DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

A couple of nights after Christmas, I got to witness something that truly astounded me. The setup was simple, pedestrian, not the kind of situation in which you’d expect something bizarre, and so it took me by surprise. My friends who were there with me said it shouldn’t have taken me by surprise, and I had to admit they were right. Here’s what happened.

I attended a meeting of the Metro Nashville Solid Waste Region Board, a branch of Nashville’s government that is supposed to oversee the way garbage is handled in Davidson County. They were considering whether to approve an old quarry as a site for a landfill for construction waste from all the new development that’s going to be happening out on McCrory Lane. Oh, you didn’t know about that? More on that later….On paper, the Board looked good—the head of the Board is John Sherman, former head of the Tennessee Environmental Council. One of our guys, right? He’s gonna do the right thing, right? Listen….

As I arrived, an engineer was winding up a presentation on the question of water flow between the Harpeth River and the landfill site. He was admitting that not all the data was in yet—in other words, they didn’t yet know if water from the quarry flowed into the river. It changes depending on the time of year, he said, and we haven’t studied it long enough to find out. This engineer, I later found out, is the man who designed the landfill, and will be running it if or when it opens. He is the only person researching the geology of the site , and he has a job riding on what the answers turn out to be. Not a good prescription for objectivity, y’know?

Then it was time for public comment. One of the first people who got up to talk was Metro Council member Charlie Tygard, who avowed the deepest concern for environmental factors, although he has encouraged the zoning changes that go hand in hand with the landfill. What zoning changes? Zoning changes on McCrory Lane…I’ll get to that. But Charlie assured the Board that the Harpeth River Watershed Association had been consulted in planning the landfill, and that they had been consulted on the plan. Charlie expressed concern that the quarry, with its cliffs, rocks, and deep water, would be an increasingly dangerous place as the McCrory Lane area became more developed. A young mother came forward and said she would like to see it turned into a sports field so her children would have a place to play sports. A man who identified himself as the owner of a horse farm adjoining the former quarry echoed concerns about the potential for fatal accidents, and endorsed the idea of turning it into a landfill. We’re talking eighty dump trucks a day for ten years to fill it in, according to the traffic study—that’s a dump truck every six minutes during business hours. Over ten years, that’s someplace in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand dump trucks, which seems to me to exude a lot more accident potential than an abandoned quarry. Do these people really understand what they’re signing up for? And what are the odds that at least one of those 200,000 trucks will contain something toxic that will end up in the river?

Then Pam Davee from the Harpeth River Watershed Association got up and pointed out that NO, her organization had NOT concurred in plans to put a landfill so close to the Harpeth River, because the Harpeth is a designated scenic river at that point in its course and it is illegal to put a landfill within TWO MILES of a designated scenic river. Okay, I thought, this sounds like an open and shut case. A contractor reminded the Board that although the application was for a class IV (construction debris only) landfill, there would be very little control over what actually went in it, and that some construction waste is QUITE toxic. Not the kind of thing you want to have leaching into a river, y’know?

Others pointed out that the quarry itself is quite scenic and worthy of inclusion in the state park that has been created from a nearby former quarry, while other citizens questioned whether sufficient waste would be generated in the neighborhood to actually fill the thing, or whether there was a secret plan to bring in waste from elsewhere. Bruce Wood of BURNT (Bring Urban Recycling to Nashville Today) was quite eloquent on this score, pointing out that the dump applicants’ duplicity in claiming support from the Harpeth River group cast doubt on everything else they said. In correspondence I had with Charlie Tygard after the meeting, he said that yes, the landfill would be bringing in waste from all over Nashville.

That was not at all clear to me during the hearing, where most people seemed to think the dump was intended only for local construction waste. Little mention was made, too, of how easy can be to change a landfill’s designation from class IV (construction waste) to class I, II, or III (varying degrees of anything goes). Just the thing for an upscale neighborhood. Oh—and nobody mentioned that Metro adopted an ordinance in 2000 (BL99-86) prohibiting construction landfills within two miles of any school or park, and as I said– There is a state park right down the road from this site, folks….

