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Real security and wealth is in the community we have
Mike A’Dair, The Willits News
Original: Bradford: ‘Invest in Willits’
Willits farmer and political activist Jason Bradford told an audience of about 50 local residents the current economic situation is even worse than it looks, if that is possible.
“They are doing stuff so bizarre, it’s obvious they are totally panicked,” Bradford said. “When the banks stopped loaning money to each other, that was a signal. We’ve gotten so far away from understanding how banks work it’s hard for us to understand the true gravity of the situation. The system is totally broke, and it’s totally unstoppable.
“Look. Eighty percent of global savings are going to the United States, to back the US debt. That’s $2 billion a day. Now if you are loaning to the United States and remember, you are loaning us 80 percent of all global savings and now the person you are loaning to has suddenly doubled its national debt in one day. And you know they created this debt out of nothing. And you know they aren’t going to be able to pay off the debt.
Now I would say they would have to say, ‘we’re not going to give the United States a free ride any more’. So that is where we are now. That is why they are considering moving the United States dollar off the reserve standard.
“I’m afraid we will be in much worse shape this time than during the Great Depression,” Bradford said. “Then we didn’t have people relying on a global system. They didn’t have food having to come to them from long distances.”
His remarks came during a talk after a showing of Money as Debt, a documentary on the nature and value of money.
… “If the US dollar loses its reserve status, then our purchasing power will decline dramatically,” Bradford said. “This will affect just about everything. This is why it’s so scary right now. So you need to get your money out of whatever account it’s sitting in, and invest those dollars in Willits.”
Bradford referenced the Community Supported Agriculture model, a business structure by which a group of people pay a farmer to grow their food, essentially investing in the farm before the growing season starts. The farmer has money to operate his farm and buy seed and equipment, and investors get the food grown.
The CSA model could be used to fund other needed activities, Bradford noted. “There are so many ways you could take the CSA model and use the model to provide basic things we really need,” he said. “You can pay somebody to start a local storage system to store grains and dried beans. You then become a shareholder in a system that could provide food for you.
“Our real security and wealth is in the community we have and the economic relationships we can make,” Bradford said.
(19 November 2008)
The case for Resilient Community
DJ, Politics in the Zeros
Some years ago I visited two villages near Gampaha, Sri Lanka. Both were small and poor. Both were inhabited by members of Rodhi caste, the Sinhalese version of untouchables. But there, all similarity ended. In the first, families of five and six lived in palm-leaf huts just large enough for them all to lie down in. They made their living begging, which I’m told is the traditional livelihood of the Rodhi. They had no running water, no toilets, no access road, and no school. Most were illiterate. They lived in squalor that up to that point I would have found unimaginable.
In the second village, people lived in houses made of wood or concrete blocks. These houses were not large and luxurious, but they were at least recognizable as permanent structures. The villagers had installed a gravity-fed water system, had enough sealed-pit latrines for the village, an access road, and a school for the children. They made their livelihood hand-weaving baskets for use by other nearby communities, though they’d recently made arrangements to sell their products in Colombo. And when we arrived, the villagers smiled at us– a facial expression I never saw in the first village.
How did two villages with an identical background develop so differently? Fifty years ago, a man named A. T, Ariyaratne, then a science teacher, had an idea for dealing with Sri Lanka’s poverty: rather than tell the villages what they ought to do, he would ask the villages what they wanted to do, and see how he could help empower them to do it. The second village accepted his proposal. The first did not.
Ariyaratne brought a group of high school students to the village and brainstormed with the villagers what they wanted and how they might accomplish these goals. In the beginning, they had only labor and experience to share. But that gift was enough to change the course of several hundred lives.
… Today, what has become the Sarvodaya Shramadana Sanghamaya (the Movement for the Awakening of All through the Gift of Labor) has touched 10,000 villages, and has a network of over a thousand member villages and tens of thousands of volunteers. It has rarely exerted its grassroots political strength. But as one peaceworker, a Brit with Quaker Peace and Service, observed: “Sarvodaya is the sleeping giant. If it wakes up, things will change.”
John Robb’s blog, Global Guerrillas, analyzes the change in warfare from modern to post-modern. It has become less centralized, attacks the system itself, and evolves rapidly to meet changing circumstances. Robb calls this 4GW: Fourth Generation Warfare. He also suggests it is nearly impossible to defend against with traditional methods.
… Robb argues that, from a security standpoint, the only way to defend against 4GW is to create what he calls Resilient Communities. He envisions these communities in an economic/security sense:
“This conceptual model creates a set of new services that allow the smallest viable subset of social systems, the community (however you define it), to enjoy the fruits of globalization without being completely vulnerable to its excesses. These services are configured to provide the ability to survive an extended disconnection from the global grid in the following areas (an incomplete list): Energy. Food. Security (both active and passive). Communications. Transportation.”
Robb’s concept has much in common with Ariyaratne’s community awakening or Gandhi’s village councils.
(21 November 2008)
Suggested by Big Gav.
