La Caixa Dels Meus Pensaments (The Thought Bank)

Happy Spring!

2010-03-28T18:59:00.015-04:00

I've been feeling pretty guilty for not writing so long. It's not quite that I wanted this blog to languish. Mostly just that I got distracted by somewhat less-important matters. This time around, I'm going to avoid making promises about consistent updating, but I do hope to write more often.

Okay, so to get right to it. My friend Carhenge (for the fantastically tacky Nebraska sculptural monument) has recently gotten into the swing of blogging. She's focusing on her fresh commitment to living car-free in a pedestrian-unfriendly city (our hometown of Omaha, Nebraska). Check out OmahaBePretty here.

Also! I just watched two very upbeat and invigorating videos, pep-talk style, and I wanted desperately to share them with you. (You can watch them in higher quality here at Eight Principles and here at Five Big Questions.) Welcome to 2010, brothers and sisters! Or, if you're more of a live-in-the-moment kind of person: Welcome to MARCH 28, 2010!

In Grave Danger of Falling Food, Part 5

2009-11-05T19:50:00.002-05:00

In Grave Danger of Falling Food, Part 4

2009-11-04T16:49:00.000-05:00

In Grave Danger of Falling Food, Part 3

2009-11-03T18:52:00.000-05:00

In Grave Danger of Falling Food, Part 2

2009-11-02T18:50:00.001-05:00

In Grave Danger of Falling Food, Part 1

2009-11-01T18:28:00.000-05:00

A Bit of Beauty: Installment #2

2009-10-25T14:35:00.002-04:00

As personal as academic writing should be!

"In Earth Muse: Feminism, Nature, and Art, Carol Bigwood defines home as 'a nomadic place, an unfinished place of variable historical and geographical boundaries, but a belonging-place nonetheless.' I can list the conscious reasons why Nebraska is now my belonging place. When I was four and five, my father worked at the CB&Q railroad shops in Havelock, Nebraska. Consequently, I began the first of twenty-some years of schooling at Hartley Elementary in Lincoln, Nebraska. Fresh out of college I was hired to teach English at Westside High School in Omaha. After three years of teaching, I returned to southeastern Iowa, where my son, Ian, was born (though he was conceived in Nebraska) and I attended graduate school in Western Illinois. Four years later, Ian and I moved to Lincoln. During the seven-year period that followed, I published my writing, married, bore a daughter, Meredith, earned a Ph.D., and divorced. And during that time, I became aware of the natural world in a way that I had not been before. Thus, the first and only landscape I've known both objectively and intimately is Nebraska's grasslands.

"Perhaps like monarch butterflies who migrate north from Mexican forests in relays each spring and summer, the females laying their eggs along the way, new generations replacing the old, I too was driven to this place by a memory older than me. When I returned to Lincoln for graduate school, I rented an apartment and later a house in the Russian Bottoms north of the train yards, a neighborhood settled by Germans from Russia in the latter years of the nineteenth century. Each evening I walked this neighborhood, learning its history from the buildings, the residents, and later, from books. Upon hearing my last name, some of the elderly residents asked if they could heft my long, hay-colored braid to see if it was as heavy as a mother's, grandmother's, sister's, wife's. An old man who lived across the alley often tried to converse with me in a language that resembled German. Several years later my brother showed me what he had collected about Knopp family history. He discovered that our paternal great-grandparents' first attempt at homemaking following their arrival in America in the 1890s was not in Burlington, Iowa, but in Hastings, Nebraska.

"These Knopps (pronounced Kuh-nop) already knew something of exile. When the German government demanded military service of their men in the eighteenth century, they moved to Russia at the invitation of Catherine the Great, a German. For over a century, my father's father's people lived in insular German communities and farmed the Ukrainian steppes during their sojourn until again military service was demanded of them, this time by the czar. My father's family did not leave soon enough. Knopp males were conscripted into the Russian army or the Russian navy. In Nebraska, my grandfather's people were neither Germans nor Russians, but Germans from Russia or 'Roosians.' A few years after their arrival in Hastings, Nebraska, years made difficult by a long, severe drought, my Knopp ancestors settled in Iowa, where rain was more plentiful and the Mississippi ran its banks most springs. There they were simply Germans.

"Perhaps other reasons that I neither know nor can name bind me to this place, not a place in which I sojourn, but a place to which I belong and that belongs to me."

- The Nature of Home, Lisa Knopp (pgs. 4-5)

A Bit of Beauty

2009-09-16T08:00:00.024-04:00

Passage of the Day

(Section) 36.

"Picture an island that's totally empty of life. It's just a mound of bare rock, surrounded by water.

Why would this island be empty? One possible reason: because it's volcanic and newborn, a mountain of lava lately rise from a vent on the ocean floor. Steaming and sterile, it might be a recent addition to the Hawaiian chain, forty or fifty miles southeast of Mauna Loa. It might be the island of Surtsey, freshly erected near Iceland in November of 1963. It might be one of the Galápagos group, which were young and uninhabited just a few million years ago.

There's another possibility: It might be Krakatau, an old island newly sterilized.

Krakatau is a shrine to island biogeographers because its ecosystem was obliterated and founded anew within scientific memory. This gave it the significance of a vast natural experiment on the dynamics of recolonization. Of course, Krakatau's recolonization wasn't so carefully controlled or so thoroughly monitored as experimentalism ideally demands. But since evolutionary biology and island biogeography are both descriptive sciences more than experimental ones, and since even descriptive scientists covet the hard validation that experimentalism seems to provide, the Krakatau case has been extremely valuable.

The cataclysm took place in a series of blasts during late August of 1883, throwing six cubic miles of igneous rubble into the sky above the Malay Archipelago. The crescendo came in a single stupendous explosion on the morning of August 27. They heard that one in Perth. The sky went dark, every barograph in the world winced, the sun appeared eerily filtered--looking green, then later blue--and thirty-six thousand people were killed, mainly by tidal waves hitting the coasts of Sumatra and Java. One wave was a hundred feet high, moving as fast as a train. Ships were pushed onto beaches in Ceylon, and a change in sea level reached Alaska. Fire engines were called out on false alarms as far away as New Haven and Poughkeepsie, and peculiar sunsets and other atmospheric effects went on for months afterward. the dust veil in the atmosphere cooled the planet, which didn't warm back to normal for five years.

When the smoke and the terror finally cleared at the site of Krakatau itself, thirty miles off the west coast of Java, a small crescent of cauterized rock remained where the island had been. That cauterized remnant was called Rakata. It was a truncation of the original name, K-rakata-u, a gentle etymological reminder of the ungentle geological truncation. Two other small islets, which stood nearby but hadn't been part of Krakatau itself, were also scorched. Although nobody can be certain, scientific opinion holds that not a single living thing on either Rakata or the other islets had survived the eruption--no plant, no animal, no egg, no seed, no spore. Nine months afterward, a French expedition to Rakata found nothing alive there except a single spider.

The spider of Rakata is emblematic of the fact that spiders in general are good dispersers. Devious beasts, they are wingless but still manage to fly. A thread of silk is paid out from the silk glands, it billows, it rises, it somehow attains purchase on an ascending column of air, and like a hang glider on a windy ridge, it lifts the spider away. This trick is dependent on forces that act at small scale. It wouldn't enable a full-grown tarantula to float through the skies of Arizona, thank God, but it does allow daintier spiders to go ballooning from one place to another. I've seen baby black widows, no bigger than poppy seeds, waft away on the thermals from a tensor lamp. The Rakata spider must have ridden a breeze out from Java.

The first botanical expedition, led by a Professor Treub, reached Rakata in 1886. Treub's team found mosses, blue-green algae, flowering plants, and eleven species of fern. The algae, consisting of slimy dark smears that coated the ground with a gelatinous matrix not unlike agar, had probably served as a welcoming mat for the spores of the ferns and the seeds of the flowering plants. The ferns were especially hearty and diverse. Among the flowering plants, four species belonged to the Compositae family (a group that includes dandelions, among other aggressive airborne dispersers) and two species were grasses. It's likely that the Compositae and the ferns had been delivered to Rakata by wind. There were also some species whose seeds would have washed in on the surf.

The arrival of other life forms was quick. By 1887 Rakata supported young trees as well as dense stands of grasses and an abundance of ferns. By 1889 it harbored not just spiders but butterflies, beetles, flies, and at least a single large monitor lizard of the speciesVaranus salvator, closely related to the Komodo dragon.

Varanus salvator, like the ferns and the Compositae, is notable for its ability to travel widely and colonize new habitat. It swims well, and on land it's a versatile opportunist, quick afoot, stealthy when it needs to be, capable of climbing and burrowing. Carnivorous but not fussy, it eats crabs, frogs, fish, rats, rotting meat, eggs, wild birds, and the occasional chicken from an unguarded coop. Flesh-eating animals tend to fare poorly on small islands and on new islands, where the pickings are slim, but V. salvator on Rakata enjoyed two advantages: It was a generalist, and it was a reptile. A generalist can eat less selectively, and a reptile can eat less often.

But even V. salvator depended on the presence of other animals, and those other animals depended on the presence of plants. By 1906, Rakata supported almost a hundred species of vascular plants, with a carpet of green on the summit and a grove of trees along the shore. The grove included the tamarisk-like species Casuarina equisetifolia, a good traveler across tropical oceans, as well as the coconut palm, Cocos nucifera, which turns up on virtually any balmy beach. Another beach-loving plant, the morning glory Ipomoea pes-caprae, had also appeared. Several years later there were fig trees and a few other species characteristic of secondary forest. The sun-loving ferns that had been so prevalent earlier were now retreating to high ground, forced out of the lowlands by the grasses and shade-casting trees.

In 1934, a half century after the new beginning, Rakata and its companion islets held 271 species of plants. One botanist has given us an informed guess as to how each of those species arrived. About forty percent came on the wind. Almost thirty percent floated across the sea. Most of the others had probably been carried by animals. They all possessed good dispersal ability, but the means were various.

Ferns do their traveling as spores, one-celled reproductive capsules that serve them in place of seeds. Spores are durable genetic packets, self-contained, resistant to drying, and tiny enough to be carried on a sneeze. With their spores riding the breezes in every direction, it's no wonder that ferns get around. Coconut palms achieve widespread dispersal because the coconut, at the opposite size extreme from a fern spore, is such a seaworthy seed. Some other plant species (such as the tropical vine Entada, also known as the sea bean) produce seeds with an air space between the embryo and the seed coat, suited for long-distance flotation. Darwin himself, during the years of work that led to The Origin of Species, did experiments to gauge the dispersal ability of various plant species. He put seeds, fruits, and sections of dried stems into seawater to see which species would float for how long and whether the seeds would retain their viability afterward. "To my surprise I found that out of 87 kinds, 64 germinated after an immersion of 28 days, and a few survived an immersion of 137 days." He also learned (and reported, in The Origin, with his usual half-barmy attention to detail) that ripe hazelnuts sank immediately and that asparagus floated much better if the plant was first dried.

The colonization of a new island isn't simply a matter of getting there. Dispersal is just the first of two crucial steps, the second being what ecologists call establishment. This distinction is especially germane for creatures dependent on sexual reproduction. Having hit the beach safely, a spider or monitor lizard still faces the problem of establishing a self-sustaining population. It needs to find food, protection, and (unless it's a pregnant female) a mate, all of which demand both adaptability and luck. If dispersal is difficult, establishment is difficulty squared. Among vertebrate animals, a reptile has the advantage of a relatively starvation-tolerant metabolism. And some reptile species (the gecko Lepidodactylus lugubris, for instance, widely distributed among small islands in the western Pacific) have even picked up the trick of parthenogenesis--single parenting taken to its logical ultimate. Parthenogenesis obviates the problem of finding a mate on every new island where a solitary pioneer might arrive.

Another mode of dispersal for terrestrial creatures is accidental transport on natural flotsam. The vehicle can be an old log, a newly uprooted tree, even a tangled mat of branches and vines washed out to sea from the mouth of a river or blown offshore by hurricane winds. Such flotsam can carry a colony of termites, an orchid bulb, a clutch of gecko eggs, a snake, maybe even a terrified rat. If the flotsam eventually washes ashore on some other coastline, the passengers have achieved dispersal. One biologist has called this sweepstakes dispersal, because the odds against success are so high. Over the great reaches of geological time, though, it seems to have happened often.

In rare cases the flotsam may even be massive and durable enough to support growing plants. A biogeographer named Elwood Zimmerman has collected testimony about 'floating islands' of vegetation washed out to sea and adrift in the blue wilderness between Sulawesi (Wallace knew it as Celebes) and Borneo. 'These mats of vegetation were lush and green, and palm trees of 20 to 30 feet high stood erect on floating masses. A survey of these rafts probably would reveal that numerous plants and animals were riding them.' Wallace himself, in Island Life, reported sightings of floating islands among the Moluccas. He added that, in the Philippines,

similar rafts with trees growing on them have been seen after
hurricanes; and it is easy to understand how, if the sea
were tolerably calm, such a raft might be carried along by a
current, aided by the wind acting on the trees, till after a
passage of several weeks it might arrive safely on the shores
of some land hundreds of miles away from its starting
point. Such small animals as squirrels and field-mice might
have been carried away on the trees which formed part of
such a raft, and might thus colonise a new island; though,
as it would require a pair of the same species to be thus
conveyed at the same time, such accidents would not doubt
be rare.

Occasionally there is even eyewitness evidence of animal transport. Wallace went on to mention the case of a large boa constrictor that rafted its way to the island of Saint Vincent in the West Indies, almost two hundred miles off the South American coast. The snake arrived 'twisted round the trunk of a cedar tree, and was so little injured by its voyage that it captured some sheep before it was killed'--an instance of successful dispersal followed by failed establishment.

And sometimes the natural flotsam might even be mineral, not vegetable--which brings us back to Krakatau. Among the various types of geological debris ejected during the explosions was pumice, a lightweight and sponge-structured volcanic glass. In its frothier form, pumice will float, and rafts of the stuff littered southern seas for as long as two years after the Krakatau eruption. Some of those pumice rafts drifted together into jams, clogging inlets on the coast of Sumatra; some washed ashore in South Africa, five thousand miles to the west; some floated eastward beyond Guam. One traveler described the concentration of floating pumice offshore from Java, with individual lumps clustered together over acres of ocean, each lump as big as a sack of coal. Another man, a ship's captain named Charles Reeves who encountered pumice on the Indian Ocean, lowered a boat for a closer look. 'It was curious and interesting to note how it had bee utilized by animals and low types of life as habitations and breeding places,' he reported. 'There were creeping thing innumerable on each piece.' Although Reeves confessed himself insufficiently learned to list them all by name, he did notice crabs and barnacles, and he saw small fish gathered underneath for feeding. Obviously the crabs, barnacles, and other 'low types of life' had climbed aboard after these lumps of ballistic pumice achieved splashdown; seeds, eggs, and adults of various terrestrial creatures had no doubt gotten onto them too, carried short distances by wind or wing or else picked up when the rafts made passing contact with a shoreline. A modern study of the Krakatau event suggests that similar eruptions over the centuries, tossing out huge quantities of floating pumice, have been important factors in the dispersal of species.

A more obvious mode of dispersal is long-distance flying. But even this isn't so straightforward as it might seem. Many species of bird and insect are reluctant to cross even modest stretches of sea. They will fly anywhere in a forest, but they won't commit themselves offshore. In the Solomon archipelago east of New Guinea, for instance, three species and several subspecies of white-eye (the genus is Zosterops) remain isolated from one another on closely neighboring islands. Likewise on Salawati and Batanta, two small islands off the western tip of New Guinea--they stand less than two miles apart, but the gap seems to have been wide enough to forestall the dispersal of seventeen bird species from one to the other. The gap between mainland New Guinea and the large island of New Britain is somewhat wider, forty-five miles. That has been distance enough to keep about 180 species of New Guinea birds from colonizing New Britain. And there's the case of Bali and Lombok, where Wallace noticed that some bird species had made the short crossing while many others had not.

It's not simply that the strong-flying species travel and the weak-flying species remain sedentary. Ecological or behavioral factors are also involved. Sea birds such as albatrosses, shearwaters, frigate birds, and pelicans make long ocean journeys, of course; since they can soar effortlessly for miles and rest on the water's surface, those species aren't much dependent on terra firma. Among land birds it's a trickier matter. Some species and groups of species are more inclined than others toward reckless or accidental ocean transits. High on the list of good travelers is the pigeon family.

The typical pigeon is a slightly plump bird with a small head and strong wings, adapted to a diet of seeds and fruit, for which it might be accustomed to make seasonal migrations. Those traits seems to predispose it toward transoceanic journeys. True pigeons and pigeon descendants are disproportionately well represented on some of the most remote islands. Sâo Thomé, a small nub of land offshore from West Africa, supports five species of pigeon. Anjouan, in the Indian Ocean north of Madagascar, also claims five different pigeons. Samoa has the tooth-billed pigeon and the white-throated pigeon. Palau has the Nicobar pigeon and the Palau ground-dove. New Guinea and its surrounding islands harbor forty-five pigeon species, roughly one-sixth of the world's total. And the Mascarene Islands have known their own generous share of pigeons and pigeon-like birds, among which the dodo is only the most famous. On Mauritius, a beautiful red-white-and-blue creature called the pigeon Hollandais (Alectroenas nitidissima) had followed the dodo into extinction by about 1835, and the pink pigeon (Nesoenas mayeri) is in jeopardy of extinction at this moment. The other Mascarenes,Réunion and Rodrigues, each harbored a large, flightless species of solitaire (Ornithaptera solitaria on Réunion, Pezophaps solitaria on Rodrigues) that, like the dodo, had pigeon affinities.

What's unusual about this roster of endemic pigeons is not just the breadth of dispersal but the breadth of diversity. The pigeon ancestors traveled commonly enough to colonize many islands--but they traveled rarely enough that, once they had colonized, they were likely to be sufficiently isolated for evolutionary divergence. In many cases, the divergence entailed loss of their ability to disperse.

The dodo itself stands as the best emblem of this general truth--that insular evolution often involves transforming an adventurous, high-flying ancestor species into a grounded descendant, no longer capable of going anywhere but extinct. It's our reminder that insular evolution, for all its wondrousness, tends to be a one-way tunnel toward doom.

- David Quammen,The Song of the Dodo:
Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction (pgs. 141-147)

Tribe, Tribe, Tribe

2009-09-15T21:22:00.016-04:00

(To the tune of "Dream, Dream, Dream"...)

I have a slight problem with my chosen life's work. It does not hold up very well; in fact, it posits itself as rather frail. I fear my rallying cries falling prey to grave misinterpretation (since I myself get lost in strange loopholes--more like strangleholds!--of extreme conservatism with it often enough). I also feel queasy about the assumptions written into the basic vocabulary itself, held together by nearly interminable threads in the etymologies stretching back thousands of years. Not to mention queasiness over the proliferation of interpretations and co-opt-ings of such a critical, central word as "tribe"!

Last month, I finished reading the intriguing sociological creative nonfiction called Urban Tribes, written several years ago by Ethan Watters (Check out the Urban Tribes website!). I quite enjoyed the two-hundred page work, but there were some rather unsettling aspects to the text, as well. I felt disappointed that Watters did not go further with the tribal metaphor he drew. I thought he did an exceptional job illustrating how groups of relatively well-to-do young urbanites are banding together and marrying later than ever before (what he calls the demographic of the "never-marrieds," apparently an official U.S. Census Bureau term). Why would they put off marriage; what's so great about singlehood? (I think I'll get into this later since there is just so much to say about Watters's work.) Anyway, Watters has a very specific picture of what he means by urban tribe. For several years before I'd even heard of the book's existence, I had been advocating for urban tribes, dating back to 2006, when I moved back home with very pressing intentions of pursuing neo-tribalism in a city environment (more on these visions later, too!). Watters's urban tribes, however, are very constricted. They span the post-college years into the early-forties but sometimes longer, depending on the eventual marrying age of certain late-blooming individuals. And then they're done. For perhaps a twenty-year interval of their lives, these tribes coalesce, and then, just as quickly as they came together, they disband and disintegrate, fall apart, dissolve back into the nuclear family, or at least married couple, units that are the American norm. This, then, is not a true tribe, the sort of unit that is supposed to last, to support itself in perpetuity for generations.

Afterwards, I finally got around to watching one of Seth Godin's TED talks, entitled, "Why Tribes, Not Money or Factories, Will Change the World" (Great title; apparently misleading!). He uses tribe in a very loose way, as a stringy image of group structuring to inspire leadership by massive social networks of strongly and not-so-strongly connected individuals, tribes in this sense being the main force behind mass movements and social change, even programmatic activism, precisely the kind of thing to which changed vision in Quinn's work stands in stark contrast.

As I just stated (somewhat prematurely, according to my intended outline, it seems!), Daniel Quinn's use of the tribe concept, under the banner of Neo-Tribalism, is rather different. It follows more closely what most students educated in public school systems and elsewhere in the information-saturated "omniverse" have encountered about famous tribes such as the Navajo, the Iroquois, the Kung!-san, the Aborigines, the Bedouin, etc., etc.. It mimics in meaning the same perpetuation pattern and unique cultural elements that people tend to expect the term "tribe" to carry. One problem, however -- these days, Neo-Tribalism, seemingly embedded with
the component of "tribalism," tends to get confused with the very contrasting and contested realms of that movement. See this article on "The African Paradox: The Tribalist Implications of the Colonial Legacy" for some of the key themes in this strange ideology, pitting tribal sovereignty against the struggle to industrialize and turn human-scale cultures into just more satellites of an already monstrous mega-culture, using a spiky distancing-from-the-legacy-of-colonialism strategy for inspiring a virulent strain of African nationalism(s).

Beyond this, the etymology of tribe, compliments of the Oxford English Dictionary, is absolutely wrapped up in agriculture-based cosmopolitanism. See below:

"[In earliest form, ME. tribu, a. OF. tribu, Sp., Pg. tribu, It. tribù, tribo, a. L. tribus (u-stem); but as the OF. has not been found in the sing. before 14th c. the ME. tribuz of 1250 may directly represent L. tribs pl. The later tribe may have been f. L. tribus on the usual pattern of derivatives from L. ns. in -us.

L. tribus is usually explained from tri- three and the verbal root bhu, bu, fu to be. It is thought by some to be cognate with Welsh tref town or inhabited place.

The earliest known application of tribus was to the three divisions of the early people of Rome (attributed by some to the separate Latin, Sabine, and Etruscan elements); thence it was transferred to render the Greek , and so to the Greek application of the latter to the tribes of Israel. This, from its biblical use, was the earliest use in English, the original Roman use not appearing till the 16th c.]"

As such, I wonder if it would really be so strange a development if I had to craft a new vocabulary to represent the aims of the Neo-Tribalist movement? I have some scribblings, as well as some suggestions on new thinking routes or thoroughfares from my thesis advisor, on how this might be done. I fear it will be impossible to accomplish, as just about every potential word that presents itself is also intricately linked to our culture's Cyclop-tic history by way of etymology. Meh. Thoughts?

P.S.: Dear reader, yes, I intend to return with a vengeance. End-of-summer, beginning-of-school-year lull has faded, and I want to be blogging every day. Also, my good friend pointed me to this spectacular blog post about ending the year with a bang, which challenge I very much intend to embrace with the slightly-less-than-a-third-of-a-year remaining. Would you care to join me? :D

Ecovillage

2009-08-02T11:08:00.004-04:00

Ecovillage.

(a beginning paragraph, in draft form, excerpt length)

Q: What’s wrong with some of the best places to live around the world in our culture?

A: They are not affordable.

Ithaca’s elegant cohousing neighborhoods and Boston’s cohousing communities (by virtue of being in an expensive city, as is perhaps the same for Ithaca) cost $200,000 or so for a space, which is about the same as the cost of a McMansion or simply typical suburban house or downtown condo in an average-sized, average-cost city like Omaha, Nebraska. Lost Valley intentional community’s trial members must pay $500 a month to live there, lured there by the possibility of getting work supposedly in 20-miles-distant Eugene, Oregon, even in the highly probable event that their membership will never become established, official, permanent, complete. All to live in a small co-housing apartment, log cabin shack, or gorgeous yurt with loft, perhaps a small mobile home.

The main people who can afford these sorts of arrangements are middle-aged, and predominantly white. Where a growing population of dispossessed, dissatisfied youngsters and just-scraping-by families (creatively frugal out of necessity), could be the nascent, ascendant, fastest growing group of interested individuals in the concept of sustainable community living (though not exactly in the New Age-ism strangely/oddly common to intentional communities, or the isolation of ecovillage living, with ecovillages often situated in rural areas just a stretch too far from the nearest big town), they have no real place in it, because they do not meet the income threshold for these communities. To my knowledge, there is no standard safety net available from the villages, no available arrangements to live in these communities at a reduced cost when personal budgets do not permit otherwise. I imagine if anyone does come up with a compromise, it only happens with a lot of pleading and bargaining, striking the juiciest deal. It is a very unfortunate state of affairs.

Thesis Check-In #1

2009-08-01T21:03:00.010-04:00

August has arrived. Oh god. Time to freak out.

I have wasted a lot of time this summer in hedonistic folly -- organizing my music collection and downloading new gems with Zune, getting lost in Google Reader (with the fantastic ease it allows for stocking up on information overload!), uploading and rearranging photos, doing small creative tasks, sleeping long hours, and otherwise avoiding the big scary things that do absolutely need to get done. This is supposed to be a catch-up summer, a thesising summer, a productivity summer. And now I'm down to a third of it. Gosh darn it, I went and shot myself in the foot again!

This afternoon, I took my thesis binder out to my little haven in the backyard and reread my thesis self-evaluation, proposed second semester schedule, and drafts. I have two common reactions to my old writing. When I read the stuff, some of it completely disgusts me. Yet I also look at some of that forgotten writing and feel impressed by it, impressed in a way reserved for others' writing, new and unfamiliar (having written some of it in a flash, no wonder that I end up having as little familiarity with it as the next person).

I had planned when I started the thesis process at the beginning of the year (late January, immediately after my return from Senegal) to put up what I conceptualized as "essay seeds" on a routine schedule, with the idea that I would then, over the summer, use any feedback I had elicited to edit them into second drafts, a little less rough. That didn't exactly transpire.

Because I have so much I care about, the essay framework for my thesis seemed as though it would give me the necessary room to cover a tremendous wealth of information. But then I actually started the process. It is even more brutal than I could have imagined, dreading it for all the preceding years, knowing that my words would wind up frozen in the library for years after my senior year had ended. I wanted to write a thesis I could take pride in, that I would not regret for years afterward. But dang, what a treacherous journey! I thought I could transform caring about almost everything into a workable thesis, but it turns out caring about so much can be caring about too much, when you have a finite amount of text and when you want to share the basic importance of your work with a reader (or three, or five) with a Ph.D.. You have to whittle away to the most important thoughts you want them to see. Yup, it's an aggravating mind-game.

I thought I would have a mix of essay lengths, some as short as a page like those of Daniel Quinn in Beyond Civilization, some medium length like those of the famous essayists (Montaigne, Eric Hoffer, Lewis Thomas), some full-out almost chapter-length. Each short essay I intended was deceptively so. I cannot, for the life of me, predict how long a project will take (in time or in words!). This has been re-affirmed through the thesis and in other ways throughout this last year. Every little thing I wanted to do in each essay would expand into a whole little world of its own, with its own individualized galactic bibliography. Either I now have to break those seemingly short essays down into even smaller chunks, actually bite-sized this time, or I have to modify the totalizing scope of the work.

I came up with such a half-trimmed rubric a couple weeks ago, based on the ghastly idea, "If I only wrote ten essays, what would those essays be?" Ten essays, ten chapters, same thing, right? Grrr...I will no longer have a unique approach if I go with my thesis advisor's idea of thinking of my thesis as chaptered, like every other cut-and-dried social science thesis (Perhaps his idea of a chapter isn't as big as I think it is; I did see a thesis with sections, two to four pages long). Ten essays ten pages each. If I finish the drafts for most of them before January, I can spend most of my second thesis semester polishing them up into that something I can take pride in, that something I can appreciate, something I can bear to have out in public, in its permanent place in the school library. But if I want to do that, I have to get to work, after all of that foolish dawdling.

I'm thinking about trying to get an introduction drafted this week, even though the whole has hardly come together. After all, this is one of my advisor's suggestions, that I start with an introduction that explains my rationale for bringing such disparate topics together. The thing is, for me, it all ties together without feeling initially disjointed, and it frustrates me that I have to divide up into pieces something that makes sense holistically, only to show how I stitched it all back together. Well, I didn't. There was no "back together" necessary. No stitching involved. Our relationship to food does not exist in some separate realm from our relationship to spirit, nor does our society's style of governance function in some kind of suspended plane from our value system or from our manners of resource use. But I have to forego the intuitive interconnections of things to cater to the interests of the disciplinary system of Academia. I truly do not understand why students in traditional colleges are not all trained to be fiercely interdisciplinary scholars (to the extent that we wouldn't even have the desire or ability to make sense of the concept of interdisciplinarity). It's really rage-inducing how microscopically-focused we've allowed ourselves to become. Alas, as much as I roil at this state of affairs, I too have fallen prey to the ever-increasing-fragmentation syndrome. Gah.

I could ramble my disgruntled thesis reactions for some time. But the important thing is that I get to writing again. Building on what I've learned about how to keep up a routine (with blogging, at least!), I will devote my main blogging energies to writing thesis content, great and small, and posting it here throughout August. I will have to reconcile myself to the fact that, if I want certain essays (explorations on a theme or question) to be as short as a book page, only a couple paragraphs long, then short writing (only a paragraph or two) will have to become ordinary (and if so, all the better, for this will deflate the pressure of writing; if I write constantly, in little portions, I will rarely have to confront the behemoth of a massive assignment). I will write other posts to diversify the offerings this month on the blog (though the thesis itself covers quite a gamut -- ecovillages, neo-tribalism, permaculture, animism, social theory, and on and on), just in case my draft work gets too caught up in one subject (Oh so very unlikely! C'mon, are we even talking about me anymore? Sheesh!). In the off chance, then. The highly unlikely off chance.

