Mendocino Environmental Center

I want to thank publicly those who have been keeping up the peace vigil every Friday, and much as I’d like to name every one of them, I won’t -but I could- and so, I will just say, “THANK YOU ONE AND ALL!!”

I noticed a shift there last summer when much was being made of the Bush Administration’s efforts to cloak and subvert our government’s processes so as to keep impeachment off the table, keep more money flowing into this and many other wars, keep the public in the dark, but their wallets open… the usual. Those of us who were there early in 2002 protesting the advent of this Iraq war were being badgered and harassed by many passers by, but now there is a beginning of some shift happening, in that the majority of folks passing by are happy that we are there, and thankful for our having been so willing to stand for peace all along.

In an effort to increase our body of knowledge I have prepared a page of links to information you might need to know. It will follow these ideas, and I hope you will use this blog space to comment upon them and to open up a dialogue here for our community to grow and to discuss issues we need to get ideas out to the public. Democracy does not occur without discourse. I have been thinking a great deal on the idea of democracy, what comes up for me is that it isn’t something given to any of us; but rather, it is a gift we earn by becoming informed and by sharing our own experiences with others. It is a matter of consideration, carefully weighing opposing views, and listening very deeply for insights to how best to pursue happiness so as to increase all of our lives’ experiences for the better.

Lately, it seems to me, that the rich have had a glut of great times, but the poor and even what was our middle class, are suffering miserably for that increase. This is not tolerable…

I think we can put our minds and bodies to better use. I would like to hear from any of you who would be willing to start a weekly demonstration with me whereby we offer coffee in the mornings and afternoons along with information pertinent to being peace-loving, prosperous, compassionate an actively democratic. WE WILL CALL THIS ACTION -WAKE UP, AMERICA!

Consider the following and please share your own favorites here:

WAKE UP AMERICA - HELPFUL WEBSITES:
Healthcare
http://www.aflcio.org/issues/healthcare/survey/

http://www.onecarenow.com
Peace, activities for social justice, and political interventions
http://www.codepinkalerts.com
http://www.americanfreedomcampaign.org/
http://www.afj.org/
http://www.amnestyusa.org/
http://www.defconamerica.org/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com
http://www.ccrjustice.org/
http://www.hrw.org/
http://www.avaaz.org
http://AngelsForTruth.com
http://www.ResurrectingLiberty.com
http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com
http://ivaw.org/wintersoldier/testimony
Environment
http://www.defenders.org/index.php
http://www.earthjustice.org
http://www.ecospace.cc
newdream-news@newdream.org
gender justice
http://www.hrc.org
http://www.tgijp.org/
http://www.youthgenderproject.org/
www.ProChoiceAmerica.org
news
www.infowars.com
www.golefttv.com
http://www.guardian.co.uk
http://www.SedonaObserver.com
http://peaceblog.wordpress.com/
financial interests
http://www.solariactionnetwork.com
http://financial-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/
http://tinyurl.com/2w2up3
www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2003/jan/debt/index.html
http://www.agora-inc.com/reports/DRI/WDRIF219
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/Issues/2005/DR021705.html
Philosophy/Psychology/Sociology
http://www.co-intelligence.org/CI-TheoreticalArticles.html
www.ted.com
www.global-mindshift.com
peace to you and to us all around the globe and beyond, if there is anyone out there with intelligent life….

I am going on the air today with Bill Durham, 1-4 pm in an effort to look for some positive things we each and all can do to make life easier, sustainable, and better for our local area, ourselves, and our nation.

I hope you will come to the MEC 106 Standley at 7 pm. for a talk by Professor Luis Fernandez; Policing Dissent:  Social Control and the Anti-Globalization Movement.

Here are some of the sites that I plan to mention on the air/show:

POLITICs

Codepink     www.codepinkalert.org

Human rights watch      www.hrw.org

Amnesty International

Oxfam

www.publicintegrity.org

www.smirkingchimp.com

www.leadingtowar.com   72 min. film chronicle of events leading us into Iraq

GREEN ACTIVISTS

 scientists concerned with our oceanic health       www.oceana.org

 auto club which does not invest in war and works for green solutions       www.betterworldclub.org

 zero emissions vehicles       www.arb.ca.gov/msprog/zevprog/zevprog.htm

 LOCAL MEAT ‘GROWERS’

MCFadden Farms 743-1122

MCGruder’s  743-1539

Masut  485-5466

Frasier  Lane Organics  983-6010

John Ford Ranch  480-2102

MENTAL FLOSS:

www.global-mindshift.org

conversationcafe.org

www.ted.com

www.gogratitude.org

Food is the one consumer choice we have to make every day. We can use that buying power in a transaction that burns excessive fossil fuels, erodes topsoil, supports multinationals that pay their workers just a few bucks a day — or the same money could strengthen neighborhood food economies, keep green spaces alive around our towns, and compensate farmers for applying humane values. Every purchase weighs in on one side or the other. ~Barbara Kingsolver

