text:
Note: A longer version of this interview will appear in the Winter 2015 issue of YES! Magazine. You can preorder it here.
Once every five or 10 years, Naomi Klein publishes a book that changes the way we see things. With No Logo, published in 1999, she explored corporate power in a globalized world and the movements springing up to resist it. The Shock Doctrine, published in 2007, showed how governments collude with big corporations to take advantage of natural and human-made disasters to push through deeply unpopular change.
Her newest book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate is another transformational book.
"Many of the past great social movements won on the legal and cultural side but not on the economic sides."
If you want to understand why governments failed to confront the climate challenge years ago, while we still had time to do so without massive disruption to our economy, this is the book to read. Klein reveals that the forces at work preventing action on the climate are part of a coherent whole—a whole that she and many activists and intellectuals, especially in the Global South, call neoliberalism: the combination of privatization, government tax and spending cuts, deregulation, and "free" trade that enormously benefit big corporations and Wall Street but are impoverishing nearly everyone else.
But what is so valuable about Klein's book is that it lays out what we need to do to step up to what is now a climate emergency.
The choice becomes a clear one: we could continue with the neoliberal business-as-usual status quo, which, scientists say, will result in a temperature increase of 4-6 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.
Or we could take on this emergency with everything we've got. This other path means building just, local economies, paying back the climate debt owed to the poorest regions of the world (see below), divesting from fossil fuels and reinvesting in sustainable local economies. And, she says, we'll also need to insist that our governments say "no" to big projects—like the Keystone XL pipeline—that facilitate increased extraction of fossil fuels and say "yes" to a rapid conversion to renewable energy resources.
If all of that sounds too good to be true, Klein is practical about how it can be achieved, drawing on years of reporting from the front lines of the climate struggle. As a starting point, the second option will require that the many social movements now pressing for a more just and sustainable world find common cause.
I spoke to Naomi Klein on September 28, shortly before her talk at Seattle Town Hall. Here's a lightly edited selection from our conversation.
Sarah van Gelder: What was it like for you to be part of the People's Climate March in New York City? Did you experience the coming together of social movements that you you were hoping to see when you wrote This Changes Everything?
"The hope is that climate is the biggest tent."
Naomi Klein: Oh, yeah. The march was a glimpse of the movement we need. It wasn't just that it was so diverse. It was that the most energetic parts of the march were the nurses unions—they were just incredible, and the transit workers, and the South Bronx contingent, which was made up of so many young people making the connections between climate justice and things like health and jobs.
The sense of threat from climate change and the hope were so powerful. It was in every way different from the last big climate march at a U.N. gathering I attended, which was in Copenhagen in 2009.
van Gelder: How was the New York march different?
Klein: There were a few big marches in Copenhagen, but it felt like only professional activists were there. This was called "The People's Climate March," and it felt like a people's march. It didn't just feel like activists and NGOs. It felt like communities, and that was because of a really remarkable, often painful, coalition that was built.
One of the things that happened is that the big NGOs that were involved checked their branding at the door and actually made real space for communities to lead and speak. It wasn't perfect. But I've been to a lot of NGO-organized events where the branding just completely takes over, and I think for the first time some of our big NGOs realized it's way better if you don't.
And I think that part of it is the whole funder model where it's all about getting your photo op and showing "Our brand's here!" and then going to a foundation and going, "Look! We did this. Look at our logo. It's everywhere."
Now people get so pissed off when organizing is done that way. They know they're being used as props. This has not been an easy lesson to learn, and I'm not saying everybody's learned it, but this was the first time that I've seen real progress in this regard.
And I think that because everybody is so happy with how the march turned out that with any luck, this will lead to real lasting change in how we build a movement.
van Gelder: You talk in your book about the notion of "unfinished liberation struggles." You argue that many of the people's movements we celebrate—civil rights, anti-apartheid, women's rights—succeeded in many ways but failed to win economic power. Did you see in the People's Climate March renewed attention to these "unfinished liberation struggles"?
Klein: When you see the kind of hope that climate action represents—to people in places like the South Bronx and other low-income communities of color in the U.S., but also in countries like Bolivia—it is because it directly addresses foundational issues around why our societies are so unequal.
This is why I think justice has to be front and center. I think there's still a sense in a lot of the mainstream green discourse that it's too divisive to foreground economic justice.
There never were the investments in the public sphere that the Civil Rights movement demanded.
But when you hear countries making the argument that there's a climate debt, it's clear the roots of that debt go back to the early days of fossil fuels. Colonialism predates coal, but coal supercharged the colonial project and allowed the pillaging of the Global South and locked us into these incredibly unequal extractive relationships.
So we in the Global North have built up an ecological debt. Fossil fuels built the modern world. And the countries that have a 200-year head start on emitting carbon have a special responsibility to both cut emissions first and fastest, and also to help countries that have not been contributing to this problem for nearly as long to leapfrog over fossil fuels and not be forced once again to choose between poverty and pollution. This is a process by which we begin to heal these colonial wounds.
And so yeah, in the book I talk about this as the unfinished business of liberation because so many of the past great social movements won on the legal and cultural side but not on the economic sides, so there never were reparations for slavery. There never were the investments in the public sphere that the Civil Rights movement demanded.
So the hope, the dream, is that in responding to climate change through a justice lens—through a lens that is not afraid to look at history and the real roots of inequality—we build this movement of movements that brings together all of these struggles that are still alive.
It's not like the civil rights struggle is over in the United States. It's that everybody is in their compartment, their little silo. And the hope is that climate is the biggest tent. It's our atmosphere. We're all in it. We don't have to build the tent. We're in the tent. We just have to know we're in the tent.
A longer version of this interview will be published in the winter 2015 issue of YES! Magazine, available for preorder here.]]>
"If we deal with small farmers we solve hunger and we also deal with food production."
The stark warning comes from the new United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Hilal Elver, in her first public speech since being appointed by the U.N. in June.
"Food policies which do not address the root causes of world hunger would be bound to fail," she told a packed audience in Amsterdam.
One billion people globally are hungry, she declared, before calling on governments to support a transition to "agricultural democracy" which would empower rural small farmers.
"The 2009 global food crisis signaled the need for a turning point in the global food system," she said at the event hosted by the Transnational Institute, a leading international think tank. She continued:
Modern agriculture, which began in the 1950s, is more resource intensive, very fossil fuel dependent, using fertilizers, and based on massive production. This policy has to change.
We are already facing a range of challenges. Resource scarcity, increased population, decreasing land availability and accessibility, emerging water scarcity, and soil degradation require us to re-think how best to use our resources for future generations.
The U.N. official said that new scientific research increasingly shows how "agroecology" offers far more environmentally sustainable methods that can still meet the rapidly growing demand for food:
Agroecology is a traditional way of using farming methods that are less resource oriented, and which work in harmony with society. New research in agroecology allows us to explore more effectively how we can use traditional knowledge to protect people and their environment at the same time.
"There is a geographical and distributional imbalance in who is consuming and producing," Hilal Elver continued.
Global agricultural policy needs to adjust. In the crowded and hot world of tomorrow, the challenge of how to protect the vulnerable is heightened.
That entails recognizing women's role in food production—from farmer, to housewife, to working mother, women are the world's major food providers. It also means recognizing small farmers, who are also the most vulnerable and the most hungry.
"Food policies which do not address the root causes of world hunger would be bound to fail."
Across Europe, the U.S., and the developing world, small farms face shrinking numbers. So if we deal with small farmers we solve hunger and we also deal with food production.
And Elver speaks not just with the authority of her U.N. role, but as a respected academic. She is research professor and co-director at the Project on Global Climate Change, Human Security, and Democracy in the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara.
She is also an experienced lawyer and diplomat. A former founding legal advisor at the Turkish Ministry of Environment, she was previously appointed to the United Nations Environment Program's chair in environmental diplomacy at the University of Malta.
Hinting at the future direction of her research and policy recommendations, Elver criticized the vast subsidies going to large agribusiness companies. Currently, in the European Union about 80 percent of subsidies and 90 percent of research funding go to support conventional industrial agriculture.
"Empirical and scientific evidence shows that small farmers feed the world," said Elver. "According to the U.N. Food & Agricultural Organization (FAO), 70 percent of food we consume globally comes from small farmers." She continued:
This is critical for future agricultural policies. Currently, most subsidies go to large agribusiness. This must change. Governments must support small farmers. As rural people are migrating increasingly to cities, this is generating huge problems.
If these trends continue, by 2050, 75 percent of the entire human population will live in urban areas. We must reverse these trends by providing new possibilities and incentives to small farmers, especially for young people in rural areas.
"We are being far too kind to industrialized agriculture."
If implemented, Elver's suggestions would represent a major shift in current government food policies.
But Marcel Beukeboom, a Dutch civil servant specializing in food and nutrition at the Ministry of Trade & Development who spoke after Elver, dissented from Elver's emphasis on small farms:
While I agree that we must do more to empower small farmers, the fact is that the big monocultural farms are simply not going to disappear. We have to therefore find ways to make the practices of industrial agribusiness more effective, and this means working in partnership with the private sector, small and large.
The new U.N. food rapporteur's debut speech coincided with a landmark two-day International Symposium on Agroecology for Food and Nutrition Security in Rome, hosted by the FAO. More than 50 experts participated in the symposium, including scientists, the private sector, government officials, and civil society leaders.
A high-level roundtable at the close of the symposium included the agricultural ministers of France, Algeria, Costa Rica, Japan, Brazil and the European Union agricultural commissioner.
FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said:
Agroecology continues to grow, both in science and in policies. It is an approach that will help to address the challenge of ending hunger and malnutrition in all its forms, in the context of the climate change adaptation needed.
Agroecology is a traditional way of using farming methods that are less resource oriented, and which work in harmony with society.
A letter to the FAO signed by nearly 70 international food scientists congratulated the U.N. agency for convening the agroecology symposium and called for a "U.N. system-wide initiative on agroecology as the central strategy for addressing climate change and building resilience in the face of water crises."
The scientists described agroecology as "a well-grounded science, a set of time-tested agronomic practices and, when embedded in sound socio-political institutions, the most promising pathway for achieving sustainable food production."
A signatory to the letter, Mindi Schneider, assistant professor of Agrarian, Food and Environmental Studies at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, said:
Agroecology is more than just a science, it's also a social movement for justice that recognizes and respects the right of communities of farmers to decide what they grow and how they grow it.
