up. Let's stop the Masonite Big Box of Job Loss project in its tracks, so we don't have to deal with even more of these out-of-human-scale monstrosities later. -DS]
by Jebediah Reed
The Infrastrucurist
When Circuit City announced last month that it was going out of business, everyone’s concern was naturally with the 34,000 employees that got laid off. Less noted has been the fate of the chain’s 1,500 big box stores scattered across the U.S. and Canada. The company, whose locations average about 25,000 square feet, was an anchor tenant in many malls and shopping centers. With numerous other big retailers teetering, not only are the prospects for filling Circuit City’s spaces gloomy, there will likely be a rash of follow-on closings among neighboring stores. And many analysts think the national retail shakeout is still in its early stages.
The problem of retail vacancies on this scale is so new that it hasn’t really been studied yet. Perhaps the only authority on the subject of empty big box stores is Oberlin College professor and artist Julia Christensen. She has spent the last seven years traveling around the country seeking out and documenting cases of communities reclaiming abandoned big boxes and putting them to a socially productive use–for instance, as museums, libraries, rec centers, and schools. She wrote about it all in her recently published book Big Box Reuse (MIT Press). A few days ago, we got her thoughts on how towns and cities can make beneficial use of these vacant structures and turn a hole in the local fabric into a community asset…
You describe big box stores as unsustainable. In what way particularly?
The main thing is that they are built on a car-centric structure. So you can’t really get to these buildings without cars. Then there’s the acres and acres of impermeable parking lots, land that we’re just paving over…
Keep reading Big Box of Trouble at the Infrastucturist→
Hat tip Energy Bulletin
~~
But I really think agriculture is going to be the best place to be. Agriculture’s been a horrible business for 30 years. For decades the money shufflers, the paper shufflers, have been the captains of the universe. That is now changing. The people who produce real things [will be on top]. You’re going to see stockbrokers driving taxis. The smart ones will learn to drive tractors, because they’ll be working for the farmers. It’s going to be the 29-year-old farmers who have the Lamborghinis. So you should find yourself a nice farmer and hook up with him or her, because that’s where the money’s going to be in the next couple of decades.
Keep reading Jim Rogers Doesn’t Mince Words→
See also Local Food: success is 100% possible→
Hat tip Energy Bulletin
..and A Perfect Pear at NYT→
Hat tip Pinky Kushner
Key quote: I have read endless tributes to Wal-Mart from “libertarian economists,” who sing Wal-Mart’s praises for bringing low price goods, 70 per cent of which are made in China, to the American consumer. What these “economists” do not factor into their analysis is the diminution of American family incomes and government tax base from the loss of the goods producing jobs to China. Ladders of upward mobility are being dismantled by offshoring, while California issues IOUs to pay its bills. The shift of production offshore reduces US GDP. When the goods and services are brought back to America to be sold, they increase the trade deficit. As the trade deficit is financed by foreigners acquiring ownership of US assets, this means that profits, dividends, capital gains, interest, rents, and tolls leave American pockets for foreign ones.
Keep reading How The Economy Was Lost→
Hat tip to Méca Wawona
~~
Image Credit: Farmer John (The Real Dirt…), Angelic Organics, Caledonia, Illinois
The last desperate act of the banking system in the face of Peak Oil’s no-more-growth equation was to engineer species of tradable securities that could produce wealth out of thin air rather than productive activity. This was the alphabet soup of algorithm-derived frauds with vague and confounding names such as credit default swaps (CDSs), collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), structured investment vehicles (SIVs), and, of course, the basic filler, mortgage backed securities. The banking system is now choking to death on these delicacies…
The task of government right now is not to prop up doomed systems at their current scales of failure, but to prepare the public to rebuild our systems at smaller scales…
If the US government is going to try to make remedial policy for anything, it better start with agriculture, to promote local, smaller-scaled farming using methods that are much less dependent on oil byproducts and capital injections…
Keep reading What Next?→
Sierra Club
Mendocino Group, Redwood Chapter
13 February 2009
Mendocino County Board of Supervisors
Low Gap Road
Ukiah, CA
Re: Final EIR and General Plan
A Different Approach on the Water Sections
Members of the Board;
We are enclosing three comment letters that address the water sections of the Draft Environmental Impact Report. We urge the Board to take a careful look at what is being proposed by the Planning Group and their professional consultant. These comment letters from the Sierra Club, our attorney, and the Mendocino County Water Agency concur on the gross inadequacy of the draft water sections of the EIR and General Plan. A review of the comment listings shows that agencies such as the Department of Fish and Game and the Regional Water Control Board share our critical evaluation of the draft documents regarding water resources.
Based on our experiences over the last three years, we do not expect the final EIR and General Plan (now due out on the 26th) to be meaningfully different from the inadequate draft presented. Those who have created the draft documents do not seem to have the understanding or motivation to create:
• An accurate description of the present degraded conditions of our water resources, or
• A comprehensive identification of the environmental issues, or
• A detailed plan to fix the problems.
Attorney Paul Carroll states:
The general plan and its EIR are expected to comprehensively analyze the availability of water to the environment and the potential adverse effects of its depletion. This obligation includes identifying future water sources and analyzing the impacts of their procurement. Under these criteria, the County’s updated General Plan/Draft EIR is a failure. Among its deficiencies, it fails to address the greatest threat to the County’s rivers and streams, namely the depletion of streamflows from diversions, many illegal; it fails to consider the availability of groundwater in connection with the demands of future development; it proposes to address water quality impacts with mitigations that do not apply to the problem at hand or that will apply for years to come; it eliminates mitigations deemed necessary by the current General Plan, such as a riparian protection/grading ordinance; and it evidences a fundamental misunderstanding regarding cumulative impacts, positing that they can be readily controlled by project-level permits and best management practices.
The Mendocino Water Agency comment letter raises six pages of material deficiencies and questions such as:
Why does this EIR not discuss the effects that lack of a Grading Ordinance for the last 25 years has had on water quality and riparian corridor conditions?
Why does this EIR not require the adoption of a Grading Ordinance as a mitigation measure?
How do policies provide mitigation when they do not have implementation measures, state what department is responsible, or have a timeline?
Since the EIR correctly points out that the County currently has no codes or ordinances that provide mitigation for construction activities and none are proposed in the EIR, how is the EIR conclusion that no mitigation measures are required justified?
How does policy language that involves “promoting”, and “supporting” result in implementation sufficient to justify the EIR conclusion that no mitigation is necessary for development impacts?
The EIR states that “lack of current knowledge…impacts are considered significant and unavoidable”. The mitigation measures are listed as “none available”. Is not a reduction in the development
patterns that would affect groundwater supplies, a mitigation measure?
The Sierra Club comment letter raises water issues missed or avoided in the EIR such as illegal diversions:
The Division of Water Rights has the opportunity to consider the environmental effects of applications for diversion prior to any taking or the construction of storage facilities by the applicant. However, the current situation is that growers have built dams onstream and later applied for their permit. The result is an administrative logjam of noncompliant diversion dams. This results in a very significant illegal taking of water with environmental effects to water supply and water quality that is not been addressed in the DEIR. The county has a legitimate interest in regulating construction of these projects and an obligation to limit the adverse environmental consequences. These diversions, being taken without right of law, diminish the opportunity for other development by those who would comply with water rights laws and county building codes.
While the DEIR acknowledges the problem of illegal construction of dams, it dismisses the issue without further examination or response in the document. At page 4.8-2 it states:
“…there are many illegal diversions and impoundments of surface water occurring in the unincorporated area of the county; however, the amount of water being diverted and the extent of diversions countywide are currently unknown.”
From The Christian Science Monitor
[Many of us remember the "debate" that Michael Shuman had here in Ukiah, which DDR refused to attend, during our fight to save the Masonite site for future jobs. Michael has just been appointed the position of Director of Research and Public Policy for Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) - DS]
Job developer Michael Shuman seeks to rebuild struggling communities with home-grown businesses.
For Michael Shuman it was the equivalent of an earthquake. Seeking cheaper labor in Canada, Toronto-based Branscan Corp. threw 1,400 people out of work by closing two paper mills in Millinocket, Maine, in 2002. The unemployment rate in this region of central Maine skyrocketed to Depression era levels of nearly 40 percent.
Mr. Shuman, an economist and job developer, was called in for damage control. Aided by an $8 million federal grant, he and his colleagues at Maine’s Training and Development Corp. were able to help most of the laid-off workers get back on their feet. But the experience convinced Shuman to do what any sensible person might do after such a calamity: Build something that’s earthquake-resistant.
To him, that involves locally owned businesses.
For the past five years, Shuman has been barnstorming across the United States, preaching the gospel of economic “localism.” It’s an appeal to community values as well as economic self-interest, a call to support locally owned businesses that don’t outsource, don’t pack up their businesses and leave on a moment’s notice, and who recycle their customers’ dollars back into the community.
Shuman describes his effort as “a political campaign that never ends.” He speaks mostly in small rural communities, often desolate landscapes with shuttered mills and boarded-up storefronts. His campaign has put him in the epicenter of a debate about what’s best for the economic health of a community: Locally owned businesses or large, multinational chain stores.
Keep reading An urgent call at CSM→
From Gene Logsdon
I found Harland Hubbard in an article in the National Geographic in the early 1960s. He and his wife, Anna, were what was called at that time modern homesteaders who had first become well-known for building their own shantyboat and floating down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to bayou country, a trip that lasted over a year. Now they lived on the banks of the Ohio in a house they had built themselves, mostly out of lumber cut from their own woodland or snagged as it floated by on the river. They did not have electricity. They cut their own wood for fuel. They raised all their food, or caught it from the river, or traded for it with neighbors. The only steady income they had was rent from a house Harlan had built in town in younger years. Their life was both rigorous and elegant. Harlan made some money from his paintings and his books. The couple provided their own entertainment: nature watching, reading, and music.
For a while, I talked about living the same way, causing Carol’s parents some consternation.In their first years of marriage, they had lived much like the Hubbards but viewed with alarm the idea that their daughter and grandchildren might have to do likewise. I was reminded, more than once, that, unlike the Hubbards, I had children to raise. So I went to Philadelphia, accepted the manacles of financial security, and forgot about the Hubbards.
Fourteen years later, Wendell Berry introduced me to the Hubbards. They lived only a few miles from his farm. Wendell and I were both writing for the Rodale Press, whose publications were seeing a dramatic rise in circulation. This was the golden age of Organic Gardening magazine. Literally millions of people were subscribing to it because they had gotten the audacious notion that they wanted more control over their lives. The magazine was suggesting ways to gain that control. Like the Hubbards, these readers thought that they wanted to go where they could own a little land free and clear, live more healthfully, more at nature’s pace than the nine-to-five regime, produce their own food, do for themselves what they had been paying others to do for them, and make enough money at some small business or craft to get by. In other words, they were motivated by the same kind of idealism that had influenced the early pioneers. They were agrarians. They found in the publications of the Rodale Press the kind of information they were looking for.
It was in this heady atmosphere of hope that, at Wendell’s suggestion, I was assigned to write an article about Harlan and Anna Hubbard. I remembered them from the National Geographic article and accepted the assignment eagerly.
Keep reading Harlan Hubbard at OrganicToBe→
By E.F. Schumacher
Small Is Beautiful (1973)
“Right Livelihood” is one of the requirements of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path. It is clear, therefore, that there must be such a thing as Buddhist economics…
Economists themselves, like most specialists, normally suffer from a kind of metaphysical blindness, assuming that theirs is a science of absolute and invariable truths, without any presuppositions. Some go as far as to claim that economic laws are as free from “metaphysics” or “values” as the law of gravitation. We need not, however, get involved in arguments of methodology. Instead, let us take some fundamentals and see what they look like when viewed by a modern economist and a Buddhist economist.
There is universal agreement that a fundamental source of wealth is human labour. Now, the modern economist has been brought up to consider “labour” or work as little more than a necessary evil. From the point of view of the employer, it is in any case simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a minimum if it can not be eliminated altogether, say, by automation. From the point of view of the workman, it is a “disutility”; to work is to make a sacrifice of one’s leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice. Hence the ideal from the point of view of the employer is to have output without employees, and the ideal from the point of view of the employee is to have income without employment.
I see mankind as a herd of cattle inside a fenced enclosure. Outside the fence are green pastures with plenty for the cattle to eat, while inside the fence there is not quite grass enough for the cattle. Consequently the cattle are trampling underfoot what little grass there is and goring each other to death in their struggle for existence. I saw the owner of the herd come to them and when he saw their pitiable condition he was filled with compassion for them, and thought of what he could do to improve their condition. So he called his friends together and asked them to assist him in cutting the grass from outside the fence and throwing it over the fence to the cattle. And they called that charity. Then, because the calves were dying off and not growing into serviceable cattle, he arranged that they should each have a pint of milk every morning for breakfast. Because they were dying off in the cold night he put up beautiful well-drained and well-ventilated cow sheds for the cattle. Because they were goring each other in the struggle for existence he put corks on the horns of the cattle so that the wounds they gave each other might not be so serious. Then he reserved a part of the enclosure for the old bulls and the old cows over seventy years of age. In fact, he did everything he could do to improve the conditions of the cattle. And when they asked him why he did not do the one obvious thing—break down the fences and let the cattle out—he answered, “If I let the cattle out, I should no longer be able to milk them.”
by Richard Heinberg
Post Carbon Institute
Extracted from an interview in Acres USA, March 2007
Over the past 200 years the human population has grown from under one billion to now over 6.5 billion. That’s an extraordinary rate of increase—completely unprecedented in all of previous history. There are verious ways of explaining how and why that has happened, but certainly it could not have happened without cheap fossil fuels with which to grow more food and to transport that food from where it’s abundant to where it’s scarce. I think it’s fair to say that there are somewhere between 2 and 4 billion people alive today who probably would not exist if it weren’t for fossil fuels. That’s a little worrisome to think about when one realizes that oil production globally is set to peak any year now, and global natural gas production will not be far behind. If we’re going to avoid to die-off of much of humanity through starvation and disease, we’re going to have to find ways of feeding people without fossil fuels or with a lot less fossil fuel use—and that really means redesigning out entire food system. It means growing more food locally, for local consumption, it means using smaller farm machinery and less of it, it means more people being involved in the process of producing food, and it means growing food with fewer chemicals and fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. Fortunately, over the past few decades we have developed information, knowledge, experience and techniques that are capable of growing food intensively, organically and ecologically. Those techniques, those methods desperately need to be expanded and replicated and made the basis for our national and global food system.
The whole chemicals industry arose starting with coal, but natural gas is now the basis for the modern pharmaceutical and agrichemical industy, and that’s a very worrisome situation here in North America because we’re seeing natural gas production turning down. Therefore we’re seeing high natural gas prices, and therefore high fertilizer prices, because, of course, fertilizer is made from natural gas. Most of the North American chemicals industry is fleeing for other shores where natural gas is cheaper. We’ve lost something like 100,000 jobs in the chemicals industry over the last two years, but we don’t read that on the business pages of the newspapers.
What [leaders] most need to understand is our systemic dependency on fossil fuels and the fact that fossil fuels are about to become much more scarce and expensive. I don’t think that simple fact has penetrated the consciousness of our officials. They have been led to believe that business as usual will continue indefinitely, that the way we are doing things now is somehow the way they’ve always been done and always will be done, which is simply not the case. We live in an extraordinary moment in history.
[Scale and greed are the problems. Break them up. -DS]
Go to Bill Moyers Journal→
Also see The Baseline Scenario→
Hat Tip Dave Pollard
It all starts off when a small collection of motivated individuals within a community come together with a shared concern: how can our community respond to the challenges, and opportunities, of Peak Oil and Climate Change?
They begin by forming an initiating group and then adopt the Transition Model (explained here at length, and in bits here and here) with the intention of engaging a significant proportion of the people in their community to kick off a Transition Initiative.
A Transition Initiative is a community (lots of examples here) working together to look Peak Oil and Climate Change squarely in the eye and address this BIG question:
“For all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive, how do we significantly increase resilience (to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to mitigate the effects of Climate Change)?”
After going through a comprehensive and creative process of:
* awareness raising around peak oil, climate change and the need to undertake a community lead process to rebuild resilience and reduce carbon
* connecting with existing groups in the community
* building bridges to local government
* connecting with other transition initiatives
* forming groups to look at all the key areas of life (food, energy, transport, health, heart & soul, economics & livelihoods, etc)
* kicking off projects aimed at building people’s understanding of resilience and carbon issues and community engagement
* eventually launching a community defined, community implemented “Energy Descent Action Plan” over a 15 to 20 year timescale
This results in a coordinated range of projects across all these areas of life that strives to rebuild the resilience we’ve lost as a result of cheap oil and reduce the community’s carbon emissions drastically.
