A Bad Dystopian Novel

Found in the Daily Planet archives, dated April 31, 1984

USA 2020—a review

by Jim E Olsun

First time novelist, Peter Parker, has produced one of the most outlandish pieces of fiction of the year. While USA 2020 is certainly an imaginative work, it stretches credulity past the breaking point by throwing in disaster on top of disaster and imagines a year where the president of the United States is a failed businessman, casino operator, and former TV star who attempts to use the office to make himself into the type of dictator more often found in Latin American countries and spends his time sending crazy messages to the public who apparently carry personal computers in their pockets disguised as mobile phones. (I am imagining the author intends this as some type of satire.)

The book has five gigantic wildfires sweeping across California and three burning through Colorado, so many hurricanes cropping up in the Atlantic Ocean that the meteorologists run out of people's names and have to use Greek letters, and a derecho (I had to look that one up—it's a rare windstorm) devastating much of Iowa and Illinois. The book also has multiple killings of Black men and women by police culminating in over 10,000 protests throughout the summer. A whole novel could have been written about any of these horrors but to claim that they all occurred in one year is way too much. There is even the mention of something called “murder hornets”.

Yet this doesn't even approach the biggest disaster facing the various people caught up in this insane imagining of a year in this country. The author actually throws in a plague-like pandemic which virtually shuts down the nation (and most of the world) and makes it completely unlikely that half of this stuff would occur. Then the author throws in characters who claim that the pandemic is a hoax and refuse to take measures to ensure their safety even as hundreds of thousands die around them.

To top all of this off, there is a presidential election that is unimaginable, won by career politician who barely campaigns. Although he is your typical presidential figure, his wife is a college professor who insists on being called Doctor and intends to keep her career rather than settling into being a first lady, his vice president is not only a woman but born of immigrant parents from Jamaica and India, and her Jewish husband refers to himself as the “Second Gentleman”. (The author certainly subscribes to political correctness) Although they win both the popular and electoral votes, the sitting president (who comes across as an out of control narcissist) refuses to acknowledge this and incites his followers claiming that the election was stolen through voter fraud.

This leads to the most unbelievable part of the novel, as it ends with a mob breaking into the Capitol building wearing fur and horned helmets and carrying spears and a Confederate flag, running around trying to find the vice-president so they could hang him while members of congress hide under their desks. Just the idea that so many people could just break into the US Capitol, one of the most secure buildings on the planet, with that much ease is simply highly unrealistic.

I am giving this book a C+ rating, only because it is a first attempt and is so highly imaginative, if equally improbable. My suggestion is that the author focus on only one disaster at a time in his next book. A year that had that many things go wrong in it is obviously impossible.

 

Ten Years!

Ten years ago on this date, I posted my first piece on this blog. To celebrate and to see how much I have changed in ten years, I want to examine everything that I wrote there and look at it in relation to how I am now.

First, it was the summer solstice; this year the solstice is tomorrow. It happens. I decided to go for the calendar date rather than the event to publish this.  Does that make me a bad pagan?

I said I wanted to change the world as a teenager and still did when I wrote that post. And now I still want social change. (The natural world works fine, as long as we work with it.  It’s society that needs to change.) But I wouldn't say I want to change society. I would say I want to be part of changing this society. It's definitely a group effort.

I am still influenced by all the identities I’ve been, and there is still a little of the teen in me (even at nearly sixty-seven), but I no longer identify as a revolutionary (partly for the reasons I outlined in my last post, and partly because, having studied history, I think revolutionaries seldom change more than the people in power).  As horribly new agey as it sounds, I’m more of an ‘evolutionary’ these days, a slow change person. I also don't think of myself as much of a theorist these days either. As to what I am politically, I’m probably mostly a communist anarchist or egalitarian communitarian or whatever the current equivalent is. I want sharing and equality and community.

And these days, I neither do co-counseling nor meditation. I sometimes do empathy sessions.   I am most influenced by Compassionate Communication (aka NVC) and permaculture, and live in a tiny income-sharing community in Queens, NY.  I suspect I couldn't imagine living in New York City ten years ago, but here I am. At least I’m finally doing the kind of community that I have wanted for a long time. I just wish I had more people to do it with.

I wouldn't change a thing in that next paragraph. “Any change… has to be built from the ground up and it has to be a cooperative, community effort.” Yes. Absolutely.

I am still filled with plenty of ideas. (I’m currently writing a fantasy novel and working on it every night.) And I am still looking for people. I am dragging myself out the door to the Ranch, to the urban farm in the neighborhood, to the composting operation in the city.  And I am trying to find the balance between doing too much and doing too little. These days I have faith that if I can keep going and can be patient long enough, I will find the right folks.

The rest of the post talks about what I wanted to do with the blog. Here’s what I want to do now. Recently I’ve been posting once a week. Now I want to take a break.

