Big Knob Fair

The Big Knob Grange Fair is coming up, September 1st through 5th. It's only a hop skip and a jump from my house, so you can visit me too if you plan to attend. The fair is really quite a delight. One of the things I enjoy so much is the the timing of the fair, for young people it's the last big summer fling. The picture wasn't actually taken at the fair, it's at a cousin's farm, but the old farm equipment displayed at the fair is alway one of my favorite attractions. The fair really is a way to connect with local agriculture. And it's a chance to meet some of the fine people who make their living plying the land.

Using a blog to think out loud is a sure way to make a blog unreadable. If any followed along even a little bit in my last post, you'll know I've been trying to think of a way to organize a we20 event. There's something pathetic about my inability to get anything together.

I had it in mind to pitch the event at a gathering of friends. I didn't. It was nice that a friend stopped by prior to it and we had a good long talk. The trouble was that my pitch sounded to him very much that I wanted my friends to make a plan for what I should be doing. That follows pretty logically from the fact that I can't seem to do anything I'm supposed to. But that's really not what I had in mind. Another issue is when I think of a small group, or think of my "community" I tend of think of people who might miss me a little when I die. Days after our talk my friend sent me a short list of people I should look for collaboration with. I'm not sure any of them really would care much if I died, but my friend is probably right that what I have in mind for a we20 meeting would make better hay with them instead of my more economically secure friends.

Recently I read one of those The Guardian debates. This one was between George Montbiot and Paul Kingsnorth. The debate, Is there any point in fighting to stave off industrial apocalypse? provoked a headache probably because it resonated with a rather persistent debate in my own head. Debates in my head tend to just go around in circles, so a good thing about debates in print is they suggest further development of the ideas. And in the last few days I've read or watched videos which have gotten me out of the rut so to speak.

What I can't figure out is whether or not any of my friends ever think about an industrial apocalypse? A couple of years ago I read or heard something regarding Peter D. Ward's book Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future (now remaindered). The point was made that our present trajectory of atmospheric Carbon could result in the extinction of all flowering plants. Needless to say, all people would become extinct prior to flowering plants. But the thought s of flowering plants going extinct filled me with such grief that for at least a few days after hearing it my actions were as if I was in a vat of molasses. I write off my reaction as a sign of my mental fragility, even still I wonder if sometimes my friends don't suffer when they encounter in one way or another evidence of the limits of planetary ecology and life on Earth?

I think they must at times. So when I think of economic conditions and getting together with a small group for discussion and for making a plan--no matter how small--the premise: What do we do now that we know there are limits? is central to what we'd talk and plan about. That premise makes me sound like a Cassandra. I don't think I'm trying to persuade, rather I'm curious about how others are feeling. What I gather from feedback is they aren't feeling up against any limits.

From Sharon Astyk's blog a really good post The Pedagogy of Collapse introduced me to a distinction made by John Michael Greer between a predicament as opposed to a problem to be solved. Astyk writes:

The obvious model predicament is death - something that can be addressed and handled in a whole host of ways, some productive, some not, but that can never be solved - we all die. How we approach our deaths, how we view them, the contexts in which they occur - these details matter enormously, but none of them approach the status of solution, eliminating the basic problem.

The debate between Monbiot and Kingsnorth seems to me to have generated more heat than light. Perhaps one of the reasons I tend to get blank stares from my friends when I bring up the topic of limits is they presume I'll launch into some millienialist rant about a coming apocalypse; or at minimum boor them by telling them how sad I feel about the state of life on Earth. I'm optimistic, however, about the possibilities for viable and humane responses whether we face problems to be solved or predicaments. It's our responses that seem most worth talking about. But how to begin the conversations?

When we got together my friend made some very good suggestions about what I could do about my economic situation. The implicit message is that what I do will have a lot more effect than what I say. As I already mentioned he also gave me a list of people I know that will probably be more receptive to my dour outlook. So that's good advice, and probably qualifies as a mini we20 gathering. My next plan is to tell as many of my friends as possible about the Big Knob Fair and hope to see at least some of them on their way to the fair.

One last link to offer is a 40 minute video of Slavoj Zizek at YouTube. It a debate with Alex Callinicos on the topic "What does it mean to be a revolutionary today?" at Marxism 2009 from early July of this year. I also watched the Callinicos video. Oddly each of their responses to each other are on their respective videos without them offering the questions. It's more compact that way, but also a bit hard to follow. I'm hardly a revolutionary! Nevertheless found their remarks, especially Zizek's commentary quite interesting.

If you plan a trip to the fair, please stop by, I'd love to see you.

Rambling about we20

On Saturday night I was out to visit friends. I was amused by a comment about my online profile picture, to the effect that I'm not really so ugly in person. Some of the conversation that evening was about the Internet and how tricky the balancing act of online and offline life is. It's not just about time, but more importantly who we are and how we imagine ourselves to be.

I love Sharon Astyk's blog Casabon's Book. I was looking at her site today and marveled at the clarity of her statement of what the site is about:

Depletion and Abundance are just two sides of the same coin. We're no longer speaking of the future when we talk about climate change and peak oil. So now the project is to accept depletion, and still find a good and abundant way of life, not just for ourselves, but for those who will come after us. We can do this - it is one heck of a challenge, but we have to find a way, so we will. That's what this site is for - finding a way forward.