The community also recognizes two crucial points:
* that we used immense amounts of creativity, ingenuity and adaptability on the way up the energy upslope, and that there’s no reason for us not to do the same on the downslope
* if we collectively plan and act early enough there’s every likelihood that we can create a way of living that’s significantly more connected, more vibrant and more in touch with our environment than the oil-addicted treadmill that we find ourselves on today.
\\!! Final point Just to weave the climate change and peak oil situations together…
* Climate change makes this carbon reduction transition essential
* Peak oil makes it inevitable
* Transition initiatives make it feasible, viable and attractive (as far we can tell so far…)
Keep reading What is a Transition Town?→
By Rosalind Creasy (1985)
Edible Landscaping
The early Puritans left their mark on us in a number of ways, some of which make life a series of joyless tasks. Sometimes I think their devotees must write garden books. The tone of many of the how-to books reeks of rules, admonitions, and dicta. How about a garden that is programmed to give you joy, to take care of you? The cottage garden is an outright celebration of what a garden can do for every part of you: colors to see, textures to touch, fragrances to smell, bird calls to hear, and myriad tastes for the palate. And, of course, we can’t forget the most important part, your soul. You will experience the renewal of life, that primordial urge to believe in the future. You will put your fingers on the emerging carrot seedlings, anticipate the taste of the first tomato, and feel delight when the hummingbird visits the sage and the monarch butterfly sips from the dew collected by the nasturtium leaf.
I am suggesting that you plant a rather hedonistic variation of the traditional mixed border. Put it where you usually see a conventional shrub or flower border—along a fence line for instance, or along a walk or driveway, next to the patio, or along shallow hillsides. Fill it with joy, with colors, tastes, fragrances and even tactile pleasures—a swath of flowers and foliage.
The mixed border, sometimes called the perennial border since it usually includes a large number of perennially blooming plants, has been in fashion since the late nineteenth century. It has its roots in the English cottage garden, and, at its best, the border is a subtle work of form, texture, and color—all used to together to delight the soul. Properly planned, the border changes with the seasons.
Traditionally the staples in the mixed border were non-edible flowers, mostly perennials, with a sprinkling of annuals for quick color. Popular perennial flower choices for this type of ornamental border were iris, peony, phlox, dalia, dais, chrysanthemum, poppy, and the like. A new variation in today’s perennial border is the addition of beautiful edibles such as ruby chard and flowering kale; plus a number of savory and attractive herbs such as variegated sage and dill; edible flowers such as nasturtium and carnation for your salads and desserts; and, to add still another dimension, fragrance, choose sweet-smelling lavender and stock. For many more choices, see the lists of flowers and beautiful edibles below.
Keep reading Creating a Cottage Garden at Organic To Be→
From Linda Sanders
Friends of Gibson Creek
2/19/09 Ukiah, California (updated) I just finished this amazing book by Thomas Pakenham, Remarkable Trees of the World. A self described “tree hunter” and renowned botanist traveled to the remotest parts of the world and to teeming metropolis’s to capture unique, rare or endangered trees with his 30 lb. Linhof camera. Pakenham winnowed down hundreds of pictures and chose sixty individual/groups of trees using three principles. Each tree must be on its feet, dead or alive, have a strong personality, and have a good face. Seven of those pictures were taken in California. Those trees you’ve gazed upon, talked to or maybe even hugged are in this book.
What about the lovely, stately and unique trees in our little town? Well there are less of them now. The Ukiah Community Forest Management Plan calls for protection and maintenance of our urban forest. Wednesday night, the Ukiah City Council voted 4 to 1 to change the language in the animal code from owner to caretaker. Essentially, the caretaker is responsible for their dog or cat. The impetus for this change was to increase compassion towards animals, by changing the language you change human behavior. The original request was to move from “owner” to “guardian” but the Council determined “caretaker” was the least controversial term. My dictionary defines caretaker as a person employed to look after or take charge of goods, property, or a person. I think guardian is a much better word choice. One who guards, protects or defends creature, person, tree.
Is the City of Ukiah a responsible caretaker of our urban forest? Please come to a public meeting between Friends of Gibson Creek, ReLeaf, and the City this Tuesday, February 24th at 5:15pm at the City Annex (on the North side of the Civic Center), it will be an opportunity to clarify existing City policies regarding trees and chart any new directions. Council member Mary Anne Landis is facilitating the meeting. If you wish to attend and want to review the City tree-related documents ahead of time then send me an e-mail and I will forward them to you. kaderli@juno.com
~~
February, 2009 No-Brainer: Use a Little Less Water at the Faucet
About 15% of your total home water use is at the faucet. And about 73% of that is hot water. Did you know that just a little thoughtfulness while using your faucet can save half of that water? And much of this isn’t even painful. All you have to do is remember to turn off the water when brushing your teeth or shaving. So here’s the challenge. Agree to try out the 5-second rule at your kitchen and bathroom faucets this month. This means you’ll remember to let the water run for only 5 seconds at a time, and you’ll win $10 in the time it takes you to type an email. If you take a picture of your faucet with a reminder sign next to it, we’ll put you into a drawing for $50.
See link below for official rules and instructions. Challenge ends February 28, 2009.
Link: February, 2009 No-Brainer
See also Felton, California Overthrows Corporate Giant For Control Of Their Water→
and Water for People and Nature: The Story of Corporate Water Privatization→
Image: Hat tip to Evan Johnson
By Gene Logsdon
Garden Farm Skills
OrganicToBe.org
To reach its full potential, a garden farm should embrace four areas: garden, pasture, tree grove, and the watery domain of pool, pond or creek. Only then will the full compliment of the food chain and the full orchestration of natural beauty be achieved. Of the four parts, the tree grove usually receives the least attention from garden farmers, which is why I have been writing about it so much, plus the fact that in winter that’s where most of the action is. We graze our pastures and gardens in summer; we should be “grazing” our woodlots in winter. And of you don’t have one, start one. Your children will honor you in the latter days. Any timber that needs to be cut and moved out of the woods should be completed now, before mud time. The maple syrup season has begun now. And as the days get above freezing and no ice lingers in the bark to dull chain saw blades, it is now comfortable to cut firewood, fence posts and furniture wood.
Two weeks ago in this space, I mentioned an unusual way to graze trees, using juniper berries to flavor a meat sauce. We finally got around to making that sauce, using a recipe from Bon Appetit in the October, 2008 issue, and substituting juniper berries from our red cedar trees (Junipera virginiana) for the larger and more succulent berries of other juniper trees that the recipe called for. We had to improvise other ways too— we did not have fresh rosemary, so used dried. But we did have fresh thyme from the garden, surprisingly green where the February snow had just melted away. The meat sauce was recommended for venison, but we put it on barbecued steaks. Since our juniper berries from red cedar were smaller than other junipers, I handpicked sixteen of the plumpest ones I could find to substitute for the eight the recipe called for. The sauce turned out to have a subtle, piquant taste different from anything I had experienced before. The flavor of the red wine dominated the more delicate juniper berry flavor a little too much, I thought, but the combination was very tasty. I’m fairly sure that the juniper berry flavor would have been more pronounced if we could have used the bigger berries of other junipers.
By Wendell Berry
Excerpts from Home Economics (1987)
The small family farm is one of the last places—where men and women (and girls and boys, too) can answer that call to be an artist, to learn to give love to the work of their hands. It is one of the last places where the maker—and some farmers still do talk about “making the crops”—is responsible, from start to finish, for the thing made. This certainly is a spiritual value, but it is not for that reason an impractical or uneconomic one. In fact, from the exercise of this responsibility, this giving of love to the work of the hands, the farmer, the farm, the consumer, and the nation all stand to gain in the most practical ways: They gain the means of life, the goodness of food, and the longevity and dependability of the sources of food, both natural and cultural. The proper answer to the spiritual calling becomes, in turn, the proper fulfillment of physical need…
The family farm is failing because the pattern it belongs to is failing, and the principal reason for this failure is the universal adoption, by our people and our leaders alike, of industrial values, which are based on three assumptions:
1. That value equals price—that the value of a farm, for example, is whatever it would bring on sale, because both a place and its price are “assets.” There is no essential difference between farming and selling a farm.
2. That all relations are mechanical. That a farm, for example, can be used like a factory, because there is no essential difference between a farm and a factory.
3. That the sufficient an definitive human motive is competitiveness—that a community, for example, can be treated like a resource or a market, because there is no difference between a community and a resource or a market…
Here we come to the heart of the matter—the absolute divorce that the industrial economy has achieved between itself and all ideals and standards outside itself. It does this, of course, by arrogating to itself the status of primary reality. Once that is established, all its ties to principles of morality, religion, or government necessarily fall into place.
by Bart Anderson
Energy Bulletin
Interview Excerpts
A change in worldviews may be more possible than it seems at first. When conditions are ripe, people’s ideas can change very quickly.
During the last century, China went from a backward feudal society, to an epic struggle with a military invader (Japan), to an ultra-left Communist society under Mao, to a spectacularly successful neo-capitalist power.
For us to change to a more sustainable way of life actually is a less extreme transition than what the Chinese went through. Many of the ideas and technologies for sustainability are already developed. Traditional forms of sustainability are still present and can be revived.
A couple of years ago, I sat down with Julian Darley, co-founder of the Post Carbon Institute, and wrote our ideas down on a napkin. Our program, so to speak:
If there were one suggestion I could make, it would be: “Take your time and go deeply into the subjects of depletion and sustainability.” In the light of peak oil, our common ideas about progress, economics, science and politics are in drastic need of revising,
Sometimes it feels like the words of the song: “Everything you know is wrong.”…
The old-fashioned virtues should be making a comeback in a low-energy world. For example:
It does sound like a traditionalist’s wish list, doesn’t it? A strange thing happens when people begin imagining a world after cheap oil. One realizes that these characteristics have a survival value.
Keep reading The Future Is Amish at Energy Bulletin→
See also Transition United States→
From Dave Smith
2/18/09 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California
If you’re an old timer around these parts, you know the Ford family, and the four Ford boys, Steve, Patrick, Robben, and Mark. The brothers are locals and have played music around here and elsewhere since high school under the names of The Charles Ford Band, and The Ford Blues Band, among others, and travel the world playing music together and separately. They most recently played here in Ukiah at Sundays In The Park this past summer, 2008.
When he’s not on the road, touring America and Europe with his band, Patrick runs his record company Blue Rock’It Records in Redwood Valley where you can buy their own albums on-line along with his other recording artists. Robben’s website is here ; and, hopefully, Mark will be the subject of a future feature.
(See links to rest of the story below)
~
During World War II, Mom was working at the phone company, in the evenings when she got out of school, one of those girls plugging in the cords just to help with the cause… and there was this move to “write letters to the soldiers overseas.” … and they were given names of soldiers to write. She wrote a letter to my Dad who was stationed in Alaska, and he wrote her back, and they started writing back and forth until he wrote that he was going to get some leave and was going to come down to see her… and they were soon married.
My dad came from a really tough childhood growing up in Indiana during the depression. His mom and dad split up when he was 7 or 8. He had an older brother and younger sister, and they were dropped off by his mom at an orphanage. It was supposed to be only temporary until she got settled and back on her feet, and she did, in fact, come back and see them on a couple of occasions. She came once, picked Dad up, bought him a new suit, went to a movie, brought him back, told him she would be back, and he never saw her again. He was taken to live on an uncle’s farm where he was physically (not sexually) abused, kind of a work slave. A tough life.
My mom came from a strong, tight, religious family in the San Joaquin Valley, Church of Christ attendance three times a week… my dad just loved her family. I, too, idolized my mom’s parents growing up. They were the best of people. Eventually our family moved up here to Ukiah when my dad found work in the lumber mills. I was three years old at the time.
We grew up in a house in Empire Gardens on Elm street just as that neighborhood was being built. The only homes built when we moved in were on one side of Arlington and Elm streets. All the other blocks were just empty fields. We would gradually lose the fields we could walk across and fly our kites in as houses were built and more families arrived. I remember gathering wild flowers in those fields for my “May Basket” and hanging it on the front door, knocking on it, running to hide, and my mom opening the door and exclaiming “Oh, who brought me these beautiful flowers?” The butterflies were just thick back in those days. Millions of them. Dragonflies, frogs, praying mantis’, salamanders… all those critters you just don’t see anymore.
We were always referred to as “those four Ford boys”… I heard that all my life. My oldest brother, Steve, was always proper, held himself very erect. He got a job at Roscoe’s Five and Ten here in town. He always had a job. There was a show on TV then called Bat Masterson. Bat wore a three-piece suit, round hat and cane, and my brother Steve saved and saved and bought this jacket and pants and this white vest with all this golden stuff all over it, and the round hat and cane with a silver knob on it. He was a freshman in high school and everyone was looking at him and saying “what in the world?” and he was stylin’! He was always like that.
I was actually the first long-hair in town… first it was combed to the side like the surfers. Then in the early sixties when the Beatles got popular I went into the barber shop and said “I want a Beatle cut” and the barber said “What the heck is a Beatle cut?” I said it was kind of like that guy in the Three Stooges and I went to school the next day and was just ridiculed, and the track coach kicked me in my rear end and said “Get your hair cut.” I took all kinds of abuse for that.
Since I was a little kid, my visual hero was Wild Bill Hickok. I had a picture of him hanging on my bedroom wall. He had the big long curls, and the buckskin coat, and this mustache and little goatee… that was the coolest looking guy there ever was. I always wanted to look like that. Even in elementary school they said my hair was getting too long and I would whine “I want to look like….” and they’d say no, no, no… and my Dad would just clip it, but even then I wanted it longer. Then in high school this whole hippie movement started and I just let my hair grow and started getting in trouble all the time… this ongoing saga. My mom would visit the Superintendent who would say “He’s a good boy, but…” and I really was a good boy, got good grades, didn’t cause my teachers much trouble. When I had a surfer look, they’d just say “get your hair cut” but when the hippie movement got going, people had a name they could call me. I just kept letting it grow, and the school kept giving me a fight about it, and the football coach would grab it coming out of my helmet and pull me down… it was just awful, the abuse I got from those people. And that was when drugs started coming noticeably into town, and many adults were sure it was I who was bringing it into town… because I was the first long-hair.
I would give my band mate Mike Osborn a ride home, and I would have to drop him off a block away so his parents wouldn’t see him riding with me. No matter how many times he told them “Pat doesn’t do drugs!” they would not believe him. I was, after all, “that long haired boy.” The funny thing is, I never did do any drugs, and I’ve never been a drinker either. When I was young, I had several friends whose parents would get into verbal fights and there was always drinking involved. I saw the fathers slap their kids and cuss like it was the only language. I knew then I never wanted to be like that. I never wanted to be out of control. But then I was also lucky to have two wonderful parents who were always in our corner.
I met my wife Sharon in Junior High, and when she came into high school as a Freshman, and I was a Sophomore, we started dating and have been together ever since. We went together 6 years and have been married 38. I don’t know how she’s managed to put up with me this long, but I’m sure glad she has: she’s my partner.
I thought growing up in this valley was pretty spectacular. We could get to the ocean, get to the city, go to the mountains, and we took advantage of it on many different levels.
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Chapter 1 – The first longhair in town→
Chapter 2 – Playing the blues→
Chapter 3 – Fighting fire with fire→
Chapter 4 – Preaching the truth
By Seth Godin
Business Guru
from his book Tribes
Not too far from us, a few blocks away, there are kids without enough to eat and without parents who care. A little farther away, hours by plane, are people unable to reach their goals because they live in a community that just doesn’t have the infrastructure to support them. A bit farther away are people being brutally persecuted by their governments. And the world is filled with people who can’t go to high school, never mind college, and who certainly can’t spend their time focused on whether or not they get a good parking space at work.
And so, obligation: don’t settle.
To have all these advantages all this momentum, all these opportunities and then settle for mediocre and then defend the status quo and then worry about corporate politics–what a waste.
Flynn Berry wrote that you should never use the word “opportunity.” It’s not an opportunity, it’s an obligation.
I don’t think we have any choice. I think we have an obligation to change the rules, to raise the bar, to play a different game, and to play it better than anyone has any right to believe is possible.