I’ve done ten years of posting and four hundred and sixty-one posts (including this one). I am not done. I still want to write about mushrooms (as opposed to simply fungi) and human physiology (hormones and kidneys and bones and blood) and whatever else that comes along which I think would be useful, and I think I want to reach five hundred posts.  But it’s summer and I want to do things. There will more later.

I ended my first post with a quote from the Dalai Lama, “My religion is kindness.”  In my last bunch of bleak posts, I’ve said again and again, the one thing we can do is be kind. Yes, I would say my religion is kindness. Kindness and compassion and love.

I used to have a word or phrase of the day and a hero of the day. My word of the day was ‘Relocalization’ and I still think it's a good one.  My hero was Audre Lorde and she is still a hero of mine. And so I will end with a quote from her.

Quote of the Day: “...I do think that we have been taught to think, to codify information in certain old ways, to learn, to understand in certain ways.  The possible shapes of what has not been before exist only in that back place, where we keep those unnamed, untamed longings for something different and beyond what is now called possible, and to which our understanding can only build roads...” - Audre Lorde

Social Change is Slow

I sometimes joke that the reason why I like cleaning things so much, is that I’ve been involved with both mental health work and social change for most of my life, and improvement in both cases takes decades. With cleaning, you can see changes quickly. It gives me fairly instant gratification.

Since blog is dedicated to social change, I want to talk about, not only how slow social change is, but why it is so slow.

I want to start with an example where social change seemed fairly rapid, but wasn't.  I’m talking about the campaign for same sex marriage.

Although I remember much of this, I refreshed my memory with the Wikipedia article on the history of same sex marriage in the United States.

By 2007, at least twenty-one states had bans on same-sex marriage and it was legal only in one state: Massachusetts.  At that point it seemed like more and more states were writing ordinances against it. It looked hopeless. The tide seemed against same sex marriage.

In 2008, even though the California Supreme Court legalized same sex marriage, voters overturned the decision and two more states passed bans on it. Only tiny Connecticut legalized it.

In 2009, it was legalized in Vermont, New Hampshire, and the District of Columbia, and almost in Maine. In 2011, it was legalized in New York. In 2012, Maine, Maryland, and Washington state legalized it. In 2013, California, New Jersey, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Delaware, Minnesota, Hawaii, and Illinois followed suit. Suddenly, there was momentum.

In 2014, it became legal in fifteen more states due to various court decisions. There were court decisions that upheld marriage bans that year as well, but change was clearly happening.

On June 26, 2015, the US Supreme Court ruled that all states were required to issue licenses to same sex couples.  

That seems like fairly rapid change, until you realize that activists had been pushing for same sex marriage since the 1970s.  What changed in the twenty first century? Mostly, the issue of ‘gay rights’ had been before the public so long, that young people didn't understand why same sex couples weren't allowed to marry. One thing I noticed at the time was that President Obama came out in favor of same sex marriage before the Supreme Court decision, but after a poll was published where, for the first time, a majority of Americans approved of same sex marriage.

Max Planck said that science advances one funeral at a time (or something like that).  So does social change.  And where a campaign can take decades, systemic social change (transforming a whole society, which is what I am calling Social Alchemy), takes even longer.  I once was a revolutionary, but as I have studied history, I’ve learned that isn't the way it works.

The Soviet Union is an example of how not to do communism. Don't foist it on millions of people from the top down.  I think Twin Oaks is an example of communism done right. It is small, voluntary, and built from the ground up. A basic permaculture principle is “Use small and slow solutions.” There's a good reason for that.

I am not a big fan of Karl Marx, but I think he gets a bad rap.  He would not have approved of the Soviet Union. That was Lenin’s doing.  And, surprisingly, he even had good things to say about capitalism. He definitely thought it was an improvement on feudalism, which preceded it.

And if we want to get beyond capitalism, and replace it, it's probably useful to look at how capitalism replaced feudalism.

There are several different views on the rise of capitalism, but what they have in common is that it was a gradual process that happened over centuries. Adam Smith didn't start capitalism, he merely documented its rise.

And for that reason, I think it will take decades, or more likely centuries to replace it. Of course, the question is, whether it will wipe us out (see my most recent posts) before it can be transformed. And my answer, again, is I don't know. But I do know that it can't be rushed.

It's a sexist quote, but it sums up the dilemma. Warren Buffett said, “You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.”  And you can't produce a new society overnight by any means that won't result in something worse.

Quote of the Day: “We are beginning to understand that the world is always being made fresh and never finished; that activism can be the journey rather than the arrival…” - Grace Lee Boggs

The Population Paradox

So here’s a problem.  It goes like this: Suppose you believe we need to reduce the size of the population.  You may decide not have any children, or you may only have one or, at the most, two. If you have children, you teach them what you believe, and hopefully they have less children as well.

Now, suppose you don't believe that the population needs to be reduced.  Suppose you believe that it should grow, and you also believe in large families.  So you have a lot of children and your children have a lot of children.