Last time I wrote here, I said I'm no good at making plans. It's true, I'm not, but I'm still eager to get something together around the we20 initiative. This coming Saturday I'll have a chance to see some of my friends again, and I'm trying to develop a pitch for a we20 meeting the following weekend at my place.

When I think about economics, I think about it from a global environmental frame. With my friends, I often discover I'm really out of sync with their perspectives. Most of the time feel at a loss as to what to say. I want to get together with friends to talk about as Astyk puts it: "finding a way forward" and don't quite yet know how to make that happen.

When I talk to friends about climate change and peak oil, I never get feedback that neither is real, but the discussions always seems to dead end. My friends are busy people doing what they need to do, which in America requires lots of driving around. I talk too much and don't listen enough. Proceeding from the assumptions of climate change and peak oil isn't going to happen unless everyone in the group actually talks about those issues.

Present tense, when we're speaking about economics,mostly we're concerned with making enough money to provide for ourselves. Unemployment is an issue among some of my friends, and it's a subject that we're loathe to talk about. Sharon Astyk's statement about what her blog is about brings climate change and peak oil into the present tense. So how to have a meeting that starts from this presumption is challenge number one.

I've lived in the greater Pittsburgh area for most of my life. I'm very happy that I have old friends, people who've known me for a long while. Really, we share a great deal in common, even if my politics have always seemed on the fringe. My politics have never been terribly coherent. Back in the 1970's a definably leftist cant in politics was often expressed. Some of the leftists seemed fairly conservative to me then, and grew more so. Actually having to get a job seemed to turn their heads around pretty quickly. One way or another we all had to make lives for ourselves.

Early this month Morgan Meis wrote a remembrance of Leszek Kolakowski. Meis discusses an essay "How to be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist." I loved Meis's essay so much I wanted to find Koladowski's essay online too. I found it.* Morgan Meis writes:

It's impossible to be a conservative/liberal/socialist. Except that Kolakowski did it.

My hunch is most of my friends politics is actually rather along the lines of Kolakowski's Conlibsoc, even if they've never heard of Kolakowski. But there are no Conlibsoc candidates on the ballot, and our talk is usually more present tense.

The point of going on about politics is that Pittsburgh will host the G20 Summit on the 24th and 25th of September. I do have my eyes cocked for various responses to the meeting. It is an important event. As I say, I'm not particularly political, but whenever the subject of the G20 comes up, it seems there's a presumption of political activism on my part. I think my friends aren't willing to acknowledge just how lazy I actually am. Of course I do value political dissent and would be happy to engage in discussions about Seattle 1999. But geez, that was ten years ago. The interesting challenge that we20 puts forward is to make a plan; to talk about now and in the future.

I was hunting through the archives of Transition Culture for ideas and came upon an exercise for visualizing the future. The idea is four characters talking at a 2030 class reunion, the premise they were young people then and my age in 2030. Cards with statements about the characters are to be distributed in the audience so they can join in asking questions about "what was it like?"

I like the idea, but need to modify the exercise so that it can be done without people preparing as actors. Still, the exercise provides a good framework for discussion to think about the present from a future perspective. Many of my friends have children in their teens and twenties now. We are all intensely concerned about them and their futures. So that's rough idea about how I intend to get the ball rolling.

A regular practice Sharon Astyk follows on her blog is to provide updates. The format of the updates follows:

Planted:
Harvested:
Preserved:
Waste Not:
Want Not:
Ate the Food:
Build Community Food Systems:

I love the list and that people who read the blog often join in the comments with their own updates. I doubt any plan we come up with will be exactly like hers. Still it really ought to be a plan that can be measured in actions taken during a week. Sharing what we do can motivate us to keep on doing and motivate us to do more.

* The excerpt references that it's from Kolakowski's book Modernity on Endless Trial. From that essay I went to the homepage of Mr. Bauld's English. A note on the bottom of the page reads:

Send comments to Brian Bauld, who has just retired from Amherst Regional High School, Amherst, Nova Scotia, in the summer of 2003.

Mr. Bauld created an incredible online resource! I've saved it for my own study, and also to recommend for someone I know who's dropped out of school and is looking to take her GED and get into college.

Make a Plan

The first hints of autumn's approach are here. The Goldenrods are just beginning to bloom and the Joe Pye Weed. Goldenrods are so common here most people think they are all the same, but actually there are at least sixty species in our area, so the blooming period is extended. Singing insects have begun their chorus too. A friend gave me a stack of zinnia seed packets last Christmas, so I'm enjoying an abundance of blooms in vibrant colors. The zinnias are also very attractive to butterflies.

We've had plenty of rain of late so growth is lush, especially the weeds abounding. My garden is a mess. That's more or less the intention, but every year I try to imagine it not being quite such a mess. I do look at the garden with a forward eye to next year, but making plans always seems easier in the Spring. In the spring I can see where some stone is, even if I can't figure out how to move it. In the summer it's all under a thicket of bramble so getting the stone seems impossible. Yet when I look at the garden now I want stone to play with now. I look out and want less grass to grow, but feel daunted by the challenge of growing anything but weeds. Summer is a lazy time. The signs of autumn's approach shake me from my torpor, if only a little.

The truth is I'm no good at making plans.

