Truffula Tuft

Pine Tree Tops

We are off to Asheville on Thursday. It's been a season of richness and loss. Chickens, cats and furniture have been steadily disappearing from our home - going to their new homes via friends and Freecycle. Meanwhile the rest of our stuff moves around, disappears into boxes and merges into piles. Our feelings are doing something similar - shifting rapidly, flowing into little eddies and giant waterfalls depending on the day - excitement, sadness, overwhelm. It is not easy to radically shift the life of a family like this.

The love and gratitude that has been showered on us lately is almost too much to take in. I feel a bit stunned. I knew we were loved and appreciated but, wow. It's been amazing.

My friend Jill gave me a cool book called Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings by Rob Brezsny. I recommend it - full of inspiring stories.

By opening it randomly I found a story about an order of monks in China that dismantle and rebuild their entire age-old temple every twenty years. They do it to keep the ancient construction techniques alive, to create the bonding of the teamwork required, and to do a deep, deep cleaning of their space, right down to the dirt and then up again. Wow. What a great practice. I feel like we are doing something like this. Hopefully the benefits outweight the stress!

Below are 2 beautiful poems for the seasonal holidays from Gary Snyder, one of my favorite poets. My friend Jane turned me onto one of them.

lots and lots of love and peace in 2008,
Jennifer

Pine tree tops
In the blue night
frost haze, the sky glows
with the moon
pine tree tops
bend snow-blue, fade
into sky, frost, starlight.
The creak of boots.
Rabbit tracks, deer tracks,
what do we know.

- Gary Snyder

In the next century
or the one beyond that
they say,
are valleys, pastures.
We can meet there in peace
if we make it.
To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:
stay together
learn the flowers
go light

- Gary Snyder

A Ray of Light in Dark Times

Crazyness around here. Piles of boxes, to-do lists stuck all over the walls. We leave for Asheville Dec. 27th. But I wanted to share this story about an art project for peace, created by Yoko Ono.

On what would have been John Lennon's 67th birthday, she unveiled a project 40 years in the making—the Imagine Peace Tower. Dedicated to Lennon, the tower shoots light into the sky and bears the inscription “Imagine Peace.” It will light up every year between October 9th, the day of Lennon’s birth, and December 8th, the day of his death.

Yoko chose a small island just off the coast of Reykjavik, Iceland for the memorial because of its beauty and its reliance on natural power. The tower will be powered entirely by geothermal energy, which is plentiful on the volcanic island.

video about it

She has a website called Imagine Peace which has a 10 minute video of clips of John and Yoko talking about their work for peace, followed by some stark images of war to the tune of "War is Over". It'll make you cry. Some of it is too ugly for kids. There's also a letter from Yoko about the various celebrations that happened this year in remembrance of John.

War is over if you want it.

peace,
Jennifer

What would Jesus buy?

A couple of new movies that look worth checking out

What would Jesus buy?
The movie Santa doesn't want you to see, starring Rev. Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, defenders of communities against supermalls and the Devil's monoculture.

Opening in theaters this month

What a way to go
A middle class white guy comes to grips with Peak Oil, Climate Change, Mass Extinction, Population Overshoot and the demise of the American Lifestyle. Featuring interviews with Daniel Quinn, Derrick Jensen, Jerry Mander, Chellis Glendinning, Richard Heinberg, Thomas Berry, William Catton, Ran Prieur and Richard Manning

You can buy it online. Also there is a community screenings schedule on their site.

This is a short film online about an important new book by Naomi Klein:

The Shock Doctrine
7 minute film introducing Naomi Klein's new book "The Shock Doctrine"

"The Shock Doctrine" provides a detailed analysis of the political and economic context that undergirds the current plundering of the US Treasury and the corporate sabotage of our democracy.