From Dave Smith
On July 5th 1932, in the middle of the Great Depression, the Austrian town of Wörgl made economic history by introducing a remarkable complimentary currency. Wörgl was in trouble, and was prepared to try anything. Of its population of 4,500, a total of 1,500 people were without a job, and 200 families were penniless.
The mayor, Michael Unterguggenberger, had a long list of projects he wanted to accomplish, but there was hardly any money with which to carry them out. These included repaving the roads, streetlighting, extending water distribution across the whole town, and planting trees along the streets.
Rather than spending the 40,000 Austrian schillings in the town’s coffers to start these projects off, he deposited them in a local savings bank as a guarantee to back the issue of a type of complimentary currency known as ’stamp scrip’. This requires a monthly stamp to be stuck on all the circulating notes for them to remain valid, and in Wörgl, the stamp amounted 1% of the each note’s value. The money raised was used to run a soup kitchen that fed 220 families.
Because nobody wanted to pay what was effectively a hoarding fee [technically known as 'demurrage' and often referred to as "negative interest"], everyone receiving the notes would spend them as fast as possible. The 40,000 schilling deposit allowed anyone to exchange scrip for 98 per cent of its value in schillings. This offer was rarely taken up though.
Of all the business in town, only the railway station and the post office refused to accept the local money. When people ran out of spending ideas, they would pay their taxes early using scrip, resulting in a huge increase in town revenues. Over the 13-month period the project ran, the council not only carried out all the intended works projects, but also built new houses, a reservoir, a ski jump, and a bridge. The people also used scrip to replant forests, in anticipation of the future cashflow they would receive from the trees.
The key to its success was the fast circulation of scrip within the local economy, 14 times higher than the schilling. This in turn increased trade, creating extra employment. At the time of the project, Wörgl was the only Austrian town to achieve full employment.
Six neighbouring villages copied the system successfully. The French Prime Minister, Eduoard Dalladier, made a special visit to see the ‘miracle of Wörgl’. In January 1933, the project was replicated in the neighbouring city of Kirchbuhl, and in June 1933, Unterguggenburger addressed a meeting with representatives from 170 different towns and villages. Two hundred Austrian townships were interested in adopting the idea.
Unterguggenberger was opposed to both communism and fascism, championing instead what he referred to as ‘economic freedom’. Therefore, it was deeply ironic that the Wörgl experiment was first branded ‘craziness’ by the monetary authorities, then a Communist idea, and some years later as a fascist one.
Read more local currrency success stories from the US and abroad at Mendo Moola→
From Dave Smith
Ukiah
In 1967, a massive buildup of troops in Vietnam occurred, along with the hippie Summer of Love in San Francisco. The culture was in chaos, at war in Vietnam and at war with itself. Big agriculture was destroying family farms and growing bigger, ever bigger.
During that year, Alan Chadwick, an artist, violinist, Shakespearean actor, and master gardener, was hired to create a Student Garden Project on the campus of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Working only with hand tools and organic amendments, Chadwick and his student assistants transformed a steep, chaparral-covered hillside into a prolific garden, bursting with flowers, vegetables, and fruit trees.
The informal apprenticeships that students served with Chadwick would eventually lead to the development of the current Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, where over a thousand apprentices have been formally trained in what he called “the method.”
Keep reading Master Garden Innovator Alan Chadwick→
From Gene Logsdon (1989)
Garden Farm Skills
The chief “product” of his business is mammoth jacks, but they are not the only animals he raises and sells. As we walk over the 180 acres, my astonishment grows. I have been on thousands of farms from the East Coast to the West, and never before have I seen such a variety or number of animals grazing per acre: not only the eighty head of mammoth jack stock, but about a dozen draft horses, a couple of lighter harness horses, a few dairy cows and calves, a bunch of fattening steers, a flock of sheep, a barnlot full of hogs, a barnyard full of turkeys, peacocks, ducks, geese, guineas, dogs, cats, and a genetic explosion of all kinds of chickens. Every niche of the farmstead is filled with animal life, and in reaction to anything unusual, a chorus of squawks, gobbles, quacks, whinnies, bellows, bleatings, and barking erupts, all drowned out by a crescendo of ludicrous-sounding hee-haws from the jacks and jennets. Jack Siemon’s farm is a celebration of the earth’s vital forces.
Siemon got interested in mammoth jacks seriously right after World War II in which he served. His wife owned a farm in Arkansas, and for a few years he tried to do the impossible: raise cotton in Arkansas and corn in Ohio at the same time. “I learned real fast that in weeding cotton, a good man and a mule could do a better and much more efficient job than a tractor weeder. But there were no good mules around. The army had bought most of them at the beginning of the war, and with the rapid adoption of tractors and trucks, mules just disappeared. So I started raising mammoth jacks to get some good mules back in circulation.”
Keep reading An Ecologically Sane Farm at OrganicToBe.org→
Also see Small Farms Surge as Demand for Local Food Changes Agriculture Industry→
Update:
Catastrophic Fall In 2009 Global Food Production→
Grow yourself some organic potatoes this spring→
Historical dry farming revived in Marin→
From Warren Johnson
Covelo, Mendocino County
Muddling Toward Frugality -1978- Sierra Club
Extensive excerpts, with permission of the author
Part 1 | Part 2
More and more, the key to economic survival will be to learn how to get by with less income. There are many opportunities to make a modest income; they will become economically viable opportunities to the first people that are able to get by on the small income generated. It is frugality that has allowed the Briarpatch network, a group of small independent entrepreneurs doing what they want to do on reduced incomes, to flourish in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is also what has allowed the Amish to thrive and expand on small farms all during the period when most small farms were going out of existence. A low income is the heart of frugality.
It takes a highly motivated and creative person or family to undertake the risk of developing his own work while getting by with less and learning how to become more self-sufficient. For the first pioneers, it can be lonely and difficult work in unfamiliar territory. The frequently heard criticism that says these people are “dropouts,” and that they do not contribute their skills and energies to solving society’s problems, is totally wrong. They are doing a task that is essential for our future, developing new skills and ways of living that will provide models for others as necessity pushes more of us in that direction. Nothing could be more important. The pioneers are opening up new economic territory where subsequent settlers can join them.
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The commune movement was a discouraging one, on the whole. The best that can be said for it is that it demonstrated a good deal about what was practical and what was not. It showed, most significantly that it is not possible to have the best of all possible worlds—combining togetherness, sharing, and simplicity with complete freedom in personal relationships and sexual matters, and asking for no sense of duty to stick out the hard times or to be on good terms with one’s neighbors. That vision of the good life, in which there were to be huge benefits at practically no cost, has, at least for the time being, been put to rest…
A better basis than communes for decentralized groups would seem to be communities—for example, a community organized under the auspices of an established organization. A community based on a known organization, philosophy, religious faith would be more apt to receive financial support and local acceptance. Bureaucracy has its usefulness too. Established organizations could better assure the continuity of the community and would be more likely to attract members from all parts of society than just the affluent young, the main group involved with the communes. The Black Muslims and CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, have both developed cooperative economic activities in the south, since they concluded a long time ago that northern cities would never provide a good life for poor blacks. Cooperatives are also an attractive alternative to what is often experienced as the lonely and threatening world of commercial competition. Individuals with land or economic enterprises could work them cooperatively, if they felt strongly enough about the particular philosophical basis on which the cooperatives were organized.
Any alternatives that might evolve, whatever their form or function, will make a major contribution to the economy and to the choices available to people. If their numbers were to increase substantially, it is possible that the shortfall in jobs could be reduced, greatly easing the adjustment to scarcity. But whatever their numbers, successful communities will be valuable additions to the range of models available to others in the future. New communities may have to struggle for a long time before getting firmly established, but this should not be held against them; it is characteristic of the muddling process. Such tasks are not easy and straightforward.
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Keep reading Muddling Toward Frugality – Part 2→
[Mayor Phil Baldwin sent the following to us noting "I found this a telling bee for our bonnets. Why is Williamson's argument marginalized or nonexistent in Mendo (and most American) environmental circles?" -DS]
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[Chris Williamson offers four arguments that planners can use to argue that "No Growth" policies are valid positions to take.]
Most local planners view some accommodation of projected population increases as the “right thing to do” and reluctantly support “No Growth” policies when forced to by their elected officials and/or voters. Many of us work and/or live in communities with growth pressure where some of the amenities and quality of life that residents enjoy are threatened by growth. Following are four arguments to respectfully offer the “No Growth” alternative as an arguable position for local planners.
1. There Is No End To Population Growth
In California, planners talk about “the next 15 million Californians by 2020″ as if that is the sum population to accommodate with housing and jobs and water, and then we’re done. But five years from now we’ll be talking about “the next 15 million Californians by 2025″; and five years later, “15 million by 2030.” There is no foreseeable end in site to growth in California and, to varying degrees, in many other areas of the Nation.
Based on the Census Bureau’s national population projections over your lifetime and children’s, any desirable area is going to see continuous demand from internal growth, intra-state migration (as increasingly digital job-holders seek out desirable places to live), and international migration.
If your city or county develops housing and jobs to meet 20-year projections, the No Growth argument is that it will only encourage more people in the long-term as well. The analogy is an added freeway lane — there is a temporary reduction in traffic volume which attracts more drivers and congestion returns.
Arguably, there are really only two future scenarios for communities in desirable areas: 1) high housing costs with some preserved open space and agricultural and 2) high housing costs without open space and agriculture. Accommodating growth never ends, therefore the rational choice is to draw the line now while you still have something to save, no matter the consequences.
Keep reading Is No Growth Also Smart Growth?→
2/9/09 Jim Kunstler this a.m…
If this nation wants to survive without an intense political convulsion, there’s a lot we can do, but none of it is being voiced in any corner of Washington at this time. We have to get off of petro-agriculture and grow our food locally, at a smaller scale, with more people working on it and fewer machines. This is an enormous project, which implies change in everything from property allocation to farming methods to new social relations. But if we don’t focus on it right away, a lot of Americans will end up starving, and rather soon. We have to rebuild the railroad system in the US, and electrify it, and make it every bit as good as the system we once had that was the envy of the world. If we don’t get started on this right away, we’re screwed. We will have tremendous trouble moving people and goods around this continent-sized nation. We have to reactivate our small towns and cities because the metroplexes are going to fail at their current scale of operation. We have to prepare for manufacturing at a much smaller (and local) scale than the scale represented by General Motors…
Keep reading Poverty of Imagination→
From Dave Smith
Ukiah
Toxic food? Toxic lipstick? Toxic assets? Ponzi schemes? Comes from the same mindless mind-set: suck out the life at each step along the supply chain, but keep claiming value, not poison, is being added. Last trusting person at the end of the chain? Oops, sorry about that! Ah, well… I got mine.
We are blessed in our town to have a thriving, locally-owned, democratically-controlled, organic- and local-farm-oriented, 100% organic produce, cooperative food store, Ukiah Natural Foods… along with farmers’ markets and organic, biodynamic, CSA farms (listed in Localizing Links below). If you are local, and not a member of our co-op, you should be—for many reasons. A main reason is shown in the graphic above from an old post by Dave Pollard, Eat Shit and Die, which expands on the topic with details… if you can stomach it.
We have also banned GMO plants from our county, and certify or own organic farmers locally under the Mendocino Renegade label thanks to the Mendocino Organic Network.
One of our local organic farmers, Charles Martin, when asked why organic foods are pricey says simply: pay for healthy food or pay your Doctor… your choice.
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Update:
See also Staying Organic During Tough Times at OrganicToBe.org→
and Co-operatives: The Feeling is Mutual→
and The Greenhorn Guide for Beginning Farmers→
and Newly Discovered Toxic Chemical Is Common In Cosmetics→
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A distinguished panel tells a packed room of environmental journalists that the way we grow our food matters to a heating planet…
Go to Agriculture and climate change at RodaleInstitute.org→
From Dave Smith
Ukiah
If you’ve ever dug up some organic potatoes you’d planted a few weeks before, cleaned them in the kitchen, fried or mashed them, and eaten them on the spot, you know how superior they are in flavor compared to store-bought. Like everything else prepared right out of the garden, or picked right off the tree, there is a special just-harvested flavor that is not going to be there a few minutes later.
Here’s where to buy organic seed potatoes: Wood Prairie Farm…→
…and here’s how to plant them: Organic Gardening Magazine Video.→
If you really want to be cutting edge, you can grow potatoes from their “true seed.“→
Have at ‘em!
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“#3. Homemade potato chips, preferably made with thin slices of freshly dug, organic red potatoes (scrubbed, not peeled), fried in homemade lard in a well-seasoned cast iron skillet, and prepared by someone you adore who is willing to stand over a splattering pan of hot oil for an hour or two while you both devour batch after batch of warm, salted chips as soon as they are cool enough to touch. Serve with lots of laughs and plenty of iced tea or cold beer.”
Keep reading Five Things To Eat Before You Die over at FarmGirl Fare→
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Roasted Potatoes © Cenorman | Dreamstime.com
From Gene Logsdon (1985)
Garden Farm Skills
A backyard henhouse for only a dozen or so chickens year-round should be commodious, a minimum of around 5 square feet of floor space per hen, which is much more than a commercial poultryman can afford. My henhouse design, based on what I’ve learned so far by building three coops of my own, differs from the standard designs in a few other ways, which you might find interesting to think about when building your own.
1. Predator Proofing. I would have preferred that my latest chicken coop be built on a concrete footing to make it more or less predator-proof. But pole construction was cheaper and easier. The bottom wall boards are of treated wood for rot resistance, and the wall is sunk into the ground 6 to 12 inches. Cats will not dig that far under to get in, and cats have always been my most troublesome predator—not my own, though, which I train not to bother chickens, but feral cats. I keep the dog tied next to the coop for further insurance.
2. The Size. I knew that for part of the year I would house approximately forty-five to fifty chickens, although there would be less than twenty year-round. Every year we buy six Rhode Island Red chicks and about thirty White Rock broiler chicks, the latter for meat, the former to add to the laying flock. The broilers are butchered when about ten weeks old, and later on I’ll butcher some old hens as they quit laying, so that the flock dwindles to around fifteen through winter. We buy chicks in June so have no need for brooder facilities. (The first few nights I might use a heat bulb on the chicks.) Anyhow, by my own idea of space requirement, a 10 by 20-foot building is more than ample. And it is tall enough so I can walk inside without hitting my head, as I did in the old coop.
Keep reading A chicken coop for a small flock at OrganicToBe.org→
From Warren Johnson
Covelo, Mendocino County
Muddling Toward Frugality -1978- Sierra Club
Extensive excerpts, with permission of the author
In a remarkable book titled The Comedy of Survival, Joseph Meeker distinguishes between two types of heroes, the tragic hero and the comic hero. He describes them as they are depicted in classical literature, although we need not be restricted to this one source; it is a universal distinction. The tragic hero is the one we have tended to honor; the one who is willing to risk everything for a goal he knows to be right, who is unswerving in defense of moral principle, and who is not hesitant to take on powers greater than himself. Yet different people see the same situation differently, and such single-minded zeal has led to wars in the past. Today, terrorists who employ indiscriminate violence see themselves as risking their lives for a noble objective. It is this same mentality that is apt to challenge resource limits, rather than accept them. On top of all this, the tragic hero is usually an unpleasant individual to be with; he takes himself very seriously; he is unwilling to compromise; and he is condescending to anyone who disagrees with him.
In contrast, the comic hero is usually relegated to the status of buffoon—base and silly, although innocuous. His goal is simply to survive and to enjoy himself as best he can. He is unwilling to fight; instead, he tries to outwit his enemies and the authorities. His victories are small; survival and life are what are important to him; no cause could be worth dying for. The comic hero is friendly toward life and takes things as they are; life is an end in itself, rather than a struggle between right and wrong. Meeker suggests that perhaps it is time that we honor these virtues. He argues that it is the comic hero who will better insure our survival—the human animal adapting to the world as it is and enjoying what it has to offer, rather than trying to make it over into something that it is not and cannot be. It has been said that true heroism is to see the world as it is and love it. This would seem to be a valuable quality, and it may turn out to be the key to the successful adaptation to scarcity.
Keep reading Muddling Toward Frugality – Part 1 of 2→
Update:
Great small business advice, as always, from Seth Goden…
Grave new world
Creativity loves a problem, but it hates a lousy audience.
If everyone around you is sure the economy is tanking, that the end is near, that time is up and the company is headed for the tubes, it’s almost impossible to find a creative solution.