Last Friday I had a night out. I visited with a friend in the late afternoon then we met her brother and mutual friends at a restaurant. My friend's brother is a psychiatrist who works with war veterans. I'm a bit prejudiced about psychiatrists. Having gotten to know my friend's brother over the last couple of years I've come to see him as a fine physician, a humane human being and someone I like. He and my friend who's a district attorney in Family Court, have the most high-pressure jobs of the group. We sat at an outside table and I'd brought along a bouquet of zinnias for the table. I would have happily spent another hour drinking and talking, instead we went to a movie.

I rarely go to see films and sometimes I love them. We saw The Hangover which I thought awful. The movie was disturbing to me and it was unsettling to dislike a comedy so much. Am I really humorless? Both the folks with high-pressure jobs thought it funny and just the ticket for the evening.

At the dinner conversation: the subject of politics had come up. I do read about American politics. But the context of my reading about politics is framed by concerns summed up in a blurb from James Howard Kunstler's book The long Emergency:

The global oil predicament, climate change, and other shocks to the system, with implications for how we will live in the decades ahead.

In other words I spend a great deal of my time with my hair on fire.

My friend's brother had never met the couple who joined us for dinner. He was apprehensive at first and a little peeved at his sister for not telling him they'd be coming too. Apparently he's got a similar sort of prejudice about attorneys as my prejudice about pyschiatrists. We all got along well, and the political conversation was polite with no disagreements. I didn't want to come off as a raving lunatic. Still throughout the conversation about politics the question pressed in my mind was "How do we cope knowing the gravity of the crises before us?"

Dave Pollard posted a beautiful post on Monday, We Were Here where he very much captures my unease prompted by the political talk:

They (and perhaps all of us) are afflicted with a new kind of endemic dissociative mental illness. The dissonance between what we 'know', in some primeval way (like the wild animals who sense an impending storm or earthquake or 'hear' noises outside conscious perception), and what we 'think' based on the day's news and on the conversations we have about the needs and events of the moment, is utterly inconsolable, irreconcilable. So we try to ignore that dissonance. We pretend it isn't real.

Posting Pollard's quote might seem as if I'm projecting the disassociation onto my friends, so I want to be clear to own up: the dissonance is mine. I suspect my friends feel it too, but it's awfully hard to talk about. I don't know how to initiate the conversation.

Today on my Twitter stream I got a gentle prod from we20 to actually do something in advance of the G20 Meeting in Pittsburgh during September. we20 is politically neutral. The idea behind the site is quite simple. Use the we20 Web site to announce a meeting of a small group of people, say twenty. Then as a group hammer out a plan to do something around finding solutions to the global economic crisis and post that. A splendid and constructive idea. My plans for a July meeting fizzled, so I better get moving for one in August.

Oddly just prior to seeing the we20 tweet I'd been surfing the Pittsburgh G20 Resistance Project group at Facebook which has almost 500 members. The organization's Web site is here. I noticed that Paul Massey of we20 had left a wall post there, so I didn't feel a need to tweet it. Indeed I felt unsure I wanted to join. There's was a twinge of paranoia about it, you know, landing on a no-fly list--not that I plan to fly anywhere. More generally I've never been a good leftist, going way back it being a radical always seem too much work for a lazy guy like me. Quite specifically I have no interest in trying to disrupt the G20 Meeting.

From the looks of the Facebook page most of the participants are younger than I. I'm glad the kids are talking. I'm very interested as to what they have to say too. These days I seem more aware of a generation gap in the way the generations speak. Of course whatever the generation, some ideas seem very wrong, promotion of violence top of my list of wrongness.

In August Congress recesses and it's one of the few times of year representatives hear from their ordinary constituents in person. The issue of the day is structural change to our health care system. Health services are paid for primarily through private insurance schemes. Outside the USA the prominence of the profit motive in medicine here may be hard to fathom. Insurance, Big Pharma, and business groups are investing full force to influence the direction of the changes to the system. Public relations companies have been busy trying to organize for the August recess. On tactic being promoted is the disruption of public meetings with representatives. This irritates me because our elected representatives seem out of touch enough as it is.

I'm tired of argument. It's not that I don't think politics is important, because of course it is. What I long for nonetheless is politics that breaks through the dissonance between what we know and feel. The challenges humanity faces are heartbreaking. There must be a space for conversations enabling enough trust that we can reveal our hearts. we20 seems a great idea to me: Small groups and an intention to make a plan. The idea enforces enough intimacy to be real. I know I can't make a plan alone, perhaps together we can.

In August thoughts of cold winter are not far away, but there's still time. It's a good month, so I'll have to pick a date for a we20 meeting. How does August 22 sound?

Response in Collaboration

'you come from the poor South, where my soul began; in that high sky your mother is still washing clothes with my mother. That's why I chose you, companera.'

pablo neruda

A friend participates in a collaborative blogging project they call The Four. And they are inviting responses to the quotation.

I've thought about the quotation enough to know all I can come up with is a sort of stream of consciousness. Aha! That's all I ever seem to come up with.

I suspect that Neruda was speaking quite clearly about geography, but like many people nowadays my experience and that of my mother were spread out in various locations. So my impulse was to take the meaning as a metaphor for a deep familiarity between persons.

A few words stuck out: mother, soul, companera.

One morning my mother woke up and said she didn't feel right and wanted to go to the hospital. Her complaints weren't very specific. In the hospital emergency room, if I remember properly, the doctors didn't finger anything specific either. She was old and weak. But they admitted her anyway. Within a day it seems clear now in retrospect that she entered a dying period. And, indeed in a week she had died. It was a week my father and I and then later my sister Sharon sat in vigil. Altogether it was an eventful week. There was much happening in my mother's mind, it was obvious to see that, but not so obvious as to what. The stories didn't always make much sense and anyway are too hard to tell because the stories and the feelings so intertwined.