Another bit of sleight-of-hand that DID emerge from the meeting is that the Department of Public Works, which has never been comfortable with even the Solid Waste Board’s tepid endorsement of recycling, had slipped a bill through the legislature that made the Department’s annual report the official ten year plan, trumping the Waste Board’s pro-recycling ten year plan—but nobody had told the Solid Waste Board this before it performed its official duty of rubberstamping the Public Works Department’s annual report. Isn’t it just wonderful how people play politics with the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the ground we live on? Power plays for control of the Titanic, I tell you.
John vanderHarst , from RAM(Recycling Advocates of Middle Tennessee) closed with testimony about the importance of recycling cement block, brick, and even fill rock and dirt, since it’s gotta be quarried from somewhere, and nobody likes to live near a quarry. Moreover, he pointed out that the Board’s ten-year plan said that another landfill could be opened in Davidson County only if it was needed, and if the recycling guidelines were followed, this new landfill wouldn’t be needed. John, in case you haven’t met him, is kind of a cross between Mahatma Gandhi and Bucky Fuller.

Well, like I said, I thought Pam Davee had pretty much made the question moot when she pointed out that it’s illegal to have a landfill within two miles of a scenic river. All it would take is one flood worse than anyone has yet imagined and we’ve dumped toxic waste in a scenic river that just happens to also be the water supply for Ashland City! (Worse floods than we can imagine JUST WON”T HAPPEN—ask the residents of Florida, Louisiana, or Cancun…I’m digressing again. ) But when the vote came down, the Board voted 6-1 to APPROVE the permit! And John Sherman of the Tennessee Environmental Council was one of the yeas! I don’t get it! I just don’t get it! Do you give up your conscience when you put on a suit and a tie?

He did say that he thought that many of the comments that had been made had merit, but that they weren’t the criteria on which the Solid Waste Board was supposed to base its decisions. HELLO? Isn’t legality a significant criterion? He said he thought that was up to the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation and the State Legislature to decide. I’m naïve about TDEC, but my friends who work on these issues don’t seem to have a lot of faith in it, and we all know the legislature is for sale. Great. Goodbye, quarry, hello landfill. Goodbye, fishing or swimming in the Harpeth River.

OK, you don’t give up your conscience when you put on a suit and tie. Daniel Lane was wearing the American Business Uniform and he was the only “no” vote. When I talked with him later, he said that in his opinion there is no need for additional landfill capacity, the question of connectivity between the Harpeth and the quarry needs further study, and the law says you’re not supposed to put a dump within two miles of a scenic river. Daniel Lane lives in the Bourdeaux neighborhood of Nashville, near the current landfill. He knows what having a landfill for a neighbor means. Thank you, Mr. Lane. I asked John Sherman for an interview, but he didn’t return my phone call.

So….the backstory I’ve been promising you. McCrory Lane, in case you don’t know, is, in Charlie Tygard’s words, “the last undeveloped freeway interchange in Davidson County.” It’s a winding two-lane road that climbs steep hills and offers a stunning panorama of Mordor, excuse me, I mean Nashville, from several locations, before it drops back down to meet Highway 100 at the Loveless Cafe. (Oh, by the way, there’s going to be a Hollywood Video store opening up on the site of an unnamed restaurant on that corner. Just the thing we need. How nice.) Nashville’s ten year plan calls for McCrory Lane to be “widened,” for over two thousand housing units to be built in place of the woods that have been feeding oxygen into Nashville’s air supply for all these years, and for strip malls that will offer fast food and other so-called services to the new residents of this new neighborhood. In short, McCrory Lane is going to get an extreme makeover, and will soon look just like the rest of Nashville, only with a steeper hill. Chalk up another one for urban sprawl. The only good news I can get out of this is that there’s going to be more people moving into WRFN’s broadcast area. That’s cold comfort. Having a wonderful time, wish you weren’t here…

There’s something very important that hasn’t been factored in to this ten-year plan, because this ten year plan assumes that we are going to have a steady supply of automotive fuel, a steady supply of heating fuel, and a steady supply of jobs to pay for all of this—not to mention a steady supply of new construction that will create enough waste to fill this massive hole in the ground. If you’re paying any attention at all, you know that none of these are assured. Just this week, the Chinese, who have been financing the Bush Junta’s multi-trillion dollar debt spree by buying American bonds, announced that they are going to start “diversifying their foreign investments.” The plug is being pulled, folks.