What is very obvious to me, and amazing, too, looking back on my years, my work, my interactions, is how much I've failed to chart any sort of progression. I just teeter all over the place, dabbling in new favorite subjects, connecting new puzzle pieces to the more and more unusual whole, starting and stopping new endeavors, never quite catching on to the how, the mechanics of the mystery surrounding how other people ever manage to be organized, disciplined, productive, and overall on top of things. In this context, my intentions for sharing my thesis check-ins, posting thesis drafts (or essay seeds), and adding content regularly to the blog (especially as I make the transition back into semester insanity) are all ways in which I am trying to get the hang of consistency, the most elusive but also the most essential of my summer goals.

Off to write out a loose posting schedule! Happy first night of August!

"We Are Thrown Together with a Sprinkling of Stardust"

2009-07-31T01:36:00.030-04:00

Good morning, world!

Today I bring you a blog post from the other end of the day, the beginning, to suitably beckon the fortuitous morning wonders tucked inside this day's dispatch.

Following closely on the heels of Kid Week, it feels appropriate that I should share some of Jostein Gaarder's remarkable work, intertwining lessons that introduce the basics of philosophy with suspenseful mystery stories. His best novels, Sophie's World and The Solitaire Mystery, are perfect gifts for children from eight on up, sharing, in the process, love of wisdom, love of learning, reading, love of story, love of language, literature.

I read about Sophie when I was straddling the ages of fourteen and fifteen, and then I followed up by reading about Hans Thomas when I was sixteen. I have been trying to finish Maya since seventeen. Even though that story has all the right elements that make his other stories work (and also tugs at me with its scenes staged in Barcelona!), I just couldn't get past the annoying presumptive attitude of the characters in regards to human evolution and human intellectual capacities (They're quite keen on putting people on a throne for their incidental part in bringing the universe consciousness of itself), as well as the droning scenes, pitting the protagonist against a gecko or lizard, which scenes just dragged on and on and on.

In any case, I still adore his writing. Having prodded myself to reopen his books, I feel as though I've been missing something critical, depriving myself, all this time by not reading these stories over again every few months, keeping their best-kept secrets always close by, much the same way I feel about a handful of other authors (a list which now includes Susan Glaspell, Eric Hoffer, Italo Calvino, Daniel Quinn, and Derrick Jensen).

The sad, disillusioned words of the father's character in The Solitaire Mystery make me think first that this trick shouldn't be so hard, but then, with fatigue pressing its fingers over my eyes and shoulders and neck muscles, I remember how difficult it really is to get out of bed in the morning, the fretting about all I have yet to accomplish draped heavily over my body, the assumption already made that this leaden feeling is normal and routine, the initial spark that proclaims, "Look out! This is mystery! This is flammable!," all but forgotten--this spark has usually faded to cold by the time I open my eyes. But, as I mentioned when I recalled I wanted to share this passage with you, it is never too late or never too much of a shock to splash some cold water on one's face and startle oneself into an alert, fully conscious state.

I challenge myself, having re-examined these particular scenes, to live that daily adventure-mystery and to wake up with a bang. Not too forcefully, I challenge you to do the same, as well.

...

From Jostein Gaarder's The Solitaire Mystery (translated by
Sarah Jane Hails; pgs. 153-156 and 167-168):

"After the oracle had assured us we would meet Mama in Athens, we walked further up through the temple site and found an old theatre, which had room for five thousand spectators. From the top of the theatre we looked out over the temple site and right down to the bottom of the valley.

On the way down Dad said, 'There is still something I haven't told you about the Delphic Oracle, Hans Thomas. You know, this place is of great interest to philosophers like us.'

We sat down on some temple remains. It was strange to think they were a couple of thousand years old.

'Do you remember Socrates?' he began.

'Not really,' I had to admit. 'But he was a Greek philosopher.'

'That's right. And first of all I'm going to tell you what the word "philosopher" means...'

I knew this was the beginning of a mini-lecture, and honestly I thought it was a bit much, because the sweat was pouring off my face under the burning sun.

'"Philosopher" means one who seeks wisdom. This does not mean a philosopher is particularly wise, however. Do you understand the difference?'

I nodded.

'The first person to live up to this was Socrates. He walked around the market square in Athens talking to people, but he never instructed them. On the contrary - he spoke to people he met in order to learn something himself. Because "the trees in the country cannot teach me anything," he said. But he was rather disappointed to discover that the people who liked to say they knew a lot really knew nothing at all. They might be able to tell him the day's price of wine and olive oil, but they didn't know anything considerable about life. Socrates readily said himself that he knew only one thing - and that was that he knew nothing.'

'He wasn't very wise, then,' I objected.

'Don't be so hasty,' Dad said sternly. 'If two people haven't a clue about something but one of them gives the impression of knowing a lot, who do you think is the wisest?'

I had to say that the wisest one was the one who didn't give the impression of knowing more than he did.

'So you've got the point. This is exactly what made Socrates a philosopher. He thought it was downright annoying that he didn't know more about life and the world. He felt completely out of it.'

I nodded again.

'And then an Athenian went to the Delphic Oracle and asked Apollo who the wisest man in Athens was. The oracle's answer was Socrates. When Socrates heard this, he was, to put it mildly, rather surprised, because he really thought he didn't know much at all. But after he visited those who were supposed to be wiser than he and asked them a few intelligent questions, he found that the oracle was right. The difference between Socrates and all the others was that the others were satisfied with the little they knew, although they didn't know any more than Socrates. And people who are satisfied with what they know can never be philosophers.'

I thought the story had a point, but Dad didn't stop there. He gestured towards all the tourists swarming out of the tour buses far below and crawling like a fat trail of ants up through the temple site.

'If there is one person among all those who regularly experiences the world as something full of adventure and mystery...'

He now took a deep breath before he continued.

'You can see thousands of people down there, Hans Thomas. I mean, if just one of them experiences life as a crazy adventure - and I mean that he, or she, experiences this every single day...'

'What about it?' I asked now, because again he had stopped in the middle of a sentence.

'Then he or she is a joker in a pack of cards.'

'Do you think there's a joker like that here?

A look of despair now crossed his face. 'Nope!' he said. 'Of course I can't be sure, because there are only a few jokers, but the chance is infinitesimal.'

'What about yourself? Do you experience life as a fairy tale every single day?'

'Yes, I do!'

He was so forthright with his answer I didn't dare argue with him.

'Every single morning I wake with a bang,' he said. 'It's as though the fact that I am alive is injected into me; I am a character in a fairy tale, bursting with life. For who are we, Hans Thomas? Can you tell me that? We are thrown together with a sprinkling of stardust. But what's that? Where the hell does this world come from?'

'Haven't a clue,' I replied, and at that moment I felt just as much out of it as Socrates had.

'Then it sometimes pops up in the evening, ' he continued. 'I am a person living right now, I think to myself. And I'll never return.'

'You live a tough life, then,' I said.

'Tough, yes, but incredibly exciting. I don't need to visit cold castles to go on a ghost hunt. I am a ghost myself.'

'And you worry when your son sees a little ghost outside the cabin window.'

I don't know why I mentioned that, but I thought I had to remind him of what he'd said on the boat the night before.

He just laughed. 'You can handle it,' he replied.

The last thing Dad said about the oracle was that the old Greeks had engraved an inscription into the temple here. It said: 'Know thyself.'

'But that's easier said than done,' he added, mostly to himself."

...

"As usual I got up before Dad, but it wasn't long before his muscles began to twitch.

I decided to see whether it was true that he woke up every single morning with a bang, as he had claimed the day before.

I concluded that he was right, because when he opened his eyes, he really did look pretty startled. He could just as well have woken up in a totally different place - in India, for example, or on a little planet in another galaxy.

'You are a living person,' I said, 'At this moment you are in Delphi. It is a place on earth, which is a living planet at present orbiting a star in the Milky Way. It takes 365 days for this planet to circle this star.'

He stared at me intently, as though his eyes had to adjust to the change from dreamland to the bright reality outside.

'Thanks for the clarification,' he said. 'I normally have to work all that out for myself before I climb out of bed.'

He got up and walked across the room.

'Maybe you should whisper some words of truth like that in my ear every morning, Hans Thomas. It would certainly get me into the bathroom more quickly.'"

...

Senegal Reflections, Half a Year Later

2009-07-30T12:35:00.030-04:00

The following writings restate verbatim my responses to a mid-year survey about the study abroad program through which I went to Senegal in late December of 2008 and stayed through early January of 2009 (What a fun way to welcome in the New Year, hours ahead of everyone back home, especially with the refreshing, warm climate! -- though actually I was recuperating from a strange ailment while all the other students were celebrating the holiday, an ailment which our professor paranoidally feared signaled cerebral malaria) to study ecovillages, microcredit, and sustainable international development. I had a partly-awkward experience because of several holes in the structure of the course and activities, but overall, I had a great time and had a very valuable, memorable, enriching experience. I wrote about it while I was there, occasionally spoke of it or reflected on it in the intervening months, and now it seems I should get to writing about it again. So much came to my attention in the three weeks I spent there in West Africa that I can't possibly have done justice to it in my record of events. At last, I have a beginning to more reflection, tempered and distanced to a much better degree than it could have been while I was mired in the immediacy of it all:

9. What do you feel you got out of your experience? How have your thoughts about this evolved in the past six months?

Well, I got to experience a predominantly Muslim country, keeping what's left of three semesters of Arabic training from slipping away.

I got to see how inefficient micro-lending practices can be around the world and got to think up other ways of running things. From something Marian said to me about international sustainable development, I started thinking a lot about the pitfalls of both facilitating sustainable development, presumptively, at a distance, without concern for the villagers' needs, as well as of complete villager-only participation (which falls into the trap of "tyranny of the majority," and which I actually experienced, to my dismay, on my village visits, having been told I would have something to contribute; it taught me a lot about humility and about accepting being irrelevant to a process, the results of which in the future won't exactly affect me anyway).

I also learned a bit of French, a bit about Senegalese history and politics, and experienced first-hand a world in which feminism, as we think of it in the West, has had little influence (though women are always lauded as the hardest workers, this also means that the men give themselves an excuse to do less and lump more work on the women). I was able to examine a lot of the assumptions about mandatory schooling, and I constantly witnessed misconceptions of the United States. Dining was completely different, albeit exciting, as was navigating the various bathroom facilities. I think I could go on for a while, but the point is I gained a great deal of insight and unique experiences from the course abroad.

My thinking about all this evolved from utter disillusionment, homesickness and then joy to be back in the States, and disappointment with the organization of the course, content, and student interactions, to acceptance of what actually happened during the course (as contrasted with what I'd expected to happen, though that itself was fuzzy) and an appreciation overall for the experience I gained in Senegal. It re-invigorated my motivation to completely invalidate the typical world-changing processes (ineffective and belligerent activism, an environment-only focus strangely dismissive of humans in complicated situations, unacknowledged and faulty assumptions) by different means (focusing on tribes--extant, re-emerging, and emerging--, the science and anthropology of what has actually been sustainable behavior through time, political ecology, social justice, un-oppressive education and a change of vision, and a saner way of raising children and a saner way of living in general).

I also went and read Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter because I was curious about literature from Senegal accessible in English and about what her take on the woman's role in Senegalese society would be (I was not at all disappointed by this wonderful book - many recommendations for this to be used in the course, for the Senegalese and the Americans to discuss together, beyond making posters of cultural stereotypes).

10. Looking back now, what do you feel are important things to share with prospective/current students on this program?

"You will get much more out of this particular program if you expect it to be more of an anthropology course about experiencing the day-to-day differences in a culture partially different from our own. Ecovillages in Senegal pretty much mean 'traditional villages' and even 'suburbs that just twenty years ago used to be villages,' with a small handful of people trying to balance the lust for development, in the style of the highly-industrialized countries, with environmental concerns. As for micro-lending, you will only be disappointed by how the process actually only seems to award one project at a time and leave other important projects in the dust, or, at best, incomplete. This disappointment means you will be doubly disappointed by how it feels that all your work in meetings and on loan applications is completely useless and pointless, especially when the Senegalese students insist on doing almost everything without you. You will not have a real say in the meetings, you will not be able to communicate your suggestions about environmental consciousness such that it at all affects the project to which the loan application applies, and you will not be allowed to defend the loan to a committee because you speak English in a French-speaking country, though you will at least learn what the lines on the loan application ask for."

11. What three issues are most important in your life right now?

1. Creating a healthy living situation
2. Living simply
3. Gaining skills/knowledge

I would have chosen such different responses if they didn't limit the choices to a pre-programmed list!

16. Please comment on how you think we could make this survey better.

As I think I said when I completed the survey before the course (did not have a chance to complete it immediately after the course, in the bustle of leaving and upon returning to the states, diving into Spring semester classes right away), the bubble portion asks really stilted questions, to which, knowing the "agree" or "disagree" or "neutral" answer alone can't possibly explain what the person taking the survey is thinking and might be more effective if room for explanation was offered for some of the more conflicted questions. For me, I get really hung up on the questions that feel like they're coming from an unrealistic, utopia-centric mindset, such as "making the world a better place," which is a very poorly defined concept that denies how humans lived without difficulty for millions of years before the Agricultural Revolution catastrophe, and which sounds like it assumes that such a better place involves the complete lack of violence or change, which, as I said, is unrealistic, and rather silly/laughable. Likewise, questions referring to "nature," a "sustainable world," "foreign" and "exotic," etc. really get under my skin, and I tend to forfeit them as "don't agree or disagree" because the words (themselves implicated notions) get in the way of answering what the writer of the question likely intended. What is meant by sustainability? Why doesn't nature included people (I mean, yes, I'm concerned about ecosystem and habitat destruction, but I am also concerned about the destruction of healthy societal organizations and human relationships that accompanies such destruction - looking at nature holistically). Those kinds of things...I apologize if that's much too analytical and negative; those things just make me feel really queasy about the survey, making me want to know how it's used, why, etc..

The Quiltmaker's Gift

2009-07-29T19:26:00.022-04:00

To wrap up Kid's Week, which it seems I must do, much to my disappointment (What fun this has been, keeping me on my toes and keeping me mostly accountable - still a bit of slight back-dating, but I'm getting the hang of routine blogging!), I share with you one of the loveliest, gentlest, most cheering children's books in existence, The Quiltmaker's Gift!

Author Jeff Brumbeau tells one of the most gripping children's stories about giving, punctuated with gorgeous illustrations by artist Gail de Marcken.

Together with the similar themes of...

A Gift for the Christ Child, a book about a child growing up with mild depravity (After all, how much do you need to have enough? In other words, what constitutes "enough"?) in a South American country (Guatemala, I believe), who nevertheless passes what little he has to the Christ Child, perceived as having even less (which may very well be true for a congregation in South America - uy, church politics and finance!),

and

The Christmas Moccasins, Ray Buckley's illustration of the power of forgiveness, reconciliation, and a resilient giving spirit, a story which will throw you off kilter, destabilize your idea of an idyllic children's fable (Did you forget about the Brothers Grimm?), with its tale about a young boy and his aged grandmother who, on their walk home one winter's night, encounter a small band of rash, disaffected adolescents and suffer injuries from the violence of these shameless youths, which tale also serves as testament to the incredible power of unwavering love, compassion, care, and understanding (For how much introspection and insight does it take to see in another's brazen, blazing, blinded behavior a violence far deeper than that found in this individual alone, in his or her capacity for hatred and senseless impulsiveness, a violence that has slowly ignited such a one into this rage?),

...also books of sharing, the stark message of The Quiltmaker's Gift inspires gratitude and kindness. The story of generosity shines brighter with every delicate and different telling!

The Quiltmaker's Gift threw me with its social justice themes, most evident as the King explores a broader --poorer, but also fuller-- world outside his palace walls, slipping off another layer of superficiality until he has less than nothing and so has begun growing into a truer appreciation for the gift of life. A Gift for the Christ Child shook me with its simple story and stunning, devoted characters. Christmas Moccassins threw me with the extent to which the violence written into our culture did not escape the focused scope of a children's book, with its piercing telling of the realities of darkness. The accompanying illustrations to all of these stories transformed their already strong impression and mesmerizing radiance into sparkling beauties.

No doubt when you find yourself (or someone you know) lacking in vibrancy, joy, and confidence, or in overall invigoration, these giving stories will splash youthful spirit over you, like cold water solidifying a day, stunning with its spark of awareness, giving voice to the preciousness of life in a very visceral way, giving, giving, always giving, until one day, we give ourselves back, having not simply exhausted the gift but having also splintered off pieces of that gift along the way and passed them along to others by means of a quiet generosity (I find myself reminded, as often happens, of the way the father in Jostein Gaarder's The Solitaire Mystery always greets a new day, which approach I will now have to dig up for you to share the relevant passages!).

Join me tomorrow for my half-a-year-later assessment of my course on microfinance and ecovillages in Senegal, and later on, as well, for notes on the spectrum of sustainable lifestyles, the clamor for energy efficiency, recent developments on the genetic front, and the way to greet a day mentioned above.

More Ancient Television

2009-07-28T17:28:00.004-04:00

There are a lot of better presentations on the water cycle available, and I actually remember the friction episode from abc's old Saturday morning cartoon, Science Court, more than this water cycle trial, because I didn't know what friction was before I saw their amusing skating-rink illustration. In any case, as much as Science Court is made up of rough-draft-quality drawings, silly gags (watch for the defense lawyer's incident with the legal scales, the stenographer's never-exactly-typing stenography, and the awkward professor), and quirkiness that often enough falls flat (which explains the show's short-lived existence pretty well), it also explains basic concepts of the legal process and science to children in a unique way. I'm not sure how engaging it is across the board, but I know my aversion to the show's animation quality, which at the time surprised me (They were able to get away with that and put it on television, rather than going back to the drawing board?), actually got me to watch it out of a sickened curiosity and pick up a couple kernels of knowledge from it, as a result! I wish more of the episodes were available online because I would probably not have chosen this one to share otherwise. Alas, today we have this introduction to a potential "edutainment" (such a ridiculous word!) tool:

Top Ten

2009-07-27T22:42:00.035-04:00

A Top Ten of Educational Resources for Youngsters

10. Metropolitan Museum online

9. Exploratorium

8. The Anti-Coloring Book(s)

7. San Diego Zoo website

6. My Daddy is a Pretzel

5. Classical Music resources online:
Sphinx Kids , Classics for Kids ,
DSO Kids , Creative Kids

4. Hey Kids, You're Cookin' Now!:

A Global Awareness Cooking Adventure

3. Journey to Planet Earth

2. David Suzuki & Kids

(also, a promising Sustainable Education site)

1. Free the Children

_ _ _ _

Ayiti!

2009-07-26T15:00:00.012-04:00

Yesterday, I wrote about some games that help build financial savvy and geographic awareness. Well, what about a game that combines a bit of those things with social justice skills and planning prowess, and even teaches kids about what sorts of things are essential for health and well-being?

Introducing Ayiti! I absolutely adore this game, partly written by a group of great youngsters themselves.

You have to balance this Haitian family's monthly finances with their emotional and physical needs, the swing of the seasons, available work and education, and their altruistic endeavors to enhance the basic offerings in their town (through a library, night classes, a soccer field, UNICEF initiatives, and the like). It's a perfect holistic game to help kids (who live in countries affluent enough to offer access to internet games) understand one form of day-to-day life in less-affluent locales, while also nudging kids to consider their own life choices and the requirements of a healthy routine.

While looking for an image of the game, I read a blog post that said it's been called "the most depressing game ever," but I think it's still kid-suitable. Of course, it's a good project in itself to research the complex history of Haiti, from the independence won by Toussaint L'Ouverture to the political roller-coaster suffered by the country ever since (but especially in the past century), as well as explore the richness of artistic expression it has inspired (Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is Edwidge Danticat's powerful Krik? Krak!, along with her other works, the most recent of which is an autobiographical book, titled Brother, I'm Dying, but I also think of Alejo Carpentier's El Reino De Este Mundo, or The Kingdom of This World, translated in one recent edition by Harriet de Onís, not-quite-incidentally featuring an introduction by Danticat).

When I read Caryl Churchill's play Cloud Nine years ago, it had very much the feel of being set in Haiti, but of course it actually takes a cheeky, gender-bending, subversive look at British colonialism in Africa, which of course doesn't feel that, that different from Spanish colonialism in South America and elsewhere, Portuguese colonialism in Brasil, and French colonialism in places like Haiti. One of the most interesting things I learned about Lewis and Clark through Academic Decathlon's 2003-2004 SuperQuiz topic (Oh, the insanity of high school!) was that the loss of New World goods imported from Haiti to France prompted Napoleon to less grudgingly (and so, more readily) sell the Louisiana purchase and give away the bulk of France's claim to the Americas (Gosh, it sounds so obvious now! I mean, I can only think, "Of course France left! Without a tropical, and hence highly productive, country as a stronghold in the New World, why bother?"). I had an idea back then in 2004 to write a book of poems from the perspectives of all the politicians involved in the dealings, at the turn of the nineteenth century, because, after all, back then, it was not a sealed deal and people could still have imagined the United States as remaining always that Eastern sliver of the continent, a fraction of its current size, which would give me plenty of creative elbow-room to imagine the different courses America could have taken from that defining historical moment. As with most things I wish I could spend my time working on now, I've indefinitely postponed this fun, ambitious project.

Well, it looks as though I've strayed a bit from my initial raving about the game. ¡Hasta pronto!

Tough Love

2009-07-25T13:57:00.006-04:00

Can you call to mind the number of elementary school kids and middle school students you know, or have known, who have something against math, geography, economics, science, or otherwise "tough" subjects? The number shoots up into the stratosphere, doesn't it? Well, what can the well-meaning do to encourage love of these demonized subjects? Here you have some of my ideas:

Cool Math for Kids - This was big back in my day!

Learn about Personal Finance with DebtSki!

Investment Games: Option 1: UpDown, Option 2: Virtual Stock Exchange, Option 3: The Stock Market Game, and Option 4: YoungMoney

Test Your Map Know-How

A Great Variety of Geography Quizzes (including rivers, lakes, mountains, landmarks, etc.!)

Geosense, a Geography Game (competitive)

Geography Bee (10 questions a day)

Crayon Physics - Very addictive and overall wonderful! (I'm still researching other great science games around.)

Don't worry, I'm really hooked on this series so you'll see more links to games and resources here in the future! And remember, as I said at the outset, there's no harm in indulging in "child's play" when we're apparently supposed to be stuffy adults! Cheers!

Zen Buddhism for Kids

2009-07-24T23:25:00.043-04:00

Kid Week, Installment #2.

I had a conversation in the recent past with a friend, about a friend, in which it came to light that this mutual friend in our friend circle had become flustered with not only Buddhism, but all organized religion in toto, because of latent gender inequality, deeply woven into the fabric of these belief systems. I am not familiar with the specific problems with gender inequality in Zen Buddhism (I recall the problem has something to do with stoicism and militarism, as well as the combination thereof, tied up in the premises of Zen practice), but it certainly doesn't surprise me it would be there (I'm - short, of course, for "I am" - so failing at E-prime right now!). And there are, of course, lots of other reasons to get flustered by organized religion, its implicated relationship to oppressive power, perpetuating and replicating inequalities of all sorts through its hierarchical interstices of power and its many un-interrogated, unexploded, underlying assumptions.

In any case, on the surface, basic Zen Buddhist ideas can be very meaningful for children growing up in the frenetic industrialized culture common to America and Japan, Thailand and India. Perhaps it does not always manifest in its industrialized iteration, but obviously, any place where Buddhism is practiced, so is our culture. Simplicity, transcendence, rebirth, compassion, calm - these virtues and notions aren't unique to Buddhism, but depicted in simple allegories and vivid images, they provide an especial balm for frantic children growing up in a super-neurotic culture.

And so, some zen stories accessible online...

Zen Stories to tell your neighbors

101 Zen Stories

And in the category of children's books, here's a collected treasury of Zen Buddhist wisdom in art-book form, perfect for introducing the novice to a whole different way of approaching the world's beauty, its wondering elements, the fantastic speed of slowness, the joys of stillness, quiet, silence, emptiness, available from both the premier bookstore of the major world religions, Soul Desires, and your local independent bookstore. Happy travels and indulgences!

Zen Shorts,

Buddhist Animal Wisdom Stories,

Samsara Dog,

Zen Ties,

Three Questions,

The Sun in My Belly,

Tibet: Through the Red Box,

Peaceful Piggy Meditation,

Journey to the Heart,

and All the Way to Lhasa.

On the theme of how Zen can and does intersect with Christianity (visible in all these books, but especially on the children's book on centering prayer) ...The labyrinth from Chartres Cathedral meets a peaceful piggy (looking initially quite disgruntled)...

May calm and stillness fill your day!

Histeria! and the CommuNuts!

2009-07-23T17:40:00.012-04:00

Kid Week, Installment #1. HISTERIA!

Oh yes, this is a week to bring out the capitals, the big booming voices, the lack of inhibitions! (How many four year-old's do you know who have already gotten strangled by nit-picky social mores? That's what I thought!) We'll bring along our love of simply running around, screaming inanities at the top of our lungs, giggling, innocently kidding (half-intentional pun) around with our friends, throwing our bodies at the ground, with gigantic smiles crawling across our mouths, apple juice running down our chins!

[Heads up!: The Theme Song of Histeria, below, is flanked by some quick but annoying AOL-produced fluff. I don't know how else to describe it.]

Today, the Histeria! "histerians" tackle Marxist and Stalinist communism both. Now if only my Russian grandparents could understand the beauty of these cartoons! It really is amazing that the WB ever aired this nuanced, almost subversive (as in ridiculously tongue-in-cheek and quite clamorous), kids' show. It seems almost better cut out for an adult audience, but as you may have noted in my profile, I loved this short-lived show as a kid. Of course, I wasn't your typical ten year-old.

...Anyway, they (my grandparents) can no longer distinguish between what's written in The Communist Manifesto and the frightening government bureaucracies they grew up with. And who can really blame them? My Great-Aunt Isa, after all, never left the mental institution after making a feisty remark about Khrushchev in her young adult years. I believe it was Khrushchev. It might've been Bulganin or Breschev, though. Sometime in the 50's probably, when she was probably a twenty-something. (How I adore Wikipedia's interactive political tables!) The brazen-ness of the women in my family could not exactly be considered an asset in Soviet Russia.

If I had grown up in that era, I'd probably have already been flung in a jail cell and shipped off to Siberia by now. Very sobering. Yay freedom! ...!? ...Right? (Side note: Do you realize the vast quantity of things in relation to which we use the verb "to ship" these days, things that have nothing to do with sea-faring vessels? Every form of package transport is considered "shipping." But just imagine the end result if we sent kiwis to the Midwest on ships and steamboats? It's really fascinating to me, as I only recently, as in the last week or so, started paying such close attention to the language behind the now-predominant, fossil-fueled, industry-powered lifestyle.)

Okay, moving on. What I love about these clips/my reasons to watch 'em: Marx, for the menacing look on his face and for the absolutely hysterical finale. Stalin, for the look on Miss Information's (great name, eh?) face when she describes the legacy of torture "Iron Joe" left behind, for the contradictory and anachronistic Fifties Housewife mom (like a deranged Grace Kelly, actually), the handful of gems she spits out (literally, at least one of those times!), the depiction of Joe's rise to power, the WB sit-com, and the little girl who asks why people didn't do anything to stop him.

With no further ado, some "edutainment"--history presented by the unlikely means of comedy.

Hope that put a smile (partly composed of horror, of course) on your face!

Kid Week

2009-07-22T15:13:00.001-04:00

Because I'm so behind on posts, I'm going to post in smaller snippets around a theme. The theme? KIDS! That's right. Childhood! Fun! Glee!

Yes, I'm serious. I think we all need to spend some time indulging our "child-like wonder" (as a best friend likes to put it). So why put it off?

"Glorious Beyond Expression And Beyond Thought"

2009-07-17T14:05:00.003-04:00

My favorite Berkeley quote (all emphases in the original). Hoorah for the real, proper idealist, in the full sense of the word ...and for theology that can still stand up to our contemporary scruples. (For those who do not know, people often boil his philosophy down to "We are all just ideas in the mind of God!") I definitely think with heavy skepticism in most situations, especially those that instinctively make me feel uneasy (such as in a short interaction yesterday with a gutter salesman who was exceedingly schmaltzy, my uneasiness exacerbated more so when my grandmother did not seem "plussed" when he tried to sell her windows, too!, and imposed on the interior space of the house, when he was only expected to work on the gutters, outside!), but not like the skeptic in his Three Dialogues.

Philonous:

"Look! are not the fields covered with a delightful verdure? Is there not something in the woods and groves, in the rivers and clear springs, that soothes, that delights, that transports the soul? At the prospect of the wide and deep ocean, or some huge mountain whose top is lost in the clouds, or of an old gloomy forest, are not our minds filled with a pleasing horror? Even in rocks and deserts, is there not an agreeable wildness? How sincere a pleasure it is to behold the natural beauties of the earth! to preserve and renew our relish for them, is not the veil of night alternately drawn over her face, and doth she not change her dress with the seasons? How aptly are the elements disposed! What variety and use in the meanest production of nature! What delicacy, what beauty, what contrivance in animal and vegetable bodies! How exquisitely are all things suited as well to their particular ends, as to constitute opposite parts of the whole! and while they mutually aid and support, do they not also set off and illustrate each other? Raise now your thoughts that adorn the high arch of heaven. The motion and order? Were those (miscalled erratic) globes ever known to stray, in their repeated journeys through the pathless void? Do they not measure areas round the sun ever proportioned to the times? So fixed, so immutable are the laws by which the unseen Author of nature actuates the universe. How vivid and radiant is the lustre of the fixed stars! how magnificent and rich that negligent profusion, with which they appear to be scattered throughout the whole azure vault! yet if you take the telescope, it brings into your sight a new host of stars that escape the naked eye. Here they seem contiguous and minute, but to a nearer view immense orbs of light at various distances, far sunk in the abyss of space. Now you must call imagination to your aid. The feeble narrow sense cannot descry innumerable worlds revolving round the central fires; and in those worlds the energy of an all-perfect mind displayed in endless forms. But neither sense nor imagination are big enough to comprehend the boundless extent with all its glittering furniture. Though the labouring mind exert and strain each power to its utmost reach, there still stands out ungrasped a surplusage immeasurable. Yet all the vast bodies that compose this mighty frame, how distant and remote soever, are by some secret mechanism, some divine art and force, linked in a mutual dependence and intercourse with each other, even with this earth, which was almost slipped from my thoughts, and lost in the crowd of worlds. Is not the whole system immense, beautiful, glorious beyond expression and beyond thought? What treatment then do those philosphers deserve, who would deprive these noble and delightful scenes of all reality? How should those principles be entertained, that lead us to think all the visible beauty of the creation a false imaginary glare? To be plain, can you expect this scepticism of yours will not be thought extravagantly absurd by all men of sense?"

followed shortly by:

"...To me it is evident, for the reasons you allow of, that sensible things cannot exist otherwise than in a mind of spirit. Whence I conclude, not that they have no real existence, but that seeing they depend not on my thought, and have an existence distinct from being perceived by me, there must be some other mind wherein they exist. As sure therefore as the sensible world really exists, so sure is there an infinite, omnipresent Spirit who contains and supports it."

