DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

In Nashville news, we now know that Pedro Garcia will be leaving his position as superintendent of schools. The school board has opted not to renew his contract. He came promising great things for Nashville schools, and he will leave without having delivered on those promises. What makes it awkward is that Garcia’s contract doesn’t expire until 2007, making him a bit of a lame duck. Unlike Mr. Bush, there’s a good chance he will quit voluntarily before that time.

I don’t think his failure is Dr. Garcia’s fault, in a way. Educational spending is being powerfully eroded from a number of different directions, just like the rest of mainstream American culture. Financial demands have mounted, while the public’s ability to meet them has lessened. There is increasing confusion about what kind of education is relevant for children in a society that is changing as rapidly as America is at this time. America’s children face a future that seems to hold little promise of security or fulfillment for any but a lucky and largely predetermined few. No wonder so many of them smoke cigarettes—what’s there to live for? No wonder drug dealing is so attractive to some—how else could you live like the people on TV?

When you get down to it, the question of “what are schools for?” starts to look like the question, “what is life for?” as in, “who do we think our children are, and what do we want them to know, how do we want them to be socialized, to create a society in which we can feel safe about growing old and dying .”

The current paradigm, I think, answers those questions the following way: “We think our children are walking embodiments of Murphy’s law, and so they need to be supervised continually so they never do anything that would hinder their willingness and ability to be cogs in the societal machine, which is, by the way, a pump designed to suck wealth up to those at the top of the human socio-economic pyramid, although we’d never tell the childen that. We need to make sure that children understand that if they get out of synch with this vision of society, they may seriously limit the likelihood that they will have the financial security that is the highest of values in this society.”

That’s the ultimate message I think Pedro Garcia was being paid to instill in Nashville’s children , so I’m actually kind of glad he didn’t succeed, especially since the society that wants to have this programming imprinted in all our young people is coming unglued at the seams even as we speak. But hey, it’s easy to be negative about American culture—what would I like to see taught in school? And how would I like to see those schools structured?

I have my ideals about how society oughta be. I also understand that, as they say in Vermont, “you can’t get there from here.” That, to me, is the profound lesson of the Russian Revolution: they tried to restructure society without having an effective way for the members of that society to restructure themselves, with the result that greed, ignorance, and anger took right back over. We have to come up with a step-by-step, self-re-enforcing, self-creating way to restructure the school system—and society as a whole.

There was a lot of experimentation with “free schools” and “open classrooms” back in the seventies. The sabotaging and suppression of that movement was one of the first steps in the conservative counter-revolution that is trying harder and harder to solidify its weakening hold on the reigns of power. Basically, we need to free up the teachers to work with their students in whatever way is appropriate. Bush and Kennedy’s “No Child Left Behind Act” was the most recent and far reaching step in the centralization of decision making and curriculum that has been going on in American schools since those heady days in the seventies. So, decentralization and relocalization of the school system are important steps to take. Parent-teacher organizations shouldn’t be taking care of peripherals—they should be working out school budgets, New England town-meeting style. Schools need to to be small enough units (a few hundred students) for this to be practical.

When you are running schools this way, the question “what should be taught” begs more of an answer than, “what the parents, teachers, and students all agree on.” (Yes, students should have some input into what they are taught—for whatever they can focus their interest and attention on will, ultimately, lead to everything else—so yes, appreciation for interconnectedness should be an educational goal.)

We need a school system that encourages creativity and individuation. Everyone has an enjoyable creative outlet of some kind, and a primary function of the school system should be to help people find their talents and express them. This sounds almost trite, but I think we are on the cusp of a cultural sea change, and that on the other side we will be a lot more dependent on our immediate neighbors not just for food and shelter but for entertainment and mental stimulation. We will be much less in the thrall of an expensive entertainment industry that makes millionaires of the lucky few who get to sing while we slave. I just get bored. I don’t want to work on Maggie’s Farm no more!

But, I digress. Individuation—we need to make sure all children learn practical psychology—we have this idea in our culture that we’re each pretty much stuck with who and what we are, but there are cultures whose psychology was much more interactive and evolutionary, and I think we need to graft that into our culture. It would seriously erode the so-called need for so-called psychiatric medication.