Charlie Tygard and his developer buddies are going to trash one of the last pretty places in Davidson County for their own short-term gain, and everyone who buys or invests out here is going to be left high and dry at the end of a long and increasingly tenuous supply line.

Broad principles result in specific decisions. When Unterfuhrer Cheney proclaims, “Die Amerikan vay of life iss not negotiable,” it comes down to the development of McCrory Lane, which is now poised to go forward, whether or not this landfill is part of the deal. I’m a great believer in thinking globally and acting locally, and I have to say that locally, it looks like we’re blowing it. That doesn’t bode well for the globe.

music: Exene Cervenka, “Real Estate”

Comments

Brilliant and humorous! Thank you for posting your writings, Martin. This story is a great example of the ridiculously scary and irresponsible way our government works. I too havae used to analogy of the government acting in a sociopathic and/or psychopathic way. And many times as an irresponsible fit throwing child… Peace,Rose
Posted by Rose Davis on 02/13/2006 09:07:48 AM

The spotlight is no longer on New Orleans, so it should come as no surprise that the rats have been at work there. The Big Easy, once home to over three hundred thousand Americans of colour who comprised 65% of its half-million population, has an estimated thirty-five thousand black residents now, out of a total city population of around one hundred thousand.

Alphonso Jackson, President George Bush’s Housing and Urban Development Secretary, told the Houston Chronicle, “Whether we like it or not, New Orleans is not going to be 500,000 people for a long time … New Orleans is not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again.”

Joseph Canizaro, one of the city’s biggest developers, and now a member of New Orleans’ rebuilding commission, was quoted in England’s Manchester Guardian as saying, ”As a practical matter, these poor folks don’t have the resources to go back to our city, just like they didn’t have the resources to get out of our city. So we won’t get all those folks back. That’s just a fact. It’s not what I want, it’s just a fact.’ Mr. Canizaro, by the way, also contriubuted about $200,000 to W’s 2004 re-election campaign. Guess he’s just sentimental about missing all the darkies, ’cause you know and I know that a whiter New Orleans is likely to be a more Republican New Orleans.

Rental and hiring tactics countenanced by both the Bush junta and ostensibly Democratic governor Kathleen Blanco are contributing to this switchover. FEMA has said it will not give loans to rebuild in “flood-prone areas”–i.e., the lower ninth ward and other low-income, low elevation parts of the city. The city has hinted that it may require any rebuilding in low areas to be done on stilts, which raises the cost of rebuilding considerably. (Actually, it’s not a bad idea, just an expensive one)

Landlords have been evicting not just tenants who have become refugees, but those who have been making every effort to stay in New Orleans and pay their rent. When a court ruled against the landlords’ efforts to run thousands of summary evictions through the courts, many landlords turned to brute force, simply breaking into their evacuated rental properties and throwing their former tenants’ belongings out on the street so that they could rent the properties out at two or three times the rent they had been receiving—frequently to workers who have been brought in from out of state to do cleanup and rebuilding.

Why have they been brought in from out of state? Because the contracts for the cleanup have gone to out-of-state companies who are primarily geared to hire—let’s call them–”guest workers.” Guest workers come from outside of the United States, from places whose poverty we can barely grasp. They have learned to live on less, and part of that involves banding together to share food and housing. We did that thirty years ago and called it hippies living in communes, but this is (mostly) Latinos living in whatever they can rent. They do have a talent for something there. I knew a guy who came up from El Salvador and worked as a janitor for five years, making about the same money I was. While I barely survived, he put his sister through the University of El Salvador, so that she became a schoolteacher—and still earned less money than he did pushing a broom in America. But I digress. More on the economics of the hiring process a little later.