...to be continued!

Living from Hand to Mouth

2009-07-16T21:17:00.006-04:00

"He who cannot draw on three thousand years
is living from hand to mouth."
- Goethe

I've been thinking a bit about the epigraph to Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World (above).

Several notes:

It's definitely a poignant statement about what happens when people don't bother to learn from history (in terms of the lessons about stupid ideas, things to never do again), or at least learn about history (in order to advance with new ideas rather than repetitive ones).
Sophie's World might have been the first seminal work in the development of my ideology, but coupled with the second, Ishmael, it becomes clear that three thousand years is a little arbitrary in terms of human history (4 million for species' existence, perhaps 1 million, 60,000 by conservative estimates, of modern-day mettle). Why did Goethe fixate on the three thousand-year mark tied up with perhaps the origins of Abrahamic faiths and their whirlwind push around the planet?
What in heaven's name is wrong with living from hand to mouth? Requiring less--remember? God forbid any group live simply on meagre (by the standards of our over-consumptive culture) but plentiful (by the standards of tribal cultures, which term Quinn claims, in Write Sideways, he should have settled for in place of the shorthand of "Leavers" in Ishmael, those who leave their fates in the hands of the gods--a concept he also hashes out, clarifies, in Write Sideways) means! (Apologies on the painful parentheticals!)

Missionaries

2009-07-15T23:41:00.006-04:00

I met some Mormon missionaries today on the walk back down to the house from the end of the trail, where I'd finished my run. I caught sight of them down the block before they approached me, initially hoping that if I didn't make eye contact and stayed on my (opposite) side of the street, they wouldn't approach me. Well, that proved impossible, perhaps our encounter even seems inevitable, since they were missionaries after all.

I decided to speak to them cordially, acknowledging their human-ness as with any other fresh interaction with strangers. I have a hard enough time as it is curbing my mean-spirited streak, attitude-heavy. Before they spoke, I contemplated making some mention, rather unpleasant and not even accurate or deferential (to indigenous spiritual practice), that I believed in and practiced the original Native American spiritual traditions already, and in their proper form, thank you.

They went through what felt like an excruciatingly long introduction (since I had already taxonomized them) about being from a church in town, missionaries from The. Church. of. Jesus. Christ......(excruciatingly long pause).......of Latter Day Saints. Did I have time, blah blah blah.

I came up with the following response (not my best, but afterwards I considered how I might respond in the future, and nothing nearly as cordial or fitting came to mind; for instance, "I am a student of philosophy and theology and have spent plenty of time studying questions of faith. At this time, I feel perfectly comfortable and content with my own spiritual experience and so do not feel I need to hear any new message. Thank you. Good day." And perhaps even one day, I could say "Actually, I've read The Book of Mormon" and then see what happens!): "Well, I'm not really in a position to hear such a message right now [I had hoped my disheveled appearance from finishing a jog would have spoken well enough for itself, such that they wouldn't approach me, for apparently being out of place and not near a home in which they could speak to me, yet somehow they weren't dissuaded], but I've met with groups of missionaries in the past [which was perfectly true]. Sorry."

Then the guy asking said to me (it really felt as though he were about to fall apart), "Do you at least happen to know anybody around who might be willing to hear our message?"

Not a regular resident of the area, I had to deny them this, but I offered that perhaps since it was a nice summer evening, and there were plenty of people out enjoying it, they would find someone who was. And I wished them a nice evening.

Another exchange, in which they asked if there was anything they could do for me (I found this a bit odd, off-kilter), a bit of grandiose gesturing from me dismissing this strange inquiry, and another smiley, breathy, "No, no, I just hope you enjoy your evening."

Missionary work was one of the first big turn offs for me from the Baptist church in which I grew up, and in an extension of that swearing off, a dismissal of all of Christianity as a whole, for a time. I have chronicled my spiritual journey elsewhere, though perhaps it's time to bring it back to the foreground here in my blog. Anyhow, my early inklings as a history and anthropology student instilled in me much guilt for living just past an old creek bed in a house where no house used to sit and tribes used to roam freely, and it also aroused much suspicion and disdain in my being when, at Children's Sermon, a special interlude in the service where the pastor spoke to the kids, who came forward and gathered round for stories, magic tricks, puppets, and all sorts of marvelous, enticing stuff, little pieces of cardboard were produced, which could be turned into little houses or plain boxes with lots of colorful print about religiously-oriented mission work in places like India, quickly-assembled cardboard piggy banks to donate to such abomination organizations.

This bothered me to no end. Did not the people of India already have Hinduism, a perfectly valid religion, to follow reverently in their land? (At this time, nuances about the populations of Muslims, Buddhists, Jains, and other spiritual minorities or sects in India did not have especial prominence in my knowledge.) In any case, it was a step on my way to being swept up with Daniel Quinn's writing, which wove together so much of the uneasy feelings I'd already developed about the trajectory and ambitions of this culture into a coherent, acceptable (to me) whole. Missionaries rely on archaic views of the Other and what exactly that other needs in terms of assistance in physical and spiritual nourishment, and otherwise.

There was a lot of interesting material in the most recent part that I read of If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways about several common misconceptions of reality tied to Christianity, old premises that don't hold up to scrutiny, a topic I felt pleasantly surprised to find Quinn addressing, as I've spent so much of my time since Ishmael learning about logic, partly to find how Quinn fits into the intellectual precedent as a writer not officially of academic books, though heavily grounded in the findings of biology, anthropology, history, etc..

"The Turfgrass Subject"

2009-07-14T18:41:00.003-04:00

"[W]hereas the aesthetic of the lawn may be old, indeed ancient, the turfgrass subject is new: the urban person who is concerned about nature but uses chemicals, who supports the Kyoto Protocol but drives an SUV, who recycles fervently while constantly wasting more and more,"

writes leading political ecology writer Paul Robbins in his book, Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are, and continues,

"Rather than condescendingly dismissing such inconsistencies as 'cognitive dissonance' as is common to apolitical critique, the book advances an alternative, which emphasizes the range of constraints on our alternatives and that stresses the way the biochemical machines we make increasingly make us who we are."

Globalization, a Millenia-Long Process

2009-07-13T19:13:00.001-04:00

"Globalization isn't a recent policy; it's been in place among us for thousands of years."

This one's obvious, but for whatever reason, often escapes the awareness of those bringing it up in a discussion. Globalization sounds to many like a process no more than maybe twenty years old because it wasn't discussed so much before then. That doesn't erase the processes of transformation that dispersed humans across the globe and the very incendiary processes that dispersed the culture borne of the Agricultural Revolution 10,000 or so years ago. Daniel Quinn's writing in Ishmael helped me understand this simple concept years ago, and I especially liked how he put this in If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways.

Coming Soon...

2009-07-07T22:13:00.004-04:00

Watch out for posts on

Unschooling

Theatre and Spatial Regulation

Comics and Eschatology

The Revolution of Un

Priorities or Programs?

Five Years Post-Ish

Guerilla Gardening

Jenson's Endgame (Premises)

--all coming soon!

I said I would update at least daily, and I'm having quite the time adjusting to that schedule and responsibility, but I wanted to say that I definitely intend on keeping to that promise. I might be a little behind right now; however, I absolutely have plans about which musings to share with you next. Hang in there!

Reflections on Pacifism

2009-07-05T18:58:00.003-04:00

A couple disclaimers: I've discovered that to reply to Derrick Jensen's premises alone presents some hefty work. I have a lot to say and quite the difficult time organizing how to say it. The university library nearby has a copy so I will soon look into the full scope of Endgame for myself, but other excerpts from the book are also available on the book's website. Since I have so much to say and have not found an easy way to communicate it, and also since I promised I'd be more consistent about posting, I'm going to pick the simplest and shortest of the premises and whittle away at that for you now. I don't have too too much to say about this premise, as I do about the others. I suppose as I read the book and see how Jensen expounds on these premises, I will have the ability to offer my response to the premises from another vantage point.

Premise Fifteen: Love does not imply pacifism.

I'd like to know exactly what Jensen intends to imply here. Does he mean to say that there are many different kinds of love, some mixed up, contentious, violent, conflictual, imbalanced, detached, overbearing, balanced, distant, unemotional, and on and on? When I sometimes indulge my cheesy side, I can still hear Edmund in the Mansfield Park movie declare, "There are as many kinds of love as there are moments in time." We can leap from disassociating love from pacifism to talking about domestic violence and other conflicted love/non-pacifism combinations. Would Jensen like to just hop on the bandwagon here and declare that love does not imply pacifism because a devoted husband can still turn and kill his wife in a rage, or vice versa?

Pacifism itself... Part of me definitely admires Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement; the long history of civil disobedience (connecting such figureheads as Jesus of Nazareth, Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and their devotees); and the refrain of "Peace, love, and justice" that inspired so much enthusiastic protest and creative (though eventually it turned destructive, apathetic, meaningless, or ineffective) action in America during the sixties (with quite the lead-in from the fifties). There are some aspects of the hippie worldview that, in a certain light, on certain days, are pretty cool--groovy, even (My father and his students would like to bring back the word so there you have my little effort). However, I don't see violence as something to overcome, even as something to wish to overcome. I think the destructive impulse resides in each of us, and mostly, we just have to figure out how best to use that capacity, to understand why we choose to use it for whichever particular reason.

I did, in fact, at one point have little interest in hearing anything directed away from a goal of something akin to "Peace on earth (and mercy mild)." But then I read Ishmael, and just as the voice on the cover (Jim Britell of the Whole Earth Review) predicted, I would end up dividing my life up into the books "I read before Ishmael and those read after." Having read Ishmael, I saw everything I encountered through the vocabulary of concepts I had made acquaintance with in Quinn's work. Not only did I continue with a lifelong impulse to question everything (already enforced the same year I was introduced to Quinn by a reading of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave"), but I questioned everything through an anthropological, evolutionary lens, with the unassuming but explosive question, "What kinds of other ways to live did and do Leavers have that get obscured by 'one right way to live' thinking?" at the forefront. Violence was certainly an integral part of life for every human culture, in some form, for, after all, even incredibly pacifistic cultures have to fend for themselves and survive somehow (broader discussions of violence and survival arise here - more material for later!). Hence Quinn's "erratic retaliator" strategy (Also more on this later; You can pretty much assume that any concept I introduce which isn't common knowledge, or on which my take isn't fully clear, I will note the instance myself and come back to it with explanations later, in future posts, eventually). So is this what Jensen is getting at? Pacifism is not the ultimate, the grandest goal for humanity as a whole (Why humanity as a whole would need a common goal is beyond me anyway, at least nowadays, this many years post-Ishmael), the greatest bit of "progress." Love and pacifism are not synonymous. You can have love as an ideal without getting it mixed up with pacifism.

He could have intended so much by this teensy phrasing. And in the end, he does imply a boatload. So what does he mean by it? I will let you know once I latch onto a copy of the book!

Fourth of July

2009-07-04T22:22:00.002-04:00

Tonight I watched the original fireworks.
Little specks of sun, falling
like confused embers
conspiring against gravity.

Upwards, up, up, out of the grass,
they danced, moving up just like miniature
fireworks, little lights on a string, first invisible,
then transformed into bright booming beauties,

Exploding, silent, without the death-chemicals
to give them their tinsel glow,
and how brilliantly they glimmer,
over dogwoods and tree stumps!

"The comfort of fireflies...
long gone before daylight," croon The Cardigans,
croon the synchronized flitters,
a song etched in every ribbon-y flight.

Under a red and blue and red and blue
and bluish white striped sky,
surrounded by the miniature winged flash bulbs,
I feel placid, gleeful, wordlessly content.

This twilight scene, ancient, imbued with timeless beauty,
makes me think there's never been
a glistening as beautiful as that summer sight,
or ever will there be.

If There's No Such Thing As Away...

2009-07-03T23:47:00.008-04:00

If there's no such thing as away, how come that's where all the blame goes? (Non-E-prime statements, obviously. In fact, the rest of the post doesn't follow E-prime strictures, either, not until I have time to edit out the verbs, "that is.")

I want to share a quote I uncovered in Janine Benyus's marvelous book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired By Nature (I mistyped the subtitle--well, typed in a subtitle of a different book--"Remaking the Way We Make Things," which actually corresponds to another delightful, world-changing book, William McDonough and Michael Braungart's Cradle to Cradle). I'd started hearing myself say repeatedly to myself and others how this book was becoming steadily obsolete, twelve years since initial publication now, but really, the message of this book hasn't reached a wide-enough audience. Sure, the science might have progressed...

(Start parenthetical rant:) Solar cells are now something like 43% efficient, but she quotes, in an epigraph to a chapter, a news release dating from 1994!, that states, and I'm including the whole thing, too, because it's an adorable quote, as well, though not quite the original focus of my post:

"'Pond scum' may be a synonym for 'primitive,' but the tiny organisms that compose it easily beat the human state of the art when it comes to capturing energy from the sun. Some purple bacteria answering to that unflattering description use light energy with almost 95% efficiency--more than four times that of the best man-made solar cells."

On one level, this says a lot about the inaccuracies and false assumptions underlying the capacities of "primitive," a word that traces its etymology to the un-stigmatized concept of beginnings, one-ness, originations...prime, primal, first. However, it also reminds us that the scientific and inventive processes of agricultural-industrial civilization are just that -- innovative. We may have detached ourselves from many useful instincts, but civilization is not a cut-and-dried failure to discard immediately, without looking back, as some, such as primitivist author Derrick Jensen, encourage, and at all haste, at that. (Hmm...I have a lot to say about his Premises to his most recent work, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization; Vol.2: Resistance, which complete work I have not yet had a chance to read, only this year having gotten around to A Language Older Than Words, a strange, sometimes loony, sometimes beautiful, powerful, poetic, ruminative work. As such, I think I might just discuss my qualms with those premises tomorrow.) Our culture has some awfully amazing accomplishments to its credit, and it continues to achieve them, as in more and more highly-efficient solar cells with better and better low-cost production. Though, of course, we should stop a second, as with any thought process in our consumerism-run-amok society, and ponder, "Do we really want to figure out how to make things better (Well, yes, the confluence of dismal planetary situations needs amelioration and remediation, but for our purposes here, I meant 'better things'), or would we end up better off if we learned once more how to require less?"

Requiring less has really bugged me a lot lately. Everything seems tied up in ways to get us to want more, and I feel this very acutely, half-trapped in these processes I do not wish to condone, not consciously, at least, as with any condonation. (With condone defined as "giv[ing ] tacit approval to" and tacit defined as "understood without being openly expressed; implied," using dictionary.com/Random House Dictionary. No, no, not doubting the intelligence of my readers, just getting a refresher myself. A long time now has passed since I had to worry about my words so carefully, to alleviate, by my worrying, such looming nightmares--not really--as the SAT. The crucial lesson of humility reminds us that it never hurts to learn the same lesson twice, multiple times, even. How's this for an exercise in meditation, the perception of relative urgencies: Try feigning ignorance next time your boss tells you how to do a routine task you've executed competently for what seems like forever. Perhaps she or he will offer insight or nuance to the task. Forgive this person, this other being, for doubting you. As a result, perhaps you'll find you've expanded your repertoire, if not in the nuance of the skill, at least in the limits of your patience. And godspeed!) My thinking about this has a lot to do with my recent reading of a small but feisty young-adult novel a friend passed on to me last month. Titled The Gospel According to Larry, this story involves a young man whose alter-ego goes haywire, the culture(s) surrounding his alter-ego, actually. Nevertheless, he stays true to the core tenets of his voluntarily simplistic lifestyle. He owns a mere seventy-five possessions! If he acquires something new, he either has to pass it along or send another of his belongings on its way. If he feels tempted to purchase a new item, he has to grapple long and hard with how much the item is really worth cluttering up his life just that bit more. I've felt incredibly jaded the last couple years. Something about this book, combined with this summer of productivity and other changes to my life this year, compels me to make more of an effort to simplify my life, perhaps even down to this drastic measure. Why not? (End rant; back to the initial point...)

(A refresher: I had started saying, "Sure, the science might have/has progressed...")

...but the idea of mimicking the planet's ancient processes, rather than applying our own hubris to the design of processes and materials, still has quite the following to amass. Onwards! Yeah...anyway, the quote:

"Though environmental policy makers have focused on the growing glut of garbage and pollution, most of the environmental damage is done before materials ever reach the consumer. Just four primary materials industries--paper, plastics, chemicals, and metals--account for 71 percent of the toxic emissions from manufacturing in the United States, according to the researchers. Five materials--paper, steel, aluminum, plastics, and container glass--account for 31 percent of U.S. manufacturing energy use."

-John E. Young and Aaron Sachs, authors of The Next Efficiency Revolution: Creating a Sustainable Materials Economy (Heh - I typed, "Sustainable Energy Revolution" -- Oh, propaganda, how you get to poor, tired souls!)

Initiatives to clean up our highways and parks, to curb the persistence of litter, have their place, but this gives us a bit of a jolt. Where best to focus our energies? We have limited lifespans, and the doomsayers predict we have very little time to solve pressing problems that could make living in the world we want to live in impossible. How will we spend our time? What to prioritize? (I also wish to discuss this topic of prioritization in an upcoming post.)

Many exhibits, photographs, books, poems, edicts, and other creative endeavors have derived from the very important concept, "There's no such thing as away." How important for us, in said overly consumptive society, to acknowledge how "away" only equates to "trash bags in trash cans that get dumped into larger garbage bins or dumpsters in garbage trucks that go to refugee camps for all the exiled trash bags, to commune with one another, die their slow deaths in the company of their trash bag companions, decompose together, layered over with the filler of more bags, soil, more bags, soil, then crushed, then filled in with more soil, and eventually something growing on that soil" -- Uy, how depressing landfill culture can feel!

But we can hardly consider our understanding, a raised consciousness (ah, the legacy of the sixties), enough. To reduce our feasible actions to the conscientiousness involved in extracting waste from our homes is quite the sad state of affairs, isn't it? And all that effort in contemplating purchasing a new item (the "Is it really worth it?" test)! It's much more difficult to stop our habituated selves from purchasing frivolous objects, with obscene amounts of packaging waste that doesn't often lend itself that well to any creative use or re-use, than it is to not have the objects available to purchase in the first place.

Streamlining. It can happen through legislation, but that's an intricate, unwieldy process. Who wants to waste the time, when one's intellectual capacities could go toward some other, more fulfilling use? It can also happen through materials design. Designers use intelligent design (Yes, ha ha. Good, good. It's one of my favorite things about the design professions, how much I get to use the words, "intelligent design," in an ironic way!), and suddenly, a billion worries extinguish in a single conscientious, carefully considered plan. And round and round we spin about this "best use of our efforts" challenge. What does the best use of your not-infinite life span look like?

Remedies to the Why-am-I-so-crazy? Wonders

2009-07-02T16:46:00.012-04:00

"How is it with your soul?" ask the United Methodists with a zeal peerless in these often glum twenty-first century days. The perpetual inquiry of John Wesley at his small spiritual meetings centuries ago, I ask it of you today. Do you feel fulfilled? Do you feel you've barely begun to live, to grasp the meaning of existence, of your actions, beliefs, emotions, ambitions? Do you waver up and down, some days just wanting to give up? Fear no longer! A companion is here!

My mother discovered Susan Brackney's The Lost Soul Companion for me years ago, and I read it at the time she handed it on to me (so probably about time for a re-reading, huh?). A delightful little compilation of sound advice, quirky ideas, and general creative revelry! I recommend it highly to "free spirits" and those looking for "comfort and constructive advice" in general, in other words, "lost" souls of both kinds, those down on their cheeriness, happiness, or fulfillment luck, and those diving down in the dumpsters.

In this book, I discovered a technique for concocting home-made snow globes, using epoxy (eww!) and old jars (yay!); a handful of microwave recipes I never got around to using; snazzy advice on improving one's social life, ability to socialize, and relationships in general (ask questions, listen, talk less - advice which I've doled out a lot lately for other reasons); my interest in attending Burning Man (which only grew more incendiary after I experienced a miniature version during the talent show at the conclusion of my introductory course on natural building in Brazil four years ago); many uplifting, encouraging, inspiring words on creativity and fulfillment (some areas of rumination dear to me!); two little, disoriented birds, and many other zany drawings and heartening words.

This book has quite a spunky feel to it. Check it out if you've had the hopelessness blues or the why-am-I-so-crazy? wonders lately...or just for a relaxing kick. (She suggests purchasing the book from an "indie store," your local bookseller, which I also support, or for those in need of instant gratification, she says, using the big box and online stores, but I'd suggest that eager readers check out Alibris, the compendium of used booksales online, instead. Turning to your library or a book-swapping site or system doesn't hurt, either.) You can also drop by Susan's website, which features excerpts, resources, and her own blog (or apparently just use my links - got a little overzealous there! Ahem! I mean, O.C.D.. I could've kept going and hyperlinked the whole post! Double entendre on the hyper!). And if you're not feeling especially much like a lost soul, you can always check out Susan's other title on the topic, The Not-so-Lost Soul Companion: More Hope, Strength, and Strategies for Artists and Artists at Heart. I've set my sights on that one! Oh, ever expanding guilt-laden reading list!

Not Blogging Fast Enough!

2009-07-01T15:21:00.008-04:00

I've got the lyrics from "Reptilia," a song by The Strokes, racing through my thoughts - "You're not driving fast enough!". Apparently, I have not managed to keep going fast enough, only the verb sounds more like "blogging."

A digression on E' ...Yes, that last sentence sounded a bit more awkward than it needed to, but I write under the heavy-handed, forbidding auspices of E-prime, which makes most writing feel more difficult than it otherwise should, what with all our reliance on the "to be" verbs. (I even felt uncomfortable writing, "over-reliant as we've become on the 'to be' verbs," since many of the 'be-(something)' verbs tend to come from corruptions and abbreviations of phrasings involving 'to be' conjugations. 'Become' seems to have derived from 'come to be' so I try to avoid it as I do the 'to be's.' I don't worry about it quite as much, but these verbs, seemingly derived from the 'be's,' do make me feel queasy!)

I keep meaning to get back up to speed, crafting at least one post a day, but I've struggled with form and structure. Also, this approach didn't keep me to the "[take] one day at a time" standard (the ideas of the A.A. organizations have a lot to teach all of us, even though many of us don't travel in its circles--its 12-step programs and other spiritual advice can heal many of us traumatized by the effects of all sorts of things, including, but certainly not limited to, alcohol, in our wearying milieu). So I will start posting more often, and creatively, about a whole mish-mash of ideas at first, until I come up with better ways to care and tend for this blog. I will keep you posted on that process itself, as well as much more. My apologies, then, if anything seems too distended and disconnected for a while yet. I feel gleeful to have the ability to share with a small but precious audience that can derive meaning from whatever plaguing thoughts with which I preoccupy myself, and the more I share, the more I'll find a coherent and cohesive way to convey those ideas. Until tomorrow!

The Two Freds

2009-01-31T23:00:00.004-05:00

I just got back from a screening of HBO's screen adaptation of The Laramie Project, with a talkback with a member of the Tectonic Theater Project who participated in the collaborative creation of The Laramie Project and who is involved in current work with a ten-year follow-up

I need to try, for once, to be brief, because I want to post this now, but I also have lots of other places to be and things to do. So...things bouncing around in my head:

The beginning of the ordeal for Matthew Shephard began on my tenth birthday (exactly). This past October being the ten-year marker therefore coincided with my twentieth birthday. We cannot separate history and seemingly distant events from our lives. It's rarely as distant as it first seems. Lee(?) talked about this with us in the talkback, saying she's always blown away when people say they were five or eight, nine or ten when the "incident" (as it was referred to in the movie/script) occurred, that the events and the concerns wrapped up in The Laramie Project still have such draw for people, that it still profoundly affects people (which seems completely as it should be).

The audience discussed with Lee how theater in general, with a certain toolbox of methodologies, and The Laramie Project in particular, might change the dialogue, might change the culture, might "change history" (as in, redirect certain sets of events from moving in one direction and steer them in a more positive one -- which of course gets us into a tricky muddle of determinism I probably shouldn't discuss, other than to say that in my Theories of Knowledge & Reality course, we pretty much settled on it as a stalwart of a concept, near-to-impossible to contradict--because, after all, events only end up in one string--and therefore more than a little troublesome!). As far as changing the cultural capacity for intense, inexplicable, and (...) hatred in America, I definitely think that The Laramie Project has done a great deal to shape and structure the dialogue. I cannot believe I have not seen the production in some form up until now, but its themes and the material it covers were far from foreign for me. To increase the exposure of this film to wider audiences of conscience could, I hope, influence the directions the people of America take in eradicating that capacity for such boundless hatred. But I think of people I've met and people who are portrayed in the film, and I become doubtful, cynical, angry, outraged. The question is, can they be reached? Can another boy or girl becoming like one of the perpetrators be avoided? Can new ideas and a fuller conscience reach them?

More to come, in the form of edits and added material to this post, on Fred Phelps, Fred Williams (the speech given by Matthew Shephard's father; shooting; forgiveness--that other conversation; Omaha foster care; drive through Nebraska; themes; communication- community), and the future...

Field Guide to This Blog

2009-01-28T20:28:00.003-05:00

Welcome. Feel free to explore, scroll, jump around however you wish. This post is just an organizing element for my own (and perhaps for others') sanity.

Blog Basics

On Blogging
Blog Jukebox

Neo-Tribalism For Newcomers

"We Are Not Humanity."
Vision is Humble
The Permaculture Ethics of Landscape and Culture
What "Ecovillage" Means in Senegal

Visionary Projects

Freedom Summer 2009, After All?

Proseminar: Home, Modernity, Haunting, Academia (Current Proseminar Project: The Full Meaning of Environmentalism and Environmental Politics)

Baobabs and Toubabs! (An Irreverent Introduction to Colonialism?)
Culture Shock
Local? Global? How Should We Live and Interact?
Environment as Home, as Whole
"We Don't Buy Adultery Offsets"
Postmodernism (question mark)
Home as Conflicted Space
Notes on the APSA Conference

Dialogue, Communication, Community

Mini Introduction to Wolof, as well as Orientation to Senegalese Politics
Who Are You?
Some Notes on Non-Exclusive Dialogue

Ecumenism/Theology/Spirituality

Theology For Our Time
Turning Twenty, Turning Pages

Freedom Summer 2009, After All?

2009-01-28T15:52:00.006-05:00

I just received the greatest forwarded email ever. Maybe. Most of the text is copied from the web hub for the Summer of Solutions, but it also has a very vague blurb about manifestations of this ambitious summer project in my favorite city, Omaha. I'm not too enthused about the root of this wide-reaching grassroots effort in the global warming crusade, by the vague approach, and such, but I'm still very impressed that this has been brought to my attention since we murmured in Prosem not too long ago about how to rally together a Freedom Summer 2009, trying to think up the most important issue(s) to put our weight behind. I came up with lots of new twists on my crazy visionary projects after our discussions, and I certainly imagined cores of activity in all major cities across the nation. Might this Summer of Solutions be such a vehicle, such that we don't have to start from scratch?

I realize there is suddenly lots of activist organizational energy in the air, riding hot on the heels of that ubiquitous Obama-mania, but what the heck? Isn't the point to reach critical mass, to work with the greatest outcome for the least effort, and wouldn't this be one way to do so? Individual projects can always branch off from the global warming-obsession core of Grand Aspirations, the umbrella organization for the Summer of Solutions (I know I'm a lone wolf with this nonchalant perspective, and that's okay; It's not that I don't think things will start changing soon or dramatically -- I just have no problem with a cataclysmic brand-new Ice Age getting us to reconsider and restructure, reshape our priorities, our luxuries, and our lifestyles. La!), just like the wealth of energy poured into Common Ground Relief in New Orleans in '05-'06 and beyond generated many unique initiatives. I sometimes feel guilty I did not return to contribute more to Common Ground's project, but the most important thing my February 2006 winter break in New Orleans taught me was how pervasive the real issues wrapped up in the level of devastation of Hurricane Katrina were all across America (with similar or related problems existing almost everywhere in the world at this point, but you already know my opinion on the history of that tumorous globe-absorption!).

I especially like the first paragraph, with the way it frames its project in the holistic environmental-social justice way I'm always going off about (I have some quibbles with the second paragraph, but if it seems pressing enough, I'll bring it up again later). The vocabulary of "solutionaries" is certainly intriguing as well, though I'm not sure what I think of it. First impression of it is that it sounds kind of cheesy, childish, quixotic, but perhaps that kind of childish, unfettered energy and outlook is one of the attitudes we're most desperate for in our milieu?

Here's the text of the email (with necessary basic proofreading provided by yours truly):

"We need to take steps, however small to begin with, towards creating a local sustainable economy that enables us to work, eat, and take care of our families, bring the neighbor back into the 'hood, and slow down global warming." – Grace Lee Boggs

In the face of a failing economy, an energy crisis, fragmented and inequitable communities, and the growing threat of global warming, people are coming together to create and implement solutions that address all of these challenges together. These people are solutionaries - community leaders who work as innovative organizers across issue lines to build the green economy as an engine for local opportunity, climate and energy solutions, and social justice.

