Dear all,
It’s been a rich month—a weekend reunion of the nonviolent social change community that shaped my life as a young adult; the first frost and then a freeze, signaling the end of the growing season; lovely community building opportunities at work as I look, with profound ambivalence, toward retirement; grandchildren; precious time with new and old friends—and tomorrow we leave for three weeks in Northern Uganda. Oh my!
It’s good to take this quiet moment with all of you. Thanks for being there.
Love,
Pamela
Hemlocks
Last spring, faced with a threat to a beloved hemlock forest in northern Pennsylvania, I couldn’t imagine just sitting back and doing nothing. But how can one person take on an invasive insect? The only thing I could think of was to be proactive in planting other trees. So I worked to propagate a flat of tiny slips of larch, cut from the tips of a healthy larch that grows near the hemlocks by the pond.
It didn’t work. I must have done some part of the process wrong, and each fresh little green slip eventually dried up and died. But while I was in motion, I looked up the name of the tiny insect that was sucking the life out of these great trees. Browsing the internet, I found not only its name—woolly adelgid—but the name of a group that offered a biological remedy. A new seed began to take root and grow.
I shared this resource with my biologist friend, John, who had first seen the telltale whiteness on the tip of a hemlock branch. They seemed legitimate to him, and I reached out. We were offered an on-site consultation, but only during a narrow window of time in the fall, and only on a weekday. The logistics were daunting, but finally one evening in late October we got in a car and headed north.
Hurtling through the night in our little cocoon, we took advantage of this spacious opportunity to catch up on months of news. As we got closer, on narrow roads winding through deep woods, we caught glimpses of the gold of fall in the maples. Then we were there, stepping out into a starry night, opening up a cold cabin at midnight and burrowing under covers. In the morning, there was the luxury of reading by the fire as we waited for the Tree Savers man to complete his two-hour journey to this bit of woods.
With no cell phone service and no address for a GPS, the directions I’d sent in advance were all we had, but he found us. We walked together to look at the hemlocks around the pond, then back to the cabin to the ones I had transplanted twenty years ago—now big young trees—then down the old logging road, through the fields that are now turning to woods, to the forest in the gorge, where we could hear the stream rushing over the little waterfall. This is one of my favorite places on earth, where you step out of the sunshine into the quiet cool cathedral of towering hemlocks.
I liked this young man. His cousin had invited him into her project when he was just sixteen, he’d gone off to college in environmental science, and now this was all he did. His knowledge about the trees, the life cycle of the wooly adelgid, and the habits of the beetle that survives by eating it, was deep. He was proud of the work they were doing together to breed this foreign beetle and help save hemlock forests all up and down the east coast. And he loved the trees. He would stand back and take in an individual hemlock—admiring its shape, its fullness, its color.
Clearly we were in good hands. And best of all, we might not be too late. He spoke of seeing miles of devastated hemlock forest not far away, all dead and gray. “But your trees are still healthy,” he said. “You’ve caught it in time.”
We came back to the cabin, worked out the beginnings of a plan, and noted the details I’d need to get clarified before presenting a proposal to the larger group. Then he left. And John and I packed our few things and got back in the car for the long ride home.
There was an otherworldly quality to the whole experience—that journey in the dark, meeting a young stranger in the middle of the woods, bearer of the gift of precious good news, then traveling back to our real lives, seemingly unchanged, but carrying that treasure within us. And the message continues to warm my heart. It’s good to try. Little seeds can grow to bear fruit. And maybe we’re not too late. Maybe we can do this thing.
Rain choice
Out from work
and into steady rain.
I’ll reach the trolley quickest turning right
yet there’s a sandwich
lying heavy in my bag.
I missed my homeless friend
on the way in,
won’t find him if I take the shorter route,
may not find him anyhow.
I hover as the rain pours down
and then turn left
at rest in that good choice.
And then I find him,
give the sandwich
chat beneath an overhang—
a spot of brightness
in the midst of all that rain.
Dare to Imagine: A new economy is possible!