Several other food experts at the Transnational Institute offered criticisms of prevailing industrial practices. David Fig, who serves on the board of Biowatch South Africa, an NGO concerned with food sovereignty and sustainable agriculture, said:
We are being far too kind to industrialized agriculture. The private sector has endorsed it, but it has failed to feed the world, it has contributed to major environmental contamination and misuse of natural resources. It's time we switched more attention, public funds and policy measures to agroecology, to replace the old model as soon as possible.
Sergio Sauer, formerly Brazil's national rapporteur for human rights in land, territory and food, added:
Agroecology is related to the way you relate to land, to nature to each other—it is more than just organic production, it is a sustainable livelihood.
In Brazil we have the National Association of Agroecology which brings together 7,000 people from all over the country pooling together their concrete empirical experiences of agroecological practices. They try to base all their knowledge on practice, not just on concepts.
Generally, nobody talks about agroecology, because it's too political. The simple fact that the FAO is calling a major international gathering to discuss agroecology is therefore a very significant milestone.
[The] jobs are democratically owned by the people who work and live there.
Now the workers own and run the businesses together under one banner, known as the Island Employee Cooperative(IEC). This is the first time that multiple businesses of this size and scope have been merged and converted into one worker cooperative—making this a particularly groundbreaking achievement in advancing economic democracy.
When the local couple that had owned the three businesses for 43 years began to think about selling their stores and retiring, the workers became concerned. The stores were one of the island's biggest employers and a potential buyer probably would not have come from within the community or maintained the same level of jobs and services. Only a worker buy-out could achieve stability.
Because these workers were trying to accomplish something historic, it took more than a year—and it wasn't always an easy road. But the workers' strength lay in their own determination, and in the ability to rely on a group of allies dedicated to growing the cooperative movement. The Independent Retailers Shared Services Cooperative (IRSSC) and the Cooperative Development Institute helped them develop their management, governance, legal, and financial structures. They were also able to secure financing from Maine-basedCoastal Enterprises and the Cooperative Fund of New England, both Community Development Finance Institutions (CDFIs). Without that dedicated technical assistance and available capital, it is doubtful the IEC would be here today.
While the creation of the IEC maintained dozens of decent paying jobs and a remote community's only nearby access to essentials such as groceries and prescription medications, it also points to a successful model that could be used across the country to expand ownership and wealth to regular working people. This experience shows that if only we had more resources to experiment with grounded, practical economic policies, we could create many more of the living-wage jobs and community-sustaining businesses we desperately need.
Worker cooperatives hold the promise of fundamentally addressing our longstanding economic woes.
The Great Recession has led many to consider better ways to organize our economy, as always happens during economic downturns. But the reality is that our economy, even during the "good times," has always been failing working people. So we need to think long term and change our strategies in order to build a durable, democratic, equitable and just economy.
In the aftermath of the Great Recession, Maine has won back less than half of the jobs we lost (ranking us 46th among the states): We are second from the bottom for total job growth, and we have one of the highest numbers of part-time workers who want more employment but can't find it. Nearly one-third of unemployed Mainers have been looking for work for more than six months, which is more than twice the national average. And what little growth there has been has occurred almost exclusively in the Portland metro region, in far southern Maine.
But it's not as if our workers were prospering before the Great Recession.
Over the last 30 years, the incomes of the poorest Maine workers grew by only 27 percent, while incomes for the wealthiest Mainers jumped by 67 percent. Starting in the late '90s, Maine lost more manufacturing jobs per capita than any other state. Maine workers also have the lowest average incomes of all the New England states and, of Maine's 16 counties, 14 of them are among the poorest in the region. As a result, one in seven Mainers overall and more than one in five children live in poverty. Most shamefully, poverty characterizes more than one in four young children, and one in three in our poorest counties.
This is the first time that multiple businesses of this size and scope have been merged and converted into one worker cooperative.
In short, Maine's low wages, limited job prospects, deepening poverty and growing inequality are not just the result of the Great Recession; it is structural and long-standing. We've needed to change the way the economy works for quite a while. And that's exactly why strategies to create sustainable, democratic businesses like the Island Employee Cooperative are so critical.
Worker cooperatives hold the promise of fundamentally addressing our longstanding economic woes. Because they give members an equal voice in the co-op's governance, a worker co-op will almost never pick up and leave its community. Those jobs are democratically owned by the people who work and live there.
In addition, in worker co-ops, employees have an incentive to work harder and smarter, because they benefit from an equitable share of the profits. And when a worker co-op is facing financial difficulty, the first response isn't to lay people off. That's because the worker-owners are sharing the risks and burdens of the business as well. Instead, members often come together to find democratic solutions to their problems, such as temporarily lowering wages or cutting hours for all workers, so that no one person has to lose their job. This is one of the major factors that also make worker co-ops more economically sustainable in low-income communities.
For the new worker-owners of the Island Employee Cooperative, the transformation into a co-op will, over time, create profound changes in their lives as they begin investing some of the business' profits into better wages and benefits—something that is extremely uncommon for those in the retail business. The co-op is also already collaborating with the Maine Community College System to deliver education programs on-site so that the workers can improve their knowledge and skills. While retail jobs are often depicted as low-wage and dead-end, these retail workers are now business owners who will learn to make many hard decisions together. And because IEC is one of the island's largest employers, the cooperative ownership model will make a tremendous impact on the community as many more families build wealth through democratic ownership.
That's a model we can and should scale up.
Unfortunately, successful examples like the IEC are rare in the United States because worker cooperative development gets little to no support from city, state and federal governments. Instead, these institutions spend a fortune on economic development programs that create windfall profits for corporations, but very few sustainable, living-wage jobs.
We could create many more of the living-wage jobs and community-sustaining businesses we desperately need.
The way states have traditionally pursued economic development relies primarily on "chasing smokestacks" and dreaming up new tax giveaways for out-of-state corporations. That serves to benefit the 1% while leaving workers in the dust.
A less costly, more effective and more equitable strategy of focusing on worker co-op development would drive investments into grassroots initiatives for economic sustainability. Some support already exists: For example, New York City just passed its 2015 budget and is investing over $1 million in a comprehensive program to support the development of worker cooperatives , including directing existing business-development resources to be more supportive of worker co-ops. Ohio has provided small grants for feasibility studies and technical assistance to employees considering a cooperative buyout of their workplace, using federal funds that are available in every state (but utilized by only a half-dozen or so). Rural Cooperative Development Grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture support state and regional groups that provide cooperative development services in rural areas (though not just to worker co-ops).
There are more examples of supportive policies, but they all amount to a tiny drop in the bucket compared to what is spent on typical economic development approaches that do little for working people.
In order to begin scaling up worker co-op development, we need to provide technical assistance and small pre-development grants to people starting co-ops within their own communities, make available better education on how to operate a cooperative, provide loan guarantees for groups who would otherwise struggle to access credit, and offer targeted, accountable tax incentives.
Communities across the country would benefit from more initiatives that support development of new co-ops, as well as converting existing businesses into worker-owned ones like the Island Employee Cooperative.
This approach would allow many more communities to sustain themselves, cultivate jobs with dignity, improve wages and help more people build wealth through democratic ownership. And then we might see a transformation into an economy that truly and sustainably serves the needs of all.
Teams of volunteers across the country hit the streets early in the morning to put a name and a face to the long-term homeless in their communities. The volunteers started canvassing at 4 a.m., combing the streets to gather names, photographs, and stories of the people sleeping there. They searched for the people at the highest risk of dying from being on the streets. Once they identified the most vulnerable people, they offered them a home.
That was the 100,000 Homes campaign's approach to eliminating homelessness in communities across the country for the past four years, and it worked. In June, one month before their deadline, campaign organizer Community Solutions announced that its more than 230 partnering cities, counties, and states had surpassed the goal of placing 100,000 people in homes in just four years. It was a bold goal. In the traditional housing placement system, it often takes more than a year to work through the multiple agencies, treatments, and counseling requirements to secure a home. The process is intended to ensure that government subsidies for housing go to the people best prepared to receive them. The 100,000 Homes campaign flipped this paradigm by offering housing first. Once housed, people received supportive services to deal with substance abuse, mental illness, and joblessness. The housing first method is quicker, and it's successful. Studies show that two years after receiving supportive housing for free, more than 80 percent of people were still living in a home instead of on the street.
Community Solutions isn't stopping with 100,000 homes. Next January, the organization will launch Zero: 2016. This new national campaign will target the elimination of all chronic and military veteran homelessness, one home at a time. It's another bold goal, and they just might do it.
When 80-year-old Shirley Logsdon went into the hospital for a back injury, she came out with nearly $1,000 in debt that she would never be able to pay. For a year and a half, she received persistent phone calls from debt collectors. Then Logsdon received a letter from Rolling Jubilee. "You no longer owe the balance of this debt," it read. "It is gone, a gift with no strings attached."
Letters like the one Logsdon received were sent to 2,693 people last November, when Rolling Jubilee bought and forgave $13.5 million in personal debt. A newly released study by the Urban Institute says about 77 million people in the United States have debt that is subject to collections—often debt that was incurred to pay for basic needs. That's one of the reasons the Occupy Wall Street group Strike Debt formed the Rolling Jubilee project. "We believe that no one should have to go into debt for the basic things in our lives, like healthcare, housing, and education," the group says. Since forming in November 2012, Rolling Jubilee has bought nearly $15 million of debt for just $400,000 on the secondary debt market, where lenders sell unpaid bills to collectors for just pennies on the dollar. Thousands of individual donations averaging just $40 have paid for these debt buys. It's a bailout for the people, funded by the people.
Freecycle and Craigslist give new life to old stuff by facilitating porch pickups for everything from free lamps and scrap wood to cans of food close to their expiration dates. That kind of stuff is posted on Buy Nothing's local Facebook pages too, but the group is about a lot more than just stuff. It's about the people and stories behind the stuff and the porch meetings between neighbors.
One year after it began, the Buy Nothing Project has grown into a social media movement with more than 225 local groups across the country and the world. Rebecca Rockefeller cofounded the first Buy Nothing group on Bainbridge Island, Wash., and says the project is helping communities discover their abundance. "There's enough stuff to go around," she says, "and the way we learn that is by getting to know our neighbors, asking for what we need, and giving what we have. Everyone has something to give." People give away their dusty household goods, but they also give childcare, cooking classes, and garden produce. People ask for what they need, too: One neighbor asks for a piece of land to bury a beloved pet, another for a late-night store run to pick up medicine.
