Dear all,
What a time we’ve been through! Now that the inauguration is behind us, we’re no longer waiting to exhale, and are breathing some better air, I’m looking forward to being able to turn our attention to other things. But I think it might still be too early. So I’m going to wait till next month to share some thinking about settler relationships with indigenous experience, and go with a brief reflection on the transition we are currently in.
I’m continuing to love being out in the mornings when darkness turns to light, and am thankful for all the points of goodness, hope and connection that are there to be found when I put my attention in their direction.
Love,
Pamela
With a new administration, many of us are feeling great relief in the break from unrelenting coarseness and constant abrasion in our public discourse. Yet I can’t help but reflect on the reality that many others among us actually found this tone attractive. As I wondered what there could be to love about coarseness, I began to consider that its opposite—smooth—can be problematic as well.
Think of those slick politicians whose oily speeches cover real issues with a slippery coat of fine-sounding words that leaves no place to get a grip. Or think of the smooth surface of a carefully crafted, but ultimately false, pseudo-reality that provides its inhabitants with no way to see, much less challenge, its lies. Or just think of an icy sidewalk, the ultimate in smoothness, and how good it would be to have a little grit beneath your feet.
As someone who has done my share of wood repair, I know that sometimes you need to first abrade the surfaces you want to join before applying the glue. Two smooth surfaces cannot easily come together in a strong bond. Those little wood fibers need to be sticking out, to give the glue something to hold onto.
Now make no mistake. I am thrilled to be free from the unrelenting coarseness that was the hallmark of our last president. The continual abrasion was painful, like having one’s elbows and knees freshly scraped each day, constantly raw and unprotected. I rest deeply in a new tone of civility and kindness. And I have a great respect for the power of courtesy in helping the complex mechanisms of social interaction to function smoothly. Yet I’m not prepared to give up on grit, or on the people who would choose it over smoothness.
What would it mean for all of us who are feeling such relief on the departure of Trump to commit with equal intensity to cutting through nice words to expose painful truths, to challenge a smoothness that chooses comfort over justice, to willingly follow anger to its source? Maybe there’s something to be learned about the abrasion of the sandpaper as well as the smoothness of the glue that together create the conditions for a stronger mend.
Community service
When COVID came
the only reading source nearby
was the tiny free library box
at the corner of the park.
Our house was stuffed with books
we’d never read again
so every morning on my walk
I took three or four to share
all through the spring.
I loved to see them gone,
knowing they’d been chosen,
adding value to a stranger’s life.
By June I finish culling every shelf,
begin to look for free books on my walks,
to save them from the rain
and from the trash, for higher use.
All fall I bring my little offering
each early morning, straighten shelves
notice what has come in
what has gone.
Then one day, deep in winter,
I see a woman stop, consider
choose a book, walk on—
a human face to this need I have served
for all these months.
Dare to imagine: a new economy is possible!
All fall I bring my little offering
each early morning, straighten shelves
notice what has come in
what has gone.
Then one day, deep in winter,
I see a woman stop, consider
choose a book, walk on—
a human face to this need I have served
for all these months.
Dare to imagine: a new economy is possible!
Battery recycling
With the demand for batteries soaring, especially in the growing electric car market, and more than 500,000 tons of lithium batteries being tossed worldwide, we need a “circular” system that builds the next generation of batteries from the materials of the last.
Start-up, Redwood Materials, currently handles all the waste materials and defective batteries coming out of the nearby Tesla Gigafactory, using proprietary processes involving a combination of burning batteries to melt their contents and submerging them in liquids that leach out desired elements, recovering 95% to 98% of the nickel, cobalt, aluminum, graphite, and more than 80% of the lithium. Much of those materials are sold back to make new Tesla batteries.
Another start-up, Li-Cycle, collects batteries at local “spoke” facilities, which shred them into three components: plastic casings, mixed metals (such as foils), and the active materials like cobalt and nickel at the battery’s heart — a dark dust known as “black mass.” Li-Cycle can sell these materials directly or ship the black mass to a central “hub” factory and immerse it in liquids in a process that extracts the metals, including lithium, at 90% to 95% efficiency.
A more efficient route may be to recycle batteries at a level of renovation rather than demolition, salvaging their larger molecular structure as opposed to their atoms. In the case of lithium-ion batteries, this means replacing the lithium, a little bit of which gets stuck to the battery’s molecular scaffolding during every charge and discharge until the battery runs out of freely flowing lithium. OnTo Technology, a battery research firm, has disassembled recalled Apple batteries, and soaked their active materials in a lithium-rich bath to restore them to pristine condition, with the final product marking the first full fuel cell re-assembled from an industrial source.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/12/amazon-panasonic-preparing-for-demand-of-battery-recycling.html
With the demand for batteries soaring, especially in the growing electric car market, and more than 500,000 tons of lithium batteries being tossed worldwide, we need a “circular” system that builds the next generation of batteries from the materials of the last.
