As promised, I chose one comment at random. And the winner is (drumroll please!)….

Britton Tuck, a student in Georgia, USA. She wrote: “What inspires me is seeing my fellow Earthship Biotecture Academy students make great strides in the way of promoting Earthship/off-grid living. I’m so inspired by these individuals and their passion to spread the word about how to lead a self-sustainable lifestyle!”

Congratulations Britton! I look forward to receiving your mailing address and will send you a copy of Twelve by Twelve: A One Room Cabin, Off the Grid & Beyond the American Dream. (If you prefer a Kindle or Nook e-book, let me know.)

A few of the other responses that touched me, and also touched others who “Liked” their comments:

Glenn in Naples, NY: “As I’m making arugala pesto from the arugala I just picked from our gardens and shelling peas, I am inspired by my small local community that used the power of social media to elect a new mayor and two board memebbrs who are young, vibrant and progressive enough to challange the status quo, support a ban on Fracking and work together to build our local community and small farm buisnesses!”

Kristina in Oregon: “The excitement my kids display as we pick up berries from the farm and prepare them for the jam we will eat through the winter.”

 Steve A. (in… where are you Steve?): ”The Transition Movement gives me hope that we can make a smooth transition to a lower-energy society.”

Mymza in the Netherlands: Sharing ideas and hopes with people, to find out that there are more dreamers out there, looking forward to the same things.

And Teresa: “Picking my kids up from school and having them ask “How much did the garden grow today, mommy?”"

Onwards!

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You can listen to the 9 minute interview here. I hope you enjoy it!

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Why personal change does not equal political change

by Derrick Jensen

WOULD ANY SANE PERSON think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?

Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet? Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide.

Or let’s talk water. We so often hear that the world is running out of water. People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the disconnect? Because I take showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers? Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans. Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings. People (both human people and fish people) aren’t dying because the world is running out of water. They’re dying because the water is being stolen.

Or let’s talk energy. Kirkpatrick Sale summarized it well: “For the past 15 years the story has been the same every year: individual consumption—residential, by private car, and so on—is never more than about a quarter of all consumption; the vast majority is commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government [he forgot military]. So, even if we all took up cycling and wood stoves it would have a negligible impact on energy use, global warming and atmospheric pollution.”

Or let’s talk waste. In 2005, per-capita municipal waste production (basically everything that’s put out at the curb) in the U.S. was about 1,660 pounds. Let’s say you’re a die-hard simple-living activist, and you reduce this to zero. You recycle everything. You bring cloth bags shopping. You fix your toaster. Your toes poke out of old tennis shoes. You’re not done yet, though. Since municipal waste includes not just residential waste, but also waste from government offices and businesses, you march to those offices, waste reduction pamphlets in hand, and convince them to cut down on their waste enough to eliminate your share of it. Uh, I’ve got some bad news. Municipal waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste production in the United States.

I want to be clear. I’m not saying we shouldn’t live simply. I live reasonably simply myself, but I don’t pretend that not buying much (or not driving much, or not having kids) is a powerful political act, or that it’s deeply revolutionary. It’s not. Personal change doesn’t equal social change.

So how, then, and especially with all the world at stake, have we come to accept these utterly insufficient responses? I think part of it is that we’re in a double bind. A double bind is where you’re given multiple options, but no matter what option you choose, you lose, and withdrawal is not an option. At this point, it should be pretty easy to recognize that every action involving the industrial economy is destructive (and we shouldn’t pretend that solar photovoltaics, for example, exempt us from this: they still require mining and transportation infrastructures at every point in the production processes; the same can be said for every other so-called green technology). So if we choose option one—if we avidly participate in the industrial economy—we may in the short term think we win because we may accumulate wealth, the marker of “success” in this culture. But we lose, because in doing so we give up our empathy, our animal humanity. And we really lose because industrial civilization is killing the planet, which means everyone loses. If we choose the “alternative” option of living more simply, thus causing less harm, but still not stopping the industrial economy from killing the planet, we may in the short term think we win because we get to feel pure, and we didn’t even have to give up all of our empathy (just enough to justify not stopping the horrors), but once again we really lose because industrial civilization is still killing the planet, which means everyone still loses. The third option, acting decisively to stop the industrial economy, is very scary for a number of reasons, including but not restricted to the fact that we’d lose some of the luxuries (like electricity) to which we’ve grown accustomed, and the fact that those in power might try to kill us if we seriously impede their ability to exploit the world—none of which alters the fact that it’s a better option than a dead planet. Any option is a better option than a dead planet.