This summer, youth will gather in communities across the nation for a Summer of Solutions - a training ground for its participants and a launching pad for a new solution-based vision of community. With the support of local partnerships, forged from a national network of fellow solutionaries, participants will create self-sustaining projects that will have a direct impact on their communities and that will serve as models for others to build on.

In Omaha, we hope to create connections between diverse groups of people by hosting a completely open conference focused on how citizens can work together to help create self-sustaining communities. This conference will be run in the vein of "open space technology," a way of facilitating dialogue that encourages open and honest discussions on relevant community issues in Omaha by welcoming all attendees, ideas, and outcomes. This conference aims to shape not only the direction of the Omaha Summer of Solutions program but also include the future of climate action and community activism in Omaha. By working in the broader metropolitan community, we hope to promote a strong platform that creates a renewable and affordable energy economy in Omaha neighborhoods. This would include building a Sustainable Community Model in a neighborhood where we would work directly with citizens to demonstrate how local food systems and local economies can be set up and operated while developing a stronger sense of community.

Summer of Solutions: Omaha is a grassroots, volunteer-based, people-powered program, and we rely on people just like you for just about everything – from the project expertise, to the local partnerships, to the financial support for the young people dedicating their summer to build the solutions. We are hosted by a student-led group called Grand Aspirations, which is fiscally sponsored by Global Exchange.

Thoughts?

Baobabs and Toubabs! (An Irreverant Introduction to Colonialism?)

2009-01-15T15:13:00.004-05:00

Yoff, Senegal.

This is only the beginning of what will (I hope!) be a much longer paper or project, perhaps integral to my thesis (no, not Honors Thesis; the Rock requires 8 credits of thesis work to graduate). I so like the sound of this particular rhyme (and usually rhyme just annoys the hell out of me!)!

Actually, I'm not sure where to start, but the idea is to trace the decline of animism (hence the baobabs) and the ascent of salvivic religions in certain places in recent centuries...Here I'm trying to distinguish between so-called "Taker" culture--very useful shorthand, but that has its problems--in the Fertile Crescent for millenia and in places like "the New World" and "l'Afrique" for only a handful of centuries. As such, the decline of traditional human societies, the tribal configurations, that is, and all the beneficial aspects and elements that go with them (this clearly includes animism) can be woven in with questions of colonialism (and here the toubabs, or white people, the people known here very acutely for their ugly history as colonists and enslavers and tormenters and rulers, etc., enter the picture) and its detrimental qualities, commodifying and transforming "the Other" with that capital "o."

That's the snapshot. To be continued...

But I must say, it`s been incredibly fun having people here ask me about my religious "persuasion" and be able to answer "animist" and have people not only understand what I'm talking about but have some idea how it is lived. Of course it's weird being one of those attempting to be part of "Taker-Hohokam," but I am perfectly willing to accept and affirm the integrity of my directionality in coming to animism--counter to most people in the world moving from traditional spiritualities into the salvivics, I'm going from Christianity and spiritual tumult to clarity and substance. La!

Mini Introduction to Wolof, as well as Orientation to Senegalese Politics

2009-01-15T13:07:00.006-05:00

Nanga def? - How are you?

Mangi fii rek. - I`m fine.

Many thanks to Living Routes/GENSEN, Maman, Mama Aiita, Pape Mamadou Samb, Marcel, Fatou C., Thier (pronounced "Chair"; yes, really), El Hadji, Pape Babacar Samb, and many others for their short and helpful lessons, their spontaneous laughter, and their patience with my halting and pathetic pronunciations, bad hearing, and bad memory! I have learned and lost so much, like grasping at water, and if I can remember even a small portion of what I`ve learned here, I will be immensely joyous. This is my attempt at such retention, and perhaps if this format gets me to help others with vocalization of these phrases, the constant repetition will help me to remember these tidbits forever. Finally, these might seem a strang assortment of phrases, but this is mostly due to the fact that when people ask me what I`d like to learn, what I`d like to be able to say, what I want to know, I draw a blank, and can`t think up a starting point. Thank goodness (or "Thanks be to God!"/"Alhamdoulilahi" - heh) that the lovely people mentioned above have worked with me and offered me gems of their lovely language anyway.

What`s your name? - No todou?

I miss you - Nama nala. (Pronounced almost as "Namba nala")

I miss you, too - Mala raw. (Pronounced almost as if in Portuguese - "Malarão")

I`m going to miss you - Di nala nama. (I just realized I`ve been saying this completely wrong as "Di namba nala" - woops!)

Me, too - Manta mit

I`m tired - Sona nàa (I couldn`t find the other accent mark on this French "clavier"; it's actually written "Sona náa")

You`re my friend. - Sama harit nga. (I REALLY like this one! Nga pronounced mostly as "Ga," with silent "n." Harit means friend, if I recall correctly.)

Dimbalema (johma casundaw) = Please (give me a cup of water)

Dieure djieuf = Thank You

You`re welcome. - Noko bok. (The "n" pronounced almost as if with a tilde - Ñoko; bok meaning "you are")

I need to sleep. - Deman bug nelaw. ("Aw" pronounced as "o")

What are your wives` names? - Sa djebar nomou todou?

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. - Ben. Nyar. Nyet. Nyent. Djouron. (I love how this sounds a bit like Russian!)

How is your morning? - Naka su bese?

How is your evening? - Naka ngonsi?

You are so clever. - Dgenga mous.

I`m tired? - Dema son.

You`re tired - Danga son!

Come eat. - Kai lek.

Come here right now. - Kai legui.

NOPIL! = HUSH!

Nyaw = Ugly

Baye = Father

Yaye = Mother

Jiguen = Female/Sister

Goor = Male/Brother

Rakh = Younger than me

Mak = Older than me

My name is not "toubab"! -Toudou-ma toubab.

Do not tell me/call me "toubab"! - Bourma wakh toubab!

That`s a good enough transition into an over-simplified political orientation:

Current President: Abdou Laye Wade

Current Prime Minister: Hadji Bou Soumaré

Current President of the Congress: Mamadou Seck

Current President of the Senate: Pape Diop

Old Prime Minister (who went on to be the President of the Congress, in which he was impeached): Macky Samb

Old Prime Minister (before Macky; corrupt, accused of embezzling and thrown out of office): Idrissa Seck

Head of the Family Ministry (accused of involvement in the "disappearance" -heh- of 76 mil. CFA; it was all over the paper on January 10th on our way back from Lac Rose!): Awa Ndiaye

Macky Samb left and set up his own party, "Yakar," which means "hopes."

Idrissa Seck also left and set up his own party, "Rewmi," "the State."

Thoughts?

La Place de l`Indépendance

2009-01-12T09:29:00.003-05:00

Today, we went into Dakar to see the central part of the city and to go to the market. The first market we went to was very makeshift and intimidating so we walked a few blocks to La Place de le Indépendance, where the Artisan`s Market was in its last day. This market was more spacious and with more beautiful souvenir/gift-type items, but even then, there were a lot of the overbearing sellers and other Senegalese persons (whose occupations are unclear) who hover over us, and won`t stop talking to us even when we most desperately want to be left alone (something they apparently cannot fathom). This was the hardest part.

We ate lunch on the next-to-top floor of the main tourist hotel, and most of us ate spaghetti (Alhamdoulilahi for American food!). For our eighth American woman (Katie and Artemis stayed home), we came upon an American straggler?, who just had a day`s layover in Dakar after a month visiting her fictive kin in Mali (Bamako). She was really a fascinating, incredibly kind, and joyful, exuberant person, and all of us were delighted she bothered to come up and talk to us and to then spend the day wandering with us.

The market was really overwhelming, as described above, and we didn`t stay too long after lunch. We saw the Chambre du Commerce that faces onto the little park, and from the top of the tourist hotel, we saw a beautiful panoramic overview of Dakar, noting our proximity to the port(s), one of which we left from on the ferry to go to Gorée only a week or so before. It was really nice to experience the heart of Dakar, with its paved streets and skyscrapers (How much I suddenly, for the first time in my recent life as a neo-tribalist "nut," miss cities!). When we got back to Yoff, we checked out the very American Shell station, with all its dazzling conveniences, and eventually worked our way to the beach, where we chattered and enjoyed the cold breeze and sand. Yay.

Lac Rose!

2009-01-10T09:37:00.007-05:00

January 10, 2009 - Yoff, Senegal - Casa Samb

Ten days have elapsed in this new year. A bright moon has shone. Many young acquaintances have found their way into my life. Myriad bacteria and ailments have I combated. Much couscous, pain chocolate, and fish (djen) have been consumed.

Today, I had lunch with Casey, Alison, and Amath at a little restaurant only a couple blocks from the Living & Learning Center. Alison and I had djebu yopp (rice with meat), while Casey consumed the popular Ananas soda because she was still recovering from her sickness on their three hour journey home. I spent the morning writing down some of the same old thoughts about my thesis, eating pain chocolate for breakfast, packing, primping? for the day, and staggering toward Salam`s house, where we finally met our rental car & driver and packed ourselves in. I had the chance to say goodbye to Maman, the young girl whose company I had enjoyed these last couple days, Aymirou, our homestay host, and then Seido, at his house, before we left town. I had chances to use "Merci beaucoup," "Di namba nala," and kind of "Sama harit nga" (though I don`t think Maman heard me).

I made the effort to ask to go to Lac Rose (since the sign said it was only 2 k(m) away, it seemed like such a waste to be there and not go!), even if I had to pay the difference, and what would you know, moody little Christian humored me! Apparently none of the guys had ever been there, either, so I felt both validated and joyed by my upstart request, since I was exposing them to something wondrous and intriguing for the first time, therefore I got to share something and not just experience it selfishly for myself, dragging them along to something that had already lost its appeal long before. All I had to say about Lac Rose was that it was really pink, kind of an orange-ish red. There were boats out far on the lake past the point where a camera zoom could make them out. There were reeds and banana trees all around, sea shells, or lake shells, making up the "beach." It wasn`t an imposingly large lake, as far as I could tell - definitely much tamer in grandeur than the Great Lakes - maybe more like the sort of thing you`d see in Minnesota or Massachusetts. But very pink, indeed. The guys and I goofed around a bit in its waters and in the general vicinity of Lac rose (documented quite well in photos), before taking off for Dakar - it`s nice to at least be on speaking/goofing terms again -- so lonely when they ignore me with little or no reason for such dense resentment!

The drive to Lac Rose seemed longer than 2 k, but I`m still glad we made the (3000 CFA) journey because it really was too close to pass up experiencing.

The drive back to Dakar was lengthy-ish (short compared to the journeys of all our classmates! - we returned the same time as the Mekhe/Mboul group), with packets of filthy polluted/smoggy air, lots of hawkers (selling phone cards, peanuts, lettuce!, bananas (? I can`t remember!), oranges, newspapers - 2 of which Christian bought!, etc.(, lots of time to take pictures, exchange emails with El Hadji (silent "i"), and get political information from him...Spent time catching up with Katie, Jess, Casey, Alison, and finally Artemis, Kazi, and Katie.

After Katie and Jess left, I went to write postcards, sort them out, when a little girl, all smiles, came in and started talking with me (in spite of my horrifying lack of French knowledge/awareness!). She wanted to play with my hair and look at the cards, which I let her do. When she figured out I spoke English, she ran to get her workbook, "My First Footsteps in English," which she guided me through - heh. Her name is something like Mamou--(?) Diallo, but she also goes by Bebe. She was born on October 22, 2008 in Yoff or Dakar so she`s half my age, and yet I spent a very pleasant hour with her in spite of our glaring linguistic incompatibilities.

She redid my ponytail (I thought she was going to braid it, having noticed that she`d used the word "tricature," knitting -- word I recall from Bouguereau titles!), danced around, took pictures with me, went through my bag, found my money, and grabbed a 1000 for pizza -- we then went next door, looked at the menu (but no amount of pizza was less than 2900!), at which point she started saying we should get glace, but I though it was some kind of drink and not worth it; she persisted and dragged me inside, where she grabbed ice cream from a freezer (and so I learned a new word very experientially!), and we got two chocolate-covered vanilla bars, with her exchanging words with the clerk when I failed to produce anything but English, and we went and ate them on the patio, then went back next door, stopping to talk to -- I presume -- her dad, who invited me to on "Saturday" with him to show me around twon (uhh...I was glad he had the day of the week confused, today being Saturday, and told him "maybe" just to get him to stop asking); we went back inside, she went and brought back stickers (one of which is now attached to this notebook), and then we went upstairs and had "translation lessons," her giving both of us "10/10" or "TB" (for Trés Bon) on our "work," before that relative came and told her it was time to leave...Oh, I also learned "On y`pas" (though I don`t know how to write it, with her dragging me around everywhere); "Let`s go!"..."Legui?"

Culture Shock

2009-01-09T18:24:00.009-05:00

Or "The Bloom and the Blight," the Joys and the Miseries...

From our handbook provided by Living Routes:

"One of the main reasons we visit other countries is to discover cultures and lifestyles that are very different from our own. We want to draw to your attention the fact that some of what we discover in any new setting is pleasant, beautiful, inspiring, rewarding, and/or deeply meaningful, but that other aspects inevitably are frustrating, less pleasant, not at all beautiful, tedious, and otherwise stressful. We propose to you that it is not possible to deepen our insights into human society and its relationship to its environment without looking at both the bloom and the blight."

Here are some other paragraphs from the handbook section on Culture Shock, out of order:

"While the introduction to new and foreign cultures greatly benefits students, it can also be overwhelming. Cultural differences can be so great that a student may need extra time to adjust. This is normal. The new cultural elements a student encounters may be so different that they seem 'shocking' in comparison to cultural norms one is used to at home. A student's reaction of feeling 'shocked' by a culture's attributes can manifest itself in mood swings ranging from anger, to depression, to panic. It can be difficult to explain culture shock, especially if you have never been through it. As Bruce La Brack wrote in his article, 'The Missing Linkage: The Process of Integrating Orientation and Re-entry,' 'Just as you can`t really describe the taste of a hot fudge sundae to someone who has never experienced one, it is difficult to actually convey just how disorienting entering another culture can be to a student without any cross-cultural experience.'

"Experiencing new cultures and obtaining a better understanding of our own culture can result in some of the most positive life-altering experiences students have while studying abroad. When going abroad, students will experience differences in manners, beliefs, customs, laws, language, art, religion, values, concept of self, family organization, social organization, government, behavior, etc. All of these elements combine to form culture.

"We want to encourage you to accept in coming to Senegal that your learning experience will combine insights that are easy and joyous and others that are highly problematic, such as the problems surrounding the lives of beggar children, and the difficult struggles of certain neighborhoods with a crisis in garbage collection."Prepare yourself for some down times; they happen to practically everyone trying to make it in a culture they have never lived in before. Realizing that what you are feeling is natural, and that other students are probably experiencing the same thing, will help you to avoid discouragement. Culture shock has its ups and downs, good days and bad--but you will pull through. Many students studying abroad experience times when they feel depressed. However, the overwhelming majority comes away from their experience abroad even stronger and better adapted for living and working with others."

...

From my journal...

Senegal – January 6, 2009.

I miss home, all kinds of things. Soft drinks, toilets, sinks, dentists, showers, hand sanitizer, health, cold!—didn’t think I’d miss that!—all kinds of “American” food, my computer, my nail clippers, my sweaters…no mosquitoes, no flies, trash collection, fresh air without all the wafting smells, drinkable tap water, my room, people who understand me when I speak, secularity, Omaha…Outside of the U.S., IPEC and my childhood dacha, tricycle, the walk, the smells…Dedushka, Dodge Street, Gene Leahy Mall in October (my birthday in 2006 I recall fondly), Soul Desires, Omaha in spring and summer (minus the tornadoes and floods), Eugene, Boston...

I feel very much placeless, untethered, and somehow this vapid lacking just doesn’t help displace my habitual negativity, stubbornness, unkindness. I get so frustrated, so boxed in my focus that I can’t find calm, placidity, acceptance, positive outlook, kind words, cheerful thoughts. Why am I so high-strung? Gah!

I’ve never felt so homesick before – Well, I guess I’m still not used to thinking in terms of homesick. That June evening in 2006 when the distance between me and Bellevue settled heavily on my shoulders, that was homesick. I remember that. This past semester, time away from the person who I’d lived with for two years, that kind of fatalism that nothing could be okay because it had shifted…it was all so unnecessary. It’s okay. I’m going to be okay.

Today we met with the group leaders in Thiaroye again, this time with less tension – but then, I was also much more detached from the whole thing. The group leaders discussed amongst themselves which projects would benefit most (and would most benefit the whole ecovillage) from a SEM microcredit loan. I was most taken back/surprised/shocked with a little man, Massamba, insisting that the women’s projects be funded first because women work harder—get up earlier to work, are more organized, will pay back the loan on time, etc.—it’s not that I didn’t realize SEM’s loans were more heavily weighted to women’s projects or that a general theme we’ve learned these many days in Senegal wasn’t that women are more dedicated and strong-willed workers then men—I just somehow didn’t see it coming that this man would open his mouth to advocate fro the women’s project. His projects, the chickens and the fishing, we were told, had been overlooked for this cycle of loans for different reasons—his chicken project with Doudou because, although their operation employs/involves 15 workers, it only really profits and benefits 2, and in this way, it is not the choiciest project for this cycle; the fishing because the new engine the men require for modernizing their “canoe”/boat cost 1 mil. CFA and the maximum amount that SEM grants for its loans is 700,000 CFA. The thing is, this purchase over the limit of the SEM base funding would have also benefited the women’s fish-curing operation, which group was struggling most with keeping transportation costs down, and so was looking at buying directly from fishermen, instead of paying the gasoline-adjusted prices.

After choosing the women’s cooperative for the first loan, the ecovillage leaders continued to discuss which project should benefit from the second of the two microcredit loans. Several were vocal about the disable persons’ cooperative because the education and employment of handicapped persons is an important and positive recent development. However, because Massamba continued to argue that men overall were less productive and effective (I’m not sure to what degree he took into account any sensitive rationale about the inherent reduced productivity of disabled persons!), the villagers, when eventually round up by Pape (our homestay “contact”) for a private counsel, came back and announced that they had agreed upon the two women’s activities and groups for the first set of loan recipients. Whey they went out, they stepped out on the pretense that Mamadou had prior working knowledge of these processes and selections to convey to the leaders…Not long after everyone returned, we shook hands with many of the men who then departed. We were left with the women, with the responsibility of getting down the information about their activities into draft loan application form…which we did, El Hadj and I in a kind of haphazard, disorderly detailed overview “order” and Adama and Jisselle in step-by-step fashion. I felt very good after we got all the information (we still need to get a photo with all the women involved) because the loan application helps a women’s cooperative with 3 women involved in gardening by that little lagoon we’ve become acquainted with in “Baghdad” (it’s such a soul-lifting cheery happy green place!), one women further her life-long fish trading business and another her cloth dying business (though it’s regrettable she has to use toxic dyes – I joked with El Hadj about starting a business here to sell natural dyes, or to do the fish trading or to join Aissa in her gardening work). Then we walked back, rested, ate lunch, and then Jisselle left to go back to Yoff. Then a sudden heaviness, emptiness, trapped-ness, overwhelming homesickness set in. I’m feeling a little better writing, especially because when I write I get to enjoy the cooler air out her in the corridor/courtyard, watch the cat go about its cat day, enjoy the children’s laughter/silliness/smiley-ness/playfulness/and bounciness, and watch the daughter? who seems about my age clean the courtyard, brushing of ff the sand and dust with a broom (2 different kinds, a long and a short kind). I do so enjoy watching people and other animals (cf. class notes w/ Ousmane pronouncing, “I refuse to be…an animal!”) going about the motions of everyday, quotidian, placid, unassuming, basic, restful, repetitive, meaningful in its simplicity as it is. The noises – t.v., mosque? Sending out call to prayer via loudspeaker, trucks, kids’ feet, kids’ happy high-pitched voices, the whisking of the broom, etc…are pleasurable, likewise. Horse’s hooves just now, as well, the rustling of leaves on this courtyard tree. It’s a nice day. I’m so happy to have this time to enjoy the good weather, the good views, the good people, the good life, the good tastes, the good words of this place. There’s a lot I don’t like on the other hand, but I’m glad to be here, but even though I’m almost halfway through my stay, I still really can’t wait to be home (in spite of the stressful course-finishing/course-beginning apparently). I miss New England, the Rock, America, in ways I just haven’t and hadn’t missed them before.

January 9, 2009. Sangalkam.

What do I like about being here in Senegal?

I appreciate the women carrying their children wrapped up on their backs; I appreciate the shared platters at meals – djebu djen (fish) and djebu yoff (meat); the children’s gentleness; the proliferation of polyglots; the prayerfulness; the colorful fabrics; the seas; the sun and the gardens very much out in splendor; the tropicalness; the mango/orange/mixed fruit/tamarind juice and the soft drinks, too; the tastiness of the meals; the pain chocolate for breakfast; the Nescafé at class coffee breaks and the Senecao at breakfast; the modernness of the Samb house; Marian`s rooftop view; doing my laundry in early evening on the Samb's rooftop; the singing and the music, the strength of solidarity all around but most inspiring somehow in the tontines and women's cooperatives; Seido Touré and his scouting skills, permaculture awareness, leadership and technologically savvy (he`s one of the most inspiring people I`ve met here); the cool soft sand everywhere; the prolific livestock (chickens, goats, cows, horses, donkeys – and today I saw my first ducks!); the historic Ile d'Gorée and the heavy knowledge and the vast sadness it arouses – how it completely changes my perception of the "sea"/Atlantic Ocean; the large families – the connectedness – the physicality—the friendship – the un-brokenness; the courtyard houses with their may rooms; getting chances to read, recite, and kind of practice, at least avoid losing by remembering even fragments of my Arabic; learning bits of French and Wolof; having the time and occasion to write, think about, and interrogate/question the premises of different approaches to sustainable living, sustainable (international) development, human health and happiness, education/feminism/sanitation/modernization/globalization; the French-influenced cityscapes; the overall gentle attitude; the malas everywhere (before it seemed that people didn't actually use them); the crafts; the markets; the different brooms; the beautiful faces; the dizzying hubbub; the fishing boats; the wrestling training/culture of wrestling adulation and watching; the un-strict and flexible, loose schedules; slower lifestyle and timing/sense of time; the time to rest and nap; taking my first "bucket splash" shower (also, in regards to water usage, the squat toilets or latrines turning out not quite so horrendous as they first seemed); the Euro-like design of the currency (with the added beautiful decorative flourish of the harp-like mask); time to read; the sublimation of computer usage (though it's hard when I have a blog to write); the colorful blossoms on the trees; the tailors; the taps (? ... I think I meant the fountain-like space with the faucet and the drain); the clothes lines; the communal spirit... But then what the culture shock consist of? See, that`s the thing, much of these things that I can perceive as beautiful, enjoyable, pleasant, and in an otherwise pleasant way can also be view in negative light, as the uglier side of life and travel here in Senegal...

I`m homesick, uncomfortable here, and missing the ease and routine and sanitation aesthetic of living in the states, at hope; I feel disrespected, I feel that boundaries have gone un-honored, exasperated that the boys have not bothered to listen or to find out, to understand what I'm used to and comfortable with and how Senegalese customs and attitudes (or just that of the boys, perhaps!) fall far, far away, on a different part of a spectrum or maybe on a different side of a completely different spectrum, far far away from what I'm accustomed to. Of course this is culture shock, and apparently I'm not taking it so well, apparently not ingesting or imbibing it quite the way Henri Nouwen would suggest or wish for conscientious travelers. Apparently I'm failing to get past the culture shock and even to take it in positively if all the relationships around me have splintered in ways so elegantly complex that I can only improve upon bad habits, negativity, volatility, impoliteness, rudeness, anger, and cannot further my spiritual or personal development as a decent human being, taking in the inconsistency and nuance, uneven-ness, idiosyncracy of others, seeing myself in another, finding my own weaknesses by recognition, accepting inconsistency, repetition, and humbling processes that remind me it`s okay to learn the same thing twice (I don`t always have to make a point of asserting my prior knowledge, authority on a subject, potentially superior thinking--in most situations? see, I`m still very much holding on to the vanity and pride!--but I do...I don`t make enough of an effort to let go--to let go of pride, resentment, annoyance/nuisances/getting riled up/having my feathers ruffled, let go of power and control, claims to knowledge--though I strive for such conclusions time and again!, let go of presumption and judgment, let go of anger and irk-dom, let go of pretension and self-importance, let myself be deflated, debased, dethroned?--uh, from what?, torn apart, find in humbleness my self, selflessly unselfish, caring for others in the minutest and most particular of ways, find in humbleness my self-honor and my self, my selfhood and my self-appreciation--without letting these things take over my humility and awareness! Right now, my life stretches out before me in "either" direction, past and future (quotations--I taught the boys about so-called "air quotes" the other day--because perhaps someone can explain it to me in different terms, in terms of a different directionality or non-linearity!), a big empty void, developing the sense of being unloved and unvalued by my assigned family, seeing out love and appreciation in surrogate families, romantic lovers, friends, many of which only disappoint because in the end, constructing reliance and dependence on an individual or even a small handful of individuals does not solve much bigger problems of societal (though this refers to a very particular society -- no preclusions about humanity or human nature allowed!) brokenness and disconnection (see, who needs psychoanalysts--harking back to Nouwen--when you can see into the relational dynamics of your own life and see how well-being derailed long before that lifetime came to be, derailed centuries--nay, millenia!--ago?!). It hasn't been what I expected, I guess, though I can't quite put what I expected...I guess this is me seeing what happens when you don't really have any expectation...or the one you had is too far from possible to see fulfilled anyway that it amounts to having none...The bulk of my time here, at least in this one third of my experience and travel and time here, this second week, has been miserable, and that I did not expect. I guess I've been clashing hard against old-fashioned masculinity and a sense of irrelevance, but who says I can't learn something of humbleness at least from the latter and maybe even learn what expending pointless energy for hopeless cases means in terms of the former. I've just gone up in smoke, a big firework exploding with bits of confetti shrapnel flying every which way, a bright big ball of flame, flash, and failure, fizzing unimportance, unsubstantial. My feelings of loneliness, unimportance, invisibility, hopelessness, and exasperation at living in "a broken world," my out-of-placed-ness in Academia and otherwise presumptive and prideful circles, with feelings of incompetence, inarticulateness, inadequacy, not fitting in, feeling perpetually misunderstood, as though I`ll never find a parallel soul, someone to see things with me on my level, to commiserate, to share, to be a companion, a friend (spiritual or otherwise meaningful friendship), someone to remind me that I`m not alone, not an alien/Martian/extraterrestrial...these feelings might never go away, might only become more pressing, more opaque, more individualized and esoteric, more isolating, more of my unique Atlas-sized burden, more of something to (? dropped thought, apparently)...more of my own personal weighty companion through life--if I can`t find a mental match, I s`pose I`ll have to do with myself, my solitude, my maddening/oppressive emotional luggage. And in order for these elements of myself not to devour me, to create an ever-widening spiritual vacuity/vacuum, a burgeoning emptiness, a suffocating placelessness/homelessness (that is somehow also a homesickness), a partially inexplicable malaise, a heavy loneliness, that lingers...I have to find some way to get past it, to get over these obstacles and myself, to let go, to detach, to humble myself, to find solace without any grounding, any precedent, any emotional "primer," to find myself, my selflessness, my goodness/"my better self," my happiness, fulfillment, forgiveness, okay-ness, peace/solace/reassurance/stability/acceptance/acceptability/grounding...But HOW? Is there any way to insure I find these elements of utmost important and QUICKLY?

...

From Henri Nouwen`s Gracias!: A Latin American Journal, the entry dated October 30, 1981:

"Today Gerry McCrane, the director of the language school, gave a presentation to the newcomers. In his gentle and pastoral way he offered us an opportunity to share our struggles in adapting ourselves to a new culture. One theme that came up was the re-emergence of long-forgotten conflicts. In displacing ourselves into a new and unfamiliar milieu, old, unresolved conflicts often start asking for our attention. When our traditional defense systems no longer are available and we are not able to control our own world, we often find ourselves experiencing again the feelings of childhood. The inability to express ourselves in words as well as the realization that everyone around us seems to understand life much better than we do, puts us in a situation quite similar to that of a child who has to struggle through a world of adults. This return to childhood emotions and behavior could be a real opportunity for mental and spiritual growth. Most of the psychotherapies I have been exposed to were attempts to help me relive those times when immature ways of coping with stress found their origin. Once I could re-encounter the experience that led me to choose a primitive coping device, I was also able to choose a more mature response. Thus I could let go of behavior that was the source of my suffering. A good psychotherapist is a person who creates the environment in which such mature behavioral choices can be made. Going to a different culture, in which I find myself again like a child, can become a true psychotherapeutic opportunity. Not everyone is in the position or has the support to use such an opportunity. I have seen much self-righteous, condescending, and even offensive behavior by foreigners towards the people in their host country. Remarks about the laziness, stupidity, and disorganization of Peruvians or Bolivians usually says a lot more about the one who makes such remarks than about Peruvians or Bolivians. Most of the labels by which we pigeonhole people are ways to cope with our own anxiety and insecurity. Many people who suddenly find themselves in a totally unfamiliar milieu decide quickly to label that which is strange to them instead of confronting their own fears and vulnerabilities.But we can also use the new opportunity for our own healing. When we walk around in a strange milieu, speaking the language haltingly, and feeling out of control and like fools, we can come in touch with a part of ourselves that usually remains hidden behind the thick walls of our defenses. We can come to experience our basic vulnerability, our need for others, our deep-seated feelings of ignorance and inadequacy, and our fundamental dependency. Instead of running away from these scary feelings, we can live through them together and learn that our true value as human beings has its seat far beyond our competence and accomplishments. One of the most rewarding aspects of living in a strange land is the experience of being loved not for what we can do, but for who we are. When we become aware that our stuttering, failing, vulnerable selves are loved even when we hardly progress, we can let go of our compulsion to prove ourselves and be free to live with others in a fellowship of the weak. That is true healing.This psychological perspective on culture shock can open up for us a new understanding of God`s grace and our vocation to live graceful lives. In the presence of God, we are totally naked, broken, sinful, and dependent, and we realize that we can do nothing, absolutely nothing, without him. When we are willing to confess our true condition, God will embrace us with his love, a love so deep, intimate, and strong that it enables us to make all things new. I am convinced that, for Christians, culture shock can be an opportunity not only for psychological healing but also for conversion. What moves me most in reflecting on these opportunities is that they lead us to the heart of ministry and mission. The more I think about the meaning of living and acting in the name of Christ, the more I realize that what I have to offer to others is not my intelligence, skill, power, influence, or connections, but my own human brokenness, but my own human brokenness through which the love of God can manifest itself. The celebrant in Leonard Bernstein`s Mass says: "Glass shines brighter when its broken...I never noticed that." This, to me, is what ministry and mission are all about. Ministry is entering with our human brokenness into communion with others and speaking a word of hope. This hope is not based on any power to solve the problems of those with whom we live, but on the love of God, which becomes visible when we let go of our fears of being out of control and enter into his presence in a shared confession of weakness. This is a hard vocation. It goes against the grain of our need for self-affirmation, self-fulfillment, and self-realization. It is a call to true humility. I, therefore, think that for those who are pulled away from their familiar surroundings and brought into a strange land where they feel again like babies, the Lord offers a unique chance not only for a personal conversion but also for an authentic ministry."