There is something she told me which moved me very much and I like to share. At one point she looked at me and said,

"It's uncanny, when I look at you now, I see you now and as a baby and a child, a handsome teenager; I see you as you have always been at once."

I put quotation marks around it, the words probably weren't exactly that, but those are the words as I recollect. Her vision of me reminds a little of the curiosity that I can look at photographs of me, no matter what age I am in them, and see myself in the photograph. Well, even at my age, it still seems a little odd to look in the mirror and see myself, and that I always do recognize me. Odder still that I'd recognize a wolf looking back at me in the mirror as some people do. The point is that in recognition seems something of a mystery, at least to me.

I loved my mother very much and felt a sense of grief that nobody else would ever see me as she was seeing me then. She knew me before I knew myself and nourished me all along. With all my sadness, there was also a smile, partly a curious one. I couldn't imagine how she was seeing all of the me at once, clearly her sight was physics amended. And a smile because in her telling me what she saw, she made clear to me a cord connecting us together through time.

Neruda also makes such cords visible.

My thoughts turned then to what it means for the invisible to become visible. My mother said what she was seeing, and I'm sure she was seeing what she was saying. But for myself, when I'm saying a cord was made visible, I'm speaking in metaphor, seeing as a way to say something was made plain.

In the bathroom where I shave my face, there is a window that looks out onto the vegetable garden. We don't bother with a fence, so animals do visit the garden and eat there. I often see woodchucks in the garden. They have burrows against the foundation of our house. Really, I'm not sure how many animals occupy these dens, many. I can look out the window at them, but the geometry is such that it's not easy for them to see me in the window. With their backs to me and intently eating, somehow they still know when I'm looking. I imagine that I can tell when someone is looking at me too. I wonder what sense it is that receives the message of someone looking? And how is it that we can sometimes look at a stranger to us and know we share a familiarity? I think sometimes we can.

"Where my soul began" seemed so easily understood that I didn't pause there, instead turning my imaginations to "that high sky." I wonder about places I've never been, and Chile of all places is rich for imagination. My soul seems so specific, objective and precise, but on further reflection I know nothing of souls.

The photograph is of Blind Wille Johnson. I snagged the photo from a page a graduate student in history at San Fransisco State University by the name of Corry Dodson for a course "Computer Methodology For Historians." I like the pages and of course the photograph. What the photograph of Blind Willie Johnson has to do with the meaning of soul, is his haunting song Won't Somebody Tell Me What Is a Soul of a Man (YouTube video). I also like very much Bruce Cockburn's version of the song which can also be heard at YouTube.

The question doesn't have a good answer even when the question makes sense. Something that makes any definition for soul difficult is that I'm rather attached to my soul as you are to yours. Souls are personal and private. Our souls are also entwined with those who've come before us and we'll leave after us in the sense I was suggesting that my mother's vision of me made a cord between us visible.

I very much like the part of the quotation: "in that high sky your mother is still washing clothes with my mother." I don't know whether he wrote this as an old man, whether his mother was dead or alive. It doesn't seem to matter much, in that this entwining of souls seems removed from ordinary time; a relationship not a thing.

Our souls are the root criterion of life and there is a universe of souls. But I can't say what is a soul of a man.

I like the word "companera." Alas, I only speak English and my tongue is so often tied as it is. In a lazy way I render "companera" as "partner." In my imagination, I'm sure Neruda is speaking of his love too.

In my imagination I have my love, but not really. Still my imagination is so vivid that in one who is my love is mutual recognition, like children whose mothers wash clothes in that high sky.

Summer is such a lovely time. Still with steps on ground soft from a summer rain, a chorus of song birds singing vespers in the twilight, the smell of sweet grass in the air, and blossoms everywhere, I can feel melancholy. In the summer it's hard to take such feelings too seriously, if for no other reason than to hear the squeals of children playing in the distance which always raise a smile.

I love the poem I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. It doesn't take long to read, or you can hear Angelou recite it accompanied by music by Buckshot Le Fonque if you're inclined towards YouTube as I am.

The caged bird sings of freedom. Surely my life is a life of great privilege. But a caged bird sings and in that song is an understanding of soul available to us all, no matter how privileged. Our souls pine and yearn for the unattainable. The slightly bitter quality is necessary as our souls are in creation.

Myopic Visionary

Nothing came of my we20 gathering. The Repower America organizer bailed out which made it easy for me to let the whole thing slide.

On the morning of July 4th my dad topped off the gasoline tank in the car. The gas he got must have been mostly water, in any case the car conked out at the end of the driveway. The car still isn't fixed, so I've been more isolated than usual this month. That's just a cop out for not trying harder to get a group together to talk turkey about what's going on and what we might do together in response. The biggest hurdle I can't seem to leap is a feeling of lacking credibility.

On a different theme, I've been thinking more recently about a generation gap between Baby Boomers like me and younger folks. I like younger folks and it's nice to cross paths on the Internet. Part of the gap as I see it has to do with different approaches to new communications technologies. And then there's how the Internet puts me in touch with things I probably wouldn't have noticed otherwise, like pictures on Facebook.

