Dear all,
Well here we are, all doing our best in hard times. A good challenge for me is to find something every day that is fun, or that gives me joy. Grandchildren help. Yesterday it was the adventure of grafting a bit of our big old apple tree onto some new root stock in the community garden. Catching glimpses of the moon always makes me smile--and now there are the crocuses. My offering this month is also something that has given me joy.
If you'd like to catch up with my life in more detail, let me know and I'll be glad to send a copy of the family letter we write every Valentine's Day.
As always, I send my very best.
Love,
Pamela
Finding Steady Ground
I doubt that I’ve been alone recently in wondering how best to respond to a rapidly changing and very troubling political situation. The needs and possibilities seem endless! I found myself wishing that somebody would look me in the eye and say, “Pamela, I know you. I know your life situation and I know your strengths. Here is a piece of work that needs doing that is just the right match.”
Well I mentioned this to my friend Daniel as we were catching up earlier this month, and he said, “I have something for you.” His attention had been very much on the many activists he knew who were struggling mightily to keep it together in these hard times. He pulled out a draft of a project he was working on, an idea for helping to keep such people grounded. When he said he could use some help with the writing and follow-up, I knew I had my answer.
We get so many messages these days with a common urgent tone: “The situation is dire; if you don’t act now, all will be lost!” The groups that send them out have mastered the art of playing on our fears. They dangle small acts of resistance or solidarity in front of us, building their mailing lists on our response but doing little to nourish our sense of agency or well-being. Daniel wanted to offer an alternative, a handful of regular sane practices that would help folks stay both grounded and in motion: Think about where and how you get your news. Have face-to-face contact with others who care. Reflect on your love for people who are vulnerable. Take in stories of courage and resistance. Stay creative. Limit your screen time. Share what you learn. What if tens of thousands of people got invitations like that instead?
So I helped Daniel write the invitation and the seven commitments to weekly grounded practice, and he launched a Finding Steady Ground FB page and website. As we worked our networks, the views and likes started growing. Clearly this approach had hit a nerve. Then, what a thrill to open one of those mass e-mail messages, this one from 350.org, and read about Finding Steady Ground! (The fact that Daniel is on their international staff helped, but he was equally thrilled that they agreed to do it.)
By this time, 90,000 people had taken a look, with thousands signing up to get on-going encouragement. We decided to start with the first commitment, about limiting over-consumption of “news”. What could we say that would be useful to all these people looking for help? I just wasn’t sure. Then one morning I had an idea about addiction, and how consuming bad news was kind of like consuming junk food--with that continuous pull to take one more bite. So I wrote a draft, Daniel created a larger frame for the message, I edited, and he worked the technical end. Then when responses to that follow-up message started coming in, he gathered, I winnowed, and he set the time-line for the next step. And so it goes.
He runs the project and sets the pace, countering the tendency toward reactive and frantic urgency with a relaxed intention that it be good for us as well. I follow his lead, offering my skills, and companionship on the journey. He has given a great gift to me as, I have come to realize, I am giving to him. I am reminded of how essential these simple acts of friendship and solidarity are as we work together on mending the world.
www.findingsteadyground.com
Pine barrens
A bird calls out—two clear whistling notes
I whistle back, trying to match those tones
as clear and pure and strong as I know how.
A pause, he calls again, I whistle back
Three more times we call those two clear notes
first from above and then from far below.
Coincidence perhaps, or maybe not.
I choose the miracle—astonished joy.
That tiny heart and mine alive as one.
Imagine: A New Economy is Possible!
Paid Leave
Washington, D.C. has passed one of the country’s most generous paid leave policies, guaranteeing eight weeks of paid time off for new parents, six weeks for those caring for sick family members, and two weeks of personal sick time.
The D.C. law will use a “social insurance model” funded through a 0.62 percent payroll tax on all private sector employers. This tax will amount to just $186 per year for an employee making $30,000.
The formula for employee reimbursement is designed to help reduce racial and economic disparities in the District: the lower an employee’s weekly pay, the higher proportion of that pay he or she will receive.
http://inequality.org/narrowing-paid-leave-divide/
Some things that have made me hopeful recently:
Seattle City Council recently voted unanimously to terminate a valuable city contract with Wells Fargo because of the bank's investment in the Dakota Access Pipeline. The city will consider “socially responsible banking and fair business practices” as a factor in its decision on selecting a new bank. http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/seattle-just-divested-billions-from-wells-fargo-over-dakota-access-pipeline-20170207
After thousands of Polish women went on strike in October over a proposed ban on abortion, effectively shutting down government offices, universities and schools in 60 cities across the country, with an estimated six million people across Europe joining their protest, members of the Polish government stated that they will not pursue legislation further restricting abortion access in Poland.
http://www.care2.com/causes/success-polish-protestors-block-proposed-abortion-ban.html
The many, many examples of people standing up against atrocities and for vulnerable people in our country.
The massive demonstrations in Korea last fall that brought down President Park Geun Hye.
http://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/south-korean-president-impeached-over-corruption-scandal/ar-AAlkBOd
Toward a Right Relationship with Finance
Check out this new book that I co-authored on Debt, Interest, Growth and Security.
The growth economy is failing to provide equitable well-being for humanity and a life-sustaining future for Earth. However our institutional endowments and individual retirement are dependent on that same growth economy. This book:
• offers background on our current economic system--how it is based on unearned income on the one hand and debt on the other, with a built-in momentum toward economy inequality and ecological overshoot;
• frames the conversation within the context of our deepest values and beliefs;
• suggests plausible and historically grounded alternatives to the current system, particularly with regard to financing retirement; and
• invites everyone to imagine new forms of durable economic and social security, and to help create the relationships and institutions that will make them a reality.
With many people now counting as never before on the performance of Wall Street for retirement security, how can this system be challenged with integrity and effectiveness? Can we break with our dependence on financial speculation and build up new structures of security in a transformed, life-centered economy?
To order the book, or read it on line, go to http://www.quakerinstitute.org/?page_id=5 and scroll down.
More resources
Resource from my friend Daniel Hunter, Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide. http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide
Recent posts on other web/blog sites:
In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust
http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby
Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years: https://www.trainingforchange.org/publications/muscle-building-peace-and-justice-nonviolent-workout-routine-21st-century (or just google the title)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
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.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/education-uprising/where-dignity-is-part-of-the-school-day
Pamela Haines
215-349-9428
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
www.pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com
Sunday, April 2, 2017
Sunday, January 29, 2017
#163 Drainage ditches
Dear all,
Since we've all been saturated with politics this month, I hope this offering is a welcome break--its randomness makes me smile. Though it has been good to be in the streets (twice with grandchildren), and I'm excited to be thinking with a friend about strategies for nurturing the spirits of activists in hard times--stay tuned.
I continue to be thankful for good health, and it's been a blessing this month to catch up with some old friends and be present to a couple of brand new babies and their parents.
Remember that our strength lies in our connections.
Love,
Pamela
Drainage Ditches
What, exactly, is the lure of agricultural drainage ditches? It started out as simple curiosity, an itch. A group of religiously based environmentalists, whom I respect and try to follow, were doing a series of workshops at a conference and I couldn’t make the one on drainage ditches. What had I missed? What did ditches have to do with earth stewardship? It was weeks, or maybe months later when I found that enigmatic note on my desk and decided to scratch the itch.
Searching the internet, I found the connection. Traditional commercial agricultural practice in this country calls for getting excess water out of fields by diverting it into ditches. If they are lined and straight, they can carry a lot of water quickly and efficiently. But, as we are learning on so many other fronts, quick and efficient often has a down side, particularly when we’re talking about highly complex and interdependent life systems.
Water that might otherwise soak deep into the soil gets carried away from the fields. Pesticides and topsoil are carried away with it. Receiving streams become more flood prone, polluted and over-enriched in a way that chokes out native water life.
So people are beginning to experiment with alternatives to the traditional drainage ditch. If the water flows more slowly, less runs off at the beginning, reducing flooding. If it can meander, unlined, through a more natural habitat on its way to the stream, it can be cleansed, mimicking the seemingly-miraculous ability of wetlands to transform water quality
I’m glad to learn this. I feel that I’ve made up for missing the workshop, and am on to other things. Yet when I find myself, in a time of meditation, hearing the phrase “a channel of God’s peace” inside my head, I have to wonder. Being a channel requires maintaining a flow, so it makes sense to put attention to clearing away obstructions. But should my goal be efficiency, on the model of those modern agricultural drainage ditches? If I work to get my channel straight and well-lined, will God’s peace flow through more easily and quickly? Or would I be of better service as the meandering kind, with more slow-moving opportunities for peace to soak in around me?
Somehow I doubt if I’ll find the final word here. But following this thread of curiosity and wonder has made me smile more than once. And I do trust the wisdom of eco-systems—which may be all the answer I need.
Jeans
I scratch my head
at holes in jeans.
First to go for me is the left knee
always.
It comes from kneeling,
bending, honest work.
(I’m always sad to feel that rip,
a sign of the beginning
of the end.)
But these jeans I see are new
with matching holes—
in thighs and shins
as well as knees.
What work is here?
What have we come to?
Paying others
to create the illusion
that we work?
How can we survive
the battles ahead
if we can’t even
wear out our own jeans?
Imagine: A New Economy is Possible!
Organic farming, scaled up
The Balbo sugar business in Brazil produces 75,000 tons of organic sugar, 34% of the world market, from a crop of about 1.2 million tons of cane. The transformation from traditional agriculture has taken 27 years, but cane production has improved, energy use has fallen by half, bio-diversity has increased, and all Balbo employees now have access to welfare, medical facilities, and low-cost housing. http://www.wired.co.uk/article/post-organic
Leontino Balbo has designed a new harvester that spreads the leaves and other waste from the cane, providing cover to protect the soil and control weeds. Waste from the distilling of sugar into ethanol is turned into a potent fertilizer. Tens of thousands of tiny wasps that infect a type of caterpillar that can be deadly for sugar cane are raised and released. Beneficial species, such as earthworms, are protected by using tilling and harvesting methods that do not compact the soil. By returning some of land to woods, wildlife that had not been seen in the region for decades has come back, while erosion has been reduced. The most advanced technology is combined with the traditional ways of natural farming, treating the farm as a living organism, and giving nature an opportunity to participate in the stewardship of the soil. http://wormdigest.org/content/view/252/2/
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
The City Council of Portland, Oregon, which has passed a zoning ordinance that effectively bans all new fossil-fuel-export infrastructure within the city’s limits—including new port facilities for shipping coal, and holding tanks for oil and natural gas—and prevents existing facilities from expanding.
http://www.ips-dc.org/%ef%bb%bf-city-just-banned-virtually-new-dirty-energy-infrastructure/
Teams of African masons trained in the Nubian Vault (NV) technique, who build safe, sturdy, well-insulated vaulted roofs of mud bricks, and train local apprentices on-site, modifying ancient Egyptian technology and making roofing accessible to poor people, by avoiding imported building material that must be paid for in cash.
http://www.lavoutenubienne.org/en/understand
A community land trust that is helping transform an informal settlement around a polluted and flood prone river channel in San Juan, Puerto Rico into a sustainable community. It provides a new model for improving informal settlements in cities without them then becoming unaffordable for the original residents.
https://www.bshf.org/world-habitat-awards/winners-and-finalists/cano-martin-pena-community-land-trust/
The women's march, with over three million people (and counting) in the U.S., and how hopeful it made so many people.
https://women2017numbers.wordpress.com/
Toward a Right Relationship with Finance
Check out this new book that I co-authored on Debt, Interest, Growth and Security.