Due to the nature of his Catholic-ness and priesthood, I believe that anyone`s resistance and discomfort with the God language above can easily be excused, especially using Julia Cameron`s semi-useful terminology, "Good Orderly Direction" (not that I don`t have problems with this approach!...it`s just the first thing that comes to mind to placate those who fear God language). I really appreciate his observations and insights, his awareness and spirituality, but then again, I`ve been really sucked into the beneficiality of spiritual practice (and the variety of spiritual practices) after so many years spent in the company of folks who concentrate their thoughts and energies, livelihoods and schedules, on the creation, maintenance, and perpetuation of sacred space, such that it works both for all and for each one, alone.

A Matter of Presumed Inferiority

2009-01-08T09:44:00.007-05:00

The limits and expectations imposed on women make the 95% Muslim population demographic rather depressing (though of course there is the chance this presumes too much about the individualization of Islam; perhaps in Senegal and elsewhere women are granted a certain autonomy and independence they might not be granted in certain fundamentalist Muslim circles...which cross-applies to fundamentalist Christian and Jewish households, as well...which is perhaps the largest dent in my corrolation above to depressing-ness).

Yet the question persists in my head--how can a population that avows women`s hardworking-ness and strongwilled-ness....that prioritizes women for loans because they`ll pay them back, that supports the women in their endeavors...also debase and demean and view women as inferior?

(Senegal – January 7, 2009. El Hadj will ask me to grab a folder for him that is equidistant from both of us. Why should I get up to get him something when he could get up and get it himself? Maybe if it was within my reach, but it is not. Is it because I’m a woman? When I tell him that it is a ridiculous thing to request of me, he gets all puffed up about how “that’s enough.” He told me yesterday he didn’t know what “stop” meant and then just kept saying the same thing a million times to me. I just can’t stand it.)

It is in response to such audacious arrogance that feminism ever bubbled to the surface constantly throughout the heavy history of patriarchy! This doesn`t mean I don`t sympathize with all of my guy friends` joking about an over-emphasis on patriarchy, rape, oppression, etc., but when I`m here, immersed in the illogic and nonsensical inequity pervasive in the daily life and treatment and perception of women, that I see--well, remember!--why feminism and a plea for equal treatment, equal roles, a view of men and women as equals, excepting certain glaring/obvious exceptions and impossibilities, had to arise, what it was so virulently responding to... and I see how my lifetime despising and intolerance for intolerant/irrational American males looks so petty in comparison to the cultural conditioning of Senegalese males...

Do they (Senegalese males) not work so hard or as seriously/dedicatedly because they are men and expect women to do everything for them (otherwise they are perceived as bad sisters, wives, friends, mothers?). Is it because of Islam? Because TRIBAL LIVING equates to egalitarian living, and how far this has disintegrated in Senegal, the urban settings, at least, which I have experienced, speaks volumes for the rapid decline of the tribal livelihood and speaks even more to my disillusionment about not traveling deeper into Senegal, into smaller-scale, more traditional villages where at least animism is still alive, and "bio-construction"/natural building, too, to see if that means tribalism is still even half-alive there, too, perhaps on its last legs but still kicking --?

Thiaroye.

2009-01-07T09:53:00.000-05:00

Thiaroye, Senegal. January 4, 2009.

I feel so happy, comfortable, utterly content. I like being in Senegal so much that it is going to be crazy difficult to part with this land when it comes time to board my south African Airlines flight home, but I realized this a while ago, and realizing this doesn’t actually help.

After some initial hubbub (mostly Marian being nagging), I stepped out to get a breath of fresh air, and ran into Marian, who asked if I’d be willing to accompany her back to her house. I was pleasantly surprised by how enjoyable/agreeable this morning excursion turned out to be: (I loved the exciting cityscape that stretched out, from her rooftop apartment), her telling me that she’d taken a voluntary vow of poverty, her offering me coffee, talking about Jisselle’s homesickness/discomfort, and what I might be able to do to make her feel more comfortable (Marian exclaiming, tears in her eyes, “Oh, isn’t it amazing/delight/wonderful/great how the universe brings together {the right people at the right time}..her optimism here gave me a feeling of a heavy burden of responsibility, a responsibility that in the coming days I grew to feel I’d failed to uphold – finishing this journal 1/9/09, during the downtime while being excluded from the loan application process), her giving me copies of our worksheets as well as a form or 2 I’d missed, talking to David on the roof, etc….”proscriptive” vs. “participatory” involvement; international development; feeding the birds,; road crossing.

Anyway, we finally left for Thiaroye…there, breakfast…tour that turned into women yelling at us over talking their photos for no effect/progress/their seeing any benefit…meeting with supposed Ecovillage president, me asking incendiary question about education, him asking what I was studying – sociology? -- at which point I replied telling what I’m studying doesn’t tell him anything about me…Thiaroye 44, where 224 men Senegalese are buried – how French repaid for fighting for them in WWII – largest keyhole bed I’ve ever seen…night visit to Christian’s home…strange translated conversation with his father about Palestine, history, war, and resistance.

My Photos:

Fish-Drying Operation

Drain

Thiaroye Scenic Walk

Well

Thiaroye 44

Factory Gardens

"Baghdad"

The Beach

The Women of Leye Djite

The Women of Pencom Dembaa

The Quirks, Idiosyncracies, and Irk-doms of Sustainable (International) Development

2009-01-07T09:47:00.003-05:00

January 6, 2009 – evening (A Matter of Presumed Authority)

We went back to the office around 5 o’clock to meet the 2 groups of women and to take their photos. Only our group of women showed up (well, one woman came for the photo of Adama’s fish-drying group), and we took their photo at the beginning.

Then, Adama and El Hadj informed me that we then would talk to them about “the importance of the ecovillage,” which was news to me, especially when Adama said, “Okay, now you’ll speak, and I’ll translate,” very abruptly, as is his style. I then had to quickly come up with some impromptu points and platitudes so that I could rattle off some general statements about the aesthetics of sustainability of the ecovillage in Senegal, throwing in the interwoven-ness of EDE on top of it. The women nodded and responded (kind of), but then when I asked them, as Adama had asked them, how their daily activities fit in with the ecovillage as a whole, they replied only with an account of their daily activities, not with how their activities affect those of others in their community. So that was disappointing, especially with it looming over my head how Marian told us that the sign of our learning is if the ecovillagers learn. But no matter how I shifted the questions in all the simulations and actual, serious meetings this week, it didn’t seem to have any sway. The leaders and workers did not soak up the framework, the manner of conceptualizing the ecovillage. I do not know how much this was due to the translation and to the lack of sustainability coursework and familiarity on the part of the Senegalese students, but either way it is frustrating and unsatisfying. Urf.

The women turned to me at the end, and via Adama, said that they were very happy and grateful? and had good hopes that I would help them. Dear me! I may be a “toubab,” but I do not implicitly by my toubab-ness carry all the weight and responsibility for financing their livelihoods with microcredit (What of the other students who were there with me? Didn't the women want their help, too?). Of course there are reasons they view the situation this way, reasons El Hadj repetitively prattles off about how they are wary of letting us white people take their pictures because too many have asked before to take their photos, promising to arrange aid and have only consistently succeeded in lying to them, the villagers, and failing them, in bringing them more of nothing as far as outside help is concerned. Nevertheless, it seems it should somehow be the Senegalese students’ job, as other students and as translators, to make it clear that we are only students sent out on behalf of GENSEN and SEM, sent as representatives, field workers, etc. to document the various ecovillage activities and transform them into compelling microcredit loan applications (this has also been frustrating, the Senegalese students compounding the functions of GENSEN and SEM, so that when the villagers’ words come back translated, the words “microcredit” and “microfinance” come up when we are merely talking about the ecological and economic viability and perpetuation of ecovillages. Rarrr?)...I , by virtue of being an American and otherwise privileged person, do not somehow have more authority than the Senegalese students to judge the sustainability and virtue of the loan applications during their loan credit process (for neither of our groups of students will ultimately decide on the order in which the loans are funded), nor do they somehow have more authority to judge those merits than the villagers themselves. This is perhaps the hierarchy everyone else around me sees, but it is not how I view the situation. Even though when Marian and I were speaking she said that we don’t have time (nor training, apparently – somehow it would help if we’d taken a couple classes on international development) to really involve the villagers in the process in a fully participatory way, that we are reduced to giving merely proscriptive –style training, advising villagers in the top-down European organizational way instead of in an egalitarian, responsibility/leadership- sharing manner. But I, in the actual heart of this course in the first half of the work so far thi s week, have not felt ther is even time for for THIS. There was enough time to scrunch in EDE(which as I discussed was only roughly discussed—even though watching the villagers in the meeting, they were clearly intrigued by the diagram (reasons I think if there were fewer and clearer images, it ocould almost speak on its own), to hear all their project purviews, to have them sort out 2 priorirty microcredit projects, and to get all the basics down for the loan. There is not, however, really time (or perhaps even a way) to get the villagers to reconceive their lifestyle, totally shift their thinking to ecovillage and sustainability thinking, to think not only of finance in terms of their own businesses and how they can be profitable for them (though of cours tey share the earning s with their families and the cooperatives) in terms of current of current endeavors. Marian has such interest in how microfinance can b used in resoundingly good/positive/ transformative developmental ways, but even a proscriptive approach cannot really get/reach this goal, and we weren’t even given enough space to be proscriptive. We had no wiggle room to shake up the villagers’ understanding (perhaps they are past the age to be affected anyway – though I’m not sure why I’m being so cynical—perhaps it was the insistence today on the lack, or, more accurately, non-existence of natural not-toxic, natural cloth dyes – but the villagers definitely demonstrate an understanding of trash problems, pollution in the air and the sea, overharvesting of fish, etc. – all kinds of major issues they have to deal with in Thiaroye and do- w/advocacy and education every time they meet people and tell them about the ecovillage-ness of Thiaroye), and to get them to shift gears in their development directionality. Oh well? It’s just very hard, tedious, unrewarding work, because it cannot actually redefine the bounds of everyday practice and lived experience, mentality and approach. But then, perhaps all this indicates is a certain infectious over-reliance and over-confidence, a self-inflation and an over-emphasis on self-importance. Perhaps the greatest thing I can learn and harness is the feeling of irrelevance, uselessness, and arbitrariness I experienced yesterday. For in many ways, the villagers’ existing successes, mentalities, meeting process, and solidarity/cooperation are overwhelmingly inspiring and beautiful as it is. Perhaps I need most to see how I am merely an observer, unnecessary as a participant but essential as an understander of the knack for so-called (“self-determination”).

Language Barrier!

2009-01-05T09:56:00.000-05:00

January 5, 2009.

I have a lot of mixed-up feelings and frustrations being here, and I want to do justice to them all in words, but writing is a process that is like sand falling through my fingers. As soon as I put pen to paper, my ideas dissipate and dissolve in my head.

Currently, I am sitting in a meeting with 5 of us representing GENSEN and SEM, and I AM ANGRY. There are 6 group leaders, actually 7 when I look around, maybe 8, because the person speaking now does not look like the ecovillage president we met yesterday. We have Mamadou Dieng, who we’re staying with here, also. That makes 14 people in this office. And it doesn’t even matter that I’m here. El Hadj actually just stated this, very (off-handedly) much a brushing off…

I feel as though I’ve been thrown into an acrobatic trap of ropes and pulleys, boxed into corners, into situations that are awkward, that I don’t want to be in.

It’s kind of like I have to accept that some things will never be understood, some things just won’t be translated; but it’s in many ways easier just to become exceedingly frustrated, animated, hyper-critical, and give up.

Today, we had a meeting with the leaders of Thiaroye, and we had a very tense and heated beginning to to the (pre)meeting, but I kept running up against a brick wall of language barrier, with very little of my worries and concerns actually being understood and addressed. We’d agreed to each discuss one quadrant of the EDE diagram, but when it came time to discuss it, El Hadj described the whole thing and then told Jisselle and me it doesn’t matter if we help or not. We felt very irrelevant, unnecessary, unwanted, and excluded from the process, and though we expressed this, we were only met with misunderstanding and more impoliteness from the males.

Who Are You?

2008-12-30T05:37:00.011-05:00

In class, Ousmane had us write in response to the prompt, "What defines your personal identity, and what does community mean to you?" This is what I scrawled:

I am a member of the human community in general and a member of a not-yet-existent/fledgling tribe in particular. Humans, of which community, as I said, I am a part, have great capacities for acquiring and using knowledge, for using consciousness and consciences, for empathy, ingenuity, sensibility, improvisation. Sometimes groups within the larger human association (species) squander these innate capacities and so any Cartesian legacy for being `thinking things` becomes nearly meaningless, without substance/grounding, for if a `thinking thing` presumes its own logic and rationality but in actuality acts without any sensibility or awareness of surroundings, for planetary, social, and tribal community contexts, then such actions essentially counter and reverse any intuitive logical capacities such `thinking things` innately (apparently) possess...(to be continued, especially since I`ve been thinking a lot about different framings of "sense," "rationality," and "logics" as groundwork for my upcoming thesis work)...

We then discussed in groups what national identity and community identity meant in our lives, what definitions we could come up with. In my group, we drew out the communal natures of traditional villages formed by the early pilgrims and colonists in the United States, long before it ever became known as such. Because so much of the value of community has disintegrated in the United States in favor of extreme individualist values, we kind of had a difficult time drawing out such examples of community identity in relation to the country that we live in and call home. We thought of small churches, going back to the first evangelical communities in Israel and Greece, how a certain concern for others and community experience were valued highly, as they were in American churches before we went through the more recent proliferation of mega-churches. It even used to be common in the United States, especially in times of greater scarcity, such as during the World Wars, to ask around in one`s neighborhood for some sugar or salt, or other staples and basic supplies, but today dependency has dwindled to the point that it`s hardly okay to ask a neighbor for anything. People often don`t even know their neighbors by name.

Ousmane said after these writing activities, very elegantly and yet very simply, something to the effect of, "No one person is completely isolated." He also gave us a quote from Kofi Annan in class:

"What makes a community? What binds it together? For some it is faith. For others it is the defence of an idea, such as democracy [or the fight against poverty]. Some communities are homogenous, others multicultural. Some are as small as schools and villages; others as large as continents...What binds us into an international community? In the broadest sense there is a shared vision of a better world for all people...Together we are stronger."

When I looked it up, I discovered that the version we`d been given was slightly abbreviated and edited (as evidenced by brackets and ellipses above). Here is the full version of the excerpted quote I found within a full text by the former U.N.-Secretary General, titled "The World Community Often Fails to Act Together, But It Can and It Should":

"What makes a community? What binds it together? For some it is faith. For others it is the defence of an idea, such as democracy. Some communities are homogeneous, others multicultural. Some are as small as schools and villages; others as large as continents. Today, of course, more and more communities are "virtual", discovering and promoting their shared values through the latest communications and information technologies. What binds us into an international community? In the broadest sense there is a shared vision of a better world for all people, as set out, for example, in the founding Charter of the United Nations. There is our sense of common vulnerability in the face of global warming and the threat posed by the spread of weapons of mass destruction. There is the framework of international law, treaties and human rights conventions. There is equally our sense of shared opportunity, which is why we build common markets and joint institutions such as the United Nations."

Later, I was reading Daniel Quinn`s Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest, and I found these passages with very similar themes, all of which make me feel very content to remember the simplicity of our connectedness, such the remedy that it is to feeling overly isolated and alone (Yes, he seems to stress some words unnecessarily, but I never said that I always agree with his mode of writing):

"Actually, it's plainly written in their lives. It's plainly written in the general community to which they belonged: the community of life on this planet. Anyone can read it. You just have to look.

Every creature born in the biological community of the earth belongs to the community. Nothing lives in isolation from the rest; nothing can live in isolation from the rest. Nothing lives only in itself, needing nothing from the community. Nothing lives only for itself, owing nothing to the community. Nothing is untouchable or untouched. Every life in the community is owed to the community--and is paid back to the community in death. The community is a web of life, and every strand of the web is a path to all the other strands. Nothing is exempt. Nothing is special. Nothing lives on a strand by itself, unconnected to the rest (Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest by Daniel Quinn, Chapter Eleven, pages 147-148)."

What "Ecovillage" Means in Senegal

2008-12-29T15:29:00.005-05:00

Much of this is copied from my notes so quotes and many phrasings can be attributed to our Tufts professor, M.Z.!

The goal of the recent proliferation of Ecovillage Movements has been to create ecovillages and sustainable communities which, by their own nebulous definitions, are meant to achieve a state such that they are sustainable on their own. Oh, how this folds in on itself! Do we perpetually insist on defining terms with the defined word used in the explanation? In my Permaculture course, Bill Mollison gave a much more satisfying definition of sustainability, which I can share with you in the future. He also shared with us a long tirade about the majority of people who rally around the term "sustainability" and don`t actually have any idea about its meaning!

She essentially began with a graph, which she referred to as the "World Model Standard Run." A google search turned up this carbon copy. The graph basically depicts the ideas of carrying capacity, "overshoot" (such the technical term that it is!), and consumption. What she had to say about it was merely that "There was no big bang; When we passed carrying capacity, there was no boom (because we had fossil fuels). We didn`t realize we were headed for disaster." She did, to her credit, leave room for some self-questioning: "Is it true? Do we know? But there is a possibility we`re in some deep trouble."

We talked about how Africa is huge (We were informed that the land mass of Africa would fit the combined land masses of Argentina, U.S., New Zealand, India, China, and Europe, perhaps more, but this needs further substantiation. She showed us an image of this, but it couldn`t have been to scale; I think it was just intended to convey the idea!). Also, another student mentioned that U.S. maps during the cold war magnified the U.S. and the Soviet Union to emphasize their conflict so Africa doesn`t look so big (also needs some background research - anyone up for the challenge?). Anyhow, in spite of (perhaps because of, but I`m skeptical!) its largeness, Africa has been rather isolated (although when the Sahara was still habitable 10,000 years ago...Here, she made a sideways reference, sort of, to the fact that agriculture made it uninhabitable by about the time of 4,500 years ago. Gee, imagine that! Fertile Crescent turning to "totalitarian agriculture" and depleting/gobbling up the resources of the planet! More research needed here, as well!) and so has changed at a different, less dramatic pace with the onslaught of colonization and the Industrial Revolution. Of course, most of Africa is somehow defined by its relationship to such forces, but the rate at which its many "Leaver" tribes have declined in prominence has been much slower than elsewhere around the globe (take the Americas for a counter-example!).

Speaking of the confluences of what many have simplified into dichotomies of East and West, South and North, those disparate dispersions of that "one right way to live" across the globe, we discussed a South African ecovillage, Tlholego, which I was surprised I had never heard of before (then again, when I stumbled on Pun Pun, I was equally shocked it hadn`t come up sooner). Tlholego was supposedly built on a European model, which means the guiding principle was "Let`s look to the past," but because it was styling itself also after European fashions, they didn`t do this very well. Yes, it`s in South Africa, and they have mixed indigenous tribes with disgruntled city-dwellers, blacks and whites, but they`ve also based much of their ecological efforts on science, overlooking the potential of existing techniques (hence reducing the cost and time inputs of research) and even intuition/instinct.

This brings me very nicely to this astonishing moment from our class. M.Z., our professor, mentioned that the BBC website has reconstructed how the British and Irish lived 2,000 years ago, taking painstaking efforts to explain and illustrate the methods, the materials, and the details of everyday life. But right here in Senegal, people live (exactly or almost exactly) the same today!

In Senegal, GENSEN (Global Ecovillage Network-Senegal), they have approved 45 low footprint villages in 10 regions (2 zones with 7 regions: nord = Dakar, Thiés, Diourbel, St. Louis, Fatiak; sud = Kolda, Casamance), with 31, 500 population, much of which longs to return to "the golden age." Out of this 31,500, perhaps 315 can say what an "ecovillage" is. Around this point, M.Z. stated, "GENSEN believes that the colonial (system) leaves them in unnecessary conflict," referring I believe to villages and ancient traditions and the "Western"/"Taker" way. (A note on terminology: I`ve spent a lot of time preoccupied with the right and wrong words, but it seems so clear to me at this moment that it doesn`t matter that much. We are not supposed to have a vocabulary to explain monstrosity (monster cultures and all they engender) because we aren`t supposed to have monstrosity. But out of hundreds of thousands, all we needed was one. And we got that one. And now we`re stuck explaining how one devoured the majority of hundreds. - Though of course some declined on their own.)

A telling moment in class was related to NGOs. Our professor quoted a man from Burkina Faso: "Why won`t they let us work for our own villages?!" The system doesn`t work well now; top-down formal villages cost a lot of money, and there is no interest by imported outsiders in the villages they are imported into. That man won`t want to be there. Besides, villagers are suspicious. Whereas if he`s from the village, this shifts a lot. He has interest, he has the villagers` trust; good things happen.

One of the things that she brought up in class that was most mind-boggling for me was the mere notion of "TWO SOCIAL CONTRACTS" (which is how it looks in my notes). It solves all kinds of dilemmas I`ve been dealing with in my head, avoiding having to work them out with others who can only see one trajectory of history that pits tribal law in the primitive "dark ages" and written law as a godsend, a salvation. It cuts out this trajectory by showing how both function entirely by different political means and mechanics they can hardly be thrown together on a clear line. They function in entirely different planes, and the disintegration in tribal law that was succeeded by a long nothingness and followed by written rules such as the Code of Hammurabai (see The Story of B for discussion of tribal law and "Taker" law) explains how these two entirely distinct notions of government and social functioning could be so incompatible and dissimilar, entirely unrelated (think skewed, in terms of geometry!).

One such social contract is that which M.Z. placed within the "Global Market System" (though Quinn and I would broaden it to "Taker" culture in its long and winding history): -Primary economic units are government & private organizations. -Employment services and distribution of goods are monetary exchanges. They are regulated to include nepotism. - Everything is (strictly) MONITORED. ...There is a legitimate conflict of interest (in Senegal?) with the realities of life support systems; 29% of the Senegalese population had jobs in 2007; there is much corruption, many are underpaid, many in higher ranks are (untrustworthy?).

The other social contract belongs to African Traditional Societies: -Family, lineage are primary units -Cradle to grave social security is assumed by the hierarchical structure of kinship; friendship obligations; distribution system regulated by the hierarchy. -FAMILY is the strongest force (which cancels out any need for unwieldy governmental structures).

What the meaning of ecovillage in Senegal (and Africa in general, it seems) came down to was this: "Northern" ecovillages are trying to create sustainable lifestyles post-Industrial Revolution, whereas "Southern" ecovillages are trying to sustain pre-Industrial Revolution lifestyles (shortest, simplest route to sustainability; we have a handout that defines an ecovillage--and don`t take this for a final word because I`ll be providing multiple definitions until I can distill the clearest and most deserving definition--as "a village that works to preserve its traditions and its natural resources against poverty and degradation, while upgrading the living environment of its inhabitants. An ecovillage is seeking both preservation and modernization in four areas," which areas are 1) sustainable traditions, culture, religion, and values, 2) sustainable environmental conditions, 3) sustainable economics, and 4) sustainable society (the health, education, and safety of the whole ecovillage).). Some of us discussed in class how North & South are merely current popular jargon, that such language oversimplifies the realities and doesn`t capture nuances.

M.Z. asked us if we thought the isolated heritage of much of Africa, and its lagging behind the Industrial Revolution, seemed like a blessing or a disadvantage. It was clear in my head that this was just right, completely as it should be, because that meant more tribes had lost fewer integral components of their belief systems, lifestyles, etc.. But looking around the room and noticing what our professor stressed, it became clear that most people see it as a mixed advantage, which makes plenty of sense also. Moving along, at about this point in the class, she exclaimed, "Look at how the diagrams by the Europeans are trying to discover how to go backwards." And then, "Here is permaculture," showing some garden or one construction project. No, that was not permaculture. I don`t know if permaculture can be encapsulated in one image (I doubt it!). And though in the notes it sounds as though she might have been ridiculing the tendency to think in terms of "going backwards" I`m almost positive she stressed it in such a way as to say this was the goal, the thing people interested in sustainability aspire to. But this makes no sense. It is impossible to imagine we could go backwards, and those who do look nothing less than foolish. We can only go forward. So we go forward, with knowledge of the past, current innovation, and ongoing inventiveness. She did mention the following, which made plenty of sense in this context: "Here in Africa you can still find answers you can`t find elsewhere (`cause they`re still in the original version)."

Yet it apparently doesn`t raise any eyebrows here that the governing mentality is
"Think Globally. Act Locally." For education, transportation, and other "modernization" needs, it doesn`t seem to occur to anyone to look anywhere other than to the so-called Western world. So a group might claim to have in its interest the perpetuation of traditions and the urge to circumvent the ugliness of the Industrial Revolution, but the endpoint they want to get to is still the "modern" one, the appealing lifestyle seen on television (soap operas from the Americas being especially popular), just via a route that bypasses all the smog, congestion, and violence. Meaning: It doesn`t matter what inherent violence might lurk within that lifestyle; because it`s glamorous and convenient and healthy and sleek, everyone should strive for this one particular manner of existence. Perhaps the derailing happens in something as simple (and oh so unassuming!) as education. Tribal societies don`t need to have curriculum when learning is so interwoven with daily life and experience. Sorry, it`s kind of driving me crazy. Expect Providence references for a follow-up!

Local? Global? How Should We Live and Interact?

2008-12-08T16:55:00.004-05:00

Written March 10, 2008, especially for Proseminar, on a topic both of interest to me and of relevance to the program. Not my most stunning writing, but decent enough in its clarity and simplicity...Nevertheless, this essay ends on a note that is very much central to a large component of my upcoming thesis work, gauge-ing various degrees of sustainability across the gamut of human societies (as much as possible, of course). Also, we discussed regionalism today in politics (hoorah!)...

“Now, it’s feeling like a small town with six billion people downtown at a little sidewalk fair in Earth Town Square. There are Germans selling Audis filled with gasoline from Saudis to Australians sipping Kenyan coffee in their Chinese shoes; Argentines are meeting Mongols over french fries at McDonald’s, and the place looks strangely tiny when you see it from the moon…” – “Earth Town Square” by Peter Mayer (singer/songwriter)

Community! As social creatures, we humans cannot extricate ourselves completely from our social surroundings. We come to know the world through them, and there is strong evidence to support the claim that we leave this world by severing our ties to our society. We cannot live alone with any degree of safety comparable to that enjoyed by, say, a band of foragers. We may define our community in different ways, yet the integral role of other people to our prospects for survival defines our relationships as essential to our lives. Could this also possibly be a sufficient way for us to define home?

Let us define community as a group of people living in close proximity and interacting with each other and their surroundings. This definition stresses interconnectedness, a concept borrowed from ecology, which, after all, applies to us humans as much as to other creatures. Our focus now shifts to the question of the community’s surroundings. Where does the community end and the external world begin? How large is the purview of the community? How large can a community grow before it ceases to be a community?

In other words, the question is how should we define local? By miles? By regions? National or physical geographic borders? Population? At this point, I become unsure. Much writing has recently been released on the benefits of local-scale economies and the scourge of their global-scale counterparts. Still another set of writers continues to vouch for the advantages of globalization, a world in which “Australians [sip] Kenyan coffee in their Chinese shoes; Argentines [meet] Mongols for french fries at McDonald’s.” This is the part where an exploration of the various texts, for and against globalization, would be quite useful. I would like to research the various arguments and see which ones make the most sense and which ones fail to address critical considerations. There are many related questions I would like to address— How global is globalization? If two countries are trading with each other and nobody else, does that really count as global? Should different regions maintain strong communication and contact, or should localization involve greater degrees of isolation? Should communities or regions struggling to maintain a local focus create a network amongst themselves? How much does interconnection affect the outcome for each individual community or region? To what degree should we trade outside of the local system? Does local entail being completely self-sufficient? What does remaining incompletely self-sufficient mean for everyone involved? Who is the self remaining sufficient? Local government? The family? The individual? And how will we define or measure sufficiency anyway?

William McDonough once stated his design standards in a TED Talk, “Our goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy, and just world, with clean air, water, soil and power – economically, equitably, ecologically, and elegantly enjoyed.” I would like to examine how local and global focuses could contribute to the development of William McDonough’s standards. Would a local focus be in danger of becoming overrun by the tyranny of the majority? Would a global focus inherently counter the ideals?

Discerning the advantages of local or global systems is an intriguing question and very relevant to our time. How should we live? What will provide the best results for people? How should we interact? How does communication modify the course a local or global system takes? The questions proliferate. Because community has a crucial role in our lives, it makes sense for us to ask in what form or forms the community is most effective to us. The next question then becomes, “What are the primary functions of community?” How else would we define effectiveness if we did not understand what was supposed to be effective? In any case, questions about the way to define community, local, home, or global, and the way (or the extent to which) those systems should interact, are increasingly important in our contemporary world, where our sustainable behavior or lack thereof will reflect themselves in our own future. A final question, then, makes us wonder, “How does the concept of ‘our children’s future’ correlate to change? Can it be an effective inciting force, or is it an abdication of responsibility?” It seems we might find some direction in exploring the nuances of all these questions.

