DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

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”

WE CAN SURVIVE BUT CAN WE COMMUNICATE?

By Carolyn Baker and Sally Erickson

The distance between us is holy ground

To be traversed feet bare,

Arms raised in joyous dance

So that it is crossed.

And the tracks of our pilgrimage shine in the

darkness

To light our coming together

In a bright and steady light.

Raphael Jesus Gonzales

****

When we think of preparing our minds, bodies, hearts, and living situations for collapse, the focus is often on our individual or household living situations.  Equally important is our need to develop a circle of trusting, mutually interdependent relationships. The culture we live in is based on hierarchies of control and influence.  Work relationships, kept in place largely by paychecks and ordered by project managers and bosses, are the most common experience most of us have of being part of an organized group. We have little experience outside of those hierarchies. Even more rare in our hyper-independent culture is to depend on others for mutual aid, support and comfort. So, for most people, it likely feels overwhelming to consider how to build a wider circle of people based on mutuality, as part of preparation for the ongoing collapse of basic life support systems.

Under the rather ill-fitting title “Manhood in the Age of Aquarius,” Tim Hogdon has written the story of the Digger movement in San Francisco, as well as a take on the history of The Farm in Summertown. I haven’t even gotten to the Farm section yet, but if it’s as well-written and authoritative as the Diggers chapter, it’s a great bit of history.

There are copious footnote/links, as well. Two that stood out for me are “Mutants Commune,” an edgy, passionate sociopolitical rant from the Haight Street days, still strong enough to produce a flashback; and an (alas, incomplete) interview with Peter Berg and Judy Goldschaft, who went from being Diggers to founding the Bioregional movement. Although they don’t talk about bioregionalism in the interview, they give a great feel for the matrix in which the movement arose.  As staid as the Green Party gets sometimes, it’s good to remember where we came from.

part 2 of an excellent interview by Carolyn Baker:

My top priority is to keep my mind open. And not to lose my sense of humor-in the grand sense. Our number one responsibility, I believe, is to come to grips with our psychological self, to take a good long look inside and find out who we really are, learn how to rid ourselves of greed, learn to how bridle ego and petty desire, learn how to share and to give and to live with less and more simply. At bottom, we must learn how to cooperate. To be member of a group or a team with no motivation other than enabling the whole. This is good advice regardless of the global situation.

Should the economy collapse or a catastrophic weather event decimate the region where you live, the coming out of it will occur through the spontaneous forming of community, either as an emergency enterprise or a long-term way of living. And this is best done when an individual has given up selfishness, shed vain materialism, and embraced the interconnectedness of all life and each other. I work on my attitude and humor more than anything else because it is my being and my mental health that will make me the most helpful to others if conditions are reduced to basic survival. In this, I am no better than a work in progress.

plus another, similar essay:

After 25 years of college teaching and administration, I left college as my primary work environment for agriculture in the early l990s. I sensed that many of humanity’s support systems and the natural capital that sustains us were breaking down. I wanted to learn more about the basics of food, water, plants, animals, the soil, climate, and the elements. I wanted to be able to feed myself and others with good, nourishing food during an uncertain future of diminishing natural resources and heightening conflicts.

After a search I decided to move to Sonoma County, remaining in the state of my birth. Whenever this native son tries to leave my home-state, California, my body goes where I direct it, but only for a while; then my feet take me back home. Sonoma has nearly 500,000 people and is within the creative San Francisco Bay Area. I bought land with berry vines, apple trees, oaks, redwoods and a tiny house in the uplands of the Cunningham Marsh near the small town of Sebastopol, where less than 8000 souls live.

Our community actively deals with issues such as making a transition to alternative energy sources and the increasingly chaotic global climate. We have active neighborhood groups and support each other to buy local and re-localize. Among the effective groups here are the Climate Protection Campaign and the Post-Carbon Institute. Sebastopol citizens regularly elect well-informed officials who seek to deal with the real issues. We welcome newcomers as we work together to build community during this transition to a post-carbon future.

and this one from the other side of the continent:

At a Barak Obama rally in Putney last week, his foreign policy advisor, Anthony Lake, said that an Obama presidency would help “America once again lead the world.”

O, Tony, that ship has passed, passed, passed. Thanks to GATT, NAFTA, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and torture, we’ve done what I used to think was impossible - we’ve turned America into a third-world nation. Obama might be able to clean up some of the mess, but we won’t be leading the world any time soon.

Yet here in Vermont, we’ve accepted the idea of peak oil. We talk about running our cars on fry grease, heating with wood, and, in general, doing the back-to-the-land thing, 2.0-style.

We talk about starting a barter economy and creating local “dollars” to trade for goods and services. We talk about growing our own vegetables, buying local foods and turning ourselves from omnivores into localvores. We talk about using rags for tampons and diapers. We talk about learning to be self-reliant and curbing our consumerism.

It’s like living in a different America. Outside, people are pretending the economy is chugging along, while we’re preparing ourselves to live after a fall which most Americans don’t believe is coming.

In the heady days of the 1960’s and 70’s, when it seemed like our time was coming any day, we began to re-imagine the world. It was, and is, easy enough to point out how crazy things are–but what would “better,” radically better, look like?