The growth economy is failing to provide equitable well-being for humanity and a life-sustaining future for Earth. However our institutional endowments and individual retirement are dependent on that same growth economy. This book:
• offers background on our current economic system--how it is based on unearned income on the one hand and debt on the other, with a built-in momentum toward economy inequality and ecological overshoot;
• frames the conversation within the context of our deepest values and beliefs;
• suggests plausible and historically grounded alternatives to the current system, particularly with regard to financing retirement; and
• invites everyone to imagine new forms of durable economic and social security, and to help create the relationships and institutions that will make them a reality.
With many people now counting as never before on the performance of Wall Street for retirement security, how can this system be challenged with integrity and effectiveness? Can we break with our dependence on financial speculation and build up new structures of security in a transformed, life-centered economy?
To order the book, or read it on line, go to http://www.quakerinstitute.org/?page_id=5 and scroll down.
More resources
Resource from my friend Daniel Hunter, Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide. http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide
Recent posts on other web/blog sites:
In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust
http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby
Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years: https://www.trainingforchange.org/publications/muscle-building-peace-and-justice-nonviolent-workout-routine-21st-century (or just google the title)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
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.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/education-uprising/where-dignity-is-part-of-the-school-day
Pamela Haines
215-349-9428
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
www.pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com
Since we've all been saturated with politics this month, I hope this offering is a welcome break--its randomness makes me smile. Though it has been good to be in the streets (twice with grandchildren), and I'm excited to be thinking with a friend about strategies for nurturing the spirits of activists in hard times--stay tuned.
I continue to be thankful for good health, and it's been a blessing this month to catch up with some old friends and be present to a couple of brand new babies and their parents.
Remember that our strength lies in our connections.
Love,
Pamela
Drainage Ditches
What, exactly, is the lure of agricultural drainage ditches? It started out as simple curiosity, an itch. A group of religiously based environmentalists, whom I respect and try to follow, were doing a series of workshops at a conference and I couldn’t make the one on drainage ditches. What had I missed? What did ditches have to do with earth stewardship? It was weeks, or maybe months later when I found that enigmatic note on my desk and decided to scratch the itch.
Searching the internet, I found the connection. Traditional commercial agricultural practice in this country calls for getting excess water out of fields by diverting it into ditches. If they are lined and straight, they can carry a lot of water quickly and efficiently. But, as we are learning on so many other fronts, quick and efficient often has a down side, particularly when we’re talking about highly complex and interdependent life systems.
Water that might otherwise soak deep into the soil gets carried away from the fields. Pesticides and topsoil are carried away with it. Receiving streams become more flood prone, polluted and over-enriched in a way that chokes out native water life.
So people are beginning to experiment with alternatives to the traditional drainage ditch. If the water flows more slowly, less runs off at the beginning, reducing flooding. If it can meander, unlined, through a more natural habitat on its way to the stream, it can be cleansed, mimicking the seemingly-miraculous ability of wetlands to transform water quality
I’m glad to learn this. I feel that I’ve made up for missing the workshop, and am on to other things. Yet when I find myself, in a time of meditation, hearing the phrase “a channel of God’s peace” inside my head, I have to wonder. Being a channel requires maintaining a flow, so it makes sense to put attention to clearing away obstructions. But should my goal be efficiency, on the model of those modern agricultural drainage ditches? If I work to get my channel straight and well-lined, will God’s peace flow through more easily and quickly? Or would I be of better service as the meandering kind, with more slow-moving opportunities for peace to soak in around me?
Somehow I doubt if I’ll find the final word here. But following this thread of curiosity and wonder has made me smile more than once. And I do trust the wisdom of eco-systems—which may be all the answer I need.
Jeans
I scratch my head
at holes in jeans.
First to go for me is the left knee
always.
It comes from kneeling,
bending, honest work.
(I’m always sad to feel that rip,
a sign of the beginning
of the end.)
But these jeans I see are new
with matching holes—
in thighs and shins
as well as knees.
What work is here?
What have we come to?
Paying others
to create the illusion
that we work?
How can we survive
the battles ahead
if we can’t even
wear out our own jeans?
Imagine: A New Economy is Possible!
Organic farming, scaled up
The Balbo sugar business in Brazil produces 75,000 tons of organic sugar, 34% of the world market, from a crop of about 1.2 million tons of cane. The transformation from traditional agriculture has taken 27 years, but cane production has improved, energy use has fallen by half, bio-diversity has increased, and all Balbo employees now have access to welfare, medical facilities, and low-cost housing. http://www.wired.co.uk/article/post-organic
Leontino Balbo has designed a new harvester that spreads the leaves and other waste from the cane, providing cover to protect the soil and control weeds. Waste from the distilling of sugar into ethanol is turned into a potent fertilizer. Tens of thousands of tiny wasps that infect a type of caterpillar that can be deadly for sugar cane are raised and released. Beneficial species, such as earthworms, are protected by using tilling and harvesting methods that do not compact the soil. By returning some of land to woods, wildlife that had not been seen in the region for decades has come back, while erosion has been reduced. The most advanced technology is combined with the traditional ways of natural farming, treating the farm as a living organism, and giving nature an opportunity to participate in the stewardship of the soil. http://wormdigest.org/content/view/252/2/
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
The City Council of Portland, Oregon, which has passed a zoning ordinance that effectively bans all new fossil-fuel-export infrastructure within the city’s limits—including new port facilities for shipping coal, and holding tanks for oil and natural gas—and prevents existing facilities from expanding.
http://www.ips-dc.org/%ef%bb%bf-city-just-banned-virtually-new-dirty-energy-infrastructure/
Teams of African masons trained in the Nubian Vault (NV) technique, who build safe, sturdy, well-insulated vaulted roofs of mud bricks, and train local apprentices on-site, modifying ancient Egyptian technology and making roofing accessible to poor people, by avoiding imported building material that must be paid for in cash.
http://www.lavoutenubienne.org/en/understand
A community land trust that is helping transform an informal settlement around a polluted and flood prone river channel in San Juan, Puerto Rico into a sustainable community. It provides a new model for improving informal settlements in cities without them then becoming unaffordable for the original residents.
https://www.bshf.org/world-habitat-awards/winners-and-finalists/cano-martin-pena-community-land-trust/
The women's march, with over three million people (and counting) in the U.S., and how hopeful it made so many people.
https://women2017numbers.wordpress.com/
Toward a Right Relationship with Finance
Check out this new book that I co-authored on Debt, Interest, Growth and Security.
The growth economy is failing to provide equitable well-being for humanity and a life-sustaining future for Earth. However our institutional endowments and individual retirement are dependent on that same growth economy. This book:
• offers background on our current economic system--how it is based on unearned income on the one hand and debt on the other, with a built-in momentum toward economy inequality and ecological overshoot;
• frames the conversation within the context of our deepest values and beliefs;
• suggests plausible and historically grounded alternatives to the current system, particularly with regard to financing retirement; and
• invites everyone to imagine new forms of durable economic and social security, and to help create the relationships and institutions that will make them a reality.
With many people now counting as never before on the performance of Wall Street for retirement security, how can this system be challenged with integrity and effectiveness? Can we break with our dependence on financial speculation and build up new structures of security in a transformed, life-centered economy?
To order the book, or read it on line, go to http://www.quakerinstitute.org/?page_id=5 and scroll down.
More resources
Resource from my friend Daniel Hunter, Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide. http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide
Recent posts on other web/blog sites:
In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust
http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby
Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years: https://www.trainingforchange.org/publications/muscle-building-peace-and-justice-nonviolent-workout-routine-21st-century (or just google the title)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
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.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/education-uprising/where-dignity-is-part-of-the-school-day
Pamela Haines
215-349-9428
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
www.pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com
Thursday, December 29, 2016
#162 Outside the law?
Dear all,
I hope you're all finding ways to rest and replenish in this slowed down winter holiday time. Sometimes the way Christmas, for instance, has been secularized and commercialized makes me want to take a stand against the whole thing. I've been challenged (once again) this season to consider how the holidays can remind us of our best and most enduring values, and what it would take to decide to approach every day as a "holy-day".
Wishing you love and strength for the new year,
Pamela
Outside the law?
I’ll never forget the little boy on our street who, when asked to pick up a snack wrapper he had dropped, defiantly replied that his mother let him litter. While many of us may have an ambivalent relationship to the law, I’m not sure I’d ever heard such an unapologetic decision to live outside of it—and I wonder what laws he flouts as an adult.
Beyond attempts to live outside the letter of the law, there are also those who defy a less clearly defined social contract, the expectation that everybody will grow up, be responsible and do their share of the work. They tend to cluster in two extremes: those who cannot find their way into the social contract because of inequity and oppression and respond with various kinds of lawlessness, and those who have access to enough money to buy their way out.
Their experience outside the social contract is very different. Those with too little who have broken criminal laws are pushed into prison in a system that seems increasingly intent on barring such people from equal participation in society forever. Those with too much often drift untethered outside the circle, roaming from one adventure to another, bedeviled by the irony that, when anything is possible and nothing is required, choice itself loses meaning. Yet this individual freedom, the right to do anything we want, unconstrained by limits, is held out as the ultimate good in our society.
This is a problem, since we are all subjects of another big law out there—natural law—that we didn’t create and can’t change. We have been blind. The discovery of an ancient layer of compressed plant life confused us into believing that our energy supplies are unlimited. The earth and its atmosphere’s enormous capacity to absorb waste lulled us into assuming that it had no end. We assumed there was an “away” into which we could throw things. We thought we could find high tech solutions to water shortages, greenhouse gas increases, soil degradation, resource depletion. We have been trying to live outside the natural law since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, but are facing its ever more unavoidable requirements.
It’s a hard transition to make. We have channeled our narrative of living within the law into harsh punishment of the smallest infractions by the most marginalized people. (Perhaps it’s not surprising that those whose violations are breathtakingly bold and outsized—damaging tens of thousands of lives in high-stakes gambling on home mortgages, or avoiding billions of dollars of taxes in complex off-shore schemes—get a slap on the wrist, if not a pay off.)