I think the school system needs to think in terms of teaching context. When I was in high school, I was taught chemistry, physics, and biology in a very academic, memorize-this kind of way, and I did poorly and retained very little of it. A few years later, I set myself up with some friends in a situation in which we intended to grow most of our own food. Suddenly, all those scientific subjects that had repulsed me as a teenager were immediately relevant—and thoroughly comprehensible.

My point is not that we should teach every kid how to garden, but the importance of meaningful hands-on subjects for growing minds. Meaningful, hands-on projects are food for the minds not just of young people but all of us, really, and school is where to start teaching kids not just how to figure things out, but how to figure out how to figure things out.

That’s the kind of coping skills I think we need to imbue in the next generation. Computers and their skills are, literally, marvelous, but one of their effects is that they are changing the world faster than our current educational system can keep up with.

We need people in our schools who understand this and are not threatened by it. Will the school board hire someone like that to run Nashville’s schools? I’m not holding my breath.

Comments

I agree with the localization of schools. The suicide epedemic amongst highschoolers in the 80’s and “columbine” style actions of the 90’s are a symoton of the mega schools. However how do you deal with segregation that would certainly follow that would happen in such a situation.
Posted by Grundy Green on 02/13/2006 05:23:52 PM

ah, yes, the old “local culture” vs. “cultural segregation” dilemma…plenty of mixers and high value placed on “different strokes for different folks” and no financial discrimination, for a quick answer… thanks
Posted by brothermartin on 02/13/2006 09:48:23 PM

The latest update in Elaine Brown’s bid for the mayor’s office in Brunswick, Georgia, is that the local courts have ruled that she is not actually qualified to run for the office or vote in the election. The court decided that she had not lived in Brunswick long enough, even though she has been registered to vote there since last year, which has always been considered sufficient. The court declared that her voter registration and residency claims were invalid.

The court decided it? No, the judge decided it. That’s why the Republicans are angling for control of the courts—they can appoint people who will agree with them and who can’t be voted out when or if the Democrats start running things again, or if the Green Party does an amazing hulk number and springs out of its current near-nonentityness to be a major contender in American politics. Don’t believe all the Republican b.s. about “just being umpires” and “not legislating from the bench.” They’re lying through their teeth. They know that controlling the courts is the way to make reality be what they want it to be.

And speaking of the divorce between reality and our legal system, did you know that seventeen million people have been arrested on marihuana-related charges in the last forty years? That’s six percent of our current population—one out of every dozen and a half people. Moreover, HALF those arrests—eight and a half million—took place in the last ten years, and a million and a half of those took place in just the last two years—yes, three quarters of a million people were arrested on marihuana charges last year. That’s two thousand, one hundred and fourteen people every day, eighty-eight people arrested for marihuana every hour, one person arrested for (nine times out of ten) marihauana possession every forty-one seconds. Every FORTY-ONE SECONDS!

Marihuana arrests were just under half of all drug arrests, which totalled one and three quarter million—eighty percent for simple possession. That’s one drug arrest every TWENTY SECONDS!! This made so-called drug crimes the most common crimes in America, with “property crimes” coming in a somewhat close second at one and two thirds million arrests, drunk driving third at just under a million and a half, petty larceny at just over a million, and violent crime way down the list at about six hundred thousand arrests. Wanna take a bite out of crime? LEGALIZE MARIHUANA! Our police officers have better things to do than go around molesting potheads!

But seriously, marihuana arrests mess up peoples’ lives far more frequently than the herb itself. (Hey, it’s possible to have an unhealthy relationship with ANYTHING. Your addiction is not the fault of the object of your addiction.)

I have a friend who made the perhaps naïve mistake of growing marihuana on his land. He would give the marihuana to people who had a clear medical need for it. He made his living as a highly paid consultant—he didn’t need to take money. He’d been growing it for years without any problem, until a local sleazeball asked him for some pot, and he turned the guy down. No medical need. So the guy turned him in. Thank You! No good deed goes unpunished!

Fortunately for his ability to make a living, those who employ him for his consulting skills have not been deterred by the legal trouble he finds himself in—but the federal government has instituted land forfeiture proceedings against him. My buddy could have murdered or raped someone, or robbed a bank, and the government would have no legal basis to take his land away—but for growing marihuana, he may lose the home he has inhabited for his entire adult life.

