Last week’s Scottsboro-Bell’s Bend community meeting was not fun, except maybe for fans of the Jerry Springer show.  There was very little in the way of new information, but there was plenty of emotion.  People interrupted each other. Developer Tony Giarratana, in his red power tie, was openly contemptuous of the locals; and this time, planning commission representative Anita McCaig really did get driven to tears.

The first thing that came up, in terms of information, was that the Maytown crew had decided their best option for access was to cross the river from Centennial Boulevard with only one bridge, which will be six lanes wide rather than four lanes.  They’re waiting for the results of the traffic study on this.

My preliminary calculations say that, if they spread their “rush hour” over enough hours, and nobody has any breakdowns or accidents, and especially if there’s a lot of carpooling, this might kinda work. Maybe. Kinda. And a big if.

Then, of course, there’s the question of what spiraling gas prices will do to the practicality of commuting any distance, not to mention Life As We Know It. Both the pro- and anti-development speakers at the meeting seemed to assume that the future is going to be a lot like the past, in terms of development pressures and possibilities.  I think they could both be very wrong, but that’s not exactly good news for either side.

The Centennial Boulevard option has some upsides.  It does not involve neighborhood destruction and it provides direct access to Tune airport, which will be convenient if anybody can still afford to fly an airplane in a few years.  Well, the top !% of the US population has more money than the bottom 80%, and they’re getting richer, so maybe Tony Giarratana’s clients will still be able to make use of the airport.  Access via Centennial Boulevard will also involve driving by Nashville’s Cockrill Bend Minimum Security Prison, which is not exactly an upscale, inspiring kind of intro to the wonders of Maytown Center–which, Tony reminded us, will be constructed according to the highest standards of Green Building.

That leads to the repeatedly raised question of how “green” it is to put a development in a cow pasture. Planning Commission rep Jennifer Carlat clung to her assertion that, because Bell’s Bend is only 7 linear miles from downtown Nashville, developing rural land there is not sprawl, at least compared to paving farmland in southern Williamson County or any other, more outlying areas where a corporate campus might be induced to locate.  They went over the strengths and drawbacks of the several areas in Davidson County that are most ripe for redevelopment, pointing out that Bell’s Bend is the only location that fully fits all the criteria.

The criteria in question are “rural or upscale suburban,” proximity to executive housing,” and “premiere/gateway location.”  None of the other possible redevelopment areas–the Fairgrounds, Metro Center, the East Bank, or McCrory  Creek Road–qualify on all these counts, although the East Bank (across the river from downtown) is considered a “premiere/gateway location.”  The presentation also noted somewhat ominously that there is  “significant existing office development in the (McCrory Creek) area that is not entirely leased.”  That doesn’t bode well for Maytown’s projected “5 to 10 million square feet of office space.”  And with consumer spending in this country sinking like a rock, will another million to million and a half square feet of retail space really support itself?  America has ten times more retail space per citizen than any other country in the world.  Do we really need to add to that?
It seems to me that the reason corporations seek “rural or upscale suburban” areas has to do with wanting security–making sure that their buildings, personnel, and automobiles will not be the target of hungry locals.  As I have said before, the extraordinarily restricted access that Bell’s Bend offers probably looks very good to some forward-looking but pessimistic corporate officers, and, to repeat myself again, Bell’s Bend offers prime sites for new “executive housing,” never mind that it will tend to drive out the locals it doesn’t enrich.

Some of the information that came out of this meeting was that there is no information on some critical topics.  The Planning Commission reps admitted that they have not done a study on the potential financial benefits to Davidson County, and in fact do not have the funding to do such a study.  “We know that, in general, corporate campuses are a good tax deal for cities, but we don’t know the specifics of this situation,”Planning Commission rep Jennifer Carlat said.  To fill this void, the Scottsboro-Bell’s Bend home team has commissioned its own study, which will be ready in time for the Planning Commissions consideration on June 24th.

Now, as I said when I started talking, this was not a happy meeting.  The local crew literally drove Anita McCaig of the Planning Commission to tears, repeatedly interrupting her and questioning her competence and trustworthiness. Her words as she started crying were, “Will you please let me finish when I’m answering a question?  I know how you could defeat this proposal.  All you have to do is ask me.”  Nobody asked–but hey, the Devil himself, Tony Giarratana, was in the room, so nobody was going to tip their hand to him.  Maybe some folks asked her what she was talking about later.  I certainly hope so.

Ah, Tony.  He was not taking guff from anyone.  He was not being polite.  When people asked him questions that he felt they already knew the answers to, he just brushed them off with, “That’s a rhetorical question,” and even got openly sarcastic with some questioners.  But, to his credit, he stopped and turned on a dime when his taunt “How come you people haven’t done more to buy the development rights on these properties if you’re so concerned about it?” was met with, “Because it costs about ten thousand dollars a property owner to do it, most people can’t afford to donate their rights, and we don’t have that kind of money.”

