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Slow Food in High Gear
from:http://www.northcoastjournal.com/food/2010/11/04/slow-food-high-gear/
The snail on steroids
(Nov. 4, 2010) At the Slow Food International convention in Turin, Italy last weekend, I joined food lovers from around the world as they perused a vast indoor market stocked with some of the tastiest morsels to be coaxed from the land anywhere. Samples were flowing in the great hall, dubbed Salone del Gusto (Salon of Taste). Rows of stalls filled the 324,000-square-foot exhibition space, offering delicacies like prosciutto from acorn-fed pigs, bread baked on maple leaves, blue-tinged Persian salt, brewed beans gathered from the wild coffee forests of Ethiopia, Sicilian spleen sandwiches and countless other gastronomic treasures.
As wine glasses were swirled and sniffed and the souls of 10,000 stinky cheeses were searched, a foodie encounter of a different sort was taking place in the building next door. There, 6,400 farmers, fishermen, cooks, food activists, teachers and students from 161 countries were engaged in three days of intense dialog. This was the other half of the Slow Food convention, called Terra Madre, Italian for “Mother Earth.”
Slow Food: The Humble Snail
Although the participants at Terra Madre came from dramatically different contexts, the common ground they shared was solid. Each is working on his or her own piece of a larger puzzle: How to save the landscapes and cultures that produce the kind of delicacies so savored across the way at the Salone del Gusto.
In addition to talking shop on a variety of issues related to food production, Terra Madre participants gave presentations to their colleagues on many subjects. One, on the importance of the moringa tree in Kenya, might not seem relevant to, say, the Amazonian Guarani tribal members in attendance. But the Guarani’s Juçara tree, which produces palm hearts and açaí, fills a similarly central role in their culture, and faces analogous threats from environmental destruction. Other presentations covered topics like sustainable seafood, seed patents and farming in arid climates.
Slow Food began in 1986 when Carlo Petrini, a journalist, staged a successful protest against plans to build a McDonald’s on the Spanish Steps of Rome. Since then, the movement has turned into an organization that’s been through many transformations, and is currently working to shed its image as a pleasure-based club of a privileged few with the time and means to linger for hours at the dining table.
“I’m sick of masturbatory gourmets, people who smell a glass of Bordeaux for half an hour and speak divinely, as if they are priests, ‘Oh, it has the wonderful smell of horse sweat,’” Petrini emphasized at a press conference during the 2008 Slow Food convention. He started Terra Madre in 2004 to help bring Slow Food in line with its mission of supporting food that’s “good, clean, and fair.”
Terra Madre can be chaotic, and at times difficult to grasp. One journalist I met complained that he wasn’t learning anything he didn’t already know. I wondered if he already knew how to prepare a wedding feast from moringa leaves. I suggested to him that Terra Madre isn’t for food journalists. It’s for people with hard, dirty hands. It’s a place for them to meet and share ideas for solutions to the obstacles they face in trying to produce good food on healthy land.
Unlike the Salone del Gusto, Terra Madre wasn’t open to the public. The participants were selected via an application process, and those chosen as delegates had their expenses paid by Slow Food.
“Terra Madre is a moment when people can realize that they’re not alone. It profoundly changes how people live their lives afterwards,” said Josh Viertel, president of Slow Food USA.
One morning, Viertel led an energetic gathering of more than 700 delegates from the U.S., and in that packed room the stereotypical Slow Food image of leisurely indulgence was nowhere to be found. What you found instead were people on a mission. One of the many resolutions agreed upon was that each chapter of Slow Food USA would partner with a chapter in Africa, with the first priority to do what they could to help their African counterparts grow gardens.
Invoking the pace of Slow Food’s mascot, the snail, Viertel reminded the group that, “It’s only taken 60 years to screw up our food system. If it takes another 60 years to fix it, that’s OK.” Petrini spoke next, emphasizing transformation, whereby old ideas that still work can be maintained, as preferable to revolution, where the good is sometimes tossed out with the bad. Nonetheless, the revolutionary spirit in the room was palpable. There was chanting, clapping, and stomping, and the energy recalled that of other social movements.
The civil rights, anti-war, labor or feminist movements would not have been what they were without the input and passion of younger generations, and the same is true with Slow Food. One subgroup at Terra Madre, called Youth Food, was the most energetic. A mentoring workshop was arranged in which elders of the sustainable farming movement were paired with aspiring farmers. The discussions included topics like how to buy land on a farmer’s income, how to develop relationships with chefs, how to run a good CSA, how to set up a proper bee hive and protect basil from the wind. Already, farmers in their early twenties are doing things like creating a program in South Africa that’s trained thousands of teenagers in organic farming and establishing a honey industry in Southern Brazil to provide economic incentive to save the local catinga forest. Hearing about this kind of activity was inspiring to the other youth — and to the elders as well.
At Youth Food’s final meeting Petrini told the group, “food and food culture [has] become an expression of power … [It has] become a rediscovery of people’s relationship with the landscape… We’re not just talking about food and agriculture, we’re talking about spirituality.”
The excitement generated, the information exchanged, and the networking that transpired at Terra Madre all conspired to invigorate a community that’s driven to create real change. The snail may still be the Slow Food mascot, but I left Terra Madre believing that what happened there could expedite the pace of real change in the food systems of the world.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rebecca-solnit/jurassic-ballot-when-corp_b_773599.html
Crossposted with TomDispatch.com
This country is being run for the benefit of alien life forms. They’ve invaded; they’ve infiltrated; they’ve conquered; and a lot of the most powerful people on Earth do their bidding, including five out of our nine Supreme Court justices earlier this year and a whole lot of senators and other elected officials all the time. The monsters they serve demand that we ravage the planet and impoverish most human beings so that they might thrive. They’re like the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, like the Terminators, like the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, except that those were on the screen and these are in our actual world.