Creativity changes the game, whatever game is being played. “We’re going to run out of cash by the end of the year,” is accurate unless you count creativity into the equation. Then the accurate statement is, “Under the current rules and assumptions, we’re going to run out of cash…” Big difference.
Creativity demands exposure to market needs, and insulation from market fears. Give it some time to work, some support, some breathing room. That’s when creativity has a chance to change the game.
From Dave Smith
Ukiah
The Mondragón cooperatives of Spain combine credit unions and service cooperatives such as grocery stores with industrial manufacturing cooperatives, research centers, and a university — all as one intergrated unit. As a cooperative corporation, they are “an association of persons rather than an association of capital.” That means one person, one vote rather than votes apportioned to the amount of capital invested. It also means that the individual workers own and control the company they work in. They are the largest worker-owned cooperative in the world, doing many billions of dollars in sales. They own and operate thousands of supermarkets, a travel agency with hundreds of units, and gas stations. They also manufacture automotive parts, domestic appliances, bicycles, and bus bodies.
Although cheap energy has allowed organizations to balloon into huge monoliths that will now have to breakup and scale down into decentralized pieces, it is instructive how well the cooperative model can adapt to financial environments and serve its members. As our giant governments, banks, and corporations flounder trying to save a way of business that will have to change drastically in the years ahead, the cooperative model, along with small-scale private businesses, is a way local communities, such as ours, can adapt to the coming “mandates of reality.”
The Mondragón cooperative model can be compared to the corporate structure as follows:
· Owner-workers are valued as people. Management professionalism, product excellence, and customer satisfaction matter more than the rapid growth of profits.
· Owner-workers participate in management, with salary difference limited to a three-to-one ratio, rather than just being used at the whim of a grossly overpaid management class.
· The social contract commits everyone involved to the development of the business, with member-owner security and partnership with capital, rather than confrontation between labor and capital.
· Profits and losses are shared among all proportionally, rather than profits being internalized and costs being externalized irresponsibly.
Mondragón’s Community Bank, a credit union that serves as the core of its financial system, is owned and controlled by the member-owners of the cooperative. Without their own banking sytem, the cooperative would have failed. The bank invests in the development of new enterprises under the motto “Savings or Suitcases,” meaning members can either invest in their own community or watch their money leave their community to work elsewhere and enrich others. The cooperative also operates their own social security facility, which provides unemployment insurance, medical services, and medical insurance.
The Mondragón consumer cooperative grocery chain, with 264 stores, is run by a general assembly composed of an equal number of consumer-members and worker-members. The assembly elects a board that is similarly balanced, with six employees and six consumer-members, with a chairperson who is always a consumer.
Mondragón principles include (1) openness to all, regardless of ethnic background, religion, political beliefs, or gender; (2) the equality of all owner-workers and democratic control on the basis of one member, one vote; (3) the recognition of labor as the most essential, transformative factor of society and the renunciation of wage labor in favor of the full power of owner-workers to control the co-ops and distribute surpluses; (4) a definition of capital as accumulated labor, necessary for development and savings, with a limited return paid on that capital; (5) cooperation, defined as the development of the individual with others, not against others, to self-manage (managers are elected by the workers) and develop training and skills; and (6) wages that are comparable to prevailing local standards.
According to Don José María Arizmendiarrieta, the founder of Mondragón: “Cooperation is the authentic integration of people in the economic and social process that shapes a new social order; the cooperators must make this objective extend to all those that hunger and thirst for justice in the working world.”
Greg MacLeod, author of From Mondragón to America, writes: “The Cooperative Corporation itself is a moral entity having responsibility at three levels: (1) towards the individual employees, (2) towards the cooperative corporations which make up the Mondragón family, and (3) towards the general society of which it is the basic unit. As a microcosm of the general society, the enterprise must practice all the virtues demanded of the total society such as respect for the members, personal development and educational programs, social security and distributive justice.”
This successful alternative to the classic, top-down corporate model allows thinking outside the box store. Bottom-up democracy works and is the next step in bringing meaning into our work as well as our politics. Some of our politicians love to constantly spout off about bringing democracy to other nations, even if it takes our bombers and infantry to preemptively force it on them. Politicians who love democracy should not stop with politics. Let’s take them at their word, in our own local communities where the action will be in the future, and ask them to help us complete the American revolution by bringing democracy into our workplaces and our economies.
Maslow on Management (Book Excerpts)
Abraham H. Maslow
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization… It refers to man’s desire for self-fulfillment, namely to the tendency for him to become actually what he is potentially: to become everything that one is capable of becoming…
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To do some idiotic job very well is certainly not real achievement. What is not worth doing is not worth doing well.
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The test for any person is—that is you want to find out whether he’s an apple tree or not—Does He Bear Apples? Does He Bear Fruit? That’s the way you tell the difference between fruitfulness and sterility, between talkers and doers, between the people who change the world and the people who are helpless in it.
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…seeking for personal salvation is anyway the wrong road to personal salvation. The only real path [is] salvation via hard work and total commitment to doing well the job that fate or personal destiny calls you to do, or any important job that “calls for” doing… This business of self-actualization via a commitment to an important job and to worthwhile work could also be said, then, to be the path to human happiness (by contrast with the direct attack or the direct search for happiness) — happiness is… a by-product, something not to be sought directly but an indirect reward for virtue… The only happy people I know are the ones who are working well at something they consider important… Or I can put this very bluntly: Salvation Is a By-Product of Self-Actualizing Work and Self-Actualizing Duty.
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…most people prefer no work at all to meaningless work, or wasted work, or made work… In self-actualizing people, the work they do might better be called “mission,” “calling,” “duty”, “vocation,” in the priest’s sense… For the truly fortunate worker, the ideally enlightened worker, to take away work (mission in life) would be almost equivalent to killing him.
~
All human beings prefer meaningful work to meaningless work. This is much like stressing the high human need for a system of values, a system of understanding the world and of making sense out of it. This comes very close to the religious quest in the humanistic sense. If work is meaningless, then life comes close to being meaningless. Perhaps here is also the place to point out that no matter how menial the chores—the dishwashing and the test-tube cleaning, all become meaningful or meaningless by virtue of their participation or lack of participation in a meaningful or important or loved goal.
~
Enlightened management is one way of taking religion seriously, profoundly, deeply, and earnestly. Of course, for those who define religion just as going to a particular building on Sunday and hearing a particular kind of formula repeated, this is all irrelevant. But for those who define religion not necessarily in terms of the supernatural, or ceremonies, or rituals, but in terms of deep concern with the problems of human beings, with the problems of ethics, of the future of man, then this kind of philosophy, translated into the work life, turns out to be very much like the new style of management and of organization.
From Dave Smith
Ukiah
What is real anymore? Local neighbors, you and me, struggling to weather a financial tsunami that threatens to take us all down with it.
What is real? Our need as citizens to “put away childish things” and work to find a common ground on which to stand together.
That common ground is local and precious, not national or symbolic. It requires us to trust, not fuss. It moves us back in a direction that we lost long ago when we all decided that the point of life was to stampede through the door and grab all we could before someone else did. And now that the grabbing is over, the bills are coming due in the mail, and in the environment.
Judging another’s values based on our identity as consumers, of various political stripes, has been a favorite pastime writ large by mass media… and it kills community. What will get us through locally will be the virtues we share, not the values we fight over.
Values are legion, symbolic, and divisive. Political values are conservative vs liberal, right vs left, us vs them; economic values are socialist vs capitalist, communist vs fascist, etc. etc., all made moot by their smudging together into a bewildering hodge-podge of muttering and grimacing, point-counterpoint yelling and screaming… then suddenly gone silent with the overwhelming alarms of financial and planetary disaster, and personal tragedy. What now?
Virtues are what is best of who we really are. They are the fundamentals of our individual character, and full of meaning. Although defined most recently by religions, they go back much further in ancient wisdom traditions before religions codified them, and thus are relevant to the secular as well. Faith in each other, hope in the future, justice for all, courage to do what is right, and love for our neighbors. And there are a couple more that we’ve forgotten even existed: Prudence, which is wisdom and sensibleness in practical matters; and Temperance, which means to be moderate in one’s needs… knowing when enough is enough.
It is from this place of responsibility that citizens can expect and demand an open and responsive democratic government, both at the county and national level. Closed off, suspicious, and paranoid government officials, as recently demonstrated by our county CEO refusing access to journalists, are not what a renewed and empowered citizenry requires in this county, and at this time in history.
While we stand and fight for our values, as a democratic society demands that we do as citizens, we will find much more to admire and work with by recognizing each other’s virtues and responsibilities. The measure is how we respect and work together as citizens, neighbors, political representatives, and journalists.
Recognize the virtues in a neighbor, and you’ll find a friend, not a foe. And in a time of fear and trembling, that’s what builds a community.
~~
The problems…
Local solutions…
Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts. ~Wendell Berry
By Gene Logsdon (1991)
The man standing stone-post-still on the shoreline of The Pond was watching a muskrat swimming on the water surface, its wake forming a V-shaped ripple of scarlet fading to indigo against the sunset. Without turning his head, which might scare the muskrat into diving underwater and scooting for its den, the man also watched, out of the corner of his eye, a great blue heron drifting down out of the sky toward him.
He was used to seeing the heron on its nightly trip up the creek valley, headed back to the rookery where most of Wyandot County’s herons, silent and solitary by day, gathered to roost. But this time, the huge slate-gray bird, its wingspan over five feet, was doing something wary great blue herons do not normally do. It continued to drift down in the twilight, made a pass over the pond, and then turned straight at him as if to land on one of the posts that held the homemade pier he was standing on. Forgetting the muskrat, but still not moving a muscle, the man watched aghast as the great bird hovered above him, like an avenging angel, and perched right on top of his head.
Not many people would have the steely nerves to suffer, without moving, a great blue heron’s talons gripping his head, but this man, my brothter-in-law, is not known in these parts for reacting to anything in an ordinary manner. He had already realized that no one was going to believe him unless he caught the bird. He started inching his right hand up the side of his body. Slowly, slowly, slowly. Gotcha! With one swift grab, he snatched the heron’s legs in his hand like a chicken thief removing a hen from the roost and bore his prize homeward so that all the neighborhood might see and believe. His family gathered round, ignorant of the danger involved. None of them knew that great blue herons can skewer an unsuspecting human’s eyeball right out of its socket with one lightning stab of its beak. This time, fortunately, its captor wore glasses and when the heron jabbed at him, it only knocked the glasses from his head. When another onlooker reached for the glasses, the heron speared him in the hand, having endured, it seemed, enough human attention for one day. A quick decision was reached. In the case of herons, better two in the bush than one in the hand. The bird haughtily stalked away, looking like the dignified old lady who hoped no one was watching when the wind momentarily blew her dress over her head. Then it regally pumped its wings up and down, slowly lifted itself into the air and flew away.
Continue reading The Pond at the Center of the Universe at OrganicToBe.org→
[You'll have to decide for yourself how predictive this might be, and what effect it will have on you and all of us locally. -DS]
Go to Housing as shelter, not speculation→
Update [Quote] And that’s where I disagree. We are not spending $850 billion to save people, we are spending $850 billion to save a system. But that system is fraudulent, and saving that system is wrong. We need to help people struggle through difficult times, and then we need to reinvent ourselves. Spending to save the system does nothing to create a new, sustainable, viable system.
So then, what’s the alternative? I believe that the federal government and the states should stop trying to save the banks and other financial institutions, should stop providing trillions in taxpayer dollars to institutions that are already bankrupt and who do not in any way serve the public interest, and should instead use any federal monies to subsidize social support programs during this economic depression. I think that the federal government should admit that the perpetuation of a system of globalization based upon usury is neither moral nor in the public’s best interest. In its place the federal government should provide support and training and funding for projects that recognize the following realities: (1) That the age of growth is over. We have entered the age of sustainability. (2) That saving the system of ‘money-as-debt’ only serves to further incarcerate the people, not liberate them. (3) That the banks and other institutions who have used deception and duplicity and Ponzi schemes to make billions in profits should be held to account.
The bottom line is this: spending money to save a system that has crashed because it is in debt is false. Like with a flooded lawnmower engine, throwing more gas into the tank isn’t going to help the cause. Vermont’s $1 Billion will not fundamentally change the lives and futures of the citizens of the state for the better. It will only, at best, temporize the pain for a brief time. But the system that keeps us in debt-servitude, and that compels us to “consume” when in fact the survival of our planet demands that we learn how to “sustain”, persists.
More of this analysis and context at The Automatic Earth→
From Dave Smith
Ukiah
Ray Bradbury, 1950
[Bradbury has stated that the novel is not about censorship; he states that Fahrenheit 451 is a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature, which leads to a perception of knowledge as being composed of "factoids", partial information devoid of context, e.g., Napoleon's birth date alone, without an indication of who he was. These excerpts: someone underlined them in a used copy found in a bookstore]
“Why aren’t you in school? I see you every day wandering around.”
“Oh they don’t miss me,” she said. “I’m antisocial, they say. I don’t mix. It’s so strange. I’m very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn’t it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this.” She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. “Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don’t think it’s social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don’t; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film teacher. That’s not social to me at all. It’s a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it’s wine when it’s not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can’t do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball. Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can get to lamposts, playing ‘chicken’ and ‘knock hubcaps.’ I guess I’m everything they say I am, all right. I haven’t any friends. That’s supposed to prove I’m abnormal. But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another. Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?”…
“…and do you know what?”
“What?”
People don’t talk about anything.”
“Oh, they must!”
“No, not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools mostly and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else. And most of the time in the caves they have the joke boxes on and the same jokes most of the time, or the musical wall lit and all the colored patterns running up and down, but it’s only color and all abstract. And at the museums, have you ever been? All abstract. That’s all there is now. My uncle says it was different once. A long time back sometimes pictures said things or even showed people.”
…Every hour so many damn things in the sky! How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn’t someone want to talk about it!… Is it because we’re having so much fun at home we’ve forgotten the world? Is it because we’re so rich and the rest of the world’s so poor and we just don’t care if they are? I’ve heard rumors; the world is starving, but we’re well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we’re hated so much? I’ve heard the rumors about hate, too, once in a long while, over the years. Do you know why? I don’t, that’s for sure! Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes! I don’t hear idiot bastards in your parlor talking about it. God, Millie, don’t you see? An hour a day, two hours with these books, and maybe…”
From Dave Smith
Ukiah
UDJ Editor K.C. Meadows writes today (excerpts):
Here at the Daily Journal, in an effort to keep the local citizens informed about the changes at the top of county government as we enter a financial crisis locally, we began this week the process of putting together a Who’s Who of the county’s non-elected department heads. We know that there have been some recent changes in the top slots and we figured the best way to let the public get to know these new and existing leaders is to do short profiles on them which we could run twice a week or so until we got through the list…
What we did not expect was that the county’s CEO, Tom Mitchell, would lead the county government in a blanket refusal to answer our questions.
We were told by one county contact that an email went out this week advising department heads that they should not cooperate. Already we have had an email from County Counsel Jeanine Nadel telling us she will not be getting back to us.
We cannot understand why the county’s top officer perceives this simple request for 10 minutes of his or any department head’s time so threatening. We thought of it as not only a public service but a positive one at that. We realize that some of this information is on the county web site but we wanted to give these county staffers a chance to personalize their responses.
Mr. Mitchell, in a snide email to our reporter, said in response to our request for information that he would like to know who our columnists are and how they get paid and why we don’t do more positive stories about the county.
Mr. Mitchell apparently forgets that he heads a public agency…
We can no longer tolerate such undemocratic and uncivil behavior from our lead “civil” servant. Mark Scaramella’s ongoing series in the AVA on the CEO’s lack of open communication only reinforces our view that we need a much more responsive CEO. Does he know what’s going on? If he has to answer “I’ll get back to you” so often to the Supes, and spend so much money on consultants, is it because he doesn’t have any answers, or are the answers being given “off-line” without citizen oversight in public meetings? Maybe he hasn’t heard that we are transitioning into a new era of openness, transparency and accountability. He needs to hop on the ol’ cluetrain.
The recent change in title from Chief Administrative Officer to Chief Executive Officer is a problem. It feeds the arrogance that an administrator is above the citizens and Supes, and takes its cues from corporate CEO behavior and our recently departed Boy King of the United States. This is top down dominance, not service… and not appropriate for a position answerable to the citizenry. Because administrators run the county like a byzantine firewalled fiefdom, switching back to a more respectful title would help redefine the position appropriately and hopefully open the county to healthy scrutiny. Mr. CEO, tear down this wall!
