Dear friends,
My love for the earth has led me in a couple of strikingly different directions this week, and I'm feeling called to share, even though you heard from me not that long ago.
Last Saturday was a warm day that seemed like a herald of spring, and I realized that this was the time to prune the cherry and peach trees that I'd planted in the community garden. It feels like a great responsibility--doing right by the trees that help nourish us, and I put time into doing it as well as I could.
Then on Monday, I participated in a protest against the Keystone XL pipeline**. I went with the intention of risking arrest--a big stretch for me--but ended up standing aside. It was clear that those of us who stayed all day, singing and supporting the civil disobedience were critical to the success of the event as well, and I went home with tons to think about: different kids of courage; what it means to stay fully awake to both the situation around me and what's going on inside; the puzzle of how to put your body on the line when the line is not visible. All that will take some time to brew, and you may hear more later...
But I also came home very much under the weight of the threat of the pipeline, particularly since it looks likely that the President may well make a decision on it in the next couple of weeks. So I decided to do something that can't be more different from risking arrest: writing a letter to the President. Actually I've written three so far, with two more in the works, and posted them on several FB pages. I'd like to invite you to join me.
So here's what I've got for you today:
Five letters to the President, and a link to his e-mail page (you're welcome to any or all of my text).
A promise to be in touch about the issues the protest brought up for me.
And a poem from last March about pruning.
Love,
Pamela
**For those of you who may not be aware, this is a plan to pipe crude oil from the Alberta tar sands in Canada through the prairies of the midwest for export from the Gulf coast. It seems clear that exploiting the tar sands fully would tip climate change to a trajectory that is irreversible and life-threatening, and that the pipeline would not only encourage that exploitation, but also pose enormous threat to the land and water supplies on its route. For more information, go to http://350.org/campaigns/stop-keystone-xl/
Dear President Obama
I implore you to do what you know is right, and stop the Keystone XL pipeline. Big money will hate and vilify you for it, and your short term legacy may be compromised by their lies. But if you do the right thing, and we end up with a future on this planet, all the world's grandchildren and great grandchildren will thank you for the single most important action that you took to ensure their chance to flourish.
In making your decision about the Keystone XL pipeline, please keep the needs of the seventh generation in the front of your mind. You don't have to be re-elected. You have the luxury to do the right thing. Go down in history as a climate hero--the one who turned the tide.
You have an unprecedented chance to make a difference for the whole world by stopping the Keystone XL pipeline. Please do the right thing. Don't give in to big money. I bet you'll sleep better at night.
We're smart enough to find a way to live with less oil. Please choose for the potential of our intelligence rather than for the pressures of greed. Say no to the Keystone CL pipeline and yes to a still-unknown, but potentially livable future.
I could offer pages of scientific reasons to stop the Keystone XL pipeline, but at root I think it's a simple moral choice: health is more important than money. Ultimately we can't build a healthy economy on the foundation of an unhealthy earth. Our children and grandchildren won't thrive. Please do the right thing.
And here's the link: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comments
On a fruit tree pruning workshop at Bartram’s Garden
The melody line dips and soars
through roots, buds, branches
soil, sun, fruit.
The base is a steady
love, love, love.
The buds will lead the way in spring
while the roots are still asleep—
They touch the sun.
Remember the children when you prune—
They need a place to sit
a way to climb.
Feed the trees with a woodsy compost mix—
Think of what they love
and how the fungi nourish them.
I’d cut back on the branches here—
Make it so the sun can find a way
to kiss the fruit.
I would have stayed all day
never mind the standing or the cold
just to hear that song.
I don’t remember all the words
I wish I could—
I treasured every one.
But the base stays with me
heartbeat of the universe
love, love, love.
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Sunday, March 2, 2014
#129 Honoring Our Elders
Dear all,
I was privileged to spend a week in February with the extended family we have claimed in Poland. It is always good to be reminded that my country is not the center of the world. For me this time, it was even more important to be reminded that our connections with each other are the threads that make up the fabric of community, Any change for the better requires those threads to be strong, and my thread is more important to the lives it crosses and weaves through than I can easily remember.
Thanks for crossing my life--and I send warm hopes for spring!
Love,
Pamela
Honoring our elders
Last spring I had the privilege of participating in a local event to honor our neighborhood elders, organized by a friend of mine. She had encouraged neighborhood groups and congregations to nominate an elder from their midst whose life had been long, fruitful and inspiring. Then friends and neighbors gathered at a local community hall to honor them. For each, a brief bio was read, they stood up (as able) to share a few remarks, and then received a certificate and the appreciation of those present. Black and white, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish, everyone in our diverse and changing neighborhood was united in being thankful for the lives of these eight elders. The concept was simple, the impact unexpectedly profound.
Our society in general is not that great with aging, and our heady faith that technology can win out over old age and death is troubling on many fronts. Our love affair with youth verges on obsession. The last 300 years has been a whirlwind of innovation, with newer and better replacing the old and familiar at a dizzying rate. With our newest gadgets now completely obsolete in a matter of years, what used to be valued as wisdom is easily consigned to the trash bin of irrelevance.
But there are more and more signs that a viable future requires a concern for our roots, that we need all the wisdom from the past that we can get our hands on and our minds around. There is the great accumulated wisdom of our ecosystems; the wisdom of our cultural traditions, and of indigenous peoples from all over the world; the wisdom of our grandparents. My grandfather took delight in a hole well dug—and in the digging of it. My grandmother coaxed bounty out of her garden, and used the smallest scraps of fabric to create both utility and beauty.
There is wisdom; there is also vulnerability. As we are coming through the bitterest winter I can remember, I’m getting better at remembering my elderly neighbors. It was a shock to realize that I’m not good at this. Raised in a community of all young families, we had no elderly neighbors—nobody to shovel for, nobody who needed looking in on when the power was out. I grew up with an unaware assumption of physical competence and self-sufficiency as a norm, and I now wonder if that assumption fed a lack of attention to vulnerability in other forms and places.
I’m up for the challenge of embracing more fully both the wisdom and the vulnerability in our communities—the long-time ecosystems that support us; our native peoples; our elders. In the midst of winter, I am shoveling for my elderly neighbors, calling shut ins—and I am looking forward to spring and another opportunity to honor our neighborhood elders.
Language density
The week was dense with Polish--
all those deep and subtle sounds
that fill the air
in homes, streets, subways, shops
as people go about their Polish days
and talk, and talk and talk.
We were with friends, family to us
cocooned in English and their love.
Others were kind and helped us on our way
so we were not lost.
Translation helped. I listened, tried
remembered more from day to day
rejoiced in all I understood.
But still the language did not bend
to ear or tongue.
Even leaving, at the airport, on the plane,
the signs and sounds stayed true
to native land.
Animated Polish filled those narrow chutes
as we came out to London’s vast Heathrow—
then lost its density, thinning away
in moments to nothing but a wisp
in that great space filled solidly
with English.
More comfortable, but all the same
a loss, somehow.
Imagine: A new economy is possible!
Local currency
Just days into the job last year, the mayor of the city of Bristol in England announced his decision to be paid in Bristol Pounds. This local currency is designed to support Bristol’s independent businesses, strengthen its economy and keep the city’s high streets diverse and distinctive. A not-for-profit social enterprise run between the Bristol Pound Community Interest Company and Bristol Credit Union, the Bristol Pound is the UK’s first city-wide local currency.
Bristol Pounds are purchased with British Pounds and can be spent with any of the more than 500 businesses that have signed up. Additionally, the program operates online banking and has a text message payment system. Says Bristol Pound director Chris Sunderland, “Of all the money spent in a city, most of it leaves the city almost as soon as it’s spent. It goes up to the financial institutions and gets lost. What people can be sure of with Bristol Pounds is that they’re circulating in the city and that’s where they’ll stay,” he said.
http://www.positivenewsus.org/mayor-of-bristol.html
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
How fruit and vegetable auctions in rural Ohio area are getting fresh vegetables into food deserts, building community, and helping rural Appalachian farmers earn a living. http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/how-a-fruit-and-vegetable-auction-in-rural-ohio-helps-appalachian-farmers-thrive
How peace, faith, environmental and union groups got Connecticut, one of the most defense-dependent states in the nation, to pass legislation convening a broad-based Commission to come up with a plan to diversify Connecticut’s overly defense-dependent economy. http://www.ips-dc.org/blog/demilitarizing_the_economy_a_movement_is_underway
A reduction in homelessness in Utah by 78 percent, based on a recognition that it is more cost effective to give people an apartment and social work services than to pay for the annual ER and jail costs associated with homelessness. http://www.nationofchange.org/utah-ending-homelessness-giving-people-homes-1390056183
The new constitution, recently agreed upon in Tunisia, which includes guaranteed equality between men and women, a mandate for environmental protection, a declaration that health care is a human right, and a democratic system with rights to due process and respect for freedom of religion.
More resources
Posts on other people's blogs: http://www.classism.org/children-mass-culture
NEW: Check out my friend Daniel Hunter's new book, a narrative of direct action campaigning: Strategy & Soul: A Campaigner's Tale of Fighting Billionaires, Corrupt Officials, and Philadelphia Casinos: www.strategyandsoul.org
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: doingdemocracy.com/MB4PnJ02.htm (or just google the title)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.org, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years.
www.startguide.org. START: a way to study and work together with others to create a better world.
For earlier columns, go to www.pamelascolumn.blogspot.com. I'm currently posting at pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com.
I was privileged to spend a week in February with the extended family we have claimed in Poland. It is always good to be reminded that my country is not the center of the world. For me this time, it was even more important to be reminded that our connections with each other are the threads that make up the fabric of community, Any change for the better requires those threads to be strong, and my thread is more important to the lives it crosses and weaves through than I can easily remember.
Thanks for crossing my life--and I send warm hopes for spring!