Why are the marihuana penalties so severe? What is the government afraid of? Why are they arresting more and more people for something so private you have to test a person’s pee to know for sure whether they’re doing it or not? Yes, they are arresting more and more people—in the last ten years, the number of annual marihuana arrests has doubled, while the number of users, as far as anyone can tell, has remained about the same—which is a pretty good testament to marihauana’s efficacy and popularity, since the drug test screws have been getting turned tighter and tighter in the last decade.

I think that, to misuse a phrase from Bush Sr. , it’s “the vision thing.” The Bush-Cheney junta has even gone before the supreme court arguing that members of the Unaio Vegetal, a long-established Brazilian church that uses Amazonian Ayahuasca in much the same way as North America’s Native American Church uses peyote, should not be allowed to practice their religion in this country. I can understand their concern from their point of view—the more it’s seen as acceptable to use psychoactive substances in the practice of religion, the more psychoactive substances will be accepted for use. If the NAC and the Uniao Vegetal are here, can the Rastafarians be far behind? And the establishment of religions clause would make it hard for the government to favor one branch of an entheogenic religion over another. A thousand flowers would bloom. Psychoactive spirituality would sweep the nation, and the fearful dominators, both Republican and Democratic, would be out of a job. Gonzalez is there to see that that doesn’t happen. And so the war on drugs continues.

Like ayahuasca and peyote, but more gently, marihuana helps people move outside their habitual modes of thinking and find at new ways to solve problems. That’s why it’s called “getting high.” Like going up in a balloon, it changes the user’s perspective on life. I think it’s outrageous that politics is essentially closed to marihuana users, who are society’s most creative problem solvers. It’s like saying that only castrated people can have sex and then wondering why the birthrate is nosediving.

Well, this has gotten a long way from Republican judicial appointments, hasn’t it? Not really—those non-inhalers inhabiting the Federal Bench are just going to be increasingly clueless and irrelevant to the massive changes this planet is starting to go through. More on that after this next song—I don’t usually do dedications, but this one is going out from Dick and Karl to their buddy Scooter…..and they add, “don’t worry, we’ll take care of your wife while you’re away.” (plays “Sugaree,” by the Grateful Dead)

It’s not much in the news anymore, but for any of 185,000 working Americans and their families, it’s still the biggest story going—Delphi Corporation is going bellyup, and a big chunk of what’s left of the working class in this country is facing a bleaker future.

Nobody expects the company to go out of business—it supplies automotive parts to General Motors, and GM’s not quite ready to throw in the towel just yet—but the company is using its bankruptcy to cut production employee wages by half or more—from an average wage of $27/hr. to an average wage of $10/hr.

That’s going from $54,000 a year to $20,000 a year. That’s going from the kind of wage that can buy a house and put a couple of kids through a good college to living in a trailer and the kids take night classes at community college while they work shifts at McBurger Mart to pay for their expenses. That’s going from buying a new car every few years to driving a clunker. That’s also going from a pension and medical insurance to social security and medicaid, if there is any. And that’s the future most of us can look forward to, if we’re not already there, as globalization sets in and manufacturers chase cheap labor wherever it leads. More on where it leads in a moment….’cause there’s more.

That medical insurance, for all the current AND retired workers—that’s where the vampire’s fangs sank into this victim and sucked it dry. The vampire is not Count Dracula, but Senator Frist or Governor Bredesen or one of their ilk, the schemers behind the for-profit health industry, the terrorists that hold us all hostage with their five-word ultimatum: “your money or your life.” The Health Industry vampires have sucked 185,000 working people and their families right out of the middle class.

Oh, I know. There’s more than just medical expenses tripped up Delphi. It was the foreign competition. It’s hard for a company that pays workers $27/hr to compete with some corporation in Singapore or China that pays its workers $27 a week and houses them in dormitories like soldiers. I’m getting to that—bear with me a moment or two longer.