By “we,” I mean those of us who were hippies not for the sex, drugs, and rock n’roll, (although, to be sure, we appreciated them!) but because we were (and in many cases still are) visionaries who could not sit down, shut up, and work like normal ants–I mean, people. We saw the artificiality of political boundaries, and the reality of natural ones, like watersheds and biological communities. We saw the futility of trying to make ignorant people change their ways through legislation, and found the satisfaction that comes from walking our talk and teaching by example. We founded magazines and movements like Co-evolution Quarterly, The New Alchemy Institute, Esalen Institute, and the Farm, and, for a while, seemed poised to turn the entire state of Vermont into a countercultural domain.

Two visionaries in particular found their tongues and began to frame a movement with a name. The name was “Bioregionalism,” and the visionaries were Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann; and true to the bioregional ideal, they were very different, but very complimentary.

Dasmann was the older of the two by a generation, and perhaps not ever technically a “hippie,” but certainly a visionary. He did study at UC Berkley as an undergraduate, but that was before World War II, which turned him into a soldier and sent him to New Guinea. By 1970, he was travelling the world for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and thus became one of the first scientists to get a global view of the ecological situation. His globetrotting brought him to the first UN environmental conference, in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1972, which is where he met Peter Berg, who, while also a Californian, had been treading a very different path.

Peter Berg had been a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the mid-sixties. The Mime Troupe, which still exists, specializes in radical street theater. Berg, in 1966, had the inspiration to take it one step further. That further step has come down to us as “The Diggers,” a group that tried to radically alter human relationships by making everything a free work of art–food, clothing, shelter, medical care. They were in effect the backbone of the seminal Haight-Ashbury counterculture community, and when it was ultimately overwhelmed, Berg found his way to a small commune way, way up in the Sierras. It was from there, as a self-appointed representative of the North American counterculture, that he went to the UN conference in Stockholm.

Berg’s meeting with Dasmann resulted in the creation of Planet Drum Foundation, an organization which to this day promotes a wholistic view of this world we live in. Berg used Planet Drum as a platform from which to convoke a “North American Bioregional Congress,” which he saw as parallel to the convocation of the first Continental Congress. His hopes that it would result in a radical reorganization of North American politics have not yet been realized, but the first North American Bioregional Congress is the point at which this story starts to become locally relevant.

Milo Guthrie, an herbalist and activist from the Nashville area, wanted to go to the bioregional congress–but only delegates from bioregional councils were entitled to attend. So he formed one–the Cumberland and Green River Basin Bioregional Council, named for the two major river systems (besides the vast Tennessee River basin itself) that define our area. The group’s name has conventionally been shortened to “The Cumberland Greens” and confused with the Green Party, which is inaccurate, although there is a relationship–the “Comittees of Correspondence” (another borrowing from the first American Revolution) that were formed out of the NABC did in fact form the nucleus of the Green Party of the United States.

“The Cumberland Greens” are not a political party, but a bioregional council—a group of people from around the bioregion who do our best to fully inhabit the places we live, to eat locally and dream globally. We meet to share our strengths and visions and take what action we can, and yes we know we are carrying a banner that was passed down to us from the hippies of San Francisco. We will be meeting January 19th at Brookmeade Congregational Church here in Nashville, and you and your visions are welcome to come. Contact Eric at islandspring@cafes.net for further details.

music: Incredible String Band, “Douglas Traherne Harding”

I was driving to Nashville with my 18-year old grandson. We had about an hour on the road; it was the first time we’d been alone together in a while. I was curious to see what would arise between us, but I was a bit surprised when he asked me, “What is the deal with these subprime mortgages?” It’s just not the question I expected from an 18-year old, but I was gratified to know he was interested.

“It’s about human greed, stupidity, and shortsightedness,” I said. “The bankers figured that if they could sell the loans they made to somebody else, they wouldn’t have to worry about collecting on them. And the people they sold the loans to figured the same thing, and so on up the ladder. It’s a pyramid scheme, a hot potato.”

My grandson was amazed and dismayed to discover that so many supposed adults could be that stupid. I have to agree. What were they thinking? Well, if they were thinking that they personally could get away with it, so far they’ve been right. To pick the most egregious example, Countrywide Financial, which is responsible for a big chunk of the bad mortgages that are clouding the financial air these days, was just sold to Bank of America, and Countrywide’s CEO is getting not just a golden parachute but a whole golden airplane out of the deal, in spite of the likelihood that BoA was nudged by the Fed to buy Countrywide in order to avoid the beginning of a domino-effect chain of bankruptcies that would have left the US ecomony bleeding to death in short order.

What a world for my grandson to grow up into. How could so many people have believed that the value of their homes was going to go up forever? That’s why they signed on the dotted line for all those adjustable-rate mortgages–they figured that by the time the rate went up, their home would be worth more, so they could just refinance, pay off the old mortgage, and be sitting pretty. Meanwhile, savings plummeted and debt soared. There was always going to be somebody to borrow from when it was time to pay the piper. Then, one day, the bubble burst and housing prices started to slide. Oops.

The bubble was still inflating when the junta, with copious assistance from the Dimocrats, passed a bankruptcy bill so draconian that anyone filing for bankruptcy is pretty much opting for a lifetime of indentured servitude, not freedom from debt. Hey, bankruptcy is for deadbeats, right? Well, it’s also for people with overhwhelming medical bills and people whose jobs get outsourced. Banks don’t go for hard luck stories and good intentions. They want cash, especially when they’re not the hometown bank but some mutual fund in Germany that’s trying to make a fortune in CDO’s.