The result is that there are less and less people who believe in reducing the population size and more and more who don't.   This is the population paradox. It says that zero growth people will tend over the generations to wipe themselves out. Even though I think that reducing the population is necessary, it's going to be tricky.

It doesn't take into account our  ability to persuade people and change minds, but it does make me think of the Shakers who died out because they believed in celibacy.  And, I think that there is an unfortunate truth to it.

I do believe that we are in population overshoot, so this paradox worries me, but I have no idea what to do about it. I have written about simple things that people can do about population growth, but I wasn't aware of this paradox at the time. Now that I am, the one thing I can think to do about it is to put it out so other people can think about it.

I want to be clear. Like all my recent posts, I’m not saying that we are doomed, but I am saying that we’ve got a problem, and these days I have become very skeptical about our ability to change it.

So I advise that we hope for the best and prepare for the worst, because what else can we do?

Quote of the Day: “When it comes to the population explosion, there are two questions on the table.  One, is our population growth going to kill us all? And two, is there any ethical way to prevent that from happening?” - Annalee Newitz

Honey, We Fried the Planet

The guy that I know who goes on and on about mass extinction is not far from the truth.

Ten years ago, when I started this blog, I was very into the idea of ‘peak oil’.  A lot of people were talking about it.  We were also very aware of climate change, but thought that peak oil would hit before any real damage could happen.

I still believe in peak oil, in the sense that there is only a finite amount of oil in the earth and much of it will be out of reach, since it would take more energy to extract than it would give.  So it's been a kind of race between peak oil and climate change. Unfortunately, right now, climate change is winning.

I think a big part of this is our desperation to keep living the lifestyle that we’ve been living for as long as we can. Peak oil folks didn't see how desperate we would get. (The Petrocrats would use the word ‘ingenious’.)  Shale oil, fracking, and oil from the tar sands, along with deep offshore drilling, have certainly bought our lifestyle more time, but they are incredibly dirty ways to get oil, causing lots of pollution. Looking at the figures now, it seems like we still have plenty of available oil, in fact, more than enough to destroy the planet with.

Yes, it would be very possible to live differently and be able to sustain the world, but it seems increasingly unlikely that enough people will choose this path in time to make a difference.

I won't repeat all the awful facts. You can read the news on climate change and see where it's going. You can march and protest and chain yourself to oil tankers and live incredibly sustainable lives and even (but please don't) shoot politicians and CEOs, but unless you can get the majority of people to change their ways, I'm not sure that it will be enough.

Further, I am skeptical and worried about the urgency people approach this with. One of the things I say often is that it was urgency that got us into this mess, and I don't think urgency will get us out of it.

Are we doomed? My optimist says no, my pessimist says yes, and honestly I don't know. (As the saying goes, it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future.)

What I do know is that things are going to get worse, and the first and most important thing that I can think of to do, is to be nice to everyone. Yes, this is another version of being kind.  If we are doomed, think of it as palliative care, and if we get a chance to build a better future, I hope that kindness and compassion will be at the foundation of it.

In the meantime, whatever the future brings, we still have to get through today and tomorrow and spending your time fretting about might or even will happen simply saps your time and  energy that would be better used in getting something done now.

I realize that writing about the destruction of the world and then going on to other subjects feels a little like the newscaster reporting a horrible massacre and then saying, “And in other news…”, but it’s what we need to do in order to do something with our lives.

And, I am not saying that you shouldn't do anything. I am just saying you should do what you think is right, because you think it's the right thing to do, and maybe it will make a difference, but there are no guarantees.

Quote of the Day:  “There are those who are trying to set fire to the world,

We are in danger.

There is time only to work slowly,

There is no time not to love.” - Deena Metzger

Commune Dramas

I often joke that all these utopian communities that I’ve heard folks dream up would work great if they didn't need to be filled with people. When someone can't figure out why it’s so hard to start communities or why so many fall apart, I want to just say, “It’s people!”  Communities are made up of imperfect people. It's the only kind of people I know of.

We recently had a visit from a leader in the communities movement. He and I spent a couple of hours going over some of the turmoil roiling through various communities. He made some remark about all the ‘commune dramas’.

Even more recently, I was on call with members of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities. (The good news is that our little commune, Cotyledon, is now officially a Community in Dialogue with the FEC. It was approved of with Guinea Pig noises. I’m not making that up! Who says that communards don't have a sense of humor?) We spent more than a half hour of that call talking about just some of the conflicts and problems that were going on at a member community dealing with some serious issues. When it was finally decided that we had talked through stuff as much as we could and figured out what kind of support the FEC could bring to the commune in question, we decided to turn to other business and the woman facilitating the call announced to a completely different community, “I should make you a certificate for being the ‘Community with the Most Problems, Spring, 2018’.  You could put it up on your wall.” (Again, humor. Very necessary.) We then launched into a discussion about some of the many difficulties that this other community was dealing with.

