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”

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”

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.”

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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.

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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

The full onset of the mortgage foreclosure crisis, coupled with demographic changes, rising fuel prices and a host of other factors means that the suburbs could be on the way out. One analyst has postulated a future in which the suburbs, which once promised so much domestic happiness, are transformed into the new slums, with rampant crime fuelled by poverty and decay. The term “slumburbia” was not far behind.

Franklin Reserve, a walled but not gated community of 15,000 people, appears to be a prosperous development. But there are signs that all is not well. Some front lawns are unkempt, and for sale signs abound, almost matched by signs offering properties for rent. On Caprezzo Way a five-bedroom, three-bathroom house, complete with pool, is on the market for $550,000, probably $100,000 less than it would have been advertised for a year ago. Across the street a more ominous sign of the mortgage foreclosure crisis is taped to the wrought iron gate of a stucco house on Cortino Way. “Notice to quit,” it declares, telling the defaulting occupants they have three days to leave.

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so, while the price of gas has tripled in the US, it’s less than doubled in Europe….because the dollar is worth less….

If we take Autumn of 2000 as our base point when the euro was trading at its low of 0.8252 relative to the US dollar and oil was trading at $35 dollars per barrel, we get the following results: The increase in price of oil in euros has been 74% since 2000, while it has been a 237% increase in US dollars.

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Gasoline May Soon Cost a Sawbuck

Big New Shock at the Pump Forecast by Two Analysts

Get ready for another economic shock of major proportions — a virtual doubling of prices at the gas pump to as much as $10 a gallon.

Gas at that price range would make diesel even more expensive, which would make trucking/shipping almost prohibitive.  And then there’s chemical fertilizer and “all the marvelous ways/they’re using plastics nowadays,” as Tom Lehrer used to sing….like, “the American way of life is not negotiable”?  OK, then we’ll just cancel it outright….

Shortages Threaten Farmers’ Key Tool: Fertilizer

….Some dealers in the Midwest ran out of fertilizer last fall, and they continue to restrict sales this spring because of a limited supply.

“If you want 10,000 tons, they’ll sell you 5,000 today, maybe 3,000,” said W. Scott Tinsman Jr., a fertilizer dealer in Davenport, Iowa. “The rubber band is stretched really far.”

Fertilizer companies are confident the shortage will be solved eventually, noting that they plan to build scores of new factories. But that will probably create fresh problems in the long run as the world grows more dependent on fossil fuels to produce chemical fertilizers. Intensified use of such fertilizers is certain to mean greater pollution of waterways, too.

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Max Keiser: Your ’stimulus’ check will cost you more than it’s worth

By Max Keiser
Huffington Post
Sunday, April 27, 2008

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-keiser/why-you-shouldnt-spend-yo_b_988…

I’ll explain two reasons why you Americans should not spend your economic stimulus check: the first applies to people who work regular jobs for wages, the second applies to people who work in investment banks for bonuses.

If you work for wages (or live on a pension), consider this: If every American said “No, thank you” to President Bush’s stimulus check and refused to cash them, the value of the dollars in your pocket right now, in terms of their purchasing power would go up by a factor greater than the face value ($600) of the stimulus check. In other words, if you didn’t spend these checks, you’d be the richer for it.

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Costs killing Maine farmers

By Sharon Kiley Mack
Friday, April 25, 2008 - Bangor Daily News

LEVANT, Maine - Dairy farmer Brian Call doesn’t have a fancy milking parlor. He hand-carries the portable milking machine to each of his 30 cows, wiping their teats with pages ripped from an old telephone book. “Another way to save money,” he comments.

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In her letter to the congressional delegation and Maine’s dairy industry members, Gibson wrote, “People need to be concerned that small farms and small businesses are closing their doors, as they are the backbone of our economy and they fuel rural communities. We are becoming ghost farms and ghost towns, the end of an era and the start of a vacuum to be filled by monopolies, a form of economic totalitarianism.”

By telling her family’s personal financial story, Gibson hopes solutions will be found to save Maine’s small, family farms.

“I will tell you that we realize no profit from our dairy farm, nothing,” she said.