Vision is Humble

2008-12-03T16:01:00.013-05:00

SPOILER ALERT

Good After Dachau book review/synopsis

In After Dachau, Daniel Quinn’s mortifying novel of society 2,000 years down the road had Hitler been able to take over the world, the main character uncovers the truth and feels intensely compelled to share his findings, to goad everyone else to attention, consciousness, and remorse. But what he discovers, after a staged kidnapping intended solely to prove a single point to him, is that “no one cares.” This revelation liberates him to redirect his energies so that he is able to do something other than fret, feel trapped, and despise everyone in his society. He takes his energy and opens a bookstore/gallery, eccentrically selling old books seized during World War II (even spearheading publication of Anne Frank’s unearthed diary) and showcasing his fiancée’s Abstract Expressionist artwork (named Gloria, she is a black woman born in 1922 and killed in the final wave of exterminations of minority populations in the genocide, when it came to New York City, trapped 2,000 years later in the body of a crash victim, Mallory Hastings). The gallery opening is abysmal, precisely because no one cares, but little by little, with Gloria and Jason’s perseverance, it gains steam as its own radical protest. One evening, someone hurls a (flaming?) brick through the storefront. Someone cares.

Despite the odds, the horrors, the ghastly unearthed secrets, the guilt, the passage of 2,000 years, it turns out others in their society can feel threatened by the fact that their world is built on lies, that they are suddenly being accused and implicated in the horrific destructive actions that their way of life was founded upon. Despite the (unbearable weight, or light-weighted-ness) of history, the brick-thrower cared about something that happened 2,000 years before, and so did Jason. Both the brick-thrower, bent supposedly on either keeping the past a secret or defending his ancestors' inhumane actions, the atrocities they perpetuated, and Jason, bent on learning about and from the truth, have particular visions, mythologies, agendas that they want to propagate (create support for) in the world. Jason slowly attracts attention, the brick-thrower slowly nurtures (his or her) exacerbation/outrage/animosity. Their visions slowly grow, humbly. While most people (rightly) do not condone the ideology moving the brick thrower to action, they can wholeheartedly relate to Jason’s character and thinking. They too would be outraged if no one cared about something so earth-shatteringly monumental and de-stabilizing about their culture. They too would do whatever it took, persevering humbly, working slowly, little by little/poco a poco, to gain steam and support for their vision and perspective on life, on an ethical lifestyle change that addresses the dark history and breaks from it in a way that will hopefully prevent a similar future catastrophe.

The analogies Quinn is trying to draw in After Dachau are many. His writing in all his other novels and nonfiction concerns itself with the similarly dark origins of our own civilization. He concludes that “History is written by the conquerors,” that we are blind to the lies we’ve been told, the mythologies/rationales/ideologies, “stories we tell about how things came to be this way,” precisely because we know nothing other than these stories; presented with nothing else, we take our stories, our histories, to be the only ones there are, to be authoritative writings of how things came to be this way, we situate ourselves, plant our feet in the ground, to then discover how unstable things are -- well, that’s just not what we asked for, not at all what we bargained for, completely unacceptable. Yet Quinn has always had this as one of his best traits as a thinker, his willingness to take on the role of the gadfly, much the way that Socrates did in his time (the similarities between the two are striking; exploration for another day). All his writing is meant to expose the lies, the secrets, the hidden realities, the mythologies, those darknesses we are all reluctant, unwilling to see, for good reason—because then our world must enter through such dramatic upheaval, an upheaval we shirk from because we are so stunningly unprepared for anything of that magnitude.

He instructs in Ishmael or Story of B to “Teach 100. If you cannot teach 100, then teach 10. If you cannot teach 10, teach 1” (though I can't seem to locate this quote). Vision is humble. Vision, he believes, is the most drastic, inciting force, the most rife with potential to turn everything, every last aspect of our cultural reality, on its head. Yet people are slow in coming around to it. God knows how much opposition I have to deal with in advocating for Neo-Tribalist thought and vision. Vision must be humble in order to survive disillusionment, discouragement, loneliness, isolation, but it will be all worth it, apparently, because one day, utter silence and solitude skips ahead many years in one breath, and a brick is sent through a wall; one day, there is a sudden transformation from silence to momentum (think Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, and the magic number - is it 125?), and many people turn to the vision because it suddenly makes sense, matters, is worth caring about, even if it is only because it offers a simpler way of living than an increasingly unlivable, harder to continue, lifestyle. Vision must be dedicated, must be perseverant, sturdy, and as such, humble vision will be less liable to crack than a volatile, impatient mentality powering an individual’s experience of the vision.

The use of art as radical protest is an intriguing component of the story. Quinn does not in any way condone what he calls programs (in My Ishmael, he includes intentional communities as such a misguided program…more on that later!). I think many protests and social movements he sees as programs in this regard, as ineffective movements that are not nearly as transformative or radical, altering, as their constituent movers and shakers think they are, which is why I found it interesting that he included similar methods in After Dachau. I think he was making a delicate distinction that any methods used to perpetuate a new vision, to educate others, even if they resemble other social movements, if they use activist art and methods, are still unique by virtue of their driving force, vision - the flowing river that overpowers the flimsy sticks or programs stuck in its path.

Quinn prefaces the entire work with a note on his complete and utter lack of support for ideas of rebirth, past lives, and reincarnation. I found this intriguing, fascinating, humorous, and all, when I first opened the novel. I see many similarities to my fear/disinterest/suspicion of New Age ideas and practices, a bias I’ve been meaning to explore in writing (what’s the difference between supporting a Buddhist praying with a singing bowl and a New Age-y practitioner or dabbler co-opting the practice for their own spiritual fulfillment/journey/whims? – think Andrew Bird’s “Heretics”: “What a crack!” – See what I mean? How do you tell?). A lot of sorting must be done to clear up the unattractiveness, the prejudice, and the merits or detriments of New Age-ism…Also a project for another day! Until next time!

Environment as Home, as Whole

2008-10-25T23:51:00.008-04:00

As part of defining environmentalism and radical environmental politics for my unwieldy Prosem/potential thesis project, I wanted to start with a discussion of environment and what it is about environment that people can get riled up about, what incites people to political action with intense feeling. After our most recent Prosem session, I had a discussion with one of my friends in the class about conceiving of the utter devastation caused to our planet over time, but especially since the incipience of industrialization, and about ways of understanding this depletion of resources, this havoc, so completely, in its grand scale, so much so that particular behaviors result and certain actions are taken to change that regrettable reality slowly, starting at an acutely personal level. She was worried that she couldn't picture water scarcity and water wars, especially affecting her, because water flows so freely, amongst regions, and so resource shortages of water are only evident in large scale, at least at present. But she admitted she already turns off the shower to lather, that she thinks about these things, that she's very aware of the issues. So it seemed that the real issue was conceiving of all environmental problems as a whole, viewing the environment holistically, seeing the connections, and therefore finding behaviors that can address these issues through multi-pronged approaches, covering several issues through one action, simplifying the intricate map of environmental havoc into a plan of action that is realistic, understandable, not quite so overwhelming as the problems themselves, in order that by not being overwhelming itself it won't go the way of the apathy that only contributes to the problem itself. I didn't know how to summarize such a simplification, where to start, so I'm picking up with the writing I did a month and a half ago, that I might eventually extract the main points, find the embarking point I can use when talking with others, without going speechless because I don't even know where to begin. With a note of caution that this is composed mostly of convoluted half-notes, here, then, is that earlier writing...

On Environmental Concerns. Due to the nature of human environment, that confluence of factors pertaining to the quality and safety of the air, water, soil, plant (matter) and animal species we encounter, weather patterns and geologic forces and formations that act upon and restrict us, as well as the quality and pattern of these factors when recombined by humans into our built environments, the politics, activism, ethics, and concerns issuing thereof/”therefrom" must address the totality of these factors, must take into account not isolated aspects but the whole of the unique sphere where they converge and form this very fascinating confluence, this wholeness, entirety, this entity, a swirling biosphere, that gives us life, nurtures and nourishes us.

The holistic approach I propose must be meticulously detailed, no doubt. In the process of outlining/elucidating/describing the necessary changes to our outlook, our mindsets (who is our?), changes we must make in order to strive toward this holistic approach, and introducing it into the mainstream environmental discourse on concerns and their accompanying policy suggestions, so as to influence/redirect the future dialogue about, and current flow of, environmental discourse, I hope to address the up-til-now, as-of-now silent issues and unnoticed-or-unknown philosophies of human (and) environment, to change the flow of discourse on this thoroughly weighty subject. I hope, also, to bridge the canon of Western philosophy and the young, seedling cannon of primitivist writing/ideology/thought, and especially to patch current intellectuals’ potholes/shortcomings/gaps on the topic of (radical) environmental politics.

What is radical environmental politics or what should it be, should it include, should it mean? Technically, taking into account the essence of the etymological anatomy of the word, it has to do with roots, which by definition then places the purview of radical environmental politics with the nutrient-channels that nourish living organisms/systems, which is a delightful allegory for contextualizing our discussion. Either it is a politics from the ground up, from the grass roots, or even better, it is a politics concerned with the very nourishment that categorizes/ epitomizes/encapsulates/ bases/roots/positions/situates the human environment totality/wholeness in its live-giving, nutrient solution; in its own definition, its most appropriate context, it essentializes our initial term, reduces it down to its essentials, the nourishment that is the core of human environment, of its meaning.

Often, due to the fairly recent phenomenon of greenwashing, we hear sound bytes from politicians and interviewable activists, those acceptable by the commercial media, who discuss singular focuses that cannot, in fact, be separated from the totality of human environment and the concerns that it generates on the whole. For instance, you might hear Barack Obama (or T. Boone Pickens, for that matter-- take your pick) discussing alternative energy in the form of wind power; Al Gore supra-publicizing global warming (Is it for his own gain? But how? Think harder if you don’t see it!); PETA protesting animal rights abuses; elementary school classrooms creating naïve posters about saving water or not polluting the air; protesters trespassing on military bases in attempts to protest nuclear armament and space warfare strategy conferences; mainstream supermarkets, including the not-really-a-supermarket infamous chain, Walmart, introducing organic/green living sections into their layouts; Apple Computers boasting the remedied/lowered/mediated/reduced/mitigated toxicity of their re-released iPhone product; or any famous office supply chain raving about their 10% post-consumer waste recycled paper products. None of these are actual accomplishments or that pressing of concerns (since the real priorities are more systemic, more likely to address multiple issues at once).

What are the implications of this view? Well, for one thing, guilt-laden middle class, moderately educated consumers, corralled by this guilt-weight into precisely programmed product/consumption decisions, can drop that weight, free themselves of the guilt, and no longer face the seeming necessity of their anxiety/worry/fear of impending environmental doom, as the supposedly logical next step in the unfolding/progression of culminating and ever-worsening environmental catastrophes and disasters appears to be. But, if this is the end result for the nascent “worrying class,” the renunciation of their ever-upward-spiraling anxiety, how should we feel? And what should we be prioritizing? How can we adapt our thinking to both the immensity/immediacy/gravity and the truth of the situation to best suit/facilitate the development/brainstorming of solutions? What are the real issues, the meatiest solutions, the most relevant concepts/thought processes/thought patterns/communication frameworks/mindsets we must elucidate, study, analyze, focus on, employ, utilize? How do we best respond, think, and act on the contemporary environmental situation, especially if it doesn’t hold any weight aside from that which we (however naïvely or unnecessarily) assign to it?

Since my concern doesn't entirely pivot around the accuracy or urgency of the issues that the prominent voices of the greenwashing movement bring up, I am still interested in discussing the role and force of global warming, recycling, alternative energy, toxicity of electronics, organic food, frugal lifestyle, etc.. But because I have been corrupted by philosophers from an early age, I see immense value in revealing the assumptions implicit in these alarm-causing issues (Cradle-to-Cradle design points out that recycling is just pointless downcycling; global warming alarmism relies on excluding scientific findings that look at geologic time, at the cyclical nature of Ice Ages, and that aren't compelled by a fear of any change to contemporary lifestyles to show that life on earth will end if, say, we don't buy carbon offsets--life on earth as we know it in our culture might end, but that really isn't such a big deal, in fact is perhaps a blessing; raw food advocates deny that cooked food was ever beneficial to peoples inside or outside of destructive civilization, etc.). If we start there, we actually have a stabler foundation from which to work because we aren't basing our actions on bogus notions.

As I just described my interest in still addressing the disparate issues that alarmists of environmental doomsday will highlight to the exclusion of any other issues in the whole of the environmental system, including human actions resulting from resource shortages (such as initiatives for feeding the starving children across the globe or turning to violence in Haiti because of extreme deforestation), etc., I want to share the elements of environmental politics and policy I wish to address in my future analysis of what a holistic environmental approach to world problems will look like. These elements include any (and, I hope, all) of the following, and most likely others that will crop up as I go:

Guerilla gardening, environmental terrorism- as separate from; ecovillages, communes; landscaping – misguided efforts; going off grid; beekeeping- colony collapse disorder/die offs/g.e. crops/ Monsanto/ research university politics; tree sitting; women's cooperatives; over-population? assumptions, resources, exponential growth, etc.; reservations, national parks, wildlife preserves, adverse effects; local currency/timeshares; child care- child rearing; radical environmental education as resistance?; biking/commuting/etc., walking; plant medicine versus pharmaceutical giants/mega-corporations – patenting, resistance; water wars; deforestation; conflicts over resources; environmental racism; toxicity – e.p.a. – prioritizing – superfund sites – remediation or lack thereof, activism, politics associated with those touchy subjects; gentrification or white flight keep good housing from being affordable housing; lack of parks, good parks, safe parks, ecological parks, green spaces, in many places; suburbs; community gardens; community building-organizing; natural building versus building codes – what is safe; nuclear armament, proliferation, Nevada test site, protesting; government and Our Stolen Future- hormone disrupters; carcinogens, toxins all around us; shade grown versus not; fair trade, free trade, resources, social justice, economic justice, well-being, disparities, safety, etc.; religious intolerance and links to resource availability, conflict, first world/third world widening gap; trash – artistic responses – recycling – cradle to cradle – waste – design – cycle – interconnections – upcycling, etc., good design; nature deficit disorder versus attention deficit disorder, education, education facilities, education methods; over-harvesting of fish, wildlife; air quality, indoor air quality – circulation – “death chamber” office buildings; fast food; good, healthy food unaffordable (if unaffordable for anyone, something must be horribly wrong, no?--I have some ideas what that horribly wrong is...); mental health, psychiatric facilities, pharmaceutical companies; symptomatic versus allopathic medicine; peak oil; solar cookers versus wood stoves; biodiesel, ethanol- politics of, economics of, lack of sustainability but impulse actions because assumed benefit of sustainability?; e-waste; feminine hygiene product waste; drug trafficking and monoculture, economy, health, delusion; needless waste; nuclear power, "clean" coal, etc.; plastic-paper-glass packaging etc.; animal rights -- popular and unknown (hermit crabs killed for medicine, etc.); birth control; healthy, drug-free, safe, "human" birth; orphanages around the world, what forces create orphans, adoption and well-being, home, resources, family and opportunities; conservation; "invasive" species; “whole” foods; nutrition – supplements; vegetarianism and cars, carbon footprint reduction; natural disasters, bad design, humanitarian aid, inaction, callousness, responses, solutions, minimizing devastation, assumptions about human life, resources; global slave trade and resources, health, children, women, social justice, earth as home, earth as unsafe home.......

Turning Twenty, Turning Pages

2008-10-20T21:42:00.023-04:00

Two weeks ago I turned twenty. I wrote about it a some days before the event, and my writing then is still indicative of the feeling of urgency I have about it:

I’m turning old, as in twenty, soon. For the last four and a half years of my life, somewhere between one fifth and one quarter of my life, my days have been, in a way, side-swept/cheapened by a peculiar phenomenon called, I suppose, not getting over myself, not accepting incontrovertible forks in the road. It has got to stop. I cannot live any more of my life in that way. If nothing else, apparently I must make some kind of way for myself in the world, must have an outlook that builds me up as I go rather than undermining me at critical moments or multi-dimensionally.

After all, I have spent my adolescence fearing that I would be lonely forever. As it turns out, this is an unlikely prospect. I have dated three rather interesting and mostly pleasant guys (when dating them, at least) in the last five years, nevermind that two were related. I have no idea where I go from there, where the threads of various relationships will take me, but at least I've learned a lesson in the extremism of self-pity.

I want the next, mirroring twenty years of my life to look entirely distinct from the last, tragic set. It has taken a rather protracted amount of time to make that observation, but it really has been tragic, and it is not surprising I have suffered much melancholy as a result in that time (Ahem. Editor's note: This pronouncement is obviously pre-birthday biased in favor of emphasizing the negative). Many unhappy circumstances have shaped my life up 'til now; I have made a great many mistakes/social blunders, stepped on people’s toes, insulted many, lived my life in somewhat socially unacceptable ways…and I cannot forgive myself.

I have bitten my nails to the brink of extinction; I haven't done as well in academic situations as I might have wished; and as I said, I have made many choices differently than many people expected me to make them, the social unacceptability of which, of many of these behaviors/actions, constantly calls into question my justification for doing so.

I have challenged my worldview many times, feared and tried to avoid solidifying my views by the time I maneuvered out of my teens, but instead I do have some solid views, including some solid views on perpetually questioning those views, a quirk that might at least, for some time yet, help to carry a younger person's lack of stubbornness with me for several more years, at advantage to me against my less open-minded peers. I’ve had some strange, half-fortuitous, spectacular, entertaining, though mostly unusual, moments in my life, but the cumulative effect is utterly unfulfilling. And that overall tenor to my life is precisely what I wish to break with for the next twenty years.

So what exactly do I want to happen in those two decades? I want to return to Brasil, to work and live there. I want to have children and raise them unfailingly continuum. I want to travel again. I want to publish different kinds of works (as in different genres, for different audiences). I want to provide for other people the kind of hope, support, care, attention, love, assurance that I felt resentment for not having in mine, and why not? How great is it if I can create that which doesn’t exist, if I can take what dissatisfies me and do something with it to enhance the lives of others, making mine better in the process, especially in the satisfaction of knowing that some of my behavior helped to steer others away from the paths I’ve been down in the urban landscape of melancholy?!

I want to complete a triathlon. I want to be happy for the most part, counter to the emptiness (though not really sadness) of the last twenty. I want to defend my views/statements well, solidly. I want to love. I want to finally be able to cook delicious meals. I want to write something that I can be proud of. I want to stay on top of things. I want to be successful, productive, but not because I am in search of success. I want to design nurturing, restorative, life-changing landscapes. I want to be a role model, mentor, important person in people’s lives. I want to create communities and ecovillages. I want to bring people together. I want to heal places like Omaha. I want to forgive my family for their failings and then avoid them and their deleterious powers in my life. I want to feel at peace in my own skin, in my own world, with my own decisions, with how things turn out. I want to live fully, simply, joyously.

I have edited and changed some of that writing, but the bulk of it still defines how I feel and what I am striving for or towards. I still feel the same. The last twenty years were mostly not up to me but rather up to my family, which experiences for a large chunk of that time I resented for that very reason. But now it is clear, the next twenty are certainly up to me.

I don't have to go to school if I don't find it valuable or worthwhile. I don't have to move across continents constantly if it seems to me a peculiarly wasteful habit. I don't have to adopt my parents' misanthropic view of their neighbors, their acquaintances, their peers. I don't have to visit random places sporadically, erratically. I can build genuine, lasting connections with people and places. I can break a cycle of familial gloom and dysfunction because I can harness a knowledge unavailable to my mother and her mother, or my father's mother and father, because I can use an inner sensitivity my parents and their progenitors seem to lack. I can create something affirming, beautiful, vibrant, something they are not capable of, something that no mellifluous tinkerings and breathy pipings could--except, of course, if used in ways for good, for something beyond individualistic projects, avenues that they would never think to use. I sound so pessimistic and flippant, and of course there have been pleasant moments with my family, but the recurring attitudes and indications of their beliefs and priorities have seared into my memory. I think of all my mother's scowls, my father's jarring tones, my grandmothers' insensitive words, my aunt's superficial goals, and I see that this need to break off and protect myself from their vapid negativity was decided long ago. It's kind of like getting stuck with the wrong family for your entire life so far. And though I've been jealous of other people's family bonds in recent years, especially their ability to deal with the people who life brought together into socially-recognized families, I have found my surrogates and, more importantly even than having my own semblance of such a socially-recognized family, will create my own tribal family over time. I simply can't give up, which I'm liable to do off and on in the somewhat lonely interim.

The "I'm not getting any younger" mentality is really getting to me. I'm filled with a kind of power surge to get everything done now. Why not? To read voraciously, an art I've never mastered--my readings always slow, pained, and meticulous, and therefore intermittent, infrequently sustained; to write intensely, constantly, spilling my ideas out of my cluttered head; to create what I want to see in the world not forty years from now but at this very moment...I didn't expect turning twenty to be much more than a lamentable aging milestone. Yet here I am, uncovering an energetic potential for manifesting goodness and hospitality that wasn't accessible to me before. I just don't know how long it will last until I crumble into a paralysis of indecision all over again. I mean, I expect that from myself, to move cyclically through my tumultuous emotions. My only hope, then, is that the energetic periods sustain themselves longer and occur more frequently than the fretting, immobile ones.

So...how did I actually spend my birthday, you ask? Well, the day before my birthday, a Sunday, my boyfriend took me to a restaurant serving Portuguese/Brasilian cuisine. The decor of the place was exquisite! There were brilliant (as in brilla - Spanish; brilhante - Portuguese) murals on the walls, depicting social dances, fishermen at sea, couples at dinner. They were painted in very earthy hues, but the dancers had bright clothing in reds and whites. Just a lovely surrounding to situate myself for a birthday dinner. I had sardines (which I tried to share with Peter, but he's a picky eater!), caldo verde, beans and rice, and mariscada (Peter took a hilarious snapshot of me on his iPhone, with me wearing a silly and childish plastic bib with a goofy lobster printed on it). I've tried being a vegetarian before, but I struggle with finding a way to balance my anthropological interest in meat and fish and an ethical position about animal rights and shrunken ecological footprints (because apparently the greatest environmental actions we can take in our society are renouncing cars and meat, a view I'm starting to find more than a little problematic!). What I can say for myself is that Peter and I looked up on the iPhone Safari the list of good, bad, and so-so fish to eat/not to eat. Check it out here. Apparently, the Monterey Bay Aquarium keeps more detailed guides by region. Also, if you're ever in the disgustingly well-to-do Westchester County, definitely make sure to dine at Aquario.

I spent much of the week of my birthday working on a brand-new Bookstore Blog for my favoritest bookstore ever, aside from fixing up the bookstore's website pages (not updating time-specific information, however, since I'm so far away and no longer involved in the daily life of the store; though perhaps I should have made some long-overdue information changes...but I barely had enough time that week, as it was!). My favorite part, of course, being the visually rich Holy Hardware page. Buying local (even if local is a long-distance loyalty) definitely adds up. Buying from Amazon, not so much. I'm really excited to have some more time to add other fabulous features to the website, such as a mini-catalogue of our incredible selection of meaningful children's books, a record of our resources for those interested in simple living, as well as adding even more photos and product information to the site. The thing is, I'd have to go home for that (to take photos, to come up-to-date with changes at the store and with new titles and items, to hang out in one of my favorite spaces in the world, with some of my favorite people and dog, etc.), and oh, how much I would like to do so! I just don't know when that will be possible. And I crumble in jealousy for those well-off folks who don't even have to think twice about arranging flights home, for vacation, etc.. Maybe I'm beyond hope, maybe I actually can't change for the better?

I'll try to keep up my spirits, my momentum and live within the exhilaration of having a hand in the crafting of the next twenty years of my life. If I'm lucky, I won't even recognize my current self, my current sour attitudes and sulking moods, my habitual languor and mediocracy, when I get there. I hope this new-found energy overtakes that prevalent sluggishness and that unnecessary pity-partying. And so a toast: To luck and momentum!

"We Don't Buy Adultery Offsets"

2008-10-16T22:53:00.009-04:00

In Prosem today, when carbon offsets came up, I chimed in, "Yeah, we don't buy adultery offsets," and I mentioned that it's just a weird concept because of the implications. It doesn't make sense. Regardless, I, too, used to be a naïve supporter of this ridiculous notion, feeling guilty about my plane flight to Brasil three and a quarter years ago, knowing that I still needed to plant approximately 10 trees to make up for my carbon contribution or pay someone else to do it. I've since abandoned my support for the concept, and so have others, others who thought up the adultery offset idea for me:

Peter Schweizer's USA Today op-ed, "Offset Away Our Guilt: If we can buy 'carbon offsets' for our environmental missteps, why not for our others sins?"

Peter Schweizer's NPR interview

In trying to dig up (on google) the earliest comparisons of carbon offsets to adultery offsets, to try to figure out when I first heard the idea from my boyfriend, I not only found an interesting statement ("Critics of carbon offsets have compared them to the medieval sale of indulgences...Trouble is, the adultery is still committed, and the carbon is still pumped into the atmosphere. The only tangible benefit is that the sinner feels good about it.") at this Canadian Buddhist monk's blog (not bad of its own accord) but also this Media Matters article about a Fox News commentator who was making comparisons, along with a guest (also backed by a multi-million dollar corporation with definite interests in not changing the status quo on what might be causing climate change), of the two kinds of offsets as early as July 2007, which either means that Schweitzer snagged/nabbed the idea from the guest, Chris Horner, or was simply thinking along the lines of those critics who found an easy comparison to that severely out-dated commodity, indulgences.

The funny thing, of course, though certainly not at all out of character, is that the Fox News commentator bashed Al Gore for frequently buying offsets but abstained from criticizing his own boss, Rupert Murdoch, for intending to make Fox News Corporation "carbon neutral" by 2010--so it's all about whatever sells, right?, not about reality, both in Fox News Land and in Carbon Offset Land?

Incidentally...On the NPR website, I discovered an appalling thing. You can listen to just about any recorded NPR moment for free, straight from your computer, just as you could from your car or your alarm-radio or your living room stereo. But suppose you are deaf. You'd also like the benefit of accessing NPR's wealth of data, thanks to the feats of the digital age. You go to the NPR website and find news articles and talks you would like to be privy to. You click on the teeny black print, "Transcript," to the right. Then you suddenly discover that you must either choose to pay $3.95 for every story that interests you or pay for a $12.95 monthly subscription to their transcript services. How pathetic and cruel is that? If you can hear, NPR is free, but if you're deaf and have to pay extra expenses for all kinds of things as it is, NPR costs a fortune. Thanks, NPR, for making program-listeners automatically implicated in such injustices. I know that at least for election speeches, CNN will also provide transcripts of talks that are mentioned in articles on their website--free. NPR certainly accrues costs to pay for transcribers, but what about their web developers, their web-audio service providers, their broadcasting crews? They don't pass those costs along to radio listeners or web listeners. They use advertising. Hence, to force such hefty costs on deaf people ($155.40 a year) is ridiculously unfair, and I can't imagine any decent justification for their behavior. Obvious conclusion? NPR should offer transcripts freely just as they do audio.

Postmodernism (question mark)

2008-10-05T23:35:00.012-04:00

I recently was asked a very simple question that nevertheless blindsided me. I initially wanted to include my response here as a simple Q&A, but in the interest of the well-rounded dialogue I'm always talking about these days, well-rounded in that it is open and clearly communicated, I think I'd rather include the actual conversation, especially since it models so nicely the disclosure of motive that I'm so passionate about furthering in academic circles.

Actually, I've already written about this incident for Proseminar, stating,

"I wanted to hear about Dubois as a thinker and Reed’s perspective on him. Class discussion gave us a sense of Reed’s background, sort of, and then plunged into a definition of double consciousness (I liked one senior's answer that asking Rockers to define double consciousness was like asking us to define postmodernism; while I think double consciousness actually isn’t that hard to explain, I resonated with the assertion about postmodernism; a friend from the Midwest asked me to define it earlier in the week because she kept reading about it in anthropology articles but had no idea what it referred to; I penned, well, typed, an explanation, but I wonder if I even captured it at all, or accurately…planning on blogging the questions and my answers, as well as my concerns about the proper way to go about defining such a daunting term), and finally emerged with some dialogue about the canon."

The conversation, which, of all spaces, unfolded through facebook (uff):

Maria: "this is entirely random, and i'm sorry. late night + long paper + caffeine = are you a post-modernist?"

me: "Random entirely okay. Long nights, lots of homework, and caffeine = my life right now, too. I read a lot of writing for my classes that assumes a postmodernist viewpoint. I took a class on Foucault, and related thinkers get referenced a lot in class discussions (also at panels at the APSA politics conference I had to attend the first week of school). I did read and discuss a short piece by Bruno Latour the other day about actor-network theory--apparently we've never been modern? But I'm not really sure where I stand. I don't really know if I keep a fixed position with the different -isms. I try (trying being a hopelessly helpless kind of thing) to analyze arguments individually, on their own merits, logics, and weak points/strong points. I'm spending so much time figuring out what matters to me and what I think in relation to the swirl of thoughts in the world (academic and otherwise) that I can't say what I "am" as far as fitting into an -ism. But I can talk about postmodernism, sure."

Maria: "alright! to clarify: i have not the slightest idea what post-modernism is unless i happen to know it by a different term. far too early sunday morning i was reading an anthropology article that kept mentioning it, and i took a guess that you might know something about it! so if you don't mind, what is it?"

me: "Oh, okay. I'm still trying to parse it out myself, but let's see if I can do it justice. One of my entrance essays four years ago was about modernism and the experience of mystery, after all. This might take two installments--sorry I'm so wordy. The problem is that there are about a gazillion ways to define modern; apparently the Romans used the term. Most often, it refers to the period of the last 500 years or so since Columbus explored [or some other, more fitting verb?] his way to the New World. That powerful 1492 journey opened an era of biological genocide, colonialism, chattel slavery, independence movements, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. Well, as if the havoc of colonialism and subsequently the colonized throwing off the oppressors wasn't enough drama, the Industrial Revolution gave us the machine gun and helped greatly to produce fleets of trains, planes, and cars, and lots of other brand new items. That's a lot of technology to shake up the world in a short time. And, well, it did.