CDO–Collateralized Debt Obligation. In theory, it makes a certain amount of sense. I loan you money, but instead of waiting around to collected it back as you make payments, I sell the debt to Joe, who gives me a lump sum and collects your payments. In practice, several other things happen, leading to unintended consequences. One is that huge numbers of debts are bundled up and sold, with the buyer pretty much having to take the seller’s word that all the apples in the bag are good. Another thing that happens is that these bundled debts are in their turn bundled and sold, and then we have another round or more of that, which leads to a complete disconnect between the bank that holds the mortgage and the person who is paying it off. If you are talking to your local bank about the possibility of defaulting on your mortgage, your local bank is interested in making sure the community in which it does business stays healthy and viable, and is more likely to try and work with you to keep you in the house and making some kind of payment. If your debt is owed to some bank overseas somewhere, they could care less about what’s happening to neighborhoods in Cleveland, or wherever you happen to be. Furthermore, they are not in much of a position to do anything with the house they have kicked you out of, because the house is not worth the value of the note they are holding on it, so the house is likely to stay empty and gradually be vandalized until it really is worthless.

And, speaking of “worthless,” anybody or any institution that bought these rotten debt securities finds, as the mortgages go bellyup, that they have a worthless piece of paper on their hands instead of an asset. So that means that hundreds, maybe thousands of governments, retirement funds, banks, and other institutions wake up one morning and discover that they are worth a lot less than they thought. Bye-bye municipal services, welfare payments, salaries. Bye-bye new loans. Bye-bye pensions and medical insurance.  Good luck, run of the mill business credit!

If this were taking place in a country that was financially healthy, it could be contained and repaired, but the US is not a financially healthy country. Just as the Ottoman Empire was once “the sick old man of Europe,” so the US is now everybody’s sick, needy Uncle Sam, constantly borrowing from Peter to pay Paul (or, all too often, borrowing from China to pay China), making a little money from arms sales (the last intact chunk of our manufacturing sector), but not really paying our own way in the world. It is only because the US owes so much to so many that we stay afloat. It’s the last big bubble. Everybody knows that we’re in over our heads, but nobody wants us to drown fast, because we’d pull them down with us; so, they’re going to let us slowly sink. As peak oil kicks in further, we will be outbid for fossil fuels; as Europe’s saner fiscal and social policies keep it afloat, the Euro will supplant the dollar as the international currency of choice, and US bond offerings will go begging. When everybody knows the only reason you’ve got money to spend is because of the printing press in your basement, they get shy about doing business with you, y’know? Well, kids, that’s where the US dollar is headed. From the government’s perspective, the only way out of this mess is massive inflation. Visualize a shopping bag full of money…to pay for a shopping bag full of groceries. That, in my crystal ball, is where we are headed.

And what will this do to our vaunted world hegemony? You can expect to see the civilian sector get squeezed to maintain the military, whether “hundred years in Iraq” McCain or “invade Pakistan” Obama is elected, but things are going to get thin for the military, as well. Right now they’re just taking it out of veterans’ benefits, but you can bet that sooner or later lack of equipment and fuel will hinder the government’s ability to bully the world. You can see it looming in all the National Guard equipment that has been abandoned or destroyed in Iraq, and has not been replaced.

These are the realities that the next President of the United States is going to have to deal with, although it is certainly not what is getting talked about on the campaign trail. Expensive health care plans? Fuggedaboutit. The next president will either be cleaning up the Bush Junta’s mess or making it worse. In either case, he or she will be increasingly constrained by the twin choke chains of internal financial collapse and international moral and financial bankruptcy.

There is a certain perverse upside to this. The worse the financial situation in the US becomes, the less demand on the world’s resources we will make. With no loan money available, suburban development will dry up–but, with money tight, there may be an even stronger pull to harvest any natural resources–from forests to coal–that can be easily turned into cash–but there will be less demand for them. My crystal ball gets a little cloudy on this one.  Sorry…

If I were the financial adviser to a Green President of the United States, with a solidly Green Congress to back me up, what would I advise? Where would I begin to unravel this fine mess we’re in?

I’d start by repealing the bankruptcy act that Bush passed, and go back to the status quo ante coup when people really could write off their unpayable obligations by declaring bankruptcy. I’d pass a law that forbade mortgage holders from evicting people except under extenuating circumstances. I’d make stockholders liable for the misdeeds of the corporations they own, to encourage corporate responsibility. I’d institute a corporate death penalty for irresponsible corporate behavior, and replace big chunks of the banking, insurance, and health “industries” with credit unions, co-ops, non-profits, and single-payer health insurance. I’d pull the US out of all so-called “free trade” agreements and work to encourage local, sustainable self-reliance in all sectors–food, clothing, housing, manufacturing, transportation, communication, entertainment…what have I left out? And I’d demilitarize the US and unlock all the resources we have tied up in world domination to meet the multiple threats of global warming and peak oil. And one last thing…me and Dennis Kucinich are gonna carry this snowball through hell!