The daughter of friends put up pictures from a music festival she attended last weekend, and because I'm friends with her at Facebook I get to see sets of pictures of friends of hers where she's been tagged in photos. I don't know the kids in most of the pictures, but I knew some of their parents when I was their age. One of the dads' picture was posted. I haven't seen him in years, in fact seeing his picture made me think of meeting his dad so many years ago. I don't really know what's up in these young lives, but the pictures make me think about when I was young.

Lots of people I knew then have done remarkable things in their lives. For others life descended in a downward spiral. I'm not sure what the report about me looks like. I'm not much more together now than I was back then. That gets to the nub of my credibility problem.

My mailing address now is Freedom, Pennsylvania. Back when I was in my early twenties it was Large, Pennsylvania. I much prefer Freedom. Large was an unfortunate trauma. I was very convinced that the energy crisis required people to find new ways of living. I was very excited about the work of The New Alchemy Institute and the notion of housing as a means for food production. My mother purchased a derelict property in a coal mining company town, a patch town. Some of this time I spent trying to invent a more self-reliant sort of life style with this house. It all went to hell in a hand basket. I feel sure the stories could be told in a hilarious way, failure is after all quite funny, but even now that episode of my life is painful enough that I've never had it in me to tell the stories in a funny way.

One very nice thing about being older is having old friends. Of course my friends know some of the stories from at Large. Because the story of Large had a lot to do with acting on predictions about energy shortages and energy costs, part of the fail has to do with how wrong my predictions turned out. That's not changed my general pessimism about energy today. But some of my friends have heard me spouting off about the energy crisis for over thirty years now. And, well, what have I got to show for it?

Yesterday thinking more or less along these lines I remembered a book I have from the early 1980's called The Integral Urban House. I was nowhere near as systematic as the folks who created that place, but something very much like it was what I was aiming for. It's cool to see the book is still in print. I wondered about the house now. According to this news article from late 2007 the Integral Urban House is just a house now.

In looking for info about the house online I kept running into descriptions of Sim Van der Ryn as a visionary. I really do admire Sim Van der Ryn's accomplishments, but I wondered what it takes to call yourself a visionary? I was feeling a bit snarky about it, given that in an inventory of my life, I never saw what came coming. A visionary, I'm not. Still we're far from coping with energy issues in a constructive way, so maybe I'm a myopic visionary.

I'm being hard on myself, and hard on my generational cohort. Some criticism is well-deserved. We screwed up in so many ways. I'm wonder whether young people know that many of their parents looked towards the future and thought big changes were needed? And I wonder what, if anything useful, we might tell them of our responses to that vision?

Here's what Matt Cantor the author of the news article about the Integral Urban House said of its reversion to just being a house:

The experiment could not sustain itself and I guess we all had to take the blue pill and go back to making believe that everything would continue to be fine no matter how we lived, who we killed or how much oil we burned.

Ouch! That stings! I've never seen The Matrix, but I get the blue and red pills. With age comes wisdom; I'm a bit short on any claim to wisdom myself. There's an irony too that even in selling-out I'm a sad sack. Lots of my age cohort have done pretty well by choosing the blue pill--the choice to go back to a waking sleep. Often the biggest reasons for the choosing blue over red as it were for many of us was a vision of life for our kids. What a mess.

Now the kids are grown and facing their own decisions. I suspect young people see folks my age as cynical. I'm not sure we really are. I feel quite sure we care very much about the world in which our children will live. So why is it so hard to get together to discuss what we might do together about the perilous future? I can't get a coherent story together that might lead to some collaboration among friends. I'm working on it and will try again soon to have a gathering here.

we20

I live near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh is not a particularly large city. It's famous as the Steel City, but iron and steel manufacturing is now so much reduced. Indeed Pittsburgh is part of the Rust Belt, places in the Middle Atlantic region of the USA once the manufacturing hub of the US. The picture was taken from the Spring Hill neighborhood facing more or less in the direction of the city. You can see the hilly terrain. Pittsburgh not a big city, it's also a city of neighborhoods, and the metropolitan area is composed of townships towns and municipalities. There's a small town flavor to the area. And I'm really in love with it.

Pittsburgh will be the setting for a meeting of the G20--Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors--in September. My first reaction was of hometown pride in being selected as the setting for an international event. My second reaction was to think of Seattle 1999. The World Trade Organization held a Ministerial Conference in Seattle. At least 40,000 protesters gathered and it became a watershed moment drawing attention to the issue of globalization.

Pittsburgh is gearing up for its Independence Day celebrations and one of the local papers tells us that the Three Rivers Regatta will be a test of security procedures for the G20 event. Oh joy! Seriously, I want them to get the security right. Partly that desire goes back to my hometown pride--perhaps foolish; I would like Pittsburgh to be seen in a good light. I don't want anyone hurt. But at the same time I believe public voices should have an opportunity to speak and be heard. Peaceful assembly is essential to that, even if I won't be part of it. I probably will avoid the whole Forth of July celebrations downtown too!

I'm not an activist. Saying that doesn't mean that I don't think, nor that I don't understand that in a democracy I have social obligations. It is surely true that the matters discussed at the G20 Meeting have real consequences for me and people all around the Earth. I intend to pay attention as best I can.