One way of reshaping the narrative is to embrace the challenge of living within, and being constrained by, natural law. The possibilities are endless. Explore all the other options to cool yourself before turning on the air-conditioner. Do without foods that have traveled thousands of miles, and cultivate a taste for what’s local and in-season. Stand against the pressure to buy new when what you have will still serve. Get somewhere without a car. Practice savoring each tiny taste or moment of a luxury, so you don’t need much to be satisfied. Think of this not as privation, but as a series of victories in finding joy living within the law.
Of course individual change is not enough. Those who are rogues when it comes to the law of nature need to be stopped, and standard legal and political remedies will likely fall short. Nonviolent direct action—which challenges the law, but is prepared to abide by its consequences—is a promising way of pushing our current system from the inside to reshape its boundaries.
As I reflect on it, there is something about that little boy’s distain for the letter of the law that resonates with the rebel in me. But I resonate more deeply with restorative justice practices, where nobody is ever pushed outside the circle. It is so clear: as members of the community of life on Earth, we all belong within the circle of its law.
Stretch
Toes on the curb, I stretch
as I take in the beauty of the park.
It makes the backs of my legs ache
but it’s a good ache.
I don’t mind.
Are there other stretches
not just in body
waiting for that choice
to welcome the ache?
Imagine: A New Economy is Possible!
Expanding health care
To help San Francisco provide access to quality health care for its uninsured adults, a law was passed in 2006 requiring covered employers to pay towards the health care costs of their employees. Healthy San Francisco is not health insurance, nor is it tied to a job. It is a program designed to help uninsured individuals in the city find access to affordable health care services. It allows eligible employers to make their obligated health care contributions directly to the City. The collected funds can then be accessed by their employees, either to help cover the cost of medical services or to receive medical reimbursement accounts. The city’s mid-sized businesses have employer health care spending requirements of $1.63 per hour, while large businesses pay $2.44 per hour and small businesses are exempt.
https://framework.gusto.com/healthy-san-francisco-what-it-means-for-local-businesses/
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
New York’s American Museum of Natural History, one of the world's most respected science museums, has slashed fossil fuel investments from its $650 million endowment.
Portland, Oregon has just adopted the first tax penalty on corporations that pay their CEOs more than 100 times what they pay typical workers. http://www.ips-dc.org/city-just-came-novel-way-fight-inequality-starts-bold-grassroots-action/
As part of the growing #MoveYourMoney and #GrabYourWallet campaigns in support of the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, Norway’s largest bank has sold its assets in the project. http://www.ecowatch.com/norway-dnb-dakota-access-pipeline-2098464180.html
The Army Corps of Engineers has announced that it will not approve an easement that would allow the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline to cross under Lake Oahe in North Dakota. http://www.badlandsjournal.com/2016-12-05/008532
Toward a Right Relationship with Finance.
Check out this new book that I co-authored on Debt, Interest, Growth and Security.
The growth economy is failing to provide equitable well-being for humanity and a life-sustaining future for Earth. However our institutional endowments and individual retirement are dependent on that same growth economy. This book:
• offers background on our current economic system--how it is based on unearned income on the one hand and debt on the other, with a built-in momentum toward economy inequality and ecological overshoot;
• frames the conversation within the context of our deepest values and beliefs;
• suggests plausible and historically grounded alternatives to the current system, particularly with regard to financing retirement; and
• invites everyone to imagine new forms of durable economic and social security, and to help create the relationships and institutions that will make them a reality.
With many people now counting as never before on the performance of Wall Street for retirement security, how can this system be challenged with integrity and effectiveness? Can we break with our dependence on financial speculation and build up new structures of security in a transformed, life-centered economy?
To order the book, or read it on line, go to http://www.quakerinstitute.org/?page_id=5 and scroll down.
More resources
Resource from my friend Daniel Hunter, Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide. http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide
Recent posts on other web/blog sites:
In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust
http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby
Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years: https://www.trainingforchange.org/publications/muscle-building-peace-and-justice-nonviolent-workout-routine-21st-century (or just google the title)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
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.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/education-uprising/where-dignity-is-part-of-the-school-day
Pamela Haines
215-349-9428
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
www.pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com
I hope you're all finding ways to rest and replenish in this slowed down winter holiday time. Sometimes the way Christmas, for instance, has been secularized and commercialized makes me want to take a stand against the whole thing. I've been challenged (once again) this season to consider how the holidays can remind us of our best and most enduring values, and what it would take to decide to approach every day as a "holy-day".
Wishing you love and strength for the new year,
Pamela
Outside the law?
I’ll never forget the little boy on our street who, when asked to pick up a snack wrapper he had dropped, defiantly replied that his mother let him litter. While many of us may have an ambivalent relationship to the law, I’m not sure I’d ever heard such an unapologetic decision to live outside of it—and I wonder what laws he flouts as an adult.
Beyond attempts to live outside the letter of the law, there are also those who defy a less clearly defined social contract, the expectation that everybody will grow up, be responsible and do their share of the work. They tend to cluster in two extremes: those who cannot find their way into the social contract because of inequity and oppression and respond with various kinds of lawlessness, and those who have access to enough money to buy their way out.
Their experience outside the social contract is very different. Those with too little who have broken criminal laws are pushed into prison in a system that seems increasingly intent on barring such people from equal participation in society forever. Those with too much often drift untethered outside the circle, roaming from one adventure to another, bedeviled by the irony that, when anything is possible and nothing is required, choice itself loses meaning. Yet this individual freedom, the right to do anything we want, unconstrained by limits, is held out as the ultimate good in our society.
This is a problem, since we are all subjects of another big law out there—natural law—that we didn’t create and can’t change. We have been blind. The discovery of an ancient layer of compressed plant life confused us into believing that our energy supplies are unlimited. The earth and its atmosphere’s enormous capacity to absorb waste lulled us into assuming that it had no end. We assumed there was an “away” into which we could throw things. We thought we could find high tech solutions to water shortages, greenhouse gas increases, soil degradation, resource depletion. We have been trying to live outside the natural law since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, but are facing its ever more unavoidable requirements.
It’s a hard transition to make. We have channeled our narrative of living within the law into harsh punishment of the smallest infractions by the most marginalized people. (Perhaps it’s not surprising that those whose violations are breathtakingly bold and outsized—damaging tens of thousands of lives in high-stakes gambling on home mortgages, or avoiding billions of dollars of taxes in complex off-shore schemes—get a slap on the wrist, if not a pay off.)
One way of reshaping the narrative is to embrace the challenge of living within, and being constrained by, natural law. The possibilities are endless. Explore all the other options to cool yourself before turning on the air-conditioner. Do without foods that have traveled thousands of miles, and cultivate a taste for what’s local and in-season. Stand against the pressure to buy new when what you have will still serve. Get somewhere without a car. Practice savoring each tiny taste or moment of a luxury, so you don’t need much to be satisfied. Think of this not as privation, but as a series of victories in finding joy living within the law.
Of course individual change is not enough. Those who are rogues when it comes to the law of nature need to be stopped, and standard legal and political remedies will likely fall short. Nonviolent direct action—which challenges the law, but is prepared to abide by its consequences—is a promising way of pushing our current system from the inside to reshape its boundaries.
As I reflect on it, there is something about that little boy’s distain for the letter of the law that resonates with the rebel in me. But I resonate more deeply with restorative justice practices, where nobody is ever pushed outside the circle. It is so clear: as members of the community of life on Earth, we all belong within the circle of its law.
Stretch
Toes on the curb, I stretch
as I take in the beauty of the park.
It makes the backs of my legs ache
but it’s a good ache.
I don’t mind.
Are there other stretches
not just in body
waiting for that choice
to welcome the ache?
Imagine: A New Economy is Possible!
Expanding health care
To help San Francisco provide access to quality health care for its uninsured adults, a law was passed in 2006 requiring covered employers to pay towards the health care costs of their employees. Healthy San Francisco is not health insurance, nor is it tied to a job. It is a program designed to help uninsured individuals in the city find access to affordable health care services. It allows eligible employers to make their obligated health care contributions directly to the City. The collected funds can then be accessed by their employees, either to help cover the cost of medical services or to receive medical reimbursement accounts. The city’s mid-sized businesses have employer health care spending requirements of $1.63 per hour, while large businesses pay $2.44 per hour and small businesses are exempt.
https://framework.gusto.com/healthy-san-francisco-what-it-means-for-local-businesses/
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
New York’s American Museum of Natural History, one of the world's most respected science museums, has slashed fossil fuel investments from its $650 million endowment.
Portland, Oregon has just adopted the first tax penalty on corporations that pay their CEOs more than 100 times what they pay typical workers. http://www.ips-dc.org/city-just-came-novel-way-fight-inequality-starts-bold-grassroots-action/
As part of the growing #MoveYourMoney and #GrabYourWallet campaigns in support of the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, Norway’s largest bank has sold its assets in the project. http://www.ecowatch.com/norway-dnb-dakota-access-pipeline-2098464180.html
The Army Corps of Engineers has announced that it will not approve an easement that would allow the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline to cross under Lake Oahe in North Dakota. http://www.badlandsjournal.com/2016-12-05/008532
Toward a Right Relationship with Finance.
Check out this new book that I co-authored on Debt, Interest, Growth and Security.
The growth economy is failing to provide equitable well-being for humanity and a life-sustaining future for Earth. However our institutional endowments and individual retirement are dependent on that same growth economy. This book:
• offers background on our current economic system--how it is based on unearned income on the one hand and debt on the other, with a built-in momentum toward economy inequality and ecological overshoot;
• frames the conversation within the context of our deepest values and beliefs;
• suggests plausible and historically grounded alternatives to the current system, particularly with regard to financing retirement; and
• invites everyone to imagine new forms of durable economic and social security, and to help create the relationships and institutions that will make them a reality.
With many people now counting as never before on the performance of Wall Street for retirement security, how can this system be challenged with integrity and effectiveness? Can we break with our dependence on financial speculation and build up new structures of security in a transformed, life-centered economy?
To order the book, or read it on line, go to http://www.quakerinstitute.org/?page_id=5 and scroll down.
More resources
Resource from my friend Daniel Hunter, Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide. http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide
Recent posts on other web/blog sites:
In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust
http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby
Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years: https://www.trainingforchange.org/publications/muscle-building-peace-and-justice-nonviolent-workout-routine-21st-century (or just google the title)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
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.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/education-uprising/where-dignity-is-part-of-the-school-day
Pamela Haines
215-349-9428
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
www.pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com
Saturday, October 22, 2016
#160 Inalienable rights
Dear all,
I'm feeling filled up with the possibility of change, after a whirlwind weekend learning about a Nicaragua micro-credit lending group, a Democracy School on local communities standing up to corporate predation, the launch of a video I was part of on the links between climate/race/justice issues and the economic system, a mind-expanding afternoon with four seven year olds and their parents playing and problem solving together, participation from afar in a native full moon ceremony, and finding an unlikely new friend and ally in challenging the monetary system--oh my!
It's just as well that all my weekends aren't this full, but what a gift to have such opportunities available. My contribution below is one effort at sharing some of what I took in.