There is an excellent article by Klein about "Disaster Capitalism" in the October Harper's Magazine. You have to subscribe to get it however. Thanks to John for turning me on to this.
Here's an interview with her that makes some of the same points.

peace,
Jennifer

No on Mukasey and Waterboarding

I heard a story on NPR this morning that shook me up. Malcolm Nance, a counterterrorism consultant who trains American service members to be ready for "interrogation techniques" was interviewed. It was in the context of Bush nominee Michael Mukasey's recent refusal to categorize waterboarding as torture.

Malcolm Nance denounced the practice and described it in detail. It's been called "simulated drowning" by the Bush administration and in the press, but according to Nance who has experienced it personally, there's nothing simulated about it.

The practice involves strapping the person being interrogated on to a board as pints of water are forced into his lungs through a cloth covering his face while the victim's mouth is forced open. Its effect, according to Mr Nance, is a process of slow-motion suffocation.

Typically, a victim goes into hysterics on the board as water fills his lungs. "How much the victim is to drown," Mr Nance wrote in an article for the Small Wars Journal, "depends on the desired result and the obstinacy of the subject." (The Independent)

Nance wrote an editorial for "Small Wars Journal" on the subject. He points out the dangerous precedent being set here and asks - "For what?". If the goal is reliable information, it's well established that torture does not work.

Who will complain about the new world-wide embrace of torture? America has justified it legally at the highest levels of government. Even worse, the administration has selectively leaked supposed successes of the water board such as the alleged Khalid Sheik Mohammed confessions. However, in the same breath the CIA sources for the Washington Post noted that in Mohammed’s case they got information but "not all of it reliable." Of course, when you waterboard you get all the magic answers you want -because remember, the subject will talk. They all talk! Anyone strapped down will say anything, absolutely anything to get the torture to stop. Torture. Does. Not. Work.

According to the President, this is not a torture, so future torturers in other countries now have an American legal basis to perform the acts. Every hostile intelligence agency and terrorist in the world will consider it a viable tool, which can be used with impunity. It has been turned into perfectly acceptable behavior for information finding.

A torture victim can be made to say anything by an evil nation that does not abide by humanity, morality, treaties or rule of law. Today we are on the verge of becoming that nation. Is it possible that September 11 hurt us so much that we have decided to gladly adopt the tools of KGB, the Khmer Rouge, the Nazi Gestapo, the North Vietnamese, the North Koreans and the Burmese Junta?

Senate Democrats are stalling the nomination of Mukasey to replace Alberto Gonzales as attorney general because of his testimony that he views the practice of waterboarding as "repugnant," but does not know if it is illegal. Mukasey's also pretty sketchy about where the President's power ends. According to his testimony, the president’s authority "to defend the nation" trumps his obligation to obey the law. Scary.

So here are two actions I would appreciate you taking the time to do:

1. The first comes from Physicians for Human Rights, a twenty year old organization who's mission is "to advance health, dignity, and justice and promotes the right to health for all. Harnessing the specialized skills, rigor, and passion of doctors, nurses, public health specialists, and scientists, PHR investigates human rights abuses and works to stop them."

They are lobbying the Senate to investigate and end 20 brutal interogation techniques reportedly used by the CIA, including water boarding, induced hypothermia, sexual humiliation and rape, and mock executions.

You can send a letter to your Senators with their simple form here.

2. Tell your Senators you don't support Mukasey's confirmation. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont sums up why here:

Of course the United States government must do everything that it can to protect the American people from the dangerous threat of terrorism,” Sanders stressed, “but we can do that effectively consistent with the Constitution and the civil liberties it guarantees.We need an attorney general who does not believe the president has unlimited power. We need an attorney general who understands that torture is not what this country is about, and we need an attorney general who clearly understands the separation of powers inherent in our Constitution. Unfortunately, it is clear that Mr. Mukasey is not that person.

Find their addresses here. Use my letter if you want, or write your own:

Dear Senator ________,
Please do not support the confirmation of Michael Mukasey as Attorney General. His evasive answer on waterboarding and his troubling statements about the executive branch being above the law tell me that he is a poor choice. Now more than ever we need to protect and uphold the consititution. This Bush lackey is clearly not going to fill the vital role of our constitution's chief champion.