In 2005, residents of the declining rust-belt city of Kalamazoo, Mich., received some unbelievably good news: A new program supported by private donors would fund Kalamazoo kids' college tuition up to 100 percent at any of Michigan's public colleges and universities. The Kalamazoo Promise would be available to any student enrolled in a Kalamazoo public school since the ninth grade. It was the most comprehensive scholarship program in the entire country.
Nearly a decade later, the place-based scholarship program has inspired more than 30 similar programs across the United States. While not all communities have donors with pockets deep enough to fund a program like the Kalamazoo Promise, the program is demonstrating how radical investment in youth can transform a struggling community and have a huge impact on its most vulnerable populations. Since 2005, young families have returned to the city, and enrollment in the school district has increased 24 percent. The number of minority students taking AP courses has increased 300 percent. The city has spent more money on the district than ever before—a lot more. Test scores have improved, and GPAs have increased, most notably among black students. The list of achievements goes on, and just this June, the program announced its expansion to include tuition coverage at 15 of Michigan's private liberal arts colleges. "There is no wholly literate urban community in the United States," says district superintendent Michael Rice. "We aim to be the first."
Without a steady paycheck, retirement package, or health care, independent artists and musicians often have to sacrifice health and security for their art. In Kingston, N.Y., a unique arts festival is helping change that by bringing neighbors together to care for one another.
At the O+ Festival, art and music are exchanged for fillings, physical therapy, routine physician's exams, and other health services. The festival began when a Kingston dentist wondered aloud to his artist friend if he could get a band he liked from Brooklyn to play for free dental care. He could, it turned out, and with the help of a few friends in the arts, his idea grew into the first O+ Festival in 2010. At the fourth annual O+ last year, providers at the festival pop-up clinic offered 99 dental appointments and 350 hours of health services for the 80 artists and musicians who performed and presented during the three-day festival. "Building a community around O+ speaks to the simple idea of compassion and being part of a community," says Joe Concra, a painter who co-founded the festival. "Because we've become accustomed to huge companies providing everything we need, we forget to look to our neighbors to see what they can offer."
Masbia serves up dignity with dinner to hundreds of hungry New Yorkers every day. Instead of long lines and a tedious intake process, diners at this soup kitchen are greeted by a friendly host and ushered to a private table for a delicious three-course kosher meal. No questions, just healthy food. Original artwork decorates the walls, the atmosphere is cozy, and the menu is prepared using fresh ingredients donated by farmers markets and CSAs. Nearly all the kitchen and wait staff are volunteers.
"It's a restaurant with no cash register," says executive director Alexander Rapaport. When Rapaport began Masbia, his goal was to provide kosher food in a comfortable, welcoming atmosphere. "Doing it with dignity means people will come," he says, and he's right. Every day, more than 500 people come to Masbia's three locations. This year alone, the growing organization expects to serve more than 1 million meals.
Before state-funded programs and large insurance companies, many people turned to community networks for services like health care, unemployment aid, and education. In mutual aid societies, people pooled resources to pay the salary of a community doctor, outfit a schoolhouse, or give financial and emotional support to members who were sick or out of work. Today, mutual aid remains an important alternative for people with limited or no access to state-funded services. Cooperatively run pre-K schools, lending circles for low-income groups, and even some housing associations fill in the gaps left by state services. Mutual aid societies are still particularly relevant among immigrant communities.
In Chicago, home to some 3,000 Iraqi refugees, the Iraqi Mutual Aid Society is Iraqi immigrants helping each other adjust to American society. Language and vocational classes provide practical skills while social and cultural events like poetry contests and concerts help refugees remain connected to their unique culture and community. Resources include free and reduced-cost child care, and the group's Immigration Legal Services Program provides help with naturalization petitions. According to iraqimutualaid.org, the region expects at least 800 more refugees annually over the next several years.
Lake Clark National Park, Alaska. Photo by usinterior / Instagram.
The Wilderness Act, which protected 9.1 million acres of mountains, forest, coastline, and other land, turned 50 this month.
There's no better way to celebrate these wild and protected places than to visit them. But then ... some weekends are for laundry.
Luckily, many of the government departments responsible for the caretaking of protected places have gotten out their smartphones and opened Instagram accounts where staff, professional photographers, and other users post quite amazing photos.
Below, you'll find photos from some of our favorite Instagram accounts that document the beauty of our public lands. Enjoy—and happy 50th anniversary, wilderness!
Going-to-the-Sun Mountain, Colorado. Photo by glaciernps / Instagram
Canhalagua flowers at Yosemite National Park, California. Photo by yosemitenps / Instagram
Chaos Canyon, Colorado. Photo by Wes Walker, rockynps / Instagram
Joshua Tree National Park, California. Photo by Brad Sutton, usinterior / Instagram
Salmon Falls Reservoir, Rogerson, Idaho. Photo by Austin Catlin, mypubliclands / Instagram
We'll give this grizzly bear—photographed by Department of the Interior—the last word (or wave).
Grizzly bear in Lake Clark National Park, Alaska. Photo by Kevin Dietrich, usinterior / Instagram.
First, she worked at NASA. Then, she did postgraduate work in organic geochemistry at MIT—all the things that one must do to become an astronaut and travel to Mars.
She never ended up there, but the story of Byrne's transition from NASA to novelist and playwright highlights much about the woman who, as she wrote about her time at NASA, "craved extreme novelty and infinite variety."Byrne is eager to share her views about any subject that comes about, whether it's environmentalism ("the environmental movement is mired in sentimentality") or the progress of technology ("I'm typing this interview on a Mac Air, which would be a fucking miraculous godlike device ten years ago").
Following her on Twitter or Facebook offers plenty of variety, too: She recently Skyped in to a book club taking place in Guatemala; I read something about her heading into a sensory deprivation chamber. And she's soon headed to Iran for research on her next book which is set in a cave in Belize.
But it's her first book, a literary sci-fi novel called The Girl in the Road, released this summer, that I wanted to talk to her about. If that book contains anything, it's Byrne's drive for extreme novelty and infinite variety.
The Girl in the Road is set in the second half of the 21st century, after geopolitical power has shifted to the East. India has replaced the United States as the world's political and cultural superpower, and Africa is also on the rise. Byrne's novel tells two overlapping stories, each of a young woman traveling to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Africa's new cultural capital.
Byrne's story is full of humanity—also, of love and violence and trauma—built around issues of our own day: Climate change and sea-level rise threaten coastal nations. Transgender and LGBT communities continue to fight for acceptance. The plot engine of The Girl in the Road is the horrors of violence, and the journeys undertaken by the protagonists take place in a world that remains dangerous for women.
And yet, despite the future setting and the violence found in The Girl in the Road, the book is not apocalyptic or fantastic. It takes place in a world that seems very plausible, if not optimistic. Clean energy technologies have been implemented. The world has undergone a new sexual revolution and gender and racial identities are somewhat embraced as fluid rather than static. Discovering the future world of The Girl in the Road feels as much like exploration as it does fantasy.
Byrne's pursuit of space travel ended when she was 24, but her eagerness for exploration remains obvious.
I wanted to learn more about this possible future, the woman who created it, and why so much of it involves contemporary issues.
Christopher Zumski Finke: I'm curious about how you got to The Girl in the Road, but I'd like to start all the way back if you don't mind. Where did you grow up? What were your parents like?
Monica Byrne: I grew up the youngest of five children in the tiny college town of Annville, Pennsylvania. My Dad taught religion, ethics, and American studies at Lebanon Valley College. We had a big old Victorian house a few blocks up the street. Our (Catholic) church was across the street. My best friends were all within a few blocks' walk. My house was like the professor's house in Narnia—we'd just explore for hours on end. We made a clubhouse in the loft of the old stable on the property, where we uncovered horse bones. I was bussed to Catholic school at Our Lady of the Valley in the neighboring city of Lebanon.
Zumski Finke: What was Annville like?
Byrne: In many ways very conservative, but I always had a sense of a wider world and a much more progressive politics, which came first from my parents (progressive Jesuits both), and my siblings inherited and expanded on that.
Zumski Finke: Tell me about childhood in The Professor's house.
Byrne: It was an idyllic childhood in pretty much every way, except one, which was that my mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor when I was seven. She had it removed, but both the operation and the radiation treatment caused major damage that made her condition progressively worsen. She first lost her vision, then her mental presence, then her mobility. During my adolescence I effectively stopped talking to her because I felt so furious at losing her, and so guilty for feeling furious, and didn't know how to express any of it, so I just focused on being a perfect student. She was bedridden by the time I was 16. She died when I was 20.
She was such an extraordinary woman and I can't overstate how much the loss of her has affected me.
Zumski Finke: Did you always plan to write novels?
Writing and art and making up stories always came so naturally to me, that I discounted them.
Byrne: In the years when I wanted to be an astronaut (14-24), writing novels was always a facetious afterthought, as in, "I'll come back from Mars and THEN write the Great Whatever Novel, ha ha ha." I couldn't allow that to be what I actually wanted to do. It may sound weird, but writing and art and making up stories always came so naturally to me, that I discounted them. I thought I should do something with my life that was hard for me, not something that came naturally.
Zumski Finke: The Girl in the Road is about the overlapping journey of two young women who have suffered, directly or indirectly, terrible violence. But it is also about climate change, the energy crisis, LGBT equality, trans acceptance, over-reliance on technology, and more.
It seems like a very modern book, socially and thematically. Did you intend to be this inclusive about social issues? Climate change?
Byrne: On a personal level, I feel much more strongly about social issues than environmental ones. The Girl in the Road reflects a changing world. It's always been changing, and will continue to change.
As for social issues, that was a very conscious theme of The Girl in the Road. I was writing the future I both wanted to live in and could reasonably expect to exist, 50 years from now. It's far from perfect—some things are better, like energy diversity; but exploitation of the weak is still a global theme, and while queer identity may be accepted in Thrissur [part of India that has broadly accepted the trans community in the novel], it's not necessarily in the rest of India, or the rest of the world.
But there are lots of little things I was conscious of—like, for example, making a lot of the default pronouns/incidental characters female. Because I'm a conditioned animal, like we all are—I'd first conceive of the character as male. Then I'd ask myself, "Any reason why the character has to be male?" The answer was almost always, "No." So I'd change it. I'm writing the code for the future I want to see.