Love,
Pamela
Inalienable rights
How did a school nurse in a little coal mining town in Pennsylvania stand up against a big corporation--and influence the Constitution of Ecuador in the process? Well, first she had to see something that had been invisible to her, and remains invisible to most of us.
Though she joined her local borough council mostly to challenge an “old boys” network, she became increasingly concerned about plans for the dumping of toxic sludge and coal fly ash in abandoned mines on the edge of town. It was shocking to discover how little power her town had to protect its people. How could a faceless corporation, with no ties to the area, have the right to come in and endanger a whole community’s air and water supply?
She learned the answer to that question at a Democracy School, where the curriculum begins in 1773. Towns all over the colonies were fed up with England writing all the laws to benefit the king and protect the profits of the East India Company. They wanted the right to make their own laws, for the benefit of their own communities. Dozens of them wrote up resolutions that were the inspiration for our Declaration of Independence, a bold (and wholly illegal) challenge to the laws of empire.
It turned out, however, that moneyed interests in the colonies were not ready to abandon a system based on the rule of property, or to embrace popular democracy, and the 1787 Constitution brought back many elements of the British system. The rights of property over people were reintroduced and became more and more entrenched in law as the decades went by—until by the late 1800’s corporations had gained the status of personhood, and keeping them from their profits became a violation of their rights. Over the same period of time, more and more local laws were pre-empted by state and federal bodies, and structures of community self-government were steadily eroded away.
Many communities now facing outside corporate harm turn to regulatory agencies as their only hope for protection. While these agencies theoretically curb harmful practices, they tend to be staffed by industry leaders, who set up the systems and write the rules, with a not-too-hidden goal of buffering the industry from the public. Furthermore, their function is to manage harms, not to stand against them, and public input at hearings has no legal status.
So, what’s a school nurse faced with a big corporation that’s threatening her community going to do? Propose a Community Bill of Rights, saying that we have a right to act to protect our community from external harm. That our human rights are inalienable and take precedence over property rights. And while we’re at it, let’s say that nature has rights too.
But is this legal? It’s certainly as legal as the Declaration of Independence, which we celebrate so happily every 4th of July. In any case, the Community Bill of Rights passed a borough council vote (narrowly), the toxic sludge and fly ash corporations were told to stay away, and the world had its first example of legislation declaring that nature has rights. This inspired other municipalities—including Pittsburgh—to adopt similar community rights ordinances, and some folks in Ecuador, then in the process of rewriting its Constitution, took notice. Ecuador now has language in its Constitution saying that nature has the right to “integral respect for its existence”.
What is the moral of this story? Small acts can have big ripples. Corporate creation of “sacrifice zones” can be stopped, if those targeted communities are willing to be bold. And standing up for the inalienable rights of humans and ecosystems may create the rights movement that will save the planet.
For more detail on Tamaqua’s struggle: http://celdf.org/2015/08/tamaqua-borough/ For more on how it fits with a larger rights to nature movement:
http://therightsofnature.org/natural-law-global-alliance For more on the group that is spearheading this movement: http://celdf.org/
Work machine
Front loader coming down the street
Last time I saw one here
a three year old was captivated.
We waved at the man
and he waved back.
So I look this time.
It's a different man--
an individual
not just a work machine
in motion.
Imagine: A new economy is possible (it may already be here)
Unbeknownst to many, literally thousands of on-the-ground efforts at building a new economy have been developing. These include cooperatives, worker-owned companies,neighborhood corporations, and many little known municipal, state, and regional efforts. These emerging economic alternatives suggest different ways in which capital can be held in common by small and large publics. They include nonprofit community corporations and land trusts that develop low-income housing, as well as community development financial institutions (CDFIs) that have over $108 billion in assets under their management. Employee ownership is also on the rise, involving three million more workers than are members of private sector unions. A third of Americans belong to cooperatives, including credit unions that serve 107 million people and manage $1.3 trillion in assets.
In the public sector, local government economic development programs invest in local businesses, while municipal enterprises build infrastructure and provide services, raising revenue and creating employment, diversifying the base of locally controlled capital. Public utilities, together with co-ops, make up nearly 90 percent of all electricity providers and generate over 20 percent of America’s electricity. From California to Alabama, public pension assets are being channeled into job creation and community development. Cities and states are looking to the creation of public banking systems like that of North Dakota…
http://www.thenextsystem.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/NSPOberlin-final.pdf
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
Two more Brazilian cities have prohibited fracking, reaching a total number of 72, and joining bans in Germany, Scotland, France, Northern Ireland and Bulgaria.
https://350.org/press-release/momentum-continues-to-grow-in-the-opposition-to-fracking-more-than-70-brazilian-cities-approve-fracking-bans/
All plastic cups, cutlery and plates must be designed to be compostable in France, according to a new law which comes into effect in 2020.
http://circulatenews.org/2016/09/ban-on-plastic-cups-plates-and-cutlery-passed-in-france/
Civilian monitors from Mon State in Myanmar have traveled to the Philippines to learn lessons about civilian ceasefire monitoring in Mindanao.
http://www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org/what-we-do/stories-from-the-field/30-myanmar-news/448-civilian-monitors-from-mon-state-myanmar-learn-lessons-about-civilian-ceasefire-monitoring-in-mindanao-philippines
The General Council of the Ho-Chunk Nation has voted overwhelmingly to amend their tribal constitution to enshrine the Rights of Nature, becoming the first tribal nation in the United States to take this critical step.
http://celdf.org/2016/10/times-ho-chunk-nation-wisconsin-becomes-first-add-rights-nature-tribal-constitution/
Toward a Right Relationship with Finance.
Check out this new book that I co-authored on Debt, Interest, Growth and Security.
The growth economy is failing to provide equitable well-being for humanity and a life-sustaining future for Earth. However our institutional endowments and individual retirement are dependent on that same growth economy. This book:
• offers background on our current economic system--how it is based on unearned income on the one hand and debt on the other, with a built-in momentum toward economy inequality and ecological overshoot;
• frames the conversation within the context of our deepest values and beliefs;
• suggests plausible and historically grounded alternatives to the current system, particularly with regard to financing retirement; and
• invites everyone to imagine new forms of durable economic and social security, and to help create the relationships and institutions that will make them a reality.
With many people now counting as never before on the performance of Wall Street for retirement security, how can this system be challenged with integrity and effectiveness? Can we break with our dependence on financial speculation and build up new structures of security in a transformed, life-centered economy?
To order the book, or read it on line, go to http://www.quakerinstitute.org/?page_id=5 and scroll down.
More resources
Resource from my friend Daniel Hunter, Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide. http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide
Recent posts on other web/blog sites:
In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust
http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby
Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years: https://www.trainingforchange.org/publications/muscle-building-peace-and-justice-nonviolent-workout-routine-21st-century (or just google the title)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
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.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/education-uprising/where-dignity-is-part-of-the-school-day
Pamela Haines
215-349-9428
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
www.pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com
I'm feeling filled up with the possibility of change, after a whirlwind weekend learning about a Nicaragua micro-credit lending group, a Democracy School on local communities standing up to corporate predation, the launch of a video I was part of on the links between climate/race/justice issues and the economic system, a mind-expanding afternoon with four seven year olds and their parents playing and problem solving together, participation from afar in a native full moon ceremony, and finding an unlikely new friend and ally in challenging the monetary system--oh my!
It's just as well that all my weekends aren't this full, but what a gift to have such opportunities available. My contribution below is one effort at sharing some of what I took in.
Love,
Pamela
Inalienable rights
How did a school nurse in a little coal mining town in Pennsylvania stand up against a big corporation--and influence the Constitution of Ecuador in the process? Well, first she had to see something that had been invisible to her, and remains invisible to most of us.
Though she joined her local borough council mostly to challenge an “old boys” network, she became increasingly concerned about plans for the dumping of toxic sludge and coal fly ash in abandoned mines on the edge of town. It was shocking to discover how little power her town had to protect its people. How could a faceless corporation, with no ties to the area, have the right to come in and endanger a whole community’s air and water supply?
She learned the answer to that question at a Democracy School, where the curriculum begins in 1773. Towns all over the colonies were fed up with England writing all the laws to benefit the king and protect the profits of the East India Company. They wanted the right to make their own laws, for the benefit of their own communities. Dozens of them wrote up resolutions that were the inspiration for our Declaration of Independence, a bold (and wholly illegal) challenge to the laws of empire.
It turned out, however, that moneyed interests in the colonies were not ready to abandon a system based on the rule of property, or to embrace popular democracy, and the 1787 Constitution brought back many elements of the British system. The rights of property over people were reintroduced and became more and more entrenched in law as the decades went by—until by the late 1800’s corporations had gained the status of personhood, and keeping them from their profits became a violation of their rights. Over the same period of time, more and more local laws were pre-empted by state and federal bodies, and structures of community self-government were steadily eroded away.
Many communities now facing outside corporate harm turn to regulatory agencies as their only hope for protection. While these agencies theoretically curb harmful practices, they tend to be staffed by industry leaders, who set up the systems and write the rules, with a not-too-hidden goal of buffering the industry from the public. Furthermore, their function is to manage harms, not to stand against them, and public input at hearings has no legal status.
So, what’s a school nurse faced with a big corporation that’s threatening her community going to do? Propose a Community Bill of Rights, saying that we have a right to act to protect our community from external harm. That our human rights are inalienable and take precedence over property rights. And while we’re at it, let’s say that nature has rights too.
But is this legal? It’s certainly as legal as the Declaration of Independence, which we celebrate so happily every 4th of July. In any case, the Community Bill of Rights passed a borough council vote (narrowly), the toxic sludge and fly ash corporations were told to stay away, and the world had its first example of legislation declaring that nature has rights. This inspired other municipalities—including Pittsburgh—to adopt similar community rights ordinances, and some folks in Ecuador, then in the process of rewriting its Constitution, took notice. Ecuador now has language in its Constitution saying that nature has the right to “integral respect for its existence”.
What is the moral of this story? Small acts can have big ripples. Corporate creation of “sacrifice zones” can be stopped, if those targeted communities are willing to be bold. And standing up for the inalienable rights of humans and ecosystems may create the rights movement that will save the planet.
For more detail on Tamaqua’s struggle: http://celdf.org/2015/08/tamaqua-borough/ For more on how it fits with a larger rights to nature movement:
http://therightsofnature.org/natural-law-global-alliance For more on the group that is spearheading this movement: http://celdf.org/
Work machine
Front loader coming down the street
Last time I saw one here
a three year old was captivated.
We waved at the man
and he waved back.
So I look this time.
It's a different man--
an individual
not just a work machine
in motion.
Imagine: A new economy is possible (it may already be here)
Unbeknownst to many, literally thousands of on-the-ground efforts at building a new economy have been developing. These include cooperatives, worker-owned companies,neighborhood corporations, and many little known municipal, state, and regional efforts. These emerging economic alternatives suggest different ways in which capital can be held in common by small and large publics. They include nonprofit community corporations and land trusts that develop low-income housing, as well as community development financial institutions (CDFIs) that have over $108 billion in assets under their management. Employee ownership is also on the rise, involving three million more workers than are members of private sector unions. A third of Americans belong to cooperatives, including credit unions that serve 107 million people and manage $1.3 trillion in assets.