Go To: Dave Pollard Blog

Dave

This is a slightly altered version of a Letter to the Editors publised several weeks ago in the Ukiah Daily Journal and Anderson Valley Advertiser. Several people commented how much they liked it, so I’m submitting it here in our blog. ~Dave Smith

For the past thousands of years we have enjoyed an abundance of food, energy, and water. Here in North America, we’ve been so gifted by nature’s seemingly unlimited storehouse that profligacy hardly mattered. There was always more from wherever it all came from. Chopped most of the trees down here? No problem. We can get more from over there. Waste? Dump it over the hill, or into the water. Pollution? Let it dissipate into the ocean and air. Just put it somewhere else and get it out of sight. Someone will deal with it later.

Well, it didn’t dissipate, it is now later, and we’re the “someones.” Disastrous climate change is caused by energy usage waste products that did not dissipate as planned. We are having now to deal with the consequences of energy profligacy, both from its waste, and its depletion. As Richard Heinberg writes in his book, Peak Everything: “Our starting point, then, is the realization that we are today living at the end of the period of greatest material abundance in human history – an abundance based on temporary sources of cheap energy that made all else possible… our central survival task for the decades ahead, as individuals and as a species, must be to make a transition away from the use of fossil fuels – and to do this as peacefully, equitably and intelligently as possible.”

Does that mean that the good times are over? Maybe not. They could be just beginning. Think that Hummer driver is happier than you? Think again. “International studies of self-reported levels of happiness show that once basic survival needs are met, there is little correlation between happiness and per capita consumption of fossil fuels.” (ibid.)

Happiness comes from living meaningful lives and has nothing to do with money or using up our heritage of abundance. The old fashioned value of conserving is the way to preserve abundance for our shared future… and it is a value recognized across the political spectrum by those who really care. And what can be more meaningful than helping one’s community transition to an abundant future based on renewable resources rather than polluting, depleting ones stolen from others now that our own are running out?

Gifts conserved are gifts with meaning. The sun pours out its life-giving abundance. The earth pours down its waters, and pushes up its plants and trees. Sun, soil, and water are the true basis of abundance and are freely given. Our care and usage, or carelessness and waste, says who we are as a community.

Just what would be a “peaceful” transition to the future? It will be a movement from our giant industrialism to human-scale, sustainable economies with secular values similar to agrarianism, distributism, cooperativism, community money, and guilds. Wendell Berry (Fatal Harvest) defines it: “…whereas industrialism is a way of thought based on monetary capital and technology, agrarianism is a way of thought based on land… [it] rises up from the fields, woods, and streams – from the complex of soils, slopes, weathers, connections, influences, and exchanges that we mean when we speak, for example, of the local community or the local watershed. The agrarian mind is therefore not regional or national, let alone global, but local. “

Conserving our local gifts of productive land begins with protecting and preserving. Only then do we contemplate usage, and only the local community must decide that usage because it is only our local community who knows and cares about protection and preservation of the whole.

A colonizer from outside only cares about exploitation of their piece: piece of land, piece of the market, piece of the resource. The whole — what is vital to those of us who will live out our lives here together as a community – is not of their concern. Therefore our decisions as a democratic community are prior — take precedence — over the colonizer’s. We trust our elected public servants to serve our community, not them; our interests, not theirs; our future, not someone else’s… by properly designating usage through zoning.

Our local agrarian future, based on the whole of our land and relationships, informed by an ethic of conserving and the reality of resource depletion, requires that Ukiah Valley land be preserved for engaging with a very different future than was once planned. It is not some distant future; it is coming now with every new drought, ice melt, rising sea, fiercer storm, and resource war, reported daily. It will be a local future, whether we like it or not, because of continually rising energy costs. It will be a smaller future, based not on grandiose money-making schemes, but on local farming and local, small-scale enterprise.

Whether or not we have an abundant and meaningful future here in Mendocino County depends entirely on us and how soon we start planning and transitioning to it. The gift of precious, close-in ag land, and industrial land preserved for human-scale enterprise based on renewable energy and appropriate technology, are crucial to our future. Keeping the zoning based on community needs for our future independence, or losing them now to outside colonizers intent on their own personal wealth accumulation, may make the difference between a future of abundance and happiness, or one of struggle and pain.

I vote for stopping the headlong rush by county civil servants and elected officials to foist property zoning changes on our community, paid for in various ways by devious outside colonizers.

I vote for a meaningful future of conserving, local independence, abundance, and good times.
~~