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Peak Farmers: A Guest Post by Elaine Solowey

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Joel Stein, the Angelino columnist said just last fall. “Agribusiness feeds us. Farmers are obsolete. They are one step above fire starters and cave painters”.

Now with food prices rising, food riots in 35 countries as of this writing and the concerns about peak oil, peak food, peak phosphorus, peak fertilizer finally crashing into mainstream consciousness it is surprising to me that no one connects the current crisis with a peak that was passed long ago.

Peak farmers.

But that peak should not be a surprise to anyone.

For the last 100 years there has been a world-wide effort to get rid of farmers…
Some were eliminated for political reasons the way that Stalin starved the Ukrainians to death and shipped the kulaks off to Siberia.

Some were driven off their land by the vast illegal enclosure actions of wealthy landowners in South American nations.

The Nazis in WWII swept up the farming inhabitants of Russian and Polish and Jewish villages and worked them to death in the factories that fed their war machine.

Millions of farmers were displaced by dams financed by the World Bank

Millions more were removed from agriculture by the policies of the WTO.

Some had their farms were taxed out from under them and the land tuned over to developers who built cheap houses and strips malls on it.

And more were eliminated by agricultural globalization, the belief that every farmer should specialize and produce as much of their single product as possible (to the neglect of everything else) - then we would all merrily cross- ship these things to each other for ever.

Still others were “sanitized” out of business. The small dairies and animal husbandry operations could not afford the large and expensive machines needed to raise animals and process milk and meat under the rules of “modern” hygiene.

These small operations were declared to be inefficient and dirty, never mind the fact that modern “hygienic” production units for meat and milk are nightmarishly cruel, filthy, and squalid. (Indeed, a backyard pigpen or chicken coop is a relative paradise compared the confining “crush” pens of the modern pig farm or the cage batteries of the modern poultry house.)

So farmers were eliminated, one after another, by murder, displacement, bankruptcy, by taxes that would not let land be passed from generation, by on- farm prices that left farmers unable to feed their own families, by subsidies that favored farms beyond human scale.

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Independence Days: My First Challenge

It is so desperately needed that we do declare our independence from the globalizing, totalitarian, destructive, toxic, dangerous agriculture that destroys our future and our power and pays to destroy democracy.  And so, when in the course of human events it becomes necessary for people to divorce themselves from a system that has become destructive, and thus:

We the people, in order to form a more perfect union of human and nature, establish justice and ensure food sovreignty, provide for the common nutrition, promote the general welfare and ensure the blessings of liberty, for ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this constitution for the United Food Sovereign People of the World.

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I challenge myself and all of you to work on creating food Independence Days this year - that all of us try to do one thing every day  to create Food Independence.  That means in each day or week, we would try to:

1. Plant something.  Obviously, those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere and having spring are doing this anyway.  But the idea that you should plant all week and all year is a good reminder to those of us who sometimes don’t get our fall gardens or our succession plantings done regularly.  Remember, that beet you harvested left a space - maybe for the next one to get bigger, but maybe for a bit of arugula or a fall crop of peas, or a cover crop to enrich the soil.  Independence is the bounty of a single seed that creates an abundance of zucchini, and enough seeds to plant your own garden and your neighbor’s.

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3. Preserve something.  Sometimes this will be a big project, but it doesn’t have to be.  It doesn’t take long to slice a couple of tomatoes and set them on a screen in the sun, or to hang up a bunch of sage for winter.  And it adds up fast.  The time you spend now is time you don’t have to spend hauling to the store and cooking later.  Independence is eating our own, and cutting the ties we have to agribusiness.

4. Prep something.  Hit a yard sale and pick up an extra blanket.  Purchase some extra legumes and oatmeal.  Sort out and inventory your pantry.  Make a list of tools you need.  Find a way to give what you don’t need to someone who does.  Fix your bike.  Fill that old soda bottle with water with a couple of drops of bleach in it.  Plan for next year’s edible landscaping.  Make back-road directions to your place and send it to family in case they ever need to come to you - or make ‘em for yourself for where you might have to go. Clean, mend, declutter, learn a new skill.  Independence is being ready for whatever comes.