Green Bay Packers Coop
The Green Bay Packers football team are owned by the fans, making them the only publicly owned, not-for-profit, major professional team in the United States. In 1923, the Packers, on the brink of bankruptcy, decided to sell shares to the community at a couple of dollars a piece to keep the team afloat. Now more than a hundred thousand stockholders own more than four million shares. They are limited to no more than two hundred thousand shares, keeping any individual from gaining control over the club. Shareholders receive no dividend check and no free tickets. They elect a board of directors and a seven-member executive committee to stand in at N.F.L. owners meetings, with football decisions made by the General Manager.
Wisconsin fans get to enjoy the team with the confidence that their owner won’t threaten to move to get a better deal. Volunteers work concessions, with sixty per cent of the proceeds going to local charities. Even the beer is cheaper than at a typical N.F.L. stadium. Not only has home field been sold out for two decades, but during snowstorms, the team routinely puts out calls for volunteers to help shovel and is never disappointed by the response.
https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/those-non-profit-packers
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
So many successful local efforts to combat fossil fuels:
--a Philippine province declared coal free https://www.rappler.com/move-ph/225951-youth-behind-coal-free-negros-occidental,
--a Berkeley ordinance banning the use of natural gas in new construction https://www.dailycal.org/2019/08/07/mayor-jesse-arreguin-officially-signs-natural-gas-ban-into-berkeley-law/mayor,
--a coal plant project that would have damaged a fragile marine ecosystem in Kenya stopped by the courts, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/kenya-court-stops-china-backed-lamu-coal-plant-project/ar-AADut6v,
--and New York City’s sweeping climate change legislation, https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/04/new-york-city-just-passed-historic-climate-legislation-its-own-green-new-deal/
New “right to repair” legislation in the European Union that includes requirements for improving the life span, maintenance, re-use, upgrade, recyclability, and waste handling of appliances. https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/eu-approves-groundbreaking-right-to-repair-laws/
All the thousands of people who worked so hard to send a great Working Families Party candidate to Philadelphia City Council—and all the other hopeful election news.
A grassroots bee petition in Bavaria that garnered signatures from more than 10% of the population, and led the German state’s premier to have the petition’s language—turning grassland into meadow and calling for a third of farms to be organic—written into law. https://www.positive.news/environment/grassroots-bee-petition-forces-greener-farming-measures-in-bavaria/
Resources
Money and Soul
My new book (based on a pamphlet of the same name) available via QuakerBooks or other on-line distributors.
("If money troubles your soul, try this down-to-earth Quaker perspective on economies large and small.")
Money, Debt and Liberation
A video of a talk I gave at Pendle Hill in January, 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7nP8eJ5vy8
Toward a Right Relationship with Finance
A book that I co-authored on Debt, Interest, Growth and Security.
The growth economy is failing to provide equitable well-being for humanity and a life-sustaining future for Earth. However our institutional endowments and individual retirement are dependent on that same growth economy. This book:
• offers background on our current economic system--how it is based on unearned income on the one hand and debt on the other, with a built-in momentum toward economy inequality and ecological overshoot;
• frames the conversation within the context of our deepest values and beliefs;
• suggests plausible and historically grounded alternatives to the current system, particularly with regard to financing retirement; and
• invites everyone to imagine new forms of durable economic and social security, and to help create the relationships and institutions that will make them a reality.
With many people now counting as never before on the performance of Wall Street for retirement security, how can this system be challenged with integrity and effectiveness? Can we break with our dependence on financial speculation and build up new structures of security in a transformed, life-centered economy?
To order the book, or read it on line, go to http://www.quakerinstitute.org/?page_id=5 and scroll down.
More resources
www.findingsteadyground.com
Resource from my friend Daniel Hunter, Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide. http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide
Posts on other web/blog sites:
In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust
http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby
Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years: https://www.trainingforchange.org/publications/muscle-building-peace-and-justice-nonviolent-workout-routine-21st-century (or just google the title)