In the public sector, local government economic development programs invest in local businesses, while municipal enterprises build infrastructure and provide services, raising revenue and creating employment, diversifying the base of locally controlled capital. Public utilities, together with co-ops, make up nearly 90 percent of all electricity providers and generate over 20 percent of America’s electricity. From California to Alabama, public pension assets are being channeled into job creation and community development. Cities and states are looking to the creation of public banking systems like that of North Dakota…
http://www.thenextsystem.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/NSPOberlin-final.pdf
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
Two more Brazilian cities have prohibited fracking, reaching a total number of 72, and joining bans in Germany, Scotland, France, Northern Ireland and Bulgaria.
https://350.org/press-release/momentum-continues-to-grow-in-the-opposition-to-fracking-more-than-70-brazilian-cities-approve-fracking-bans/
All plastic cups, cutlery and plates must be designed to be compostable in France, according to a new law which comes into effect in 2020.
http://circulatenews.org/2016/09/ban-on-plastic-cups-plates-and-cutlery-passed-in-france/
Civilian monitors from Mon State in Myanmar have traveled to the Philippines to learn lessons about civilian ceasefire monitoring in Mindanao.
http://www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org/what-we-do/stories-from-the-field/30-myanmar-news/448-civilian-monitors-from-mon-state-myanmar-learn-lessons-about-civilian-ceasefire-monitoring-in-mindanao-philippines
The General Council of the Ho-Chunk Nation has voted overwhelmingly to amend their tribal constitution to enshrine the Rights of Nature, becoming the first tribal nation in the United States to take this critical step.
http://celdf.org/2016/10/times-ho-chunk-nation-wisconsin-becomes-first-add-rights-nature-tribal-constitution/
Toward a Right Relationship with Finance.
Check out this new book that I co-authored on Debt, Interest, Growth and Security.
The growth economy is failing to provide equitable well-being for humanity and a life-sustaining future for Earth. However our institutional endowments and individual retirement are dependent on that same growth economy. This book:
• offers background on our current economic system--how it is based on unearned income on the one hand and debt on the other, with a built-in momentum toward economy inequality and ecological overshoot;
• frames the conversation within the context of our deepest values and beliefs;
• suggests plausible and historically grounded alternatives to the current system, particularly with regard to financing retirement; and
• invites everyone to imagine new forms of durable economic and social security, and to help create the relationships and institutions that will make them a reality.
With many people now counting as never before on the performance of Wall Street for retirement security, how can this system be challenged with integrity and effectiveness? Can we break with our dependence on financial speculation and build up new structures of security in a transformed, life-centered economy?
To order the book, or read it on line, go to http://www.quakerinstitute.org/?page_id=5 and scroll down.
More resources
Resource from my friend Daniel Hunter, Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide. http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide
Recent posts on other web/blog sites:
In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust
http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby
Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years: https://www.trainingforchange.org/publications/muscle-building-peace-and-justice-nonviolent-workout-routine-21st-century (or just google the title)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
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.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/education-uprising/where-dignity-is-part-of-the-school-day
Pamela Haines
215-349-9428
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
www.pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com
Sunday, October 2, 2016
#159 Turtle Island
Dear all,
I wrote Turtle Island early in the month and sent it to the newspaper, as a way of trying to call attention to the events at Standing Rock--which were still virtually invisible then. Though they didn't print it and it's now a little dated, the story is still true.
I'm feeling blessed by the breadth and depth of relationships in my life. I would never have imagined as a small child that I would get to be close to so many people, from so many backgrounds, with so many accompanying joys and challenges.
And, as we continue to be assaulted by bad news and dire predictions, I keep reminding myself that I can always do my share, and that despair is an insult to the future.
Love,
Pamela
Turtle Island
This is a story about an old stone turtle in our neighborhood park, a pre-dawn walk with a one year old, and the Standing Rock Sioux nation’s struggle to stop a pipeline that threatens their river and sacred sites in the Dakotas.
I’ve known the turtle for a long time. My boys, who used to play at the little wall and slide surrounding it, now have children of their own. While the rest of the playground was torn down years ago to make way for a bigger, fancier one across the street, the turtle has stayed. The Standing Rock nation is new to me, though I have been following stories of indigenous leadership in protecting the environment, mostly in the Pacific Northwest, for several years. I’ve cheered their efforts from afar, as a well-wishing onlooker needing all the hope I can get in this scary world.
But after spending five days kayaking from the Six Nations reserve in southern Ontario to Lake Erie in July, in a joint effort to honor the treaties and protect the earth, that well-wishing onlooker role no longer fits. It’s personal now. With the tension growing around the pipeline standoff, the drum-beat of urgency grows: People are being brutalized by pipeline security guards. Rights are being flagrantly abused on all sides and no one is listening. If you care, you’ve got to do something. Get yourself out to North Dakota. Drop everything you’re doing to organize everyone you know to stand against this injustice.
I’d like to. My heart is pounding along with that drum. But I don’t see how I can drop everything I’m doing, and something keeps me from seeking out videos of oppression and details of injustice, sharing with all my friends, and urging them to watch and share as well. I just don’t see how more free-floating outrage, laced with despair, numbness and guilt, will help.
So when I get a note from a new friend on the Six Nations reserve that they will be holding a sunrise prayer service Labor Day morning to support the people of Standing Rock, and inviting me to join from a distance, I know I want to be there. These are people I know and love. This would be a way to connect. But I had offered to take our two young grandchildren Sunday night, to give my son and daughter-in-law a break and help her heal from a nasty concussion. Even with the help of my husband, I have no idea what will be required of me at dawn.
But the one-year old is awake at 5:30, ready for a new day. So we get up, gather clothes for the cool of the morning, collect the stroller, and head down to the park to greet the day. As I wonder where to settle, I remember the turtle. With me sitting on the ground and him content in the stroller, it’s a perfect spot. We stroke the rough places and the smooth places on the turtle’s back and head, and I talk to him about why we are here. I talk about Turtle Island, the name local indigenous groups gave to this land, about how we love the earth and the water and the air, how we need to protect it, about the people of Standing Rock and our friends at the Six Nations reserve, how we’re all in this together. We play with the spiky little balls from a sweet gum tree. And the sun comes up. And in the sweetness of this time together, my eyes fill with tears.
This was the missing piece. One of the great gifts of July’s kayaking trip had been a story that an elder shared from her grandmother: You have to cry till your tears run sweet. With those tears, I can remember not just what is urgent, but what I love.
The next evening I hear from one of our other new friends. She is heading out to the Dakotas to serve as a medic in the pipeline struggle and looking for support. This I can do, and I’m glad for the opportunity to do it. I’m thankful to these precious friends and wise ancestors, to a bright-eyed grandchild, and to that old stone turtle, invisible to me in the park all those years, for helping me find a way to do my part.
Guys
I may have to leave this seat.
There is much I can tolerate
on the trolley
but hyper-confident male argument
about which hot shot coaches and athletes
should have done what
to win the big game
loud in my ear from right behind
is an assault almost unbearable.
As I consider my options
the conversation shifts.
Do you have a date for the weekend?
Suddenly, these are high school boys
shy and awkward
reaching out as best they can.
They leave before me
now visible--
one tall and fair
the other compact and dark-skinned
and I give thanks
for the chance I had to witness
these two friends.
Imagine: A new economy is possible!
Feeding school children from small farms
A 2009 law in Brazil stipulates that school authorities must spend at least 30 percent of their school meal budget on produce from smallholder farmers. With about 45 million children receiving free school lunches each day, Brazil’s 5 million small farmers are among the prime beneficiaries of the hundreds of millions of dollars the government spends on school meals.
Access to a guaranteed market through the feeding program allows many of these small farmers to stay on their land rather than migrating to the big cities in search of work. With the process of formalizing land claims expensive and time consuming, farmers without formal land title deeds also benefit, using the income from the program to gain such deeds.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/where-the-worlds-biggest-school-meal-program-is-keeping-local-farmers-in-business-20160902
Some things that have made me hopeful recently:
The hope and energy gathered around the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/09/14/standing-rock-protest-camp-becomes-movement#gallery
Dual announcements in July that Berlin’s parliament voted to divest from oil, coal and gas companies, and the city of Stuttgart, in southwestern Germany, pulled its funds out of fossil fuels in response to the mounting threat of climate change.
http://gofossilfree.org/europe/category/divestment-2/
The action by Philippines environment secretary Gina Lopez over the summer to close eight mines for various violations of land, water quality, and air emissions standards, with the shutdowns indefinite pending restoration work and changes in practices that bring them back into compliance with environmental statutes.
http://www.circleofblue.org/2016/water-management/gina-lopez-crusader-sets-philippines-water-mining-safety-unexpected-new-course/
The Moral Day of Action on September 12, where religious leaders in 30 state capitols stood with people impacted by unjust policies to declare that some issues are not liberal or conservative, but right versus wrong.
http://www.breachrepairers.org/blog/moraldayofaction
Toward a Right Relationship with Finance.
Check out this new book that I co-authored on Debt, Interest, Growth and Security.
The growth economy is failing to provide equitable well-being for humanity and a life-sustaining future for Earth. However our institutional endowments and individual retirement are dependent on that same growth economy. This book:
• offers background on our current economic system--how it is based on unearned income on the one hand and debt on the other, with a built-in momentum toward economy inequality and ecological overshoot;
• frames the conversation within the context of our deepest values and beliefs;
• suggests plausible and historically grounded alternatives to the current system, particularly with regard to financing retirement; and
• invites everyone to imagine new forms of durable economic and social security, and to help create the relationships and institutions that will make them a reality.
With many people now counting as never before on the performance of Wall Street for retirement security, how can this system be challenged with integrity and effectiveness? Can we break with our dependence on financial speculation and build up new structures of security in a transformed, life-centered economy?
To order the book, or read it on line, go to http://www.quakerinstitute.org/?page_id=5 and scroll down.
More resources
Resource from my friend Daniel Hunter, Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide. http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide
Recent posts on other web/blog sites:
In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust
http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby
Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years: https://www.trainingforchange.org/publications/muscle-building-peace-and-justice-nonviolent-workout-routine-21st-century (or just google the title)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
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.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/education-uprising/where-dignity-is-part-of-the-school-day
Pamela Haines
215-349-9428
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
www.pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com
Pamela Haines
215-349-9428
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
www.pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com
I wrote Turtle Island early in the month and sent it to the newspaper, as a way of trying to call attention to the events at Standing Rock--which were still virtually invisible then. Though they didn't print it and it's now a little dated, the story is still true.
