[Scpg] [CCTransitionTowns] "The second-most radical thing you can do"

Tue Oct 28 22:00:46 PDT 2008

I also suggest we "be the change" by doing what we want to see, even small
acts like riding a bicycle to medium acts like planting edible landscapes or
even larger acts like starting a local ethanol co-op or a solar/wind
business.

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 12:24 PM, rosemary wilvert
<rwilvert at sbcglobal.net>wrote:

>  Right on, Linda Buzzell and Rebecca Solnit!
>
> And the SECOND-MOST RADICAL thing you can do is get involved in where your
> city is going, because you're going to have to live in it. In other words,
> GET INVOLVED IN LOCAL POLITICS. "Politics" isn't something nice people don't
> get involved in. It's what's out there, what's going to affect you. It can
> be fun! Don't leave it to the few who've been standing up year after year
> against runaway development.
>
> As we will, by necessity, enjoy staying home more and tilling our yards and
> eating our own fresh produce, we must keep our city a decent,
> inspiring place to live. Go to your City Councils and County Boards of
> Supervisors and say, "ENOUGH paving of farmland for box stores selling cheap
> goods from China!  Enough SPRAWL and traffic jams! Enough sell-outs to
> developers who want to make big money before freighting collapses.
>
> Get involved in the city you will be spending your time in. Fight for
> open-space preservation, solar installation subsidies, pedestrian- and
> bike-friendly streets...You'll be fighting for your own self-interest. Let's
> live deeper as we enter a future of opportunity, reconnecting with our roots
> in farmland and community.
>
> Rosemary Wilvert
> Dreamer of the SLO life
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> *From:* LBUZZELL at aol.com
> *To:* perma-psychology at googlegroups.com ; sbperm2006 at googlegroups.com ;
> Scpg at arashi.com ; sbfoodfuture at googlegroups.com ;
> chat_act_ecopsy at yahoogroups.com ; ecology-psychology at jiscmail.ac.uk ;
> sb-simplicity-circle at lists.riseup.net ; sbogc at yahoogroups.com
> *Cc:* cctransitiontowns at hopedance.net ; transition-sb at googlegroups.com
> *Sent:* Tuesday, October 28, 2008 7:42 AM
> *Subject:* [CCTransitionTowns] "The most radical thing you can do is stay
> home"
>
> We've reached Peak Travel, and relocalization is the next logical step.
> Thanks to modern communications, we can stay in touch by text, voice and
> video but will probably be zooming around the planet less often. And as
> Solnit points out: "Perhaps the most radical thing you can do in our time
> is to start turning over the soil, loosening it up for the crops to settle
> in, and then stay home to tend them."
>
> Linda
>
> http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/3628/ The Most
> Radical Thing You Can Do
> Staying home as a necessity and a right
> by Rebecca Solnit
>
> LONG AGO the poet and bioregionalist Gary Snyder said, "The most radical
> thing you can do is stay home," a phrase that has itself stayed with me for
> the many years since I first heard it. Some or all of its meaning was
> present then, in the bioregional 1970s, when going back to the land and
> consuming less was how the task was framed. The task has only become more
> urgent as climate change in particular underscores that we need to consume a
> lot less. It's curious, in the chaos of conversations about what we ought to
> do to save the world, how seldom sheer modesty comes up—living smaller,
> staying closer, having less—especially for us in the ranks of the
> privileged. Not just having a fuel-efficient car, but maybe leaving it
> parked and taking the bus, or living a lot closer to work in the first
> place, or not having a car at all. A third of carbon-dioxide emissions
> nationwide are from the restless movements of goods and people.
>
> We are going to have to stay home a lot more in the future. For us that's
> about giving things up. But the situation looks quite different from the
> other side of all our divides. The indigenous central Mexicans who are
> driven by poverty to migrate have begun to insist that among the human
> rights that matter is the right to stay home. So reports David Bacon, who
> through photographs and words has become one of the great chroniclers of the
> plight of migrant labor in our time. "Today the right to travel to seek work
> is a matter of survival," he writes. "But this June in Juxtlahuaca, in the
> heart of Oaxaca's Mixteca region, dozens of farmers left their fields, and
> women weavers their looms, to talk about another right, the right to stay
> home. . . . In Spanish, Mixteco, and Triqui, people repeated one phrase over
> and over: the*derecho de no migrar*—the right to not migrate. Asserting
> this right challenges not just inequality and exploitation facing migrants,
> but the very reasons why people have to migrate to begin with." Seldom
> mentioned in all the furor over undocumented immigrants in this country is
> the fact that most of these indigenous and mestizo people would be quite
> happy not to emigrate if they could earn a decent living at home; many of
> them are just working until they earn enough to lay the foundations for a
> decent life in their place of origin, or to support the rest of a family
> that remains behind.
>
> From outer space, the privileged of this world must look like ants in an
> anthill that's been stirred with a stick: everyone constantly rushing
> around in cars and planes for work and pleasure, for meetings, jobs,
> conferences, vacations, and more. This is bad for the planet, but it's not
> so good for us either. Most of the people I know regard with bemusement or
> even chagrin the harried, scattered lives they lead. Last summer I found
> myself having the same conversation with many different people, about our
> craving for a life with daily rites; with a sense of time like a
> well-appointed landscape with its landmarks and harmonies; and with a sense
> of measure and proportion, as opposed to a formless and unending scramble
> to go places and get things and do more. I think of my mother's