Action: We need an uproar from our citizenry, asking our county’s elected leadership to force compliance to K.C.’s request.
Turn up the heat! Let the sun shine in!
~~
Cartoon Credit Link
From Dave Smith
Ukiah
We are blessed with numerous, pioneering biodynamic vineyards and farms here in Mendocino County. Action: Convert conventional farms to organics, and organic farms to Biodynamic. Here is a brief introduction:
BIODYNAMICS is the original foundation of publicly recognized organic agriculture. It is often called “organic plus” as this method is free of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, but also is minimally dependant on imported inputs and includes proactive holistic farming techniques such as herbal soil preparations, rigorous composting systems, and alignment with a planetary calendar. Avoidance of pest species is based on biological vigor and its intrinsic biological and genetic diversity.
Biodynamic agriculture was conceived in the 20th century by the philosopher Rudolf Steiner (photo). It is a naturally organic, holistic practice that seeks to maximise farm output while ensuring it is also self-sustainable. Special attention is given to balancing the farm with soil, plant, animal and cosmic processes in order to ensure continued harmony. The word “Biodynamics” combines the biology of agriculture with the dynamic aspects of ecological systems. Biodynamic agricultural principles emphasize living soil, the farm as a wholistic organism and acknowledges both the visible and invisible forces that create a healthy ecosystem.
The goal of a Biodynamic farm is to be able to support just the right balance of people, plants and animals, so that no outside inputs such as soil amendments or feed for the animals is needed. This is done by carefully timing planting, weeding, fertilizing and harvesting to coincide with the lunar and celestial phases which will most enhance the farm output. Specially made compost consisting of time-tested doses of plants, minerals and animal manure is applied throughout the seasons to enhance plant vitality and soil fertility.
Biodynamics uses a systematic ecological approach in which the farm is seen as a unique and self-sustaining entity. Any problems that arise are addressed within the confines of the farm itself. This means that fertilizers and pest management substances must be created on the farm.
Biodynamics is the oldest certified ecological farming system and has been an assurance of quality since it’s birth in 1928. When asked why the world was in so much turmoil and why people didn’t seem able to make moral and productive decisions necessary for positive change, Rudolf Steiner responded that our food lacked the etheric life forces to support our will. Steiner believed that the quality of food needed to improve for people to have enough will to be capable of making choices that would lead to a harmonious relationship with nature.
~~
“Naturally grown wines… tell us what is real… These winemakers are basically saying they are prepared to be vulnerable to the rhythms of the earth… Can you taste the Biodynamics? Of course not. But, you can taste courage… you can taste tenderness in the winemaking itself… This is what is real… Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we need that absolutely.” ~~ Matt Kramer, Wine Spectator
~~
More on Biodynamics based on “An Introduction To Biodynamic Agriculture”, originally published in Stella Natura calendar 1995.
What is Biodynamic agriculture? In seeking an answer let us pose the further question: Can the Earth heal itself, or has the waning of the Earths vitality gone too far for this? No matter where our land is located, if we are observant we will see sure signs of illness in trees, in our cultivated plants, in the water, even in the weather. Organic agriculture rightly wants to halt the devastation caused by humans; however, organic agriculture has no cure for the ailing Earth. From this the following question arises: What was the original source of vitality, and is it available now?
Biodynamics is a science of life-forces, a recognition of the basic principles at work in nature, and an approach to agriculture which takes these principles into account to bring about balance and healing. In a very real way, then, Biodynamics is an ongoing path of knowledge rather than an assemblage of methods and techniques.
Biodynamics is part of the work of Rudolf Steiner, known as Anthroposophy – a new approach to science which integrates precise observation of natural phenomena, clear thinking, and knowledge of the spirit. It offers an account of the spiritual history of the Earth as a living being, and describes the evolution of the constitution of humanity and the kingdoms of nature. Some of the basic principles of Biodynamics are:
Broaden Our Perspective
Just as we need to look at the magnetic field of the whole earth to comprehend the compass, to understand plant life we must expand our view to include all that affects plant growth. No narrow microscopic view will suffice. Plants are utterly open to and formed by influences from the depths of the earth to the heights of the heavens. Therefore our considerations in agriculture must range more broadly than is generally assumed to be relevant.
Reading the Book of Nature
Everything in nature reveals something of its essential character in its form and gesture. Careful observations of nature – in shade and full sun, in wet and dry areas, on different soils, will yield a more fluid grasp of the elements. So eventually one learns to read the language of nature. And then one can be creative, bringing new emphasis and balance through specific actions. Practitioners and experimenters over the last seventy years have added tremendously to the body of knowledge known as Biodynamics.
Cosmic Rhythms
The light of the sun, moon, planets and stars reaches the plants in regular rhythms. Each contributes to the life, growth and form of the plant. By understanding the gesture and effect of each rhythm, we can time our ground preparation, sowing, cultivating and harvesting to the advantage of the crops we are raising.
Plant Life Is Intimately Bound Up with the Life of the Soil
Biodynamics recognizes that soil itself can be alive, and this vitality supports and affects the quality and health of the plants that grow in it. Therefore, one of Biodynamics fundamental efforts is to build up stable humus in our soil through composting.
A New View of Nutrition
We gain our physical strength from the process of breaking down the food we eat. The more vital our food, the more it stimulates our own activity. Thus, Biodynamic farmers and gardeners aim for quality, and not only quantity. Chemical agriculture has developed short-cuts to quantity by adding soluble minerals to the soil. The plants take these up via water, thus by-passing their natural ability to seek from the soil what is needed for health, vitality and growth. The result is a deadened soil and artificially stimulated growth. Biodynamics grows food with a strong connection to a healthy, living soil.
Medicine for the Earth: Biodynamic Preparations
Rudolf Steiner pointed out that a new science of cosmic influences would have to replace old, instinctive wisdom and superstition. Out of his own insight, he introduced what are known as biodynamic preparations. Naturally occurring plant and animal materials are combined in specific recipes in certain seasons of the year and then placed in compost piles. These preparations bear concentrated forces within them and are used to organize the chaotic elements within the compost piles. When the process is complete, the resulting preparations are medicines for the Earth which draw new life forces from the cosmos. Two of the preparations are used directly in the field, one on the earth before planting, to stimulate soil life, and one on the leaves of growing plants to enhance their capacity to receive the light. Effects of the preparations have been verified scientifically.
The Farm as the Basic Unit of Agriculture
In his Agriculture course, Rudolf Steiner posed the ideal of the self-contained farm – that there should be just the right number of animals to provide manure for fertility, and these animals should, in turn, be fed from the farm. We can seek the essential gesture of such a farm also under other circumstances. It has to do with the preservation and recycling of the life-forces with which we are working. Vegetable waste, manure, leaves, food scraps, all contain precious vitality which can be held and put to use for building up the soil if they are handled wisely. Thus, composting is a key activity in Biodynamic work. The farm is also a teacher, and provides the educational opportunity to imitate nature’s wise self-sufficiency within a limited area. Some have also successfully created farms through the association of several parcels of non-contiguous land.
Economics Based on Knowledge of the Job
Steiner emphasized the absurdity of agricultural economics determined by people who have never actually raised crops or managed a farm. A new approach to this situation has been developed which brings about the association of producers and consumers for their mutual benefit. The Community Supported Agriculture(CSA) movement was born in the Biodynamic movement and is spreading rapidly. Gardens or farms gather around them a circle of supporters who agree in advance to meet the financial needs of the enterprise and its workers, and these supporters each receive a share of the produce as the season progresses. Thus consumers become connected with the real needs of the Earth, the farm and the Community; they rejoice in rich harvests, and remain faithful under adverse circumstances.
~~
[Action quote, last paragraph. -DS]
PRESS RELEASE
January 21, 2009
Contacts:
Citizens for Adequate Review (CFAR)CFAR Member Antonio Andrade (707) 462-4930
Rachel Mansfield-Howlett, Attorney representing CFAR, Provencher & Flatt, LLP (707) 284-2380
As a result of a law suit filed by Santa Rosa attorney Rachel Howlett on behalf of Citizens for Adequate Review (CFAR), CFAR, Mendocino County, and Diversified Developers Realty (DDR) have reached an agreement which requires environmental review prior to DDR proceeding further with their proposed Mendocino Crossings Development on the old Masonite site north of Ukiah. Under the terms of the settlement agreement between the parties, the existing slabs, buried footings, underground utilities and other improvements at the site of the demolished Masonite facility will remain in place and be included in the scope of environmental review for the proposed Mendocino Crossings Project.
This is an important victory for local control of our community’s development. This agreement confirms that, prior to work beginning, all development proposals must be reviewed, that sites be safe and clear of toxics prior to any permitted use, and that County approval must be obtained.
The issue emerged In July of 2007 when the County issued DDR a permit to demolish the Masonite facility. CFAR asserted the demolition was the first stage in the development of the site for commercial purposes, stating this was a piecemeal approach to development, and a violation of California environmental law. Validating DDR’s investment in the demolition by issuing the permit was setting a precedent to keep moving forward with the project. Concerned community groups and residents found it appalling that the demolition was able to proceed at all when the County had full knowledge commercial development in this area was controversial, including opposition by the City of Ukiah.
DDR identified the site as ‘under construction’ in their filings with the Federal Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), had a project application on file with the County, was holding public meetings promoting their project, and advocated for the project before the Board of Supervisors. Demolition was step one of a multi-staged project that the County should have known required review under California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA.) The County Planning and Building Department ignored the magnitude of the structures on site, the air quality impacts from demolishing these improvements, the proximity of the demolition to a school, and also did not send the application to demolish the historic structures to all relevant County departments and agencies for review and comment.
Rather, they treated the demolition as similar to a homeowner wanting to take down a garage, claiming they simply issued a valid ministerial permit with no environmental review being required. Without benefit of a clear and comprehensive review of its potential deleterious impact to the environment, and the community, the County abdicated their responsibility to protect the environment. There was no recognition by the County that by issuing the permit they were effectively eliminating existing manufacturing capacity for future use, and opening the door for DDR to move ahead with a project in an area not zoned for retail commercial use.
CFAR thanks all those who demonstrated their commitment to the quality of life in the Ukiah Valley by funding this costly effort. With the public being taxed by the County to fund its oversight responsibilities and services, an enormous burden was created when citizens had to then undertake suing the County to compel compliance with state law.
Hopefully, with a newly constituted Board of Supervisors, Mendocino County will put aside a ‘development at any cost’ mentality, cohesively organize County departments and agencies so they do not piecemeal their review but rather systematically and comprehensively apply legally established 21st century environmental standards to projects. We live in a beautiful environment characterized by small town values and our governing bodies need recognize its inherent value, and to become vigilant, conscientious stewards.
~
See also The People’s Business→
From Gene Logsdon
OrganicToBe.org
This is a fairy tale story that is not at all a fairy tale. The story has so many parts to it that I scarcely know where to begin. Louise Kuerner’s horse, Dentzel, the Percheron referred to in the title, lives on the Kuerner farm in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, a farm immortalized on canvas by Andrew Wyeth, widely viewed as America’s foremost living painter and by many art lovers as one of the best artists anywhere in any time. He has used the Kuerner farm’s building, animals, fields and people hundreds of times as subject or models. I might argue that Dentzel is now the most famous draft horse in the world too because recently, Wyeth painted him in a work titled “Karlanna,” and a watercolor study done for the final painting called “Fenced In.”
Dentzel’s other distinction in life is that he is currently the only draft horse to be driven (by Louise) in the enormously popular Parade of Carriages that precedes the Point-to-Point steeplechase races at Winterthur in the state of Delaware every spring. “At 17.2 hands, he’s the biggest horse in the parade,” says Louise, laughing. “But that’s what I wanted. A big horse. When my first horse, Pony, died, I thought I didn’t want to go through that heartbreak again. But when I found Dentzel, I just had to have him. He was even sick when I first saw him, not a smart way to buy a horse, but we nursed him back to good health and he’s been just splendid ever since.”
Continue reading The Percheron… at OrganicToBe.org→
From Dave Smith
Ukiah
The Ukiah Daily Journal is now a mere shadow of its former self. It is being sucked dry by its parent company who takes close to a million dollars annually (by some estimates) out of our community, sending it to parts unknown, and hires people on the other side of the planet to do most of the paid work… apparently hoping that local volunteer-generated content can fill in the gaps and not harm the cash flow leaving our community. The local staff and employees, troopers all, are not to be blamed for its sad demise under current ownership.
If any community enterprise should be independent and locally-owned it should be our daily newspaper. Chain-owned newspapers are as harmful to a community’s prosperity as big-box chains. Surely there is enough money in our community to buy our newspaper back from distant corporate owners, relocalize its jobs, contextualize its stories, keep its advertising and subscription revenue, and profits, circulating locally… and restore its rich tradition of local news done well.
Free The Journal!
~
Image Credit: Evan Johnson
Barack on Michelle (1996)
Excerpted from The New Yorker Jan 19, 2009
[This says so much about both of them. -DS]
Michelle is a tremendously strong person, and has a very strong sense of herself and who she is and where she comes from. But I also think in her eyes you can see a trace of vulnerablity that most people don’t know, because when she’s walking through the world she is this tall, beautiful, confident woman. There is a part of her that is vulnerable and young and sometimes frightened, and I think seeing both of those things is what attracted me to her. And then what sustains our relationship is I’m extremely happy with her, and part of it has to do with the fact that she is at once completely familiar to me, so that I can be myself and she knows me very well and I trust her completely, but at the same time she is also a complete mystery to me in some ways. And there are times when we are lying in bed and I look over and sort of have a start. Because I realize here is this other person who is separate and different and has different memories and backgrounds and thoughts and feelings. It’s that tension between familiarity and mystery that makes for something strong, because, even as you build a life of trust and comfort and mutual support, you retain some sense of surprise or wonder about the other person.
Ukiah Inaugural Bash
Tonight 1/20 5:30pm
Ukiah Brewing Company & Restaurant
Speech Replay at 6:00pm & 7:30pm
When Barack Obama takes the oath of office on January 20th, the millions who worked to put him in office are going to celebrate. You are invited to watch President Obama’s speech and celebrate what we have all made possible! Bring instruments and good vibes to share, a new era in American history is beginning.
Kids Welcome. No Cover.
From Mary Anne Landis
Ukiah
This link is to Van Jones’s speech to the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, being given today. All about Green job myths, which he does a good job busting– and funding needs. Practical and inspirational.
Testamony before the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming→
See also Transition Towns California→
and Solar Living Center Workshops Calendar→
Author/Radio Host Thom Hartmann offers some economic thoughts for Obama:
Alexander Hamilton’s Advice To The Obama Administration
Alexander Hamilton, in 1791, proposed to the United States our first true industrial policy. We adopted it over the next few years, Abraham Lincoln reaffirmed it fourscore years later, and it was again affirmed by every President of the United States until Reagan began his now-28-year “Reagan Revolution” which has disassembled America’s industrial base and impoverished our nation. For over 200 years, Hamilton’s policy made America the most powerful industrial nation in the world; now – after just 28 years of Reagonomics and Clinton/Rubinomics – we are the largest importer of other people’s industry, and the most indebted nation in the world.
The entirety of Hamilton’s paper is easily found on the web. The first third of it deals with Jefferson’s objections to it (which Jefferson withdrew later in his life), as Jefferson favored America being an agricultural rather than an industrial power in 1791. Once you cut past that, though, Hamilton gets right to the rationale for, and the details of, his 11-point plan to turn America into an industrial power and build a strong manufacturing-based middle class. Ironically, his policies are exactly – EXACTLY – what Japan, South Korea, and China are doing today. And what we have ceased to do.
Hamilton had it right. We must reject Reagon/Bush/Clinton/Bush-onomics and return to what the Founders knew worked. Here are selected excerpts from Hamilton’s 1791 Report on Manufactures to Congress:
First, Hamilton points out that real wealth doesn’t exist until somebody makes something. A “service economy” is an oxymoron – if I wash your car in exchange for your mowing my lawn, money is moving around, it’s a service economy, but no real and lasting wealth is created. Only through manufacturing, when $5 worth of iron ore is converted into a $2000 car door, or $1 worth of raw wool is converted into a $1000 Calvin Klein suit, is real wealth created. He also notes that people being paid for creating wealth (manufacturing) creates wages, which are the principal engine of demand, which drives an economy. And both come from a foreign trade policy.