Sincerely,

peace,
Jennifer

Big Fires, Big Melt

Carbon Equity, a British campaign for action on climate change, just came out with The Big Melt report, a review of all the 2007 literature and studies looking at the current condition of the Arctic ice.

According to the report "the Arctic sea ice is disintegrating 100 years ahead of schedule", having dropped 22% this year below the previous low, and it may completely disappear as early as the summer of 2013. This is far beyond the predictions of the International Panel on Climate Change.

Rob Hopkins, one of the blogs I regularly read, says

[The Big Melt] does not make for comfortable reading, and indeed it adds enormous urgency to to need to reduce emissions. It argues that to speak of 2 degrees being a safe threshold is nonsense, that we haven’t yet reached 1 degree, but already the Arctic ice is melting 100 years ahead of when the IPCC predicted it would.

Rob makes a point of posting positive, action-oriented info on his blog, which is why I read it. He is active internationally in helping communities prepare for peak oil and global warming. He named his post about The Big Melt "The Single Most Depressing Thing I Have Ever Read." That ought to warn you.

Sharon Astyk (another fovorite blogger) says about it: "If you are a sensitive sort, I strongly recommend reading it while clutching a teddy bear and having your back massaged."

Makes you want to dive right in, eh?

Here are a few highlights:

• Climate change impacts are happening at lower temperature increases and more quickly than projected.

• The Arctic’s floating sea ice is headed towards rapid summer disintegration as early as 2013, a century ahead of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections.

• The rapid loss of Arctic sea ice will speed up the disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet, and a rise in sea levels by as much as 5 metres by the turn of this century is possible.

• The Antarctic ice shelf reacts far more sensitively to warming temperatures than previously believed.

• Long-term climate sensitivity (including “slow” feedbacks such as carbon cycle feedbacks which are starting to operate) may be double the IPCC standard.

• Temperatures are now within ≈1°C of the maximum temperature of the past million years.

Are your eyes glazing over? Mine did.

Melting arctic ice affects more than just polar bears, who are having a rough time these days. A warmer Arctic will change global weather patterns and likely disrupt food production around the world. Melting glaciers and land-based ice sheets will contribute to rising sea levels, threatening low-lying areas with erosion, flooding, and contamination of freshwater supplies.

We all need to make personal changes to cut our carbon footprints, working toward 90% and we really need some leadership to instigate sweeping policy changes, and radical and inspired conservation efforts on a federal level. However, I'm not holding my breath waiting for that.

I'd like to hold my breathe today though. These wildfires sweeping southern California are giving us lots of smoke and particulate matter in the air, as well some spectacular sunsets and moonrises.

According to Tom Swetnam, fire ecologist at the University of Arizona, global warming has increased temperatures in the West about one degree and that has caused four times more fires. He and a team of top climate scientists also discovered a dramatic increase in fires high in the mountains, where fires used to be rare.

As the spring is arriving earlier because of warming conditions, the snow on these high mountain areas is melting and running off. So the logs and the branches and the tree needles all can dry out more quickly and have a longer time period to be dry. And so there's a longer time period and opportunity for fires to start.

Depressing huh? Sorry.

In the interest of promoting positive messages and ideas for action, I'll close with a link to the world's oldest blogger, Olive Riley. She lives near Syndey Australia and was born October 20th, 1899 - 108 years ago.

Her friend filmmaker Mike Rubbo decided to document Olive's personal stories with the blog, or "blob," as she calls it.

Mike says "Blogging is a fabulous way for all of us who have similar concerns to connect across national borders, cultural divides, and barriers of age so that we can achieve our common goals: a sustainable way of life; mutual respect even in the face of challenging differences; and, most significantly, a peaceful world. Surely a 108-year-old woman can benefit, and benefit us, by participating in our dialogue."