Love,
Pamela
Honoring our elders
Last spring I had the privilege of participating in a local event to honor our neighborhood elders, organized by a friend of mine. She had encouraged neighborhood groups and congregations to nominate an elder from their midst whose life had been long, fruitful and inspiring. Then friends and neighbors gathered at a local community hall to honor them. For each, a brief bio was read, they stood up (as able) to share a few remarks, and then received a certificate and the appreciation of those present. Black and white, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish, everyone in our diverse and changing neighborhood was united in being thankful for the lives of these eight elders. The concept was simple, the impact unexpectedly profound.
Our society in general is not that great with aging, and our heady faith that technology can win out over old age and death is troubling on many fronts. Our love affair with youth verges on obsession. The last 300 years has been a whirlwind of innovation, with newer and better replacing the old and familiar at a dizzying rate. With our newest gadgets now completely obsolete in a matter of years, what used to be valued as wisdom is easily consigned to the trash bin of irrelevance.
But there are more and more signs that a viable future requires a concern for our roots, that we need all the wisdom from the past that we can get our hands on and our minds around. There is the great accumulated wisdom of our ecosystems; the wisdom of our cultural traditions, and of indigenous peoples from all over the world; the wisdom of our grandparents. My grandfather took delight in a hole well dug—and in the digging of it. My grandmother coaxed bounty out of her garden, and used the smallest scraps of fabric to create both utility and beauty.
There is wisdom; there is also vulnerability. As we are coming through the bitterest winter I can remember, I’m getting better at remembering my elderly neighbors. It was a shock to realize that I’m not good at this. Raised in a community of all young families, we had no elderly neighbors—nobody to shovel for, nobody who needed looking in on when the power was out. I grew up with an unaware assumption of physical competence and self-sufficiency as a norm, and I now wonder if that assumption fed a lack of attention to vulnerability in other forms and places.
I’m up for the challenge of embracing more fully both the wisdom and the vulnerability in our communities—the long-time ecosystems that support us; our native peoples; our elders. In the midst of winter, I am shoveling for my elderly neighbors, calling shut ins—and I am looking forward to spring and another opportunity to honor our neighborhood elders.
Language density
The week was dense with Polish--
all those deep and subtle sounds
that fill the air
in homes, streets, subways, shops
as people go about their Polish days
and talk, and talk and talk.
We were with friends, family to us
cocooned in English and their love.
Others were kind and helped us on our way
so we were not lost.
Translation helped. I listened, tried
remembered more from day to day
rejoiced in all I understood.
But still the language did not bend
to ear or tongue.
Even leaving, at the airport, on the plane,
the signs and sounds stayed true
to native land.
Animated Polish filled those narrow chutes
as we came out to London’s vast Heathrow—
then lost its density, thinning away
in moments to nothing but a wisp
in that great space filled solidly
with English.
More comfortable, but all the same
a loss, somehow.
Imagine: A new economy is possible!
Local currency
Just days into the job last year, the mayor of the city of Bristol in England announced his decision to be paid in Bristol Pounds. This local currency is designed to support Bristol’s independent businesses, strengthen its economy and keep the city’s high streets diverse and distinctive. A not-for-profit social enterprise run between the Bristol Pound Community Interest Company and Bristol Credit Union, the Bristol Pound is the UK’s first city-wide local currency.
Bristol Pounds are purchased with British Pounds and can be spent with any of the more than 500 businesses that have signed up. Additionally, the program operates online banking and has a text message payment system. Says Bristol Pound director Chris Sunderland, “Of all the money spent in a city, most of it leaves the city almost as soon as it’s spent. It goes up to the financial institutions and gets lost. What people can be sure of with Bristol Pounds is that they’re circulating in the city and that’s where they’ll stay,” he said.
http://www.positivenewsus.org/mayor-of-bristol.html
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
How fruit and vegetable auctions in rural Ohio area are getting fresh vegetables into food deserts, building community, and helping rural Appalachian farmers earn a living. http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/how-a-fruit-and-vegetable-auction-in-rural-ohio-helps-appalachian-farmers-thrive
How peace, faith, environmental and union groups got Connecticut, one of the most defense-dependent states in the nation, to pass legislation convening a broad-based Commission to come up with a plan to diversify Connecticut’s overly defense-dependent economy. http://www.ips-dc.org/blog/demilitarizing_the_economy_a_movement_is_underway
A reduction in homelessness in Utah by 78 percent, based on a recognition that it is more cost effective to give people an apartment and social work services than to pay for the annual ER and jail costs associated with homelessness. http://www.nationofchange.org/utah-ending-homelessness-giving-people-homes-1390056183
The new constitution, recently agreed upon in Tunisia, which includes guaranteed equality between men and women, a mandate for environmental protection, a declaration that health care is a human right, and a democratic system with rights to due process and respect for freedom of religion.
More resources
Posts on other people's blogs: http://www.classism.org/children-mass-culture
NEW: Check out my friend Daniel Hunter's new book, a narrative of direct action campaigning: Strategy & Soul: A Campaigner's Tale of Fighting Billionaires, Corrupt Officials, and Philadelphia Casinos: www.strategyandsoul.org
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: doingdemocracy.com/MB4PnJ02.htm (or just google the title)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.org, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years.
www.startguide.org. START: a way to study and work together with others to create a better world.
For earlier columns, go to www.pamelascolumn.blogspot.com. I'm currently posting at pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com.
Sunday, February 2, 2014
#128 Leaving the Land of I
Dear all,
A bitterly cold January has me extra thankful for warmth, in all its manifestations. Farmers say the cold is good for the land and the crops. I'm glad for that, but I find myself, along with the earth, turning toward the spring.
Love,
Pamela
Leaving the Land of I
It didn’t take a Kansas tornado for us to find ourselves in the Land of I. Many of us were born there and have lived there all our lives, not knowing any other place as home. For others our homeland has been transformed so gradually that it’s been hard to notice the change from day to day. Yet here each one of us is, surrounded by all the bright colors and the glittering promises.
All I have to do to be happy in the Land of I is to make the right choices among all the possibilities and opportunities that are flashing so insistently around me. What products will give me satisfaction, pleasure and status? What clothing will show me off to best advantage? What amusements will entertain? What friends will best fulfill my needs? What education will lead to the most satisfying career? What family will enhance my happiness? What choices will maximize my power and influence? Even, what good works can I undertake to fulfill my urge toward generosity and compassion?
If I choose well, I can have a good life and perhaps leave my mark on the world. If I stumble, I can correct and make a better selection. If I fall, I can hope for the strength to get up and try again. If I continue to struggle, it is because too many of my choices have been unwise.
In the Land of I, every person also gets a pair of rose-colored glasses—to make the colors and the promises more seductive, and to obscure the hard realities that nobody really wants to look at anyway. Immersed in the bustle and hype of the Land of I, it’s hard to imagine any other world. Yet one is there and available to all of us, just a click of the heels away.
This world is quieter. The choices are less insistent. The lights flash less, but burn more steadily. Rose-colored glasses are nowhere to be found, and we see things happening to others around us that make us grieve. There are still individual choices, but they are more subtle. How is my life entwined with those around me at this moment—and the next—and what attitude can I hold, what step can I take that will increase our overall welfare? In the longer term, how can I orient and equip myself to make my best and fullest contribution to this world, and how can I help others to do the same?
No longer in the Land of I, we don’t have to make all these choices on our own. In this world, others don’t care so much about the glitter of our clothes or social circles or careers, but they are deeply invested in promoting our gifts, our goodness and our potential.
None of us have to abandon our own center to live here; rather we all get to inhabit it more fully as each person finds a place in the middle of ever-greater circles of “we”. We get to be for ourselves and for others at the same time. But first we have to make the decision to leave the Land of I. If we can take off those rose-colored glasses, turn our backs on the glitter and the empty promises and start claiming our connections, together we can find our way back home.
Imagine--A new economy is possible!
Guaranteed basic income
In March 1973, the governor of Manitoba, Canada, began a $17 million experiment in implementing a minimum basic income: Mincome. With a hope to go national, the experiment took place in a small city with 13,000 inhabitants north of Winnipeg. To ensure that no one would drop below the poverty line, for four years about a thousand families, covering 30% of the city’s total population, received a monthly paycheck.
In 1978, the newly elected conservative government decided to stop the experiment cold. Decades later a researcher discovered the raw data, analyzed for years, and came to the these conclusions about the effects of Mincome: average marital age went up; birth rates went down; school completion improved; work hours decreased only to give mothers more time with new babies, and adolescents more education before taking work; hospital visits went down (an enormous cost savings); domestic violence decreased and mental health improved.
It’s been said that the big reason poor people are poor is because they don’t have enough money. Maybe it would be cheaper and more efficient to address poverty by guaranteeing a basic income than by setting up a myriad of services, steeped in distrust, hedged by regulations, and administered by vast expensive bureaucracies. An overwhelming majority in the U.S. endorsed President Nixon’s proposal for a modest basic income in1970. Maybe it’s time to revisit that idea.
For more, go to: https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money-to-everyone/35246939860-ec3a6c3e
Some things that have made me hopeful recently:
Thousands of North Carolinians who have been challenging the state government’s antidemocratic austerity agenda for the past 10 months in protests called Moral Mondays, organized by a coalition including unions, civil rights organizations, the faith community, and environmentalist and feminist groups. - http://labornotes.org/2014/01/moral-monday-protests-spread-out-north-carolina#sthash.IgawboNY.dpuf
The city of Los Angeles, that is starting the new year out with a ban on plastic bags, requiring shoppers to bring their own reusable bags or pay ten cents per paper bag--the largest U.S. city to have such a ban.