> lower-middle-class childhood vacations, which consisted of going to a lake
> somewhere not far from Queens and sitting still for a few weeks—a lot
> different from jetting off to heli-ski in the great unknown and all the
> other models of hectic and exotic travel urged upon us now.
>
> For the privileged, the pleasure of staying home means being reunited with,
> or finally getting to know, or finally settling down to make the beloved
> place that home can and should be, and it means getting out of the limbo
> of nowheres that transnational corporate products and their natural
> habitats—malls, chains, airports, asphalt wastelands—occupy. It means reclaiming
> home as a rhythmic, coherent kind of time. Which seems to be what Bacon's
> Oaxacans want as well, although their version of being uprooted and out of
> place is much grimmer than ours.
>
> At some point last summer I started to feel as if the future had arrived,
> the future I've always expected, the one where conventional expectations
> start to crack and fall apart—kind of like arctic ice nowadays, maybe—and we
> rush toward an uncertain, unstable world. Of course the old vision of the
> future was of all hell breaking loose, but what's breaking loose now is a
> strange mix of blessings and hardships. Petroleum prices have begun doing
> what climate-change alarms haven't: pushing Americans to alter their habits.
> For people in the Northeast who heat with oil, the crisis had already
> arrived a few years back, but for a lot of Americans across the country, it
> wasn't until filling up the tank cost three times as much as it had less
> than a decade ago that all the rushing around began to seem questionable,
> unaffordable, and maybe unnecessary. Petroleum consumption actually went
> down 4 percent in the first quarter of the year, and miles driven nationally
> also declined for the first time in decades. These were small things in
> themselves, but they are a sign of big changes coming. The strange postwar
> bubble of affluence with its frenzy of building, destroying, shipping, and
> traveling seems to be deflating at last. The price of petroleum even put a
> dent in globalization; a piece headlined "Shipping Costs Start to Crimp
> Globalization" in the *New York Times* mentioned several manufacturers who
> decided that cheaper labor no longer outweighed long-distance shipping
> rates. The localized world, the one we need to embrace to survive, seems to
> be on the horizon.
>
> But a localized world must address the unwilling and exploited emigrés as
> well as the joy riders and their gratuitously mobile goods. For the
> Oaxacans, the right to stay home will involve social and economic change in
> Mexico. Other factors pushing them to migrate come from our side of the
> border, though—notably the cheap corn emigrating south to bankrupt farm
> families and communities. The changing petroleum economy could reduce the
> economic advantage to midwestern corporate farmers growing corn and maybe
> make shipping it more expensive too. What's really needed, of course, is a
> change of the policy that makes Mexico a dumping ground for this stuff,
> whether that means canceling NAFTA or some other insurrection against "free
> trade." Another thing rarely mentioned in the conversations about
> immigration is what American agriculture would look like without
> below-minimum-wage immigrant workers, because we have gotten used to food
> whose cheapness comes in part from appalling labor conditions. It is because
> we have broken out of the frame of our own civility that undocumented
> immigrants are forced out of theirs.
>
> Will the world reorganize for the better? Will Oaxaca's farmers get to stay
> home and practice their traditional agriculture and culture? Will we stay
> home and grow more of our own food with dignity, humanity, a little sweat
> off our own brows, and far fewer container ships and refrigerated trucks
> zooming across the planet? Will we recover a more stately, settled, secure
> way of living as the logic of ricocheting like free electrons withers in the
> shifting climate? Some of these changes must come out of the necessity to
> reduce carbon emissions, the unaffordability of endlessly moving people and
> things around. But some of it will have to come by choice. To choose it we
> will have to desire it—desire to stay home, own less, do less getting and
> spending, to see a richness that lies not in goods and powers but in the
> depth of connections. The Oaxacans are ahead of us in this regard. They know
> what is gained by staying home, and most of them have deeper roots in home
> to begin with. And they know what to do outside the global economy, how to
> return to a local realm that is extraordinarily rich in food and agriculture
> and culture.
>
> The word *radical* comes from the Latin word for root. Perhaps the most
> radical thing you can do in our time is to start turning over the soil,
> loosening it up for the crops to settle in, and then stay home to tend
> them.
>  Thanks to George Vye for passing this along to us.
>
>
>
>  ------------------------------
> Play online games for FREE at Games.com! All of your favorites, no
> registration required and great graphics – check it out!<http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100000075x1211202682x1200689022/aol?redir=http://www.games.com?ncid=emlcntusgame00000001>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> CCTransitionTowns mailing list
> CCTransitionTowns at hopedance.net
> http://lists.hopedance.net/mailman/listinfo/cctransitiontowns
>
> To unsubscribe from list list, send a blank email to:
> cctransitiontowns-unsubscribe at hopedance.net
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> CCTransitionTowns mailing list
> CCTransitionTowns at hopedance.net
> http://lists.hopedance.net/mailman/listinfo/cctransitiontowns
>
> To unsubscribe from list list, send a blank email to:
> cctransitiontowns-unsubscribe at hopedance.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.permaculture-guilds.org/pipermail/southern-california-permaculture/attachments/20081028/8d86c378/attachment.html>