We call these monsters corporations, from the word corporate, which means embodied. A corporation is a bunch of monetary interests bound together into a legal body that was once considered temporary and dependent on local licensing, but now may operate anywhere and everywhere on Earth, almost unchallenged, and live far longer than you.
The results are near-invincible bodies, the most gigantic of which are oil companies, larger than blue whales, larger than dinosaurs, larger than Godzilla. Last year, Shell, BP, and Exxon were three of the top four mega-corporations by sales on the Fortune Global 500 list (and Chevron came in eighth). Some of the oil companies are well over a century old, having morphed and split and merged while continuing to pump filth into the air, the water, and the bodies of the many — and profits into the pockets of the few.
Thanks to a Supreme Court decision this January, they have the same rights as you when it comes to putting money into the political process, only they’re millions of times larger than you — and they’re pumping millions of dollars into races nationwide. It’s like inviting a T. Rex into your checkers championship — and it doesn’t matter whether dinosaurs can play checkers, at least not once you’re being pulverized by their pointy teeth.
The amazing thing is that they don’t always win, that sometimes thousands of puny mammals — that’s us — do overwhelm one of them.
Gigantic, powerful, undead beings, corporations have been given ever more human rights over the past 125 years; they act on their own behalf, not mine or yours or humanity’s or, really, carbon-based life on Earth’s. We’re made out of carbon, of course, but we depend on a planet where much of the carbon is locked up in the earth. The profit margins of the oil corporations depend on putting as much as possible of that carbon into the atmosphere.
So in a lot of basic ways, we are at odds with these creations. The novelist John le Carré remarked earlier this month, “The things that are done in the name of the shareholder are, to me, as terrifying as the things that are done — dare I say it — in the name of God.” Corporations have their jihads and crusades too, since they subscribe to a religion of maximum profit for themselves, and they’ll kill to achieve it. In an odd way, shareholders and god have merged in the weird new religion of unfettered capitalism, the one in which regulation is blasphemy and profit is sacred. Thus, the economic jihads of our age.
They Fund By Night!
In the jihad that concerns me right now, most of the monsters come from Texas; the prey is in California; and it’s called our economy and our environment. Four years ago, with state Assembly Bill 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, we Californians decided we’d like to cultivate our environment for the benefit of all of us, human and biological, now and in the long future.
They’d like to pillage it to keep their profit margins in tip-top shape this year and next. The latest tool to do this is called Proposition 23, and it’s on our ballot on Nov. 2. It is wholly destructive, cloaked in lies, and benefits no one — no one human, that is, though it benefits the oil corporations a lot. (You could argue that it benefits their shareholders, but I’d suggest that their biological and moral nature matters more than their bank accounts do and that, as a consequence, they’re acting against their deepest interests and their humanity.)
When he signed AB 32 into law, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who’s totally weird, termed out, but really good on climate stuff, said:
Some have challenged whether AB 32 is good for businesses. I say unquestionably it is good for businesses. Not only large, well-established businesses, but small businesses that will harness their entrepreneurial spirit to help us achieve our climate goals. Using market-based incentives, we will reduce carbon emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020. That’s a 25% reduction. And by 2050, we will reduce emissions to 80% below 1990 levels. We simply must do everything in our power to slow down global warming before it’s too late.
With Proposition 23, two out-of-state oil corporations, Valero and Tesoro, and right-wing oil billionaires based in New York and Kansas are trying to use the California initiative process, originally intended to allow citizen intervention in the governance of this state, to countermand AB 32 and set policy for us. “According to data from the California Secretary of State’s office,” Kate Sheppard recently reported in Mother Jones magazine:
More than 98% of contributions to the pro-Prop. 23 campaign are from oil companies. Eighty-nine percent of the contributions come from out of state… Valero contributed $4 million, Tesoro gave $1.5 million, and a refinery owned by the notorious Kansas-based billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch, of Koch Industries, kicked in another $1 million. Just last week, Houston-based Marathon oil contributed $500,000.
Actually, Tesoro and Valero are headquartered out of state, but their refineries in California gave us 2.4 million pounds of toxic chemicals in our air and water last year, and they’d like to continue offering the citizens of my state these gifts that keep giving illness, death and long-term environmental devastation without interference. The coming vote is not about protecting fancy places for upscale hikers — the stereotype used to portray environmentalism as a white-person’s luxury movement — it’s about air quality for inner-city people, especially those who live near refineries and harbors. This is the kind of environmental degradation that’s about childhood asthma and increased deaths from respiratory illness. In other words, Prop. 23 is part of a corporate war on the poor. A vote for Prop. 23 is a vote to turn the lungs of poor children into a snack for dinosaurs, to put it in bluntly Hollywood-ish terms.
Lies of the Living Dead
To sabotage AB 32, they’re spending lots and lots of money and telling lots and lots of lies. Start with the proposition’s name — “The California Jobs Initiative” — designed to make you think that this measure will create jobs. Actually, according to most reputable analyses, it will do the opposite. A green economy has made jobs, is making jobs, and will make more jobs. This stealth initiative would suspend AB 32 until unemployment in California drops below 5.5 percent for four consecutive quarters, which it won’t anytime soon, if ever.