Yep, that’s about the chance we have of making the right moves in America, unless millions of people have a road-to-Damascus moment and something even more pervasive than the fall of Communism takes place here…the fall of Capitalism! It has a nice ring, but it won’t be an overnight phenomenon. The revolution, as Gil Scot-Heron famously said, will not be televised. On television and in the corporate media in general, there will be an insistent drumbeat that things are fine and all our problems are about to be solved. There will be increased security against “terrorism,” increased focus on trivial news (BRITNEY HAS HOT FLASHES, STRIPS NAKED AS THOUSANDS WATCH)….now, what was I talking about? Gee, let’s go to Walmart…they just sent me a credit card…..as long as I keep both my job at MacDonalds and the 7-11, I can keep up with the interest on one more card…maybe we can find somebody else to live here, with ten of us in this apartment the rent’s not bad….

Is that the future? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it will be stranger than we can imagine. Maybe there will be a lot of self-reliant, interconnected people taking care of each other under the government’s radar, and “the government” will become increasingly irrelevant until it just fades away. Sooner or later, we’ll find out. I wish I had a better situation to leave to my grandson.

music: REM, “Fireplace”

I just returned from a two-week swing through New England, and overall it was a very encouraging experience. I lived in Vermont for several years in the nineties, and in many ways felt as if I had left the US for a saner country. It was very refreshing to visit again and find a place where sanity and counterculture have spread and grown, rather than eroding and fragmenting as they seem to have done here in the south. And no, it wasn’t ”like I’d died and gone to heaven.” There were plenty of problems still to solve, both personal and political, everywhere I went. But it felt like there was the will and intelligence and infrastructure to do it. Let me give you some examples.

There are nearly 600 organic farmers in Vermont, according to the state’s organic growers’ association. Considering the small size of Vermont, this means that organic farmers are pretty ubiquitous. Not quite as ubiquitous as dairy farms—there are about 1400 of those left, down from a 1947 peak of 11,000. But gee, that’s one organic farmer for every thousand Vermonters, and about one dairy farm for every four hundred and thirty people. If we had a similar proportion here in Tennessee, there would be about five hundred organic farms and over a thousand dairy farms just in the Nashville area alone. That sure would be a different Nashville, wouldn’t it?

These aren’t just fruit and vegetable farms. There are meat and field crop producers, as well as some overlap between the organic farm numbers and the dairy farm numbers, so we are talking about the possibility of a whole diet from locally grownorganic food—yes, even homegrown sweets, because there are honey producers and maple tappers aplenty up in the northeast woods. And there are cafes and co-op grocery stores in the small towns, vibrant little community centers where people eat and shop and meet their neighbors and talk and argue and plan and create.

Not all of this food gets consumed locally. In fact, most of it gets shipped down to Boswash, the Boston-Washington urban conglomerate, where the money is. But the Vermonters would like to keep more of their produce at home, and they are working on ways to keep it local, and benefit their communities as they do. The organic farmers have teamed up with a food-policy think tank called Foodworks and Shelburne Farms, an environmental education center, to create FEED, “Food Education Every Day,” an organization which works to get local school and other institutional cafeterias to use as much local food as possible, and to educate schoolkids about the many advantages to locally grown food. They have gotten the state legislature on board, and so there are grants and incentive programs, but the program practically sells itself. I should add that it’s not a ”top down” affair; each school district, in a council of teachers, administrators, farmers, and cooks, determines its own priorities.

They have had to add one step to make it work better, but that step adds value for everyone. In Vermont, the garden season and the school season barely overlap, and everyone involved quickly realized that having a way to process and preserve food would make it more available. So, voila! Small-scale canning and processing has become part of the mix, adding value and local employment. Tomatoes and peppers become salsa or tomato sauce; carrots are made into carrot sticks, bagged, and stored; apples are sliced by the bushel—don’t ask me why, but they found out that most kids will eat more apples if they are sliced first! Processing also enables them to use produce that is not aesthetically pleasing enough to sell fresh.

And then there are the in-school educational programs—soup making contests, with the kids as judges; farm visits where kids get to pick their own carrots, blueberries, apples, or whatever; school cafeteria staff, long the subject of bad jokes, get to do something creative, nutritious, local, and tasty. It’s a win/win situation, and it’s growing. Vermonters did not seem overly worried about political, economic, or even ecological collapse.

I’m glad to know they’re up there and doing so well. I hope their inspiration spreads. We could use some of that energy down here, where locally grown food, organic or not, is still a novelty, and the organic food stores depend on trucks from California and Florida to stock not just their produce, meat, and dairy departments, but all the other grocery shelves as well. Five hundred organic producers in the Nashville area? What have we got now, about five?

What would it take to start growing our growers to the point where we might imagine local farmers providing a measurable share of the food that is eaten in middle Tennessee? First of all, we have to look at our tax codes and land valuation and zoning policies, which make it much more profitable to subdivide land and sell it than to grow food on it. Zoning has to recognize that small-scale food production is a legitimate use of one’s home, although I think there should be some common-sense limits to this! Then there are infrastructure questions—how to help people get into farming, I think the way to do this is to find people who can take on a backyard garden with a fork and a hoe and feed their neighborhood, then help them graduate to a half-acre or an acre and feed their community with occasional help from teenagers, retirees, or people who want some healthy exercise after sitting at a desk all week. And of course there are weather questions. We don’t yet know if last year’s stunning heat and drought was a terrible anomaly, or the beginning of a new pattern. Growers will have to learn to be flexible; we do live in a climate in which, with a little simple protection, salad vegetables and leafy greens will produce all winter, and that’s likely to keep on being the case, no matter what our summers become.