Suddenly, Tony was quite seriously saying that this was something the Mays brothers would very likely be willing to help fund.  He certainly sounded sincere; it was a distinct switch from the middle finger approach he had been taking, and, since one of the things the Mays family is known for is funding the regreening of East Nashville after the tornado of 1998, this could be a way to make lemonade out of the Maytown lemon.  If it happens.

The most common, and obvious, expressed reason for all the venting at this meeting was the feeling that the community had been betrayed by the Planning Commission when the Commission started trying to write Maytown Center into the plan, but I think that’s only half the story, or maybe a lot less.

We are all starting to wake up to the fact that we have been massively betrayed at every level of our society.  Our expensive educational system is increasingly irrelevant.  We built a petroleum and automobile-based society as if we would never run out of petroleum and always be able to afford individual private vehicles, and now we are running out of both petroleum and money for consumer spending.  We have sucked up all the money and credit that could have been used to re-establish society on a more sustainable basis and burned it in a futile war of aggression, and the leaders who have masterminded this colossal trainwreck remain not only unapologetic, but thoroughly insulated from any consequences for their irresponsible behavior.

We don’t get to yell at Bush and Cheney, not in any way they have to listen to.  We don’t get to express our displeasure at the faceless suits who have moved our industry to China, our farming to Central America, and our dollars to the toilet.  They are segregated off in gated communities, safely inside the Beltway, or, like the May brothers, in some foreign country.  Their money, which used to be ours until they took it from us through some medical emergency or retirement home or stock market flimflam or corporate downsizing, is safely tucked away in foreign accounts so that no matter what happens in the USA, they’ll be OK.  They’re not going to see or hear us.  But the poor ladies of the planning commission were sacrificial lambs,  scapegoats exposed to the wrath of the masses and made to pay for every insult that anyone in Bell’s Bend has ever suffered from the faceless rich.  Their only sin was needing a job, just like the rest of us, and finding one that put them in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Fortunately, we’re all still civilized enough that the abuse was only verbal.  But, beyond the immediate issue of land use in Bell’s Bend, the April 29th meeting was a reminder that, as Mr. Obama has famously remarked, there is a vast well of bitterness in America’s heartland, a reservoir generally glossed over by the polticians, pundits, and mainstream media.  As long as it is ignored, it is only going to grow and deepen, until some accident of history turns it loose.  It will take some extraordinarily gifted people–thousands of them, all over this country–to transform this simmering rage into constructive politics that reshapes and redirects America.  Without those people and that redirection, we will instead see a social explosion of volcanic proportions.  It will not be pretty, it will not be constructive, and it will make Mad Max seem like the good old days.  I know which path I prefer, but I make no claim to be able to predict the future.  It’s up to all of us.

music:  Burning Times “The Only Green World”

The Green Party of Tennessee met in a smoke-free back room at Nashville’s Italian Market last Saturday.  I’d like to say we decided the future of Tennessee, with Party co-chair Katey Culver playing the part of capa di tutti capi, but overall I’m afraid our effect on Tennessee politics is just not that powerful.

The party is, however, beginning to make itself felt.  Chris Lugo, who is once again the party’s candidate for US Senate, reported that the two months he spent as the only person seeking the Democratic nomination finally shamed the Democrats into running somebody against Lamar Alexander, who has been all but endorsed by our so-called Democratic governor.  It’s a bad news/good news situation for Chris–while he’ll be in competition with a Democrat, candidate Bob Tuke is calling for a slow, “phased withdrawal” from Iraq and escalation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, leaving Chris as the “get out now/settle by non-military means” candidate.  The rising tide of frustration with the war and the Democrats’ failure to end it, plus the fact that this is Chris’s second run, will hopefully improve his showing.

The party nominated TSU political science professor John Miglietta to run against 5th District Congressman Jim Cooper.  John has a tremendous advantage over just about anybody else the Green Party could run, because he is not now, and never has been, a hippie, unlike most of the rest of the party.  If most of us got anywhere close to mounting a serious challenge to the two-party system, the Demopublicans would have no trouble finding dancing skeletons in our closets, which they would use to fan the flames of voter hysteria, and, if necessary, have us arrested or at least publicly humiliated for daring to think for ourselves.  But John, bless his heart, is just as square as they come, and he still sees things our way.  That means a lot to me. For him, it means he could go all the way to the top.

One of my old hippie teachers used to talk about the importance of acceptance of our ethos by “honest squares.”  This is actually quite scientific; if the hippie/Green world view can be arrived at by someone through a process completely independent of the counterculture, that amounts to independent validation of the results of the decades long “thought experiment,” to borrow a phrase from Einstein, that was originally launched by the late and much lamented trio of Dr. Hoffman, Dr. Leary, and Aldous Huxley.  Well, this doesn’t have much to do with our current race for political office and against time, and will probably embaras the hell out of many Greens, but I just had to go and open my big mouth, now, didn’t I?  Well, I’m not responsible for the fact that the Green Party’s lineage goes back through the North American Bioregional Congress to the Haight-Ashbury Diggers to the San Francisco Mime Troupe.  I just think we should be proud of it, that’s all.