A judge in western Pennsylvania who has ruled, in a case where a natural gas fracking corporation was trying to keep pollution payouts secret, that corporations are not people, and cannot elevate their "private" rights above the rights of the people.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexia-parks/heroic-women-judge-debbie_b_3082265.html
A man from India who has single-handedly turned a barren sandbar into a 1360 acre forest.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWG70IlY4Kk
More resources
Posts on other people's blogs: http://www.classism.org/children-mass-culture
NEW: Check out my friend Daniel Hunter's new book, a narrative of direct action campaigning: Strategy & Soul: A Campaigner's Tale of Fighting Billionaires, Corrupt Officials, and Philadelphia Casinos: www.strategyandsoul.org
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: doingdemocracy.com/MB4PnJ02.htm (or just google the title)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.org, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years.
www.startguide.org. START: a way to study and work together with others to create a better world.
For earlier columns, go to www.pamelascolumn.blogspot.com. I'm currently posting at pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com.
My favorite magazine: YES! Magazine reframes the biggest problems of our time in terms of their solutions. Online and in print, they outline a path forward with in-depth analysis, tools for citizen engagement, and stories about real people working for a better world: www.yesmagazine.org
A bitterly cold January has me extra thankful for warmth, in all its manifestations. Farmers say the cold is good for the land and the crops. I'm glad for that, but I find myself, along with the earth, turning toward the spring.
Love,
Pamela
Leaving the Land of I
It didn’t take a Kansas tornado for us to find ourselves in the Land of I. Many of us were born there and have lived there all our lives, not knowing any other place as home. For others our homeland has been transformed so gradually that it’s been hard to notice the change from day to day. Yet here each one of us is, surrounded by all the bright colors and the glittering promises.
All I have to do to be happy in the Land of I is to make the right choices among all the possibilities and opportunities that are flashing so insistently around me. What products will give me satisfaction, pleasure and status? What clothing will show me off to best advantage? What amusements will entertain? What friends will best fulfill my needs? What education will lead to the most satisfying career? What family will enhance my happiness? What choices will maximize my power and influence? Even, what good works can I undertake to fulfill my urge toward generosity and compassion?
If I choose well, I can have a good life and perhaps leave my mark on the world. If I stumble, I can correct and make a better selection. If I fall, I can hope for the strength to get up and try again. If I continue to struggle, it is because too many of my choices have been unwise.
In the Land of I, every person also gets a pair of rose-colored glasses—to make the colors and the promises more seductive, and to obscure the hard realities that nobody really wants to look at anyway. Immersed in the bustle and hype of the Land of I, it’s hard to imagine any other world. Yet one is there and available to all of us, just a click of the heels away.
This world is quieter. The choices are less insistent. The lights flash less, but burn more steadily. Rose-colored glasses are nowhere to be found, and we see things happening to others around us that make us grieve. There are still individual choices, but they are more subtle. How is my life entwined with those around me at this moment—and the next—and what attitude can I hold, what step can I take that will increase our overall welfare? In the longer term, how can I orient and equip myself to make my best and fullest contribution to this world, and how can I help others to do the same?
No longer in the Land of I, we don’t have to make all these choices on our own. In this world, others don’t care so much about the glitter of our clothes or social circles or careers, but they are deeply invested in promoting our gifts, our goodness and our potential.
None of us have to abandon our own center to live here; rather we all get to inhabit it more fully as each person finds a place in the middle of ever-greater circles of “we”. We get to be for ourselves and for others at the same time. But first we have to make the decision to leave the Land of I. If we can take off those rose-colored glasses, turn our backs on the glitter and the empty promises and start claiming our connections, together we can find our way back home.
Imagine--A new economy is possible!
Guaranteed basic income
In March 1973, the governor of Manitoba, Canada, began a $17 million experiment in implementing a minimum basic income: Mincome. With a hope to go national, the experiment took place in a small city with 13,000 inhabitants north of Winnipeg. To ensure that no one would drop below the poverty line, for four years about a thousand families, covering 30% of the city’s total population, received a monthly paycheck.
In 1978, the newly elected conservative government decided to stop the experiment cold. Decades later a researcher discovered the raw data, analyzed for years, and came to the these conclusions about the effects of Mincome: average marital age went up; birth rates went down; school completion improved; work hours decreased only to give mothers more time with new babies, and adolescents more education before taking work; hospital visits went down (an enormous cost savings); domestic violence decreased and mental health improved.
It’s been said that the big reason poor people are poor is because they don’t have enough money. Maybe it would be cheaper and more efficient to address poverty by guaranteeing a basic income than by setting up a myriad of services, steeped in distrust, hedged by regulations, and administered by vast expensive bureaucracies. An overwhelming majority in the U.S. endorsed President Nixon’s proposal for a modest basic income in1970. Maybe it’s time to revisit that idea.
For more, go to: https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money-to-everyone/35246939860-ec3a6c3e
Some things that have made me hopeful recently:
Thousands of North Carolinians who have been challenging the state government’s antidemocratic austerity agenda for the past 10 months in protests called Moral Mondays, organized by a coalition including unions, civil rights organizations, the faith community, and environmentalist and feminist groups. - http://labornotes.org/2014/01/moral-monday-protests-spread-out-north-carolina#sthash.IgawboNY.dpuf
The city of Los Angeles, that is starting the new year out with a ban on plastic bags, requiring shoppers to bring their own reusable bags or pay ten cents per paper bag--the largest U.S. city to have such a ban.
A judge in western Pennsylvania who has ruled, in a case where a natural gas fracking corporation was trying to keep pollution payouts secret, that corporations are not people, and cannot elevate their "private" rights above the rights of the people.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexia-parks/heroic-women-judge-debbie_b_3082265.html
A man from India who has single-handedly turned a barren sandbar into a 1360 acre forest.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWG70IlY4Kk
More resources
Posts on other people's blogs: http://www.classism.org/children-mass-culture
NEW: Check out my friend Daniel Hunter's new book, a narrative of direct action campaigning: Strategy & Soul: A Campaigner's Tale of Fighting Billionaires, Corrupt Officials, and Philadelphia Casinos: www.strategyandsoul.org
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: doingdemocracy.com/MB4PnJ02.htm (or just google the title)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.org, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years.
www.startguide.org. START: a way to study and work together with others to create a better world.
For earlier columns, go to www.pamelascolumn.blogspot.com. I'm currently posting at pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com.
My favorite magazine: YES! Magazine reframes the biggest problems of our time in terms of their solutions. Online and in print, they outline a path forward with in-depth analysis, tools for citizen engagement, and stories about real people working for a better world: www.yesmagazine.org
Sunday, January 19, 2014
#127 Confidence
Dear all,
Well, the flurry of the holidays is over--what a treat to have that time with our three guys, two wonderful partners and two irresistible little ones, and see the two-year-old so excited about his one-year-old cousin! Now we're in the midst of cold and snow, slowly picking up the threads of the rest of our lives.
I've been learning lessons about the limitations of independence, and the sweetness of help--more on that next time.
Love,
Pamela
Confidence
One end of the drawstring of Chuck’s gym shorts had disappeared deep into the waistband. He had tried getting it out without success and asked for my help. I have sewn plenty of waistbands in my day, working elastic or a drawstring through them with the help of a big safety pin fastened at one end, so I was a good person to go to. It was a challenge, since I didn’t have access to the end of the drawstring. All I had was the knot, deep inside the waistband. But as I worked at that little knot, I could feel the potential for motion. Slowly, slowly, I worked the knot closer to the opening, till finally it came through—and the gym shorts were back in business.
This is a very small story—in itself hardly worth remembering, much less retelling. But as I came upon those gym shorts one day, taking them out of the washer and out to the line to dry, I thought about the confidence I had brought to fixing them—and confidence is something worth talking about.
Confidence. Sitting in the trolley, I think about how my mother would have approached that word. “Confidence. It comes from the Latin. ‘Con’ means with, and you can hear the root, ‘fides’. Think about the word ‘fidelity’. It means ‘faith’. So confidence means ‘with faith’.”
I approached the gym shorts with faith in the outcome. Chuck’s experience didn’t provide him with the faith that he could fix them himself. But he had faith in me.
I think of that little knot, invisible to the eye, and barely discernable to the touch. I think of how hard it would be for somebody else to know that this was the movable part, how hard to believe that it could be moved so far, how easy it would be to give up. And I can’t help but wonder what would be different if we had confidence that bigger things could be moved, fixed, or changed.
What if we could tap into a deeper well of confidence? It wouldn’t provide any shortcuts. The work wouldn’t be any less challenging. But we would be much more likely to take on those struggles that we care about so passionately, and to persist openheartedly when no change was visible on the horizon.
Where could we find such confidence? In each other for starters. In the experience of others who have tried—and failed but also succeeded—in endeavors that are foreign to us. In those who have found strength in very different circumstances, and those who have a long track record of endurance and hopefulness. In the seasoned elders of our communities. In the wisdom of our cultural and faith traditions—and the faith traditions of others.
Most of all, it means holding an expectation that faith and confidence are there to be found and are worth looking for. It requires confronting our defeats and discouragements and not accepting them as the final reality. It requires building our own confidence by daring to try new things. It requires exploring for the confidence of others, more deeply and farther around the edges of our experience than may be comfortable. But every bit of confidence that I have can be useful to others if I can find a way to share it—and if I reach widely, intentionally and persistently, there will always be more to be found.
Imagine: A new economy is possible!
Cap and What?
Two big economic strategies being considered to help reduce carbon use are cap-and-trade and cap and dividend. Cap-and-trade involves giving each polluter an allocation of emissions. If it doesn’t use up that allocation in a year, it may sell those emission allowances to another company that polluted more than its allocation. Cap-and-dividend, in contrast, involves imposing a carbon cap, auctioning off all carbon allowances, and returning the revenues generated to all households on a per capita basis.