Meanwhile, oil is pushing a hundred dollars a barrel, and there’s no telling where the price will jump the next time there’s a catastrophe to intensify the growing scarcity. Imported food, whether from California or across the ocean, is just going to get more expensive. The sooner we start providing for ourselves, the better off we’ll be.

music: Kristina Michelson, “Hippies in the Hills”

My mother died ten days ago. This is the eulogy I read at her funeral, not part of a radio show, at least not yet.   In some ways her death was a great relief, because she has been in declining health for years, and I have been mourning her gradual departure for a long time, but the actual fact of her passage is a tremendous shock. Wordsmith that I am, I am at a loss for words to express my feelings. “Don’t cry for me, ” she said as she lay dying, and, so far, I haven’t. Her death is a tremendous reminder to me to work as hard as I can for what I believe in while I still have the strength.

Without further preface, here it is:

My mother was born April 6, 1912, in New York City, the granddaughter of Russian Jewish immigrants on one side and French Jewish immigrants on the other. Her grandfather was a door-to-door peddler in Illinois; her father was the leading floor covering salesman in New York City—but my mom graduated from high school in 1930, into a society that was falling apart from the Great Depression. So, she had to figure out her own way through the world—choosing to work and travel and be her own person instead of following the traditional path of marrying out of her parents’ home and into her husband’s.

She journeyed to San Francisco in search of a new life thirty years before I did, and I grew up on her stories of being penniless in San Francisco and hitchhiking to Canada with her friends, little dreaming that, as a young man, I too would hitchhike around the country and find myself penniless in San Francisco. She imbued the stories she told with a sense of excitement and wonder that taught me to see my life as a series of adventures—when I could just as easily see it as a series of trials.

As an independent woman, my mother also developed a strong sense of social justice that led her into political activism in the heady, radical thirties, and her passionate stories of strikes, leafleting, and picket lines, (sometimes joined by my grandmother, a feminist in her own right), of partying with the young Communists and taking part in huge anti-Nazi demonstrations when German passenger ships would dock in New York, likewise helped form my view of proper adult behavior. But she was not all seriousness; she aspired to start a dance school where people could learn dances from around the world, as a way of fostering international understanding.

And it was her passionate commitment to social justice, her desire to do as much as she could to stop the Nazi menace, that led her to volunteer for the U.S. Army when war broke out. She started out cleaning airplanes, but soon her natural talent for understanding and expressing the human situation was recognized, and she spent much of the war on the staff of various Army publications as a writer and editor, in England and France.

And it was in England that she met my father, a soldier and a shy country boy from western Ohio with a conservative, traditional Christian upbringing. I think neither had ever met anyone quite like the other. Although she had vowed at twenty-five never to marry and have children, the attraction of opposites and the ticking of her thirty-three year old biological clock combined to pull her and my father into marriage.

So, she moved with him to central Ohio, where she and my father soon began to suffer from culture clash long before it had a name. In an attempt to solidify their disintegrating marriage, she bore me, at the relatively late age of thirty-six. The pregnancy, after several miscarriages, was difficult, leading her doctor to recommend that she never attempt pregnancy again. The final difficulty came when she still had not gone into labor a month past her due date. After one exam, her doctor told her to come back the next day. “NO!” my mother said. “I’m not leaving this hospital until I have my baby!” My ten-months pregnant mother was so forceful about this that the doctor gave in and set up an immediate c-section, in the course of which he discovered that my mother had the beginnings of an infection that, in another 24 hours, would have had serious consequences for both of us. Thanks, Mom.

I was only a year old when my mother went back to college, part-time, with the aim of becoming a schoolteacher. Graduation and divorce happened close on each other, and she found herself with a new life as a single mother and a substitute teacher. Work was unpredictable, my father was not forthcoming with alimony, and there were times when money was short and we didn’t have a whole lot to eat. The penny-pinching skills my mother had learned in the Great Depression came in handy, as did her upbeat attitude. Life was always an adventure.

Then, unexpectedly, one of her substitute teaching assignments turned into a full-time teaching position—eighth grade English—in a Dayton, Ohio suburb, a job she would hold for over twenty-five years. Every night, over dinner and between grading a never-ending stream of papers, she would tell me her day’s adventures. Adventures challenging her students to read, to think, and to write. Adventures working with, and sometimes clashing with, conservative school administrators who found her as fascinating and difficult as my father had, but had to respect her talent as a teacher. Adventures starting a branch of the National Federation of Teachers—a bona fide, militant, AF of L union—when she grew frustrated with the compromises brokered by the National Education Association in her school district. She did not rest until her upstart union was the recognized bargaining agent for Kettering’s teachers. She taught me that you can take on the status quo and win.  (Note–Since writing this, I discovered that her AFT chapter sputtered and died when she retired, which is just as good a lesson–don’t worry about whether you win or lose!)

Through all this time, she stayed connected with her family in New York, Every summer, she and I would head for New York City, where we rented a room in a large, old, ramshackle beach house. My grandparents summered in the room next door, and there were two other couples in the other rooms on that floor, each with its own tiny refrigerator and stove. We all shared the same bathroom. Other couples and families with kids took slightly larger apartments in the attic, ground floor, and basement. Old men smoked cigars, played pinochle, and read Yiddish newspapers. Some of them bore the tattoos they had been branded with in concentration camps. We were on the beach block, and a very long way from Wonderbread, suburban Ohio. It was my first experience of living in community, and I loved it. Thanks, Ma.