Back to the subject at hand!  We also selected delegates to the party’s national convention, and determined who they should vote for–five out of eight are committed to Cynthia McKinney, with Kent Mesplay, Kat Swift, and “uncommitted” each getting a delegate.  I have a hard time getting excited about Green Party Presidential candidates.  In my view, it’s just a publicity stunt unless we’ve got a shot at getting a majority in Congress.  We’re a grassroots organization, know what I mean?

Anyway, Cynthia is black, she’s a woman, and she hasn’t sold out.  I wish her well.

Speaking of grass roots,  I wish I had a whole lot more candidate news for you.  I wish we had a crew of people running for the state legislature, where many races are uncontested, but we are awfully thin in the ranks.  However, we do have a plan afoot that could change that.

The plan is our Ballot Access Lawsuit.  The Demoplublicans have written the rules for getting on the Tennessee ballot in such a way that it is virtually impossible for any other parties to get their party name printed on the ballot.  The only problem is, that’s unconstitutional, according to a court in Ohio, where the laws were about as tortuous and monopolistic as they are here.  The Tennessee legislature could have changed that, but, being made up of Demopublicans and Republicrats, they had more important things to do, like allow mountaintop removal in Tennessee.  So, we are having  to sue in Federal court to overturn Tennessee’s laws.  Since it’s the same Federal Court that overturned Ohio’s laws, we think we have a reasonable chance for success.

The State Attorney General, being a committed Demopublican, doesn’t want to let the Green Party on the ballot, and so he is doing everything he can to drag this case out past this year’s election, just as the state’s election officials are doing everything they can to stall legislation that will replace the state’s touchscreen voting machines with equipment that will produce a verifiable, recountable paper trail.  Put that together with the fact that the US has more people in prison than any other country in the world, a quarter of the world’s known prison population, in fact, and you can get downright cynical about what a wonderful, free country this is.

Well, anyway, the Ballot Access lawsuit will put our party name on every ballot in the state, even if the newspapers won’t give us the time of day.  That could just be the little match that starts the big fire.  Maybe that’s a lot to hope for, but the future of the human race is at stake.  “Once more unto the breach, good friends…..”

an original song for the Green Party!  actual recorded version of this coming soon!

My wife sez this ain’t in accord with the Laws of Attraction but I say if you can’t laugh at your troubles you’ll never get rid of ‘em…..

(IF YOU’RE A) GREEN PARTY FIGURE

Are you tired of the Republican

Tired of the Democrat?

Tired of old-boy leadership

All rich and mostly fat?

There’s another political color

Besides the red and blue

That color’s green

But before you switch

I got a little warnin’ for you

IF YOU’RE A GREEN PARTY FIGURE

They’ll treat you like a chigger

IF YOU’RE A GREEN PARTY FIGURE

They’ll scratch you ’till they bleed

IF YOU’RE A GREEN PARTY FIGURE

Right in your face they’ll snigger

IF YOU’RE A GREEN PARTY FIGURE

They’ll yank you like a weed

You can say out loud

You’re green and you’re proud

Say it ’till the cows come home

And no bull, boy, like a lonely bull

You’ll be outstanding in your field all alone

The newsers won’t return your calls

No matter what you say

They don’t care what answers you got

You ain’t in their play

IF YOU’RE A GREEN PARTY FIGURE

You’ve got a “kick me” sticker

IF YOU’RE A GREEN PARTY FIGURE

They treat you like a piece of spit

IF YOU’RE A GREEN PARTY FIGURE

You won’t get no satisfaction

IF YOU’RE A GREEN PARTY FIGURE

You’d best get used to it

You gotta speak the truth the way you see it

Can’t buy them corporate lies

“Cause if you start eatin’ their baloney

You’ll be dead before you die

Dead before you die

Dead before you die

They say two’s democracy,

three’s a crowd

So vote for one of us

Too many choices gets confusing

Quiet in the back of the bus

Don’t question the basic assumptions

That create the rich and the poor

Play the Republicrat game, my friend

Or we’ll show you the door

IF YOU’RE A GREEN PARTY FIGURE

Your skin had better get thicker

IF YOU’RE A GREEN PARTY FIGURE

Slings and arrows gonna rain on you

IF YOU’RE A GREEN PARTY FIGURE

They’ll cuss you with great vigor but

IF YOU’RE A GREEN PARTY FIGURE

What else can you do?

If you are looking for a book that unblinkingly, unemotionally, lays out exactly how, and how badly, we are screwing up this planet, you are looking for Lester Brown’s Plan B 3.0.