Continue reading Alexander Hamilton’s Advice To Obama→
From Dave Smith (2005)
[I'm a member of a Community Sustained Agriculture (CSA) farm. In the spring, members invest our fair share of money in the farm, and then, in return, we receive our fair share of the weekly harvest throughout the spring, summer, and fall. This is an interview I did with the farmers, Gloria and Stephen Decater, for my book, To Be Of Use. My photos are included. ~DS]
The Decater family runs a CSA (community-supported agriculture) diversified and partially solar-powered farm that every week supplies its 180 member families in Mendocino County and the Bay Area with fresh, high-quality biodynamic/organic food. They plow and till the land with their four draft horses. Besides growing almost fifty varieties of vegetables, they raise sheep, cows, chickens, and pigs.
We sit on old wooden chairs in the flower garden as the afternoon sun passes its zenith and heads toward the Pacific, miles west of us. Gloria has been flitting around the farm on a bike with a class of third graders from Marin County. Camped out for a four days of hard labor, they are absorbed in various projects organized by several farm apprentices and parents. Stephen has been out around the barn and pastures, working with apprentices who are planting and harvesting greens. Gloria has on old Levi’s and sandals with heavy wool socks; Stephen is in a worn green plaid flannel shirt, heavily soiled Levi’s, and deeply scuffed work boots. Despite their long hours and heavy schedules, they’re relaxed. They begin by describing the beauty and love they found in a garden.…
→Stephen: I met Alan Chadwick in 1967 at his garden project at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As a young, idealistic person I saw Alan as an older person doing something that was totally positive for the world … and this was during the Vietnam War with all kinds of awful things happening around us. The adage of beating your swords into plowshares felt real when I was putting my energy in that direction, growing food and flowers. Working in the garden opened this whole world of beauty and culture: the history of different flowers, where they had come from, how they needed to be taken care of, this whole world of activity, with the human being in nature, working in a supportive way. That took my heart and interest and eventually became what I spent all my time doing.
The garden was so vitally alive, and we were immersed in that life. When you are with the flowers for a couple of hours morning after morning, they have a kind of soul expression of the Earth, an expression of love. In Alan’s creation of a garden for people to come into and be immersed in, he was actually trying to create a healing. Those were “back-to-the-land” times, when people were wanting to reconnect with nature. Alan was doing that in a very conscious and cultured way. It wasn’t ”go back to nature by going wild” but rather, go to nature by recognizing the life there and working with the cultural skills that have been humankind’s heredity for centuries. For me it was the raw life-force connection, but at the same time, it was the cultural and artistic beauty a human being could create in the world as opposed to the ways humans destroy life.
So I’ve been trying to create the garden in my own life ever since then, and create it as a garden that is open to people so they have contact with nature, see it, feel it. You can talk about experiencing nature forever, but when someone comes in and their nose is immersed in a living flower, it suddenly hits them with the true expression of life. You are meeting other “beings,” not just human beings. It’s like when you are in relationship with someone and feel the love and caring that comes from them … that is something that is real and has an impact on your spirit and heart. In the garden you experience nature as being alive.
I followed Alan here to the Covelo Garden Project, where Gloria and I met, and we eventually began running our own farm. Everything in nature serves something else: the earth serves the plants, the fruit of the plants serves the animals, the manure from the animals serves the earth. [A screeching “cockadoodle” rings out from the barn area.] We can learn those relationships by becoming part of them. It was critical back in Santa Cruz. … I was bringing my friends into the garden there, and it continues to be critical in this urban-separated world to experience the bounty of food as a Gift.
When we talk with the kids who visit us, we ask them, “Where did this farm come from? Where did the animals come from? Did we make any of those things?” These things come from the wild world, nature, creation, to begin with, but when we bring them into the farm, we begin to culture them. You don’t have a farm without a human being. Without the human being, Mother Nature is taking care of the culture. So on the farm, we are being cocreative with nature, and we experience that relationship. Even though most people are not living on farms today, we are still eating food from farms that are occupying land somewhere. The problem is that now it’s an anonymous relationship. But in order to have real appreciation for the gifts of nature, our relationships with those gifts need to be more conscious. People eating food need to recognize that their partners are the Earth and the people growing the food — not some factory somewhere.
Gloria: Our school classes, which include parents, are here from the Bay Area for four days, and they only fully “arrive” on the farm about the second morning. They may not be able to verbalize their experience necessarily, but at some point in time, for some people immediately and for others after they leave, even ten or fifteen years later, they look back and say “that was the first time I really experienced life, living, the gift of life” — and they’re grateful for it. I’ve heard that from so many. That’s why we continue to share this farm. If I couldn’t feel that, and if there wasn’t that appreciation, I couldn’t do it. But I see the impact. [We can hear one of the Decater sons, Nicholas, pounding nails nearby as he finishes his current tool shop building project.] I’ve heard from quite a few college kids in their twenties who came here in third grade; they say it was the most intense experience in their school education, and they remember everything. When they come as kids, they can be, and succeed, and thrive on the farm in a way they can’t in school — and it can change their relationship with their classmates and teachers. The work they do here is not something made up for them. It’s real, valuable work that helps the farm go forward. It has an impact. They can feel it. They develop a sense of worth that they didn’t have before. And parents, realizing that their spoiled children are very capable of doing things if they’ll just let them, say: “Oh, they can be responsible! Oh, we’ve spoiled them rotten. We’d better change that. The way we’re raising them isn’t right.”
Stephen: Out of that they can see that shoveling up that manure to make compost is something human beings have devoted their lives to for thousands of years. [As Stephen begins to ruminate, Gloria moves nearby for some spontaneous weeding.] I once had an experience where I was totally distraught, worrying about different things, and I couldn’t really work, and finally in frustration I went out and started shoveling manure. All of a sudden it was like hundreds of thousands of people from centuries back in time were standing right there beside me, and I was shoveling manure with them as they had been doing for thousands of years. And it was like, “Okay! I’m not alone. I can do this!” This is where life is at, doing these mundane tasks, but they’re not separated out of time — they’re continuous with the whole of human experience. Our modern world separates us from that connection and that relationship. And the beauty of farming is this universality of life and activity that is flowing through the whole world. When we become part of that we lose our alienation and our separation; we can come together and recognize our relationships.
Gloria [returning]: A farmer’s life is so rhythmical, and that is why farmers can continue to work on and on through the days and years. When you’re doing something in rhythm it’s so much less tiring. For example, scything grain is really a dance form, and when you get going it is so beautiful, so enjoyable. You think to yourself how farmers in the past would get together and scythe all day, and sing, and be joyful, and how they loved it. When you milk a cow, you’re milking two teats at once. If you milk only one teat, you are twice as tired than if you milk two teats at once in rhythm. There’s just no comparison. That rhythm is so joyful.
Stephen: Hard, physical work can be enjoyable and rewarding. The bad rap in agriculture has come because people worked so hard and still couldn’t make a living — they weren’t economically compensated for their work. Eliminating people from agriculture has disconnected us all from the soil and the land. A farmer has two tasks: growing food that is nourishing is one level, but on another level there is a spiritual nourishment that comes only from being in a farm and experiencing the work of a farm. We need farms that can create that opportunity. Even if we could produce all of our food with corporate industrial organic production, although it would be better for the environment than conventional farming with chemicals, it would still leave people largely out of agriculture — we would still not have a culturally or socially conscious agriculture. If it’s going through a regular market system, there is a disconnect with people using that food, knowing where it comes from, how it is grown, whether the farmer’s needs are being met, and if the growing methods are sustainable long-term. This is cultural nourishment and spiritual nourishment that people are missing out on. [An apprentice stops by to ask advice about the harness they will be putting on the draft horses for the afternoon plowing.]
We need a new kind of farm, one that is not only market-oriented, as simply a producing unit, but a farm that is also an oasis that people can come into and experience the culture of their agriculture. It is too fundamental a part of human life to be left out of one’s existence. Large machinery and monocropping blocks that potential. In a given area of land that one large farm occupies, many small farms can produce equally, if not more food per acre, with more energy efficiency. It’s been proven over and over. If we human beings are to reconnect with the Earth and the life of the Earth, and sustain and heal that life, it is going to mean we need to create smaller farms that the community can have relationships with.
We run what is known as a community-supported agriculture, or CSA, farm. Family members pay a monthly or annual fee and then divide up the weekly allotment that comes from the farm. I view the CSA concept as a completely different economic process than we are used to thinking of traditionally as “market agriculture.” Historically, in market agriculture, we can see that the “market” has not maintained its farmer population. If the market system worked for farmers, you would see more of them prospering. [Several jabbering kids hurry by, on the way to their next project. They pass two of their classmates, who are pushing wheelbarrows stacked high with freshly scythed hay.]
When someone goes to the supermarket to buy food, only ten cents or less goes to the farmer. The only way to survive on that is to grow ten times more product, which is not possible without large capital inputs. So farming has become a system run by banks and large industrial corporations, subsidized by our taxes, that keeps food artificially cheap, driving out the small farmer who is not subsidized and can’t compete with their prices.
There is no future for the family farm under that system. So we need an approach where the people eating the food work directly with the people growing the food. If we want to create a local agriculture that is not so totally dependent on banks for capital, fossil fuels for energy, toxic chemicals for pest problems, and chemical fertilizers, and not burdened by the environmental destruction that comes from all that, we need to bring it back to a food system that works locally. We will need local farmers who have economic support that can sustain them and respects the Earth. We worked in market agriculture for several years. … We had a small farmer’s market locally in Covelo and sold to natural food markets in the county. There were not enough stores for us to be sustainable. We were only able to squeak by on limited income because we were growing all of our own family’s meat, milk, and produce. But it was impossible to do any of the capital improvements — build fences, lay pipelines — that we needed to take it to an economically viable level…
Stephen: In 1988 we heard about the CSA approach. As soon as we heard that idea, we knew that this was the way it should be: having a relationship with the people eating our food rather than a market relationship where we come to market with our produce, get people excited enough to buy something, and have to move the prices around to compete with our neighbor or other growers. In the conventional market the most important thing is that the food is cheap. That’s the best deal. But if that means the Earth gets shafted producing it, and the farmer gets short-changed and disappears, have we really gained any advantage? Farmers become an expendable resource, unrecognized as critically valuable people in the community. When the community supports the farm and farmer directly, then instead of getting ten cents from a dollar spent on the food, the farmer is getting eighty or ninety cents that can really be utilized on the farm. And that makes all the difference in the world to create economic viability. Even going to the farmer’s market makes it difficult to survive because we have to load all the food, get it to the market, sit there and sell it, and if it isn’t sold, we have to take it back to the farm. So we’re really absorbing some of the middleman’s and retailer’s costs, which makes it difficult.
Gloria: When we grow for our community members, we aren’t looking out in the field of lettuce and thinking, “That’s a dollar a head; next week it may be fifty cents a head; what is somebody going to pay for it?” Instead, we are getting away from the idea of what the vegetable costs, and instead we’re thinking, “Terry Nieves is going to eat this, Marla Anderson is going to eat this.” Their money for that lettuce goes to support the farm, environmentally and socially, and to have a relationship with their food and the farm, to support a farm that invites school kids into the farm. Alan Chadwick used to call it “finding your affinity with nature and life.” Kids visiting a large corporate farm get to see a farmer drive off in a large tractor on a hundred-acre field — not much to interact with.
A unique community supports our farm. We have the farmers, the farmers’ family, the apprentices, the member families from the Bay Area and Mendocino County, and the plants and animals. We have 180 member families. This is our sixteenth year. Maybe half have been with us the whole time. They have raised and educated their families around the farm, changed their diet, changed their budgets. There are things they don’t buy anymore, habits they don’t have anymore because they get their basket every week and learn to cook and eat according to what’s in season, and they have been thrilled with that — particularly in how that develops their relationship with their children. Many of the families’ children come to the farm, make compost, work on the farm, and develop a different relationship with food, and vegetables, and money. When they get their basket, many of the families lay it out on the table and think about what they’re going to eat for the next few days.
Some people can’t adapt to that of course. They’d rather go to the store or the farmer’s market and pick what they want, when they want it, and the quantity they want, and that’s perfectly fine. But we want people to be concerned about community and coming to the farm and seeing the farm and working with us and being concerned about the challenges and successes on the farm.
Stephen: We need that flexibility on the farm because we don’t know what nature is going to do each year. This year we planted fifteen hundred plants of broccoli and cabbage about three weeks ago, right before the late deluge of rain we had this year. In all the twenty-odd years we’ve been growing here, that has never happened. We got so much water in an already saturated ground that the rootlets just sat there smothered in water, unable to grow. They’re dead! We’ve never before lost a whole crop like that at one time. In a market format, the farmer is just out of luck at that point. If you are monocropping, with only one crop like corn, instead of a diversified farm of many crops, and you get a bad year where you lose a crop, and you’re on a weak economic footing, that can be the end. It can mean the foreclosure of your land. [A parent stops by to ask Gloria when they will need to have the evening meal prepared. Another parent is cutting flowers nearby for the table.]
Instead, CSAs humanize the economic process. Schumacher called it “economics as if people matter.” In the market, everybody is trying to find a new niche, a niche that works — which is great for a year or two until every other farmer finds the same niche, and then it’s off to finding another new niche to compete with. In this county, hops were the niche, then it was sheep, then pears for awhile, now it’s wine grapes. I don’t want to constantly fight that process; I simply want to grow good food. And I want to have lots of other farms around us growing good food, too. I don’t want to be in competition with them, finding niches or underpricing them. I just want to serve our community, meet their needs, and meet my family’s needs out of that relationship.
It takes only 180 households to support a small family farm. This is the opportunity for people today to make real change. Community farms can be initiated by a group of eaters finding a farmer to work with or by a farmer seeking out a group of eaters. We could be much less dependent on fossil fuels from the other side of the world by farming this way locally. By growing a lot of the food that is now coming from other parts of California and the world, we could have a healthy, diversified agriculture that feeds us. Being on the farm helps each of us understand the agricultural process, what our part in it is, and what is healthy for us all in the long run.
~~
[There are those who denigrate the sixties and seventies as worthless excursions into mindless hedonism and excoriate the flower children and everything they stood for. The organic food movement and the small organic farms we are blessed with started with the flower children dropping out from what was... wanting to live healthier, more peaceful lives. They’re the ones who felt the problems, went back to the land, and relearned how to work with nature. And it will be their little islands of sanity and health, now matured into productive farms through hard work, that will be revealed to have been the better, more sustainable way after all: the "poor" inheriting the Earth. ~DS]
Live Power Community Farm Website→
By Gene Logsdon
There is an interesting development in mainstream U.S.A that just might have significant relevance for garden farming. Record numbers of people are acquiring pets. The dog and cat business is not at all depressed by the recession. (If you are wondering what all this has to do with the Amish, bear with me.) You see evidence of the trend everywhere, especially in advertisements where dogs are shown licking the cheeks of children— this in a society that has an almost manic dread of germs. Pets are the in-thing. Apparently our society is so enmeshed in its mechanical and electronic gadgetry that the human psyche is seeking solace in real life, as in the ancient loving connection that we have always enjoyed with animals.
The modern pet craze is not limited to cats and dogs but embraces many animals, especially horses. (Now you see how the Amish are going to get into this discussion.) Statistics say there are 6.9 million horses in the U.S. involved in various activities from racing, showing, pleasure riding, polo, police work, farming and ranching. The horse business or hobby adds about $112 billion to the GNP. Horses generate more money than the home furniture and fixtures business, and almost as much as the apparel and textile manufacturing industry. In other words, while we generally think of Old Dobbin as a step backward in time in agriculture, horses are very much a part of our modern economic and social lives today.
Continue reading Did the Amish get it right after all? at OrganicToBe→
From Linda Sanders
Friends of Gibson Creek
Tree Friends,
You have yet another opportunity to express your opinion about our urban canopy. Come to the Planning Commission meeting this Wednesday (14th) at 6 pm in City Hall.
A public discussion will focus on examining existing City tree protection and planting policies. Commissioners will review the General Plan Open Space Conservation Element, Community Forest Management Plan, Tree Protection & Enhancement Policy, Commercial Develop Design Guidelines, Tree Planting and Maintenance Recommendations, Landscaping and Streetscape Design Guidelines, and Article, Ch 5 Ukiah Code: Street Tree Policy, Purpose and Intent.
The commission will also look at developing a method or procedure for using these existing policies and directives when reviewing proposed development projects in the future.