So, she shouldn’t have been too surprised when I joined the Caravan, and the the Farm. She came and visited me on the Caravan when we arrived back in Nashville, and spent a night on the bus with me—and the eight or ten other single people living in it. A few months later, when we had settled on the Martin Farm, she arrived on a Sunday morning and found the gate locked and deserted—we were all at Sunday Morning Services. she just climbed over it—in her high heels—and walked in. She was not afraid of adventure.

In addition to her union activities, she had become active in the Democratic Party, working at the neighborhood level to educate people and get out the vote. This led to her running as a Democratic candidate for the Ohio state legislature, but it was a strongly Republican district and a strongly Republican year—1980. At least she made her opponent work for his seat! She was never afraid to challenge power and authority in the name of social justice.

A few years later, in 1984, she was selected as a delegate to the Democratic convention, and helped nominate Walter Mondale. It was not a high point for the Democratic Party, but it was one of the high points of her life. One of my most treasured photographs of her was taken at that convention. She is holding a Mondale sign over her head and looking absolutely fierce.

Her commitment to her family diverted from politics, back into teaching, after that. Our kids were coming into their teenage years and we invited her to come down to the farm and work some of her English teacher magic on them. She devoted a stormy, but fruitful, year to our young wild ones, deciding at the end of it that she had had enough of butting heads with teenagers—but she succeeded in maintaining warm, friendly relations with all those little butt-heads that have continued through the years as they have grown into adults with teenagers of their own. She had a way of finding what kids were good at, and encouraging them, even as she gave them a hard time for their shortcomings.

She returned to Ohio and resumed her Democratic Party work, always pushing for the Democrats to take more populist stances, never hesitating to challenge entrenched elitism wherever she found it. Although age and heart disease were slowing her down, she had not lost her taste for novelty and adventure—so she accepted our invitation to move to Tennessee three years ago and started a new life her at 92, with verve and gusto. She never felt that she was too old to do something to make the world a better place, and she was a tremendous inspiration to everyone who came in contact with her. Although she is gone, her spirit and intentions live on in many, many people.

Goodbye, Mom, and thank you for so very much.

Comments

hello there. i am your cousin of some sort, i believe second, as you know my mother is your first cousin. my name is steffani and i am 31 years old as of tuesday. my mother told me she mentioned me profusely when the two of you met last year, so maybe i am a tiny bit familiar. i have WANTED to contact you for a while, but my mother said that maybe i should wait. anyway, i can no longer wait because i want to share that i really admired your mother when i was a child. i used to be babysat by aunts eva and dot. your mother used to visit randomly, at least in my memory, and i just KNEW she and i were some kind of RELATIVES, partially because even as a young child there was no one remotely like me in our family and mostly because i could keenly feel that unlike every other grownup i had ever met, i had SOMETHING in common with her. my memory of her was that she was ballsy and beautiful and earthy and exotic and SOMEHOW “what i wanted to be when i grew up.”..and of course her DEMOCRAT STICKERS on her car…. i am now the democrat sticker lady in my family (though maybe not so much so anymore i am more “green”, i would say, this time around) and would hope and pray that SOMEDAY would have been an INSPIRATION for some other small child in close minded Ohio (and our family, bless them all) like your mother was for me. losing a parent is an experience that is daunting, enlightening, awful, and transformative, and i want to share with you that my thoughts are with you during this time and my memories are of your dear and wonderful mother, who as you can see meant a LOT to MANY people, even me. thank you and blessings… steffani (jennings) crummett
Posted by steffani (jennings)crummett (sandy’s daughter) on 05/11/2007 02:46:36 PM

If you want to gauge how far out of kilter our country’s legal system has gotten, consider my friend Bernie, who was busted for growing marijuana to give to people with medical needs. The feds tried to put him away for a five year mandatory minimum, but for reasons I will go into shortly Bernie pulled eighteen months in a halfway house (which my informants tell me is actually tougher than jail) and two and a half years of “supervised release,” plus the federal government wants to effectively fine him a million dollars by confiscating the farm where Bernie has lived for the last forty years. And, they have appealed his parole and are asking that he be given even more than five years. Please notice it’s the feds doing this. If Bernie’s case had stayed at the state level, he would have been dealing with two years of probation and an eight thousand dollar fine, and would not be faced with losing his home. Those are the broad outlines. The more I ponder the details, the more I have to mourn what a Kafkaesque mockery “justice” has become in this country.

OK, here’s some homegrown Kafka for you. First, the complaint. The person who turned Bernie’s name over to the drug task force was was allegedly disgruntled because Bernie wouldn’t sell him any marijuana for recreational use. A certain form of popular justice did catch up with this guy, though, as he finally had to leave the area due to the negative force of popular opinion as word of his role in Bernie’s bust got out. I can only hope a similar fate awaits the rest of Bernie’s persecutors, I mean prosecutors, but so far it hasn’t caught up with them.

Irony of ironies: at the time the helicopters, ORV’s, and SUV’s descended on Bernie’s farm, he was in the final stages of preparing a report for the State of New Mexico on how to implement a medical marijuana program—a medical marijuana program that has just been passed, as written by Bernie, and signed into law by presidential contender and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. Way to go Bill! I mean, I love Dennis Kucinich’s ideals and his willingness to tilt at windmills but Bill Richardson actually got something done about this crazy kink in America’s consciousness.