Zumski Finke: You were conscious about the social issues you included. Are you drawn to them personally?
Byrne: For sure. I'm a queer woman. I'm honestly not sure how I could live in this world and not be drawn to these issues personally. I live them, daily.
Zumski Finke: Can you share a little about how you got involved in these issues?
Byrne: I don't see it as a process of "getting involved," which to me is a framing that bespeaks the privilege of not having to live it day in and day out. It would take a whole book to describe how being female has circumscribed my experience of the world, and therefore, the art I make.
The Girl in the Road reflects a changing world. It's always been changing, and will continue to change.
I mean, where would I start? Where I wrote an editorial in my high school newspaper about the wrongness of domestic abuse, and got food thrown at me in the cafeteria for a week? Where my graduate school adviser at MIT had an unspoken policy of not taking women into the field because he "didn't feel comfortable with them"? Where I went on a research trip for my next novel this past spring and a guide who was supposed to be helping me held me down and forced my legs open in front of his friends as part of an elaborate joke I didn't realize was happening until it was happening? And those are just the macro-aggressions. Just from being female. Micro-aggressions happen on a daily basis, and have, for 33 years. There's no way I can't be "involved in these issues."
I can say that I've had a family that's been nothing but supportive of me. My dad is wonderful; he never told me there was anything I couldn't do. When I told him in college that I was in love with a woman, he didn't bat an eye.
I learned feminism from my sisters. We were politically progressive and socially liberal in a conservative town. My mom headed the local chapter of Amnesty International, and would go to church on Thursday nights to hold meetings and letter-writing sessions. She went out of her way to befriend those in our (very small, very white) community who she thought might feel lost or out of place, especially immigrants. I remember a Bangladeshi woman named Dilsud, in particular, sitting very stiffly on our living room couch in her resplendent sari. Mom was acting from both compassion and curiosity. I very much feel like I got, from her, a similar curiosity—befriending whatever is strange to me, whether it be new places or new people or new philosophies, and absorbing it, making it not-strange.
Zumski Finke: In the book, as you mention above, transgender individuals have received cultural acceptance in portions of India. Why did you decide to include trans issues in such detail?
Byrne: It wasn't necessarily a choice to address trans issues qua trans issues. Trans issues are human issues. It's just who Mohini [a trans character in The Girl in the Road] turned out to be. I have trans friends, so Mohini reflects the community I live in.
Zumski Finke: Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories are extremely popular right now. But I read elsewhere you did not want to create an apocalyptic future for The Girl in the Road? Why not?
I'm writing the code for the future I want to see.
Byrne: Besides just being an overdone literary trope, I just don't see apocalypse happening the way people seem to fantasize it happening. To me it's far more interesting to experience (and describe) the future as a slow taffy stretching from the present.
I'm only 33, but that's what it looks like so far. We're still here. We intermix more. We clash more. We're becoming ever more human. That journey of increments is far more interesting to me.
Zumski Finke: So would you say you are optimistic about our collective future? For example, do you think that some of the creative technological solutions to climate change that you envision in your book are possible?
Byrne: As far as lives on this planet go, I have a really comfortable and easy one. So when I answer whether I'm optimistic about our collective future—and my first instinct is to say "yes"—I have to own that that's where my answer comes from.
I think the climate solutions described in The Girl in the Road are absolutely possible, with the (some might say cynical) caveat that they'll happen when they become an economic necessity, and not a moment before. That's the only explanation I can come up with for why we're not all already solar-powered. Peak oil is coming, or peaking, or has already passed, but we're all still in a dreamy dream of endless abundance.
Meanwhile, the smart businesspeople and smart scientists are a step ahead, figuring out how to scale up and profit from new models. Unfortunately the climate is already jacked. We'll watch the unprecedentedly violent thunderstorms from our solar-powered rocking chairs.
Zumski Finke: In the novel, the balance of global power has shifted away from the United States and Western nations and moved to India and Africa. What led you to that reframing?
Byrne: It's just what I see already happening in the world, in terms of population growth, economic development, mass-produced technology, reverse brain drain, and so forth. So I thought it was a plausible extrapolation to say the effect has grown by 2068.
We're still here. We intermix more. We clash more. We're becoming ever more human.
There's also a dash of contrarianism and wish-fulfillment in there, too, of course! I loved India and I loved Africa. I love what is strange to me and have a really difficult time with people who are afraid of what is strange to them. I find that attitude a lot in the States, and especially among the people I grew up with, so it's a form of me saying, "Get used to it."
Zumski Finke: Your fictional future seems very possible to me. How much effort did you put into making it realistic?
Byrne: I put a lot of effort into figuring out a realistic future. But it's so hard to predict. I've lived through (and continue to live through?) a burst of technology and connectivity that is probably unprecedented in human history. It's hard to know whether we've reached a plateau, or whether innovation will continue to accelerate at a similar pace for the next several decades.
But I make one baseline assumption, which is: We'll still be human. We'll always be human. Human nature stays the same. In Thomist terminology, the accidents may change, but the substance does not. So I can write about humans in 30,000 B.C. (as Kim Stanley Robinson did in Shaman) or 30,000 A.D., and the song remains the same.]]>
Since the first community supported agriculture program was established in western Massachusetts in the 1980s, the concept of buying food directly from local farms has taken off. There are now thousands of CSAs across the country. It's a simple enough model—consumers purchase a share of the season's harvest upfront, and they get a box or bag of fresh, locally grown produce each week from the farm.
And this model is not restricted to farming. In recent years, people have applied the CSA idea to other types of goods and services such as dining out, microbrews, and even fish. It's a system that works for both producers and consumers. Here are some of our favorite examples.
According to the Brewers Association, there were nearly 1,500 microbreweries in the United States in 2013, a 23 percent increase over the 2012 count. As craft beer becomes ever more popular, some breweries have adopted the farm CSA model to offer customers exclusive access to their favorite local brews.
By purchasing a CSB share, you get to take home a specified quantity of beer at regular intervals, usually monthly. You are directly purchasing from the producer, thus creating a relationship between creator and consumer. CSB memberships typically offer six- or twelve-month options and include additional benefits like discounts and members-only events.
It's a system that works well from a brewery's perspective too. "For a small producer, you get money upfront that you need to buy ingredients and packaging, you know what people want ahead of time (in some instances), and they come and pick up the beer themselves," explained Page Buchanan, owner of House of Brews in Madison, Wis., in an email. "So, it solves the challenges of knowing what to make, buying the raw materials to make it, and then distributing it to the end consumer. It's very efficient."
Similar to farm-based CSAs, this exchange program connects people to local producers, but instead of taking home a basketful of fruits and veggies, shareholders receive a collection of local artwork. And just as the type of produce in a farm share changes, the type of art varies with each batch, depending on which artists contribute.
Commissioned artists create a specified number of pieces, usually around 50 or so, which is the number of shares available for purchase. Each share typically consists of one piece from each of the participating artists and costs anywhere from $50 to $500. Shares are distributed through a series of "pick-up parties," allowing patrons the opportunity to meet artists in their community.
Art sharing programs have cropped up all over the country in recent years. The idea for community supported art was developed five years ago by Minnesota-based art organizations Springboard for the Arts and mnartists.org. Now there are roughly 40 CSAs based on the Minnesota model in cities nationwide, from Philadelphia to Miami to Jackson Hole, Wyo. Although the specifics of each program vary, the basic premise remains the same—strengthening the tie between art and community by connecting people with local artists.
"It's about creating those connections directly between the artists and the shareholders," said Andy Sturdevant, Artists Resources Director at Springboard for the Arts. He was involved in organizing the first community supported art program and said he borrowed the idea directly from the successful farm-based CSA movement.
"It's a model people already understood," he said. "People like to know where the things they buy come from, whether that's food or whether that's artwork."
Purchase a community supported medicine share, and instead of cucumbers and squash you receive a mini herbal apothecary filled with all-natural products like dried herbs and spices, tea blends, tonics and tinctures, and skin salves and oils. Contents vary depending on the season.
Again, the idea is to connect consumers directly with producers, and in this case the result is a mutually beneficial relationship between local herb-growers, medicine-makers, and people in the community. Forgo big pharmaceutical companies and instead invest in herbal, organic medicine that comes from the farm down the road—what could be healthier than that?
The CSA model has ascended into the literary world with the rise of community supported publishing. Offered by a handful of small, independent publishers, a CSP membership gives patrons a steady supply of books and other publications hot off the press. South End Press in Cambridge, Mass., offers CSP subscriptions (starting at $20 a month) that provide members a monthly batch of all new material and select backlisted books and publications as well as a 10 percent discount on everything else. Pretty sweet deal. [Update: As of Summer 2014, South End Press has closed for business].
The Head & The Hand Press in Philadelphia also runs a CSP program. According to The Head & The Hand website, "For an upfront annual investment from our shareholders, we produce bi-annual shares of our creative work including our novels, our almanacs, our chapbooks series, and other offerings created in our workshop. We will also offer our shareholders exclusive insights into how the work was produced, plus access to our offerings before they hit the street."
Small publishing companies are trying to tread water in the precarious publishing business. Supporting smaller players through a CSP share can make your reading habit sustainable for all parties—authors, publishers, and readers.
Useful as it may be as journalistic shorthand, "mansplaining" is cultural bubblegum in comparison to Solnit's actual body of work, most recently Men Explain Things to Me, a collection of essays that begins with that eponymous piece, goes on to illuminate aspects of her argument, and, finally, seeks solutions.
Mansplaining reveals the assumption that women know less than men, are less capable of knowing, and are therefore less deserving to be listened to or heard. And there's the great harm. "At the heart of the struggle of feminism to give rape, date rape, marital rape, domestic violence, and workplace sexual harassment legal standing as crimes," writes Solnit, "has been the necessity of making women credible and audible."
That necessity is evidenced in "The Longest War," the book's second essay. A rape is reported in the United States every 6.2 minutes; one in five women will be raped in her lifetime—statistics Solnit presents not to condemn all men or to alarm women, but to help us begin the hard work of confronting "a pattern of violence against women that's broad and deep and horrific, and incessantly overlooked."
Confronting reality—often by looking at phenomena from unexpected angles—is at the core of Solnit's impressive body of work. Her articles, essays, books are all informed by her background as a journalist, art critic, historian, and activist. That pursuit ultimately takes her beyond reporting facts, statistics, or even lived experience. Solnit's great undertaking is the exploration of imagination and consciousness. One of her recurring concerns is how those most personal qualities are subjugated by imbalances and abuses of power—sexism, racism, colonialism—and how they may be liberated.