If 1999 was a watershed moment for anti-globalization movement, then the 2008 run on the financial markets was a watershed moment too. In 1999 people in developing nations, labor unions, young people and disenfranchised people of all sorts began to deeply question the neo-liberal policies that had dominated world economics since Reagan, Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping. Since 2008 even the most dyed-in-the-wool capitalists are raising questions too.

The job numbers for June came out today and nearly a half million more people ;have been forced from their employment; raising the official unemployment rate to levels not seen since Ronald Reagan was president. In 1976 there were about 250,000 people in Allegheny County--where Pittsburgh is--directly engaged in steel manufacture. By 1980 there were less than 5,000. Regionally job numbers have held up better than other areas of the country in this recession. That fact is somewhat tempered by the fact the region has never fully recovered the jobs since the 1980's.

The economy sucks, people are noticing. Even though unemployment is high, there is a perverse situation that the buying power of people who are working actually increased in June. So noticing the economy is a bit more nuanced than we might think. Something working people might notice are things shared in common that are in trouble. The state is cutting arts funding; in the scheme of things a very small budget item, but one which affects many people. This summer the Pennsylvania Governors School was cancelled which for more than 20 years had brought the brightest high school students across the state together to participate in dynamic learning programs during the summer. Regional funds for libraries are being slashed among many other cuts. So even for people working feeling their money goes a little further, they see effects of the poor economy. For most of us the signs are obvious.

What is not so obvious is what to be done. More than ever people are aware of environmental limits. Take the issue of atmospheric carbon. We all know it's a problem and such a big problem that none of us alone can do much about. It's a global issue. But I also think that most Americans look at the promise of "green" jobs suspiciously. We know we take cheap energy for granted so don't know how to think about how to get out of the spin we're in. Building more houses in ever sprawling suburbs doesn't make much sense to us, but neither do all the people who were engaged in construction building them and who are now out of a job. We take it as a given that our economy depends on growth, and to our minds growth is literally fueled by fossil fuels.

In June Jason Bradford put a presentation he made at "The Generation Green Tent" during the Summer Arts and Music Festival at the Benbow Lake State Recreation Area. It's a great presentation that I encourage reading and sharing. One point he made was:

Problems with the environment or natural resources are problems with the economy because human economic systems are a subset of planetary ecological systems. Environmental issues should be the main topics on page 1 of the business section of your local newspaper—assuming you still have one.

He also makes the point that we are about off our rockers because of the cognitive dissonance over what we know and our assumptions about the economy. Perhaps in 1999 there were lots of Americans who interpreted the issues of globalization in familiar frames like: Buy American, or Don't ship our jobs oversees. But now the reality of global climate change has taken hold. The link Bradford makes between economics and environment is very real to us, even if we don't talk together about it much.

The other evening a paid organizer for Repower America called me on telephone. I must have signed a petition or given out my details at some point. My sales resistance isn't so strong, so I try pretty quickly to dispense with such calls. What kept me connected a little longer was the money pitch never began. And that left me with an opportunity to run my mouth, saying I'm not going to do anything if it means my having to go anywhere. This isn't entirely a snot-nosed reaction, transportation is something I have to plan and ration. But Pablo on the other end must have learned well in organizer's school because he came back with an idea for "Green Barbecues." The idea is to invite your friends over to talk about economic/environmental issues. Perhaps together we can do something useful. Then closing the sale, Pablo had me pick a date. The date is July 8, 2009.

we20

In April the G20 met in London. In advance of that meeting I stumbled upon an effort called we20--that's their FaceBook page. The basic idea of we20 is for people all over to create meetings of 20 or so to discuss the dire problems we all face. And the most important part is to try to think of a plan to put actions to our words. The organization is entirely neutral, we20 doesn't take a position. What they have done, however is to create tools so that individual we20 meetings can share with others. That Web site is here. At the time I first discovered we20, I thought how smart that all was, but didn't act on it. Then recently I noticed a Tweet from we20 at Twitter about Pittsburgh and it jogged my memory.

I've committed to try to entice a few friends to my place for a Green Barbecue so that the Repower America organizer can encourage the people who show up to sign their petition. I think that's a good thing.

Almost all of my friends want as little to do with the Internet as possible. We talk about face to face being so important, but I'm not sure how many I can actually attract Wednesday night. Still, I know my friends think they should be doing something about the pickle we're all in. It took Repower America to get me off my duff, but the essential thing for grassroot efforts is for people to get together and share some intention. With these Green Barbecues, Repower America hasn't developed a way to tell the stories online like we20 has. So while my friends might not see anything about it online--including this blog post--I'm still keen on using the Internet to connect. So I've listed the event at the we20 Web site. I'll also try to report on it there and at the FaceBook page.

I maybe missing something essential, but I don't think it matters too much what we call small grassroots efforts to get together to address our challenges. But I do think it important more and more people do get together for that purpose. There are online communication tools, I think they're great and intend to explore them. Still the basic point is to get together and get to work. Our survival and happiness depends on it.

Stories

My friend Pingting noting my lack of posting here wonder if I got lost in the garden. I have been busy in the garden the last few months, but I've also been writing elsewhere. One of those places is Ned.com which is a social network I like. Ned.com grew out of the Omidyar Network's experiment with social network sites to help people organize to do good. That experiment closed and Ned uses the coding of the old site. There are a few hold-overs from the Onet days there too.