And here’s the interesting wrinkle in Bernie and Bill’s excellent plan to provide medical marijuana: it will be grown by the State of New Mexico, not by individuals. Now, I think everybody should have the right to grow their own, BUT—in this confrontational day and age, in which the feds have been busting individual growers and private dispensaries right and left in California, New Mexico is setting up a system where the feds will be up against—not individuals, but the State of New Mexico. What a scenario: the feds trying to bust a New Mexico State grow room while the New Mexico State Police deploy to defend the marijuana growing facility…. but, I digress.

So, the state heat came down and busted Bernie, hauling away his plants and his computer (including his draft of the aforementioned New Mexico Marijuana Law). Always back up your work outside your computer, folks! The next thing that happened was…nothing. For three months, nothing. And then, although it had been a state raid, Bernie found himself facing federal charges, allegedly due to the amount of marijuana involved, even though that amount was grossly exaggerated—like, they counted the dirtballs around the roots, not to mention the stalks, as part of the weight, which even violates their guidelines.

At this point, the plea bargaining began. Do you know about plea bargaining? It’s pretty diabolic. The feds figure out everything they could possibly charge you with, which, in most people’s cases, is quite a lot. You have no idea how complex our web of laws is until you become entangled in it. In most of the cases of which I am aware, friends of mine began by facing decades in jail on open-and-shut cases. (The thing about being a prisoner of conscience is, the law does not recognize your conscience in any kind of positive way. You’re lucky we’ve gotten past burning people at the stake.) The upshot of plea bargaining is, you give them some piece of your soul and they drop most of the charges, and a jury never hears the case.

So, the bargaining began. Bernie’s lawyer was adept, and managed to nail down one controversy by getting the evidence reweighed—and discovering that the actual amount was one-quarter of what Bernie had originally been charged with—and that STILL included the freakin’ rootballs, fer cryin out loud! In fact, the usable amount of herb that Bernie was busted for growing came to seven pounds—about as much as the feds legally provide to each one of the five people who are legally getting medical marijuana from the U.S. government. (The original charges against him claimed that the confiscated plants weighed a total of one hundred and forty pounds.) Things were looking good for our boys—Bernie would only have to deal with probation and he’d get to keep his farm—but, when he and his lawyer showed up to sign the agreement they thought they had made with the feds, they had a big, ugly surprise—the feds had gone back to demanding a five year minimum and confiscation of Bernie’s farm. Problem was, thinking he knew what he was agreeing to, Bernie had already entered a guilty plea, and the court denied his petition to revoke that plea, even though the feds had lied to Bernie about what they were going to ask him to plead guilty to. And—the judge set Bernie’s sentencing hearing only two days after that decision, effectively denying him the chance to appeal. How’s that for Kafka?

Fortunately, Bernie drew a sympathetic judge, who allowed sixty character witnesses and medical marijuana testimony and ultimately reduced Bernie’s sentence below the five year mandatory minimum. But yeah, the feds have court action going to get Bernie behind bars, and they’re angling to confiscate his farm. For marijuana he had been demonstrably giving away for years. The guy was a consultant with a six-figure income. He was most emphatically not in it for the money. And if this had been a state case, as many cases of this size are, Bernie would have drawn two years probation and an eight thousand dollar fine. Kafka enough for you?

I am beginning to suspect that this is not some random case of prosecutorial insanity. As I mull over Bernie’s story, especially in light of the current controversy over politicization of the US attorney system and direction of it from the executive branch for the purpose of punishing political enemies of the administration, I connect certain dots and suspect I am seeing Karl Rove’s pasty finger pushing its way up my poor friend Bernie’s ass. I mean, if these people outed Valerie Plame, America’s number one anti-WMD undercover agent, why wouldn’t they go after a vocal, credentialed proponent of medical marijuana like Bernie? This is not the first time he has come to their attention, after all. On one page in the save Bernie’s farm website, he admits that, when he helped win the first big tobacco case against RJ Reynolds in 1984, “Reynolds thugs torched a car in my driveway to send me a message.”

Consider that some of what the junta stands accused of in the prosecutorial meddling affair is dropping the fine against the tobacco industry (of which R.J. Reynolds is, of course, a major part) from a hundred and thirty billion dollars to ten billion dollars, and that the politically appointed Justice Department official who directed this had for many years been a lawyer in a firm that worked for—R.J. Reynolds, a major contributor to the Bush campaign. Kafka, anyone?

I got pretty excited to learn that the current US attorney for middle Tennessee, Craig Morford, who is pressing the appeal of Bernie’s sentence, is one of those interim, without-Congressional-oversight Bush loyalist appointees that constitute another wing of the current Justice Department scandal, but actually it was his predecessor, Jim Vines, who worked most of the flimflam on my friend Bernie. Jim left the job highly praised by the DEA, and has not gone public about the “real” reasons for his departure, but it is worth noting in his favor that he was responsible for prosecuting bribery scandals in the (Republican) Sundquist administration. On the other hand, he was part of the Tennessee Waltz sting, which was so blatantly aimed at discrediting Democrats that the only Republican snared in it was not charged . So would he have prosecuted Bernie on orders from the Justice Department, R.J. Reynolds, or the White House? We may never know, but…

I have often commented that the marijuana laws are in place largely to curb dissent in this country. I think I have just made my case.