Like Virginia Woolf, whom she celebrates in one of the essays in this book, "Woolf's Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable," Solnit uses prose to venture "unknowing into the unknown," to offer a description of how we come to some understanding of great mysteries—in this case, identity, perception, society, the arc of history. This is Solnit's style and method at her most fluid—risking digression, making connections, taking the reader on a journey to an unexpected but necessary destination. It is the antithesis of mansplaining's use of language to dominate. Instead, Solnit invites the reader to find agency through heightened awareness—both of what we know but also of what we don't. The grounds for hope, she writes, "are simply that we don't know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly."
"Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth—and in our minds, where it all begins and ends," she reminds us in her final essay. While there is no shortage of those who join "the volunteer police force" to put women down, to subject and subjugate them, we have made more progress than we often realize. New feminists and a new feminism rise up under the most difficult circumstances. In the context of history, we've only just begun with this endeavor. It's far too soon to surrender.]]>
More than 4,500 pedestrians are killed and more than 68,000 are injured by motor vehicles every year on the streets of America. The victims are disproportionately children, seniors, and people of color.
A recent report from the National Complete Streets Coalition found that from 2003 to 2012, more than 47,000 people were killed crossing the street. That's 16 times the number of people who died in natural disasters over the same period.
"Vision Zero is about changing the culture of our dangerous streets."
The pedestrian safety crisis is even more dire internationally. Worldwide, more than 270,000 people are killed while walking every year—that's 22 percent of a total 1.24 million yearly traffic fatalities, according to the World Health Organization.
"It's like an airplane falling out of the sky every other day. If that actually happened, the whole system would be ground to a halt until the problem was fixed," said Scott Bricker, executive director of America Walks, a coalition of walking advocacy groups. "We need to address this terrible problem with the same urgency."
Unfortunately, pedestrian deaths—and all traffic fatalities—are viewed as an inevitable side effect of modern life. "People accept this as normal, just as 100 years ago most people accepted that women could not vote," observes Gil Penalosa, executive director of 8-80 Cities, an international organization that's working to make streets safe for people of all ages.
Yet recent history offers genuine hope for making our streets safer. A generation ago domestic abuse and drunk driving were seen as sad, unalterable facts of human nature. But vigorous public campaigns to prevent these tragedies have had remarkable results, offering clear evidence that destructive human behavior can be curbed when we put our minds to it.
From Philadelphia to Chicago to Oregon, campaigns to reduce pedestrian, bicyclist, and motorist deaths to zero are now taking shape around the country.
The campaigns are based on a new safety strategy called Vision Zero, which is modeled on successful efforts in Sweden. Pedestrian deaths in Sweden have dropped 50 percent since 2009, and overall traffic deaths have been cut in half since 2000—making Swedish streets the safest in the world, according to the New York Times.
Campaigns to reduce pedestrian, bicyclist, and motorist deaths to zero are now taking shape around the country.
The Economist reports that Sweden accomplished this by emphasizing safety over speed in road design, and attributes the impressive drop in traffic deaths to improved crosswalks, narrowed streets, lowered urban speed limits, and barriers that separate cars from bikes and pedestrians.
Sweden took a far different approach than conventional transportation planning, where "road users are held responsible for their own safety" according to the Vision Zero Initiative website. Swedish policy believes that to save lives, roads must anticipate driver, bicyclist, and walker errors, "based on the simple fact that we are human and we make mistakes."
This is similar to the Netherlands' Forgiving Roads policy, which has reduced traffic fatalities by 75 percent since the 1970s. In comparison, there's been less than a 20 percent reduction in the U.S. over the same period.
Utah, Minnesota, and Washington have adopted aggressive measures that are similar to Vision Zero to cut traffic deaths. All three states have seen traffic fatalities decline by 40 percent or more—25 percent better than the national average.
In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio won office last year on the promise of reducing traffic deaths in a city where someone is killed or seriously injured by a motor vehicle every two hours on average.
"The fundamental message of Vision Zero is that death and injury on city streets is not acceptable, and that we will no longer regard serious crashes as inevitable," he wrote in a letter to New Yorkers. "They happen to people who drive and to those who bike, but overwhelmingly, the deadly toll is highest for pedestrians—especially our children and seniors."
To save lives, roads must anticipate driver, bicyclist, and walker errors: "We are human and we make mistakes."
Traffic accidents are the largest preventable cause of death for children under 14 in New York, and the second highest cause of fatal injuries for people over 65.
In May, New York's city council passed 11 bills and six resolutions to implement de Blasio's Vision Zero Action Plan across many city departments.
The plan includes teaching street safety in schools; allowing the city legislature to lower speed limits to 25 mph; increasing police enforcement for speeding, failure to yield to pedestrians, and dangerous driving; and creating a permanent Vision Zero Task Force at City Hall.
According to walking and bike advocates, one of New York's biggest problems is that the police department focuses more resources on street crime than on street safety—even though in 2013, there were 356 traffic-related deaths (half of those killed were pedestrians or bicyclists), compared to 333 murders.
Advocates cheered when de Blasio chose as his police chief William Bratton, who has spoken out about the need to curb traffic injuries and deaths.
"It's really impressive what Mayor de Blasio has done," said Noah Budnick, deputy director of Transportation Alternatives. "He has put his money where his mouth is" by finding funding for street safety projects and increased police enforcement in an era of tight budgets.
After New York, San Francisco has advanced the farthest with Vision Zero planning. The city saw a near-record high of 25 pedestrian and bike fatalities last year. To combat the rising number of fatalities, Walk San Francisco and the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition launched the Vision Zero Coalition with the San Francisco School District and more than two dozen community organizations. Their mission is to encourage city officials to:
"Vision Zero is about changing the culture of our dangerous streets," wrote Nicole Schneider of Walk San Francisco and Leah Shahum of the San Francisco Bicyle Coalition. "[It] is also about empowering historically under-represented communities that are disproportionately burdened by traffic injuries."
The plan has already been endorsed by the San Francisco Police Department.
A number of local advocacy organizations around the country are working with the national Alliance for Biking and Walking to launch the Vision Zero Strategic Collaborative. The collaborative will push for these policies across the nation.
America is on the verge of a walking revolution. After many decades in which walking continually lost ground to other modes of transportation and recreation, there's growing interest about restoring walking as a way of life.
A diverse network of organizations came together last year at the first-ever walking summit to champion walking as one solution to our health care crisis (one-half hour of walking each day reduces the risk of many major diseases); as a tool for strengthening our hometowns (people out walking heighten the sense of community and security); and as a clear route to reducing climate change (more folks walking means less CO2 emissions).
"We won't increase walkability—which is good for people's and communities' health—until we make the streets more safe and comfortable for walking," said Katherine Kraft, America Walks' National Coalition Director and Coalition Director of Every Body Walk!
Vision Zero, Kraft says, is the path toward a better life for all of us.
Do I roll down my window and hold out some coins? Or pretend I don't see him?
Do I avoid eye contact because, deep down, seeing him forces me to confront a scary reality—that I, too, could wind up begging on the streets? Do I let his presence reinforce the common belief that poverty is inevitable, a timeless plight I cannot solve?
My stoplight turns green. Problem solved. For now.
Although not for the man with the hand-lettered sign, nor for about 47 million other Americans who live beneath the official poverty line, as well as under a daily judgment of failure.
The question today is: Whose failure?
In this storied "land of opportunity," where those who pull themselves up by their bootstraps are exalted, any failure to do just that is reflexively disparaged: "If you fail to succeed, then you must be lazy. You didn't try hard enough. So you deserve to sleep in a doorway downtown or maybe in a park."
Yet the official numbers reveal an altogether different reality: The vast majority in poverty are not those we see begging at stoplights. In 2012, 2.9 million Americans worked full-time jobs and still lived below the poverty line. Some 22 percent of our children live in poverty, and it's worse for African American youth—38 percent—and Hispanic children—34 percent.
You don't have to crunch many numbers to see that having a permanent underclass is neither natural nor inevitable but is, in fact, a choice our society has made. Consciously.
For the very wealthy, top marginal tax rates have been lowered from 91 percent, when Lyndon B. Johnson became president, to 39.6 percent by 2013 under President Obama's administration. Those were intentional changes to the tax code that widened the gap between the rich and the rest. And, starting around 1994, policy changes encouraged offshoring of U.S. jobs, and corporations moved to downsize domestic workforces, shrink wages, and destroy pensions.
Fifty years ago, President Johnson declared his War on Poverty. Yet, in less than a decade, demagogic politicians began refocusing the nation on a new foe. America's leaders retooled from our noble War on Poverty to a cynical war on crime. The term "criminal" came to mean poor people, usually with brown or black skin. If you were poor, you were not just the problem; you became the enemy.
"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning," explained Warren Buffet, the billionaire who became a traitor to his class by calling for higher taxes on the wealthy.
If we want to do something about poverty, our first step is crucial: Change the story. Stop believing the myths: that "we'll always have poor people" or that "the poor deserve their lot." Accepting these fictions will assure more poverty and send more money upward to transnational corporations and the superrich—who will spend it to further manipulate a political process that already has made inequality more extreme in America than in any other developed country.
This issue of YES! looks at strategies Americans can choose—or already are choosing—that can help us write a new story, one that shows how the wealthiest nation in history can choose to eliminate poverty, reduce inequality, and include all of us in a New American Dream.]]>
Because of this plant, the majority of the county's waste is composted or recycled.
Sevier County, Tennessee, is home to the twin tourist destinations of Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, and attracts more than 11 million visitors per year. Gatlinburg is a quaint mountain town packed with quirky stores, restaurants, moonshine shops, and an aquarium. Pigeon Forge is home to the Dollywood amusement park. These towns are poised at the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which covers roughly a third of the county.
Perhaps it's this proximity to the natural world that helped inspire Sevier County's unique approach to waste disposal. When it opened in 1991, the Sevier Solid Waste Composting Facility was one of the first in the world to use rotating drums, or "digesters," for breaking down compost. Because of this plant, the majority of the county's waste is composted or recycled. Today, it's still a rare breed.
"There's about 12 or so [composting facilities] in the world like this," explains Tom Leonard, general manager of Sevier Solid Waste. "Every one of them has gotten some design feature from here, because we're one of the oldest."