The implication is that doing something about climate change is a luxury we cannot afford in this bleak economy. That’s a lie. Down the road, if we don’t retool to address a future in which there’s less petroleum (at far higher prices), we’ll truly crash and the suffering will be intense. AB 32 would prevent that crash; Prop. 23 steers us directly into it.
The more we heat up the planet, the more it costs all of us, not just in money, but in colossal famines, displacements, deaths, and species extinctions, as well as in the loss of some of the things that make this planet a blue-green jewel, including its specialized habitats from the melting Arctic to bleaching coral reefs.
Doing something about climate change makes economic sense right now. It’s good business.
It’s hardly surprising that the corporate aliens lie when it comes to the relationship between doing something about climate change and the economy. After all, oil corporations funded a lot of the disinformation campaigns which, for years, promoted the idea that human-caused climate change was a figment of the overheated imaginations of mad environmentalists, and later that there was controversy (as well as corruption) among scientists when it came to global warming. The only honest information would have been that about 97 percent of the world’s relevant scientists overwhelming agree that climate change couldn’t be more real and is a genuine danger to humanity and the planet — and that the evidence is all around us in freakish weather, rising oceans, melting arctic ice and glaciers, shifting habitats, and more.
The Phantom of Democracy
The oil dinosaurs want to win so badly in my home state because what happens here matters everywhere. The nation often follows where California goes. In the 1970s, we started setting energy-efficiency standards that mean we Californians now use about half the energy of the average American (with no diminishment of quality of life or pocketbook pain). In the last decade, we created cutting-edge measures to curb carbon emissions.
In 2002, Los Angeles state assemblywoman Fran Pavley (now a state senator) put out AB 1493, which was to — and will — reduce vehicle greenhouse gas emissions. It was, unfortunately, held up for six years by the Bush administration and then transformed into a national standard by Barack Obama as one of his first acts in office. Pavley also authored the now embattled “Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006,” AB 32.
If you think oil corporations and life share an interest, you should’ve been in the Gulf of Mexico a few months ago. I was. I saw their oiled pelicans, their unemployed fishermen, and their oil-smeared marshes. I tasted and smelled the poisons I could not see, and I read their lies.
The people of the Gulf will struggle to survive the recklessness of BP for decades to come, but the petrobeasts aren’t just destructive when things go wrong; they’re that way when things go according to plan as well. If the 5.5 million barrels of oil that spilled into the Gulf, thanks to BP, had instead made it to our gas tanks, the consequences would still have been dire. They are dire. The companies funding Prop. 23 are themselves a major source of climate change and, of course, a major obstacle to coming up with solutions to it.
Like the people of the Gulf during the spill, the people of Richmond, California, in the San Francisco Bay area, live with those tastes, smells, and consequences all the time, because they’re in the shadow of Chevron’s biggest west coast refinery. (Corporate headquarters are only 25 miles away.) Sirens go off during excessive leaks of toxins like ammonia, and as if out of a horror movie, an explosion at the plant in 1999 that sent an 18,000-pound plume of sulfur dioxide fumes into the air was said to be so nasty it took the fur off squirrels.
Chevron is one of the biggest corporations on the planet. While the average income for a human being in Richmond is a little more than $19,000, Chevron’s profits last year were $24 billion, meaning the corporation is more than one million times as rich as the average citizen there. Nonetheless, the humans there won a huge victory recently, preventing the corporation from expanding and retooling its refinery so that it could process even dirtier crude oil (with dirtier local emissions, in a place that already suffers huge health consequences from the monster in its backyard). It may be the world’s first victory against refinery expansion.
Chevron is both the state’s biggest single greenhouse-gas emitter and a huge financial force in Richmond elections, invariably funding campaigns against green candidates. The mostly poor, mostly nonwhite citizens of Richmond are, however, organized and motivated, so if you want to watch a monster movie in which the little guys have been winning lately, follow city politics there.
One of the cool things about the West County Toxics Coalition, the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, the Green Party mayor, and the activists working with them is that they know better than anyone how to act locally and think globally, and even sometimes how to act globally and think locally. Maybe collectively they’re not so little. They’re allied with antiwar groups, with Burmese human rights groups, with the people of Ecuador and Nigeria who have suffered petro-contamination at least as bad, if not worse than BP’s Gulf spill this spring, with groups around the world fighting the petrobeast. There’s a movement out there, and sometimes it even wins amazing victories.
Around the world this month, 350.org coordinated more than 7,000 demonstrations in favor of lowering atmospheric carbon to a sane 350 parts per million, while the climate-justice movement had a global day of action on Columbus Day. Among the month’s heroic efforts were direct action against mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia, blockades of refineries in France and Britain and of a coal-fired power plant in Germany, protests and gas-station blockades in Canada, and a rally in the Philippines, a demonstration in Finland, a march in Ecuador, a protest in South Africa, among others. In California, activists worked steadily against Prop. 23.
Think for a minute about horror movies: In some of them, the little people rally and do heroic things and the monsters or aliens are vanquished. The forces that have come together against Prop. 23 are impressive, ranging from inner-city job coalitions and traditional environmental groups to university think tanks and business interests. Winning or losing, however, depends on what happens when California voters look at that deceptive label “California Jobs Initiative” on their ballots on Nov. 2.
If your heart isn’t pounding, and you aren’t biting your fingernails and teetering at the edge of your seat, then you haven’t noticed the monsters yet. Look carefully. They’re all around us — and they’re coming for you.
