Tuesday, November 29, 2011

The Era of Small and Many- Reversing the trend of generations

by Bill McKibben

Published in the November/December 2011 issue of Orion magazine



Painting: Suzanne Stryk

Earlier this year, my state’s governor asked if I’d give an after-lunch speech to some of his cabinet and other top officials who were in the middle of a retreat. It’s a useful discipline for writers and theorists to have to summarize books in half an hour, and to compete with excellent local ice cream. No use telling these guys how the world should be at some distant future moment when they’ll no longer be in office—instead, can you isolate themes broad enough to be of use to people working on subjects from food to energy to health care to banking to culture, and yet specific enough to help them choose among the options that politics daily throws up? Can you figure out a principle that might undergird a hundred different policies?
Or another way to say it: can you figure out which way history wants to head (since no politician can really fight the current) and suggest how we might surf that wave?

Here’s my answer: we’re moving, if we’re lucky, from the world of few and big to the world of small and many. We’ll either head there purposefully or we’ll be dragged kicking, but we’ve reached one of those moments when tides reverse.

Take agriculture. For 150 years the number of farms in America has inexorably declined. In my state—the most rural in the nation—the number of dairies fell from 11,000 at the end of World War II to 998 this summer. And of course the farms that remained grew ever larger—factory farms, we called them, growing commodity food. Here in Vermont most of the remaining dairies are big, but not big enough to compete with the behemoths in California or Arizona; they operate so close to the margin that they can’t afford to hire local workers and instead import illegal migrants from Mexico.

Monday, November 21, 2011

Paramilitary Policing of Occupy Wall Street: Excessive Use of Force amidst the New Military Urbanism

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New York City Students Join OWS Day of Action with Union Square Rally, March

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Saturday, November 19, 2011

Back to the Land, Reluctantly

Susan Gregory Thomas is the author of “In Spite of Everything: A Memoir.”
I’M not interested in being hip or a hippie. Nor does my happiness particularly hinge on artisanal cheese. (Odd, perhaps, given that I grew up a stone fruit’s throw away from Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif.)
As a 42-year-old Brooklyn mother of three, what I care about is lunch, and feeding my family on a tenuous and unpredictable income. And so I have 20 fresh-egg-producing hens and a little garden that yields everything from blackberries to butternut squash to burdock root.
My turn with spade and hoe started a few years ago when I found myself divorced and flat broke. My livelihood as a freelance writer went out the window when the economy tanked. I literally could afford beans, the dried kind, which I’d thought were for school art projects or teaching elementary math. And I didn’t know how to cook.

Luckily, my late father had hammered into me that grit was more important than talent. So, when I couldn’t afford fancy food — never mind paraben-free shampoo — for my babies, I figured, if peasants in 11th-century Sicily did all this, how hard could it be?
 I researched how to raise hens from chicks so we could get our omega-3-filled eggs. I learned to stretch a single piece of cheap meat into nearly a week’s worth of dinners. I made my own cleaning products. Not because I liked it. Because it was cheap.
My goal was to have healthy, unprocessed food for $10 or less a day. Cereal was the first thing to go. It dawned on me that making granola was a matter of tossing oatmeal and nuts into a bowl with a little oil, honey and spices — and then baking until brown. No more $14 boxes of fancy grains with pomegranate antioxidants.

iPhone App True Food Shopping Guide

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Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Label GMO

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Friday, November 11, 2011

TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline plan on hold!!!

Marcin,
Huge news: The Obama Administration just rejected TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline plan, putting the project on hold indefinitely while they study alternate routes.
This decision is a tremendous victory in the grassroots campaign against a pipeline that, until recently, was considered a done deal. The expected 12-18 month delay is a critical blow to the project, making it likely that the pipeline will be rejected or abandoned altogether.
Today’s decision is a major step in the right direction, and a true reason to celebrate — but let’s be clear: we can’t stop. The fight against Keystone XL isn’t over, and there are critical decisions on the horizon.
Perhaps the best news of the day is that we know how to win this fight. In this battle between people power and corporate dollars, people power is coming out on top.
In the last 72 hours, you have pledged over 200,000 hours to stand up to Big Polluters this year. Our people power will win this fight, and it will carry us to victory against coal, fracking, and the corporate interests polluting our politics.
Let’s keep the people power going. We’ve set a new goal of 500,000 hours for People Power 2012.