As we walk around the facility, Leonard points to a grassy rise in the distance. "That back there is our old Class 1 landfill, but we don't use it anymore."
About 100,000 tons of solid waste and treated sewage pass through this facility every year—and an astounding 70 percent is diverted from landfills by being composted or recycled. That's compared to 34.5 percent of all U.S. waste that was diverted in 2012, according to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. San Francisco, declared the greenest city in America by the Siemens Green City Index, recycled 77 percent of its waste in 2010, but was the only North American city of the 27 listed in the index to recycle more than Sevier County.
The county's waste diversion rate becomes even more impressive when Leonard explains that 99 percent of the county's waste is diverted from its Class 1 landfill—the most environmentally harmful type, requiring heavy lining to prevent runoff, careful regulatory oversight, and decades of maintenance. Garbage in these landfills is eventually covered up, but it never really goes away, Leonard says.
"I just don't like the word 'forever,' because that's a long time. So what we're doing is, we're stabilizing the material back down to its form, and our ultimate goal is not to put anything from this plant into a landfill."
"Our ultimate goal is not to put anything from this plant into a landfill."
Another unique component to Sevier County's approach: residents and businesses aren't required to separate recyclables from their daily waste. There are no recycling bins for home pickup, and the only items people are required to separate are construction and demolition materials, electronics, and tires. The separation of recyclables happens on the back end, as a part of the composting process. (While cardboard can be composted, citizens are asked to separate it because it makes more money for the county as recycled cardboard than as compost.)
In the end, this facility is financially self-sustaining, thanks in part to the money saved by not sending waste to a Class 1 landfill, where most non-recyclable waste in the U.S. ends up. A great deal of money is also saved on transporting garbage to landfills, which are often far away from pickup locations because of the challenges of finding affordable, usable land.
The facility also ensures that waste management is relatively affordable for the county and its cities; the cost of handling waste is $40 per ton, lower than the national average. In Sevier County, these costs are covered in part through a $12-per-month fee for curbside pickup. The Waste Business Journal reported that the average cost to place a ton of municipal solid waste into a landfill in 2012 was $44.23.
Meanwhile, individuals get free compost, with the rest being used for city and county projects such as road maintenance.
The tourist industry posed a unique dilemma when Sevier County administrators began seeking new waste disposal options in the late 1980s: "Because so much of our waste stream comes from our millions of visitors that come to the county every year, it's almost impossible to get them to recycle in the way that we'd need them to," explains Larry Waters, who has been Sevier County mayor since 1978. The county is home to nearly 94,000 people, a population dwarfed by the huge volume of tourists.
County administrators visited other sites where composting strategies had been implemented and ultimately contracted with Bedminster Bio-Conversion to build the original facility and operate it for the first few years.
Waters says that the county was the first to install a facility of this type. "We were pretty nervous about that—whether or not it was going to meet our needs and do what we needed it to do."
However, the Sevier County facility would soon become a model for other, similar composting plants throughout the world. What's more, the tourist industry proved to be a key advantage, since the high volumes of restaurant food waste are great for compost.
"For us, [composting and recycling] is not only the right thing to do, it financially makes sense for us to do it, so it's exciting."
Today, the Sevier Solid Waste Composting Facility receives visitors from around the globe, seeking to gain insights from what Sevier County has learned through trial and error. More efficient processes and technologies have been developed over the lifetime of the facility, and even today operators are always on the lookout for better approaches, Leonard says.
Constant improvement is on Leonard's mind as he guides me through the facility. We walk inside a huge structure covered with corrosion-resistant plastic, where broken-down materials are pulled from the ends of 185-foot-long cylindrical digesters that rotate slowly.
After three days, materials are pulled out of the digesters and placed onto a conveyor belt, which carries them into the next room. There, they'll be sifted for glass and recyclables, then laid out into windrows for roughly 37 days. Windrows are narrow, long piles of material that are turned regularly to improve aeration and aid the breakdown into compost.
For all the streamlining this process has undergone, Leonard is today preoccupied with resolving two problems: First, he needs to reduce the moisture in these massive rooms of windrowed compost—not so much that the microorganisms breaking down the compost die, but enough to make it easier to separate glass from the moist compost. It'll mean more glass recycling in the long run, and will increase the amount and quality of compost the facility can produce.
The second problem is how to make more efficient use of the plastics the facility collects. Many of them can be recycled, but there may be a more financially and environmentally efficient way to put them to use. Leonard believes this problem may soon be resolved with the type of innovative approach that has become the norm here. He hopes to sign a contract with the technology company PHG Energy soon, in the hopes of starting to convert used plastics into fuel within a year.
"We can produce about 6 megawatts of power from just our plastics," Leonard says, enough to power about 2,400 homes per year.
"For us, [composting and recycling] is not only the right thing to do, it financially makes sense for us to do it, so it's exciting," Leonard says.
About 300 tons of garbage a day pass through the 188,000-square-foot Sevier Solid Waste Composting Facility in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., and this tipping floor is where that garbage is first collected. The floor is enclosed by a woven, corrosion-resistant plastic. Garbage is funneled through five pits in the tipping floor and into up to five "digesters," which are long, cylindrical drums that rotate 24 hours a day.
"Paper, food waste, cardboard—anything that's organic can be broken down in our system," explains Tom Leonard, general manager of the facility. Biosolids from the local wastewater treatment plant are also mixed in, and help contribute to the microorganisms that will eventually break down waste into compost.
Leonard explains how the composting process gets started. The tipping floor is where municipal waste and biosolids from the wastewater treatment plant are first collected before they're funneled into rotating "digester" drums, which start the composting process.
Leading from the tipping floor to another enclosed structure, digesters rotate 24 hours a day. It takes three days for garbage to travel 185 feet along these drums. The three larger digesters are 14 feet in diameter, and two more measure 12 feet in diameter; all are slightly tilted toward the building where compost will eventually be removed.
"Basically, it's breaking up all those bags and allowing all that stuff to mix together, so now you can get all your organics, all your food waste and paper waste, all mixing together, and then the bugs can start working on that," Leonard explains. Microorganisms are naturally occurring in the garbage and sewage that enter the digesters. The process is aerobic, so air is blown into the digesters to keep the microorganisms alive and well.
The process of breaking down the waste creates a lot of energy, increasing temperatures in the middle of the digesters to between 160 or 170 degrees.
"They turn 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so about one revolution a minute," explains Leonard, showcasing the digesters that kick-start the composting process. The functionality of these digesters has been improved over the years through trial and error, and now they serve as models for composting plants around the world.
Leonard points out the ends of the digesters, where garbage is removed after three days of constant rotation. By this time, much of the garbage resembles compost, but large pieces of plastic, metal, and other items that can't be broken down into compost remain. The material that comes out of the digesters is transported by conveyer belt into the next room, where it's sifted to remove larger items.
Construction materials such as wire, carpet, hoses, and large pieces of plastic aren't allowed in everyday trash, since they can clog up the digester.
After the garbage is sifted, "there's no organics left," Leonard says. "It's inert material, so it goes into a Class 3 landfill, which takes construction, demolition, vinyl siding, plastic, glass windows." Leachate—runoff that has passed through waste and often carries elements and chemicals from that waste as a result—is minimal in Class 3 and Class 4 landfills, meaning these landfills are less harmful to the environment.
Most organic materials have started to break down into compost after three days in the digesters, but recyclables such as the metal can that Leonard is pictured with here still need to be sifted out. The conveyer belt to Leonard's right transports the materials to a primary trommel screen, which sifts the materials that come out of the digesters down to a 1-inch diameter. In this way, items like recyclable cans and plastics are separated.
After larger items are filtered out, remaining organics are laid out in windrows—long rows of compost pictured at left. Compost in the windrows will be turned twice a day over a period of about five weeks.
Leonard holds finely sifted compost after it's passed through a final trommel screen, which sifts down the compost to particles not larger than a quarter-inch in diameter. The sifting process helps to separate glass from the organic material. That glass can be recycled later. One of the biggest challenges the Sevier Solid Waste Composting Facility faces today is managing the moisture in the area of the windrows: it needs to be moist enough to keep the compost breaking down, but dry enough so that glass can be better separated from the compost. The better it separates, the more can be recycled.
Though cardboard can break down into compost, Sevier Solid Waste asks customers to separate it, since it has more value when sold for recycling. It can be sold at about $100 to $125 per ton. Sevier County has plenty of cardboard waste, too, because of the many restaurants catering to the county's large tourism industry.
After about 40 days, what was once considered trash has become finely sifted, nutrient-rich compost. "Sixty percent of everything that comes in goes out as compost … and is used on farms, goes back to the earth," explains Leonard, who is pictured holding the final product here. An added bonus: individuals can come and pick up bags of compost for free.
"That's one way the citizens can see that we can make something useful out of this waste," says Larry Waters, Sevier County mayor.]]>
The farmers, who came from Peru, China, and Bhutan, made plans to exchange plant varieties in an effort to protect the diversity of their crops in the face of an increasingly unpredictable climate. There were tons of great photos from the event that we were unable to include in the original article, so we've compiled a collection of them here.
The pictures below were taken by photojournalist Adam Kerby and offer more information about the gathering in Peru—as well as a peek into the lives of some of the farmers who attended.
A farmer from Yunnan Province, China, attends the biodiversity summit held in Peru in April 2014.
An administrator from the Cusco-based nonprofit Asociación ANDES accompanies Quechua farmers on a tour of the Parque de la Papa—22,000 acres of conserved land where more than 1,400 varieties of potatoes are grown.
A Bhutanese farmer and a translator learn about the agricultural technology of the ancient Incans while touring ruins near the town of Pisac.
A community leader from the Bhutanese district of Bumthang learns about local medicinal plants.
Quechua farmers conduct a ceremony to thank Pachamama, or Mother Earth, for the potato harvest.
A young Quechua girl thanks Pachamama for the harvest.
A Quechua woman collects wild medicinal plants.
A Quechua woman weaves fabric on a loom.
A Quechua woman displays blankets woven by the textile collective at Parque de la Papa.
A Quechua farmer harvests a mixed crop of corn and beans.
A Quechua farmer carries local varieties of corn and beans back to his home.
A Quechua farmer husks corn at home.
A Quechua farmer eats a meal of corn and beans at home. The fresh flowers are from his personal garden.
Quechua farmer Lino Mamani and his wife rest after climbing to the top of a local mountain peak.