Rebecca Solnit’s brother David does organizing work against Chevron, and she often shows up for the marches. She is the author of 13 books, including the forthcoming Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (which maps toxins and right-wing corporations in the Bay Area, among other things) and A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. She writes for Tomdispatch.com as often as she can. It’s her personal version of being David in the face of all those Goliaths. To catch Solnit discussing “mixed-up California” in a Timothy MacBain TomCast audio interview, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here.
Copyright 2010 Rebecca Solnit
Op-Ed: Ben Emery | An Open Letter to the Citizens of the US Congressional District 4 CA
Published on Sep 28, 2010 – 7:25:06 AM
By: Ben Emery Candidate US Congressional District 4 CA
September 28, 2010 – Nothing in our Constitution addresses political parties or partisanship. However, over the past 30 years, political parties have presented partisanship as the only operating paradigm. Our government has become less representative because that’s what BOTH parties want. They fight for campaign dollars instead of votes, then use those dollars to manipulate opinion in an effort to frighten voters to take their side. This was not what the founders envisioned for our grand republic.
I am running a true grassroots campaign. I have a small staff of volunteers who believe in our cause. Instead of the obscene sums of special interest money the major parties prize, our war chest consists of our volunteers’ work. We pledge to fight for a government that represents the values and the interests of the people who live, work, and own businesses in California’s 4th congressional district.
The 112th Congress should have several members whose objective is government for, of, and by the people. I hope to find common ground with members who aren’t afraid to use the power of government to restrict the impact that money has on our representative republic. I will work to influence others in Congress to pull our elections off the “open market” and instead make them publicly financed. Not only will we bring about an improved, transparent, and representative government, we will also achieve significant savings by ending the cycle of money from election to earmarked, pork barrel legislation and back to the next election.
Again, thank you for your interest. In our past, we have faced crucial tests and Americans have rallied. I have to believe we’ll do that again now. However, we can’t do that until our government represents the people instead of representing the benefactors of the political parties. Together, we have important work to accomplish.
We hope you can join our team. Working together, we can achieve our goals.
Thank you.
Ben Emery
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/asher-miller/shovels-and-ballots-getti_b_711442.html
Executive Director, Post Carbon Institute
Posted: September 9, 2010 08:13 PM
After major disappointments in Copenhagen and Washington, D.C., millions of us concerned about the climate crisis have been left wondering “what now?“. The stakes couldn’t be higher, and the political and infrastructural challenges so large and complex, that it’s no surprise to see soul-searching and disagreements over the best course of action. Especially when legislative and diplomatic efforts to date have fallen flat.
When folks like Dave Roberts — who fiercely advocated for admittedly weak cap-and-trade legislation because he felt that it was our best hope for progress — have given up on the nation’s capitol, it’s clear that a lot of people are being forced to reevaluate.
The Debate — Scale Vs. Feasibility
It’s understandable why activists invested so much to securing a binding diplomatic agreement in Copenhagen and legislation in Washington, D.C. Their belief was that only a coordinated, international policy mechanism could address a crisis that is, by its very nature, global in scope. They’re right. But negotiating such a response is akin to getting 192 drug addicts to check-in to rehab, when treatment won’t start until everyone shows up.
Believing this is a fool’s errand — unlikely to work, at least with the result being anything meaningful — others have advocated for concentrating on where we’re more likely to make progress: the personal and community scale. But reducing your carbon footprint to nil, or even that of an entire city or state, is not going to keep the climatic forces away if elsewhere they continue to burn coal or deforest the Amazon. Unless someone can invent the dome from Stephen King’s imagination.
It’s easy to pick holes in each of these strategies because the sad truth is that none are likely, on their own, to be commensurate with the scale of the challenge. Which is why I think it’s our expectations, not approaches, that need to change.
Practicing Resilience
The first expectation shift is to move our thinking away from trying to “solve” this crisis to “responding” to it. This may sound like a difference without a distinction, but it’s fundamental to the approach we should take, particularly when climate is so inextricably connected to the concurrent economic and energy challenges we face. In attempting to “solve” a problem like climate change, we’re looking for a miracle that’s going to allow us to get back to business as usual. In trying to “respond” to it, however, we acknowledge that business as usual is no longer an option. This is clearly necessary for a number of reasons:
- The cat is already out of the bag when it comes to climate change. We’ve already altered the climate, even if we completely stop using fossil fuels this very second. Hence the planetary name change, a la PCI Fellow Bill McKibben. Some level of adaptation is required, though how much is still in our control.
- As our report “Searching for a Miracle” details, no known combination of alternatives can fully replace our current use of fossil fuels.
- Even if we could somehow to discover and bring online a clean energy alternative at sufficient scale and speed, there are numerous other limits that will prevent business as usual from continuing.
Redundancy, adaptability and experimentation are going to be key in how we respond to this and other crises.
Both/And
The second thing to understand is that it needn’t be — indeed it shouldn’t be — an either/or proposition. It’s a both/and proposition. When done right, efforts at different levels can amplify one another and are iterative. This can even be true when groups reasonably respond to the same opportunities in totally different ways.
For example, some of our friends in the UK are considering holding a “Great Stay At Home” during the COP 16 meetings in Cancun, Mexico, in late November and early December 2010. The idea, as articulated by Transition founder and PCI Fellow Rob Hopkins right after COP 15 last year, was this:
So how about this, as a co-ordinated approach for the next time there is such a gathering, which will again, no doubt, be trailed as “the last chance to save the planet”? We (that is, those who care passionately about climate change and the need for a proportionate response), confound expectations, and stay at home. Using the web-based technologies we now have at our disposal, we co-ordinate an international festival of meaningful change. We stay home and insulate whole streets, create community gardens, work meaningfully with our local authorities to do projects with them, eat local food diets for the duration of the conference, live without cars, insulate our schools, set up an area of the settlement in question as a model for what it would look like transitioned. We start bringing the future that we can imagine but which is still beyond the comprehension of so many, into focus.
