Saving a Neighbor's Farm

Our family recently got involved in a campaign to help a local family save their organic farm. It's a micro-dairy that bottles the milk right their on the farm in half-gallon glass bottles, and produces other dairy products like yogurt, cheese curds, and such. They're in debt, like most farmers are, and are on the verge of being foreclosed on. It's been an uphill battle for them since 1990, and now they've decided to reach out to the community for help.

In one of our recent meetings it came up that they are sick of not only being in debt but being paid little or nothing for their labor. Then, this morning, in reading about how farming in america is being systematically destroyed I ran across this quote by an economist that predicts the country may soon just get out of the food buisness altogether. He notes:

"A golfer pays $275 to wander around on the turf at Pebble Beach for about 4 hours, and there is a waiting list to do it. How often do people pay farmers for the opportunity to wander around in their fields?" -- Quote from Bill McKibben's Deep Economy

I wish I had more to say about this besides it is utterly insane and just another indicator where we are headed as a nation, but I don't.

I am requesting, though, that if anyone out there has any organizations or individuals that we can turn to for financial support or to promote the campaign please let me know here or through private message. All suggestions and ideas will be greatly appreciated.

Letter to the Editor

It was nice to take a 48 hour break from the internet. I finally got on to sit down and write a letter to our local newspaper's editor.

Sustainable Communities

It was a pleasure to read [Insert Name] letter to the editor last week. Why? Because a fellow citizen mentioned local government doing something about global warming in the first paragraph of his letter. Then that fellow citizen went on to point out that we can't expect federal and state government bodies to do much about the future of humanity on this planet.

A number of thinkers over the years, like Thomas Linzey from The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, have pointed out that state and federal environmental laws do more to protect the rights of corporations over the rights of communities and ecosystems. In other words, what environmental regulations regulate is environmentalists.

Perhaps this is why we're seeing militant environmentalism in the Penokee Hills. Maybe their actions are a result of the inherent injustice in the laws that have been written to protect the environment. As a result they've taken it upon themselves to do something about this in ways that most of us would not approve of. This is nothing new, of course. We've seen this throughout history surrounding many injustices. Slaves formed underground railroads and the Black Panthers fought back by any means necessary when faced with overt racism.

So this has got me wondering: If more citizens got together in their communities to lay out their visions of what a sustainable community is there would be no need for militant environmentalists because they'd have local laws in place to protect themselves and their landbase from destructive activities like the one being proposed in the Penokee Hills or the various frac sand mines to the south of us.

I think it's time for us to take the advice of Rene Diderot--the spiritual father of our American democracy-- when he said "If we look to the city rather than the state it's because we've given up hope that the state may create a new image for the city." That's what our country was founded on and perhaps that's what it is going to take for it to survive into the future.

Saturday's Daniel Quinn Quote

From The New Renaissance:

"During your lifetime, the people of our culture are going to figure out how to live sustainably on this planet--or they're not. Either way, it's certainly going to be extraordinary. If they figure out how to live sustainably here, then humanity will be able to see something it can't see right now: a future that extends into the indefinite future. If they don't figure this out, then I'm afraid the human race is going to take its place among the species that we're driving into extinction here every day--as many as 200--every day"

Derrick Jensen has been Rescued!

Well, if you haven't heard, Derrick Jensen was kidnapped a few days ago. But thanks to heroes like Urban Scout he was rescued. And someone was lucky enough to capture the rescue on film. Check out this video.

Public Radio and Global Warming

Thank you for your comments about my letter in my last post, Willem and Sonny.

This morning I called into another show on WPR (Wisconsin Public Radio) about global warming. This time the guest was Joel Rogers from the Apollo Alliance. What he basically was saying is that we can have a sustainable civilization, system of capitalism, and so on. He has an article in this months issue of The Nation Magazine talking about that.

I think it was in his book Welcome to the Machine where Derrick Jensen talks about how no government is capable of taming and controling the megamachine. Anyway, I called in and said that basically what the guest is proposing is impossible. Because any system that takes more from the landbase than it gives back is inherently unsustainable, therefore civilization has always been and always will be unsustainable. And I also said that since civilization has always been based on slavery, and the wage slavery that is a part of capitalism can never be fair or just.

Well, he started off his response saying he didn't agree with my premises. The rest of the response is what most of us have probably heard hundreds of times already, " there are many benefits to civilization. With the right restraints and management we can have our cake and eat it too, and so on. Of course, the response was more indepth. I just can't remember all of it right now.

I often wonder when guests are asked questions similar to the one I asked that after show they actually let them percolate into their conscious?

"In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must, in a broad sense, tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It is not necessary that the lies be particularly believable. The lies act as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities. Truth must at all costs be avoided. When we do allow self-evident truths to percolate past our defenses and into our consciousness, they are treated like so many hand grenades rolling across the dance floor of an improbably macabre party. We try to stay out of harm’s way, afraid they will go off, shatter our delusions, and leave us exposed to what we have done to the world and to ourselves, exposed as the hollow people we have become. And so we avoid these truths, these self-evident truths, and continue the dance of world destruction". D. Jensen

You can listen to my question if you click HERE. The program is fairly easy to find on the archive list. It would be Joy Cardin's March 28th show at 6:00 AM. My question is about 35 minutes into the program, just after WPR's middle of the show newsbreak.

Derrick Jensen Interview on New Dimensions

Here is an interview with Derrick Jensen on New Dimensions. You have until March 26th for free downloads!

Program Description:Ecologist, activist, and prolific author Derrick Jensen asserts that the human species is not by nature a plague species. Indigenous people lived for tens of thousands of years in harmony with the planet that sustained them. The difference between those cultures and what westerners think of as civilization is, in essence, our perception of the world. Jensen notes, "The principle difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that even the most open-minded Westerner generally views listening to the natural world as a metaphor." Further, the predominant culture is not characterized by open-mindedness, since to that world-view; nature is a commodity. Jensen argues that the key to change and life sustaining action is rooted in seeing nature as sentient-a being worthy and deserving of personal relationship. In this dialogue he compares and contrasts both world-views as he has encountered them in his life. The good news, he asserts, is that because so much is messed up there's a way for everyone to get involved.

Derrick Jensen is an environmental activist, lecturer, teacher and author of Listening to the Land (Context Books 2000); A Language Older than Words (Context Books 2000); The Culture of Make Believe (Context Books 2002), and Endgame, Volumes I and II (Seven Stories Press, 2006)

Topics explored in this dialogue:
Who knows what to do to live
sustainably
What is a penopticon
What is really good about everything
being so messed up
What are the three rules of a dysfunctional culture
What is a writer's job