Commune dramas happen (and dramas happen at co-ops and cohousing communities, although not as often and intensely since people at those communities aren't as intimately involved) because you have lots of very imperfect people trying to work closely together to do some really tricky stuff.

On top of that, even the most isolated communes have lots of people going in and out and these people bring all of the problems of society (competition, scapegoating, racism, patriarchy, privilege, homophobia, intolerance, sensitivity, judgement, etc) in with them. Communes are always struggling with the question of who they will accept and who they won't and when to ask someone to leave and what behaviors can be tolerated (or not).  If you limited communities to only people who have it all together, they would be empty. As a result, there is lots of struggle and lots of drama at the communes. Given that, it's amazing, when you think about it, that a community like Twin Oaks could last more than fifty years (and it's still going). I think that’s an an incredible victory.

I have little illusions that  communes are all wonderful utopias.  I see the myriad problems that they deal with. I’ve seen the dark side of communal living.  It comes with the territory.

So, when you hear me go, “Rah! Rah! Community!”, know that it's because I believe strongly in what they are trying to achieve. Yes, in many ways they are poor vehicles for social change. But I don't know of anything better.

Quote of the Day: “Folks have found their own level after the first years of being overwhelmed.  Some of them have been disappointed with the lack of emotional intimacy, while others, especially teens, have felt uncomfortable living in a fishbowl.

“At times, most of us have probably asked ourselves, ‘What am I doing here?’--a question, I believe, that arises from a complex calculation of time and energy spent and one’s tolerance for conflict.  Sometimes I’ve asked myself, after a difficult confrontation, why I should put so much of my life energy into something that seems, at the time, to give back little. Yet I’m sure that at other times each of us has surely declared: ‘I can't imagine living anywhere else!’--a response to the very personal exchanges that make living in community so rewarding.” - Roberta Wilson  

Difficulties, Tragedy, Complexity, and Kindness

I generally try to be optimistic. Optimists live longer, for one thing. And they are more likely to be listened to, for another.

I know a man who launches into a tirade about mass extinction on very little provocation. It doesn't make others want to do anything about climate change; it makes others want to avoid him.

But, as much as I want to be optimistic, I try to be realistic as well. The world isn't going to be the way that we want it to be, the world is the way that it is and it is very complex. There are a lot of wonderful things going on and a lot of worrisome things going on and one doesn't negate the other.

I try to keep a fairly positive tone in this blog but lately I have been thinking about some of the difficulties with social change (social change being the focus of this blog) and I think it's important to talk about them.

As much of a communities booster as I am, communities are far from perfect and acknowledging that and pointing out the pitfalls and difficulties is part of showing what real community (not an ideal utopia) is, warts and all. Knowing the problems with communities doesn't make me want to give up on them, but it makes me appreciate even more how difficult building them is and some of the limitations of communities as vehicles for social change.  I will write more about this in my next post.

Even more difficult to look at is climate change and the ways we are destroying the earth.  This, indeed, is tragedy. The man I spoke of could be right, we could be headed for extinction, or, at the very least, one poisoned planet. And we need to look at that as well--and I intend to in a future post.

And then there's population, which I want to talk about.  And the slow pace of social change, which I may also devote a post to.

There are just so many problems in the world.

I don't plan on tackling all of them in this blog, but I will say that I am grateful for anyone working on any of them.  I do want to acknowledge three in particular that I don't intend to write a post on at this point, but I think are particularly difficult and troublesome.  These are racism, male domination, and economic inequality.

More than fifty years after the civil rights movement began, black men are still being shot by police, and being incarcerated at horrendous rates.   Recently, two black men were arrested at a Starbucks for asking to use the restroom and, even more recently, three African-American women were stopped by the police as they were moving out of an Airbnb because a white woman in the neighborhood saw them and was afraid there was a burglary in progress.  It turns out that there was also a white woman with these women, but she wasn't seen as “suspicious”. Unfortunately, I see articles like this on a regular basis.

Women are finally being heard about the abuse and harassment and exploitation they receive from men, particularly rich and powerful men. Unfortunately, that continues as well. The #metoo movement is exposing a fault line in sexual relationships that has been needed to be looked at for a long time. The communes have been pushing consent culture even before this, but even in the communes, there are a great many problems. As long as men have more power than women, this is going to continue, and changing power dynamics is far from easy, especially when men don't want to give up power.

The point of income-sharing communities is to reduce economic inequality, but I don't see that changing in this society any time soon, either.  In fact, with the current administration, I suspect economic inequality will be increasing. And even if we got it under control in the US, our lifestyle causes poverty and hunger around the world.  And that's hard to change as well.

My question is always, what can we do?  At the very least, we can care. We can live simply and treat others well. Above all, we can be kind--to others and to ourselves.   It's not accidental that my first two Quotes of the Day on this blog were about kindness. As Kurt Vonnegut said, “There's only one rule that I know of… you've got to be kind.”