Cap-and-dividend avoids the pitfalls of carbon trading, which can be as easily manipulated and abused as has been financial securities trading. Carbon dividends would help offset the increase in price of most goods that would come with reducing carbon. If the money were returned to people on an equal basis, higher-income and higher-consumption households would pay out more (in higher energy and product costs) than they would receive back from dividends. But lower-income, lower-consumption households would receive back more than they pay. Also, by offering a cash incentive, a cap and dividend strategy could spur all households to try to reduce their carbon footprints.
For more information:
http://www.ilsr.org/instead-cap-and-trade-cap-and-dividend/
Some things that have made me hopeful recently:
White ranchers and landowners, threatened with eminent domain and the loss of the right to their own land by the Keystone XL Pipeline, who are beginning to understand what the native tribes experienced during colonization, and to notice a shared pride in the land that's the source of both culture and livelihood. As they work together to oppose the pipeline, an 'us' and 'them' is turning into a 'we'.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/cowboys-and-indians-camp-together-to-build-alliance-against-keystone-xl
Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn's championing of the city's divestment from fossil fuels.
http://350.org/about/blogs/seattle-mayor-orders-city-divest-fossil-fuels
Native peoples' successes over the past year in reintroducing fading species--including a record return of Chinook salmon to the Columbia River, restoring habitats and challenging big industry. http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/12/31/10-environmental-victories-and-triumphs-2013-152924
Uruguay's recent legalization of marijuana--aimed at breaking the link between the lucrative marijuana trade and organized crime--that has kicked off a trend in a region wearied of the bloodshed, expense and failed results of Washington’s “war on drugs".
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/131222/latin-america-uruguay-argentina-marijuana-legalization
More resources
Posts on other people's blogs: http://www.classism.org/children-mass-culture
NEW: Check out my friend Daniel Hunter's new book, a narrative of direct action campaigning: Strategy & Soul: A Campaigner's Tale of Fighting Billionaires, Corrupt Officials, and Philadelphia Casinos: www.strategyandsoul.org
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: doingdemocracy.com/MB4PnJ02.htm (or just google the title)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.org, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years.
www.startguide.org. START: a way to study and work together with others to create a better world.
For earlier columns, go to www.pamelascolumn.blogspot.com. I'm currently posting at pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com.
My favorite magazine: YES! Magazine reframes the biggest problems of our time in terms of their solutions. Online and in print, they outline a path forward with in-depth analysis, tools for citizen engagement, and stories about real people working for a better world: www.yesmagazine.org
Well, the flurry of the holidays is over--what a treat to have that time with our three guys, two wonderful partners and two irresistible little ones, and see the two-year-old so excited about his one-year-old cousin! Now we're in the midst of cold and snow, slowly picking up the threads of the rest of our lives.
I've been learning lessons about the limitations of independence, and the sweetness of help--more on that next time.
Love,
Pamela
Confidence
One end of the drawstring of Chuck’s gym shorts had disappeared deep into the waistband. He had tried getting it out without success and asked for my help. I have sewn plenty of waistbands in my day, working elastic or a drawstring through them with the help of a big safety pin fastened at one end, so I was a good person to go to. It was a challenge, since I didn’t have access to the end of the drawstring. All I had was the knot, deep inside the waistband. But as I worked at that little knot, I could feel the potential for motion. Slowly, slowly, I worked the knot closer to the opening, till finally it came through—and the gym shorts were back in business.
This is a very small story—in itself hardly worth remembering, much less retelling. But as I came upon those gym shorts one day, taking them out of the washer and out to the line to dry, I thought about the confidence I had brought to fixing them—and confidence is something worth talking about.
Confidence. Sitting in the trolley, I think about how my mother would have approached that word. “Confidence. It comes from the Latin. ‘Con’ means with, and you can hear the root, ‘fides’. Think about the word ‘fidelity’. It means ‘faith’. So confidence means ‘with faith’.”
I approached the gym shorts with faith in the outcome. Chuck’s experience didn’t provide him with the faith that he could fix them himself. But he had faith in me.
I think of that little knot, invisible to the eye, and barely discernable to the touch. I think of how hard it would be for somebody else to know that this was the movable part, how hard to believe that it could be moved so far, how easy it would be to give up. And I can’t help but wonder what would be different if we had confidence that bigger things could be moved, fixed, or changed.
What if we could tap into a deeper well of confidence? It wouldn’t provide any shortcuts. The work wouldn’t be any less challenging. But we would be much more likely to take on those struggles that we care about so passionately, and to persist openheartedly when no change was visible on the horizon.
Where could we find such confidence? In each other for starters. In the experience of others who have tried—and failed but also succeeded—in endeavors that are foreign to us. In those who have found strength in very different circumstances, and those who have a long track record of endurance and hopefulness. In the seasoned elders of our communities. In the wisdom of our cultural and faith traditions—and the faith traditions of others.
Most of all, it means holding an expectation that faith and confidence are there to be found and are worth looking for. It requires confronting our defeats and discouragements and not accepting them as the final reality. It requires building our own confidence by daring to try new things. It requires exploring for the confidence of others, more deeply and farther around the edges of our experience than may be comfortable. But every bit of confidence that I have can be useful to others if I can find a way to share it—and if I reach widely, intentionally and persistently, there will always be more to be found.
Imagine: A new economy is possible!
Cap and What?
Two big economic strategies being considered to help reduce carbon use are cap-and-trade and cap and dividend. Cap-and-trade involves giving each polluter an allocation of emissions. If it doesn’t use up that allocation in a year, it may sell those emission allowances to another company that polluted more than its allocation. Cap-and-dividend, in contrast, involves imposing a carbon cap, auctioning off all carbon allowances, and returning the revenues generated to all households on a per capita basis.
Cap-and-dividend avoids the pitfalls of carbon trading, which can be as easily manipulated and abused as has been financial securities trading. Carbon dividends would help offset the increase in price of most goods that would come with reducing carbon. If the money were returned to people on an equal basis, higher-income and higher-consumption households would pay out more (in higher energy and product costs) than they would receive back from dividends. But lower-income, lower-consumption households would receive back more than they pay. Also, by offering a cash incentive, a cap and dividend strategy could spur all households to try to reduce their carbon footprints.
For more information:
http://www.ilsr.org/instead-cap-and-trade-cap-and-dividend/
Some things that have made me hopeful recently:
White ranchers and landowners, threatened with eminent domain and the loss of the right to their own land by the Keystone XL Pipeline, who are beginning to understand what the native tribes experienced during colonization, and to notice a shared pride in the land that's the source of both culture and livelihood. As they work together to oppose the pipeline, an 'us' and 'them' is turning into a 'we'.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/cowboys-and-indians-camp-together-to-build-alliance-against-keystone-xl
Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn's championing of the city's divestment from fossil fuels.
http://350.org/about/blogs/seattle-mayor-orders-city-divest-fossil-fuels
Native peoples' successes over the past year in reintroducing fading species--including a record return of Chinook salmon to the Columbia River, restoring habitats and challenging big industry. http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/12/31/10-environmental-victories-and-triumphs-2013-152924
Uruguay's recent legalization of marijuana--aimed at breaking the link between the lucrative marijuana trade and organized crime--that has kicked off a trend in a region wearied of the bloodshed, expense and failed results of Washington’s “war on drugs".
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/131222/latin-america-uruguay-argentina-marijuana-legalization
More resources
Posts on other people's blogs: http://www.classism.org/children-mass-culture
NEW: Check out my friend Daniel Hunter's new book, a narrative of direct action campaigning: Strategy & Soul: A Campaigner's Tale of Fighting Billionaires, Corrupt Officials, and Philadelphia Casinos: www.strategyandsoul.org
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: doingdemocracy.com/MB4PnJ02.htm (or just google the title)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.org, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years.
www.startguide.org. START: a way to study and work together with others to create a better world.
For earlier columns, go to www.pamelascolumn.blogspot.com. I'm currently posting at pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com.
My favorite magazine: YES! Magazine reframes the biggest problems of our time in terms of their solutions. Online and in print, they outline a path forward with in-depth analysis, tools for citizen engagement, and stories about real people working for a better world: www.yesmagazine.org
Saturday, January 4, 2014
#126 Climate and Faith
Dear all,
I wrote this over a month ago, but am just now getting around to posting: A strong north wind yesterday brought down all the remaining leaves on our street. It seems fitting then that the essay and poem this month are both about trees. On a very different front, I'm trying to get some momentum going on a campaign to get my college to divest from fossil fuels--a small step beyond consumer choices that anyone can take on climate change (see the first thing that makes me hopeful, below). And, as I prepare for Thanksgiving, here's a mind-bender that's stuck with me: What if we woke up tomorrow to find only the things that we were thankful for today?
Love,
Pamela
Climate and fate
I don’t remember exactly when I first internalized the message that the Sahara was steadily, inexorably pushing south, transforming some unimaginable amount of arable land every year into barren waste. It was appalling. While I didn’t doubt that our species had played a role, the forces of nature that had been unleashed seemed now to be beyond the power of any human action to contain, much less reverse.
By the time I heard about draught in the Sahel, with all its unspeakably tragic human consequences, I was so numb that I could barely take it in. After all, who has ever won against a desert? Who could fault me for accepting defeat? So when I saw a reference recently to reforestation efforts in Niger, the image that came to mind was brave little tree seedlings, valiantly trying to survive in a vast expanse of hot sun and bone dry sand—doomed to a short, harsh life and cruel death. But I was compelled to investigate, and this is what I learned.
When the French colonized what is now Niger, they brought their own experience with agriculture, an unshakable confidence that they knew better, and an intention to use their superior understanding to make a profit. Big fields are best for export-oriented monocultures, and crops need sun (in France) so trees outside of designated woodlots should be cut down. These practices, along with the starving of local initiative that comes with strong centralized ownership and control, set the stage for desertification. A period of unusually high rainfall after World War II postponed the impact, but draught came with a vengeance in the 1970’s. With agricultural exports drying up—literally—and uranium mining hard hit by the end of the nuclear power plant boom, the economy tanked. All that was left for the newly independent nation was to use the tragedy of draught and the specter of desertification—both all too real—to petition for international aid.