Besides being ineffective at causing the sorts of changes necessary to stop this culture from killing the planet, there are at least four other problems with perceiving simple living as a political act (as opposed to living simply because that’s what you want to do). The first is that it’s predicated on the flawed notion that humans inevitably harm their landbase. Simple living as a political act consists solely of harm reduction, ignoring the fact that humans can help the Earth as well as harm it. We can rehabilitate streams, we can get rid of noxious invasives, we can remove dams, we can disrupt a political system tilted toward the rich as well as an extractive economic system, we can destroy the industrial economy that is destroying the real, physical world.

The second problem—and this is another big one—is that it incorrectly assigns blame to the individual (and most especially to individuals who are particularly powerless) instead of to those who actually wield power in this system and to the system itself. Kirkpatrick Sale again: “The whole individualist what-you-can-do-to-save-the-earth guilt trip is a myth. We, as individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve them.”

The third problem is that it accepts capitalism’s redefinition of us from citizens to consumers. By accepting this redefinition, we reduce our potential forms of resistance to consuming and not consuming. Citizens have a much wider range of available resistance tactics, including voting, not voting, running for office, pamphleting, boycotting, organizing, lobbying, protesting, and, when a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we have the right to alter or abolish it.

The fourth problem is that the endpoint of the logic behind simple living as a political act is suicide. If every act within an industrial economy is destructive, and if we want to stop this destruction, and if we are unwilling (or unable) to question (much less destroy) the intellectual, moral, economic, and physical infrastructures that cause every act within an industrial economy to be destructive, then we can easily come to believe that we will cause the least destruction possible if we are dead.

The good news is that there are other options. We can follow the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentioned—Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United States—who did far more than manifest a form of moral purity; they actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.

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In Washington, DC, the fight over the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline mostly divides common enemies: Republicans and Democrats; environmentalists and fossil fuel interests; big business and the federal bureaucracy.

But though the project exists in a state of suspended animation, TransCanada — the company that wants to connect the tar sands in Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico — is preparing to build anyhow. In particular, on the portion of the pipeline that would link Nebraska to Texas, TransCanada has threatened to use disputed eminent domain powers to condemn privately held land, over the owners’ objections. And that’s creating unusual allies — Occupiers, Tea Partiers, environmentalists, individualists — united to stop TransCanada from threatening water supplies, ancient artifacts, and people’s basic property rights. 

In 2007 TransCanada’s agents at Universal Field Services approached Randy Thompson, 64, of Martell, NE, asking to survey his farm land. Thompson assented at first, under the assumption that he’d have final say over whether a Canadian company would be allowed to build anything on his property.

“Once I found out a little bit more about what was going on, I rescinded that permission,” Thompson told TPM by phone on Sunday. “[W]e did meet with them once, maybe a couple times. We told them, you don’t have a permit yet, so we absolutely do not want this thing on our property. So until you actually get a permit we have no reason to have any further discussion about this. They continually called me, like once a month or whenever they felt like it. Kept the pressure on us. Made us an offer, $9000. Whatever the offer was, we just don’t want the damn thing on our property.”

That’s when TransCanada really stepped up the pressure.

“In July 2010, we got a written letter from TransCanada, they told us if you don’t accept this within 30 days, we’re going to immediately start eminent domain proceedings against you,” Thompson said. “They didn’t say anything about a permit. I tried to contact the Governor’s office. All I got back was a form letter talking about the pipeline.”