I like having pages of things I'm thinking about online. My thoughts sort of go around in circles and it's nice to have pages to remind me where I was when I last took up one topic or another. I'm quite forgetful, so I also like having access to old links. These sorts of purposes work against other people engaging with what I put up. In discussion forums people expect others to say more or less on topic. Often my experience at a place like Ned.com is to be thinking about multiple threads so my comments tend to blend topics. This can be very annoying to others. But people sharing a history together, even online, has its advantages; among them is that some people are used to me and my digressions.

Recently at Ned.com a German-Palestinian national introduced a project he's embarking on. By the way the link is to a Page at WiserEarth another social networking site like Ned.com where the purpose is to connect people together for positive action. Al Saad is new to Ned.com, so I didn't want to leave one of my rambling missives on his thread, for fear of putting him off, nevertheless his project sent my mind reeling in many directions.

Al Saad after living in Germany for the last twenty years plans to return to Palestine to help catalyze the creation of a holistic green economy there. I've noticed that Al Saad mentions not infrequently that English is not his home language. I've also noticed that all of the pages he's put up in English are clear. So if you're interested to find out more about his efforts, don't let the English be a reason not to. Wael Al Saad is using online social media to connect to others, so there are plenty of ways to follow and interact with him. I think the WiserEarth page is the best place to start.

I think in stories and I think most people do. Something that stories do is to establish that something is part of a whole and meanings aren't just personal, but created by groups. When I encountered Al Saad's project two different sets of stories started spinning: Stories about Palestine. And Stories about creating a green economy.

The subject of a green economy is one that dominates the threads at Ned.com. My friend Linda Nowakowski introduced me to Buddhist Economics. Nowakowski is not Buddhist, but she had been teaching business related courses in Thailand for many years. I've heard to half-jokingly say that her mission is to take the Buddhist out of Buddhist economics. By that I think she means finding ways to relate the really good ideas contained in Buddhist economics to fellow westerners. The term Buddhist economics is related to E. F. Schumacher who wrote the popular seventies book Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Schumacher's ideas are still current, not the least of the reasons for that is the work of the E. F. Schumacher Society, which has labored since 1980 to create and promote strong local economies.

Schumacher coined the term Buddhist economics, but it wasn't coming out of deep scholarship about Buddhist theology. Indeed, Schumacher himself was a late convert to Roman Catholicism. And his interest in that general direction came from time spent in India in the 1950's where he developed a keen interest in Gandhian economics. Thailand has a long Buddhist tradition, so the emergent schools of Buddhist economics there. There is a wonderful online resource Buddhist Economics by Buddhist monk Phrabhavanaviriyakhun. Even in Thailand, Buddhist economics remains part of heterodox economic thinking, nevertheless it is part of economic discussion there.

Buddhist economics interests me in large part because it turns thinking about economics towards thinking about the stories we use to make sense of things. There are plenty of posts online of scientist ruminating about religion. I'm sure that thinking scientifically is a very useful invention. My problem with the notion that people should give up on religion and take up science, or essays something like that, has not so much to do with science as it does with how I believe people think: We think in stories. The method of science is to create new knowledge by testing propositions. Yet people need to understand the world as part of a whole and religious stories create a foundation for most people. What's more because stories are socially constructed and ubiquitous in our everyday lives most of the time we don't explicitly think about the stories explicitly. People today confront great challenges. To name just a couple there's the twin challenge of peak oil and climate change cause by among other things carbon in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels.

I'll be the first to admit that my recent writing at this blogs--sparse as it is--is quite awful. It doesn't hold up. I think it's part of wrestling with how we as people know. I'm convinced by science, but the stories remain. So I'm now, and have been clumsily trying to figure out some consilience between the two realms.

I do spend a lot of my time gardening. It's a bit embarrassing even with all the effort my garden looks chaotic. Some of my friends wonder why I spend so much time on flowers; Why not stuff you can eat? Part of the reason for flowers is simply serendipitous. There were areas of the property that were hard to maintain and growing stuff there seemed the easiest thing to do. I have had a long interest in organic gardening, and certainly have grown food over the years. I am also interested in permaculture. Permaculture agricultural techniques mimic natural ecologies. But permaculture is not only about growing things, it's also about culture. Part of the allure of permaculture is the sense that it's easy. There are tales of people growing all they need to live with just a few hours of labor a day. I don't really think such stories are apocryphal, but I do think it's hard work to invent and get systems like that up and running.

Agriculture with fields of one crop in neat rows mimics what happens after a fire or a flood when a more complex ecosystem is disrupted. Such monocultures aren't really sustainable over a long time. And of course monocultures are very vulnerable to being wiped out by pests and the weather. Agriculture is hard risky work and over the 10,000 years or so people have been practicing, we've come up with clever ways to deal with the risks and downsides. Permaculture seeks to make growing systems that are more durable and resilient and yet still productive. Wonderful work is being done in this direction and I'm all for it. In a way my flower beds allow me an opportunity to explore and learn about this type of growing.

Something I spend too much time on is mowing grass. I would like to move towards much less of that. But my elderly father owns this property and I'm not going to change the stories of grass in his mind. He's also got very much of a farmer's idea of how growing food is done. That's good and I've learned much from him. But to some extent his vegetable garden represents a bunch of chores I don't particularly like. In particular, I just don't get his fascination with tilling the ground so much. Anyhow, the reason I do some of my gardening activities has to do with stories. These sorts of stories are along the lines of: That's how it's done. That's what they say. Mostly we never go into the whys of neatly sheared grass or denuding the soil to grow things.