Some of that aid went to failed tree-planting efforts; other projects had impact only as long as new money kept flowing in. But one man in one little NGO discovered that, in many places, the root systems of the trees that had been cut down were still in place; farmers just kept chopping off the brushy growth as it sprouted up in the middle of the fields. If it were pruned to leave the strongest shoot, however, that shoot would quickly grow into a tree. The potential benefits were enormous: shade in a sun-drenched land, water retention, a means of breaking the destructive sand-filled winds, carbon fixing, and generation of scarce organic matter and firewood. But there were obstacles. Generations of western farming practices left people reluctant to have trees in their fields, and centralized—often corrupt—control of resources left farmers without property rights to any tree they might grow.
In the mid to late 1980’s two things happened to tip the situation toward change. A new draught made desperate farmers willing to try anything, and the death of the country’s president resulted in a power vacuum that essentially knocked out all central authority for years. This created the space for local communities to develop their own protocols for land and tree management, and the speed with which new trees grew, with all the associated positive feedback loops, allowed these communities to increase crop yields and be significantly buffered from the effects of draught.
Such positive results were noticed and replicated in neighboring areas, and by the time a centralized government was functioning again, the evidence was sufficiently compelling that they were induced not only to support replication, but to legislate protection of local land management practices.
By now Niger—said to be the poorest country in the world—has successfully reforested 5 million hectares (almost 12.5 million acres) of land with some 200 million trees, securing the livelihoods of 4.5 million people. An aerial view of the border between Niger and Nigeria makes clear the difference that this greening has made.
Of course there is no guarantee of a happy ending. Population pressure can still drive people of the Sahel into poverty and, if rainfall decreases over time, the land’s ability to produce food will be compromised. The lesson is not that climate change is a myth, but that our numb submission to what seems like fate is part of the problem. The truth is that there is untapped resilience in both nature and the human spirit; the potential for rapid change in a positive direction cannot be discounted; and the freeing up and resourcing of local initiative, whether by accident or by design, may be at the heart of the solution.
Inferno
An oasis of serenity no more,
great clouds of swirling dust
roar of machines and men in gas masks
have conjured up a war zone in the park.
The enemy is leaves.
Blowing every blade of grass
blasting under every bush
their goal is total mastery
and barren earth
(which will be covered up next spring
with pricey mulch).
In another universe of possibility
peace and leaf removal coexist:
long-handled rakes and
muscles turned to useful work
bring leaves from grass
to mound around each bush
providing insulation from the winter cold
then breaking down to fertilize the soil.
There’s a modest circularity in this
a hopeful sign of things both past and yet to come
acknowledgment that nature and a few strong arms—
no fossil fuels, machines or noise
no pricey mulch—
can do the job with quiet elegance.
Imagine: A new economy is possible!
It all turns on affection
Excerpts from a talk by Wendell Berry
Economy in its original—and, I think, its proper—sense refers to household management. By extension, it refers to the husbanding of all the goods by which we live. An authentic economy, if we had one, would define and make, on the terms of thrift and affection, our connections to nature and to one another. Our present industrial system also makes those connections, but by pillage and indifference. Most economists think of this arrangement as ”the economy.” …They never ask, in their professional oblivion, why we are willing to do permanent ecological and cultural damage “to strengthen the economy?”
…By now our immense destructiveness has made clear that the actual value of some things exceeds human ability to calculate or measure, and therefore must be considered absolute. For the destruction of these things there is never, under any circumstances, any justification. Their absolute value is recognized by the mortal need of those who do not have them, and by affection. Land, to people who do not have it and who are thus without the means of life, is absolutely valuable. Ecological health, in a land dying of abuse, is not worth “something”; it is worth everything.
…I would insist that the economic arts are just as honorably and authentically refinable as the fine arts. And so I am nominating economy for an equal standing among the arts and humanities. I mean, not economics, but economy, the making of the human household upon the earth: the arts of adapting kindly the many human households to the earth’s many ecosystems and human neighborhoods. This is the economy that the most public and influential economists never talk about, the economy that is the primary vocation and responsibility of every one of us.
www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/wendell-e-berry-lecture
Some things that have made me hopeful recently:
In a focused effort to combat global warming, seven colleges and 22 cities in the US have committed to divest from fossil fuels in the last year--and dozens more campaigns are underway across the nation.
http://gofossilfree.org/commitments/
the name Rolling Jubilee, a group of Occupy Wall Street activists has managed to buy almost $15 million of Americans' personal debt helping them pay off their outstanding credit in one year, using $400,000 to purchase anonymous debt cheaply from banks and then "abolish" it, freeing individuals from their bills.
http://www.alternet.org/occupy-wall-street/occupy-wall-street-activists-buy-15-million-americans-personal-debt
Healing and Rebuilding our Communities workshops in Rwanda and Burundi that include participants pairing across ethnic lines for a "trust walk", including this testimonial: I remember the trust walk when the person who killed my family was my partner. During the genocide, I witnessed this man kill my two brothers with a machete and my younger sister with a spear. I was shaking because my partner was a known killer and very strong. I thought he might throw me down, but he also had fear and he took me gently, kindly. I asked him, “Will you lead me in peace?” After the trust walk with him, I felt it was not good to stay in my grief and had no fear against him. http://aglifpt.org
An agricultural cooperative in South Korea with 2,000 growers and 380,000 consumer members, and sales growing annually by 20%, creating an alternative economy that supports local organic farmers, produces healthy food and protects the environment in the process.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/177159/south-korea-ground-zero-food-sovereignty-and-community-resilience
I wrote this over a month ago, but am just now getting around to posting: A strong north wind yesterday brought down all the remaining leaves on our street. It seems fitting then that the essay and poem this month are both about trees. On a very different front, I'm trying to get some momentum going on a campaign to get my college to divest from fossil fuels--a small step beyond consumer choices that anyone can take on climate change (see the first thing that makes me hopeful, below). And, as I prepare for Thanksgiving, here's a mind-bender that's stuck with me: What if we woke up tomorrow to find only the things that we were thankful for today?
Love,
Pamela
Climate and fate
I don’t remember exactly when I first internalized the message that the Sahara was steadily, inexorably pushing south, transforming some unimaginable amount of arable land every year into barren waste. It was appalling. While I didn’t doubt that our species had played a role, the forces of nature that had been unleashed seemed now to be beyond the power of any human action to contain, much less reverse.
By the time I heard about draught in the Sahel, with all its unspeakably tragic human consequences, I was so numb that I could barely take it in. After all, who has ever won against a desert? Who could fault me for accepting defeat? So when I saw a reference recently to reforestation efforts in Niger, the image that came to mind was brave little tree seedlings, valiantly trying to survive in a vast expanse of hot sun and bone dry sand—doomed to a short, harsh life and cruel death. But I was compelled to investigate, and this is what I learned.
When the French colonized what is now Niger, they brought their own experience with agriculture, an unshakable confidence that they knew better, and an intention to use their superior understanding to make a profit. Big fields are best for export-oriented monocultures, and crops need sun (in France) so trees outside of designated woodlots should be cut down. These practices, along with the starving of local initiative that comes with strong centralized ownership and control, set the stage for desertification. A period of unusually high rainfall after World War II postponed the impact, but draught came with a vengeance in the 1970’s. With agricultural exports drying up—literally—and uranium mining hard hit by the end of the nuclear power plant boom, the economy tanked. All that was left for the newly independent nation was to use the tragedy of draught and the specter of desertification—both all too real—to petition for international aid.
Some of that aid went to failed tree-planting efforts; other projects had impact only as long as new money kept flowing in. But one man in one little NGO discovered that, in many places, the root systems of the trees that had been cut down were still in place; farmers just kept chopping off the brushy growth as it sprouted up in the middle of the fields. If it were pruned to leave the strongest shoot, however, that shoot would quickly grow into a tree. The potential benefits were enormous: shade in a sun-drenched land, water retention, a means of breaking the destructive sand-filled winds, carbon fixing, and generation of scarce organic matter and firewood. But there were obstacles. Generations of western farming practices left people reluctant to have trees in their fields, and centralized—often corrupt—control of resources left farmers without property rights to any tree they might grow.
In the mid to late 1980’s two things happened to tip the situation toward change. A new draught made desperate farmers willing to try anything, and the death of the country’s president resulted in a power vacuum that essentially knocked out all central authority for years. This created the space for local communities to develop their own protocols for land and tree management, and the speed with which new trees grew, with all the associated positive feedback loops, allowed these communities to increase crop yields and be significantly buffered from the effects of draught.
Such positive results were noticed and replicated in neighboring areas, and by the time a centralized government was functioning again, the evidence was sufficiently compelling that they were induced not only to support replication, but to legislate protection of local land management practices.
By now Niger—said to be the poorest country in the world—has successfully reforested 5 million hectares (almost 12.5 million acres) of land with some 200 million trees, securing the livelihoods of 4.5 million people. An aerial view of the border between Niger and Nigeria makes clear the difference that this greening has made.
Of course there is no guarantee of a happy ending. Population pressure can still drive people of the Sahel into poverty and, if rainfall decreases over time, the land’s ability to produce food will be compromised. The lesson is not that climate change is a myth, but that our numb submission to what seems like fate is part of the problem. The truth is that there is untapped resilience in both nature and the human spirit; the potential for rapid change in a positive direction cannot be discounted; and the freeing up and resourcing of local initiative, whether by accident or by design, may be at the heart of the solution.
Inferno
An oasis of serenity no more,
great clouds of swirling dust
roar of machines and men in gas masks
have conjured up a war zone in the park.
The enemy is leaves.
Blowing every blade of grass
blasting under every bush
their goal is total mastery
and barren earth
(which will be covered up next spring
with pricey mulch).