I think this a fantastic idea. But does that mean that NGOs and environmental activists should all boycott COP 16? Absolutely not. Without allies in Cancun to bear witness, keep delegates’ feet to the fire, and push for meaningful international agreements, then the odds of delegates paying any heed would be close to nil. And conversely, when delegates attempt to hide behind excuses about political or technical feasibility, our friends in Cancun can point to what’s being done right then back at home by everyday citizens with shovels, caulk guns and bicycles.
Done right, these two approaches can be greater than the sum of their parts. If there’s anything that gives my cynicism pause, it’s the possibility of divergent efforts like these amplifying rather than defusing one another.
And that is why I want to encourage every single person out there to get involved in a 10/10/10 Global Work Party. No, Glenn Beck, it’s not some International Neo-Communist Party. It’s hundreds of thousands of people in more than 140 countries making a statement by getting their hands dirty. As our friends from 350.org explained:
“Since we’ve already worked hard to call, email, petition, and protest to get politicians to move, and they haven’t moved fast enough, now it’s time to show that we really do have the tools we need to get serious about the climate crisis.”
On 10/10/10 we’ll show that we the people can do this — but we need bold energy policies from our political leaders to do it on a scale that truly matters. The goal of the day is not to solve the climate crisis one project at a time, but to send a pointed political message: if we can get to work, you can get to work too–on the legislation and the treaties that will make all our work easier in the long run.
Part of what I love about 10/10/10 is that even if actions fail to move politicians sufficiently, through these projects a foundation can be laid — no matter how small or simple the projects — for transitioning each and every community. Yes, it’s a focused day of international action. Yes, it’s intended to make a statement. But it can and should also serve as the start or boost for ongoing resilience building.
10/10/10 Sonoma County
The 350.org site has some ideas and resources for creating a project (including starting a Transition Initiative) but I wanted to share what we’re doing here in Post Carbon Institute’s home base to give folks just one example of what can be done.
PCI is part of an ad hoc coalition of local nonprofits and the County that set as our vision: “10 Issues. 10 Communities. 10,000 People.” Because of the short time frame and the unique characteristics of the county (nine cities and a number of smaller towns, with a population that’s generally progressive and climate aware), our intention was to encourage grassroots groups throughout Sonoma County to take the lead in organizing local projects. We’re fortunate to have a number of grassroots organizations spread throughout the County who are already doing great work. As organizers, our strategy is simply to provide the framework and tools to facilitate, promote, and support projects.
That said, it’s vitally important to us to use 10/10/10 as an opportunity to engage people in longer-term and more robust efforts. And so we set for ourselves the following goals:
- To educate the community about the impacts global climate change and our dependence on fossil fuels has on virtually every aspect of our lives and the countless, concrete ways we can break this addiction. So we’ve named 10 issues that are directly impacted by or relate to the climate crisis: biodiversity; buildings; economy; energy; food; health; social/economic justice; transportation; waste; and water.
- To organize a minimum of one project focused on each issue area and at least one project in 10 Sonoma County communities.
- To provide participants with suggestions and resources for personal actions they can take in each issue area to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels and their impact on the climate. A website will provide people with a way to make reduction pledges, as will each project site.
- To get the participation of elected officials in each of the nine Sonoma County cities, as well as the County Board of Supervisors. We don’t want them making speeches. We want them to get their hands dirty alongside their constituents.
- To use this weekend as a vehicle for ongoing engagement.
The most ambitious effort will likely take place in Santa Rosa, the largest city in the county. Our friends at the newly formed CAReFree Sunday Street Scene (part of the growing international Ciclovia movement) are working with the City of Santa Rosa to close off a major section of downtown for biking, walking, and entertainment. Along the route — which includes City Hall, Luther Burbank Home & Gardens, and a greenway along the Santa Rosa Creek — they hope to set up ten projects (one for each issue referenced above) where pedestrians can stop, participate, and learn. The folks at CAReFree Sunday Street Scene have been talking with organizers of Tour de France cyclist and Santa Rosa native Levi Leipheimer’s Gran Fondo bike event, which takes place the day before, about staying to join in the ciclovia. Hopefully, with creative project ideas like this, we’ll meet our target of 10,000 participants.
We’ll know in a few weeks how successful this organizing effort was, but the key thing is also the simplest thing: Try something. So please visit 350.org today to find a project in your community. If one doesn’t exist, start one.
Don’t throw it away…
September 6, 2008 in section: Uncategorized by Mr Green with 18,603 views
from – http://myzerowaste.com/articles/throw-it-away/
That’s rubbish, just throw it away …
How many times have you heard that or said it yourself ?
It must be one of the most common phrases in our language. We think it so often that it has become ‘normalised’ in our minds. Rubbish is something useless, something we don’t want, something to be thrown away…
Did you ever stop to think where or what ‘away‘ is? Is it just a term like ‘get rid of…’ or ‘throw out‘?
What it really means is;
- ‘I don’t want this and I’m not responsible for it any more’
It’s a word about separation of what you have, but what you don’t want.
There is a problem here. Away is always somewhere else, it is not a magical black hole that takes all the stuff we want to be free of and somehow finds a new happy home for it. When we ‘throw our rubbish away’ it usually means it goes somewhere else that is anything but happy and certainly not a good home.