I'm feeling blessed by the breadth and depth of relationships in my life. I would never have imagined as a small child that I would get to be close to so many people, from so many backgrounds, with so many accompanying joys and challenges.
And, as we continue to be assaulted by bad news and dire predictions, I keep reminding myself that I can always do my share, and that despair is an insult to the future.
Love,
Pamela
Turtle Island
This is a story about an old stone turtle in our neighborhood park, a pre-dawn walk with a one year old, and the Standing Rock Sioux nation’s struggle to stop a pipeline that threatens their river and sacred sites in the Dakotas.
I’ve known the turtle for a long time. My boys, who used to play at the little wall and slide surrounding it, now have children of their own. While the rest of the playground was torn down years ago to make way for a bigger, fancier one across the street, the turtle has stayed. The Standing Rock nation is new to me, though I have been following stories of indigenous leadership in protecting the environment, mostly in the Pacific Northwest, for several years. I’ve cheered their efforts from afar, as a well-wishing onlooker needing all the hope I can get in this scary world.
But after spending five days kayaking from the Six Nations reserve in southern Ontario to Lake Erie in July, in a joint effort to honor the treaties and protect the earth, that well-wishing onlooker role no longer fits. It’s personal now. With the tension growing around the pipeline standoff, the drum-beat of urgency grows: People are being brutalized by pipeline security guards. Rights are being flagrantly abused on all sides and no one is listening. If you care, you’ve got to do something. Get yourself out to North Dakota. Drop everything you’re doing to organize everyone you know to stand against this injustice.
I’d like to. My heart is pounding along with that drum. But I don’t see how I can drop everything I’m doing, and something keeps me from seeking out videos of oppression and details of injustice, sharing with all my friends, and urging them to watch and share as well. I just don’t see how more free-floating outrage, laced with despair, numbness and guilt, will help.
So when I get a note from a new friend on the Six Nations reserve that they will be holding a sunrise prayer service Labor Day morning to support the people of Standing Rock, and inviting me to join from a distance, I know I want to be there. These are people I know and love. This would be a way to connect. But I had offered to take our two young grandchildren Sunday night, to give my son and daughter-in-law a break and help her heal from a nasty concussion. Even with the help of my husband, I have no idea what will be required of me at dawn.
But the one-year old is awake at 5:30, ready for a new day. So we get up, gather clothes for the cool of the morning, collect the stroller, and head down to the park to greet the day. As I wonder where to settle, I remember the turtle. With me sitting on the ground and him content in the stroller, it’s a perfect spot. We stroke the rough places and the smooth places on the turtle’s back and head, and I talk to him about why we are here. I talk about Turtle Island, the name local indigenous groups gave to this land, about how we love the earth and the water and the air, how we need to protect it, about the people of Standing Rock and our friends at the Six Nations reserve, how we’re all in this together. We play with the spiky little balls from a sweet gum tree. And the sun comes up. And in the sweetness of this time together, my eyes fill with tears.
This was the missing piece. One of the great gifts of July’s kayaking trip had been a story that an elder shared from her grandmother: You have to cry till your tears run sweet. With those tears, I can remember not just what is urgent, but what I love.
The next evening I hear from one of our other new friends. She is heading out to the Dakotas to serve as a medic in the pipeline struggle and looking for support. This I can do, and I’m glad for the opportunity to do it. I’m thankful to these precious friends and wise ancestors, to a bright-eyed grandchild, and to that old stone turtle, invisible to me in the park all those years, for helping me find a way to do my part.
Guys
I may have to leave this seat.
There is much I can tolerate
on the trolley
but hyper-confident male argument
about which hot shot coaches and athletes
should have done what
to win the big game
loud in my ear from right behind
is an assault almost unbearable.
As I consider my options
the conversation shifts.
Do you have a date for the weekend?
Suddenly, these are high school boys
shy and awkward
reaching out as best they can.
They leave before me
now visible--
one tall and fair
the other compact and dark-skinned
and I give thanks
for the chance I had to witness
these two friends.
Imagine: A new economy is possible!
Feeding school children from small farms
A 2009 law in Brazil stipulates that school authorities must spend at least 30 percent of their school meal budget on produce from smallholder farmers. With about 45 million children receiving free school lunches each day, Brazil’s 5 million small farmers are among the prime beneficiaries of the hundreds of millions of dollars the government spends on school meals.
Access to a guaranteed market through the feeding program allows many of these small farmers to stay on their land rather than migrating to the big cities in search of work. With the process of formalizing land claims expensive and time consuming, farmers without formal land title deeds also benefit, using the income from the program to gain such deeds.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/where-the-worlds-biggest-school-meal-program-is-keeping-local-farmers-in-business-20160902
Some things that have made me hopeful recently:
The hope and energy gathered around the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/09/14/standing-rock-protest-camp-becomes-movement#gallery
Dual announcements in July that Berlin’s parliament voted to divest from oil, coal and gas companies, and the city of Stuttgart, in southwestern Germany, pulled its funds out of fossil fuels in response to the mounting threat of climate change.
http://gofossilfree.org/europe/category/divestment-2/
The action by Philippines environment secretary Gina Lopez over the summer to close eight mines for various violations of land, water quality, and air emissions standards, with the shutdowns indefinite pending restoration work and changes in practices that bring them back into compliance with environmental statutes.
http://www.circleofblue.org/2016/water-management/gina-lopez-crusader-sets-philippines-water-mining-safety-unexpected-new-course/
The Moral Day of Action on September 12, where religious leaders in 30 state capitols stood with people impacted by unjust policies to declare that some issues are not liberal or conservative, but right versus wrong.
http://www.breachrepairers.org/blog/moraldayofaction
Toward a Right Relationship with Finance.
Check out this new book that I co-authored on Debt, Interest, Growth and Security.
The growth economy is failing to provide equitable well-being for humanity and a life-sustaining future for Earth. However our institutional endowments and individual retirement are dependent on that same growth economy. This book:
• offers background on our current economic system--how it is based on unearned income on the one hand and debt on the other, with a built-in momentum toward economy inequality and ecological overshoot;
• frames the conversation within the context of our deepest values and beliefs;
• suggests plausible and historically grounded alternatives to the current system, particularly with regard to financing retirement; and
• invites everyone to imagine new forms of durable economic and social security, and to help create the relationships and institutions that will make them a reality.
With many people now counting as never before on the performance of Wall Street for retirement security, how can this system be challenged with integrity and effectiveness? Can we break with our dependence on financial speculation and build up new structures of security in a transformed, life-centered economy?
To order the book, or read it on line, go to http://www.quakerinstitute.org/?page_id=5 and scroll down.
More resources
Resource from my friend Daniel Hunter, Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide. http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide
Recent posts on other web/blog sites:
In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust
http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby
Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years: https://www.trainingforchange.org/publications/muscle-building-peace-and-justice-nonviolent-workout-routine-21st-century (or just google the title)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
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.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/education-uprising/where-dignity-is-part-of-the-school-day
Pamela Haines
215-349-9428
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
www.pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com
Pamela Haines
215-349-9428
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
www.pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com
Sunday, August 28, 2016
#157 Bitter and Sweet
Dear all,
Our boys and their wonderful families keep being served health challenges--we're so much looking forward to the time when everyone is well again! And while it's lovely to get to the garden in the coolness of dawn--and the tomatoes are delicious--I'm also looking forward to the end of this oppressive heat.
But my slowed down summer evenings have been a treat. I've loved tracking the cycle of the moon, and joining new friends from last month's kayaking trip (from a distance) as they hold full moon ceremonies in service to the health of their people. And I keep forgetting to mention the book I've been working on for two years that is now out! (see "Imagine" below)
Love,
Pamela
Bitter and Sweet
Bitterness and sweet tears have been on my mind this summer. On the eve of a five-day paddle down an unknown river early in the summer, we gathered for orientation at a campground on a Native reserve in Canada. Everything—and almost everybody—was new. We closed with an elder sharing stories from her grandmother, and one sentence settled deep into my heart with the ring of truth. Her grandmother said, “You have to cry till your tears are sweet.” Grieve beyond the point of bitterness. This was the moment at which my journey down the river began—taking in a gift of wisdom as I prepared to put out my best effort toward defending the treaties and protecting the earth.
In midsummer I heard from a young woman across the ocean who is like a daughter to me that her marriage was in trouble and she needed advice. I pulled myself together to offer everything I had—and it wasn’t enough. Her response that she was feeling bitter—this from one of the most generous, hardworking and loving people I know—shocked me as nothing else had, and I entered into a full-blown campaign to gather more resources around her. This woman, of all people, must not be left to bitterness.
Late in the summer, I read an article in the paper about “bitter voters”. President Obama had used those words in the 2008 election campaign to characterize white working class people whose small Midwestern towns had been left behind, where the promises of successive administrations had not brought regeneration. He said, “It’s not surprising that they get bitter. People feel like government’s not listening to them, and as a consequence, they find that they can only rely on the traditions and the things that have been important to them for generation after generation: Faith. Family. Traditions like hunting. And they get frustrated.”
In an attempt to join those voters, to be on their side, another politician had challenged that characterization of bitterness and negativity and emphasized their spiritual richness. While I have no doubt these are good people, I still think Obama was right. They were also bitter, and they still are. You can try to sanitize that bitterness, or gloss over it, or pretend it is something that it is not. Or, much more problematic, you can feed on it for political advantage. But the advice of our native grandmother’s grandmother—to cry till the tears are sweet—offers a way forward that rings with the sound of truth.
Bitterness is a hard, tight thing. It needs to be loosened, by attention, by understanding, by tears. Someone in this election season has said that you cannot make an impact on such voters in an interchange of less than ten minutes. I would guess that it takes significantly more, and that it cannot succeed at all without a deep well of open-hearted listening. There are so many lost hopes and broken promises. There is such a strong sense of betrayal, of becoming invisible in one’s own country. What will it take for the tears of the bitter voters to run sweet?
Beyond knowing
I take it to bed with me
A report on corporate tax evasion
financial power grabs
shadow banking
regulatory loopholes.
The need to know is strong.
What are the levers
to rein in these shadowy
and powerful forces
that lurk at the core
of much of what is wrong
in our world?
I wade through dense language
barely hanging on at times
determined to understand.
These folks suggest
detailed policy changes
hoping to guide
the next president.
I have been guided as well
and now know more.
But just my knowing
changes nothing.
What do I do with the clarity
inside my head?
Imagine: A new economy is possible!
Toward a Right Relationship with Finance.
Check out this new book that I co-authored on Debt, Interest, Growth and Security.
The growth economy is failing to provide equitable well-being for humanity and a life-sustaining future for Earth. However our institutional endowments and individual retirement are dependent on that same growth economy. This book:
• offers background on our current economic system--how it is based on unearned income on the one hand and debt on the other, with a built-in momentum toward economy inequality and ecological overshoot;
• frames the conversation within the context of our deepest values and beliefs;
• suggests plausible and historically grounded alternatives to the current system, particularly with regard to financing retirement; and
• invites everyone to imagine new forms of durable economic and social security, and to help create the relationships and institutions that will make them a reality.