In another universe of possibility
peace and leaf removal coexist:
long-handled rakes and
muscles turned to useful work
bring leaves from grass
to mound around each bush
providing insulation from the winter cold
then breaking down to fertilize the soil.
There’s a modest circularity in this
a hopeful sign of things both past and yet to come
acknowledgment that nature and a few strong arms—
no fossil fuels, machines or noise
no pricey mulch—
can do the job with quiet elegance.
Imagine: A new economy is possible!
It all turns on affection
Excerpts from a talk by Wendell Berry
Economy in its original—and, I think, its proper—sense refers to household management. By extension, it refers to the husbanding of all the goods by which we live. An authentic economy, if we had one, would define and make, on the terms of thrift and affection, our connections to nature and to one another. Our present industrial system also makes those connections, but by pillage and indifference. Most economists think of this arrangement as ”the economy.” …They never ask, in their professional oblivion, why we are willing to do permanent ecological and cultural damage “to strengthen the economy?”
…By now our immense destructiveness has made clear that the actual value of some things exceeds human ability to calculate or measure, and therefore must be considered absolute. For the destruction of these things there is never, under any circumstances, any justification. Their absolute value is recognized by the mortal need of those who do not have them, and by affection. Land, to people who do not have it and who are thus without the means of life, is absolutely valuable. Ecological health, in a land dying of abuse, is not worth “something”; it is worth everything.
…I would insist that the economic arts are just as honorably and authentically refinable as the fine arts. And so I am nominating economy for an equal standing among the arts and humanities. I mean, not economics, but economy, the making of the human household upon the earth: the arts of adapting kindly the many human households to the earth’s many ecosystems and human neighborhoods. This is the economy that the most public and influential economists never talk about, the economy that is the primary vocation and responsibility of every one of us.
www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/wendell-e-berry-lecture
Some things that have made me hopeful recently:
In a focused effort to combat global warming, seven colleges and 22 cities in the US have committed to divest from fossil fuels in the last year--and dozens more campaigns are underway across the nation.
http://gofossilfree.org/commitments/
the name Rolling Jubilee, a group of Occupy Wall Street activists has managed to buy almost $15 million of Americans' personal debt helping them pay off their outstanding credit in one year, using $400,000 to purchase anonymous debt cheaply from banks and then "abolish" it, freeing individuals from their bills.
http://www.alternet.org/occupy-wall-street/occupy-wall-street-activists-buy-15-million-americans-personal-debt
Healing and Rebuilding our Communities workshops in Rwanda and Burundi that include participants pairing across ethnic lines for a "trust walk", including this testimonial: I remember the trust walk when the person who killed my family was my partner. During the genocide, I witnessed this man kill my two brothers with a machete and my younger sister with a spear. I was shaking because my partner was a known killer and very strong. I thought he might throw me down, but he also had fear and he took me gently, kindly. I asked him, “Will you lead me in peace?” After the trust walk with him, I felt it was not good to stay in my grief and had no fear against him. http://aglifpt.org
An agricultural cooperative in South Korea with 2,000 growers and 380,000 consumer members, and sales growing annually by 20%, creating an alternative economy that supports local organic farmers, produces healthy food and protects the environment in the process.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/177159/south-korea-ground-zero-food-sovereignty-and-community-resilience
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
#125 A perpetrator's tale
Dear all,
There are so many ways to think of this time when October turns to November--the completion of the harvest season, a time when the veil grows thin between the worlds of the living and the dead, a pause before the winter holidays and then the winter. While that image of the veil thinning is a compelling one, I'm just plain looking forward to harvesting my sweet potatoes--there's something magical about them growing there unseen.
I send love.
Pamela
A perpetrator’s tale
I’ve accumulated a few facts about Indonesia over the years: a Dutch colonial history; a chain of islands that includes Bali; a nasty civil war in Aceh around the time of the big tsunami; a forest ecosystem increasingly threatened by palm oil plantations. Among them is the fact that there was a big purge of Communists in the mid-1960’s, in which the US played a role.
Now, I’ve found out about a guy who put in eight years working on a documentary about that atrocity, and I’ve learned a lot more. There’s a familiar back-story: an inclusive politician had been elected president; the US wanted a more reliable cold-war ally; and an army general was happy to oblige. Not only did he orchestrate a coup, but he went to arrange the killing of anybody who could be remotely associated with communists, unionists or democratic reformers—a million or more people in all.
The filmmaker first wanted to focus on the survivors, but the military didn’t allow it, so someone suggested that he film the perpetrators. Well, here was my first surprise. Those mass murderers were still around, and able to be identified? Not only that, it turns out, but they are all in positions of power, still boasting about their death-squad prowess, and providing a very effective deterrent to anybody who might like to challenge the regime’s policies.
In a second surprise, he found one perpetrator who was eager to be a star in his movie. Considered the ringleader of the death squads in his area, this man was still extolled and feared for the role he had played. He was happy to talk about his part in the genocide, and ready to cheerfully reenact the most gruesome acts of killing. The filmmaker decided to follow this man’s lead, going along with increasingly elaborate and surreal reenactments. As time went on, it became clearer and clearer that some inner demons were driving this man. When he brought in another death squad buddy, who pointed out that this documentary would make them—not the communists—look like the bad guys, he still couldn’t stop.
In the filmmaker’s own words, “He is trying, actually, somehow, to deal with his own pain. He’s trying to deal with his nightmares. He finds a forum in the film to express a pain that the regime has no time for. The regime wants him to say it was heroic, it was great, so that he can live with himself, all the other killers can live with themselves, and the survivors are kept suppressed and silenced. And suddenly, in the making of the film, he has a chance to deal with the ghosts that haunt him.”
This is the third and biggest surprise: that someone was able to show so compellingly, almost without his own volition, the pain of being a perpetrator. Many of us know, on some level, that it’s hard on people to hurt others, but our compassion is bound up so thoroughly with the victims that we are reluctant to give it much thought. Here is the unvarnished, unavoidable truth about that pain. Some perpetrators may never be able to show it, perhaps they can’t even know it consciously, but it’s there to be found.
The official story in Indonesia, still taught in the schools, is that the genocide was a necessary and heroic chapter in the nation’s history. But this documentary, which has successfully evaded the film censors (a final surprise), has found audiences throughout the country. A wall of silence of almost fifty years has been breached. And that just may be enough to change the story—all because of a tenacious filmmaker and a perpetrator who grabbed at the chance to address his pain.
For more information: http://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/19/the_act_of_killing_new_film
Sighting
As a species
the mail carrier
is a loner
marking his own territory
making his rounds
in solitary self-sufficiency.
Yet here was a pair
male and female
each marked with that distinctive
uniform and bag
moving side by side
down the street
up steps together
and back down
as if inseparable.
A remarkable sighting
An invitation
to turn what we know
on its head--
imagine the impossible.
Imagine: A new economy is possible!
100 years of federal income tax
In the fall of 1913, Congress passed a new revenue act that featured a modest income tax: 7% on income higher than $4,000, or slightly more than $94,000 today. By the 1940s that rate had soared: income above $200,000 faced a 94% percent tax rate, and that top rate hovered around 90% into the early 1960s.
According to critics of progressive income taxation, these high-tax years should have been a time of economic calamity. But commerce did not cease; the wealthy did not flee; the entrepreneurial spirit did not evaporate. On the contrary, the United States thrived throughout the mid-20th century, becoming the first industrial nation ever where the majority did not live in poverty. The nation’s steeply graduated tax rates raised the revenue that bankrolled new programs and services that opened doors into middle-class life, teaching us that our country works best when we tax progressively — and significantly so.
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/10/02/irs-at-100-how-income-taxation-built-the-middle-class/
Some things that have made me hopeful recently:
Alternatives to Violence (AVP) workshops in a 120,000 person refugee camp in northwestern Kenya, through which Somalis, Congolese, Ethiopians, Sudanese and others find transformation. “We are all refugees. We came to Kenya from our countries because of many problems. Creating new problems here will hurt us more. We need each other and our tolerance. Cooperation from this workshop means we can make this camp a haven as we pray for peace in our mother countries” Timas Ibrahim Hamdan from Sudan
Chinese orphanages being transformed into community centers, with a visionary group of child advocates modeling loving, responsive, stimulating, and developmentally appropriate programming for young children, and the ripples beginning to spread.
A Washington Heights, NYC elementary school where more than 80% of parents opted to have their four-six year olds sit out new standardized multiple-choice tests, causing the school to cancel the tests altogether. http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/uptown/parents-opt-city-test-article-1.1492127#ixzz2ie6XF7wE
Farmers throughout the US and Canada who are bucking the mono-culture/chemical intensive trends, and discovering that more respect for the health of the soil yields better results all around. For just one example: http://grist.org/food/one-weird-trick-to-fix-farms-forever/
Posts on other people's blogs:
http://www.classism.org/children-mass-culture
More resources:
NEW: Check out my friend Daniel Hunter's new book, a narrative of direct action campaigning: Strategy & Soul: A Campaigner's Tale of Fighting Billionaires, Corrupt Officials, and Philadelphia Casinos: www.strategyandsoul.org
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: doingdemocracy.com/MB4PnJ02.htm (or just google the title)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.org, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years.
www.startguide.org. START: a way to study and work together with others to create a better world.
For earlier columns, go to www.pamelascolumn.blogspot.com. I'm currently posting at pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com.
My favorite magazine: YES! Magazine reframes the biggest problems of our time in terms of their solutions. Online and in print, they outline a path forward with in-depth analysis, tools for citizen engagement, and stories about real people working for a better world: www.yesmagazine.org
There are so many ways to think of this time when October turns to November--the completion of the harvest season, a time when the veil grows thin between the worlds of the living and the dead, a pause before the winter holidays and then the winter. While that image of the veil thinning is a compelling one, I'm just plain looking forward to harvesting my sweet potatoes--there's something magical about them growing there unseen.