I don't play the part of "normal mom" very well, nor do I play it often. My daughters Saoirse and Ula have been trained to sleep in, to afford me as many quiet pre-dawn silent work hours as possible. If they step into my office before 7:30 in the morning, they are met with a snarling beast. I expect them to make their own breakfasts. I refuse to drive them to ballet class or music lessons.
The director emailed me a copy of the script, and we'd be in touch so I could help Ula practice.
But once a year, I dig out my prepaid cellphone and charge it up. For one week in July, Saoirse and Ula are each allowed to attend one week of a summer camp, where they can experience some of the things our farm life doesn't allow. I cancel my morning writing sessions, ignore the farm as much as possible, and keep a calendar and clock in front of my nose at all times.
Then, so they can feel like real children on real schedules, I walk upstairs with my biggest steel bowl and bang on it with a wooden spoon at 6 a.m. while singing Irving Berlin's "Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning" until they drag their weary bodies out of bed. Then we race over the back roads and I deliver my children to their respective camps. On time.
This year, Saoirse went to spend a week practicing 19th century homesteading skills at The Farmers Museum. Ula, who has been dreaming of the stage for years now, chose a local theater camp, where the children would put on a production of "Anansi and the Moss-Covered Rock."
On Tuesday, camp was still fine for Saoirse. But when I retrieved Ula, the musical director met me at the sign-out sheet. "So we were wondering if Ula would be willing to play the part of Anansi in our play," she whispered. "She has great stage presence…"
From what I could tell, Ula was one of the youngest children in the group. My "normal mom" heart thumped with pride, and I said yes. We agreed that the director would email me a copy of the script, and we'd be in touch over the week so I could help Ula practice at home.
On the way back, we stopped at the gas station (an almost-daily occurrence during normal parenting week). There, we met our friend Matt. I rolled down the window to let Ula announce with joy her starring role. "We'll be at the show!" Matt called before pulling away.
When we got home, I sent an email to our neighbors, relatives, and friends. "Friday night, 6 p.m.," they were all told.
I dutifully printed off the script, and brought the rehearsal CD into the kitchen. Once the supper dishes were cleared, Ula and I practiced. She loved every minute of it, and threw her body and soul into rehearsing her solo. At 11 p.m. I put the script down and refused to let her continue.
"You must sleep!" I told her.
On Wednesday, the director emailed me a list of songs and lines that Ula was having trouble with. It was disturbingly long. That evening, my friend Alicia managed to leave three of her five children with her husband and came over for a girls' night.
Propping herself up on a stool in the kitchen, she poured herself a glass of wine, took a sip, and savored the taste. She smiled at me as I pulled the silk from some ears of sweet corn. But I kept my eyes on the clock as I tried to figure out when I was supposed to find the time to review Ula's lines before the next morning.
"Bet you're wishing she didn't get the part of Anansi," Alicia said. She was right. At this point, I was wishing Ula could play the moss-covered rock.
"I'm out of my league," I confessed. "She's too young to learn all this stuff and the show is in two days!"
A normal mom would have done a better job rehearsing with her children, I told myself.
"Yup." She gave me a knowing nod. "It's a little extra work for the kid and a lot extra work for the mom."
To his credit, Bob was actually the one left to do the rehearsing that time. On Thursday, he brought Ula home from camp in the farm truck.
"How'd it go?" I asked.
"I got stuff wrong," she said quietly. Her eyes were wide with fear. "I almost cried in front of everyone."
That night, she couldn't practice her part. I sat with her while she wept. How were we going to get through this? What did normal parents do?
Ula and I left early on Friday, and I put the rehearsal CD on the car stereo. "Why aren't you singing?" I asked as she gazed at me through the rear-view mirror.
"I want you to sing it with me."
"But the show is tonight! You need to be able to do it on your own!"
"Please? Will you just do it with me?"
I skipped to the part where she had the most difficult lines. "I'll say the part of the bush deer," I told her. "You say your Anansi lines."
We practiced, but she was quiet and hesitant. And her rehearsal didn't go much better. It was four hours before the show and the prompter had to feed her every line. My brave and brazen child suddenly couldn't raise her voice above a whisper. A normal mom would have done a better job rehearsing with her children, I told myself. A good mom wouldn't have let her daughter get in over her head.
But here we were. Over our heads. And there was nothing to be done about it. The rehearsal ended and all the children ran outside to play. I was helping to clean up when the director spoke.
"Well, your being here may have helped," she began.
"I'm sorry to intrude on your day," I said. "Ula was just so frightened."
"Well, I'm sorry too." She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. "She acts so mature. We just didn't realize how young she was."
"Maybe it will all change tonight," I said. "Maybe she just needs to feel what it is like to have an audience."
"Things usually go better than I expect them to," she said.
She must not be expecting much, I thought.
I didn't care if she sang beautifully. I didn't care if she forgot her lines. Just let her feel happy and fulfilled.
Ula and I got in the car to leave. I turned the ignition and the rehearsal CD began to play.
"Please, Mom! I can't!" Tears were coming down her face.
"But you've got to know it for tonight."
She stared out the window and half-heartedly mouthed the words as we drove. She was feeling like a failure. But in truth, I had failed her. I should have had her rehearse more, should have seen that she was too young for the part.
Every year, during this one week of camp, I see other families on the run, watch other mothers with their children, fill my gas tank three or more times in five days. It always brings us to the brink. All the driving. All the scheduling and coordinating. All the packed lunches. And now, all the rehearsing we should have done. I try to understand how other people do it. But here we were, three and a half hours before a play, and my kid was going to ruin the show for everyone owing to my ineptitude as a normal mother.
To hell with it, I decided. Time to do things my own way. I turned off the stereo and swung the car over to the side of the road, then down to the park along the creek.
"What are we doing, Mom?"
"Magic," I answered. "We're doing magic." I thought about Dumbo's feather, the one the crow gave him that was supposed to be magical and give him the power to fly. Ula unbuckled her car seat while I ran around opening all the doors, digging under seats and scrounging through the trunk, finding anything I could to make magic for my 7-year-old.
I found a lollipop from our last trip to the bank in the glove compartment. I found a container of salt in my lunch bag. I dug out half of an organic, fair trade bar of dark chocolate.
"I don't care what they think. We need magic. Let's go."
As I searched, I wracked through my mental rolodex of deities we could pray to. The Christian God? No, too hierarchical. The Virgin Mary? No, too unfamiliar. The Greek god Zeus? No, too much thunder and drama. Fairies? No, too prone to play tricks.
I tried a focus on the time of year. My Aunt Kimmie is Wiccan and once mailed me a hand-written letter where she wrote out the Eight-Spoked Wheel of the Year, outlining all the festival days. We were at the end of July. Just this morning I had picked that letter off the top of my desk clutter, and I remembered that this was the time of Lughnasadh, the Celtic Fire Festival that marked the beginning of the harvest. It was a time to honor the God Lugh, the Celtic deity of many skills. That could work.
I grabbed Ula by the hand and led her down to the creek bank. I handed her the chocolate bar.
"Here. Break this up and throw it into the creek!"
"But Mommy, this is your favorite chocolate!"
"Rituals require sacrifice," I assured her. With glee, she broke up the chocolate and tossed it across the flowing water. I joined her in the dispersal.
"We offer this gift for the god Lugh!" I called out.
"We offer this gift," she repeated, "for the god … Lou?" She turned to me. "Who's Lou?"
Confidence mattered more than than anything else. "Lugh is the Irish god of many skills," I said with as much authority as I could muster. "You need many skills tonight, and—lucky for us—this is the time of his festival so he's extra strong right now."
"We offer this gift to the god Lugh," she said.
"Now stand still!" I told her. "It's time to make you a protective circle!"
A few boys were fishing a little ways down stream.
"Mommy? Are those boys watching us?"
"What are they thinking?"
"I don't care what they think. We need magic. Let's go."
Ula closed her eyes and stood still. I opened my vial of salt and made a circle around her. "I make this circle of salt so that you may feel protected and safe," I said.
"But I can't stay in this circle all night. We have a play."
"The circle is symbolic," I said. "The protection will follow you even when you step out of it."
The answer seemed to suffice. She closed her eyes and let me proceed.
"And on this day, we pray to the god Lugh," I continued. "And we ask for his gifts this night. For courage, for imagination…."
She repeated each phrase after me. There should be at least three things, I thought to myself.
It wasn't just Ula's first time going through this. It was my first time through, as a parent.
"For joy!" I shouted.
"For joy!" she said, with the fullest voice I'd heard thus far.
"Now Ula," I instructed her. "Step outside your circle, and know that its protection follows you." Cautiously, she stepped outside and looked at me. Normal moms would be going over lines and rehearsing songs, I thought. Maybe later.
"I want you to think," I went on, "think about each of your fears. And I want you to pick up one stone for each fear. Call it out, then throw it away into the water."
She stared down at the ground, then selected two stones. Looking out over the widest part of Fox Creek, she wound her arm behind her, then bellowed out "Fear of failure!" and pitched it as far as she could.
"That fear is now washed away," I said.
She wound up with the second stone. "Embarrassment!" she yelled. And she threw.
My eyes were filled with tears. "Your embarrassment is washed away," I said.
I handed her the bits of crumbled up lemon lollipop. "Now give him this."
"Isn't that littering?"
"It's dessert."
She watched the water a little longer. I looked around at the ground in search of something to give her in a medicine bundle. Someone had dropped three beads from a fishing lure. "Here," I called her attention to them. "Hold these in your hand until we can get home and find you a medicine bag."
"What's that?"
"They are gifts from Lugh to remind you that he's helping you tonight."
"It looks like litter."
"But there are three? See? This one is for courage," she held her palm open to receive it. "And this one is for imagination, and this one," I dropped the last into her hand, "is for joy. So you will have fun tonight."
I spoke with conviction, but my mama's heart was rattled with fear on her behalf. "Time to go," I said, pointing her in the direction of the car. As she scuttled off I turned back to the creek.
"Please," I whispered. I didn't care if she sang beautifully. I didn't care if she forgot her lines.
"Just let her feel happy and fulfilled," I asked. And there was nothing more I could do.
I was pacing about outside the theater when Bob came in. I shook my head when he gazed at me with questioning eyes. "It doesn't look good," I said when Ula was safely out of earshot.
"Crap," he muttered.