With many people now counting as never before on the performance of Wall Street for retirement security, how can this system be challenged with integrity and effectiveness? Can we break with our dependence on financial speculation and build up new structures of security in a transformed, life-centered economy?
To order the book, or read it on line, go to http://www.quakerinstitute.org/?page_id=5 and scroll down.
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
Reverend William Barber’s call for a 21st century moral movement that evokes Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement, both in a revival I attended in Philadelphia and in a speech at the Democratic National Convention. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAFZKcYn8qI).
A TV news reporter's astonishingly direct discussion of our country's historical relationship to native people, their role as our first environmentalists, and the irony of arresting them for trespass as they protest pipelines that endanger all our waters. http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/rewrite-the-protests-at-standing-rock-751440963846
Muslims in France who publicly attended mass in response to the killing of a Catholic priest by a Muslim extremist. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/muslims-catholic-mass-france_us_579e3c67e4b0e2e15eb63576
A campaign led by students at Columbia University that has successfully pressured the school to become the first institution of higher education to divest from the private prison corporation CCA and the private security company G4S, combined with the federal Justice Department’s announced plan to end the use of private prisons after concluding that they are less safe and less effective that government run prisons. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp
More resources
Resource from my friend Daniel Hunter, Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide. http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide
Recent posts on other web/blog sites:
In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust
http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby
Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years: https://www.trainingforchange.org/publications/muscle-building-peace-and-justice-nonviolent-workout-routine-21st-century (or just google the title)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
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.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/education-uprising/where-dignity-is-part-of-the-school-day
Pamela Haines
215-349-9428
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
www.pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com
Our boys and their wonderful families keep being served health challenges--we're so much looking forward to the time when everyone is well again! And while it's lovely to get to the garden in the coolness of dawn--and the tomatoes are delicious--I'm also looking forward to the end of this oppressive heat.
But my slowed down summer evenings have been a treat. I've loved tracking the cycle of the moon, and joining new friends from last month's kayaking trip (from a distance) as they hold full moon ceremonies in service to the health of their people. And I keep forgetting to mention the book I've been working on for two years that is now out! (see "Imagine" below)
Love,
Pamela
Bitter and Sweet
Bitterness and sweet tears have been on my mind this summer. On the eve of a five-day paddle down an unknown river early in the summer, we gathered for orientation at a campground on a Native reserve in Canada. Everything—and almost everybody—was new. We closed with an elder sharing stories from her grandmother, and one sentence settled deep into my heart with the ring of truth. Her grandmother said, “You have to cry till your tears are sweet.” Grieve beyond the point of bitterness. This was the moment at which my journey down the river began—taking in a gift of wisdom as I prepared to put out my best effort toward defending the treaties and protecting the earth.
In midsummer I heard from a young woman across the ocean who is like a daughter to me that her marriage was in trouble and she needed advice. I pulled myself together to offer everything I had—and it wasn’t enough. Her response that she was feeling bitter—this from one of the most generous, hardworking and loving people I know—shocked me as nothing else had, and I entered into a full-blown campaign to gather more resources around her. This woman, of all people, must not be left to bitterness.
Late in the summer, I read an article in the paper about “bitter voters”. President Obama had used those words in the 2008 election campaign to characterize white working class people whose small Midwestern towns had been left behind, where the promises of successive administrations had not brought regeneration. He said, “It’s not surprising that they get bitter. People feel like government’s not listening to them, and as a consequence, they find that they can only rely on the traditions and the things that have been important to them for generation after generation: Faith. Family. Traditions like hunting. And they get frustrated.”
In an attempt to join those voters, to be on their side, another politician had challenged that characterization of bitterness and negativity and emphasized their spiritual richness. While I have no doubt these are good people, I still think Obama was right. They were also bitter, and they still are. You can try to sanitize that bitterness, or gloss over it, or pretend it is something that it is not. Or, much more problematic, you can feed on it for political advantage. But the advice of our native grandmother’s grandmother—to cry till the tears are sweet—offers a way forward that rings with the sound of truth.
Bitterness is a hard, tight thing. It needs to be loosened, by attention, by understanding, by tears. Someone in this election season has said that you cannot make an impact on such voters in an interchange of less than ten minutes. I would guess that it takes significantly more, and that it cannot succeed at all without a deep well of open-hearted listening. There are so many lost hopes and broken promises. There is such a strong sense of betrayal, of becoming invisible in one’s own country. What will it take for the tears of the bitter voters to run sweet?
Beyond knowing
I take it to bed with me
A report on corporate tax evasion
financial power grabs
shadow banking
regulatory loopholes.
The need to know is strong.
What are the levers
to rein in these shadowy
and powerful forces
that lurk at the core
of much of what is wrong
in our world?
I wade through dense language
barely hanging on at times
determined to understand.
These folks suggest
detailed policy changes
hoping to guide
the next president.
I have been guided as well
and now know more.
But just my knowing
changes nothing.
What do I do with the clarity
inside my head?
Imagine: A new economy is possible!
Toward a Right Relationship with Finance.
Check out this new book that I co-authored on Debt, Interest, Growth and Security.
The growth economy is failing to provide equitable well-being for humanity and a life-sustaining future for Earth. However our institutional endowments and individual retirement are dependent on that same growth economy. This book:
• offers background on our current economic system--how it is based on unearned income on the one hand and debt on the other, with a built-in momentum toward economy inequality and ecological overshoot;
• frames the conversation within the context of our deepest values and beliefs;
• suggests plausible and historically grounded alternatives to the current system, particularly with regard to financing retirement; and
• invites everyone to imagine new forms of durable economic and social security, and to help create the relationships and institutions that will make them a reality.
With many people now counting as never before on the performance of Wall Street for retirement security, how can this system be challenged with integrity and effectiveness? Can we break with our dependence on financial speculation and build up new structures of security in a transformed, life-centered economy?
To order the book, or read it on line, go to http://www.quakerinstitute.org/?page_id=5 and scroll down.
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
Reverend William Barber’s call for a 21st century moral movement that evokes Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement, both in a revival I attended in Philadelphia and in a speech at the Democratic National Convention. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAFZKcYn8qI).
A TV news reporter's astonishingly direct discussion of our country's historical relationship to native people, their role as our first environmentalists, and the irony of arresting them for trespass as they protest pipelines that endanger all our waters. http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/rewrite-the-protests-at-standing-rock-751440963846
Muslims in France who publicly attended mass in response to the killing of a Catholic priest by a Muslim extremist. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/muslims-catholic-mass-france_us_579e3c67e4b0e2e15eb63576
A campaign led by students at Columbia University that has successfully pressured the school to become the first institution of higher education to divest from the private prison corporation CCA and the private security company G4S, combined with the federal Justice Department’s announced plan to end the use of private prisons after concluding that they are less safe and less effective that government run prisons. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp
More resources
Resource from my friend Daniel Hunter, Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide. http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide
Recent posts on other web/blog sites:
In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust
http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby
Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years: https://www.trainingforchange.org/publications/muscle-building-peace-and-justice-nonviolent-workout-routine-21st-century (or just google the title)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
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.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/education-uprising/where-dignity-is-part-of-the-school-day
Pamela Haines
215-349-9428
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
www.pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com
Wednesday, July 27, 2016
#156 A good mind
Dear all,
What a month! (Quite apart from everything that's going on in the world…) Chuck and I had the honor of participating in a native solidarity kayaking trip in southern Ontario which was way more mind/heart expanding and inspiring than we could have imagined, then came home to the news that our dear friend from Northern Uganda, Abitimo Odongkara, had just died. It feels like it's taken the rest of the month to give both experiences--and both communities involved--the attention they have called out for.
We are blessed to have both these communities in our lives, and it's good to remember that only when we are willing to know deep sorrow can we experience deep joy. Yet I have to say that I"m hoping for a more tranquil August!
And the good news from the community garden is that the peaches from the tree I planted a couple of years ago are ripe, and delicious.
Love,
Pamela
A good mind
Before we set out on our first day of paddling, we gather in a circle for the traditional Haudenosaunee (Six Nations, Iroquois, People of the Longhouse) thanksgiving address. These are the words that come before all else.
Bruce, an unassuming man in his forties, takes about five minutes to offer these thanks, in a native language that I learn later is Cayuga. With heads uncovered, we follow the theme of thanksgiving as best we can, each in our own way. Then Brooke gives an overview in English, mentioning everything Bruce has given thanks for.
Starting with the responsibility to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things, we give thanks to one another as people. Then we give thanks for the earth mother, the waters, the fish, the plants, the food plants, the medicine plants, the animals, the trees, the birds, the four winds, the thunders, the sun, Grandmother Moon, the stars, the wisdom keepers, and the creator. Having given these thanks, our minds are one.
Then Brooke offers a few words of her own, reminding us of the opportunity to be healed on the water, offering her hope that we will all keep a good mind. A good mind. That phrase comes up over and over again during our five days paddling down the Grand River together to honor the treaties and protect the earth, inspired by the1613 Two Row treaty where whites and natives agreed to live respectfully, side by side.
One evening we listen to Lisa, who felt compelled last fall to respond somehow to the outbreak of suicides on this Six Nations reserve in southern Ontario. Looking to traditional rituals for guidance, she decided to revive the sacred fires of the solstice and equinox. With a few friends, she shared these intentions and gathered a big group of people for a weekend fire at the winter solstice. She said that the summer solstice fire was hard; not so many people came, and keeping it burning from Friday evening through Sunday morning was a challenge. But even if just one person has been healed, she says, it’s worth it.
Since November, Lisa has also been holding a moon circle, a ceremony for women, at every full moon. These are time for sharing, open to any woman in the community. She has noticed that women will share in these settings things they would never reveal to social workers. Individual by individual, she is helping to knit the fabric of the community back together, good mind by good mind.
Suzie tells a compelling story in another evening sharing circle. We have camped at the Caledonia Fairgrounds, just below the bridge. In Caledonia ten years ago, a simmering land dispute between the Six Nations and land developers in town sparked into ugly confrontation. Emotions ran high, and the two peoples were left even more distrustful and separated. Yet they live right across the river from each other; we can see the bridge from where we sit. Suzie, a teacher in the Six Nations, found another teacher in Caledonia who was willing to do a pen-pal project with their students. It was a simple idea, connecting children one by one. They met at the end of the year, and the next year more children—and their families—were involved. Ten years later, 2000 children were pen pals, the celebration caught up whole communities, and the idea had leapfrogged across Canada to Alberta. Now here is a good mind at work!
Shane joined the paddle at the last minute, a stranger to everybody, just knowing somehow that this was where he needed to be. Shane never told a story. It was clear that there was trouble and hardship in his past, but he wasn’t one for words. Still he found his way into the center of the group, with his intimate knowledge of the river, his flashes of humor, and his ever-ready helping hand. At our closing circle, he said that he had never been treated with so much respect in his life, and he would honor the group by working harder to keep a good mind, something he had not done so well in the past.