By her second post Olive was already making a point about the joys of buying local produce and the hazards of a political process gone wrong.

peace,
Jennifer

Big Changes Afoot

We're moving across the country. Leaving Los Angeles for Asheville, NC. People tend to have strong reactions to this. Either "No! You can't leave, we need you here!", or "Congratulations! Wish I could get out of here too."

I have lots of reasons, some I tell some people and not others. Connor asked me today where I thought we'd be in 100 years. After explaining that I would not be around at all, I said I hoped he'd be in Asheville playing with his great grandchildren. I said 100 years from now Los Angeles will probably not be a very good place to live.

One big reason for the move, I'll fess up here - I'm fleeing the potential post-carbon Los Angeles that I've been worrying about ever since I saw End of Suburbia in 2003. It's been a long journey from there to here. First I responded by digging in and doing everything I could as a City Repair-ing, permaculture-ing, community-art-making kind of gal. But the stress of also trying to make a living, raise our son, and cover the basics in this vast, crowded, expensive, polluted place often made it feel impossible.

There is a technique for land restoration in Australia called the Bradley method - when trying to regenerate native bush, instead of taking the non-natives out of the most damaged places first, go to place where the bush is the healthiest and restore there, so you strengthen it. Then you go to the next healthier place and so on until the only areas left are the most damaged but they are surrounded by restored areas where the native plants have naturally regenerated and healed the soil. In this way the ecosystem will support your work all along the way and especially on those last problematic spots.

That's how I feel about Los Angeles vs. Asheville. From a restoration standpoint LA is the fast lane of the 110 freeway and Asheville is the edge of a city park where it meets the forest.

There's a good chance that I'm just burned out or getting old. The interlocking problems are so dense here. I think the loss of the South Central Farm last summer was really the last straw for me. We went to visit Asheville for the first time only a week after watching the heartbreaking bulldozer destruction of that oasis. A progressive city of 75,000 in the Blue Ridge mountains seemed like such a green haven. Not perfect but certainly a better bet in the global-warmed, post-carbed, corporately-governed future we seem to face.

The other big reason for the move is financial but this is also tied to trying to create a better future for everyone. I want to live more sustainably. I want to at least stop contributing to making things worse. Plain and simple - in Asheville we can live a lot cheaper. It's a no brainer. Cash in the equity we are blessed to have. Turn it into a little house with a big garden, orchard, chickens, maybe even goats! Biking distance to the farmer's market and the video store. Get rid of a lot of debt and free up time to dedicate to community building and art.

The Archdruid has an interesting post here called Cities in the Deindustrial Future
where he espouses the benefits of small cities.

This is the plan. Of course we picked a pretty dicey moment to put the house on the market. In the process of preparing it for market I've also had to get up close and personal with all our stuff, boxes and boxes and boxes of it. My participation in the consumerist affliction of the culture is not as minimal as I've been pretending to myself. Damn, you can cram a lot of crap into a house!

How does one move across country in an ecofriendly way? More on that in posts to come.

peace,
Jennifer

Plan B

Sorry for the lack of posts. I've been consumed by preparing our house for sale and getting ready to move across the country. Being mired in the ups and downs of the LA real estate market, the following article, from one of my regular blog reads, felt quite relevent and I wanted to share it. John Michael Greer's The Archdruid Report is a wry and smart take on TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it).

His latest post is called Scrabbling Around For Plan B

Those of my readers who have been paying attention to the financial news over the last couple of weeks may have noticed a certain weakening of the ebullient smile Wall Street likes to paste on the world. Pundits and financiers who were announcing vast profits and crowing over new stock market records a month ago are adopting a noticeably different style as they try to explain why many billions of dollars invested in hedge funds and the like aren’t there any more.

Read the rest, containing a good summary of the complex house of financial
cards now standing the breeze, here.

