[Sdpg] [starhawk] Reclaim the Commons, first update

[Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson]

Reclaim the Commons:  Daily Update
We ve Begun!
By Starhawk


June 3, 2004

Reclaim the Commons has begun, our extremely ambitious mobilization here on 
our own home ground in San Francisco.  Tonight will be the first evening of 
the teach-in.  Yesterday, Wednesday, we began moving into our convergence 
center, after many cliff-hanging dramas.  As of Monday, we were still 
trying to get an agreement signed for a different space that had many 
problematic features, not least that we were subleasing and the owner ran a 
business upstairs.  As time grew shorter, the guys we were renting from 
grew more and more nervous, and more and more restrictions slipped into the 
agreement.  Then, at 4:30 in the afternoon on Memorial Day, I got a call 
from one of our group who is a realtor, that a new place was available.  It 
s huge.  It s beautiful.  And it s two blocks from Moscone Center, where 
the big biotech convention will be.  It has a front room 40 by 40 that we 
will fill with plants, seating circles, a bubbling fountain and a couple of 
ponds: our permaculture garden lounge.  We have space for meetings, big 
spokescouncils, trainings, for the medics and the media team and Food Not 
Bombs and artmaking and a kids space, all under one roof.

We re nesting, washing the floors, collecting old chairs, couches, tables 
and rugs, and filling the place with plants.  Next door to us is a junk 
shop and some of us have been happily shopping.  I ve pulled off what has 
to be some ultimate Sustainability  Coup by  bringing down all the 
cardboard that covered the solar panels we had installed on our house last 
winter to be recycled into puppets and signs. I m setting up tubs to define 
seating areas and filling them with sample plant guilds, feeling that 
somehow I ve swapped karmas with Martha Stewart she s in trouble with the 
law, and I m arranging flowers.

I have a really, really comfortable bed, so high you have to hop onto it, 
with a mattress thick and firm.  And I actually get to sleep in it this 
time.  I m working with friends that I ve done political work with for 
twenty-five years, in a town where I don t have to study the map and learn 
the streets because I already know them.

And yet so much of San Francisco feels strange to me.  I normally spend 
very little time downtown, or in the warehouse district south of Market 
where I ve been searching for space.  Yerba Buena, the park and arts 
complex that sits atop Moscone Center where the biotech convention will be 
held, is a big, public project that displaced a Filipino neighborhood and a 
lot of poor elders when it was built.  I ve taken my Goddess daughters to 
movies at the Metreon and to Zeum, the wonderful, interactive youth museum 
in the park.  They ve ridden e the carousel and performed in plays at the 
Arts Center.  I ve never before done a ritual there, under the gaze of 
high-rises in the heart of downtown, but two nights ago we chanted for the 
full moon and planted crystals in the grass.   Downtown at night is almost 
empty, a few passersby strolled on the paths but we were mostly alone in an 
eerie quiet as the moon rose and the waterfall fountain that border the 
park sang behind us.  The action has begun.

June 4

It s astonishing how many people in San Francisco seem to be abandoning 
their couches just at this moment.  We keep getting calls from someone 
scanning Craig s List on the internet to go pick up a couch here, a 
refrigerator there.  I achieve my main ambition of the day, and get my hair 
cut.  After that, it s just directing traffic, answering calls, planning 
the trainings, thinking about who might facilitate the meetings, and then 
finally rushing off to the teach-in at the Unitarian Church.

Brian has been nervous all day, worried about the turn out for the 
teach-in.  It s been hard organizing it because this one had virtually no 
funding, and the money that did come came late.  We printed up a great 
broadsheet months ago and then had no money for weeks and weeks to print 
more. We re so late getting the convergence space partly because no one 
believed we had money to rent it until a few weeks ago.  It seems like all 
the progressive funding in the country is being sucked into efforts to 
defeat Bush.  A worthy cause, certainly, but just another example of how 
the current administration is sucking the lifeblood out of anything that 
truly feeds and nurtures the spirit.