Archduke Ferdinand is un-fortuitously shot, and off the countries of Europe go, galloping into the Great War, blaming each other for the tragic event. Ungodly amounts of people die. Thank you, machine gun creators (uff!). It's ugly, Europe's a mess, lots of post-traumatic stress disorder. Think Verdun, where plenty of bombs still haven't been dug up. Nobody really knows what happened, how it could be so horrible, what the world is coming to, how rationality, the greatness of Western civilization, could get us to this inhumane point. So you get post-traumatized artists taking up the banner of the German Expressionist art movement. You get Piet Mondrian and Neo-Plasticism. James Joyce's Ulysses. Intellectuals swearing off the apparent greatness of modernity because of the results. And then it happens again. Worldwide depression, widespread panic, Hitler takes advantage of it. The different methods used by the Nazis in the Holocaust are so deadly because of the technology. [Hitler’s staff is very efficient; they time the trains to maximize deportations. The killing squads tear through Poland in very little time.]

World War II, then, changes the nature of the widespread disillusionment. You get Existentialism, Hannah Arendt’s writing, the United Nations. Oh, and a bunch of people swear off God (Where was s/he amidst all this needless suffering and senseless violence? What is god’s ethic?). America emerges as a superpower, props up Europe, which is utterly devastated.

Whatever postmodernism means, as a reaction and casting off of modernism, in its nebulous forms of philosophy, art, literature, history, theory, etc., it attempts to dig deep, to uncover assumptions, to deconstruct, to expose the structure of institutions, to show what is a sham, to tell truths, to find meaning when there doesn’t seem to be much left in the world. Postmodern philosophers write about meaning, semantics, punitive systems, postcolonialism, sexuality, and a lot about power, about who has it, who has agency, and who it objectifies, makes voiceless."

Maria: "alright, that makes a lot of sense with what my anthro class did last week (theories on chimpanzee violence). it'll probably come into play this week, too--we're doing how morality vs. objectivity should be used in research. i love contentious issues classes! and a million thank-yous! i'm certainly not sure where i stand on any of it yet, but this is fun stuff."

me: "Yay! I'm intrigued... please, if you have a moment, will you share a bit about these theories on chimpanzee violence? I'm also interested to hear about your discussions of morality and objectivity as it relates to anthropological research."

Maria: "it's your birthday tomorrow--happy birthday! my brother's birthday is tuesday; he wants me to get him an expensive [Nebraska] hat. weirdo.

the chimpanzee violence stuff is mainly centered around chimpanzee warfare, general primate infanticide, and other such violent displays and whether such behaviors are natural or caused by human influence/pressure. there's even one anthropologist who denies they happen intentionally at all. and, of course, it all ties in to theories of how human warfare and violence evolved, though my class didn't discuss those much.

as for morality and objectivity, postmodernists have a tendency to claim that anthropology, by virtue of devoting itself to the study of human meanings, cannot be objective and therefore is not a science. if it is not an objective science, then it must be a bunch of generalizations lumped together by selfish interests (Western, white, and male are common candidates) to be used for the domination and oppression of minorities.

because oppression and domination are bad, generalizations are also bad, and so is anthropological science. some take this further to say that anthropology therefore has an obligation to take an active political and moral part in deciding issues surrounding native peoples. others disagree. that's a pretty general overview; if you want to know more, [i have a link to the class's website...] or if you want a more detailed overall summary i can send you my reaction papers. they're probably fairly dry, but they cover all the bases in about 4 pgs. my personal stance on each is that chimpanzee violence is natural; human influence in the cases where it applies is only causing natural behaviors that were already evolved to deal with similar stresses. and morality is an objective science; its use of the scientific method assures this as much as it can ensure objectivity for any science.

and i find active political/moral participation in ethnic issues by anthropologists to be at best risky and at worst imperialistic. but that's just me."

The conversation turns more towards the status of anthropology at the end, which is a perfectly adequate topic on its own, which I've been meaning to explore in these virtual pages anyhow, but I will probably be writing more on that later, not now, since there is just not enough time and too much going on.

So? Have I adequately defined the background of the term? I doubt it, since I was mostly just pulling ideas from what I already (think I) know, not intensely researching its etymology and different uses of the term. How would you define it? What would you say must be included to properly contextualize the term postmodernism? A definition of modernism, perhaps, in order to distinguish post-? Which architectural, literary, and otherwise cultural milestones, which historical and scientific shifts must receive mention? How to explain it more simply, differently? What rhetorical devices to use to achieve this aim?

The concerns I mentioned in the beginning about accurate definition center around that constant companion of late, inadequacy. I think it's all too unfortunate that students feel too overwhelmed by disparate threads of information that they can't weave together definitions of the simplest terms. Though it's no good having someone presume that you don't know a term, it is even worse if you actually cannot put it into words, even if simply on your own time, not under heated pressure. Inadequacy's grip cannot paralyze students so completely that they cannot complete even the simplest of academic tasks, reciting definitions. I am not claiming this is in any way an easy feat; I struggle with it myself, but neither do I want Academia to zap me of all the talent I might have. My only other concern is the one expressed above. Because it's such an unprepossessing term that nevertheless refers to a very broad scope, what to include and what to exclude? How do you actually come up with a definition instead of a five-hundred page detailed history? To what extent does it matter what you include? At what point have you lost some sense of sanity, lost some of the word's actual meaning and reach, lost your respectability because you have in some way failed to be honest, failed to stay committed to the truth? And does that matter, either?

Some Notes on Non-Exclusive Dialogue

2008-10-02T22:36:00.012-04:00

Here are some notes that I penned (during tonight's talk) out of the motivation that keeps coming with my frustration:

Conditions for Non-Exclusive Dialogue:

Simplicity, Clarity, Occam’s Razor applied to logic, sentence structure

Logical foundation: use of arguments with premises and conclusion, not messy thoughts that contradict themselves and perhaps even go on to deny such contradiction, ever so presumptuously; the parliamentary debate system is useful for building this skill for strong, non-cryptic argumentation

*Vernacular language preferred; specialized language will certainly exclude (I prefer this vocabulary because it doesn’t require what debaters call “spec knowledge,” special knowledge available to a select few)

Changing the tide: dialogue that includes “normal” people (non-academics) has somehow been debased, degraded, been thrown out of favor, which is unfortunate

*Students shouldn’t feel stupid (my notes confound me even if I return to them an hour after writing them. I can’t remember, but I believe I started writing down this principle based off a related comment made earlier in the day, but nothing in my notes could possibly demystify this for me) and neither should non-students…if we ever want to achieve inclusion, expand the currency of ideas and their usefulness, and yield a smarter population, how would we accomplish that if the majority of people aren’t part of the conversation? There seems to be more potential in a kind of hive mind, lurking in community dynamics, in connection. The World Café technique calls it “collective intelligence,” something acquired by cross-pollinating focused dialogue with other conversations. The technique is incredibly well designed, but there must be other ways to achieve similar purposes, though I don’t think constantly holding cafés, one a day or one a week, would be a bad idea. It might finally bring out the genuine subtext from those withholding it when they speak; if people come into the process humbly, willing to work with its simple rules, then perhaps finally everyone will not only be on the same page, but also more efficient. Perhaps we will even, with a shared purpose, start working towards achieving something remarkable.

Home as Conflicted Space

2008-09-28T21:30:00.014-04:00

Does home dupe us in the notions of its safety, in assuring us about our impulses for cradling, cocooning, burrowing into that which will never harm us, never turn against us, that which will fortify us against the outside world, serve as our fortress? Or does it really unfailingly protect us from all things harmful just because it's home?

Then why did Anne Frank’s home in Amsterdam and the homes of so many millions of other European Jews prove unsatisfactory as fortresses to protect against the raids, the intrusions, the unfathomable acts perpetrated by the Nazis? (I apologize that I'm invoking Anne Frank to those who think her story is overtold at the expense of others, but that story clearly demonstrates this concept I'm outlining, and since so many people know it, it demonstrates that concept in a way people can picture). Why then did Anne’s family’s home have to be carved out of an attic apartment in an office building, and why again did that presumed fortress ultimately fail? Why, not as in "What could have led to this?" because that we already know, but why, as in "What is it about home that cannot save us from the horrific, cannot fulfill the functions we expect it to?". Is it simply because we imbue the home with expectations it cannot actually meet? Or what? What's the point of a home (the typical meaning of home, the physical kind, on a city block or a plot of land), if it just means being ultimately defenseless? There are so many human rights abuses and social justice issues (forced relocation of towns and villages; gang warfare, which seems usually to rage close to the homes of the gang members themselves and close to the homes of others in their communities and neighborhoods; domestic violence, for instance) that pivot around the home, that reverberate outward from problems at home (even if defined in numerous ways) or from problems at the most basic levels, comparable to the basic nature of the home, those pesky basic needs of nutritious food, abundant water, decent shelter, and adequate clothing. I'd like to explore over time how these spaces, that we expect to be comfortable and harmonious, become otherwise and how they can come back to homeostasis, to equilibrium.

Switching gears here to a different degree of concerns about home as conflicted space, why is the physicality of the home itself also potentially the cause of our deaths? Or, why is the body so fragile? If our bodies are our homes at the most immediate level (perhaps the most immediate level is actually the cell, the genetic code, the atom, the subatomic particle), and we work outward, why do we suffer, and why can it all end with one stroke? Why do freak accidents happen all the time in the home? What's the point of a completely unsecure home, of utter fragility, of the constant threat of breakability? Again, what's the point of being ultimately defenseless?

Our bodies are no protection. We can choke at the breakfast table on a mouthful of Frosted Mini-Wheats. We can dash our hopes and dreams by becoming immobilized, we can fall down from almost any height and falling at a bad angle, paralyze ourselves. We can risk our lives by filling our homes with objects of utility that also pose harms, threats to our safety. Technology seems so helpful until you electrocute yourself, until it catches fire, until it explodes, until it poisons the air you breathe and otherwise poisons the integrity of your body, your organs, your hormones, or even your DNA.

Kitchenwares and other items made of delicate materials such as ceramic and glass seem ever so helpful until they shatter and imbed themselves in skin, or until they start to fall and we feel liable to protect them, salvage them, keep them from injury, and in attempting to keep intact that which refuses to remain intact, to cooperate, we leave ourselves open to great dangers, and the unwieldy objects drop anyway, and in dropping, slice apart our tendons, and nerves, and main arteries, potentially fatal activities starting with simple, trite objects, making the home much more a contested place than it otherwise, harmoniously, appears.

The latter of these countless unfortunate incidents and freak accidents, in which the home ceases to be shelter and works against us, occurred in my home two months ago today. I had just worked my last full day at one of the coolest bookstores in the world, having celebrated my going away with my co-workers and bosses. My boyfriend and I came home sometime around 6 o'clock. I went to go load the pictures of the party and of merchandise (to eventually add to the store's website) onto my computer. Peter brought me a glass of water and then, since we were supposed to be moving across the country at the end of that week, decided, especially since I'd been bugging him about it, to go wash dishes so that he could pack them up. Some time later I hear a loud crash in the next room and think that perhaps it's funny, all kinds of kitchen items toppling in a domino effect. We'd dropped many things in our kitchen before. But before I can assume this is true, I hear Peter screaming my name at the top of his lungs, over the sound of the water, through the barrier of the wall. I throw open the door, and there he is, wide-eyed and gripping his wrist as tightly as possible, a sanguine pool covering the kitchen tile.

Now I'm rushing across the living room, grabbing the phone, dialing 911, running over to his stereo and turning off the music he was blasting to entertain himself while performing monotonous tasks in the kitchen. And now the guy on the other end of the phone is telling me to wrap a clean towel around Peter's hand--and insinuating that this might not have been an accident. A little too early to add insult to injury, don't you think? We're rushing down the stairs of our apartment and waiting for a firetruck to arrive (they always send firetrucks to our neighborhood for emergencies). Peter tells me, "If I pass out, you're going to have to apply pressure to my wrist, or I'll die." Now that I'm beyond sufficiently panicked, the crew arrives, and Peter's talking with them about all sorts of things, the injury, his pain, having them drive me to the hospital, amazingly talkative for being on the verge of death.

At the hospital, though our family and a friend arrive, it's four hours of hell. Peter's joking every moment that the medical students and doctors aren't torturing him. They apparently don't know how to bandage wounds properly and unnecessarily hurt him as they wrap too tightly, unwrap, and rewrap the wound additional times because they can't tell how badly it's damaged. They're ready to go through this tortuous procedure time after time, without either giving him painkillers first or letting the drugs sink in, so we learn early on about the limitlessness of their cruelty. By this point, we'd already assumed (somewhat intuitively) that he'd cut his major artery and nerve and so would need surgery, long before they officially came to the same conclusion and decided on surgery.

He's in surgery for another four hours. Speaking of home, hospitals don't provide much of a home-like atmosphere for family members waiting for their loved ones to emerge from the operating room late at night. Eventually, the doctor comes in and tells us exactly what Peter cut (three quarters of the way through his major artery and median nerve, severing three tendons as well) and how exactly they reconstructed it all (opening the wound up to reveal a kind of triangle, zigzagging the cuts so that now Peter has a mark that makes everyone think of Zorro). When Peter does come bounding by in his hospital bed, we chase after him and his hurried nurse. He's loopy as hell from the drugs but still joking with his nurses. We run through the list of of Peter's medications (he's an amazingly unhealthy young guy) for the millionth time with the nurse, just as we had with the account of the injury (hospitals desperately need better methods of communication, of relaying information, than making the patient provide the same information several times). I stay with Peter while the family goes home for the night, we talk for a little while, and then I fall asleep in the stiff hospital chair. By the afternoon of the same day, we're taking Peter home to his parents' house, where he'll be comfortable, and I'm still dreading having to clean up the kitchen at our home. That night, after dinner with everyone, my friend and I drive to my apartment and attack the floor, the sink, the wall, and other stained areas with bleach. I try to do some other packing, to imagine sleeping the night in my own apartment, but all I can do is talk with my friends online about how shaken up I am. When Peter calls, we decide to have his dad come pick me up because I can't spend the night in my own house.

We set Peter up in occupational therapy to do flexor tendon exercises and delay our trip by about a week, and he starts to recover rather quickly, though one day he reacts strangely to the painkillers, yielding the perennially adorable groggy statement, "I love you...Cheesepuff!" (Cheespuff referring to his special, hospital-provided, bright-yellow foam arm rest). And by now, we've had a chance to talk over the whole ordeal, all the gruesome details. If nothing else, we most certainly know that the plate that broke in half and slid into his wrist just had it out for him. Still, the O.R. report comes back, stating, "He came in with a story of breaking a plate while washing dishes." A story, huh? No one trusts anyone anymore.

Ever since the evil plate enacted its vendetta against my boyfriend (of course the plate didn't actually have any agency; that's why we call it a freak accident--poetic license, thank you), I've been struggling with these notions about home as conflicted space. What meaning does home have on any level, as the code for our gene sequence, as our emotions, as our bodies, as our inhabited spaces, as our journeys, as our friendships, as our attachments, as our created communities, as our planet, if all of it is so fragile and destructible? Why bother creating when it can all be broken away? It's a very paranoiac view of the world, but as I'm still piecing through the trauma of that July night, I've got a lot of paranoia sitting on my shoulders. I don't like ceramic plates and other breakable items. I don't trust objects or very much of anything at all thanks to a very personalized Murphy's Law. How to counter these fearful notions about the home? How to create safety, or a sense of it, in the midst of a conflicted space?

The Permaculture Ethics of Landscape and Culture

2008-09-16T21:12:00.007-04:00

(A final paper I originally wrote for my ethics class, December 2007.)

Ten thousand years ago, agricultural society sprang from the Fertile Crescent. Many thinkers (these include Marshall Sahlins, Jared Diamond, and Daniel Quinn) have argued in recent years that this was one of the most ridiculous pursuits in the history of the human species. I follow their logic, to such an extent that I have formed an understanding of humans essentially inextricable from their surroundings. We humans shape our surroundings but we are nothing if not malleable, and our surroundings influence our ways of living. Our landscape, the place we call home, and our culture are intertwined, and if our culture is based on the merciless destruction of that very landscape, our culture is based on a foundation that is already crumbling, and our culture will soon collapse, as well. If we place the focus not on the terrified response, “How do we save our presiding culture?” but on the question, “What basic tools do we need to move from collapse (of our culture) to a landscape (a place we can call home) that can sustain the presence of so many cultural refugees?” we will be much the better for it. I wish to offer the model of Permaculture in response to this question, with the added reassurance that we certainly have the tools available, we simply need to understand them better.

Care for the earth. Care for the people. Limiting of population and consumption. Further examination of these three principles makes it obvious that an overarching rule can be established, namely that, “The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children. Make it now” (Mollison 1). These three principles combined, along with the overarching rule, form the whole of Permaculture ethics, a code established some twenty years ago by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, two Australian horticulturists and designers seeking a better model for communities and a framework for sustainability. They established this model in Permaculture, a specialized design system that represents both permanent agriculture and permanent culture by incorporating all the edgiest practices of our time period—ecological landscape design, agro-forestry, sustainable agriculture, alternative energy, natural building, alternative economic models (usually localized economies), community building, and non-traditional education—into one field. Mollison and Holmgren grounded their new discipline of Permaculture in a simple code of ethics, which all Permaculture designers now share in common. But what makes these Permaculture ethics, well, ethical? I seek to defend in this essay, along with the conclusion that Permaculture can provide for the refugees of agricultural society where agriculture cannot, the ethical validity of the code of Permaculture ethics, especially as contextualized with other ethical theories and their principles.

Before exalting the merits of Permaculture, we should first consider individually each piece of the code of Permaculture ethics. If the only ethical decision to be made is to take responsibility for our existence and the existence of our children, why do we need the other three principles? Well, on its own, the directive, “take responsibility,” sounds awfully vague to me! Had Mollison and Holmgren stopped after writing down “the only ethical decision” they saw necessary for humans, they would have added nothing to the world in the way of solutions, much less environmental ones. Unless they wrote specific guidelines to sketch out what they meant by “take responsibility,” we might have the absurd case of people running around, monopolizing industrial agriculture, making millions of dollars a year while laying waste to the planet, saying they were taking responsibility for their futures and their children’s futures by securing assets to pay for their needs, and calling themselves “Permaculturists” on top of all that!

Lucky for us they did not do this, and now we understand responsibility to equate with care for the earth, care for the people, and limiting consumption and population. We might even find it advantageous to tack on a few more guidelines, an advantage which we will explore later. Care for the earth, an ethic defined as a “provision for all life systems to continue and multiply,” includes conservation of endangered plant and animal species, careful observation of natural processes, modeling the built human environment after any observed patterns we uncover in this way, and promoting polyculture over monoculture (Mollison 2). Care for the people, an ethic defined as a “provision for people to access those resources necessary to their existence,” manifests in ways such as eradicating the global slave trade, creating self-sufficiency in the community instead of providing the minimum charitable contribution, strengthening communication among individuals and groups so that anyone with new ideas will not be overlooked, and creating community-enriching attractions, such as museums, libraries, free schools, theatres, recreation areas, or restaurants stocked with local produce and goods (Mollison 2). Limiting population and consumption, an ethic that functions in such a way that “by governing our own needs, we can set resources aside to further the above principles,” comes into play in ways very distinct from the other two ethical guidelines (Mollison 2). It is realized in various instances, from education about fair trade to planning an alternative, un-materialistic holiday, such as a conscientious Christmas celebration, from the choice to live simply to an understanding of populations as a function of food supply. These ethical guidelines work together almost like fairy godmothers, illuminating the types of activity required in taking responsibility for one’s own future and that of one’s children.

The ethical code of Permaculture pertains to the contemporary ethical climate largely in an economical way. Supporting multi-national corporations such as Monsanto, which has a frightening monopoly on genetically modified crops, does not care for the earth, for seed and crop diversity, nor care for the people, for bankrupted small farmers defending themselves in court against Monsanto’s claims of unauthorized use of their patented seed, and doesn’t even limit population and consumption, for as much as Monsanto claims to have answers to nutrition problems across the world, there are healthier answers that do not involve ingesting as yet untested (on humans over time), brand new genetically modified foods, such as corn, tomatoes, soy beans, and potatoes, and that do not create further reliance on insupportable agricultural society. However, supporting a local independent bookstore, for example, can mitigate some of the damaging effects of our run-amuck society. Though local businesses cannot always offer the incredible sales or savings that online stores or big box stores do, they will, in a self-protecting way, invest money in other local businesses, so that each dollar spent there goes even farther in supporting the local economy. Also, local independent businesses have remained human-scale and are therefore less likely to treat customers simply as money-spenders but as unique people worth getting to know. In this way, they will respond to community needs and offer helpful services with ease and efficiency, without having to get approval from an almost endless chain of higher-ups. Most importantly, investing in our local economy overall helps make it our landscape, the place we call home, not just some landscape, some other being’s home.

If we buy all our produce, for example, from companies in California, we are laying waste to our own region. So much gasoline is wasted when items grown on industrial farms in Florida are trucked all the way to California and items grown on industrial farms in California trucked to Florida, big trucking ships passing in the night. It is a food system designed in a completely illogical manner, with industrial agriculture all over the place, even ruining our own region; even if the food we consume doesn’t directly come from the Midwest, something being produced in our region (in Nebraska and Iowa, that would mostly be the corn and soybeans to feed livestock across the country) inevitably has maintained in its essence the rest of the imbalanced structure. When we support small farms in our region, usually these farmers are thinking much farther into the future than those on the industrial farms, and so they are often turning to sustainable agriculture, providing options for Community Supported Agriculture (CSA’s), and forming into cooperatives (this is not confined to the more liberal coastal states, but is happening right here in the breadbasket of America).

Buying local is equivalent, then, not only to care for the people but care for the earth, as well. Local businesses are more likely to strive to improve the ecological health of their surroundings, their region, their landscape. But what about limiting population and consumption? By having to compete in an increasingly outsourced or globalized economy and by thinking of customers as people and not consumers who should “Buy, buy, buy!” local businesses take into consideration the limits of consumption that already exist, whereas the big businesses (which, it might help to point out, might have a headquarters in a place that would make them seem local, but they are not motivated by a devotion to their region) seem to think of growth as unlimited, even though this economic model is “an outmoded and discredited concept” (Mollison 1). Furthermore,

“It is our lives which are being laid to waste. What is worse, it is our children’s world which is being destroyed. It is therefore our only possible decision to withhold all support for destructive systems, and to cease to invest our lives in our own annihilation…Most thinking people would agree that we have arrived at final and irrevocable decisions that will abolish or sustain life on this earth. We can either ignore the madness of uncontrolled industrial growth and defence [sic] spending that is in small bites, or large catastrophes, eroding life forms every day, or take the path to life and survival” (Mollison 1).

In almost every conceivable way, Permaculture offers an ethical solution to the ailments of the economic system of our deluded agricultural society that assumes it can run itself on the resources of the entire world at a rate of exponential growth, which is impossible if we wish not to devour ourselves.

Permaculture ethics have a useful framework to offer as an ecological matter, as well. In our consideration of the ethical benefit Permaculture design provides for ecological problems, we should tack on two additional ethical principles under our umbrella rule of “take responsibility.” These two new principles come from William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s book, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things:

1) “Once you understand the destruction taking place, unless you do something to change it, even if you never intended to cause such destruction, you become involved in a strategy of tragedy. You can continue to be engaged in that strategy of tragedy, or you can design and implement a strategy of change” (44).

2) “As long as humans are regarded as ‘bad,’ zero is a good goal. But to be less bad is to accept things as they are, to believe that poorly designed, dishonorable, destructive systems are the best humans can do. This is the ultimate failure of the ‘be less bad’ approach: a failure of the imagination. From our perspective, this is a depressing vision of our species’ role in the world.

“What about an entirely different model? What would it mean to be 100 percent good?” (67).

With these five ethical guidelines in place (care for the earth, care for the people, limiting population and consumption, a strategy of change, and being 100 percent good), we can observe how these ethics would be ecologically valuable in a city like Omaha, a city that is plagued by its Superfund status from Asarco’s lead contamination. Care for the earth means healing the contamination by removing the lead, the contaminant, while care for the people means making everyone aware of the problem, providing resources to residents in the affected area, evaluating and treating poisoned children, and creating forest gardens, orchards, or community gardens in the treated areas to give the community a vision of hope and sustainability in place of the grim vision of pervasive contamination and ruin. Limiting population and consumption here can be viewed in its alternate phrasing, “Share the abundance,” which means once the contaminated area is healed and planted over with perennial goodness, all the members of the community may take part, sharing in the celebration.

Thus, a strategy of change is the vehicle by which people decide that if poisoning the population didn’t work last year or the year before that and if it won’t work the next year or the year after that, then noticing this pattern and not doing anything about it is the strategy of tragedy and devising a wholly unique, relevant solution is the appropriate thing to do, in this instance, creating orchards and gardens for posterity, as an act of responsibility for the future that we, along with our descendants, will live in. Finally, the ecological applicability of the overarching ethic to “take responsibility” will follow the pattern of being 100 percent good, by not succumbing to the lie that the only thing we can do is curb our ridiculous behavior, to “reduce, reuse, recycle,” but rather by daring to think that we can craft an entirely different future based on good design, that will then prove to be 100 percent good to its very roots. In our Omaha example, this 100 percent goodness would take the form of re-conceptualizing our entire city model and framework and rearranging the elements of the city to work for ecological wellness instead of destruction, to eliminate the need for the “reduce, reuse, recycle” philosophy by eliminating waste from the functional structure of the city.

The other two ways in which Permaculture ethics are extremely useful are cultural and spiritual ways. In the groundbreaking work on child development, The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost, Jean Leidloff explained much of our agricultural society’s psychological devastation as a function of child-rearing. In an interview, she explained the basis of her antidote:

“The two words that I've arrived at to describe what we all need to feel about ourselves, children and adults, in order to perceive ourselves accurately, are worthy and welcome. If you don't feel worthy and welcome, you really won't know what to do with yourself. You won't know how to behave in a world of other people. You won't think you deserve to get what you need” (Mercogliano).

For me, this approach seems to combine easily with the rule, take responsibility for your existence and your children’s existence. It is much easier to take responsibility for our futures if we stop hitting ourselves over the heads and acknowledge our worth and the necessity for what we have to offer. We can then go out and follow the guidelines of Permaculture ethics from a place of stability, confidence, and ingenuity.

This cultural background is closely linked with a spiritual one. The spiritual stability I think is useful from the vantage point of Permaculture ethics comes from Daniel Quinn’s writings, in which he details the spiritual model of animism as an antidote to dominating and subjugating the earth to agriculture. When we acknowledge the benefits of viewing every element of our planet and everything on our planet as having a spirit, we can not easily maintain a relationship, based on domination, to all those spirits, to the coal and the Redwoods, to the buffalo and the Missouri, to trees or to people. In his collection of animist stories, entitled Tales of Adam, Quinn gifts us with Adam’s insight:

“‘You’re wrong,’ Adam replied. ‘A certain kind of lion would do that, and I would track it down and kill it, because it’s a lion gone mad, a lion that kills whatever it sees, beyond need. It’s thinking: “If I kill everything I see, then the gods will have no power over me and will never be able to say, ‘Today it’s the lion’s turn to go hungry, today it’s the lion’s turn to starve, today it’s the lion’s turn to die.’ I’ll kill everything in the world so that I alone may live. I’ll eat the hare that would have been the fox’s, and the fox will die; I’ll eat the antelope that would have been the wolf’s and the wolf will die; but I will live. I shall decide who eats and who starves, who lives and who dies. In this way, I shall live forever and thwart the gods.” And this madness makes the lion into a murderer of all life’” (13-14).

This theme recurs in Quinn’s work, with the clear analogy running from lion to human (Quinn has written in The Story of B that “We are not humanity,” meaning the whole of humanity cannot be confused for the human victims of agricultural civilization, which he has dubbed Taker culture), the sort of human that lives in agricultural society. Agricultural societies carry with them an Ethos not apparent to anyone in the society, in the form of the concept that humans have the special privilege to decide who (or what) lives and who dies. Quinn’s character, Adam, makes it clear that this is not a workable Ethos. What Adam ultimately implies is that each individual should respect the Law of Life, defined as “how it was done from first to last, no two things alike in all the mighty universe, no single thing made with less care than any other thing throughout generations of species more numerous than the stars,” and not mistake herself for a god, for one who can decide who will die and who will live (Quinn 5-6). The directive of respecting the Law of Life and not intervening with life and death we can therefore append quite smoothly to the initial three ethics of the Permaculture code.

Finally, let us establish a seventh ethical principle in this ethical code. An argument for the essential quality of our evolving universe was put forth in the first of Jason Godesky’s Thirty Theses, a work interwoven with much of the philosophy of the environment I have discussed so far. He writes, “We can suppose another form of consequentialist ethics, like Mill’s Utilitarianism, but with a different measure of ‘good.’ It is not happiness, but diversity that should be our measure. Diversity of life, of thought, of action” (Godesky). The Principle of Utility becomes “The Greatest Diversity Principle” and replaces the old Utilitarian decision-making model. Bill Mollison’s emphasis on polyculture, Daniel Quinn’s emphasis on a multiplicity of tribes (instead of one monster culture, Taker culture), and McDonough and Braungart’s emphasis on a strategy of change, on good design and intentionality, all model themselves after the evolutionary advantage of diversity.

We see how Permaculture ethics match up to Utilitarian ethics, but what of other ethical theories? Certainly, Aristotelian ethics claim that humans have virtue when they flourish from functioning well. Those ethics hinge on the function of man as a rational being. What if we were to revise those ethics to hinge on the function of humankind as an ecological being, to relate to its landscapes in ways that support the ecological balance? That would certainly match up with the Permaculture ethics. Moral relativism flippantly discards any decision-making models other than those established by the individual, whereas Permaculture ethics, though it remains up to the individual to establish her definition of taking responsibility, has a set of guidelines to direct individuals on the ecologically-stable, moral path. Kantian ethics may be too inflexible to have much in common with Permaculture ethics, but one could argue for the directive to “take responsibility” that it is its own categorical imperative. Permaculture ethics are therefore not entirely unprecedented or incomprehensible; they even share certain elements with long-standing ethical theories.