I just quoted two high-ranking Republicans’ view of the future of New Orleans. The city attempted to fulfill their prophecies by unilaterally beginning the demolition of over five thousand homes in the lower ninth ward. Residents have gotten a temporary restraining order to stop this. When I say unilaterally, I mean that no one was told that the remains of their home were about to be removed—it was only when the backhoes showed up that they had any idea of what was in store. That ain’t fair. Nor is it fair that, although much of the city’s public housing is habitable, it is not being opened and made available.

What irony—the good news is, unilateral demolitions have been stopped. The bad news is, more than four months after the hurricane, almost none of the 50,000 homes estimated to need demolition in New Orleans have actually been cleaned up. Maybe the 2006 hurricane season will take care of it, eh?

So, that’s the rat-infested mess. What’s the deep green perspective on it? First of all, yeah, New Orleans is a lousy place for a large city, and with a warming climate, rising sea levels and intensifying storm seasons, it is only going to get worse, even if we come up with the fourteen billion dollars (only a month and a half of military expenditures in Iraq, after all) it will take to restore the wetlands that once provided a measure of protection to southern Louisiana.

Now, I confess that I once had a vision that my life’s work could be tearing down a formerly great city and recreating wilderness where once it stood, and so to me there’s a certain environmental justice, I think, in turning big parts of New Orleans back into cypress swamps. But you don’t do that by executive fiat. You don’t move people around by strong-arming them from above. You educate them about the situation, you help them formulate plans of their own. And if they don’t want to move after all that? Well, you figure out the best way to help them stay where they’ve been, with their friends and family. Human life is about community, not consumerism.

And the way the wreckage from the storm is being cleaned up is just another pyramid scheme, just another indictment of the Bush junta. FEMA hires well-connected contractors—well connected to the Republican establishment, not well connected to the communities that need cleaning—for $24 a cubic yard, and those companies take a cut and find a subcontractor, and THOSE companies do the same thing, so that the guys who are actually doing the work are getting paid $4 a cubic yard to clean up the hurricane debris.
How big is a cubic yard? I mean sure, it’s three feet by three feet by three feet, but to put it more visually, the back of a medium size pickup truck will hold a little over two cubic yards. So, the contractors on site are getting about ten bucks a pickup load, while Kellogg, Brown, and Root is getting over fifty bucks a pickup load for doing none of the work—but you can bet they’ll be making some hefty campaign donations sooner or later. And that’s why they’re hiring Latinos to do the cleanup—the fat cats have squeezed it down to where an American couldn’t make a living doing New Orleans cleanup. Herr Bush talks about wanting to bring in guest workers to do “jobs Americans won’t do.” It’s more like bringing them in to do jobs companies don’t want to pay Americans a living wage to do. If the minimum wage had kept up with inflation since 1968, it would now be $8.85 an hour. If the minimum wage were high enough to keep full-time workers above the poverty level, nationwide it would be $9.50 an hour. Here in Nashville it would be $11.50 an hour. Is that too much to ask? How does it compare to what you make?

If I were running this program, I would be giving first priority for cleanup jobs to current and displaced New Orleans residents, and while I had them all together taking care of the dirty business on the ground, I would be educating them about the overall situation and helping them figure out what to do. There’s parameters, if you know what I mean. Housing that will withstand a category 5 or 6 hurricane in a location below sea level? Waterproof bunkers, big bucks, not for everyone. Inexpensive,simple structures that will keep you cool and dry during most tropical weather and be easy to replace when they blow away? That’s the time-honored way of living in the hurricane belt. It’s not the American way of life. But there might be something to it, eh?

music: Steve Earle, “Amerika v. 6.0”

I want to talk to you about a Chinese man, recently deceased, by the name of Wang Binyu. He was the talk of China, until the government censored all print and internet discussion of his case and quietly executed him back in October.

Executed him. Yes, Wang Binyu was a criminal. He killed four people with a knife. He admitted to it, and even turned himself in to the police immediately afterwards. So what was all the fuss?