At best when we throw our rubbish away, it ends up in the waste bin, but then it gets collected and probably dumped into the earth to rot and contaminate. Worse still the waste is collected and incinerated and potentially produces other toxic contamination for the environment. Even worse, we throw our rubbish away onto the ground as litter that is at the mercy of winds, water and the scattering process of peoples carelessness. Ultimately, all our waste ends up contaminating something or some creature, including ourselves.
Every time you throw something ‘Away’ it goes to a place that is usually worse than when you had it.
In the UK we throw away 30 million tonnes of rubbish a year – that’s half a tonne each. How many times did you ‘throw it away’ to accumulate all that? Much of this rubbish is thrown away needlessly. This wastes valuable resources like glass, paper, aluminium and tin, and pollutes the environment as harmful chemicals leach into the ground around landfill sites. 30 million tonnes of waste gone somewhere else, out-of-sight, out-of-mind and secretly infecting the planet.
There’s no such place as away, it’s always somewhere else.
And yet we continue to manufacture and consume products that have
- built in obsolescence,
- perceived obsolescence
- non-recyclable packaging.
We continue to indulge our wants and self-serving agendas oblivious to the environmental impact of our choices. Tucked away in our comfortable walled up environments, we don’t see and don’t care about where our waste goes. Out-of-sight sight … out-of-mind serves us well. Blinkers on and the sound turned down, we neither see, nor hear the plight of the natural world that is literally heaving with the weight and devastation of what we are doing. The millions of tons of waste that we are relentlessly pumping into the sea, the Earth and atmosphere are accumulating, mutating and creating a vast cancer of seething chemicals that only create harm and death as they spread mercilessly across the planet.
If waste was dumped in your garden, what would you think?
No-one has the right to do that and someone would have to pay the cost of polluting your property. We all think we have rights, because we are human, we are special, we are civilised people. The planet and the creatures that inhabit the earth appear to have NO RIGHTS at all. They have no voice of protest when we dump millions of tonnes of rubbish in their feeding grounds. When we tear down their habitats and pollute their waters, no-one breaths a word about their rights. It’s ok, because we are the superior species and we can do what we like. We’ve been dumping waste relentlessly since the industrial revolution. That seems like a short period in history starting just over 100 years ago, a mere blink in evolutionary history and yet in that short period we have significantly destabilised the natural balance of the eco-system to an alarming level.
Somehow, we just don’t believe it, we call it ’scaremongering’
And that helps to relegate the seriousness and sooth our conscience. Or maybe we do see the shadow of what is coming and ignore the consequences, hoping that science and policy makers will magically come up with a solution. We viewed a program by the Discovery Team that was showing a proposed project to pump cold water from 1000 feet in the oceans to the surface in order to create co2 eating diatoms. These scientists seriously see this as a potential ‘answer’ to our co2 emissions. Despite the potential to imbalance the ocean’s eco-system and disrupt the already delicate plankton environments. And that’s the way we see things now; solution engineering takes over from prevention engineering. It’s just like modern medicine, we look for ways to alleviate the symptoms, rather than prevent the illness in the first place.
The horse has already bolted and we are turning all our attention to catching the beast, while the faulty gate is still wide open for others to follow.
If this kind of ‘fix-it’ mentality prevails …
We are set to see some pretty horrendous actions in the next few years. The whole waste incineration issue is built on solution engineering and not prevention engineering. Manufacturers are still offer placating excuses for their greed marketing and profit campaigns. Oil producers still hold us in a stranglehold by shielding developments in alternative technologies until they have exhausted their oil supplies. Government and local councils make lame choices to placate us with half-hearted proposals to improve waste management, but only if it secures votes in the ballot box. Very few people and organisations are fully committed to preventing the problem of waste, outside of a profit benefit for themselves.
Does all that seem too harsh, is it scathing and negative?
If it does, it’s because the answer to all our problems is starring us in the mirror everyday. All the while we talk in big political and corporation language, we are still chasing the escaping beast and our eyes are way off the ball. The answer is, as Occams’ razor points out- the most simple and obvious; One person… you, multiplied millions of times over. You are the sole and collective answer to the Earth’s environmental siege. You, me, us, together provide the single most effective prevention and solution engineering impact to the world’s problem of waste, global warming and environmental catastrophe.
Every consumer choice and purchase decision you make is a vote of confidence for the producer of the product or service.
The more votes they get, the more they produce. It’s a simple equation of demand creates supply. Every time you buy something you add a vote for that item and say “That’s what I want, you are making it right and I agree with your values” These consumer votes are responsible for the vast corporations we see today. They are responsible for political actions and policies and all the way down to the taste in your food and the colour of your soaps. Collectively, we drive the market the way we want it.
The process of consumer choices is very carefully monitored by manufacturers and advertising.
Don’t believe for a moment they don’t see your actions to buy red apples over green apples. Big brother IS watching but not the way we imagine from George Orwell’s predictions. The probelm is we don’t see or believe in our personal power any more. We think ‘my single choice will never be seen or make a difference’. That is the first trick of the shadows that we need to get over. We have gradually been weaned to surrender our power in the belief that decisions are always made by someone else, whether that’s by doctors to look after our health or politicians to govern our lives. In all walks of life we have abdicated responsibility for making our own choices in favour of believing that going with the flow is the best, safest decision. We call it democracy, fashion, trends, popularity and a whole culture of following the crowd is now acceptable and secure in modern life
So what do we do about this?