I send love.
Pamela
A perpetrator’s tale
I’ve accumulated a few facts about Indonesia over the years: a Dutch colonial history; a chain of islands that includes Bali; a nasty civil war in Aceh around the time of the big tsunami; a forest ecosystem increasingly threatened by palm oil plantations. Among them is the fact that there was a big purge of Communists in the mid-1960’s, in which the US played a role.
Now, I’ve found out about a guy who put in eight years working on a documentary about that atrocity, and I’ve learned a lot more. There’s a familiar back-story: an inclusive politician had been elected president; the US wanted a more reliable cold-war ally; and an army general was happy to oblige. Not only did he orchestrate a coup, but he went to arrange the killing of anybody who could be remotely associated with communists, unionists or democratic reformers—a million or more people in all.
The filmmaker first wanted to focus on the survivors, but the military didn’t allow it, so someone suggested that he film the perpetrators. Well, here was my first surprise. Those mass murderers were still around, and able to be identified? Not only that, it turns out, but they are all in positions of power, still boasting about their death-squad prowess, and providing a very effective deterrent to anybody who might like to challenge the regime’s policies.
In a second surprise, he found one perpetrator who was eager to be a star in his movie. Considered the ringleader of the death squads in his area, this man was still extolled and feared for the role he had played. He was happy to talk about his part in the genocide, and ready to cheerfully reenact the most gruesome acts of killing. The filmmaker decided to follow this man’s lead, going along with increasingly elaborate and surreal reenactments. As time went on, it became clearer and clearer that some inner demons were driving this man. When he brought in another death squad buddy, who pointed out that this documentary would make them—not the communists—look like the bad guys, he still couldn’t stop.
In the filmmaker’s own words, “He is trying, actually, somehow, to deal with his own pain. He’s trying to deal with his nightmares. He finds a forum in the film to express a pain that the regime has no time for. The regime wants him to say it was heroic, it was great, so that he can live with himself, all the other killers can live with themselves, and the survivors are kept suppressed and silenced. And suddenly, in the making of the film, he has a chance to deal with the ghosts that haunt him.”
This is the third and biggest surprise: that someone was able to show so compellingly, almost without his own volition, the pain of being a perpetrator. Many of us know, on some level, that it’s hard on people to hurt others, but our compassion is bound up so thoroughly with the victims that we are reluctant to give it much thought. Here is the unvarnished, unavoidable truth about that pain. Some perpetrators may never be able to show it, perhaps they can’t even know it consciously, but it’s there to be found.
The official story in Indonesia, still taught in the schools, is that the genocide was a necessary and heroic chapter in the nation’s history. But this documentary, which has successfully evaded the film censors (a final surprise), has found audiences throughout the country. A wall of silence of almost fifty years has been breached. And that just may be enough to change the story—all because of a tenacious filmmaker and a perpetrator who grabbed at the chance to address his pain.
For more information: http://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/19/the_act_of_killing_new_film
Sighting
As a species
the mail carrier
is a loner
marking his own territory
making his rounds
in solitary self-sufficiency.
Yet here was a pair
male and female
each marked with that distinctive
uniform and bag
moving side by side
down the street
up steps together
and back down
as if inseparable.
A remarkable sighting
An invitation
to turn what we know
on its head--
imagine the impossible.
Imagine: A new economy is possible!
100 years of federal income tax
In the fall of 1913, Congress passed a new revenue act that featured a modest income tax: 7% on income higher than $4,000, or slightly more than $94,000 today. By the 1940s that rate had soared: income above $200,000 faced a 94% percent tax rate, and that top rate hovered around 90% into the early 1960s.
According to critics of progressive income taxation, these high-tax years should have been a time of economic calamity. But commerce did not cease; the wealthy did not flee; the entrepreneurial spirit did not evaporate. On the contrary, the United States thrived throughout the mid-20th century, becoming the first industrial nation ever where the majority did not live in poverty. The nation’s steeply graduated tax rates raised the revenue that bankrolled new programs and services that opened doors into middle-class life, teaching us that our country works best when we tax progressively — and significantly so.
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/10/02/irs-at-100-how-income-taxation-built-the-middle-class/
Some things that have made me hopeful recently:
Alternatives to Violence (AVP) workshops in a 120,000 person refugee camp in northwestern Kenya, through which Somalis, Congolese, Ethiopians, Sudanese and others find transformation. “We are all refugees. We came to Kenya from our countries because of many problems. Creating new problems here will hurt us more. We need each other and our tolerance. Cooperation from this workshop means we can make this camp a haven as we pray for peace in our mother countries” Timas Ibrahim Hamdan from Sudan
Chinese orphanages being transformed into community centers, with a visionary group of child advocates modeling loving, responsive, stimulating, and developmentally appropriate programming for young children, and the ripples beginning to spread.
A Washington Heights, NYC elementary school where more than 80% of parents opted to have their four-six year olds sit out new standardized multiple-choice tests, causing the school to cancel the tests altogether. http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/uptown/parents-opt-city-test-article-1.1492127#ixzz2ie6XF7wE
Farmers throughout the US and Canada who are bucking the mono-culture/chemical intensive trends, and discovering that more respect for the health of the soil yields better results all around. For just one example: http://grist.org/food/one-weird-trick-to-fix-farms-forever/
Posts on other people's blogs:
http://www.classism.org/children-mass-culture
More resources:
NEW: Check out my friend Daniel Hunter's new book, a narrative of direct action campaigning: Strategy & Soul: A Campaigner's Tale of Fighting Billionaires, Corrupt Officials, and Philadelphia Casinos: www.strategyandsoul.org
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: doingdemocracy.com/MB4PnJ02.htm (or just google the title)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.org, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years.
www.startguide.org. START: a way to study and work together with others to create a better world.
For earlier columns, go to www.pamelascolumn.blogspot.com. I'm currently posting at pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com.
My favorite magazine: YES! Magazine reframes the biggest problems of our time in terms of their solutions. Online and in print, they outline a path forward with in-depth analysis, tools for citizen engagement, and stories about real people working for a better world: www.yesmagazine.org
Thursday, October 17, 2013
#124 Comfort and Judgment
Dear all,
We're in the midst of a string on stunningly beautiful fall days, our family is flourishing, and my biggest complaint is that there are more things I would love to do than can begin to fit into a day--and there is the constant balancing act: fully appreciating beauty and well-being while not being seduced into blindness and complacency. I'm trying to get back to the discipline of noticing the times in my days when what I am doing "rings true", with a goal of being more attentive and choosing ever more awarely.
I send my love.
Pamela
Comfort and judgment
Chuck and I had a difference of opinion about how to get a crowd of folks up to his brothers’ farm. We would fit in two cars, but it would be more comfortable and convenient to take three. Since it was his birthday celebration, I didn’t press the point. Three cars were, indeed, very convenient, and the impact on the planet of those extra hours of car driving was barely worth noticing in the larger scheme of things.
The part of the conversation that stuck in my mind, however, was our interchange about comfort and judgment. When I said that I wasn’t a big fan of arguments based on comfort, he said that was easily seen as judgmental, particularly by those for whom comfort has been scarce. I felt painfully torn. One of the dearest wishes of my heart is to leave behind forever the spirit of judgmentalism that pervaded my childhood. Yet I also can never forget a little card that my mother had posted above her desk: “Convenience pollutes.”
All the disposables—the plastic, paper and foam of fast food and picnics, diapers, paper towels, juice boxes—made to be used once and thrown away; those quick errands where driving can save so much time; the second car that avoids having to take the public transportation schedule into account; the pre-processed, pre-cut, pre-packaged food that is so much quicker to prepare; the washer-dryer in every house and the lawn-mower in every garage; all take a toll on the earth’s resources and capacity to absorb waste. There’s no doubt: convenience pollutes.
I’m thinking now that comfort also pollutes. Year-round climate control, big luxurious cars, that long hot shower in the morning, the freedom from having to be jostled by crowds, first class airplane seats, golf carts—the list could go on. Loving comfort has its own traps in terms of what we will trade away for it. Feeling entitled to comfort elevates the problem to a whole new level: who would I fight to hang on to what I have come to believe is rightfully mine?
I do believe that comfort has a place in this world, as when someone is sick, or dying, or grieving a great loss, or when someone has exerted enormously. Coming from the root, “to strengthen greatly”, it is an appropriate response to particular circumstances, a mechanism to soften adversity or make a time of challenge more bearable. But I baulk at the idea that most of us in the industrialized West live in such a state of chronic challenge that we require round-the-clock comfort.
Also, if we have it all the time, if we come to expect it as our due and make sure it’s always present, then its utility as a means of softening adversity is lost. It has become the new normal, and something more comforting, more comfortable must be found to take its place. I’m troubled by the implications that this dynamic of escalation has—on our psyches, on our connection to others with less access to comfort-providing resources, and on the health of our planet. I much prefer a bracing level of discomfort, so we can better appreciate and truly luxuriate in our comfort when it comes.
But what about judgment? Theoretically I could just learn to respect everyone’s different decisions around comfort. Yet I find myself unwilling to concede, unwilling to completely surrender this territory to personal choice. I don’t see a lot of clear thinking here, with all our wounds and insecurities making us so vulnerable to the lures of comfort. Add in a multi-million dollar comfort-selling industry, and it’s hard to make truly free choices in this area.
My mind jumps to the deep desire my young children had for the junky plastic toys that surrounded them—on television, in the stores, in the hands of their friends—and how mad I got at their upset when those toys broke. It was a struggle to be on their side at those moments, but I finally found a way to be true to both of us. “I’m so sorry,” I would say. “The people who make those toys just think about money, and don’t care about what it feels like for children when they break.”