It turns out TransCanada used the same approach with many other landowners — with some success. “It was pretty effective, it kinda scares the hell out of you,” Thompson said.

A TransCanada letter to another owner – who requested anonymity – reads, “This letter is Keystone’s final offer, and it will remain open for one month after the date of this letter or until you reject it. We believe the amount of the offer [$5,280.00] is a premium price for your property. Keystone’s offer is high because the company prefers to acquire this property through negotiation and to avoid litigation and its associated delays and debts.”

The letter goes on, “While we hope to acquire this property through negotiation, if we are unable to do so we will be forced to invoke the power of eminent domain and will initiate condemnation proceedings against this property promptly after the expiration of this one month period.”

Julia Trigg Crawford, 53, of Lamar County, TX faced similar pressure. On Friday, a judge voided a temporary restraining order she’d secured against TransCanada on the grounds that the company is threatening to build the pipeline across a portion of her 600 acre property that archaeological authorities say is teeming with Caddo nation artifacts. It also threatens a creek she uses to irrigate her land and wells her family uses for drinking water.

“I do not want my place to be a guinea pig on this,” she told my by telephone. Those practical concerns lay atop a more fundamental question of whether a for-profit company should be able to seize private land for profit.

“I’m looking out my window every hour,” Crawford said. “While they don’t have a permit to build anything, they have the right to start construction…. A foreign for profit pipeline was allowed to condemn my land without my being allowed to talk to a judge.”

Thompson described himself as a conservative guy who supported Republicans, but had never been involved in politics beyond exercising the basic right to vote. Crawford calls herself a “political agnostic” who eschewed activism until TransCanada came into her life. But they, along with others in their position, and sympathizers have come together, with the help of Bold Nebraska activist Jane Kleeb, who became involved in the Keystone fight in May 2010, after landowners raised concerns at a State Department hearing on the pipeline.

“They actually don’t have eminent domain authority in Nebraska until they have their permits,” she explained in a phone interview. “It would have been fair for TransCanada to say once we have a permit we could take you to court for eminent domain. Letting landowners know that they could face eminent domain proceedings is one thing…but they were just bullying these landowners.”

The result: protests in Paris, Texas against the pipeline, on Crawford’s behalf.

“You could check off 20 different kinds of boxes, politically, professionally, temperamentally,” Crawford said. “We had Occupiers, Tea Partiers. This is about rights as a landowner.”

Farmers on the proposed route likely wouldn’t face these threats were it not for the 2005 case Kelo v. City of New London in which the Supreme Court, divided 5-4, ruled that eminent domain powers extend to the transfer of land from one private owner to another, if that action increases economic development.

The ruling outraged conservatives and libertarians. The effect of it today is to place people like Randy Thompson on an unfamiliar side of the divide between conservatives and environmentalists; and business and liberal political activists. He even testified this month against TransCanada as a witness for Henry Waxman’s minority on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

“I’m a little ashamed to say that maybe if it hadn’t come across our land, I wouldn’t have gotten involved,” he told me. “I’ve gained a great deal of respect for people who do care about our environment I’ve become much more aware of environmental issues. I have to admire them for being concerned about our environment.”

“Republicans,” he said, by contrast, “could give a rats ass about the people out here.”

By Brian Beutler, TMP,  February 27, 2012

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It’s the 20th annual Buy Nothing Day, an all-out offensive to unseat the corporate kings on the holiday throne.

Historically, Buy Nothing Day has been about fasting from hyper consumerism – a break from the cash register and reflecting on how dependent we really are on conspicuous consumption.

This year’s Black Friday will be the first campaign of the holiday season where activists are setting the tone for a new type of holiday culminating with #OCCUPYXMAS. As the global protests of the 99% against casino capitalism continues, why not take the opportunity to hit the empire where it really hurts…the wallet.