He points to the cause of the problems as rooted in a growing habit of choosing to be blind to risk:

In effect, the idea of risk had evaporated from the minds of the speculators. It’s understandable that banks and mortgage companies would stop worrying about risk once they learned to package their mortgages and sell them to other people. It’s less understandable that people who wanted to buy houses, to live in or (more and more often as the boom went on) to sell at a profit in a few months, lost track of the fact that if things went wrong they could be left with debts far beyond their ability to pay. It’s still less understandable that investors around the world would lose track of the fact that a high interest rate that never gets paid isn’t actually worth anything at all.

Still, the same myopia has appeared on cue in every previous speculative frenzy, too. Purchasers of subprime toxic waste can now join the long line of self-deluded gulls that reaches from the people in 1999 who bought stock in fly-by-night dotcom firms, all the way back to the people in 17th century Holland who spent hundreds of guilders buying single tulip bulbs on the assumption that they’d be able to sell them for even more in a few weeks. It’s an affliction endemic to market capitalism throughout its history, but it became pandemic in the last years of the 20th century and remains so today – and not just in the world of economic speculation.

And compares this blindness to the blindness about peak oil:

It’s worth suggesting, in fact, that blindness to risk has become one of the most widespread mental habits in contemporary society. Plenty of examples could be cited, but one discussed many times in this blog – peak oil – belongs high on the list. All through the controversies about how much petroleum the world still has, how rapidly it’s being depleted, and whether or not it can be replaced by some other set of energy resources, one constant theme has been the refusal of most people outside the extreme “doomer” end of the peak community to notice that industrial civilization could end up in deep trouble if things go badly.

Those who argue that the world still contains ample supplies of oil that just haven’t been found yet, like those who insist that innovation will take care of the problem by pulling some currently unknown technological rabbit out of a hat just in time, tend to respond to such questions as “but what if you’re wrong?” in the same tone of irritated superiority as a Wall Street financier might have done a few months ago if asked what would happen if subprime defaults got out of hand. There’s an oddly incantatory quality to this nothing-can-go-wrong rhetoric, as though it will all work out fine just as long as everybody agrees it will.

And maybe it will. But dear friends, you might want to consider having a Plan B.

peace,

Jennifer

Ambient Orb

I've been so busy lately this blog has languished. But I just saw this cool thing on Treehugger that fits with my thoughts in a recent WorldChanging.com article I wrote about real-time monitoring of resource use. Check it out:

The All-Seeing Orb Says You Are Wasting Electricity
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto, 07.24.07

The Ambient Orb is, according to Clive Thompson of Wired, "a groovy little ball that changes colour in sync with incoming data- growing more purple, for example as your email box fills up or as the chance of rain increases." Ambient says that "the physical environment becomes an interface to digital information rendered as subtle changes in form, movement, sound, color or light."

Mark Martinez of Southern California Edison couldn't get people to conserve energy when power supplies were tight, no matter what he did, and then applied the power of the orb. Within weeks, Orb users reduced their peak period energy use by 40%. Martinez says "its nonintrusive. It has a relatively benign effect. But when you see your ball flashing red, you notice."

Thompson at Wired thinks that the killer app for the ambient idea is to tie more than electricity use into it but to have it monitor our entire carbon footprint, and broadcast it to the world, stick it on your facebook page, and trigger "what Ambient Devices CEO David Rose calls the sentinel effect: You'd work harder to conserve so you don't look like a jackass in front of your peers."

Imagine if everyone does it. Thompson continues:

The hope is that it could spawn a cascade of conservation. It's fun seeing your personal energy tab go down by kilowatts — but just imagine watching the world's usage plunge by terawatts or petawatts. It would be like a global Prius, with millions worldwide tweaking the Earth for maximum mileage. Now that's fun.