In closing, our Truth in Strange Places Award goes once again to freshman Senator James Webb, who recently gave the following response to a question about whether he would accept the position of Vice President on the Democratic ticket:

“I am still finding my way around the Senate and I’m having a really good time in the Senate. We’ve — this is a chance to put a lot of issues on the table. One of the issues which never comes up in campaigns but it’s an issue that’s tearing this country apart is this whole notion of our criminal justice system, how many people are in our criminal justice system .. — I think we have two million people incarcerated in this country right now and that’s an issue that’s going to take two or three years to try to get to the bottom of and that’s where I want to put my energy.”

Senator Webb, I’d like you to meet my friend Bernie….

music: REM, “Welcome to the Occupation”

My wife and I like to go out dancing a couple of times a month, and for the last three years one of our favorite dance parties has been centered around an African drumming group led by a friend and neighbor of ours. The gathering rapidly became too big to meet in anyone’s home, so for a while we met in the sanctuary of a local “New-Age” church, where the altar bore the somewhat ironic (for us) inscription, “be still and know that I am God.” We describe ourselves as a “rhythm church,” and for us it’s more like, “shake your booty and know that you are God/dess.” Well, somebody in the congregation thought they saw someone smoking a joint in the parking lot, and complained to the minister, and we were outta there. Zero tolerance. It was wonderful to see how the standards of proof were applied, if you know what I mean…..

The next venue that we settled into was a “coffee house” in an urban neighborhood. They had great food, served good beer for those who were into it, didn’t allow smoking indoors, and had just enough room for a dance floor when we pushed the tables back. Recently, however, we have run afoul of unintended consequences. The coffeehouse applied for a wine license—and, according to Tennessee law, an establishment with a wine license must maintain forty usable chairs at tables, at all times, whether the customers want ‘em or not. They can’t be pushed back into a pile, or the ever-vigilant inspectors from the Alcoholic Beverage Commission will levy a fine.

Could we declare ourselves “a private party” and keep meeting at the coffeehouse? Well, the liquor law says that all “private parties” in public establishments must be reported, and, according to the coffeehouse/wine bar’s manager, too many private parties in a row “raises red flags.”

I started making phone calls and going on the web to confirm what I was hearing. An employee of the ABC told me that she didn’t know anything about the history of or rationale for the law, it was simply her business to enforce it. Along the way, I found out that a “dance license” is also required for places that intend to feature dancing as part of their activities. And what happens if people just get up and start to dance? Is it illegal to dance, for cryin’ out loud? Apparently, it is. The laws of Metropolitan Davidson County state:

“It is unlawful to hold or conduct any public dance or to operate any public dancehall within the metropolitan government area until such dancehall or other place in which such public dance may be held shall first have been duly registered as a public dancehall with the chief of police and a permit shall have been issued by the beer permit board for the operation of such dancehall or the holding of such dance, an application fee of one hundred dollars plus a one hundred dollar annual fee for the permit.” 6.12.020 Registration, permit and fees required.

Wow, we’d been breaking the law all along. Apparently, if you have a reasonable expectation that people are going to get up and dance at your public function, you gotta pony up two hundred bucks, even if it’s a free, one-time event. That’s a party pooper, eh?

Of course, the logical reason for all this is wanting to avoid the tragedy that could occur if a large number of people were in a room with poor exits and the place caught fire, or the floor collapsed, and it’s true that such tragedies have occurred. But they occurred in a different context than our community of drummers and dancers.

This statute presumes that there is some separation between the promoter and the public, that the promoter will, if possible, exploit the public and even expose people to danger in order to make a little more money, and that the state must therefore act to protect the public from unscrupulous promoters. This is not relevant to our situation, but the law does not recognize this. Our loose community of ecstatic drummers and dancers would have to coagulate into a formal organization, with an admission policy, and have private parties somewhere, somehow, in order to not violate this particular law. That so-called remedy, I think, would not really improve anything. It would just create more bureaucratic paper-shuffling.

Something else that I found peculiar was the presumed close connection between dancing and beer. Beer licensing and dance hall licensing go hand in hand. Hey, beer companies sponsor rock n’roll these days, don’ they? I guess I’m kind of old-school, though—to me, alcohol is antithetical to a really good dancing experience, but then the celebratory substances I favor when I’m dancing are thoroughly illegal. Oh, well. It occurs to me that if those substances were legalized under the current paradigm, and regulated by laws similar to the beer laws, it would create a whole new level of legal and legislative red tape. Maybe that’s some of why they’re not legal yet—there’s no way for the system to integrate them, given its negative assumptions about human nature.

This has quite an eye-opener for me. I had no idea how restrictive the laws are in this state. I suspect that some of what drives them is religious fanatacism that figures that if it can’t actually stop drinking and dancing, it will make them as difficult as possible. It’s a trivial issue, compared to so many, but at the same time, it illustrates the dualistic, Byzantine thinking that has been encoded into law under the rubric of the Democrats and the Republicans, and makes it difficult to stage small, semi-spontaneous, low-rent community events—the kind that make a community a community. Want a party that really wants to get government off people’ backs? Want a party that is really liberal? Want a party that really likes to party? Go Green!

music: Ed Haggard and the Love Drums, “Soliwoulen”