The flip side of this is, that even at $27 an hour, those hundred and eighty-five thousand people were still wage slaves. WAGE SLAVES, WAGE SLAVES, WAGE SLAVES. They’re upset ’cause massa done turned them out to chop cotton with the field hands, and they ain’t gonna get to stand around in nice clothes and serve tea and feel like they’ve got a better station in life.

BUT–I am willing to bet that well over ninety percent of those hundred and eighty-five thousand workers has something else they’d really rather do with their lives, however much pride they may take in a factory job well done and the society of their fellow-workers. If Delphi were as generous with their factory hands’ severance packages as they’re being with their executives, we might get to find out.

But we’re not going to find out the creative fantasies of those workers—they’re too busy trying to figure out how to cover a fifty-thousand dollar a year lifestyle on twenty thousand dollars a year, and that is causing a lot of pain in America this holiday season.

Meanwhile, overseas, the Chinese are feeling the rising tide….Beijing, once a city of bicycles, has now banned them as traffic hazards….the over view: 5 of the ten most polluted cities in the world are in China, and as our money fuels their economy, they now consume more grain, coal, steel and meat than the United States, and are about to overtake us in oil consumption. Those five items: grain, coal, steel, meat, and oil—are the mainstays of world trade, by the way. If things keep going the way they are now, though, here’s what may happen: in just another twenty-five years, if China’s GNP keeps growing at its current rate, per capita income in China will be the same as current per capita income in the U.S. China will consume two-thirds of the world’s grain, and twice as much paper as the world is now producing—already half the tropical hardwood logs harvested in the world are going to China.

If the Chinese go on acquiring automobiles at the same rate they are now, in twenty-five years there will be 1.1 billion cars in China—almost half again more than exist in the whole world today. And those vehicles, based on current mileage ratings, will contribute to a Chinese demand for about a hundred million barrels of oil every day—fifteen million barrels more than current world production. No wonder there’s so much concern about peak oil, eh?

These figures, by the way, come from Lester Brown’s Worldwatch Institute.

Obviously, the Chinese cannot use more oil, paper, or whatever than the world is capable of producing, nor can they so thoroughly dominate world markets that there will be nothing left over for the rest of us—at least, I hope so! What this points out is that we are going full-tilt boogie towards an impossible situation, so something else will happen. A billion and a half Chinese are not going to be enjoying the lifestyle that only three hundred million Americans can barely support by ripping off the planet for way more than our share of the pie.

And that is why, although I think it’s a shame for corporations to rip off workers and reward the managers who screwed things up, as happened with Delphi, I am also aware that we are all, the workers AND managers at Delphi and me and just about everyone here in the good ole USA, we are all frightfully out of touch with what life is like for the vast majority of people on this planet, both the ones who are lucky enough to still be subsistence farming and the ones who have been displaced by our greed, sucked into the cities to live in shacks, and scramble each day for the pennies that will be needed the next.

Ross Perot talked about the “great sucking sound” made when NAFTA opened up the border between America and Mexico and most of the United States’ manufacturing capacity went south. He was an accurate prophet. But the answer to that sucking sound is not to attempt to plug it up with protectionism. The way to end that sucking noise is to end the dominion of the corporatists, who have run the world’s resources in a way that gives extreme wealth to a few and drudgery to the vast majority. The planet’s resources could still give everyone a graceful life in a sustainable way, but that time is slipping through our fingers. We need to act.

To begin with, I believe there are enough resources tied up in military uses on this planet that, if they were redirected, they would go a long way towards solving the problems that seem to require a military response. The resources tied up in our vastly inequitable and exploitive worldwide corporate distribution system need to be reallocated in ways that promote promote local control, regional self-sufficiency and ecologically appropriate culture. Is that too much to ask?

Perhaps, just perhaps, it will be easier than it first appears. The corporatist media trumpets the idea of a strongly conservative America, but polls of the public on actual issues reveal strong support for stringent environmental protection, universal health care, a higher minimum wage, medical or even general legalization of marihuana, an immediate end to the war in Iraq, and many other positions far more radical than the Democratic Party is ready to endorse, but all positions and proposals articulated by the Green Party.