Wang Binyu was a classic member of what the communists like to call “the proletariat.” He worked at a steel mill in China and lived in a dormitory provided by the company. He was owed a couple of years of back wages, which is apparently not unusual in Chinese industry. He had been attempting to collect those back wages for several months because his father was ill and needed money for an operation. Wang’s bosses at the steel mill had not only given him the runaround, they had been downright mean to him; the local labor bureau’s efforts to help had been ineffectual. Something blew in Wang Binyu, and he killed four of the people who had been giving him a hard time.

It seems he had a particularly strong attachment to his father because his father had been the parent who raised him, after his mother died from a botched sterilization operation—which had been forced on her because she had had a second child. The family’s efforts to obtain compensation for this obvious medical malpractice case had not been successful.

Not only did the Chinese government censor discussion of Wang Binyu’s case (after it had ignited a nationwide storm of protest), they didn’t even bother to tell his father the date of Wang’s trial, and when they needed his father’s signature on Wang’s death warrant, they got him to come to them by saying they would give him Wang’s back wages—and they never did pony up the money.

Wang was not asking for clemency. “I want to die,” said Mr. Wang in an interview with New China News Agency. “When I am dead, nobody can exploit me anymore. Right?”

The thing about Wang Binyu’s case is that his situation is not unusual in China. Only the fact that he went postal about it is different. So I suppose the Chinese didn’t want to give other workers any ideas, and that’s why they censored his story, and censored the news of his execution. They also censor the number of executions that take place in China. Amnesty International has documented at least 3,400 in the last year. There were only 400 known executions worldwide last year outside of China, which would mean that nearly 90% of all executions worldwide took place in China. Other, believable estimates given off the record by members of the Chinese government put the number of annual executions in China at between ten and fifteen thousand.

So, that’s something to think about when you see the “made in China” label. The companies that buy from China are willing to accept this kind of injustice for the sake of low prices. That’s why I say economics is the prevailing religion in America—when it comes to decision making, cheap trumps human rights every time.

And, speaking of religion in America, let’s look at some details about the Christmas season just passed that may have escaped your notice. Seventy percent of all those artificial Christmas trees that are taking the country by storm come from China. The Chinese exported over a billion dollars worth of Christmas paraphenalia to the West last year. And all these tschotsckes are produced by an officially atheist workforce that gets paid, typically, about $84 a month. Eighty-four dollars a month. I don’t know about you, but I have to make that much a DAY to keep my head above water in this country. No wonder they’re taking us to the cleaners.

Asked if the workers in the Christmas decoration factories know the significance of what they are making, a company spokesman commented to the Asia Times, “Christmas is not a big traditional festival here and we don’t celebrate it.  Our workers are mostly middle-aged women who don’t need to know anything about it.”  Attaboy, Mr. Scrooge!

But Wang Binyin and those Christmas factory people are lucky compared to some workers in China. Due to lax environmental regulation, the country has become a dumping ground for the world’s electronic trash. Did you know that 4,000 tons of electonic gizmos, from hand-held video games to computer monitors, are discarded every HOUR? 4,000 TONS EVERY HOUR? EVERY HOUR!!?? Because they’re made cheaply in China, it’s cheaper to pitch them than to fix them.

Much of this electronic junk ends up back in China, where it is “recycled. “ This involves unprotected, poorly paid workers taking things apart by hand to reclaim various heavy metals, precious metals, and assorted chemicals, many of which are highly carcinogenic. Wang Binyin is lucky. He died a quick and relatively painless death compared to the cancer many Chinese are developing and will develop due to the toxic waste they are dealing with. Hey, it’s one way to control the population. Made in China. Great idea.

Economics is the state religion in China, just as it is here in America. Whatever makes the most money in the short run is the clear choice, even if it’s clearly a choice that fouls your own nest, and the Chinese clearly have no qualms about destroying the environment they live in. For another example, let’s look at the Nu River, which just happens to be one of only TWO free-flowing rivers left in the country. It has escaped entrapment so far because it is in the hilly and remote far south-west of the country, and many environmentalists thought it would be permanently saved when the UN designated it a World Heritage Site due to to its tremendous biodiversity and relatively pristine state.