Still, with almost no resources we ve accomplished a lot, The space is up 
and running, the calendar is on the walls.  Erik arrives in late afternoon 
with a U Haul truck filled with plants, wine barrels, and eager 
permaculturalists and we begin setting up the Garden Lounge. We place the 
barrels to define seating circles and traffic flow, and start to fill them 
with plants.  We arrange the plants in guilds, which I explain to our eager 
helpers are plant affinity groups.  In permaculture, we try to group plants 
that support each other and fulfill different functions nitrogen fixers 
that take nitrogen out of the air and change it into a form that plants can 
take up in their roots for fertility; insectaries that attract beneficial 
insects; dynamic accumulators that take up minerals in their roots.  We re 
grouping those things that grow together; a barrel of berries, elderberry 
and a small maple, all forest edge plants.  I ve made another that s a moon 
garden, all white and silver gray plants that are also drought tolerant 
insectaries.  By tomorrow s press conference, we ll have a bubbling 
fountain and a pond in the center.   I pull a few out for the kids room, 
velvety lamb s ears, scented geraniums, a strong smelling native sage.  We 
also have hundreds of tomato plants to give away at the Really, Really Free 
Market.

Many of these plants were propagated months ago, in a day up at our ranch 
in the Cazadero Hills when all the neighbors came by to snip cuttings and 
pot up wild seedlings.  I have to say a special thanks to Mer, who kept 
those starts watered in our greenhouse for months, all through the heat 
waves of March.

When I arrive at the teach-in, there are only a few people there, and my 
heart sinks.  But I m early, and as time goes on more and more arrive, 
until finally the hall is filled and overflowing.  I give an overview of 
the mobilization, and then we hear from a panel on GMOs and food.  The 
facts are alarming, but we are also on a rising tide of victory.  Just a 
couple of key facts:

Monsanto s stock is down 40%.

Although biotech companies claim to be feeding the world, 85% of GMO crops 
are herbicide resistant varieties of corn, canola and soy that contribute 
to an enormously increased use of chemicals that kill the life of the 
soil.  The other main crop is BT cotton, which is supposed to produce its 
own natural pesticide, and which has been a big failure.  Anuradha Mittal 
talked about how the governments of a number of Indian states had to bail 
out farmers who planted it.

Biotech claims to be cutting edge science, but actually it is stifling science.
Ignacio Chapela, the UC Berkeley biologist whose lab discovered the genetic 
contamination of original races of corn in Puebla and Chiapas, told how the 
graduate student who did the fieldwork was branded a bioterrorist and 
blacklisted, and how many other scientists who investigate the dangers of 
GMOs are cut out of grants, jobs, and professional support.

The FDA waived safety trials for GMO foods.

And much more.  But as usual, no more time to write this morning.  Check 
the website at www.reclaimthecommons.net 
<http://www.reclaimthecommons.net/>  for more, and check the Indymedia page 
for interviews.  And if you re in the Bay Area, come down to 960 
Howard.  Plant to march with us on Saturday meet at UN Plaza at 11 AM in 
the peace march. And come to the other activities, especially the action 
day, June 8.  Greenbloc and Pagan clusters will be at 4th and Howard at 
6:30 AM bring plants to create the garden in the streets!


             www.starhawk.org <http://www.starhawk.org/>

Starhawk is an activist, organizer, and author of Webs of Power: Notes from 
the Global Uprising and eight other books on feminism, politics and 
earth-based spirituality.  She teaches Earth Activist Trainings that 
combine permaculture design and activist skills, and works with the RANT 
trainer s collective, www.rantcollective.org 
<http://www.rantcollective.org/> that offers training and support for 
mobilizations around global justice and peace issues.

To get her periodic posts of her writings, email 
Starhawk-subscribe at lists.riseup.net and put subscribe in the subject 
heading.  If you re on that list and don t want any more of these writings, 
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subject heading.  Feel free to post and forward these stories for nonprofit 
purposes, all other rights reserved.

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