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The Politics of Food is Politics

By DE CLARKE and STAN GOFF

In recent days, we have seen the rising price of oil and the devaluation of the dollar create two quantum shifts in the economy: the beginning of the collapse of the air travel industry and a global crisis of food-price inflation. These are related in ways that are crucial to understand — because we are seeing the outlines of an historic opportunity to change the terms of theory and practice for a politics of resistance. As air carriers have gone bankrupt, the knock-on effects on travel agents, airports, airport-colocated hotels, “package” vacation resorts, etc. are considerable.

This is how one cascade pours into another, as the manifold contradictions of our global system merge and co-amplify. Tourism, which was supposed to be a relatively benign, non-extractive industry for colonized nations — an alternative to brutal extraction and cash cropping — turns out to have been just as extractive all along due to the climate (and cultural) damage done by commodified air travel.

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My own…anecdotal evidence….using simply composting mulch on organic compost over non-compacted soil, is that in 12 square surface-feet, one can grow three species of food, with six plants each… producing okra, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, peas, bush beans, etc. Mixing them, and adding a couple of marigolds and aromatics (like mint or parilla) seems to keep the little critters from taking more than their share. Last summer I had one cucumber vine that produced around 50 mature cucumbers, totalling well over 20 pounds of food, for around three months. By rotating seasonals, it is easily conceivable to take a 12 square-foot plot in a temperate zone and raise 100 pounds of food a year… being very conservative. Neither Syngenta, nor Cargill, nor Archer-Daniels-Midland want you to know this.

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We are not accustomed, especially on the political left, to thinking about such practical activities as “political.” We are still trapped in a strategic-theoretical model that equates power with policy, and policy is then undertaken as a purely ideological struggle. The persuasion of the word and the concept is given primacy over the persuasion of actual conditions and deeds. Metaphorically, we have constructed a line, running from left to right, and we use a constellation of policy-issues to place both people and discourse along that line.

The system, however, reproduces itself most earnestly through “facts-on-the-ground.” Fighting a system with nothing more than ideas is the most Quixotic, and ineffectual, form of struggle. Before we can suggest ideas, we must first have some facts-on-the-ground of our own to point to. Fortunately, we do. Some of them have just been recited above. We just need to point to them with more urgency now. Because the facts-on-the-ground of the present capitalist system, as we can see, have slammed into something like the end of an unexpected cul-de-sac. The epidemic of dollar hegemony has torn through the world like a plague; but plagues burn themselves out when all who are susceptible have been wiped out.

The airlines have run into the deep impasse of tooling and organization… and so has our food system. Our system has arrived decisively at what Ivan Illich called its second watershed: all our “cures” have become the disease. We are in a state of accelerating iatrogensis. The capitalist/extractive/technomanagerial system can only prescribe more of the same medicine that is killing us… or new medicines to treat the symptoms of the last medicine. This is not a metaphorical treadmill, but a downward spiral… and there is a bottom.

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Capitalism began by kicking people off their land and forbidding them to grow their own food; the end of capitalism may come when people who grow their own food and share it with neighbors are able to say a resounding No to capitalism’s end-phase exterminism.

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Canada’s C-51 Law May Outlaw 60% of Natural Health Products; Big Pharma Pushing to Criminalize Supplements

(NaturalNews) A new law being pushed in Canada by Big Pharma seeks to outlaw up to 60 percent of natural health products currently sold in Canada, even while criminalizing parents who give herbs or supplements to their children. The law, known as C-51, was introduced by the Canadian Minister of Health on April 8th, 2008, and it proposes sweeping changes to Canada’s Food and Drugs Act that could have devastating consequences on the health products industry.

The Act also changes the definition of the word “sell” to include anyone who gives such therapeutic products to someone else. So a mother giving an herb to her child, under the proposed new language, could be arrested for engaging in the sale of unregulated, unapproved “therapeutic substances.” Learn about more of these freedom-squashing changes to the law at the Stop51.com website: http://www.stopc51.com

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