We have seen that in these various contexts of economics, ecology, culture, and spirituality, as well as in the context of other ethical theories, the decision-making rule provided by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren holds true. So now we have one overlaying ethical directive, under which we have the following seven specific ethical principles or guidelines, all closely linked:

Overarching Ethic – The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children’s, which existence is worthy and welcome.

1. Care for the earth.
2. Care for the people.
3. Limiting of population and consumption (Also: Share the abundance).
4. Respect the Law of Life and do not mistake yourself for a god, for one who can decide who will die and who will live.
5. Design and implement a strategy of change if aware of current destruction.
6. Be 100 percent good if desperate for reversal of current processes.
7. The Greatest Diversity Principle: Maximize Diversity and Minimize Homogeneity OVERALL.

With these principles and this ethical code, our over-arching rule has a well-defined context. It becomes possible to apply, without being confused with agriculturalists, industrialists, and economists who see the whole world in terms of commodities that will provide unlimited economic growth, without consequences in the ecological fabric of our landscape, our home-place.

From the work of many visionaries and from the assorted examples presented
here, we start to shape an image of a culture on its last legs, faltering to keep its cultural Ethos hidden from all the humans in its grip (so that they can’t discover the irrationality and un-sustainability of its premise, that humans have the power to decide what should live and what should die). In our examination of Permaculture, we see an alternative, a horticulture-based culture that will be far from the evolutionary ideal but that could probably hold the weight of all the refugees of agricultural-based culture when it collapses. Through Permaculture, perhaps those of us participating in the culture that went so far astray ten thousand years ago can make the first few steps on the way to regrouping ourselves into the tribal configuration that has proven so workable for us throughout the history of our existence. We need only to take responsibility for our existence and that of our children.

Bibliography

Godesky, Jason. "Thesis #1: Diversity is the primary good.." The Anthropik Network. 19 July 2005. The Anthropik Network. 8 Dec 2007 thesis-1-diversity-is-the-primary-good/#>.

Hemenway, Toby. "Is 'Sustainable Agriculture' an Oxymoron?." Toby Hemenway – Ecological Design and Permaculture. May 2006. 1 Dec 2007
.
McDonough, William, and Michael Braungart. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. 1st ed. New York: North Point Press, 2002.

Mercogliano, Chris. "An Interview with Jean Liedloff." An Interview with Jean Liedloff. Journal for Living. 1 Dec 2007 .

Mollison, Bill. Permaculture: A Designers' Manual. 2nd ed. Tyalgum, Australia: Tagari Publications, 1988.

Quinn, Daniel. Tales of Adam. Hanover, New Hampshire: Steerforth Press, 2005.

On Blogging

2008-09-10T21:26:00.002-04:00

I've created so many blogs, some of which have provided a nourishing framework in which to develop my ideas, yet they fall into all kinds of traps-- I post a couple times and then the blog just languishes, I don't keep a consistent focus, or I share too much about my life and then have to remove the blog from public display. Let's see if I can find some way to keep myself committed to this blog. I've obviously had an on and off relationship with blogging, but I find so much value in publishing my thoughts for anyone to read, without having to seek approval from a hierarchy of editors. One of the amazing things about intelligent blogs is that there's an inherent academic validity, or at least a genuine quality, without any kind of established standards or enforced rules. I imagine Wikipedia, for instance, would be more reliable if not for pranksters and incompetent writers with delusions of grandeur *. The open, uncontrolled format of the blog certainly allows for false information or carelessly presented information to appear on a respectably-designed blog, which can fool some people into thinking the information itself is respectable, accurate, erudite. I write later about the different forces pulling at the blog form, but for now, it is enough to say that the use of the blog by respectable people to share information quickly without interference by editors or censors is awe-inspiring and spectacular. As for my own blog, I'm glad to have a couple of models to follow, such as Anthropik and No Impact Man (which you can now visit from my revised links selection in the sidebar to the right of the page). Posts vary from academic responses to personal insights, with an occasional hodge podge of bullet points thrown in. I expect I'll fall into the same pattern.

I have had several initial ideas about the purpose of this blog. My first, broad goal was to get myself communicating with the world about my unconventional ideas about unknown subjects and undiscussed concerns. I wanted to move away from personal anecdote blogging to more scholarly writing about books I read, events I attend, and such. This purpose fused with a higher academic standard, an intention to weave together my interest in the not-so-well-known movement of primitivism with more well-known theory and mainstream philosophy. In conjunction with a seminar I am enrolled in at present, my personal blogging project of finally giving voice to my uncommon ideas has grown into a clear intent to share my work with my immediate academic community and to engage the larger community in this focused dialogue about primitivism and related issues. I guess I got too sick of constant self-criticism in the style of "If I am in the severe minority in my way of thinking about these things, perhaps I am wrong, or crazy, or just plain incompetent," and decided I would at least find out how remote my ideas were from those of others before I continued thinking in that vein.

These initial ideas developed over a long enough span of time that I reconsidered my wish to leave behind self-interested blogging for academic writing. I'm not sure any more that including some discussion of my subjective experience of the academic community is equivalent to self-indulgent writing. About that subjectivity...my personal and deeply emotional experience of the academic community and the alienation I feel there, not to mention my lack of a sense of belonging, which I actually have no problem with--let me make that clear, but it is such a strange, unique, awkward, and therefore, as I said, emotional experience that it seems I need to give voice to that experience, or even that it needs me to give voice to it, to name it in a community that disavows, dis-acknowledges it, even though the condition exists and has long existed, even though the problem persists. In my plans for this blog I, uncharacteristically, intended to be objective in some way, but I've never been able to accept objectivity as any kind of valid goal (I understand that many people practically worship the concept, especially for activities of high esteem, such as legal rulings or psychological experiments, but I have little patience with the idea that human beings have the capacity to exclude their own biases of any size from their deliberations and analyses) so I'm not sure why I didn't question myself on that sooner. Hence, my original purpose of separating the academic from the personal is a little naïve. Though I will try to keep my anecdotes and personal essays either brief or highly relevant, I have decided to pursue a very human approach to the academic topics I will grapple with in these electronic pages. I really am not naïve enough, as it seems many academics are, to presume that I can excise myself from the larger picture, the greater whole. That is the course I'm delineating for this project. If you object, please don't waste too much of your time trying to convince me I am wrong in my approach. Though I question the validity of some of my beliefs on the basis that I am the odd one out in relation to everybody else, I do not question my approach to expressing those beliefs and other thoughts. Kindly move along if you cannot reconcile yourself to my method of going about discussing these issues.

I briefly mentioned my blogging history above, but for the interested, I can detail it now, this being a post on blogging, after all. The uninterested may kindly skip ahead two to four paragraphs. In any case, my personal blogging story: Due to a server crash in early 2004, my first blog, named after my favorite band, died. The little community that constituted Kmorg (pronounced "Kay Morg") nurtured my fledgling blogging efforts and provided a comfortable space for a disgruntled high schooler to work through her ideas and disillusionment at the time. Kmorg was short for Killing Machines.Org; however odd that little detail might sound, especially when considering my interests and motivations, it was actually a very gentle, pleasant, and aesthetically-pleasing website, functioning as an independent weblog community with maybe 2,000 users. The same people then went on to host a similar project, HateLife, which promptly disintegrated for the same reason. Many Kmorg users like myself were disheartened that the inputs of time and money necessary to revive Kmorg were not available. The Kmorg operators were, however, kind enough to provide archives of the journal texts (no archives of the beautiful, picturesque sunset background, though) and recommendations of other blogging communities. They directed me to the blogging behemoths of the time, LiveJournal and Blogger (today, WordPress and TypePad enjoy similar popularity).

I chose Blogger for its simple design and devoted following. I figured a blog-hosting service with millions of users could manage its server issues, but I spent a little bit of time in late 2004 dabbling with LiveJournal because, for whatever reason, my friends preferred it. I spent much time with my primary Blogger blog during the 04-05 school year (which, incidentally, marked my first year of college), chronicling the eccentric behaviors of my friends and the notable experiences of that exciting first year, but when I returned home after having enjoyed one of my most valued life experiences in the summer of 2005, when I traveled to Brasil to learn about permaculture, I found I could neither convey what I wanted to about what I'd learned and experienced, nor could I keep up with the pace of my sophomore year in college and maintain a blog about my day-to-day experiences. After that, my blogs received much less attention from me for several years, with occasional posts and reorganization of my Blogger work space, but none of the intensive upkeep that I had maintained in my first year of blogging.

I now look back on much of my writing (as well as the writing of that Kmorg community as whole) from that time, that first dedicated year of blogging, as petty, but at the time blogging was a much-needed and much-appreciated outlet. Thanks to the retrospective view, I now understand the blight of blogging as a combination of the following: writing that is self-absorbed, hard to follow, illogical, unfocused, trite, too detailed/littered with inside jokes and references to have import for a wider community, unedited, and has no element of peer-editing (however informal, there is no connection to opposing views or bibliographic sources or a world beyond that specific blog), those kinds of things. As I do with many other elements of my life, I will fret about whether or not my writing fits my own criteria for decent share-able information, whether as a blog or as any kind of published material, but I view such fretting in a good light, in that perpetual consideration of the criteria, perpetual questioning can only make a piece of writing sharper, less unwieldy, more robust. If I learned nothing else from blogging over the years, I see how blogs serve different purposes and, accordingly, come in different kinds. The forum for a teenager's angst or venting is distinct from and incomparable to a critic's space for sharing reviews, stories, photos, excerpts, etc.. Yet both kinds, and many other special formats, are hosted on Blogger.

Though I would enjoy seeing a new standard and perhaps a separate space for blogging by intelligent people, if not people involved in Academia (say, an autodidact or unschooled high school student with insights galore), I do value the overall framework provided by blog-hosting websites for enhancing dialogue in general and for quickening the speed at which ideas can be shared. Though personal publishing may be so pervasive that it discredits the whole community participating in it, a discrediting that can occur by the mediocritizing force (the force that pushes accomplishments toward mediocrity) of overwhelming involvement by a mass in an activity, by the mainstreaming and overusing of a medium by all kinds of people, in which the uneducated, impolite, or irrelevant ideas of a few can mar the perception of all, it is kind of unfair. Personal publishing might be an eerily popular phenomenon, but how does that eeriness translate into a dismissal of decent work or intriguing works-in-progress on the grounds that the sharing of ideas by all kinds of people in all kinds of ways makes the medium entirely trite and worthless, without merit? That argument hits a little too close to elitism for me. Nothing else to say about my blogging history and outlook on blogging mediocracy (apparently that isn't a word, but I so wish it were, and spelled that way, too, that I'm going ahead and using it).

Since I am taking advantage of the phenomenon of personal publishing to share my thoughts with a wider audience, causing myself little to no hassle to publish my writing, I don't see why a little discussion of copyright wouldn't be useful, and so to begin...What force does a blog's implied copyright actually have? Posing that question more broadly, what kinds of values do copyrights perpetuate? I struggle with what kind of respect to give not only intellectual property laws but also the rationales behind them. Due to the increased access to information and self-publishing services spawned by the last century's increased connectivity, we are surrounded by ubiquitous soundbytes, ubiquitous memoirs, ubiquitous advertisements, bland photographs, unedited blog posts, unfinished webpages, illogical articles, unorganized nonfiction, boring fiction, pointless video clips, etc.. In that kind of unfiltered, information overload context, what worth does personal publishing online have, and what of copyrights? I have heard too many horror stories about the hundred year-old "Happy Birthday" song's creators extracting loyalties, of the hampered creative impulse of a writer who crafted a unique piece of fiction from the perspective of a character in another piece of fiction, in that case Gone With the Wind. Related horror stories about Monsanto's patenting of seed bring even more questions into view. The recent popularity of the Creative Commons license and open source code marks a tremendous shift in established modes of thinking about intellectual property. I find this shift in thinking very uplifting, in that there is new hope for breaking up the concentrated power of copyright-holders and breaking up the monotony of the stalemated discussion on changing intellectual property law. Whether or not lawmakers and officials were interested in letting copyright law evolve, the Creative Commons people took matters into their hands, as did other individuals and groups working toward similar aims.

The Creative Commons' definition from their website:

This isn't my area of study (there are many more informed sources for an interested reader to explore), but it has always concerned me, so I thought it valuable to include some of my thoughts about copyright in a blog hosted on Blogger, which used to provide an informal copyright signature at the bottom of each blog. Because I've grown up with "all rights reserved" literature and legality, I'm accustomed to thinking about writers and creators as deserving of special attention, personal financial gain, and ongoing intake of loyalties. But in a collaborative world, where creative material will be shared one way or another and connections drawn among vastly different works in the constant unfolding of thought and creativity, the Creative Commons license of "some rights reserved" makes much more sense. If you wish to elaborate on my words or to connect my ideas to others I haven't considered, to share my writing with others or incorporate quotes from it into a paper, I will not hunt you down. Feel free to communicate with me about your own endeavors. If you do, I will not put a damper on discussion by requesting a donation or, worse yet, suing for such contribution. Let a Creative Commons-type copyright apply to my writing in this blog. I will consider applying for one as a formality, but you have now heard what I have to say on the topic.

I must also mention that Blogger's system of displaying posts doesn't exactly suit me. The reverse chronology is somewhat useful, in that any new posts are easily accessible to subscribers who have already read the whole of the blog. But what if certain posts would serve as better introductions to the blog than the newest ones? In order to keep my welcome post and other orienting information about my blog easily accessible, I've decided I will change the posting years for that handful of posts (because I have that strange time-traveling ability thanks to Blogger). I will include information about each post's truthful publication at the beginning of the post, and the displayed month and date at the bottom of each post will remain accurate, though even that reference point, that concept of accuracy, shifts, e.g. if the author adds content or edits pieces of the post at a later date. *Update, I've decided this is too much of a hassle and too strange. I will simply have the one post for guidance as an introduction to the blog, and I hope it is a a helpful post.

Another way I wish to modify Blogger's system of newest posts displayed first, with old posts obscured and drowned out by newer ones, is to provide one of those prioritized, welcoming posts I just mentioned, in which I direct readers to posts on different subjects. I'd like to set up something, perhaps series, that connects posts on related topics. I have few ideas for such series, such as one on design and another on home, or one on re-wilding and one on animism & ecumenism, but I'll have to postpone creating the introductory post for all the different series until I have some actual material to guide anyone toward. Actually, I am particularly excited to create a series of permaculture lessons (that I mentioned never having gotten around to after I returned from Brasil three years ago) so maybe these series will emerge faster than expected. Just a taste of all I have planned. Stay tuned!

As for comments, please take full responsibility for the content you post. Why waste your time masquerading as someone else or attacking anyone on insubstantial grounds if your post will simply get deleted with rapidity? Comments that contain excessive foul language, violent threats, personal attacks, or even intellectual attacks based on insufficient grounds, will receive this kind of prompt attention and be removed permanently from the discussion. The intention is simple-- to promote active, engaged, and relevant conversation about the issues at hand, issues too often ignored as it is. If a comment distracts from this purpose, then it will vanish from the thread, as I explained already. Thank you for you consideration.

* I apologize, my own prank. This kind of wiki article in this kind of hooligans' wiki database, however, captures very well what it seems has come to be called wiki vandalism. If such pranks could be completely relegated to Uncyclopedia, Wikipedia might actually succeed in making physical encyclopedia libraries obsolete, and as such, succeed in a small act of environmental activism to save all those tomes from being produced, hence saving acres upon acres of forest. However, the essential feature of Wikipedia, its open editing format, prevents such impropriety from going extinct. So long as Wikipedia remains true to its intent, pranksters will always blindside readers, in the process employing plenty of vigilant Wikipedia content-checkers for the entire existence of the database. And so, in the near future, people will still require unchanging articles from traditional encyclopedias to cite in their research.

Notes on the APSA Conference

2008-08-31T17:40:00.003-04:00

Maybe I can finally put into words the utter mind games that APSA played on me…It was one frustrating, disheartening, soul-zapping weekend. And then it was over. The next day, around noon, a knock at my door. After the first week living apart and fighting a lot because of the separation, my boyfriend chose smartly to come and surprise me. A very loving pick-me-up only a couple days after my world cracked open. Perhaps I should be grateful for the mind games--my previous experiences at the Rock have never led me to these kinds of extreme brinks of inadequacy before. Maybe I’m just breaking through to something, excising some inner barrier. Too soon to tell.

It started frantically enough. We didn’t leave early enough to make any panel on time. We tried to pair up. I really should have gone with my initial conference buddy, but when I thought that another student was willing to go to the panel titled, “The ‘Glocalization’ of U.S. Foreign Policy: City Responses to International Issues,” I stayed put and the other groups ran off to their panels. I ended up waiting a minute or so with that student for some of the others. Once they arrived, I discovered they weren’t interested in being any later to a panel than they already were so the group decision was that we had to go to a panel in the building we were in. I didn’t want to get hopelessly separated from everyone by going to the panel I would much rather have gone to, but I really wish I had! Group dynamics and disorientation and time ticking away don’t combine well. I lost the best chance I had to find something matching my interests at the APSA conference. It would have been helpful to attend an urban policy session because of my designer’s focus on city planning, but alas, I missed the opportunity, then and later.

The first session we attended turned out to be a roundtable on twentieth-century international thought. The first panelist had been doing research on the interwar period. Luckily, my feeling of being extremely out-of-place was echoed by a commenter at the end who criticized this panelist and some of the others for focusing on such an ancient decade. At least one other student really liked that commenter, too, because what he exposed was so ridiculous anyway. The first speaker’s best moment was mentioning the failures of translation—he’d apparently heard a Bulgarian translator resort to an unconventional technique with the statement, “The speaker has made a joke…it is too complex to explain to you…you are to laugh.” The second speaker had an interesting paper, in which she responded to a harsh moment at a past APSA conference, in which she most strongly felt the lack of whimsy. Her paper concentrated on political satirist playwrights, which was exciting. These first two presenters were the most palatable, whereas the third speaker was a really boring historian blabbing convolutedly, speaking with no real point. The fourth presenter spoke in monotone and much too quickly. One of the most intriguing things about this panel was the moderator’s suggestion-request for all the presenters to situate the discussion in some cohesive context by bringing up books and thinkers that are under-appreciated and perhaps nearly-forgotten.

Because the first panel wasn’t really my cup of tea, and I feared I wouldn’t get to go to any panel that interested me, I split from the group to experience a panel that seemed to mesh with my interests: “Rethinking Marxism & the Future of Radical Environmental Politics.” It had little to do with radical environmental politics. The extent to which Marx was a focal point was minimal; it encompassed the first paper and came to a dead stop. After that it was a lot of Derrida, Butler, Foucault, Habermas, Nietzsche, Dewey, and more obscure names. It might have been more appropriately titled, “Rethinking the Postmodernists & the State of the Animal Rights Movement.” The moderator began by describing the Democratic National Convention. He called the attempted effort of “Recreate ‘68" "befuddled,” and pronounced that the left had been redeemed by the positive Denver coverage. After taking a class on the sixties with a staunch Nebraska Republican (the logically-flawed, absurdist type), the moderator's attitude towards his subject was refreshing.

The first paper was titled, “Marx, Animals, and Anti-capitalist Politics,” presented by MacDonald. His paper pivoted around the quote, “I am not an animal, I am a human being!” from the movie Elephant Man. At one point, he mentioned that this statement would be more poignant if used instead of “Workers of the world unite!” He ruminated, “Do workers dream of sheep?” and mentioned John Bentley Foster’s Marx’s Ecology and Jan Berger’s “Why Look at Animals,” neither of which I had ever heard of and which I now would like to read. His paper was the easiest to follow, but perfect clarity was still hard to come by. His clearer moments involved the following contributions: to link Marx with animal rights, you could make the argument from the fact that Marx was obviously critical of factory work and aware of animal use in factory production, as well as from his concern with human exploitation and alienation; making a distinction between organic species-ism (Marx) and alienated species-ism (capitalism); constructing the assertion, “Under capitalism I am not a human being.”

Unfortunately, one of the presenters couldn’t make it because, as the moderator explained, in these tough times universities are cutting costs and the California system is one of the first to succumb. The talk I didn’t have the benefit of experiencing was titled “Radical Environmental Political Theory: Heidegger’s Unruly Children,” and though the moderator tried to summarize the paper briefly, that didn’t really help me understand its basis. I wonder how this would have changed my experience of the panel to actually have a presenter address the “radical environmental politics” part of the session. Maybe he would’ve lost me with the theory language just like the others, though. But the dig is in not knowing!

The third speaker’s paper, “On the Subject of Green Solidarity: Marxist Engagement and the Demand of Democratic Possibility,” was the most befuddling. He seemed to have an intention of making a difference or something, there was such intensity in his presentation, but the content of the paper was untranslatable into the language of my world. I’m such a Midwesterner. East Coast elitism and pomp (expressed through the priorities of American Academia/intellectualism, wherever the intellectuals happen to hail from) drive me nuts.

“Animals, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Eating” was the final presentation by graduate student Young. She began with the premise, “There is and always has been a little shit in the meat.” In the course of her talk, she covered Fast Food Nation and Nietzsche—the hysteria of the carnival. Occasionally, her paper changed tones and made sense, but for the most part, the minutes of her speech just dragged on, dragging me further down into my inadequacy pit.

The respondent was the most interesting speaker of the panel. He began with the images from the beginning of City of God, the Brasilian movie about gang warfare in Rio de Janeiro: you see the close-up of a knife getting sharpened, a chicken getting decapitated, the feathers plucked, and the bird cooked with spices, then close up of a live chicken watching his buddy getting marinated, the chicken, antsy, wobbling, the chicken jumping to escape, then the chase, and then you come into the pivotal moment of the movie that we return to later. But this montage brings up important questions of how much awareness the chicken has of what is happening and what will happen to it. Can a chicken think? If so, how does a chicken think? The respondent went on with his notes—Yes, we all know, capitalism sucks; Fast Food Nation is right on, there was not enough discussion about plants, about the boundary between plants and humans/animals; we need to answer the question, ‘What is it that’s good in the environment,’ so we can judge what is wrong; his mother’s cat is addicted to valium; there is a dog training school operated by Christians ("Based in what, the Old Testament?" he commented; I happen to know that the program he was referring to is run by the Monks of New Skete. Also, I believe that the absurdity is less a reflection of Christianity, which has so many different manifestations, many of which intellectuals tend to ignore, and more a reflection of the absurd obsession of the well-to-do, and those who wish they were, with their dogs); the presenters should aspire to more specificity, less selectivity/erasure; Wittgenstein – “If lions could talk, we wouldn’t understand them”; and his touching comment, “When the crocs get the tourist, I’m for it. They bought the ticket!” I especially liked that he pointed out to Young that there’s not just shit in the meat, there’s a little shit in the water, too, even organic fertilizer, there’s shit in that, too. He rehashed MacDonald’s ideas: Marx is very human-centered, the main thing is how we relate to each other; it’s something that needs to be figured out if Marx is going to be used in discussion of animal rights.

Afterwards, I met up with the majority of our little delegation to the conference, who exchanged notes on a panel about international diasporas. My frustration was still racking me, but I started walking along with the others to lunch; along the way, I started to crack. I couldn’t keep from crying. It was all too hopeless. I was too inarticulate, too inadequate, too unlike everyone else there. I wanted to be someplace else, to feel connected, but I was in this gross sprawling mall-hotel and the people around me were strangers. I couldn’t stop myself from the negativity so, without the possibility of explaining myself to the others while all teary-eyed, I had to abandon the idea of lunch and go off to recover.

-----------------------------------

“And in some ways, Barack Obama is a little like Kung Fu Panda”
– Slavoj Zizek

As though I weren’t having a bad enough day as it was, one that necessitated I take a break from lunch with the others and walk back to the hostel to vent my frustration into my pillow, then recoup with lunch in peaceful solitude during the third panel session, I ended up getting sick. When I found the others (how lucky I was) and found out where Zizek’s talk would be, I discovered that I wasn’t the only one feeling frustrated. My friends in the class were communicating similar sentiments. But my stomach wasn’t happy enough to discover the redemption of the day. I missed the first half of the Zizek lecture, and I really wish I hadn’t. I’m hoping to eventually find audio of the lecture online. Surely someone was recording it! What I did get a chance to hear, cheered me up in my weary state. Zizek’s grasp of history, popular culture, and psychology was conveyed in the most accessible manner of any presenter I heard all day. His use of movies to tie his talk together certainly shared elements with the “Radical Environmental Politics” panel, but he made the movies relevant to his talk in ways the others failed to do because he wove in his insights from the films skillfully whereas the others just used movies as accessories, illustrations of points, not embarking points for thought.

Some of my unfulfilled wishes from the conference: having a chance to attend more panels, such as panels on urban policy, education, and environmental issues; going to the book room the last day; attending the unique events (there was a film screening!); feeling comfortable and competent enough to pose questions to the panel. Aside from the endearing term “Zizekian,” the main thing I learned from the APSA conference was about how not to present a conference paper. My guidelines: in the interest of speaking so that people can understand you, limit your paper to a length shorter than recommended, then read it at a slow enough speed that someone could follow it, use technical jargon sparingly, incorporate pop culture references to circumvent the audience’s discomfort and growing alienation from reality, and be jovial—it makes for a better weekend, better interactions, better panel cohesion.

Theology For Our Time

2008-04-16T17:33:00.022-04:00

Here's my hodge podge for April:

Today, I attended a couple of talks by a Sister of Mercy, Kathleen Erikson, who works with immigrants on the border at the Women's Intercultural Center, at the detention center, and in other settings. The Center is in Anthony, New Mexico, which isn't far from El Paso and Ciudad Juárez in Chihuahua, Mexico. She gave a talk in the early afternoon entitled, "Voices from the U.S. - Mexico Border," and one in the evening called "No Human Being is Illegal: Spiritual Activism and Immigration."

This past weekend, Horizons of Faith presented four spectacular lectures by Rita Nakashima Brock, a scholar whose work focuses on the destructive nature of the crucifixion obsession to Christianity. Her lectures centered around the idea of paradise, thoroughly informed by the research she and co-writer Rebecca Ann Parker worked on for their forthcoming book, Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire. Their 2001 release, Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us was a stunning exploration that blended their theology of the cross with their personal histories in connection with violence and suffering. Their cooperative endeavors and presentation style, as well as a handful of others, have already infused academia with new forms of scholarly writing, forms that I believe must become the favored approaches to academic work. An obsession with objectivity neglects the role that personal history plays in the shaping of theories and ideologies.

Throughout the weekend, Rita made mentions of the ev08 (or Envision '08) conference that she's been organizing. Though I'm still trying to figure out the distinctions in the word "evangelical" (How differently fundamentalists use is from the way ELCA Lutherans claim it! For those who don't know, perhaps many, ELCA stands for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America...) and pin down the purview of the Emergent Church movement and it's cross-sections with Jim Wallis, author of God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It and The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America, and his contingent of Brian McLaren, Shane Claiborne, Diana Butler Bass (her? really?), and others, I think it's really cool that Rita and her people at Faith Voices for the Common Good are working to ensure that the young evangelicals with the left-leaning activist-y political sentiment don't feel silenced. The inroads they're making to connect progressive Christians with these young evangelicals, who in turn, will connect progressive impulses with conservative Christianity, are really fascinating. Keep the youth and their impulses from feeling silenced, and they won't break off into a faction and refuse to dialogue with mainstream Protestants and other progressive Christians. Sounds logical enough, right?

Also this month, I gave my "Images of God" presentation in theology class (we were all assigned this presentation). Everyone else had their paper from which they read, detailing their spiritual histories and responses to the course and the images of God examined so far. I instead went and looked for my own, as I had written plenty in my journals for the class about my spiritual journey so far--about my happenstance introduction to the American Baptist Church (distinct from the Southern Baptists as slightly less virulent conservative theology), the mild exposure throughout my childhood to Russian Orthodox icons brought by various relatives from Saint Petersburg, my break with Christianity as a young adolescent, my dabbling in Buddhism, then atheism, then agnosticism, until my experiences with the earth slowly brought me back to some sense of the "sacred," and brought me to an ecumenical bookstore, where I not only broadened my knowledge of theology but also renewed by faith in Nebraskans as a not entirely closed-minded population.

My images of god presentation (if I had any say in it, we would have been examining images of gods, but that would have only been a subject for a secular school exploring theology and religion)

showed the feminine face of god,
spoke to my need for silence, solitude, serenity, and simplicity,
explored Marian images co-opted by indigenous and marginalized communities (in Japan, Korea, Australia, Indonesia, and the United States, many of which I found at this amazing repository of Marian images), especially the Black Madonna as portrayed by both black and white artists (I even found a remarkable Adam image of a contemporary black youth, holding his iPod, against Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel background),
discussed the concept of hospitality and openness through an attitude of welcoming all (but I also discussed how viewing God as all-encompassing, of both good and bad, everything, is problematic because of the problem of evil),
covered dance as a spiritual image and experience, before
discussing animism in contrast to the debate about dominion versus stewardship, and
considering earth images, earth-based spirituality, permaculture and the design of welcoming, inviting, spiritually-nourishing spaces (not to mention the appreciation of such spaces that exist without human tampering), community, and images of people embracing the planet-globe.

I covered all of the images most poignant and meaningful to me at this point in my life and detailed why they seemed to fill fill such a void, a void that had been left by Christianity up 'til now.

And so, we commence...

2008-03-19T12:54:00.001-04:00

Oi gente! Greetings!

I intend to use this blog for reflection on the following topics, along with oh so many others:

All Manner of Philosophy
Sustainability
Localization
Re-wilding
Primitivism
Globalization
Neo-tribalism
Permaculture
Ecotecture
Ecological Design
Environmental Ethics
Eco-theology
Eco-feminism
Theater of the Oppressed
Children's Literature, Culture, Education, and Development
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Unschooling and Unjobbing
Anthropology
Environmental Racism
Social Justice
Economic and Environmental Justice
Ecological Economics
Biology
Community
Hunter-Gatherer Economics
Activism
Parenting and Education
Governmental Systems
Media (also art and dance)
Comparative Literature
Sustainable Community Development
Bioregionalism...

those kinds of ignored subjects of steadily increasing import in the contemporary "civilized" world!

(Please disregard the Keep Reading link below.)