If you are looking for a book that gives some idea of what could be done to at least soften the impact of the crash that is happening, you are looking for Lester Brown’s Plan B 3.0

But if you are looking for a book that talks about why Lester Brown’s proposals aren’t being adopted, you will have to look elsewhere.  You might start with Al Gore’s recent Assault on Reason, but the Inconvenient Truth guy, for all his smarts, is still part of the problem. I mean, really, Al,…”Occidental Petroleum”?…”Green Walmart”?

A lot of recent writers, from Al Franken to Michael Moore to Greg Palast, and the list goes on, seem to grasp pieces of the puzzle.  Some  blame capitalism, but history shows that the Communist Russians and Chinese were voracious destroyers of the environment as well.  For me, the little-known Buddhist writer David Loy has laid it out best in two of his recent books: A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack, and Money, Sex, War, and Karma, Loy describes “the religion of the market” and how it has distorted the human psyche and the planetary ecosystem.  But, while I strongly recommend these books to you, they’re not the ones I’m here to talk about.  I want to focus on Lester Brown and Plan B 3.0.

I mean, it shows you how schizophrenic we are as a society when this book has a blurb by Bill Clinton, but Hillary’s platform calls for massive production of biofuels, which Brown excoriates, and targets an 80% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050–which, according to Brown, is about thirty years too late.  Barak Obama, too, thinks we can wait until 2050, and John McCain?  Get serious!

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  The first half of Plan B lays out the problem, or problems.  Deteriorating oil and food security, rising temperatures and rising seas, emerging water shortages, natural systems under stress–all I’m doing here is reading you the chapter headings.  In a chapter titled “Early Signs of Decline,” he tells us that malnutrition is so pervasive in India that “60 percent of all newborns in India would be in intensive care had they been born in California.” and then goes from nutrition to the iminent exhaustion of the world’s mineral resources, finding that there are only a few decades worth of extractable lead, tin, copper, iron, and bauxite (aluminum) left in the ground, and covering the growing number of failing states–including Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons and is just a natural disaster away from chaos.  As recent events in Burma show us, the world is much more fragile than we would like it to be.

All of this adds up to a convincing argument that the consumer civilization that we try so hard to enjoy was a really bad idea.  So….is it too late to change it, or are we headed for Mad Maxville?

This, unfortunately, is where Brown falls down.  He has a great many good ideas, possibly enough that, if we could try all of them, enough of them would work to pull us back from over the brink, but there are also assertions that even an uneducated layman like me can clearly see amount to grasping at straws, even without the question of their political feasibility.  More on that in a moment.  But first, the straws.

Brown is big on universal primary education.  There are compelling arguments for this, such as that the more education a girl gets, the fewer children she is likely to have, and certainly universal literacy is a kind of evolutionary advance, but universal education is a sword that can cut two ways.

There are traditional ways of life that are ecologically balanced, and depend on children functioning as part of the family team.  Skills such as farming, animal care, construction, and many crafts are best taught to the young.  When children are taken from their parents and forced to sit in a classroom where their heads are filled with abstract facts, the transmission of these traditions is broken.  Families cease to function, and school graduates, given a carefully selected taste of life beyond their villages, leave for the burgeoning cities, where mostly they become part of the problem. If we are going to impart universal literacy, and I agree we should, we need to value traditional village survival skills and allow time for children to learn them.

Brown also banks heavily on “forest farming” and no-till agriculture to stabilize watersheds, recharge aquifers, and sequester carbon.  Again, we need models different from the ones usually practiced for these ideas to work in the real world.  Forest farming all too often results in monoculture one species of tree planted on thousands of acres, with herbicides used to prevent anything else from growing, just as no-till farming is heavily dependent on herbicides and patented seeds.  Herbicides, like all other petrochemical products, are just going to get more expensive and harder to find, while patented seeds are owned by multinational corporations who thus prevent farmers from engaging in the ancient practice of saving their own seeds, turning seed into another major expense for the grower and decreasing food security.

Brown suggests that the US build a vast network of electric-powered public transport, with the electricity generated by solar, wind, and geothermal plants.  The US is the only first-world country that does not have a good public transportation network.  What we have, instead, is a sprawling, automobile-oriented infrastructure that does not lend itself to centralized public transportation, and we have destroyed our country’s financial integrity by spending trillions fighting to control Iraq’s oil and building McMansions, so that the credit we would need for such an infrastructure investment is no longer available to us.  Heckuva job, Georgie.

Brown advocates a “World War II-type mobilization” to retool US industry to create the products needed to transition into a post-oil economy. Unfortunately, the US is not the manufacturing country it was in the 1940s, and a retooling of Chinese industry to create what is need instead of the distractions that now make up so much of the market would only worsen the US’s financial hemorrhage.

But in a way, these are quibbles.  The glaring point at which Brown misses the boat is in the very goal he sets:  stabilizing CO2 emissions below 400ppm, with the thought that that is the “tipping point” beyond which catastrophic, irreversible climate change will set in.  Well, even a book written as recently as last October, like this one, can be dated.  Since Plan B was published, Dr. James Hansen, the US’s premier climate scientist, has announced that, in his estimation, the tipping point was at 350 ppm, and we have already passed it.  Oops.