But NO, the Chines have a plan to dam the Nu, and while there is more opposition to this than there has been to any other environmentally obnoxious plan in the history of modern China, I’m not betting they won’t go ahead and remove millions of people from their traditional tribal homelands (putting them in the same homeless/refugee labor pool that produced Wang Binyin) and trash the Nu valley. But hey, all those rivers, not just the ones in China but the Indian ones as well, are fed from the glaciers of the Himalayas, and it looks like the Himalayan snow pack may be gone in thirty years, turning every major river in Southeast Asia, from the Indus to the Ganges to the Mekong to the Huang Ho, into a seasonal stream—you know, one that dries up in the summer. Ain’t that lovely? More on that coming up…..

music:  Joan Baez, “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”

As I said, scientists studying the glaciation of the Himalayan Mountain chain think it quite possible that permanent snow cover on the Himalayas will be a thing of the past in just another thirty years, if things continue at their current rate—and the thing about climate change seems to be that it is not continuing at its current rate, it’s speeding up. Studies of air bubbles trapped in 650,000 year old Antarctic ice reveal that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now is higher than it’s been in that entire timespan, and scientists think that the only reason temperatures aren’t already higher than they’ve been in 650,000 years is because this rise has happened so fast that the climate hasn’t had time to catch up yet. “Climate and carbon dioxide are like two people who are handcuffed together,” one scientist explained. “Where one goes, the other has to follow.”

This is not good news for the billions of Indians, Chinese, and other southeast Asians who depend on the glacier-fed rivers of southeast Asia for water. Many of these people live near the ocean, and it will be even worse for them, because the Himalayan glacial complex is the third largest ice mass on the planet (behind Greenland and Antarctica) and when it melts the oceans will rise a foot and a half or so, making life more difficult for shore-dwellers from Bangladesh to New Jersey. You don’t often think of it, but the topography and population distribution in New Jersey make it almost as vulnerable a storm target as New Orleans.

And the storms are cranking up. We have just had tropical storm Zeta, which churned up the eastern Atlantic ocean over New Year’s and tied the record for the latest tropical storm on record, while back in October Hurricane Vince became the first hurricane to make landfall in Spain, and in December we had Hurricane Epsilon, only the fifth hurricane ever reported that late in the season. Zeta was the 27th named storm this year, beating out the old record by 4 storms, and Epsilon was the fourteenth hurricane, beating out the old record by two. Oh, I forgot to mention the good news from the Himalayan study—it looks like maybe fluctuations in the Gulf Stream don’t have as much of an effect on climate as was previously thought. But there’s lots of other factors hard at work to change the climate.

The Bush administration is dragging its heels on admitting there is a problem here not, I believe, because they don’t think there’s a problem, but because if they admit there’s a problem, then they’ll have to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. As long as they don’t admit there’s a problem, they can quietly protect themselves from impending calamity, but they are under no obligation to do anything to help out the rest of us, which after all would divert resources away from protecting their own precious asses. So that’s why the emperor is wearing a beautiful suit of clothes, and the sky is not falling.

music: Mike Scott and the Waterboys, “Dumbing Down the World”

Imagine you are traveling to a town about the size of Goodletsville or Shelbyville, Tennessee—about 14,000 people, for those of you not familiar with Tennessee. Now, imagine that the only way into that town is a rutted dirt track. And imagine that, for whatever reason, you or your companion are in need of what they call “feminine hygiene products,” and that you find there are none for sale in the stores of this town of 14,000 people—that town is Guma, Ethiopia, and not only are there no sanitary napkins, there are no bathrooms in which to privately take care of that or other bodily functions, and no running water to wash with after you go out behind a bush and do what you need to do. That’s Africa, folks, and it ain’t Kansas. The ladies make do with rags, and they stay home so they don’t have to deal with “it” in public.