It really is time for action as individuals, but we need a collective force of many people working together to make changes that get noticed and send a clear message back to manufacturers and policy makers.
How do we do it?
As consumers we need to take back our power, that means understanding that as individuals we constantly have choices that need to be influenced by truthful information and not propaganda. We need clear thinking followed by proactive responses. It also means we may need to step outside of our personal comfort zone and become an individual in the crowd, instead of blindly following everyone else.
If there is a plan to change packaging and waste management from the grass roots upwards, We also need clear guidelines to understand our objectives and targets
Prevention engineering
Usually we look at the end product and centre our attention on waste, rubbish and pollution. This is giving attention to solution based problem solving and not looking at prevention. We need to go back to the source and see that as a consumer, we control what is wasted by our purchasing choices. We are accountable for the life cycle of every item we buy. Let’s look at a basic check list of how we purchase:
- Can we justify its purchase, do we need it ?
- Can we recycle compost, or reuse the packaging ?
- Does it have a reasonable shelf life without going off or spoiling?
- Is it a convenience food that could be avoided?
In addition to the question on food you may also consider these questions for other consumer goods
- Is it ethically made and fairly traded?
- Is it made from non-sustainable materials?
- Does the manufacturing process involve mining?
- Does it have a short life expectancy?
- Does it have built in obsolescence or perceived out dating?
These questions should strongly influence all our purchasing decisions.
In addition, we must also be prepared to make a stand to let retailers know about our views. This next step can be a somewhat daunting, as it involves being outspoken in shops.
If you buy something and it is a real need, then you should not have to suffer the task of disposing of careless packaging, especially if it is not recyclable. One of the best ways to send a clear message to retailers and manufacturers is to do something radical like removing the packaging at the point of sale and telling the retailer to either send it back to the producer or recycle/ reuse it themselves responsibly. Another less intimidating option is to return un-recyclable packaging to the retailer another time.
Other actions you can take is to ask the retailer what facilities they have to take back packaging. Some large retailers already offer recycling banks, although these may not include all the plastics that they sell in the store. They may try to refer you to the local council, but you have to make a strong stand that although it may be uncomfortable to them, they have to take responsibility and pass that message back to the producers.
All of these add up to one important end result:
- We consume according to our needs and the needs of the environment we live in
- We only consume goods that have recyclable, compost-able or reusable packaging
- We only consume goods that we need and reduce waste to a minimum
- We send a strong message to producers that we won’t be responsible for their waste.
- We shop seasonally and locally, supporting local trade and fresh foodstuffs.
- We reject all convenience items with packaging that cannot be reused or recycled.
We finally get the message, that there is no such place as AWAY!
AMY GOODMAN: We’re broadcasting from Tiquipaya, just outside Cochabamba. And today we are going to be joined by the hour—for the hour by Bolivian President Evo Morales. But first, we go to the opening day of the global conference on the World Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change and Rights of Mother Earth.
As the peoples’ climate change talks here move into their third day, thousands of participants from across Latin America and around the world are streaming into the small Bolivian town of Tiquipaya to discuss how to slow the impact of global warming. Anjali Kamat and Rick Rowley filed this report on Tuesday’s opening ceremony.
ANJALI KAMAT: Fifteen thousand people from around the world gathered under the hot Andean sun on Tuesday morning for the official opening of the World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. Bolivian music, indigenous ceremonies and the Bolivian army’s honor guard were on hand to greet the first indigenous president of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Evo Morales.
PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] People of the world, honor guard of Bolivia, greetings.
ANJALI KAMAT: In a forty-minute address, President Morales outlined the failures of Copenhagen and Bolivia’s alternative proposals to tackle climate change. He warned that the world faced a stark choice between capitalism and survival.
PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] We are here because in Copenhagen the so-called developed countries failed in their obligation to provide substantial commitments to reduce greenhouse gases. We have two paths: either Pachamama or death. We have two paths: either capitalism dies or Mother Earth dies. Either capitalism lives or Mother Earth lives. Of course, brothers and sisters, we are here for life, for humanity and for the rights of Mother Earth. Long live the rights of Mother Earth! Death to capitalism!
ANJALI KAMAT: The Bolivian government has promised to present the outcomes of this popular conference to the 192 nations involved in the official UN climate change discussions. Participants said they hope this conference would have a greater political impact in the UN-sponsored talks.
CONFERENCE PARTICIPANT: [translated] Copenhagen basically was by and for the authorities. It was for the leaders of the countries. This is a gathering of the people. And as people who suffer the consequences, we share our concerns and our expectations.
This is a movement. It is a first step to mobilize the whole world, to search for another kind of civilization, another kind of relationship with nature. And I think that if we, the people, come together, we can generate a worldwide movement. That is the road we are on.
ANJALI KAMAT: Social movements, indigenous organizations, environmental groups, labor unions and individual activists from five continents have flooded into the small town of Tiquipaya in the last few days to take part in the summit. Saeed Ali Mousavi is a religious student from Iran.
SAEED ALI MOUSAVI: [translated] We need to change the world. We need to destroy capitalism. And we can. All the people united here show that it is possible and that we can do this. We are all people who cannot and do not want to accept that capitalism is the global power.
LESLIE BORGES: [translated] My name is Leslie Borges of Brazil. The summit is very important because it is one of the few times that people bring their struggles, their flags and their opinions directly to decision makers. This is a unique moment.