Quote of the Day: “Love and kindness are never wasted.  They always make a difference.” - Barbara De Angelis

Self Care

I guess we all need this kind of reminder once in a while.   I got mine recently.

The first and most important piece of social change is taking care of yourself.   I’ve heard this as the oxygen mask strategy. When you fly in a plane, they inform you that in an emergency, an oxygen mask will descend from overhead, and when it does, you are to put on your own first before helping anyone else.  Really, you can't work on changing anything or helping anyone if you aren't able to function. You are one of the most important parts of social change--whether you are building a community or out in the street committing civil disobedience--and you need to be in decent shape to do this.

My own reminder came after several hours of working hard with others on a compost project--mostly shoveling compost out of piles and into bags.  Like I said, I worked pretty hard and was happy with the job I did, but the next morning I was in rough shape. For anyone new to this blog, in spite of my name, I am not a young woman, I am an old man.  I’d like to pretend that I am thirty but I am well over twice that. And I don't know exactly what I pulled, but I was hurting.

As I said in my last post, I have stopped doing things like Point A and Commune Life--a lot of which was internet work.   I spent much of the winter reading or on the computer. Now that spring is here, I want to be outside doing stuff. But not having done much over the winter, I think I overdid it.

Usually I get away with things like this because I stretch every morning. So there are certainly things that I do to take care of myself. Obviously I need to do more. I need to slow down and pay attention to how I move when I am working. I have not had a very physical life and now there is a bunch of real work that I want to do, and the only way I am going to get to do any of it,is to be careful and take care of myself.

I often support others in focusing on taking care of themselves, first.  Now I get to follow my own advice.

Quote of the Day: “If I wished to defeat those who wanted to use their lives to make a difference, this is exactly the way in which I would go about it.  Few such people would be tempted from their purpose by fame, or power, or even wealth. … I could use their own dedication against them, driving them to work until they became so depleted and empty that they could no longer go on.  I would make certain that they never discovered that blessing life is about filling yourself up so that your blessings overflow onto others.” - Rachel Naomi Remen

The Trip Gets Longer and Stranger

The title of this post is a play on the title of a previous post, A Long Strange Trip, which in turn was taken from the lyrics of a Grateful Dead song, Truckin’.  And I have been putting off writing this post for quite a while now.

One reason is that there are delicate and personal issues involved with the direction my life has been moving in and this limits what I can say here.

What I can say is that I really didn't expect to find myself quite in the situation that I’m in.

On the positive side, I am now living in the income-sharing community that I came to New York City to build and I am building it with a couple of wonderful people (DNA and Gil) who I have known for almost three years now and who are every bit as committed to this as I am.  On top of this, we just got a fourth member who also seems really interested in our community. We're calling the community Cotyledon and it is a real joy being here. (And if you follow the link, you can see pictures of the place, DNA and Gil and me, and Smiling Hogshead Ranch--which I will write a bit more about later.)

The first strange piece is that I came to NYC solely because I was doing this work as part of Point A--and now I am not involved at all with Point A. (This is the difficult and very personal part of the saga that I can't go into.)  I'm also (for related reasons) no longer managing or in any way part of the Commune Life blog--which, sadly, seems to be floundering a bit since I left.  (Or, at least, the posts seem a lot more sporadic.) I would still strongly recommend looking at it, since it has an enormous amount of information on what communes are, how to build them (and how not to build them), and a bunch of information on particular income-sharing communities around the US and around the world (or at least in Canada, Spain, and Israel).

Leaving Point A and Commune Life has been a real loss for me, but with spring here, I am preparing to dive into several urban agricultural projects, some of which are connected with Smiling Hogshead Ranch, which I’ve been slightly involved with for nearly three years (and DNA and Gil are very involved with).  So, in a real way, my losses have opened up space for me to take on these new things.

Another strange thing is that I started working on this community project in New York City after I left working on a rural community farm project in upstate New York back in 2014.  But there are plenty of connections between the two. The guy that I had difficulty with ended up at Ganas while I was living there.  The community farm project did happen and is now called East Brook Community Farm and we have talked about building connections between our community and them.  And, in another strange interconnection, our newest community member is someone I knew from the upstate project.

This may be the strangest part of this trip.  I think I am done with something and yet I find myself reconnecting again and again. I'm learning that I can't say I am completely finished with something. I just don't know. So who knows, I may yet reconnect with parts of Point A or Commune Life.   I’m absolutely not planning on it, but I am learning that I can't know.

Quote of the Day:  “Collaborative groups that last over time reinvent themselves periodically. They may need to change their structure, organization and ways of working as they grow and develop.  They are not static, but dynamic, not artifacts, but living organisms.” - Starhawk

Studying Nutrition

Many, many, many, many years ago, I was ever so briefly a nursing student. (Yes, among many things, I am a nursing school drop out.)  I did well in the academics but I was a disaster doing the bedside work. One of the things I enjoyed learning about was nutrition.