On Nov 25th we escape the mayhem and unease of the biggest shopping day in North America and put the breaks on rabid consumerism for 24 hours. Flash mobs, consumer fasts, mall sit-ins, community events, credit card-ups, whirly-marts and jams, jams, jams! Occupy the very paradigm that is fueling our eco, social and political decline.

And if you REALLY have to open the wallet– buy local. Support the Transition!

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Well, here’s one. A website called Intentional Communities serves the growing communities’ movement, providing resources for starting a community, finding a community home, living in community, and creating more community in your life.

And Intentional Community is simply an inclusive term for ecovillages, cohousing communities, residential land trusts, communes, student co-ops, urban housing cooperatives, intentional living, alternative communities, cooperative living, and other projects where people strive together with a common vision.

Let me know if you find the site helpful.

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The view from my writing desk in the cabin

During my too-short stay at Pine Needles—it was supposed to be longer but my schedule only allowed twelve days— I made friends with the folks around the cabin: raccoons, red squirrels, eastern grey squirrels, chipmunks, muskrats (I watched a muskrat couple frolic in the water, mate, take baths, and build their dam), bats, and white-tailed deer. Oh, and then there were the abundant water turtles, a large snake, and fresh-water mussels.

While hiking yesterday evening, I spooked a large raccoon out of a feeder stream. Then a mother white-tail leapt by, with her white-dotted bambi in less sure footed toe. I climbed into the canoe and watched a bald eagle glide over (not 10 meters above!), scaring a pair of young mallards I’d been observing into a tree on one of the islands in front of the cabin in the swollen St. Croix.

My gratefulness overflows toward the Dunn family, who so wisely and generously left their 20 acre plot and Pine Needles cabin on the St. Croix as a Land Reserve—thereby giving it to all of mother nature’s creatures, and not the developersand not the developers. The river otters and herons thank the Dunns!

Also, my appreciation to the St. Croix River Research Station for stewarding the property into the next generation through the Artist/Writer at Pine Needles residency program. Dan, Sharon, Todd, Joy, Jill, Erin, and everyone else at the station is doing a marvelous job of understanding and conserving Minnesota’s environment.

I also enjoyed getting to know some of the many Marine on St. Croix residents who came to my talk last Thursday “What’s your Twelve by Twelve?”  Thanks and such a blessing to meet you.

At the research station the other day, staff scientists showed me the labs where they study “glassified” algae (it looked so cool under the microscope—thanks Joy) in sedimentation cores from fresh water bodies here in order to help bring them back to their historically natural state. Dan wowed me with a tour of the springs rushing beautifully up out of the earth through the sand, and into streams feeding the St. Croix.

Woodpeckers hammer above right now as I write. A human voice from a distant canoe is muted by birdcalls of all sorts: a chatty  red squirrel (they’re my favorites, along with the pudgy and curious woodchucks), the breeze in the trees below a slate grey sky, and a wilderness that overwhelms homo sapien’s mini-presence. During these days I’ve shrunk—to no more than a mammal among mammals, making my tiny nest in cotton sheets each night under vaulting pine trees.

Nature is the best, perhaps the only therapy that handle our 21^st century techno-angst. Here, nature has calmed me and made me realize the wisdom of Rule Number Six: Don’t take yourself so damn seriously! (In case you’re wondering, the first five rules are all the same. Each one reads: See Rule Number Six.)

Here on the St. Croix, I haven’t gotten into a car at all. I’ve canoed to the tavern in town for a pint of local Stillwater-brewed ale; biked the state park to the north and every other day to the Eagle nest in Marine;  and used Line Two (my feet) to access everything else. Ah, what would a more bio-regional century look like, with Transition Towns and Slow Food Convivums as our anchors? Can We the People pursue the good life instead of the goods life? Can we ratchet the quality of our lives up from excess to the far-greater peak of simplicity?