These same polls reveal that many of the people who endorse these positions see themselves as conservative. Hey, I see myself as a conservative! I want to conserve the ecology of this planet, and the dignity of every human life on it. Friends, remember that: the Green Party is the ULTIMATE conservative party. We are not no f-ing liberals. Well, actually, we ARE liberals, too—because the dictionary definition of liberal is “generous, free, openhanded, ample, loose, broad-minded” and those are all wonderful qualities to aspire to—oh, and then liberal also can mean “licentious,” but hey, weren’t Bill Clinton’s screwups a lot funnier than Dubya’s have been?

So—aren’t the Democrats liberals? Nu, are the Democrats really liberals? They’re taking their cues and money from the same folks as the Republicans. Their main concern is to service the corporate structure, with the genuine welfare of the population running a distant second. That’s why American public opinion is way more radical than anything that ends up in the Democratic platform. They’re more liberal than the Republicans, but that’s not saying much. They’ll actually give you crumbs? That’s nice. Wouldn’t you really rather have a place at the table? I would, and I would like you and everybody else to have a place at the table, too. That’s why I’m Green.

I’ve spent a lot of time on this show talking about the weather in the arctic—and by the way, in late October the sea ice at Barrow, the northernmost point in Alaska, was still a hundred miles offshore. Just a few decades ago, the Arctic Ocean was frozen clear up to the shore by this time of year. Freed of its damper of ice, the ocean is chewing relentlessly at the shoreline, forcing relocation of villages that have been in the same place for centuries, if not millennia. Meanwhile, down south….

In Africa, forests are disappearing, cut for local use as firewood for the most part, and this is drying the climate and drying up the rivers and silting up the hydroelectric dams and of course making subsistence agriculture even chancier, and making commercial, irrigated agriculture even more expensive. The two prongs of this dilemma are the need for firewood as cooking fuel and the need for a source of income for the firewood cutters.

A concerted program could replace firewood with solar cookers and water heaters and methane production—which would also help clean up Africa’s massive, shall we name it delicately, sanitation problem. There’s nothing like putting value into something to keep people from leaving it laying around in the street, and that doesn’t just mean cans and bottles, folks.

This still leaves a bunch of unhappy, out-of-work firewood vendors and their families. Sure, a certain number of people will be employed building solar and methane facilities, but there are people out selling wood on every street corner in Africa and unless the rules of the economic game are changed, they’re going to need some way to come up with the scratch to feed their families. And this is where it gets tricky. Thanks to the intervention of western medicine, law, and technology, there are just too many people in Africa for them to all go back to their traditional, sustainable ways of life, just as we here in Tennessee couldn’t all go back to burning firewood , shooting deer, and riding horses. There ain’t enough wood and there ain’t enough deer or horses and there ain’t enough pasture, and if there was enough wood the people in downtown Nashville would smother from the smoke. But, I digress.

What we might do is appoint a commission to study the matter—say, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Vandana Shiva, Helena Norbert-Hodge and a few other champions of compassion could take this one on and come up with a solution. It would be cheaper than doing nothing or sending in the army, I can assure you of that.

In South America, the situation is a little more, shall we say, clearcut? The Amazon is being deforested not for the cooking fires of the hungry multitudes but for plywood for the Chinese and cattle ranches for land barons, who maintain their wealth habit by selling beef to Europe and America. Even Brazil’s popular, populist President Lula hasn’t been able to dent this one.

It’s a real global security threat and it needs the kind of attention we’ve mistakenly given Iraq—but oops, we done whupped the tarbaby a good one and now we are stuck and B’rer Fox is done nabbed us and this time he ain’t gonna throw us in that briar patch, people, this is not a drill, this is catastrophic global warming, the Amazon River is running dry, a thousand towns that depend on river transport are cut off due to low water.

The rainforest has apparently been cut back far enough that the hydrological cycle–the forests’ ability to generate the rain that sustains them–has been disrupted, and the Amazon climate may have flipped over into savannah mode, but all that water is still banging around loose in the atmosphere and it’s just going to make the weather more unstable—did you know that the first South Atlantic hurricane ever was recorded this year?

Let me elaborate a little on the rainforest hydrological cycle. First, an acre of hardwood trees pours hundreds of thousands of gallons of water into the atmosphere every day. That’s why it’s cooler and more humid under a forest canopy than it is out on the plains. When there are millions of acres of hardwoods, all that water rises up into the sky and joins together and creates regular afternoon rainstorms.