And nutrition is still one of the things that I’m interested in. When I think about agriculture, a question arises.  What should we plant? Which leads me to the question of, what foods are better for people? How do we know? And one way of knowing is by studying nutrition.

I have been looking in libraries for a really good nutrition textbook.   I’m not interested in the latest diet or food fad, I want to know what mainstream nutritionists currently think.   (Okay, my nutrition education was from the 1970s, some things have changed since then.) I finally found one that I liked this winter, but then I left town for some traveling and returned the book.   Since I got back, I have been looking for that book, but it's no longer in the library and, stupidly, I didn't write the name of the book down. I went looking in the Queens library system catalog and did find something that looked okay in the catalog but turned out to be some kind of outline rather than a text.  (The book itself has the additional heading, “Student Note-Taking Guide”. Unfortunately, that part wasn't in the catalog.) Rather than just return it and try again, I decided to use it in conjunction with one of those ‘Idiot’s Guide’ books (which generally have decent information, even if the format is very commercialized and silly).  I figured between the two, I should get some halfway decent information. In the future, I may go looking for that good textbook again.

So what did I learn?   Here's some basics. First, there are six categories of nutrients: carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, minerals, and water.   Yes, water is a nutrient. The first three categories all have calories--as does a seventh non-nutrient, alcohol. Something that I did remember from my nursing years is that carbohydrates and proteins have four calories per gram, alcohol has seven calories per gram, and fats have nine calories per gram. All of the first six categories pay important parts in your diet.

Most of this stuff is common knowledge.   You want to get enough calories to thrive but not much more. Exercise as well as nutrition is important in maintaining your weight as well as your health. You need to get all your vitamins and minerals.  Eat plenty of vegetables. (Really. Probably the best piece of dietary advice I can give.) Drink plenty of water and get plenty of rest.

But a couple of things that aren't so obvious.  Your body needs sodium as well as potassium, but the ratio is important. You need to make sure that you are getting more potassium than sodium.   Fruit is a good source of potassium. Likewise, some fatty acids are essential, but you need to get more omega three than omega six. Fish is a good source of omega three, but for vegetarians like me, nuts and seeds (especially flax seeds and chia seeds) are also a good source.

Not all vegetables are alike.  I am a strong advocate of leafy greens (like kale, collards, spinach, and dandelion greens) and the orange veggies (like carrots, sweet potatoes, winter squashes, and pumpkin).  And, of course, you can never go wrong with broccoli.

Finally, for vegetarians and vegans, make sure that you get enough B12.  Unfortunately, the best way to do this is to take a supplement, since B12 is only found naturally in animal products.

Social change depends on strong, healthy people, and since the society I want to create is one that meets everyone’s needs, knowing what we need nutritionally is important.  And thus I study nutrition.

Quote of the Day: “... nutrition is the science of how the body uses food. In fact, nutrition is life.   All living things, including you, need food and water to live…. If you don't eat and drink, you’ll die. Period.” - Carol Ann Rinzler

The Three Pillars of Social Change

I'm currently studying a bunch of different things, including mycology, which is the study of fungi.  I was reading a book on Radical Mycology (by Peter McCoy) where I read the first description outside of my writing or Joanna Macy’s of what I think of as the best strategy for social change.  Peter McCoy briefly talks about what he refers as ‘the three major pillars of social change’: “education and awareness building around important issues; resisting, slowing, and stopping ineffective or disastrous social systems; and designing functional and appropriate alternative systems that increase quality of life.”  He then goes on to other things, but I was surprised.

If I have any long term readers left, they probably have heard all this several times, most recently with my essay on Strategy.  The short version, for recent readers, is that I believe that for social change to happen, you need three things: Analysis (that is, a clear understanding of what is currently going on), Vision (knowing where you want to go to), and Strategy (figuring out how you can get there).  

I think there is a lot of good analysis and vision around but for a long while I felt there wasn't much in the way of clear strategy. Then I heard Joanna Macy talk about what she called The Great Turning. She said that there were three dimensions to it: actions to stop or slow down harm, creation of ‘structural alternatives’, and a shift in consciousness.  I immediately related it to a chant that I heard many years ago in Detroit: “Agitate, Educate, Organize!” Her point is that we need to do all three of these to create change.

Yes, the order shifts around between her version, Peter McCoy’s version, and the labor organizing chant, but the same pieces are in each: the need for ‘holding actions’, for building alternatives,  and for getting information out that can change people's perspectives. We need folks out there agitating--marching, demonstrating, and doing civil disobedience--to buy time for us to not only create those alternatives, but get them up and running and make sure that they work, and then networking them together to put something in place that can replace the current, oppressive system.   (I love what the International Workers of the World say in their ‘Preamble’ : “...we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”) But all this alternative creation doesn't mean much unless people know about it and understand why it is necessary.