By Carolyn Baker
For several months I have been meaning to write a review of Rob Hopkins’ The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience, but other things got in the way-like a planetary economic meltdown and out of control climate change that exceeds some of the most dire predictions by climate scientists. I should have spoken out earlier in support of this movement, but I didn’t. Now, as we commence this new year, I am.
I will begin this book “review” by telling you that I find nothing-absolutely nothing wrong with The Transition Handbook. If that then makes this article into a commercial for the book instead of a review, so be it.
For nearly a year I have been emphasizing in my writing that a positive vision must be held in consciousness alongside all of the abysmal events unfolding around us. Even as I have been insistent on staring down the collapse of civilization, I have embraced at the same time, what could be and have held in my mind and heart the threads of the new paradigm that so many of us are working to create…
The Handbook concludes with these remarkably uplifting words:
While Peak Oil and Climate Change are understandably profoundly challenging, also inherent within them is the potential for an economic, cultural, and social renaissance the likes of which we have never seen. We will see a flourishing of local businesses, local skills and solutions, and a flowering of ingenuity and creativity. It is a Transition in which we will inevitably grow, and in which our evolution is a precondition for progress. Emerging at the other end, we will not be the same as we were: we will have become more humble, more connected to the natural world, fitter, leaner, more skilled, and ultimately, wiser.
Continue reading The Transition Town Movement at CarolynBaker.net→
See also via Energy Bulletin Local Currency in the Wall Street Journal?→
From Dave Smith
Ukiah
Excerpted from The Natural Step For Communities-
How Cities and Towns Can Change to Sustainable Practices
Övertorneå — the first eco-municipality in Sweden
In the mid-1980s, the little town of Övertorneå (Eu-vehr-tawr’-neh-aw) in northern Sweden received a national prize as the Municipality of the Year. In his speech at the award ceremony, a prominent county official, Councilman Jan-Olof Hedwtröm, compared Övertorneå to a bumblebee. As lore has it, the famous aeronautic engineer Sikorsky hung a sign in his office lobby that reads: “The bumblebee, according to our engineers’ calculations, cannot fly at all, but the bumblebee doesn’t know this and flies.”
This was the regional and national establishment’s view of Övertorneå. Changes were happening in the town outside the envelope of what was then regarded as business-as-usual community development. The municipal government and its larger community had made a commitment to develop in a way that was in harmony with nature. Övertorneå residents and town officials sought a win-win-win relationship betwen humans, society, and nature. Residents and officials were coming to understand that investing in ecological approaches to meet community needs could also bring about an economically positive future. To characterize its transformation, Övertorneå began to call itself an “eco-municipality.”
Övertorneå was discussing and practicing ideas such as mobilizing people, taking a bottom-up approach to community planning, collaborative community development, cooperating across department and industrial sector boundaries, investing in local culture, and taking into account the local informal economy. Such ideas were foreign to conventional Swedish town planning and community development practices at that time. What the regional and national establishments could see, without understanding why, was that these strange ideas evidently produced remarkable results — for example, over 200 new business enterprises producing several hundred jobs in a small town of barely 6,000 inhabitants. These county and national agencies considered new jobs and businesses to be the most important indicators of successful community development.
Continue reading The Bumblebee That Changed The World→
via Dave Pollard
lost
stand still. the trees ahead and bushes beside you
are not lost. wherever you are is called Here
and you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
must ask permission to know it and be known.
the forest breathes. listen. it answers,
i have made this place around you.
if you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
no two trees are the same to Raven.
no two branches are the same to Wren.
if what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
you are surely lost. stand still. the forest knows
where you are. you must let it find you.
( — david wagoner)
See also Wild Foresting→
By Gene Logsdon (1991)
Dave Haferd sees his farm with eyes that are 200 years old. He knows every foot of its 180 acres, on top and underneath. Walking across his land, he discourses endlessly and joyfully upon almost any rock, post, tree, clod, weed, or building that his eye falls upon. The gully that cuts deeply into the hill going down to the creek is where the road used to go years and years past, he says. The boulder in the fence corner required two days of hard work to move out of the field, he says, which reminds him that over in another field—he waves his arm in a southerly direction—there is a stone so huge embedded in the soil that he has never been able to move it. He worries, now that he is thinking of retiring, that the next farmer will break his plow on it.
Continue reading Knowing One’s Place at OrganicToBe.org→
From Dave Smith
Ukiah
There will be public input tonight at a City Council meeting at which the seat vacated by John McCowen’s County Supervisor election will be filled by appointment.
The candidates are Mary Anne Landis, Mary Elizabeth Tracy Bell, Michael Whetzel, Erika L. Pierce, Brian D. Kornegay, Jeanne K. Metcalf and John Graf.
I hope and expect that the City Council will appoint the best qualified candidate whose values, effectiveness, and track record of public service most closely match those of the person elected, John McCowen, and those of the majority of the City Council. The democratic will of the voters will thus be fulfilled.
For those reasons, and many more, that candidate is clearly Mary Anne Landis.
To somehow argue that a prior election loser should be appointed is to subvert the will of the majority and set the City Council up for the petty bickering, incompetence, and dysfunctionality suffered by the County Board of Supervisors these past few years.
No thanks.
[Local community advocate Julia (Dakin) Frech is heading up a local effort to organize a Time Bank. Mendo Time Bank website is here. The link to join Mendo Time Bank is here. How Time Banks work is here. Time Banks are active in many parts of the world and are a very successful way to build community. What a great way to start off a challenging new year here in Mendocino County. What follows is a brief overview. -DS]
Excerpted from No More Throw-Away People
by Edgar Cahn
“Time Dollars” in a “Time Bank” are a local currency, issued locally, and honored locally. Instead of money that flows to the highest return, we need a local currency that will stay put as a kind of safety net. It functions as a reward for sinking roots, staying in place, accepting responsibility, building community, keeping family together. “Co-Production” elevates the non-market economy as the only possible shelter from the vicissitudes of the global market economy. As a complementary economic system based on maximizing self-sufficiency, it represents a buffer in a world where money’s mobility and global interdependence can mean ubiquitous vulnerability.
There is no doubt that money rewards self-interest, greed, ruthlessness and material acquisition. We need an economy that rewards decency, caring, civic participation, and learning as automatically as the market now rewards unbridled self-interest, winner-take-all competion, and runaway specialization. Time Dollars devalue specialization and assert that the most special and important thing a human being can do is to be a Human Being. That is about as unspecialized a job description as one can get. They are a new tool, available as a kind of appropriate technology to enable the nonmarket economy to compete for a larger share of energy, time and talent and to enlist the capacity of those whom the market devalues or excludes.
Time Dollars simply count the hours people put in. But even when people don’t spend the Time Dollars they earn, something else happens. Observers note that turnover in Time Dollar programs is far lower than in volunteer programs. It was less than 10 percent in all of the original programs, and less than 3 percent in the largest Miami based one. The only thing done differently is to count. And people earn Time Dollars without stopping whatever volunteering they are already doing.
Counting counts. Recording something makes a difference. It confers value. It invests an act with a degree of permanence. It means that what is learned or done will not be forgotten. It just might shape the future.
A user-friendly information and accounting system serves two functions. First, it makes knowledge of what people can do into a shared resource. Information is wealth. Shared information is shared wealth of a new kind. This is one kind of wealth that is not diminished by sharing. In fact, it is increased.
Most of us do not know what our neighbors can do. And we don’t ask. But when that information is in a data base, we don’t mind phoning up and saying, “Do you have anyone in the computer who could take care of my dog this weekend or help my child with homework?” That’s not a question we are going to go up and down the street asking. Nor is it information that would normally be volunteered by a neighbor in casual conversation. Information systems create a new social etiquette that breaks down old barriers. Any email user knows that.
Merely the issuing of Time Dollar bank statements operates as a kind of reward. Those of us who enrolled in frequent flier miles programs know how pleased we are to see the mileage grow, even if we know we may not be able to use those miles for months or even years.
Time Dollars as a currency with restricted purchasing power may be inferior for certain purposes, but it sends out a message: Maybe we don’t really want all the things we value most – our future, our fate, our lives – monitized and determined by market value… up for grabs to the highest bidder. And perhaps we need a currency that, regardless of the market, enables us to use our time to secure a kind of self-sufficiency, that can’t be eliminated by cutbacks in Medicare or eroded by inflation.
~~
Time Dollars in a Nutshell
1. Members list the services they can offer and those that they need
2. All agree to both give and to receive services
3. Everyone is interviewed and provides references
4. Every hour giving help earns the giver one credit, a Time Dollar
5. Members ‘buy’ the services they need with their credits
6. The computer matches the task, the giver, and the receiver
7. Every transaction is recorded on a computer ‘time bank’
8. Members receive a regular ‘bank’ statement
9. One hour is one credit regardless of the skills one offers
10. Members can donate credits to friends or to the ‘credit pool’
11. Everyone is seen as special with a contribution to make
12. All activities maintain set standards of care and a code of ethics
From Evan Johnson
Media conglomerate owner Singleton has steadfastly maintained his company is financially sound and honoring its financial commitments.
Media company announces employee benefit cuts
Written by Elizabeth Larson
Wednesday, 31 December 2008
LAKEPORT – The parent company of the Lake County Record-Bee [Ukiah Daily Journal, et. al.] gave employees some not-very-happy holiday news this week, telling them that the company is cutting its matching contributions to the 401(k) retirement plan.
……
Moody’s Investors Services downgraded nearly all of the company’s $1 billion in debt further into junk status, reaching a non-investment grade rating of “Caa3,” which according to an Associated Press report is the third-lowest rating on Moody’s scale.
Moody had previously downgraded MediaNews’ debt in May. Three months later, the company sold its Connecticut newspaper holdings, including the Connecticut Post and seven non-daily newspapers, to Hearst Corp.
The rating downgrades are based on Moody’s lowered opinion of the company’s ability to meet its financial obligations after a 16-percent decline in revenue for the third quarter, and concerns over a revolving $175 million credit facility that comes due in December 2009, according to the Associated Press.
The Associated Press noted that the downgrade also has the impact of making it harder for MediaNews to find new financing because of default concerns.
~
[Let's get these local newspapers back into local, independent ownership. The $800,000 that leaves our county every year from the UDJ to parts known (Asia) and unknown, would be better used circulating in our community. Also, rumors of The Bullhorn resurrection are encouraging. Go for it, Laura and Sid! -DS]
From Lisa Mammina
New Year’s Eve Party
PAY IT FORWARD, RING IT IN, JUST DANCE!
Celebrate with Great Music and Good Friends
Appetizers and Drinks
8:00 pm to 1:00 am
Over 21 Crowd
No Host Bar
$20 Per Person
107 S. Oak St., Downtown Ukiah
More Info? Call 707.467.8229
See also Live Hulu Coverage of Times Square 2009→
One says to me, ‘I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to travel; you might take the [railroad] cars and go to Fitchberg today and see the country.’ But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day’s wages. I remember when wages were sixty cents a day for laborers on this very road. Well, I start now on foot, and get there before night; I have travelled at that rate by the week together. You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive there some time tomorrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will be working here the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroad reached around the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you; and as for seeing the country and getting the experience of that kind, I should have to cut your acquaintance altogether.
~
It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living; how to make getting a living not merely honest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious; for if getting a living is not so, then living is not.
~
It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?
~
With all your science can you tell how it is, and whence it is, the light that comes into the soul?
~
Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence. Wherever a man separates from the multitude and goes his own way, there is a fork in the road, though the travelers along the highway see only a gap in the paling.
~
Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life, as a dog does his master’s chaise. Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.
~~
See also A Timbered Choir by Wendell Berry→
(Tip of the hat to Dave Pollard)
From Linda Sanders
Friends of Gibson Creek
Tree Friends-
On December 17, 2008 the City Council chambers packed with students from the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas and members of Compassion for Animals, Respect for the Earth (CARE) voiced their request for changing the language in the existing animal related code from owner to guardian. The tree protection supporters voiced their support of a city tree
commission.
Council briefly discussed the benefits of a tree committee versus commission and decided to re-agendize Tree Ordinance, Tree
Commission or Tree Committee, Existing Policies and Recommendations and Plans for sometime in March. City staff created the 12/17 agenda item that listed nine competing interests for the 12/17 meeting, of course it placed us at a disadvantage in vying for the Council’s attention. Council voted 4-1 for changing the animal regulation language to guardian. Tree protection will take time.
Do come to the Planning Commission meeting on 1/14/08.
From Dave Smith
More at Mendo Moola
Excerpt:
On July 5th 1932, in the middle of the Great Depression, the Austrian town of Wörgl made economic history by introducing a remarkable complimentary currency. Wörgl was in trouble, and was prepared to try anything. Of its population of 4,500, a total of 1,500 people were without a job, and 200 families were penniless.
The mayor, Michael Unterguggenberger, had a long list of projects he wanted to accomplish, but there was hardly any money with which to carry them out. These included repaving the roads, streetlighting, extending water distribution across the whole town, and planting trees along the streets.
Rather than spending the 40,000 Austrian schillings in the town’s coffers to start these projects off, he deposited them in a local savings bank as a guarantee to back the issue of a type of complimentary currency known as ’stamp scrip’. This requires a monthly stamp to be stuck on all the circulating notes for them to remain valid, and in Wörgl, the stamp amounted 1% of the each note’s value. The money raised was used to run a soup kitchen that fed 220 families.
Because nobody wanted to pay what was effectively a hoarding fee [technically known as 'demurrage' and often referred to as "negative interest"], everyone receiving the notes would spend them as fast as possible. The 40,000 schilling deposit allowed anyone to exchange scrip for 98 per cent of its value in schillings. This offer was rarely taken up though.
Of all the business in town, only the railway station and the post office refused to accept the local money. When people ran out of spending ideas, they would pay their taxes early using scrip, resulting in a huge increase in town revenues. Over the 13-month period the project ran, the council not only carried out all the intended works projects, but also built new houses, a reservoir, a ski jump, and a bridge. The people also used scrip to replant forests, in anticipation of the future cashflow they would receive from the trees.
The key to its success was the fast circulation of scrip within the local economy, 14 times higher than the schilling. This in turn increased trade, creating extra employment. At the time of the project, Wörgl was the only Austrian town to achieve full employment.
Six neighbouring villages copied the system successfully. The French Prime Minister, Eduoard Dalladier, made a special visit to see the ‘miracle of Wörgl’. In January 1933, the project was replicated in the neighbouring city of Kirchbuhl, and in June 1933, Unterguggenburger addressed a meeting with representatives from 170 different towns and villages. Two hundred Austrian townships were interested in adopting the idea.
Unterguggenberger was opposed to both communism and fascism, championing instead what he referred to as ‘economic freedom’. Therefore, it was deeply ironic that the Wörgl experiment was first branded ‘craziness’ by the monetary authorities, then a Communist idea, and some years later as a fascist one.
Continue reading full article at The Oil Drum→
See also Beyond Greed and Scarcity at Yes Magazine→
Excerpts from The Idea of a Local Economy
Orion Magazine (2001)
Wendell Berry
A total economy is one in which everything—“life forms,” for instance,—or the “right to pollute” is “private property” and has a price and is for sale. In a total economy significant and sometimes critical choices that once belonged to individuals or communities become the property of corporations.
A total economy, operating internationally, necessarily shrinks the powers of state and national governments, not only because those governments have signed over significant powers to an international bureaucracy or because political leaders become the paid hacks of the corporations but also because political processes—and especially democratic processes—are too slow to react to unrestrained economic and technological development on a global scale. And when state and national governments begin to act in effect as agents of the global economy, selling their people for low wages and their people’s products for low prices, then the rights and liberties of citizenship must necessarily shrink. A total economy is an unrestrained taking of profits from the disintegration of nations. communities, households, landscapes, and ecosystems. It licenses symbolic or artificial wealth to “grow” by means of the destruction of the real wealth of all the world…
Aware of industrialism’s potential for destruction, as well as the considerable political danger of great concentrations of wealth and power in industrial corporations, American leaders developed, and for a while used, the means of limiting and restraining such concentrations, and of somewhat equitable distributing wealth and property. The means were: laws against trusts and monopolies, the principle of collective bargaining, the concept of one-hundred-percent parity between the land-using and the manufacturing economies, and the progressive income tax. And to protect domestic producers and production capacities it is possible for governments to impose tariffs on cheap imported goods. These means are justified by the government’s obligation to protect the lives, livelihoods, and freedoms of its citizens. There is, then, no necessity or inevitability requiring our government to sacrifice the livelihoods or our small farmers, small business people, and workers, along with our domestic economic independence to the global “free market.” But now all of these means are either weakened or in disuse. The global economomy is intended as a means of subverting them.