This does not invalidate Brown’s many excellent suggestions for technical fixes to the environment, but it underlines the failure of conventional politics to take him seriously.

Brown points out that everything that needs to be done could be done for a fraction of the US’s, and the world’s military budget, and would greatly lessen the need for military-style security.  Unfortunately, our country’s Presidential candidates seem to be competing with each other about how much they will increase military spending–which will only make things worse, and cause calls for more military spending, until our overseas bankers cut off our credit.

What Brown does not seem to understand is that the US is run by an elite who see nothing wrong with the fact that they are getting richer while we are getting poorer.  Most members of this elite are concerned about the environment, but they are not concerned enough to do something about the fact that it is they and their pathological acquisitiveness that is a big piece of the problem.  Since that seems to be the case, I must sadly conclude that we are in for a full-tilt crash and Mr. Brown’s caring and thoughtful book will be seen by historians of the future, if there are any, as a brilliant exercise in what might have been.

OK, Lester…what’s “Plan C”?

music: James McMurtry, “Dancing in the Ruins”

Well, it’s official.  In an interview with ABC news, White House resident George Bush said, …”yes, I’m aware our national security team met on this issue (using torture). And I approved.”  Bush has implicated former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former Justice Department attorney John Yoo, former Pentagon official Douglas Feith, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of State Colin Powell,  and former CIA Director George Tenet, as well as current junta members Dick Cheney and Condoleeza Rice, as co-conspirators in his torture ring.

Also implicated as having known about and approved the junta’s use of torture on prisoners was Democratic House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, as well as leading Senate Democrats Diane Feinstein and Charles Schumer, who voted to approve Michael Mukasey as the new Attorney General, even though he as much as condoned torture during his confirmation hearing.

And then we have the case of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who, in an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes, had the following conversation with journalist Leslie Stahl:

LESLEY STAHL: If someone’s in custody, as in Abu Ghraib, and they are brutalized by a law enforcement person, if you listen to the expression, “cruel and unusual punishment,” doesn’t that apply?

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA: No, no.

LESLEY STAHL: Cruel and unusual punishment?

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA: To the contrary. You think—you think that you would—has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I don’t think so.

LESLEY STAHL: Well, I think if you’re in custody and you have a policeman who’s taken you into custody—

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA: And you say he’s punishing you?

LESLEY STAHL: Sure.

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA: What’s he punishing you for? You punish somebody—

LESLEY STAHL: Well, because he assumes you, one, either committed a crime—

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA: No, no.

LESLEY STAHL: —or that you know something that he wants to know.

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA: Ah, it’s the latter. And when he’s—when he’s—when he’s hurting you in order to get information from you—

LESLEY STAHL: Yeah?

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA: —you don’t say he’s punishing you. What’s he punishing you for? He’s trying to extract—

LESLEY STAHL: Because he thinks you’re a terrorist, and he’s going to beat the you-know-what out of you.

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA: Anyway, that’s my view. And it happens to be correct.

There’s a name for the kind of discourse you just heard.  It’s called “sophistry,” which Webster’s Dictionary defines as “ssubtly deceptive reasoning or argumentation.”  They weren’t being punished, so it can’t be called “cruel and unusual punishment.”  We were just trying to get information from them, so it was OK.  Yeah, right.  Let’s apply that standard to Scalia and listen to him squeal.

So here’s the deal. According to British attorney and law professor Phillippe Sands,

“the Geneva Conventions are absolutely clear: there are no circumstances in which torture is permitted. And if the account is accurate, the President is, in effect, owning up to the fact that he has committed a war crime. And under the torture convention, there is an obligation to investigate any person who has committed a war crime.”

But…who can do it?  The Bush junta isn’t going to investigate itself, especially for hanging crimes.  The Democrats are compromised.  The Supreme Court would just laugh, if Mr Scalia is any measure–and unfortunately, he probably is.  Phillippe Sands says there are justice departments and judges in Europe who are outraged by the junta’s conduct, and quietly laying the groundwork for prosecution, although I’m not holding my breath about extradition….hmm, how ’bout “extraordinary rendition”?  Sauce for the goose, eh?

Did I say hanging crimes?  Yes, although I’m not out to hang anybody.  The US government prosecuted Germans and Japanese government officials for approving torture policies.  Most received prison terms, although Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was hung.  Condi Rice is the US official <!– @page { size: 8.5in 11in; margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } -whose government position is most analagous to von Ribbentrop’s. Wanna dance, Condi?

Of course, the Nazis were responsible for the deaths of millions, in concentration camps and on battlefields, and the Bush junta has only been responsible for the death of about one million Iraqis, mostly by accident as “collateral damage,” so you could argue that their crimes have not been as reprehensible as the Nazi atrocities.  But hey, when he was Governor of Texas, Bush let plenty of people fry for just one murder.  Shouldn’t he get what he gave?