Start-up, Redwood Materials, currently handles all the waste materials and defective batteries coming out of the nearby Tesla Gigafactory, using proprietary processes involving a combination of burning batteries to melt their contents and submerging them in liquids that leach out desired elements, recovering 95% to 98% of the nickel, cobalt, aluminum, graphite, and more than 80% of the lithium. Much of those materials are sold back to make new Tesla batteries.
Another start-up, Li-Cycle, collects batteries at local “spoke” facilities, which shred them into three components: plastic casings, mixed metals (such as foils), and the active materials like cobalt and nickel at the battery’s heart — a dark dust known as “black mass.” Li-Cycle can sell these materials directly or ship the black mass to a central “hub” factory and immerse it in liquids in a process that extracts the metals, including lithium, at 90% to 95% efficiency.
A more efficient route may be to recycle batteries at a level of renovation rather than demolition, salvaging their larger molecular structure as opposed to their atoms. In the case of lithium-ion batteries, this means replacing the lithium, a little bit of which gets stuck to the battery’s molecular scaffolding during every charge and discharge until the battery runs out of freely flowing lithium. OnTo Technology, a battery research firm, has disassembled recalled Apple batteries, and soaked their active materials in a lithium-rich bath to restore them to pristine condition, with the final product marking the first full fuel cell re-assembled from an industrial source.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/12/amazon-panasonic-preparing-for-demand-of-battery-recycling.html
Some things that have made me hopeful recently. (This month I find myself thinking of groups, rather than events)
The Public Banking Institute is the umbrella under which a remarkable movement is taking place, for reclaiming our public resources from private profit-maximizing financial institutions back to public use for public good.
https://www.publicbankinginstitute.org/
Friends Peace Teams, Asia West Pacific, supports peace workers in areas of conflict and suffering, seeking to restore and nurture peace, share stories of nonviolence, healing and reconciliation, discover our common humanity and celebrate our rich cultural diversity.
https://friendspeaceteams.org/awp/
Friends Peace Teams, Asia West Pacific, supports peace workers in areas of conflict and suffering, seeking to restore and nurture peace, share stories of nonviolence, healing and reconciliation, discover our common humanity and celebrate our rich cultural diversity.
https://friendspeaceteams.org/awp/
Ekta Parishad, a mass-based Gandhian peoples' movement for land rights in India, with an active membership of 250,000 landless poor, promotes nonviolence as a way for the struggle, dialogue, and constructive actions towards building a peaceful and just society.
https://www.ektaparishadindia.org/oursuccess
Germantown Residents for Economic Alternatives Together (GREAT), a grassroots and visionary group of neighbors in Philadelphia sharing common interest in working toward cooperative ownership, resource/skill-sharing, and active citizenship where people of the community shape the development that occurs.
https://www.greatgtown.org/
Germantown Residents for Economic Alternatives Together (GREAT), a grassroots and visionary group of neighbors in Philadelphia sharing common interest in working toward cooperative ownership, resource/skill-sharing, and active citizenship where people of the community shape the development that occurs.
https://www.greatgtown.org/
Resources
Finding Steady Ground
If you need reminding of some simple ways to stay grounded in challenging times, I recommend this website, which I helped a friend develop following the last presidential election.
www.findingsteadyground.com
Other resources 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
Climate Resistance Handbook, or I was part of a climate action. Now what? https://commonslibrary.org/climate-resistance-handbook-or-i-was-part-of-a-climate-action-now-what/
Leading Groups On-Line. https://www.trainingforchange.org/training_tools/leading-groups-online-book/
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
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: New link: https://www.peaceworkersus.org/docs/muscle_building_for_peace_and_justice.pdf (or just google the title)
Finding Steady Ground
If you need reminding of some simple ways to stay grounded in challenging times, I recommend this website, which I helped a friend develop following the last presidential election.
www.findingsteadyground.com
Other resources 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
Climate Resistance Handbook, or I was part of a climate action. Now what? https://commonslibrary.org/climate-resistance-handbook-or-i-was-part-of-a-climate-action-now-what/
Leading Groups On-Line. https://www.trainingforchange.org/training_tools/leading-groups-online-book/
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
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: New link: https://www.peaceworkersus.org/docs/muscle_building_for_peace_and_justice.pdf (or just google the title)