Wael Al Saad's ideas for Palestine are closely related to permaculture ideas of mimicking complex ecosystems not just in agriculture, but also in business enterprises. So part of the challenge is to find ways for people to hear these new stories without the old stories of "They say" and "That's the way it is done" precluding them.

Palestine is an ancient and holy land and the religious and political stories often work against collaborative approaches to solving problems. Indeed one of the first thoughts that popped into my head--not thoughts really--were maps and pictures of the area from a book of Children's Bible stories I had as a child. Somehow in my mind these images were yellow from age, even though I haven't seen the book in probably forty years and I have no idea whether the pages have actually yellowed. That was a big clue to me that some of my stories of Palestine are tired stereotypes. There are always real pitfalls to stereotypes, and the perceived affection for the land from childhood acculturation may be a serious pitfall. In any case thought were running as I read some of the materials Al Saad has posted.

I've become really fond of the Web site Religious Dispatches. A couple of recent articles are interesting in re stories about Palestine. The first is more obviously connected than the second, Time for Jews to Abandon the Old Foundation Myth of Israel? by Ira Chernus. It's worth reading the whole article. Chernus in part of the piece talks about the work of Brit Tezedek v'Shalom, an American peace and justice organization. The group addresses head on the foundational myths of modern Israel and explores new foundations as a way towards peace.

The second article is Disco-Reggae at Abu Ghraib: Music, the Bible and Torture. Author Erin Runions explores the question:

What does it mean when a country that likes to proclaim itself a defender of freedom plays a song about liberation to people it is torturing?

The essay perhaps isn't directly related to Palestine or Wael Al Saad's project, but is related to the foundational myths of the USA.

The 2000 presidential election in the United States was not settled immediately, so there was a period for debate. I did not vote for G. W. Bush, because he seemed quite frightening to me. At a party shortly after the election--I think, it could have been just after 9/11--an old acquaintance lit into me about my raising concerns about Bush's millenarian beliefs. I think part of the ferocity of his reaction was the sense that in making it I was being disingenuous. I was sincere about my concerns, so as the administration proceeded I was attuned to events premised on such thinking. Nonetheless even now I'm startled by some revelations of what happened dribble out. Gentleman's Quarterly's slideshow of Pentagon intelligence briefs sent to President Bush in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq surprised me. As did the fact that Bush told France’s President Jacques Chirac:

This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.

I'm not sure why I'm surprised, but the surprise is related to the cognitive dissonance that the sordid facts of torture under my flag provoke.

The "Disco-Reggae" song in Runions' piece is Rivers of Babylon (YouTube) by Boney M. Years ago I was entertaining two of my aunts with a trip to the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. We stopped to eat at the "Dirty O" a hot dog shop. The real name is the Original Hot Dog Shop, but the "Dirty O" gives hint that the place is slightly dangerous. I avoided sitting upstairs near the bar, but was still worried a little about the whole idea of eating there. The hot dogs and especially the French fries are great, so my aunties were enjoying it. Over the juke box the original Melodians rendition of "River's of Babylon" came on. One of my aunts heard "Zion" in the song and said that the song is why a grandchild is named Zion. I mentioned for the edification of the other aunt, who knows her Bible, that it was a psalm put to music--it's psalm 137. Runions points out the irony of forcing an Iraqi POW to listen to loud repetitious playings of the song:

When US interrogators chose songs with references to Babylon linking Iraq and ancient Babylon, they were also tapping into a lengthy apocalyptic tradition in which Babylon becomes a mythical figure of evil; the biblical account of Babylon conquering Judah, exiling the people of Israel, and destroying the temple has long been read as part of an enduring spiritual struggle. In the United States, Babylon is often used to represent what the nation opposes.

Yet at Abu Ghraib, the allegory of “Rivers of Babylon” works uneasily, contradictorily. In the usual pattern of apocalyptic and national biblical interpretation we would expect the ancient Israelite captives to represent the United States, under threat by Babylon. But in this case, it is the Iraqi (“Babylonian”) detainees weeping by the waters of Babylon, while US soldiers are the cruel captors.

Reason is very important to finding a way out of the mess humanity faces today, but reason alone seem insufficient. We also must become more aware of the stories which guide our lives and share new stories. Doing that is much easier said than done!

In thinking about the thread at Ned.com about Wael Al Saad's efforts to create green economies in Palestine, that's the point I wanted to make. But it took my roundabout rambling to come to the point. I'm still not sure what to write in thread because the focus is on "practical" issues. Mostly it seems raising the topic of stories seems to be a trivial concern: just stories. Still I'm convinced stories motivate much of what we do. Stories , what "they say" are fundamental to why I mow so much grass and do a hundred other things in my daily life. Stories animate our economies and determine the shape of markets. Stories lay behind why Americans torture.

Theologian Walter Wink in an essay Facing the Myth of Redemptive Violence wrote:

This Myth of Redemptive Violence is the real myth of the modern world. It, and not Judaism or Christianity or Islam, is the dominant religion in our society today.

There surely are peacemakers who are atheist and agnostic; just as surely there are religious peacemakers. Engagement across this divide of differing perspectives is a daunting challenge. Still the importance of working towards more peaceful coexistence is so important to be motivating. And to me it seems that taking stories seriously is an essential element in building such bridges. All of us are influenced in what we do do by stories. It is essential that we engage them.