Naah.  Two wrongs don’t make a right.  Here’s a couple of ideas.

One:  We’ll let them play “Survivor.”  Put America’s leading war criminals on a low-lying tropical island in the monsoon belt, guard it to make sure nobody gets in to “rescue” them, and check in once a year to see who’s left.  We can confiscate their wealth, since they mostly stole it, and use it to make amends to the Iraqis and everybody else they harmed in their scramble to the top.  Whoever is left alive after ten years gets to spend the rest of their life doing some court-ordered activity to help society.

Two:  Put them in re-education camps.  Real ones, not ones where they get tortured.  Keep hammering them with what their policies have done for most people, but also use various psychological means to break down their selfish personalities and enable them to become the people they could be….hey, I can dream, can’t I?

music: Mickey Hart’s Mystery Box, “The Next Step”

I’m not the only one writing about this!

from a Thai publication called “The Nation”

Spirits in a Material World: David Loy on Re-evaluating Religion

by Pravit Rojanaphruk

A dynamic new belief system has evolved over the last few decades, says Prof. David Loy: one that he thinks can be described as ‘the first truly world religion.’ “It’s the most successful religion of all time,” says Loy, a professor of philosophy and religion at Japan’s Bunkyo University, during a recent trip to Bangkok.

“It’s winning more converts, more quickly than any other religion in human history.” Loy is referring to what he terms “the religion of the market”, a belief system which offers “salvation through consumerism” and whose message, “buy me if you want to be happy”, is transmitted through the mass media using “the most effective proselytising technique ever developed”: addictive advertisements.

Loy regards the desire to accumulate ever-increasing amounts of money and material possessions as a “religion” because he feels it is motivated by the spiritual drive–albeit a distortion of the same, which he believes all of us possess. “All of us have a sense of lack. Buddhism says that there is no self. Well, I think all of us know this (intuitively) but we repress it. And the way it comes out is (in our) great concern for security, for grounding ourselves. Some people think, “I don’t have a girlfriend”; “I don’t have enough money.” It comes out in many different ways. For a lot of intellectuals, like myself, I think it comes out more strongly in terms of fame. We all want to be famous: we all want to be interviewed.”

more

Urban Farmers’ Crops Go From Vacant Lot to Market

Denniston Wilks grows produce for sale in East New York, Brooklyn.

IN the shadows of the elevated tracks toward the end of the No. 3 line in East New York, Brooklyn, with an April chill still in the air, Denniston and Marlene Wilks gently pulled clusters of slender green shoots from the earth, revealing a blush of tiny red shallots at the base.

“Dennis used to keep them big, and people didn’t buy them,” Mrs. Wilks said. “They love to buy scallions.”

Growing up in rural Jamaica, the Wilkses helped their families raise crops like sugar cane, coffee and yams, and take them to market. Now, in Brooklyn, they are farmers once again, catering to their neighbors’ tastes: for scallions, for bitter melons like those from the West Indies and East Asia and for cilantro for Latin-American dinner tables.

“We never dreamed of it,” said Mr. Wilks, nor did his relatives in Jamaica. “They are totally astonished when you tell them that you farm and go to the market.”

For years, New Yorkers have grown basil, tomatoes and greens in window boxes, backyard plots and community gardens. But more and more New Yorkers like the Wilkses are raising fruits and vegetables, and not just to feed their families but to sell to people on their block.

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Dharma in the Dirt

MUIR BEACH, Calif.

AS a proudly Birkenstocked Zen gardener, Wendy Johnson can mindfully muster up affection for many of the earth’s species, with the possible exception of persimmon-devouring gophers.

But poison hemlock holds a special place in her heart.

Without the presence of this pernicious carrot look-alike, a potent vertigo-inducing poison that when ingested can cause death, she reasons, her garden would be all cloying lilac- and lily-scented perfection — boring, in short. The innocent-looking malevolent weed, which she allows to flourish for its capacity to draw rich minerals from the soil for compost, “gives the garden its punch,” she said, “snapping me back to my senses.”

Like her beloved hemlock, Ms. Johnson has deep taproots in California. Her own garden, bordered by a mountain creek with a view of the Pacific Ocean, lies down the road from the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, where she helped pioneer the concept of organic gardening in the United States. Now the farm’s unofficial gardener emeritus, she lived at Green Gulch for 25 years, marrying, raising her two children and growing produce for Greens Restaurant, which was founded by the Center in 1979.

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The North American Bioregional Congress is coming to Tennessee in 2009.  Its three hundred or so participants will arrive at The Farm, in Summertown, next September. They will spend a week in intensive interaction, and then journey back to their respective bioregions, inspired through communion at the Congress to ever more deeply reinhabit their home watersheds and bring their friends and neighbors back–or is it forward?–to Earth as well.