Continue reading The Idea of a Local Economy→
FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights
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. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.
All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.
America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens.
From So Shall We Reap, Colin Tudge
via The Transition Handbook, Rob Hopkins
A system of farming that was truly designed to feed people and to go on doing so for the indefinite future, would be founded primarily on mixed farms and local production. In general, each country (or otherwise convenient political or geographical unit) would contrive to be self-reliant in food. Self-reliant does not mean self-sufficient. A self-sufficient country would produce absolutely everything that it needed, and would not trade with outsiders and this, for most countries, would be a non-sense…
Self-reliance does mean, however, that each country [or county or region - Ed.] would produce its own basic foods, and be able to get by in a crisis. Strategically, this can be highly desirable. Britain found this in both world wars, when the entire country was under siege. Today, surely, most poor countries would benefit from basic self-reliance, and might well make this their prime goal, even if they also attempt to compete in world markets with rivals that have various kinds of head start.
See also Disaster Farming→
From the original Contrary Farmer, Gene Logsdon, over at OrganicToBe.org
The summer tornado that touched down in Holmes County left a path of destruction cut as cleanly into the landscape as a swath mown through the middle of a hayfield. The wind plucked up giant oaks, tulip poplars, ashes, and maples and laid them down in crisscrossed, splintered chaos through the Amish woodland. With the same nicety for borderline definition, the tornado sliced through Amish farmsteads, capriciously reducing barns to kindling while ignoring buggy sheds, chicken coops, corncribs, and houses close by. In the twenty-minute dance that the tornado performed before exiting into the wings of the sky as abruptly as it had come, it destroyed at least fifteen acres of mature forest a hundred years or more in the growing, and four barns that represented the collected architectural wisdom of several centuries of rural tradition.
But what followed in the wake of the tornado during the next three weeks was just as awesome as the wind itself. In that time—three weeks—the forest devastation was sawed into lumber and transformed into four big new barns. No massive effort of bulldozers, cranes, semi-trucks, or the National Guard was involved. The surrounding Amish community rolled up its sleeves, hitched up its horses and did it all. Nor were the barns the quick-fix modern structures of sheet metal hung on posts stuck in the ground. They were massive three-story affairs of post-and-beam framing, held together with hundreds of hand-hewn mortises and tenons.
A building contractor, walking through the last of the barns to be completed, could only shake his head in disbelief. Even with a beefed-up crew, it would have taken him most of the summer to build this barn alone and it would have cost the farmer $100,000, if in fact he could have found such huge girder beams at any price.
Continue reading The Barn Raising at OrganicToBe.org→
From Jeff Cox over at OrganicToBe.org
After holding my six week old granddaughter in my arms this afternoon, I had a revelation about Christmas. All my life, I thought the celebration was about the arrival of the redeemer in the form of a particular baby 2,000 years ago. But today I realized that there’s a larger context to the Christmas story.
Looking at the sleeping baby in my arms, I saw that every baby has the potential to be a redeemer. Every newborn could grow to become a savior. Each new baby is a blank slate on which may be written a deep and meaningful story. Every baby should have three kings come to worship him or her, and give that baby precious gifts. Who knows who that little person is, or will become? Every newborn is a renewal of the pledge of life: that we will grow stronger and better and more valuable than ever before. And all that hope is wrapped tightly in the body and soul of a newborn babe.
Continue reading Solstice Renewal at OrganicToBe.org→
See also What is worse than coal in your stocking? Coal in your drinking water (AlterNet)→
Click on post title above for full-size video
From Dave Smith
I’ve long admired the life and thinking of author and talk show host Thom Hartmann (pictured here). He advocates a living wage, not a minimum wage, and a reversal of the gradual decimation of our middle class by raising our national wage so there is prosperity for all, not just the few. History proves his wisdom.
We cannot have full prosperity until our big businesses and institutions accept the union democratic process of bargaining between equals. Prosperity does not trickle down, it bursts up from a well-paid citizenry. Bashing the unions during these trying times will do nothing but prolong our national financial agony. When Henry Ford grasped the fundamentals of how prosperity works in an industrial economy, he raised his workers wages so they could afford the cars they were building and the auto industry took off. He understood that everyone benefits when labor is paid a living wage… that effective demand is the key.
President Lincoln also understood this:
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
In his article Needed: Workplace Democracy, Thom defends the union movement that, even with all its flaws, is fundamental to reversing the financial disaster caused by greed and lack of democratic values at the top, and years of anti-union, anti-regulation, and anti-middle-class policies.
Thom writes:
It took the Republican Great Depression to wake people up. It took Franklin D. Roosevelt to speak the truth. If a politician said the same things today that Roosevelt did in the 1930s – openly accusing big business of being anti-American and antiworker – he’d be accused of socialism and communism. Very few national figures have the courage to speak out today the way FDR did back then.
Roosevelt provided courageous leadership. In his first term, he had sent to Congress the National Industrial Recovery Act, which set standards for wages and working hours and established the right of laborers to organize. This set the stage for labor groups to bargain for wages and conditions. Thanks in large part to FDR’s work on behalf of labor, in the 25 years after World War II the real incomes of the middle class doubled.
Go to Thom Hartmann’s article Needed: Workplace Democracy→
From Dave Smith
It been clear for decades now what a disaster chemical farming is wreaking on our personal health and the health of our planet. From the so-called Green Revolution in developing countries, to the vineyards, golf courses and lawns in our local environs, the use of poisons to grow our food and green our playgrounds has turned our bodies into sacks of toxic landfill; our preventative health systems into obscenely profitable medical drug systems; and our brains into mush… unable to tell the difference between a home to live in and a get-rich-quick scheme, or to accept the science that global warming is caused by our daily activities.
According to 28 years of exhaustive research by the venerable Rodale Institute (videos), we can mitigate a large chunk of greenhouse gas damage by moving to local, small-scale organic farming. The report states that by turning all our farmland in this country to organic practices “where we are putting basically cover crops or compost back into the soil and not using chemical fertilizers, we could mitigate 25 percent of our emissions in this country alone… the biology in the soil wants to pull the carbon and keep it down in the soil…” but synthetic fertilizers kill that biology. Small organic farming can feed the world and help save it from climate disasters at the same time.
There are organic alternatives for farms, vineyards, lawns, parks, and golf courses that are gaining in use across the world. Mendocino County is already a national leader in organic and biodynamic vineyards. As the first county to ban GMO’s, we need now to begin banning the unnecessary and destructive use of chemicals in our local farming, gardening and horticultural practices. Whether or not we use harmful chemicals ourselves, we all inhale and absorb second-hand chemicals wafting through our air and tracked into our homes along with our kids and pets who roll around in neighbors’ chem-saturated lawns.
Local retailers and farm suppliers can be better neighbors by replacing their harmful chemical products with organic alternatives, and begin educating their customers on their application and use.
A presentation by local Jason Bradford originally given to Leadership Mendocino, Nov. 14, 2008. Jason presents from the point of view of the year 2020 on the history of Mendocino county after an energy crisis, describing the rapid changes that followed. A brilliant must-see for county residents…
Continue to video at Global Public Media→
From Dave Smith
I admire our meeting-people… those who make democracy work by sitting in endless meetings and engaging in the process of finding common ground among diverse personalities and interests, and then making compromises and decisions that will not make everyone happy, but will make forward progress.
The give and take to find consensus or a majority; the standing firm on principle; the willingness to probe another’s reasons and compare it to one’s own… and then to painfully change one’s mind and accept another’s argument, or stand aside for the betterment of community. This is how progress is made in a democracy, and it requires patience, respect, discipline, civility, dignity, forbearance, and many, many hours of listening with attention and empathy… and when required, passionate defense of what is fair and right.
This is all in good working order and in full display at Ukiah City Council meetings. If only we could simply replace the County of Mendocino Board of Supervisors and County Staff with their counterparts in the City of Ukiah, the county might start working again.
With two new Supervisors coming on board, one can hope.
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”
From Linda Sanders
Friends of Gibson Creek
Tree Friends,
Tonight at City Hall near 6:30 pm the Tree Ordinance is the second item on the agenda, see Unfinished Business Item 10a www.cityofukiah.com (See City Council Agenda). Vice Mayor Baldwin says that our item should come up quickly. Friends of Gibson Creek will be asking Council to appoint a tree commission to work on a tree ordinance in 2009, using the City of Davis’ Tree Program as a model for Ukiah . We will also be requesting that all tree activity on City property follow the current policies and procedures that were adopted by city council back in 1994.
Bruni Kobbe’s well written letter to the editor appeared in yesterdays UDJ to highlight the many benefits of the urban canopy. Thanks Bruni, and to all of you for doing your part on behalf tree protection and healthy communities. Your support tonight is really important!
Rob Hopkins (UK):
This involves looking at what I call the Head, the Heart and the Hands of Energy Descent.
By the Head I mean the concepts of peak oil, arguments for and against localisation as well as any historical examples that we can learn from.
The Heart refers to exploring how to actually engage communities in a positive and dynamic way, how to use peak oil as a tool for empowerment rather than leaving people feeling helpless. This part of the exploration is about how to actually facilitate change, and the dynamics of cultural transformation.
The Hands refers to the practical aspects, could the UK become self sufficient in food and how? How much well managed woodland would it take to heat a town with efficient CHPs? Can local materials be used to retrofit houses?
Continue reading about Transition Cultures→
From Linda Sanders
Friends of Gibson Creek
Tree Friends,
We are going back to City Hall this Wednesday. Fortunately the Tree Ordinance has moved up the agenda ladder to Unfinished Business Item 10a (See City Council Agenda). Since 12/3, Friends of Gibson Creek have been very busy meeting with the City Manager, communicating with council members and conversing and e-mailing members from ReLeaf, Main Street Program and City of Ukiah’s Paths Open Space & Creeks Commission. Ideally, we would like the Council to appoint a tree commission to work on tree protection using the City of Davis’ Tree Program as a model for Ukiah.
Look for Bruni Kobbe’s article in the Ukiah Daily Journal that should run before Wednesdays City Council meeting. Thanks so much to all of you who came to the last Council meeting on 12/3. It was a test of patience. I anticipate a better reception this time but one never really knows. Your support is crucial, please add your voice on the 17th.
Quotes from Dave Pollard at How To Save The Earth
Quote from Kurt Vonnegut:
Our daily news sources, newspapers and TV, are now so craven*, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books do we learn what’s really going on.
*weak, spiritless, cowardly
Anna Taylor, Anderson Valley, passes this along:
Comment letters received in response to the Draft General Plan Update and Draft Environmental Impact Report documents are available for review on the Planning Team Website. Attachments, including attached letters, are included although not separately listed. Email addresses have been blacked out. The comment period for inclusion of each comment and response within the Draft Final Environmental Impact Report began with the release of the Draft General Plan Update on July 21, 2008; the Draft EIR on September 18, 2008; the subsequent comment period ending on November 18, 2008.
To view the letters, go to www.co.mendocino.ca.us/planningteam. Go to “What’s New” on the homepage, or to the “Master Calendar” on the General Plan Update page.
For assistance in accessing this information, please telephone the Planning Team at (707) 467-2569.
Sally Palacio
Administrative Assistant
Mendocino County Planning Team
From Dave Smith
See update below…
A local merchant forwards this:
A dollar spent at a locally-owned store is usually spent 6 – 15 times before it leaves the community.
From $1 you create $5 – $14 in value within the community.
Spend $1 at a national chain store and 80% of it leaves immediately.
Thanks for contributing to our sustainable community.
Quote: Tim Mitchell, first cited in E magazine, article available through the Northwest Earth Institute’s Choices for Sustainable Living discussion course book.
~
Update 12/11/08: The local Chamber of Commerce sent this quote out to their email list today, and soon thereafter a retraction email was sent out and replaced with the same quote minus this part: “Spend $1 at a national chain store and 80% of it leaves immediately.”
H-m-m-m…
From Dave Smith
Jeff Vail:
This post will argue that, when measured from the perspective of the median participant, decentralization offers a superior structure for both economic and political organization, a structure that may prove far more sustainable in a post-peak world than our current, centralized, hierarchal patterns of organization. Suburbia, not as a model for material consumption, but as a legal and social lattice of decentralized and more uniformly distributed production land ownership, has the potential to serve as the foundation for just such a pioneering adaptation—a Resilient Suburbia.
Continue reading A Resilient Suburbia 4: Accounting for the Value of Decentralization→
From Dave Smith
Excerpt from Gene Logsdon post today over at OrganicToBe.org:
I walk from one part of my property to another as through a continuous wilderness. The vegetable rows, the woods, the pasture, the creek bottom, the little grain- and hayfields are all “garden.” They are all part of the Great Garden that once covered the Earth and might cover it again. As I walk, I pass only from one realm of the Great Garden to another. The more indeterminately the borders coalesce, the more assuredly I achieve the oneness of the natural continuum.
Continue reading My Wilderness →
From Dave Smith
From Dave Smith
Over the years, our community has engaged in Buy Local, Shop Local, Localization, Support Locally-Owned Business, and other educational and action efforts with some limited success.
But the timing of individual leadership and our community’s awareness and urgency has never coalesced effectively or long-term around the efforts.
Recently, one of our local merchants realized that his major product was not selling, and he had an “Oh Shit! Moment.” The economy was crashing, local customers were not visiting his store, and it was affecting him personally. He got on the phone and sent out emails and organized meetings and the business community jumped on the bandwagon and created an effective Buy Local campaign in days that woke up the local merchants and the community.
The urgency of one person (the hundredth monkey?), and the response of the community as a whole, created action on a grand local scale… at least for Holiday 2008. And then what? On to Blackholesville?
In the future, there will be Oh Shit! Moments around local food, farming, energy, money, media, water, and more, just like the consumer and credit scares of this moment. We’ve had several scares in past years — with momentary, urgent action — then the momentum drifted off into black holes somewhere. The energy scare during the seventies certainly created awareness, but the culture as a whole drifted off once again into ignorance when the emergency was over.
Here’s to more epiphanies that create long-term actions for the common good. It looks like this time there’ll be no second chance.
From Dave Smith
Business Guru Seth Goden recently wrote the following:
Great caption for a cartoon in this week’s New Yorker:
There’s a lot I want to experience, but not a lot I want to actually do.
In my exposure to companies big and small, this is probably the single biggest gulf. Lots of people there for the ride, not so many actually doing.
Doing appears risky, because it exposes you to criticism and perhaps failure. Experiencing is hot right now, being part of the social network, helping maintain that online tribe you belong to.
Getting your ducks in a row is not nearly as powerful as actually doing something with your duck.
How’s your duck doing?
From Dave Smith
Stoneleigh over at The Automatic Earth:
By understanding the nature and direction of social mood, it is possible to resist becoming part of a highly unconstructive consensus, although there may be a social price to pay for doing so. Retaining trust in one’s fellow man will become harder and harder, especially at a societal level. This is why we recommend establishing and cementing relationships of trust at the local level as soon as possible, as such relationships are the most valuable thing you can have in times of great upheaval.
Read more of Markets and the Lemming Factor at The Automatic Earth
From Dave Smith
From Dave Smith
Remember when Joe Wildman ran for Supervisor in the 1st District? One highlight was Joe’s famous sense of humor. Check his rejected campaign slogans (pdf file).
“This election is about change… can you spare any?”
From Dave Smith thanks to The Thom Hartmann radio program
Larry Beinhart over at The Huffington Post has the facts:
THE MYTH
Do tax cuts stimulate the economy?
Yes. Tax cuts allow people to keep more of their own money therefore they have more to invest and spend into the economy and more money to start business and create jobs therefore also helping to stimulate the economy.
“I think when people take a look back at this moment in our economic history, they’ll recognize tax cuts work. They have made a difference.” ~George W. Bush
THE REALITIES
The brute facts are these:
Large income tax cuts are followed by a bubble and then a crash.
High income taxes correlate with economic growth.
Income tax increases are followed by economic growth.
Moderate income tax cuts are followed by a flat economy.
All this is especially true as applied to the top tax rates, the amount paid on income that exceeds the highest bracket.
THE THREE GREAT TAX CUTS: BOOM, BUBBLE, CRASH…
Continue Reading Tax Cuts: Theology, Facts and Totally F**cked at The Huffington Post →
Top ten reasons!
Continue Reading Why Support Locally Owned Businesses?
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