This isn’t just an inconvenience—it’s something that helps keep women out of school and public life. It’s not just a religious and social taboo, it’s a lack of simple technology—a latrine with a wall around it and a handwashing sink. These things are not rocket science, and if we were not burning money in Iraq (which we had no more right to invade than the Nazis did Poland), we could be helping build toilets in Africa, which would probably do a lot more to combat terror and spread democracy than all the Marines and smart bombs we can muster. Yeah, I know, it wouldn’t make much of a video game.

I am serious when I say this lack of sanitary facilities and privacy keeps girls from staying in school. New York Times reporter Sharon LaFreniere recently visited Guma and other towns in Ethiopia, talking with families, women, and young girls, and that’s what she found. A hundred and seventy boys in school past the third grade, but only three girls.

Well, no, it’s not JUST that. The Ethiopian people have a domestic economy that requires a lot of help at home—hauling water, preparing food from basic raw ingredients, herding animals—and these are traditionally women’s jobs, and moreover they are jobs that must get done or people go hungry. This is something that we Westerners, who have spent our entire lives in a money-based economy, have lost touch with. When you take kids completely out of their traditional home economies and put them in school full-time, the kids fail to learn basic cultural survival skills. Then the traditional economy, which is relatively sustainable compared to our money-burning hot rod, sputters and goes out, leaving people stuck on the hungry fringes of a money economy in which they have no hope of success.

Furthermore, I think that one of the major psychological failings of our global money economy is that it expects people to be consistent cogs for its gears. What I am about to say may sound horribly patronizing to some of my readers, (I’m a man, not a woman, after all!) but let it land where it may: without falling into superstitious taboos, we need to give women the opportunity to have some quiet time once a month—a respite from work, family obligations, whatever material responsibilities they have, they should be able to bail out of them for a few days a month if that’s what they’d like to do. I think this simple, basic step would radically and positively change the world we live in.

But back to the dusty streets and latrine-less schools of Ethiopia. These children need to be educated in a way that does not alienate them from their culture, that blends reading, writing, arithmetic and a global perspective seamlessly with the ability to take care of themselves. Across the border in Kenya, a group is doing just that. With help from England’s Children in Crisis Foundation, the Kenyan group Action in the Community Environment is promoting small-scale vegetable gardening as a way to improve both nutrition and the local economy. ACE makes small-scale loans to individuals and community groups—we’re talking $150-500 dollars here—to get them started doing what their ancestors did before the global economy turned Kenyan farming into an export business which has enriched a few landlords and turned many Kenyans into penniless, hungry peasants.

I think there’s an exciting link between the lack of latrines in Africa and this gardening project. Latrines are a traditional source of fertilizer, and with what we now know about microbiology and the life cycles of parasites, it is possible to compost this human manure long enough to safely apply it to vegetable gardens. One simple, low-tech link helps solve both the food and the sanitation questions. We should only be that smart in this country, eh?

music: Paul Simon, “Under African Skies”

Comments

My thoughts exactly! It’s a taboo subject here too, where ‘education’ is the supposedly magic word. But there are too many qualified people for the few jobs here already. Every single Indian kid doesn’t need a diploma in computers. There is a growing disgruntled over-educated populace, not willing to go back to the village farm because of “modern” notions of success, but with no future in the cities they’ve moved to.
Posted by sirensongs on 01/10/2006 04:50:15 PM

Oh BTW, I love your music “soundtrack” idea for each post. I think I’m stealing it…or at least borrowing. Love, Caroline
Posted by sirensongs on 01/10/2006 04:51:47 PM

I don’t think people should go back to peasant life, I think they should go forward to a more cosmic peasant life–educated, not ignorant, something taken up and walked with rather than something begrudgingly accepted because there’s no other way, although I think there isn’t any “other way” for most of us–humanity would be much better served if most of us spent most of our time providing food, shelter, clothing, entertainment and inspiration for each other at a very local neighborhood level, rather than busting our chops (and our planet) shipping shit all over the place to ramp up the gnp and keep a few clever people rich and/or famous.
Posted by brothermartin on 01/11/2006 03:03:47 PM