I truly appreciate all those folks out there, putting their bodies on the front lines.  For my part, I have been working on creating communes as well as various sustainable structures, and supporting others as they built stuff.   I plan to talk more about what I’m currently up to in a post soon. And I think of this blog, as well as the one on Commune Life that I managed until recently, as educational work, letting folks know about alternative ways of living.

And I want anyone reading this to think about what you can do to help make a better world. Which of these is the better strategy?  The one that calls to you.

Quote of the Day: “The first dimension of the Great Turning is… heroic work… It serves to save some lives, and some ecosystems, species, and cultures… for the sustainable society to come. It is, however, insufficient to bring that society about.

“The second dimension of the Great Turning is equally crucial….We are … creating structural alternatives. … They may be hard to see at first, because they are seldom featured in the media,  but if you keep your eyes open… they come into view… The actions that burgeon from our hands and minds may look marginal, but they hold the seeds for the future.

“These nascent institutions cannot take root and survive without deeply ingrained values to sustain them.  … They require… a profound shift in our perception of reality… It is the third, most basic dimension of the Great Turning.” - Joanna Macy

All-American Communes

I’m far from patriotic and so it seems wild to me to label anything,  “All-American”, but I also realize that at the beginning of this blog, I spent four months (from a post labeled “US History 1:Why?” on January 1st, 2009, to “USH30: What About Now?”  posted on April 27th) focusing on American history.   

In fact, the most popular post on this blog, by far, is one of the history posts,  “USH25:Social Movements in the Eighties”.  It's had over three thousand page views, which isn't a lot for a blog, I know, but the next most popular post has only five hundred something page views.   My guess is that the reason it's so popular is that it shows up in searches, and it may be one of the few pieces on eighties social movements, and it's being used by high school and college students for writing papers.

I’ve talked extensively here about communes and communities as laboratories for social change and, in my history posts, I also talked about communal histories, especially the utopian communities of the nineteenth century.  I have thought about that as the beginning of the communal movement in the US.

Finally, I have a Google newsfeed set up to flag any articles on “Communes" or “Intentional Communities”.  Recently this showed up.

 

It's a promotional piece for a talk on the Oneida community.  I’ve always been fascinated by this community, but what grabbed my attention was the beginning of the piece.   

The author mentions the communes of the sixties and how ‘counter-culture’ and, for some people, ‘un-American’ they were.   He then goes on to say: “In reality, though, they were as American as apple pie.  We often miss the fact that the English colonies in America started out as experimental utopian societies: the Pilgrims with their communism and commitment to the simple life; Massachusetts and the other Puritan colonies, with their austerity and a commitment to self-examination and self-criticism that would make Chairman Mao cheer; Rhode Island, with its commitment to anarchy; the Pennsylvania Quakers, with their pacifism and their mysticism; the pacifist anabaptist sects, with their semi-closed communities; Georgia, where the rulers imported misfits and criminals so as to reprogram them after isolating them in the wilderness.

“Our pioneer settlers were the lunatic fringe, and when they sailed away, folks back in Europe were delighted to wave goodbye.”

It’s a very different view of American history, and one that makes me appreciate that the communal experiments that a bunch of us are engaging in, go a long way back.

Quote of the Day: “We got another burst of utopian communities in the middle of the 19th century, as the world was turning toward the modern age, away from lifestyles that had endured for a thousand years. … While dozens of such communities speckled the American landscape, they lay especially thick in a band then ran from Boston to Buffalo. “ - Kirk House

Deeper into the Soil

When I started writing this, I realized that it would be my fifth post about soil.  (I added a label called “Soil" so that my posts about soil and soil science can be found more easily.   My last post on this was The Soul of Soil,  written back in December of 2015.)  I think about soil a bunch and I’ve written about soil a bunch.   In this post I will try to dig a little deeper, so to speak.

What does soil have to do with social change?  At the most basic level, if you want to create a sustainable society,  you need to take care of the soil.  Soil is what sustains us.  And, because I am interested in communities as a tool for building a new society, and communities (and societies) consist of people and I want to see healthy people, they need to eat well and that requires good soil.  There will be no social change without taking care of the soil.  We literally, as well as metaphorically, stand on the soil.

I’ve talked several times about soil science being a combination of chemistry,  geology, and biology.   So, when I decided to start re-learning about soil, the first thing I did was do a bunch of background reading on geology.  Then I started reading about soil, both in books like Teaming with Microbes (see my post on Soil Science where I talk a little about this book) and a textbook called Fundamental Soil Science (by Mark Coyne and James Thompson) and in other science books, like the book that started it all, Biology, by Neil Campbell and Jane Reece (that's the one I refer to in my post on Biology 101: An Introduction) and a book that I acquired last year, called Environment by Peter Raven and Linda Berg, that have chapters focusing on soil.

Interestingly enough, both the Biology and Fundamental Soil Science textbooks talk about biogeochemical cycles.  Yes, biology, geology, and chemistry.