There are many other ways to describe this journey, many stories that could be told. But it’s the power of this group of people—native and allies, men and women, young and old, friends and strangers—all intent on keeping a good mind as we traveled together down the river, that will stay with me forever.
Haiku on the first evening of our paddle
The First Nations elder
on water:
You have to cry
till your tears taste sweet.
White river guide:
deep native ties,
tales of savagery
still fascinate.
Camp bathroom talk:
Fierce scientist
sampling water to fight
pipeline danger.
Imagine--A new economy is possible!
Shared resources
Many people on the Six Nations reserve in southern Ontario remember the community rowboat that was tied up at the river, available to anyone who needed to cross over to the store on the other side.
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
A paired set of victories on the West Coast, where Native communities were able to assert their traditional rights and halt first the Gateway Pacific Coal Port near Seattle and then the Northern Gateway Pipelines project in British Columbia.
http://orcasissues.com/gateway-pacific-coal-port-rejected/
http://ens-newswire.com/2016/07/01/canadian-court-kills-enbridge-northern-gateway-pipeline/
Philadelphia’s water department, that exceeded their five-year clean water targets, creating over 837 greened acres--enough to keep an estimated 1.5 billion gallons of polluted water out of the city’s waterways during a typical year of rainfall.
http://www.phillywatersheds.org/big-news-green-city-clean-waters-blows-past-year-five-targets
A woman from the Six Nations reserve in southern Ontario, who spearheaded an enormously successful movement to build relationships between native and European heritage children.
http://www.penpalproject.ca/gatherings/2016.html
http://www.penpalproject.ca/information/background.html
More than thirty city mayors from fourteen states, who signed onto a letter in June, calling on state legislatures to “affirm the ability of localities to protect the health and quality of life of residents against the widespread expansion of industrial fracking”—indicating the potential for change from local elected officials.
http://celdf.org/2016/07/blog-u-s-mayors-embrace-community-rights-condemn-legalization-corporate-violence/
More resources
Resource from my friend Daniel Hunter, Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide. http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide
Recent posts on other web/blog sites:
In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust
http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby
Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years: https://www.trainingforchange.org/publications/muscle-building-peace-and-justice-nonviolent-workout-routine-21st-century (or just google the title)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
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.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/education-uprising/where-dignity-is-part-of-the-school-day
Pamela Haines
215-349-9428
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
www.pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com
A paired set of victories on the West Coast, where Native communities were able to assert their traditional rights and halt first the Gateway Pacific Coal Port near Seattle and then the Northern Gateway Pipelines project in British Columbia.
http://orcasissues.com/gateway-pacific-coal-port-rejected/
http://ens-newswire.com/2016/07/01/canadian-court-kills-enbridge-northern-gateway-pipeline/
Philadelphia’s water department, that exceeded their five-year clean water targets, creating over 837 greened acres--enough to keep an estimated 1.5 billion gallons of polluted water out of the city’s waterways during a typical year of rainfall.
http://www.phillywatersheds.org/big-news-green-city-clean-waters-blows-past-year-five-targets
A woman from the Six Nations reserve in southern Ontario, who spearheaded an enormously successful movement to build relationships between native and European heritage children.
http://www.penpalproject.ca/gatherings/2016.html
http://www.penpalproject.ca/information/background.html
More than thirty city mayors from fourteen states, who signed onto a letter in June, calling on state legislatures to “affirm the ability of localities to protect the health and quality of life of residents against the widespread expansion of industrial fracking”—indicating the potential for change from local elected officials.
http://celdf.org/2016/07/blog-u-s-mayors-embrace-community-rights-condemn-legalization-corporate-violence/
What a month! (Quite apart from everything that's going on in the world…) Chuck and I had the honor of participating in a native solidarity kayaking trip in southern Ontario which was way more mind/heart expanding and inspiring than we could have imagined, then came home to the news that our dear friend from Northern Uganda, Abitimo Odongkara, had just died. It feels like it's taken the rest of the month to give both experiences--and both communities involved--the attention they have called out for.
We are blessed to have both these communities in our lives, and it's good to remember that only when we are willing to know deep sorrow can we experience deep joy. Yet I have to say that I"m hoping for a more tranquil August!
And the good news from the community garden is that the peaches from the tree I planted a couple of years ago are ripe, and delicious.
Love,
Pamela
A good mind
Before we set out on our first day of paddling, we gather in a circle for the traditional Haudenosaunee (Six Nations, Iroquois, People of the Longhouse) thanksgiving address. These are the words that come before all else.
Bruce, an unassuming man in his forties, takes about five minutes to offer these thanks, in a native language that I learn later is Cayuga. With heads uncovered, we follow the theme of thanksgiving as best we can, each in our own way. Then Brooke gives an overview in English, mentioning everything Bruce has given thanks for.
Starting with the responsibility to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things, we give thanks to one another as people. Then we give thanks for the earth mother, the waters, the fish, the plants, the food plants, the medicine plants, the animals, the trees, the birds, the four winds, the thunders, the sun, Grandmother Moon, the stars, the wisdom keepers, and the creator. Having given these thanks, our minds are one.
Then Brooke offers a few words of her own, reminding us of the opportunity to be healed on the water, offering her hope that we will all keep a good mind. A good mind. That phrase comes up over and over again during our five days paddling down the Grand River together to honor the treaties and protect the earth, inspired by the1613 Two Row treaty where whites and natives agreed to live respectfully, side by side.
One evening we listen to Lisa, who felt compelled last fall to respond somehow to the outbreak of suicides on this Six Nations reserve in southern Ontario. Looking to traditional rituals for guidance, she decided to revive the sacred fires of the solstice and equinox. With a few friends, she shared these intentions and gathered a big group of people for a weekend fire at the winter solstice. She said that the summer solstice fire was hard; not so many people came, and keeping it burning from Friday evening through Sunday morning was a challenge. But even if just one person has been healed, she says, it’s worth it.
Since November, Lisa has also been holding a moon circle, a ceremony for women, at every full moon. These are time for sharing, open to any woman in the community. She has noticed that women will share in these settings things they would never reveal to social workers. Individual by individual, she is helping to knit the fabric of the community back together, good mind by good mind.
Suzie tells a compelling story in another evening sharing circle. We have camped at the Caledonia Fairgrounds, just below the bridge. In Caledonia ten years ago, a simmering land dispute between the Six Nations and land developers in town sparked into ugly confrontation. Emotions ran high, and the two peoples were left even more distrustful and separated. Yet they live right across the river from each other; we can see the bridge from where we sit. Suzie, a teacher in the Six Nations, found another teacher in Caledonia who was willing to do a pen-pal project with their students. It was a simple idea, connecting children one by one. They met at the end of the year, and the next year more children—and their families—were involved. Ten years later, 2000 children were pen pals, the celebration caught up whole communities, and the idea had leapfrogged across Canada to Alberta. Now here is a good mind at work!
Shane joined the paddle at the last minute, a stranger to everybody, just knowing somehow that this was where he needed to be. Shane never told a story. It was clear that there was trouble and hardship in his past, but he wasn’t one for words. Still he found his way into the center of the group, with his intimate knowledge of the river, his flashes of humor, and his ever-ready helping hand. At our closing circle, he said that he had never been treated with so much respect in his life, and he would honor the group by working harder to keep a good mind, something he had not done so well in the past.
There are many other ways to describe this journey, many stories that could be told. But it’s the power of this group of people—native and allies, men and women, young and old, friends and strangers—all intent on keeping a good mind as we traveled together down the river, that will stay with me forever.
Haiku on the first evening of our paddle
The First Nations elder
on water:
You have to cry
till your tears taste sweet.
White river guide:
deep native ties,
tales of savagery
still fascinate.
Camp bathroom talk:
Fierce scientist
sampling water to fight
pipeline danger.
Imagine--A new economy is possible!
Shared resources
Many people on the Six Nations reserve in southern Ontario remember the community rowboat that was tied up at the river, available to anyone who needed to cross over to the store on the other side.
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
A paired set of victories on the West Coast, where Native communities were able to assert their traditional rights and halt first the Gateway Pacific Coal Port near Seattle and then the Northern Gateway Pipelines project in British Columbia.
http://orcasissues.com/gateway-pacific-coal-port-rejected/
http://ens-newswire.com/2016/07/01/canadian-court-kills-enbridge-northern-gateway-pipeline/
Philadelphia’s water department, that exceeded their five-year clean water targets, creating over 837 greened acres--enough to keep an estimated 1.5 billion gallons of polluted water out of the city’s waterways during a typical year of rainfall.
http://www.phillywatersheds.org/big-news-green-city-clean-waters-blows-past-year-five-targets
A woman from the Six Nations reserve in southern Ontario, who spearheaded an enormously successful movement to build relationships between native and European heritage children.
http://www.penpalproject.ca/gatherings/2016.html
http://www.penpalproject.ca/information/background.html
More than thirty city mayors from fourteen states, who signed onto a letter in June, calling on state legislatures to “affirm the ability of localities to protect the health and quality of life of residents against the widespread expansion of industrial fracking”—indicating the potential for change from local elected officials.
http://celdf.org/2016/07/blog-u-s-mayors-embrace-community-rights-condemn-legalization-corporate-violence/
More resources
Resource from my friend Daniel Hunter, Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide. http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide
Recent posts on other web/blog sites:
In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust
http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby
Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years: https://www.trainingforchange.org/publications/muscle-building-peace-and-justice-nonviolent-workout-routine-21st-century (or just google the title)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
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.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/education-uprising/where-dignity-is-part-of-the-school-day
Pamela Haines
215-349-9428
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
www.pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com
A paired set of victories on the West Coast, where Native communities were able to assert their traditional rights and halt first the Gateway Pacific Coal Port near Seattle and then the Northern Gateway Pipelines project in British Columbia.
http://orcasissues.com/gateway-pacific-coal-port-rejected/
http://ens-newswire.com/2016/07/01/canadian-court-kills-enbridge-northern-gateway-pipeline/
Philadelphia’s water department, that exceeded their five-year clean water targets, creating over 837 greened acres--enough to keep an estimated 1.5 billion gallons of polluted water out of the city’s waterways during a typical year of rainfall.
http://www.phillywatersheds.org/big-news-green-city-clean-waters-blows-past-year-five-targets
A woman from the Six Nations reserve in southern Ontario, who spearheaded an enormously successful movement to build relationships between native and European heritage children.
http://www.penpalproject.ca/gatherings/2016.html
http://www.penpalproject.ca/information/background.html
More than thirty city mayors from fourteen states, who signed onto a letter in June, calling on state legislatures to “affirm the ability of localities to protect the health and quality of life of residents against the widespread expansion of industrial fracking”—indicating the potential for change from local elected officials.
http://celdf.org/2016/07/blog-u-s-mayors-embrace-community-rights-condemn-legalization-corporate-violence/
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