Maybe I can learn from that hard-fought victory to be on the side of people who seem to be choosing short-term comfort over their long-term psychic well-being and the overall health of our biosphere. “I hate it that this issue of comfort is such a loaded one. What a confusing mix of different personal preferences, standards, levels of adversity (past and present), histories around discomfort, takes on what’s due to us and to the future. Add in a system that is squeezing out sources of real comfort, like time with loved ones, and focused on convincing us we need and deserve any product or service they can make a buck off of—and the chances of having a relaxed and mutually enlightening conversation on this topic recede toward zero. But I want to try. I want us to be on each other’s side as we puzzle this thing out together.”
O and P
His farm is in Jamaica
not far outside of Kingston
in the low hills, not the famous higher ones.
Going as often as he can
always on the lookout for cheap flights
he grows so many kinds of fruit that I lose track
--and coffee too.
All this I learn
one morning as I’m heading home
from gardening
basket of produce on my arm.
He’d honked his horn and stopped
leaned over from the driver’s seat
said he knew me from my gardening.
He tells his name, and asks me mine
treats me as a peer who knows a common craft.
And so we talk
Omar and Pamela
one farmer to another,
and I walk home enriched by
a new friend.
Imagine: A new economy is possible!
Saving labor?
With labor as an expensive part of the production process, the focus of technological innovation over the last half century on saving labor has seemed a straightforward and logical one. Why pay a pricey person if you could get a machine, created from cheap materials by cheap energy, to do the job as well or even better? It’s hard to get our minds around the reality that natural resources and fossil fuels, along with the ability of the earth to absorb our wastes, are now the limiting factors. We are facing a future where productive processes that use LESS resources and fuel, and MORE human labor, will be better positioned to address the dual issues of scarce resources and high unemployment. Our concept of efficiency, which is at the heart of how we evaluate our economic choices, now needs to be completely rethought.
Some things that have made me hopeful recently:
A European Union directive that by 2019 member countries collect and recycle 65% of the weight of all electronics put on sale, or 85% of all e-waste, with retailers required to take e-waste from consumers.
A new non-profit supermarket that has just opened in the distressed food-desert city of Chester PA, said to be the first such supermarket in the country.
An initiative in Paraguay where poor rural mothers learn to be more responsive to young children's needs, and in the process are empowered to become actors in their communities.
Pope Francis, again, and again.
New: posts on other people's blogs:
http://www.classism.org/children-mass-culture
More resources:
NEW: Check out my friend Daniel Hunter's new book, a narrative of direct action campaigning: Strategy & Soul: A Campaigner's Tale of Fighting Billionaires, Corrupt Officials, and Philadelphia Casinos: www.strategyandsoul.org
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: doingdemocracy.com/MB4PnJ02.htm (or just google the title)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.org, a home for all the parenting
writing I've done over the past 20 years.
www.startguide.org. START: a way to study and work together with
others to create a better world.
For earlier columns, go to www.pamelascolumn.blogspot.com. I'm currently posting at pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com.
My favorite magazine: YES! Magazine reframes the biggest problems of our time in terms of their solutions. Online and in print, they outline a path forward with in-depth analysis, tools for citizen engagement, and stories about real people working for a better world: www.yesmagazine.org.
We're in the midst of a string on stunningly beautiful fall days, our family is flourishing, and my biggest complaint is that there are more things I would love to do than can begin to fit into a day--and there is the constant balancing act: fully appreciating beauty and well-being while not being seduced into blindness and complacency. I'm trying to get back to the discipline of noticing the times in my days when what I am doing "rings true", with a goal of being more attentive and choosing ever more awarely.
I send my love.
Pamela
Comfort and judgment
Chuck and I had a difference of opinion about how to get a crowd of folks up to his brothers’ farm. We would fit in two cars, but it would be more comfortable and convenient to take three. Since it was his birthday celebration, I didn’t press the point. Three cars were, indeed, very convenient, and the impact on the planet of those extra hours of car driving was barely worth noticing in the larger scheme of things.
The part of the conversation that stuck in my mind, however, was our interchange about comfort and judgment. When I said that I wasn’t a big fan of arguments based on comfort, he said that was easily seen as judgmental, particularly by those for whom comfort has been scarce. I felt painfully torn. One of the dearest wishes of my heart is to leave behind forever the spirit of judgmentalism that pervaded my childhood. Yet I also can never forget a little card that my mother had posted above her desk: “Convenience pollutes.”
All the disposables—the plastic, paper and foam of fast food and picnics, diapers, paper towels, juice boxes—made to be used once and thrown away; those quick errands where driving can save so much time; the second car that avoids having to take the public transportation schedule into account; the pre-processed, pre-cut, pre-packaged food that is so much quicker to prepare; the washer-dryer in every house and the lawn-mower in every garage; all take a toll on the earth’s resources and capacity to absorb waste. There’s no doubt: convenience pollutes.
I’m thinking now that comfort also pollutes. Year-round climate control, big luxurious cars, that long hot shower in the morning, the freedom from having to be jostled by crowds, first class airplane seats, golf carts—the list could go on. Loving comfort has its own traps in terms of what we will trade away for it. Feeling entitled to comfort elevates the problem to a whole new level: who would I fight to hang on to what I have come to believe is rightfully mine?
I do believe that comfort has a place in this world, as when someone is sick, or dying, or grieving a great loss, or when someone has exerted enormously. Coming from the root, “to strengthen greatly”, it is an appropriate response to particular circumstances, a mechanism to soften adversity or make a time of challenge more bearable. But I baulk at the idea that most of us in the industrialized West live in such a state of chronic challenge that we require round-the-clock comfort.
Also, if we have it all the time, if we come to expect it as our due and make sure it’s always present, then its utility as a means of softening adversity is lost. It has become the new normal, and something more comforting, more comfortable must be found to take its place. I’m troubled by the implications that this dynamic of escalation has—on our psyches, on our connection to others with less access to comfort-providing resources, and on the health of our planet. I much prefer a bracing level of discomfort, so we can better appreciate and truly luxuriate in our comfort when it comes.
But what about judgment? Theoretically I could just learn to respect everyone’s different decisions around comfort. Yet I find myself unwilling to concede, unwilling to completely surrender this territory to personal choice. I don’t see a lot of clear thinking here, with all our wounds and insecurities making us so vulnerable to the lures of comfort. Add in a multi-million dollar comfort-selling industry, and it’s hard to make truly free choices in this area.
My mind jumps to the deep desire my young children had for the junky plastic toys that surrounded them—on television, in the stores, in the hands of their friends—and how mad I got at their upset when those toys broke. It was a struggle to be on their side at those moments, but I finally found a way to be true to both of us. “I’m so sorry,” I would say. “The people who make those toys just think about money, and don’t care about what it feels like for children when they break.”
Maybe I can learn from that hard-fought victory to be on the side of people who seem to be choosing short-term comfort over their long-term psychic well-being and the overall health of our biosphere. “I hate it that this issue of comfort is such a loaded one. What a confusing mix of different personal preferences, standards, levels of adversity (past and present), histories around discomfort, takes on what’s due to us and to the future. Add in a system that is squeezing out sources of real comfort, like time with loved ones, and focused on convincing us we need and deserve any product or service they can make a buck off of—and the chances of having a relaxed and mutually enlightening conversation on this topic recede toward zero. But I want to try. I want us to be on each other’s side as we puzzle this thing out together.”
O and P
His farm is in Jamaica
not far outside of Kingston
in the low hills, not the famous higher ones.
Going as often as he can
always on the lookout for cheap flights
he grows so many kinds of fruit that I lose track
--and coffee too.
All this I learn
one morning as I’m heading home
from gardening
basket of produce on my arm.
He’d honked his horn and stopped
leaned over from the driver’s seat
said he knew me from my gardening.
He tells his name, and asks me mine
treats me as a peer who knows a common craft.
And so we talk
Omar and Pamela
one farmer to another,
and I walk home enriched by
a new friend.
Imagine: A new economy is possible!
Saving labor?
With labor as an expensive part of the production process, the focus of technological innovation over the last half century on saving labor has seemed a straightforward and logical one. Why pay a pricey person if you could get a machine, created from cheap materials by cheap energy, to do the job as well or even better? It’s hard to get our minds around the reality that natural resources and fossil fuels, along with the ability of the earth to absorb our wastes, are now the limiting factors. We are facing a future where productive processes that use LESS resources and fuel, and MORE human labor, will be better positioned to address the dual issues of scarce resources and high unemployment. Our concept of efficiency, which is at the heart of how we evaluate our economic choices, now needs to be completely rethought.
Some things that have made me hopeful recently:
A European Union directive that by 2019 member countries collect and recycle 65% of the weight of all electronics put on sale, or 85% of all e-waste, with retailers required to take e-waste from consumers.
A new non-profit supermarket that has just opened in the distressed food-desert city of Chester PA, said to be the first such supermarket in the country.
An initiative in Paraguay where poor rural mothers learn to be more responsive to young children's needs, and in the process are empowered to become actors in their communities.
Pope Francis, again, and again.
New: posts on other people's blogs:
http://www.classism.org/children-mass-culture
More resources:
NEW: Check out my friend Daniel Hunter's new book, a narrative of direct action campaigning: Strategy & Soul: A Campaigner's Tale of Fighting Billionaires, Corrupt Officials, and Philadelphia Casinos: www.strategyandsoul.org
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: doingdemocracy.com/MB4PnJ02.htm (or just google the title)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.org, a home for all the parenting
writing I've done over the past 20 years.
www.startguide.org. START: a way to study and work together with
others to create a better world.
For earlier columns, go to www.pamelascolumn.blogspot.com. I'm currently posting at pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com.
My favorite magazine: YES! Magazine reframes the biggest problems of our time in terms of their solutions. Online and in print, they outline a path forward with in-depth analysis, tools for citizen engagement, and stories about real people working for a better world: www.yesmagazine.org.
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