See ::Ambient Orb

Rachel Carson, DDT and Bats

"The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe around us, the less taste we shall have for destruction." Rachel Carson

Rachel Carson has been one of my heros for a long time. An early prophet of the environmental movement, her book Silent Spring (published just a few weeks after I was born in 1962) made the problems with pesticides public for the first time. As a result DDT was banned in the US. That this is a good thing should be a no-brainer, right? But apparently she is still being vilified for it 40 years later. The reason given - malaria kills millions of people annually worldwide. Because DDT has been used against the mosquitos that spread malaria, some say it's her fault that people are still dying from it. This is not only spurious, it's based on ignorance and possibly corrupt science.

I had no idea there was a controversy about it until I found this on enviro blog, Celsias:

Rachel Carson - is she friend, or foe?

There has long been a debate over the effects of Rachel Carson’s work Silent Spring, and that debate came to a head recently when a U.S. Senator effectively blocked a resolution to honor Carson on what would have been her 100th birthday:

"A Republican Senator known for his criticism of various environmental causes is single-handedly holding up two bills in the US Senate that would honor the life of Rachel Carson, author of the well-known book Silent Spring, RAW STORY has learned. The bills were introduced by a bipartisan group of Senators from Carson’s home-states of Pennsylvania and Maryland on the occasion of the centennial of her birthday on May 27. “This week, Dr. Coburn blocked two bills intended to honor Rachel Carson on the 100th anniversary of her birth (one bill to name a post office after her in PA, and a resolution honoring her),” said a press release at Senator Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) website." - Raw Story

My initial thought was: “Why on earth would someone block an attempt to honor someone posthumously, unless that person was someone heinous, like maybe Hitler or Stalin?” What I found was shocking. The Senator apparently subscribes to a theory that actually does compare Carson to Hitler and other brutal dictators....

read the rest here.

Rachel Carson never advocated a total ban on DDT. Instead she pointed out that the indiscriminate spraying of the time was not only poisoning birds and fish and people, it was making the target insects and the diseases they carry even stronger:

"No responsible person contends that insect-borne disease should be ignored. The question that has now urgently presented itself is whether it is either wise or responsible to attack the problem by methods that are rapidly making it worse. "

Human exposure to DDT has long been linked with low birth weight babies and harmful reproductive effects. The politicians leading the crusade to undermine Carson’s legacy are also aggressively disputing other significant scientific evidence in the news lately. Can you guess what it is? That car and coal power plant emissions contribute to climate change! HA! That should tell you something about who's paying their bills.

For more about why Senator Coburn's claims have no scientific weight, see Who’s Promoting DDT in the PANNA (Pesticide Action Network North America) newsletter.

It's far too easy for corporate mouthpieces to make incorrect scientific statements and get away with it. It's outrageous that the NY Times is publishing stories like this one What the World Needs Now Is DDT. I do not claim to be an expert in any way on this subject but I do know that the world does not need more DDT.

I wonder how restoring the bat and dragonfly populations might help fight malaria? They love to eat mosquitos - one Little Brown Bat can eat 200 in one night. How about finding better ways to get clean drinking water to the people at risk? I know there are many solutions that don't mutate the insect into an even stronger and deadlier threat, while poisoning rivers, animals and people.

peace,
Jennifer

90% Emissions Reduction Project: Gasoline, pt. 2

I forgot something in my gasoline calculations yesterday - airline flights and rental cars. Oops. We flew to Asheville, NC last year for a family reunion. Then we rented a car and drove to Florida to see other family members. Here are my updated calculations:

2,298 mi + 2710 mi = 5008 (Los Angeles to Asheville/Ft. Lauderdale to Los Angeles) x .017 mpg (according to Google answers/MetaFilter) = 85.13 x 3 people = 255.40 additional gallons of gasoline for the family
yikes!

Rental car drive from Asheville to Ft. Lauderdale: 743 miles at mpg 28
= 26.53 gallons of gas

612.54 (yesterdays calculations) + 255.40 + 26.53 = 894.47 total gallons of gasoline

894.47 divided by 3 people = 298.15 or 59.63% of the average American

Wow, vacations really impact your emissions! Something to consider when planning your summer.

peace,
Jennifer