When I first moved to Tennessee thirty-five years ago, there was enough forest cover where I lived to create the same effect. Mornings were foggy, and then as the moisture rose and cooled, it tended to fall back down as an afternoon thundershower. In the eighties, much of the hardwood forest around me was cut, and those morning fogs and afternoon showers are no longer part of the weather cycle here—nor, apparently, in the Amazon.

Furthermore, the high temperatures characteristic of the tropics speed up soil processes in a way that tends to burn up organic matter and wash out nutrients pretty quickly unless they are being cycled through the elaborate carbon net called a rainforest. The lively energy that grows the rainforest is contained in its living fabric, and disappears when that fabric is rent. We do not know how to recreate rainforest once it has been turned into pasture.

Anyway, curbing the Brazilian beef trade and the Chinese hunger for plywood are two fairly concrete goals that wouldn’t even require revolutionary changes in the world economic system. Fundamental changes, yes, but not necessarily revolutionary ones. Again, perhaps a panel of deep ecologists and biologists can come up with a way to reclaim the Amazon. I can guarantee you it will be a lot more gratifying and doable than “bringing democracy to Iraq” in order to maintain a stranglehold on their oil supply.

So, from a Green perspective, global warming is a far greater threat to our national security than so-called terrorists. In our psychotic pursuit of these Muslim scapegoats, we ignore our real enemy at our very great peril.

Type www.solviva.com into your web browser, and you get a luminously green page that advertises, “Sustainable Solar-Dynamic Bio-Benign Design: /Offering Better Ways to Live, at Less Cost /Today and Tomorrow, Anywhere on Earth.” When you read through the web site, you find a wealth of practical, down-to-earth, thoroughly doable advice on small-scale agriculture, wastewater treatment, and energy-conservative design that does not sacrifice comfort and grace.

If America had really made energy conservation “the moral equivalent of war,” as Jimmy Carter counseled us, the government would have been doing everything it could to foster places like Solviva not just all over America, but all over the world. Instead, government after government in this country, at both national and local levels, has opted for more of the same old dysfunctional same old: long supply lines, the squandering of local agricultural resources, and continued dependence on the availability of affordable oil.

Still, there are bright lights in the world like Solviva, I thought, and so I arranged to interview Solviva’s founder, Anna Edey, for what I expected would be an upbeat story about one of the successes of the environmental movement. Instead, I found myself talking with a profoundly discouraged woman. “Everybody says what I”m doing is wonderful and they really admire me,” she told me, “but nobody is willing to step up and do what I’m doing.” She was unable to find a competent manager for her commercial greenhouse, and it when it deteriorated to the point that it no longer worked as a food production facility, she put it on the market; but the only buyer she could find was someone who just wanted the site—who tore down the greenhouse and put up a profoundly energy-hungry home instead–”big windows facing north,” Anna said.

The island of Martha’s Vineyard, where Solviva is located, had not taken Anna’s advice about ecological design and had embarked on many costly “improvements” that were polluting the island’s limited fresh water supply and driving up the need for heating oil on the island—and, of course, driving up the taxes of the limited number of residents, making it less and less possible for someone who is not an active and successful player of the money game to live there—and, while Anna demonstrated with her greenhouse that it is possible to earn big money with her ideas, they are not fundamentally about making money, but about getting outside the money system.

Her book, in spite of nationwide publicity and rave reviews from Organic Gardening and Mother Earth News, has sold less than ten thousand copies. You can order it online at her website, www.Solviva.com.

Anna expressed her concern to me about the inertia she had witnessed: “People know what we need to do in order to make the change, but it seems like they just won’t do it.. I find myself wondering if, as a species, we’ve lost our will to survive and will be going extinct. Will our children’s children be able to have and raise children?”

I wish I had some overwhelming proof I could present her that would give her hope in this weary world, but I confess I share the same forebodings. No one can tell the future. All I know is, I want to work as hard as I can to create a world in which my worst nightmares are only dimly remembered dreams, a world of sufficiency and sustainability and justice and love and respect. Isn’t that what you want, too? Is that too much to ask for?