Big Green Brother
Katharine Mieszkowski, Mother Jones
… Custard is one of hundreds of thousands of employees partaking in an initiative Wal-Mart calls the Personal Sustainability Project, a.k.a. psp. Since 2007, all Wal-Mart employees in the US have been asked to take a simple, concrete step to benefit their health, their local community, or the earth. psp pledges, which can involve work or home life or both, have included vows to drive the speed limit (to save gas), clean up trash, quit smoking, switch to a reusable bottle, or turn off the tap when toothbrushing. Since last year, Wal-Mart claims, 45 percent of its workers in the United States have taken on a Personal Sustainability Project; workers receive no financial incentive, and many of the projects take place after hours, off the clock.
The project is the brainchild of former Sierra Club president Adam Werbach, who is now ceo of the Saatchi & Saatchi marketing agency’s green branch.
… So, is the psp one of the quickest ways to get large numbers of people to go green—or just another way for Wal-Mart to extend its tyranny over workers’ personal lives? The answer just might be both.
…The program, says Fishman, is an example of corporate America filling a role akin to churches and community organizations—and that’s not a bad thing in his view: “As long as it doesn’t drift in the direction of being some kind of compulsion, it’s wonderful.”
Then again, compulsion is a real concern. This is, after all, the same company that held mandatory meetings for managers and department heads this summer, warning that Democratic victories would hurt its business by bolstering unions.
Besides, critics argue, if Wal-Mart cares about making employees’ lives more sustainable, why not start with their paychecks—or its infamous labor practices, which have resulted in lawsuits over sex discrimination, anti-union tactics, mandatory overtime, and more?
… Wait. A Wal-Mart exec who grows her own produce? Isn’t that a form of retail heresy? It’s one of the ironic twists of the psp program that it invites employees to reduce use of some of the very products the company hawks, from cigarettes to gasoline—though of course, as Kearsley notes, Wal-Mart also sells bicycles, organics, and reusable shopping bags.
(November/December 2008 Issue)
The power of religion
Leonard Stern, Ottawa Citizen
Beginning nearly 50 years ago with Jane Jacobs, a whole industry of cultural critics has arisen to explain why our sense of community has eroded in the post-industrial age.
The most frequently cited culprit is the advance of technology. It used to be that people lived and died not far from where they were born. Then airplanes and highways made us mobile, and modern communications created the illusion that no matter how dispersed we were, we could still maintain connections.
No one stays in a single place for very long anymore. Just as staff turnover creates unstable companies, it’s hard to build community when half the neighbourhood is always either moving out or moving in.
… What’s interesting now is that an increasing number of people finally have had enough of this anonymity and isolation. Intellectuals from management maven Richard Florida to planning guru James Kunstler are talking about the importance of again creating “communities,” and the value of belonging to them.
It’s unpopular to say so, but this longing for community could foreshadow a renewal of religious sentiment; indeed, it may even be an expression of spiritual yearning.
… Psychologists have confirmed this effect in numerous experiments. In one study, cited in the UBC paper, researchers who secretly prompted thoughts of God in their subjects were able to produce acts of generosity between strangers.
… When anti-suburbia planners lament the anonymity and loneliness of postmodern life, they are lamenting the loss of meaning.
Religion is a dirty word in some quarters these days, but it might not be a bad idea to look at what faith-based communities, with shared values transcending geography and technology, and their ability to promote pro-social behaviour, have to offer.
(21 November 2008)
Energy: How low can you go?
John-Paul Flintoff, Sunday Times (UK)
To take the heat out of global warming we must take radical action, learning to live on half the energy we currently consume. John-Paul Flintoff tries the low-watt diet.
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Somewhere upstairs, my wife is sitting in bright light beside a warm radiator, sipping tea, flicking through glossy magazines as she blow-dries her hair, and consuming in 30 minutes about half the energy used by the typical Bangladeshi all day. And I’m trying to make up for that. I’m sitting in the dark. The heating is off. I’m wearing two jumpers, a hat and a scarf and a pair of fingerless gloves I improvised out of old socks that had gone at the ankle. I’m writing this on an ancient manual typewriter. It’s not easy. Unlike a computer, it doesn’t let you move blocks of text around, and there’s no word count. You can’t switch to the internet to look something up. It’s also bone-shakingly hard work, a bit like a workout at the gym.
But I’m enjoying myself. There is no junk e-mail. And I’m extremely happy to think of all the electricity I’m saving. Because recent calculations suggest that IT will very soon overtake aviation as a guzzler of energy. All these videos on YouTube and unread blogs take up space on servers that suck ever-increasing amounts from the grid. An avatar on the online game Second Life uses as much energy as the average Brazilian.
Then there are all the gadgets we can’t seem to live without. All the batteries that need recharging. In fact, it was the batteries going on my mouse that got me thinking about using this typewriter. Now I’m planning to de-escalate my digital life altogether. Out with the computer unless strictly necessary, in with the typewriter. Out with the Palm Pilot, in with the paper diary.
(23 November 2008)