A foggy morning in front of my retreat cabin

Finally, the birds. Thanks to the great blue herons who taught me patience here every day and inspired my writing. I spotted the following birds at Pine Needles, among many others: bald eagles and eaglets, mallards, hawks, red-bellied woodpeckers, common yellowthroat, American crow, black-capped chickadee, pileated woodpecker (identified through hammering, not seen), Canada goose, wood ducks, chickadees, swallows, Baltimore orioles, and humming birds. Your songs travel with me. Peace.

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"You are, therefore I am," Satish Kumar

“Because We Are”

I am because we are, the five-toed,

the elegant-fingered, the ones

whose brains flower like coral

whose dreams span earth and move out -

I am because we animals

love to run and huddle, because

our tongues love to lick skin,

nuzzle and enter each other’s

mouths, clean milky young,

taste sweat from necks and slick

fur flat, lap water from clean pools:

because we love to swim, sleep, eat,

lie in the sun, move to the shade;

and because we are the fish

flying in ballets through shallows

and deeper, where the ocean floor

hollows and darkness begins;

I am because of centuries of thought

and centuries of dream, because of poetry,

grass, music, growing corn,

because of wine from grapes

and bread from flour,

because of a million hands,

because of cave paintings

and the true line drawn,

the bison on the wall,

doe in the clearing, because

of shooting stars and sudden floods,

ships goring out, footprints,

because of men and women

coming together, lying down

together, coming, again and again,

because of father, mother, brothers,

lovers, children, everyone making

enough love, because of skins, eyes, hands

and words, because of closeness,

because of breath.  Because

of the touch in the night

the surgeon who saved me

because of intelligence

because of care

because of enough people

loving enough people

for those centuries

for ever, I am.  We.

—  Rosalind Brackenbury

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“Twelve by Twelve” by William Powers – Troubling and Inspiring at Once, By Cori MacNaughton, Tampa Bay Examiner

I picked up this book on an impulse, when the book store we visited had none of the permaculture books for which I was looking.

12x12 Cabin Blueprint

I was intrigued by the subtitle: “A One-room Cabin off the Grid & Beyond the American Dream,” but when I read the back cover review, calling it a “Walden for the Global Warming Era,” I was skeptical in the extreme; Walden has long been a favorite of mine, and not only for Thoreau’s generous and accurate description of the noble character of the Newfoundland dog.  Still, there was something about it that called to me, and I found myself unable to re-shelve the book.

I was not disappointed.  “Twelve by Twelve” is a lyrical and poetic take on the worst that we have done to the earth as a species, the sometimes despicable ways in which we treat one another; the myriad of often blindingly simple ways in which solutions can be found and implemented for the benefit of all.  The title refers to a one-room cabin, literally twelve feet by twelve feet in dimension, owned by a skilled but rather eccentric doctor, who chose simplicity and political activism over material wealth and creature comfort.  When the doctor offers the author the use of her cabin for an extended period, his experiences therein leave him – and us as readers – profoundly changed.

It is, at once, an enchanting portrait of the interesting and intriguing doctor; her spare and yet somehow spacious cabin and thriving permaculture garden; her assortment of resilient and quirky neighbors and the relationships the author manages to build with them all; and a deeply personal and unflinchingly honest spiritual and emotional journey on the part of the author, as he observes his feelings while in the cabin ranging from profound joy, deep depression, and everything in between.  And, in examining and questioning his own deepest motivations, he throws additional light and insight into my own.

Powers is a skilled writer, with a gentle yet determined and often self-deprecatingly humorous voice, along with keen and insightful observations on the wonders and foibles of humankind and what it is that makes us so.  His narrative takes us from the tiny North Carolina cabin and its environs, to Africa and the Bolivian rainforest.  He is so full of profound yet simple truths as to be of value everywhere.

Troubling and inspiring at once, this is a wonderful and quick read, which will both move and inform you, and leave you truly caring about what happens to the author and those of whom he writes.

Rarely has an impulse purchase offered so much.

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