What in the world am I talking about?  Bioregions?  Communion?  At a Congress?  Reinhabit their watersheds?  Maybe I’m the one who needs to get “brought back to Earth”?

Well, thank you for your concern, but I feel pretty well grounded.  I am reinhabiting the place I live–staying home a lot, learning my local flora and fauna, water cycles, weather, dirt, and my human neighbors–though sometimes that seems like the hard part.   It’s the culture we live in that has come ungrounded.

Now, in the course of human events, it has become obvious that the political system we have built since 1776 no longer serves us, or most of the other inhabitants of the planet–human and otherwise–either.  We need to reimagine our relationship with our communities at all levels.  Politics is a function of culture, and to truly and deeply change our politics into something that will work in the coming centuries, we have to initiate a culture change, a psychological and spiritual change that starts with renewing and revisioning our felt connection with the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the plants and animals that make it possible, as well as the way we relate to our children, our mates, our families, and our friends. The North American Bioregional Congress is a safe space in which to join with like-minded people and do all that.

“Bioregonal”?  What’s “bioregional”?

A “bioregion” is, to quote from the North American Bioregional Congress’s website,

A geographical area whose boundaries are roughly determined by nature rather than human beings. One bioregion is distinguished from another by characteristics of flora, fauna, water, climate, rocks, soils, land forms, and the human settlements, cultures, and communities these characteristics have spawned. “Local community is the basic unit of human habitation. It is at this level that we can reach our fullest potential and best effect social change. Local communities need to network to empower our bioregional communities. Human communities are integral parts of the larger bioregional and planetary life communities. The empowerment of human communities is inseparable from the larger task of reinhabitation — learning to live sustainably and joyfully in place.”

and a “Congress,” in the Bioregional view, is

a way of holding a working meeting of fully-participating, well-informed, aware equals who see themselves in some sense as representatives—officially or unofficially, formally or informally—of groups, or organizations, or movements, or ideologies, or philosophies or of regions or watersheds, or of natural ecosystems, and plant and animal communities. It is an assembly of peers working consensually in a representational capacity. In this a congress is much different than what we commonly call a “conference”.

In order to allow this community of equals to fully form and maintain coherence, there are no “drop-ins” allowed.  Participants come for the whole thing, or not at all, and that includes the media.  Everyone helps with the cooking, the cleanup, and the childcare.  This is not a “conference.”

At a “conference,” attendees’ main duties are to show up for workshops and meals and have food and information poured into them.  At a “conference,” there are well-known outside speakers, big-name entertainment, and a set schedule of workshops.  A “conference” tries to draw in as many people as it can. This ain’t no stinking conference.  This is do-it-yourself, participatory, and by invitation–and, by the way, you are invited.

This temporary village is considered a “sacred space,” not in any narrow, sectarian sense, but in the broadest possible terms–that the gathering of this intentional community for the purpose of reconsidering everything from one’s most intimately personal thoughts and attitudes to the state of the planet is itself a holy purpose and that all participants are worthy of respect.  Rituals and blessings are shared and invented.  Lives get changed.

Bioregionalism goes far beyond mere “environmentalism.”  Here’s another quote from the website that explains it better than I could:

While environmentalism does much good work in consciousness raising, it is only a part of what must be done. Environmentalism fails to propose comprehensive and systemic change at all levels — based on ecology. Bioregionalism does, reaching for something far deeper and more holistic that must be manifested.

Bioregionalism is an all-inclusive way of life, embracing the whole range of human thought and endeavor. It advocates a full restructuring of systems within a given bioregion, orienting toward regeneration and sustainability of the whole life community. This inclusion of the nonhuman in the definition of community is vital. Indeed, one of the basic tenets of bioregionalism is the notion of “bio-centrism,” or “eco-centrism,” where reality is viewed from a life-centered or ecologically centered perspective, rather than from a human-centered focus (anthropocentrism).

Bioregionalism speaks to the heart of community. If we are to continue to live on Earth, the definition of community has to include all the living things in our ecosystem. Without the flowers, mammals, insects, trees, birds, grasses, and the living soil and waters in community with each other, we would not be here at all. Humans need other life forms in order to survive. Without a respectful, cooperative relationship with others, we are both physically and spiritually impoverished. Without their ecological teachings we are ignorant and cannot know how to live.

Elsewhere on the website, somebody comments, “If you think you’re an independent organism, try seeing how long you can hold your breath.”

The bioregional movement is a seed for a new human culture, one in which the proposals of the Green Party, so often a voice crying in the wilderness, would be as sensible and obvious and implemented as the next breath you take.  We need a new culture and a new politics, and we’re running out of time to get on the road there.  Got ideas?  Bring ‘em to the North American Bioregional Congress.  We’ll listen.

music:  Kate Wolf:  “Medicine Wheel”

Why Gas in the U.S. Is So Cheap

by Steve Hargreaves
Friday, May 2, 2008 provided by

Relatively low taxes have kept pump prices far below most other developed nations, which some say is precisely why the current runup is so painful.