What they are talking about is the cycling of elements (at the least, carbon and nitrogen and phosphorus--but the Soil Science book also covers sulfur and even iron and manganese and “heavy metals”) through the soil and the atmosphere and the water.  Ions of these elements (or compounds that contain them, like phosphates and sulfates) cycle through all of these, plus rocks and living creatures. Thus biogeochemical.

I’m also learning a lot more about weathering (how the rocks turn into soil), soil profiles (and the different horizons involved with that), and the various types of soil.   There are still chapters to read on soil management, the hydrologic (water) cycle, watersheds, and soil fertility--so much to learn.  I find myself reading and rereading chapters and getting out even more books from the library. And soon it will be spring and I will be actually working with the soil and creating more soil by composting. Maybe I will never be done with soil science.

In the meantime, speaking of science, I currently have four science heroes--and they are all women.   And I don't think that is an accident.   I will talk more about that in my next post.

Quote of the Day: “Real soil is active, alive, moving!” - Elaine Ingham

Back Once More

It's been a while. I’ve been busy with another blog as well as starting a new community.

And suddenly, for complicated reasons, I am done with the other blog.

And, honestly, I didn't start right back on this one.  Part of what was going on is feeling a bit burnt from the pace that I had set for myself on the other blog.   I was cranking out posts, many of which I was soliciting rather than writing, three times a week.   I kept hearing from people that we should have been posting less often.   But for me the hard part wasn't the frequency, it was that I was mostly doing it by myself.

Still, in many ways I'm sorry to see it go.  But this does give me time to return to this blog.

The community I’m in has a bit of a focus on urban agriculture.   And right now, February, there isn't much happening in that respect.  We did have a wild day earlier this week when the temperature was suddenly in the mid-seventies.   Global weirding at work, but we took advantage of it to get some needed work done outdoors.

Otherwise I am doing a lot of reading.   Science stuff mostly.   Soil science, geology, mycology, and nutrition are big for me right now, as I wait for the growing season to arrive. Soil science is particularly interesting to me because it combines chemistry, biology, and geology, is closely connected to my love of compost and composting, and the soil is the absolute foundation for plant life.

So, as I return to this blog, I plan to do a bunch of writing about what I am reading as well as what I am thinking about.  And these days much of it is about science.  Science and social change and, of course, community.   So get ready for some posts about science, starting with soil science.

Quote of the day: “Math and science originally come from the goddess traditions of ancient Egypt.  … Ma’at was the Goddess of truth, justice and divine wisdom who brought the universe into order from chaos at the beginning of creation.  Her name is the root of the word ‘mathematics’.” - Mara Penfil and Fern Katz

Questions

I've talked a lot lately about my view of strategies for social change.  (See my pieces on Strategy, 1/24/16, Now What?, 1/22/17, and TINA is the Enemy, 1/27/17.)  While I talk about the need for activism, I see a lot of my work as being in organizing alternatives, and I really see the importance of the education/consciousness shifting work.  While my work on the Commune Life blog definitely fits into this, I see a need for a lot more work in this area.  I think that education, in many ways, is the neglected piece of the triangle.

As I've been wondering how to work on the education piece, I realize that the real problem isn't a need for more information.  There's lots and lots of information out there.  In fact, maybe there's too much information out there--people complain of information overload.  (This blog, for example, has almost 450 posts.  That's a lot of information to deal with.)  The old rule is to show rather than tell, but I think even better than showing is to engage people's curiosity. If they have to find out the information themselves, they may be more interested and remember it longer.

A while ago, I came up with the idea of throwing out questions.  In this over connected age, it's not hard for people to find answers but my hope is that in looking for the answers, this might engage people better.

I've thought of several ways to do this.  One could be graffiti.  If someone saw a question on a wall, they might be curious about the answer.  There might be places online where you could post questions as well.  We could make these into memes.  There's probably several other ways to get these questions out.  But what questions?  What could we ask that would make people curious, seek out answers, learn and think.

So here's a list of some questions.  This is really only a beginning but may give you ideas about what you could put out there.  Feel free to put these questions out into the world and add others.  I think this could be a great way to engage and educate people.

Here are the questions I came up with:

Who was Audre Lorde?
Who was Emma Goldman?
Who was Sojourner Truth?
Who was Bayard Rustin?
Who was Rosa Luxemburg?
Who was Grace Lee Boggs?
Who were the Haudenosaunee?

What is Civilian-based Defense?
What is Nonviolent Communication?
What is Permaculture?
What is Ecofeminism?
What is the Federation of Egalitarian Communities?
What is Parecon?
What is Libertarian Municipalism?
What is Gross National Happiness?
What is emergence?
What is decentralization?
What was Limits to Growth?

When were the Rochdale Principles written?
When were the Diggers (both the English originals and the San Francisco activists) active?

What did Martin Luther King and Malcolm X have in common?
Were the apostles communists?
Were the Mbuti egalitarian?









What questions would you ask?



Quote of the Day:  "We awaken by asking the right questions." ― Suzy Kassem