"I think she needs to see familiar faces." Bethany, another friend whose daughter was in the cast, walked up to me. "Why are you looking so nervous?" she asked, cool and calm in the face of the performance.
"Ula's ready to throw up," I said. "And therefore, so am I."
She hugged me. "It's a rite of passage," she said. "This is a big night for her."
We nosed and nudged our way to the front of the line, then charged into the theater, grabbing the front row for ourselves. A few minutes later, in came Grammie and Pop Pop. And then her Aunt Erin, Uncle Matt, and her cousins, Evie and Tick. Following them was Matt from the gas station, along with his wife Nancy. I peered around the dark room. It was filled with the faces of people who love my little girl.
The lights came up. Children came out singing, holding puppet monkeys, lions, elephants, rhinoceroses, and zebras. Then the stage fell quiet. All the children looked to the back corner and waited. And then she came around the corner. Around her neck I could see the yarn that held her hidden medicine bundle. Her eyes searched the audience and found mine. We locked gazes, and she smiled broadly. Then she began creeping across the stage like Anansi, the spider.And then it was time for her solo.
And she froze.
The prompter fed her the first line.
And the second line.
She chimed in a bit on the third line. Then a bit more on the fourth.
She sang the next verse by herself, then pretended to fall asleep, just as she was supposed to do, according to the script. And the audience—nearly half of which was her friends and family by this point—burst into applause.
I watched her body tremble in response. She looked up from her slumber in surprise and shock. That was real applause. For her.
And that was it. She became Anansi the spider. Sure, she forgot lines. She forgot where on the stage she was supposed to be. She needed quite a few reminders from the prompter. A few times, she crossed her legs and grabbed herself as though maybe she needed to pee. But the tears poured down my eyes every second of that 25-minute production. Not because she was making mistakes … but because she was loving every minute of it. And the applause never stopped coming.
Bethany had been correct; the experience was a rite of passage. Ula couldn't stop smiling when the play was done. She was smothered with hugs, decorated with flowers, showered with kisses. But just before those lights came up for the play, she'd had her darkest hour. And by forcing herself to confront that, she was now basking in light.
But it wasn't just Ula's first time going through this. It was my first time through, as a parent. I don't suppose praying to Celtic gods and sprinkling lollipops and chocolate into creeks count as normal coping mechanisms, but I consider it a gift from the gods that all of Ula's friends and family came out to surround her during that dark hour. I consider it a gift from the gods that they filled the room with smiles and applause, sending her the courage and joy that she needed to face her fears.
"She came through!" The director sang out as we cleaned up after the show. "You were right! She just needed to feel that audience!"
She turned to Ula. "How was that?" she asked.
"Piece of cake," Ula said, waving her hand in dismissal. "Mommy? Can we sign up for theater camp next week too?"
"Forget it!"
One week in the life of normal is enough for me.
Some commentators see Germany's move as proof that organizing against the new round of trade agreements is gaining ground.
The deal is called the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, or CETA. It's part of a new wave of large, aggressive trade deals that also includes the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the United States and the European Union, and the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) between 12 countries of the Pacific Rim.
If all the deals passed, they would affect more than half of the world's economy. But the red light from Germany could signal that these agreements are not as inevitable as their advocates suggest.
Germany's objections are centered specifically on the so-called "investor-state dispute settlement" provisions in CETA. These provisions—also known by the acronym ISDS—allow transnational corporations to take legal action against individual governments if they believe that the country's domestic laws violate a trade agreement. And the legal disputes happen through arbitration, which is a way to settle disputes completely outside of the involved countries' courts.
We've seen this movie before. Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) stipulates that three-person panels of private attorneys decide who wins in disputes between corporations and individual governments. These proceedings are closed to public observation.
The fallout has been dramatic: Corporations have used the NAFTA tribunals to win big-ticket monetary settlements from the taxpayers of nations whose domestic laws interfere with corporate profits. According to a report by the consumer-rights advocacy group Public Citizen, there are 17 pending claims in which corporations are seeking a total of $38 billion through NAFTA and other deals.
The compensation won through these claims hits particularly hard in Argentina—the most frequent target of these cases according to a 2014 report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. In one example, Argentina was ordered to pay $185.3 million to the energy company BG Group, who sued for profits lost when the country froze gas prices in 2001.
Argentina is not alone: another report by the same U.N. group shows that 66 percent of investor-state cases initiated in 2012 were brought against "developing or transition economies":
Meanwhile, the number of corporate claims has been on the rise: The UNCTD's report from 2014 shows that in 2002 there were fewer than 100 known treaty-based ISDS cases. By 2013, that number had reached 568—a five-fold increase over 11 years:The cases settled through NAFTA's dispute resolution tribunals show corporate and investor rights trumping national sovereignty and domestic laws. Exxon Mobil won $60 million from Canada in 2007 because local regulations required oil companies to pay to support research and development in the country's poorest provinces. U.S. energy company Lone Pine Resources is seeking CA$250 million in damages because the firm "expended millions of dollars and considerable time and resources" on a fracking project before Quebec banned fracking in 2011—a decision Lone Pine called "arbitrary" and "capricious."
Opposition to these provisions is not limited to the political left. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, has taken issue with investor-state dispute provisions in trade agreements like the TPP and TTIP. The institute's Free Trade Bulletin argued in March that investor-state dispute settlements are "an unnecessary, unreasonable, and unwise provision to include," and suggests sacrificing the provision in order to save the trade agreements.
Germany is no stranger to similar dispute settlements. After the country decided to phase out nuclear power following the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in 2011, the Swedish energy firm Vattenfall filed for arbitration to seek €3.5 billion ($4.6 billion) in damages, blaming the country for past and future loss of profits.
Not everyone is convinced by the messages coming out of Berlin.
Considering how that worked out, Germany's change of heart is perhaps to be expected. But some commentators see the move as proof that global organizing against the new round of trade agreements is gaining ground. Arthur Stamoulis, director of the Citizens Trade Campaign, noted that "The German government and other governments are starting to feel the heat from public opposition to [investor-state dispute settlements]."
Yet not everyone is convinced by the messages coming out of Berlin. Peter Fuchs, executive director of PowerShift, a Berlin-based NGO focused on international trade and investment policy, expressed skepticism toward the idea that German opposition will sink CETA.
"Unfortunately, you cannot trust this government at all when corporate interests are at stake," Fuchs said, calling the German government "a staunch proponent of neoliberal trade and investment agreements."
According to Fuchs, this is a time for the public to ramp up pressure by calling on politicians to reject the trade deals. He pointed to the upcoming European Citizens Initiative against TTIP and CETA as one campaign aimed at making that happen.
However seriously one takes Germany's apparent about-face, the development has emboldened the fight against the agreement. And with a growing chorus of skeptics from both left and right, these problematic provisions seem newly vulnerable, as do the agreements overall.
As Arthur Stamoulis told YES, "With renewed activism, corporate power grabs like CETA, TTIP and the TPP … really can be stopped."]]>
Pierre Paslier is an artist and engineer who created a set of high-tech DIY tools to help activists get their message out. He doesn't identify as an activist himself—but through his experiences creating Banksy-inspired street art and participating in a handful of Greenpeace demonstrations, he began to wonder if he could use his own skills to help people spread their political messages more beautifully and effectively.
"The people were focused on the message they were sharing, but not so much the way they were spreading it."
Paslier hopes that his creations will inspire visitors to design their own tools for activism.
"I've always been fascinated by the creative ways street artists challenge the dominance of advertisement in the city," he said in an interview with YES! "I was interested in how ugly graffiti would be cleaned straight away, but how clever and good-looking stencils would stay and people would talk about it."
When he moved to London for graduate school, Paslier got acquainted with the local community of street artists and activists. Those conversations inspired him to find a way to help make their work more impactful.
"I started to realize that often in small activist communities, most actions relied on giving flyers in the street or writing on posters," he said. "The people were very focused on the message they were sharing, but not so much the way they were spreading it."
Paslier wanted to change that. He started by doing research, talking to activists from Greenpeace, Amnesty International, and a handful of smaller organizations to find out which techniques and tools they found most effective. He also worked with them to brainstorm a list of qualities that new tools would need to have, such as replicability, affordability, and anonymity. And with those qualities in mind, he created a set of four tools called the StreetToolbox.
In June 2014, he published the prototypes on a web page where people can freely download instructions on how to build the tools. Paslier hopes that his creations will inspire visitors to design their own tools for activism and add them to the "toolbox."
"These tools are a fun use of the technology that's emerging for regular people," said Bill Moyer, executive director of the activist support-group Backbone Campaign.
Read on to learn about the first four tools in the project.
"OpenSquare" is a remote controlled toy car fitted with a plastic funnel-shaped container filled with sand. The car can be pre-programmed to drive in a set pattern and pour colored sand onto a flat surface to form words or symbols—for example, the logo of the Pirate Party, or a message like "Don't Frack NY."
Musical note - OpenSquare from pierre paslier on Vimeo.
"Flying Flyer" is a helicopter-style drone for peaceful protest. It's a small craft with a wire armature that lets it post stickers and decals in hard-to-reach places.
A CEO's office window? A high-up point visible to a crowd of protesters beneath? It's all possible with Flying Flyer. Bill Moyer at Backbone Campaign stressed that drones should be used with care because these flying crafts sometimes crash; that can be dangerous if there are people around.
"In the right context, where you have a controlled environment and you're not endangering anyone, it could be a very effective tactic," he said.
Flying Flyer from pierre paslier on Vimeo.
"Fade" creates a light show on the wall of a building. First, the wall is coated with transparent phosphorescent spray paint. Then a portable laser projector draws a bright-blue repeating message on the phosphorescent surface. Think of it as temporary, dynamic graffiti—and it packs a surprising visual punch after dusk.
This could be used to write a slogan on the wall of a shopping center, a bank, or an office building. But be careful with this one—you'll want to obtain prior written permission from the owner of the building or you could face legal action.
Fade from pierre paslier on Vimeo.
"Revolution" is a mod for your bicycle that allows you to print a message on the street along your morning route (or anywhere else that's bike-accessible). Stamp-like letters are attached to the wheel with a simple zip-tie system, and an ink pad is attached next to the wheel. The manual release allows the rider to choose when and where to activate the printing system.
"The Revolution mod could be used in a really targeted way," especially if used with washable and biodegradable ink, said Emily Johnston, media coordinator for environmental group 350 Seattle.
Revolution - Streettoolbox from pierre paslier on Vimeo.
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