Despite daily headlines bemoaning record gas prices, the U.S. is actually one of the cheaper places to fill up in the world.

Out of 155 countries surveyed, U.S. gas prices were the 45th cheapest, according to a recent study from AIRINC, a research firm that tracks cost of living data.

The difference is staggering. As of late March, U.S. gas prices averaged $3.45 a gallon. That compares to over $8 a gallon across much of Europe.

The U.S. has always fought to keep gas prices low, and the current debate among presidential candidates on how to keep them that way has been fierce.

But those cheap gas prices - which Americans have gotten used to - mean they feel price spikes like the ones we’re experiencing now more acutely than citizens from other nations which have had historically more expensive fuel.

Cheap gas prices have also lulled Americans into a cycle of buying bigger cars and bigger houses further away from their work - leaving them more exposed to rising prices, some experts say.

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Revenues from Europe’s high gas taxes are used to fund a variety of things. One thing they have built is better public transportation, said Peter Tertzakian, chief energy economist at ARC Financial, a Calgary-based private equity firm.

They gave people an alternative to driving, something we don’t have in North America,” said Tertzakian.

***

Americans have taken advantage of cheap gas prices to do other things - like buy bigger cars and bigger houses further away from city centers, said Schipper.

On a per capita basis, Americans use three times more oil than Europeans, he said. That means Americans are more exposed to rising gas prices than their counterparts across the Atlantic.

“Five-thousand square feet in the suburbs, that’s much rarer in Europe,” said Schipper, referring to big homes. “We dug our hole.”

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and that hole’s only going to get deeper….from the Oil Drum, a prediction of $1000 a barrel oil by 2020  (let’s see, that translates out to $30/gallon for gasoline, doesn’t it?  and everything else that’s oil dependent will jump in price by more or less a factor of ten, too….)

This is a guest post by Phoenix, an engineer working in the energy sector, and a friend of mine for well over 3 decades.

In January 2006 Phoenix emailed me a spreadsheet that predicted an oil price of $100/barrel by 2008, followed by an ongoing geometric rise in oil prices. I remember immediately phoning him to point out that the scenario was impossible because it is unsustainable - $100/barrel would cause economic havoc comparable to the oil shock of the 1970s and if a geometric price progression followed, then no economic recovery would be possible and… well, I recall using the phrase “rioting in the streets inside of 18 months”.

As we know, oil hit $100 in January 2008 and kept climbing, surpassing even Phoenix’s predictions. So when Phoenix offered to explain the model that generated those numbers, I leapt at the opportunity. Here is the story of how Phoenix became Peak Oil aware and generated his Price Calculator.

Click to Enlarge

OTC: $100 trillion needed to rebuild energy infrastructure

Uchenna Izundu
International Editor

HOUSTON, May 5 — The oil and gas industry will need to invest $50-100 trillion to rebuild its ageing infrastructure within the next 7 years and stave off a serious drop in oil and gas production, Matt Simmons, chairman of Simmons & Co. International, told OGJ May 5 at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston.

In a worst-case scenario, Simmons said, oil and gas output could fall by 10-20% by 2013 if industry does not replace its rusting, corroded assets. Spare capacity also has run out because formerly cheap prices for oil and gas precluded upgrading and construction of new facilities .

The average age of offshore rigs is 25 years, and oil companies have ignored the problem for the past few decades because of the low energy prices, which meant that maintenance has been expensive.

However, the upward trend in prices can help pay for the rebuilding of the energy system, Simmons stated.

“There is no blueprint in place, and this is a global problem. The longer the blueprint is postponed, the more acute the crisis will get,” he said.

The reconstruction problem is compounded by the shortage of skilled engineers to carry out the work and the scarcity of raw materials.

“No census has been carried out on the age of the infrastructure,” he said. “The industry’s tool kit for corrosion is old, and painting over rust creates an illusion. Few parts of oil infrastructure have been replaced.”

Leaks, stains, oil streaks, metal fatigue, and brittle steel are all signs of ageing pipelines, platforms, wells, and other assets. Simmons said the industry’s focus had been on declining production, which was important, but it failed to recognize that declining oil fields are also accelerating rust on oil equipment.

“Peak oil is a reality. In 2005 we had peak production and this fell by 265,000 b/d in 2007. There is a high likelihood that production will continue to fall.”

Simmons forecasts that oil prices could hit $200/bbl as global demand increases. He pointed out that the industry had previously sold its best-quality grade of oil at $15/bbl and flared natural gas because it was too costly to develop.

“That was a mistake,” he concluded.

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And maybe spending that much on an oil infrastructure that is poised to destroy civilization as we know it is a bad idea…maybe we should fund our transition into the post oil economy while we’ve still got some oil left to grease the skids, so to speak….