SPIRITCHILD: My name is Spiritchild. I’m from the artist and activist collective called Movement in Motion, grassroots organization. Basically we’re—we use hip-hop to document social movements. We talk about the bus depots in Harlem, all the smoke and the smog that’s coming through to the South Bronx, so we have asthma. And we talk about the connections between South Bronx asthma to Katrina disasters to the Maldives, Tuvalu, and, you know, things of that issue, and, you know, connecting to climate change, so trying to have a global movement, express it through hip-hop, through social arts and things of that nature. And hopefully we can keep this going.
CARLOS ARRIEN: My name is Carlos Arrien, and my organization is BoliviaSol. This small country of eight million people could throw a gauntlet and stand on its feet and say, you know, this stuff about Mother Nature is not just quaint, it’s not just beautiful, it’s not just nice. It’s real. And we have to do something about it. And here is—you know, here is Tiquipaya, and here is, you know, this and that, and we’re going to make it happen and open the door to the participation of people who have been shut out of this process of coming to terms with, you know, global warming and climate change. So it’s an extraordinary event, and that’s why we’re here.
KETY ESQUIVEL: My name Kety Maria Esquivel, Kety Esquivel, and I’m the executive director and CEO for an organization called Latinos in Social Media. We’re a group of Latinos from across the United States who are mobilizing online and social media in various capacities. I came here to Cochabamba for this conference with a group of folks that are from indigenous communities, as well as underrepresented communities across the United States. And the reason that we wanted to come to Bolivia is because historically these climate conversations are happening without our voices being at the table. And that can’t continue. This has to—in order for it to work, the solutions have to really include everyone’s voice, and especially demographically, as the numbers are changing in the United States, we have to be at the table.
And I think what makes this conference different than what we saw in Copenhagen is that we’re here. In Copenhagen we weren’t here. And if you talk to people around here, everyone shares the common vision that we are the ones we’re waiting for. We share the vision that we are the ones that can create the solution, all the way from the president to all of us who are here as individuals representing different organizations and the grassroots. We all believe now that we can do it together in solidarity.
ANJALI KAMAT: On the first of this peoples’ climate summit, hopes were high for a the gathering that promises an inclusive and democratic process to take on the challenge of climate change.
For Democracy Now!, this is Anjali Kamat and Rick Rowley.
AMY GOODMAN: Voices from the World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. We’re broadcasting at the summit in the Bolivian town of Tiquipaya just outside Cochabamba.
The Pachamama Alliance & the Awakening the Dreamer Initiative
The Pachamama Alliance
“This movement is humanity’s immune response to resist and heal political disease, economic infection, and ecological corruption…” ~Paul Hawken
In the mid-1990′s, through a mysterious set of circumstances, a group of North Americans visited a remote and intact group of indigenous people – the Achuar – located deep in the Amazonian region of Ecuador. This relationship that was to become The Pachamama Alliance, was actually initiated by the indigenous elders and shamans themselves who, out of their deep concern for the growing threat to their ancient way of life, and their recognition that the roots of this threat lay far beyond their rainforest home, actively sought the partnership of committed individuals living in the modern world.
The Pachamama Alliance is committed to finding ways to support a growing effort to help us awaken from the seductive trance of unlimited progress, unrestrained private interest and material accumulation. We are clear that there is now an unprecedented opportunity to live from a new vision, one made possible by the merging of two ways of seeing the world that until now have seemed to be totally distinct— a marriage of the technological skill of the modern world, with the earth-honoring wisdom of indigenous cultures.
Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream is a program of The Pachamama Alliance that serves as a galvanizing space for individuals to deeply explore the extraordinary possibilities inherent in a communion of technology with spirit. Through participation in this program, people are offered a new place to stand in looking at their world and their lives, and are empowered to formulate their own personal daily practices that contribute to the creation of a new dream for themselves as well as for our world.
The New Dream The Old Dream is dying. Its demise becomes inevitable as we discover the devastation we’ve caused to our own planet home, as we count the rising cost of our inhumanity to each other and as we see how our current way of living fails to deliver lasting happiness. All of these are the inevitable conclusions of an old dream rooted in acquisition, consumption and putting personal gain above communal good. The New Dream is emerging! It’s community, collaboration; it’s life-enhancing and earth-honoring; it’s together and for our grand-children, rather than Supersize me Now!So we’re seeing the largest social movement of all time, millions of people and organizations working for environmental sustainability, social justice and spiritual fulfillment, three facets of a new dream for humanity and planet Earth.
The Symposium At the heart of the initiative is the Awakening the Dreamer Changing the Dream Symposium. Through dynamic group interactions, leading edge information, and inspiring multimedia, participants of this half-day event are inspired to reconnect with their deep concern for our world, and are empowered to make a difference.
Designed with the collaboration of some of the finest scientific, indigenous and activist minds in the world, the Symposium explores the current state of our planet from a new perspective, and connects participants with a powerful global movement to reclaim our future. It is an exploration of four questions
• Where Are We? – an examination of the state of environmental, social and personal well-being • How did We Get Here? – tracing the root causes that lead to our current imbalance
• What’s Possible for the Future? – discovering new ways of relating with each other, with the Earth and looking at the emerging Movement for change
• Where Do We Go from Here? – considering the stand we want to be in the world and our personal and collective impact If you are ready to be disturbed, inspired and moved to action, and to be introduced to a thriving community of committed cohorts, then join us in exploring the most critical concerns of our times, and discover new opportunities to make a real difference in accelerating the emergence of an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, and socially just human presence on this planet!
Find a symposium
Or, if you are interested in hosting a symposium locally, contact Michael at 530.559.0277 or michaelmelendez@comcast.net
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