The Age of McStupid®™. The Film Review

Pete's Draggin'

Last night, I watched British writer-director Franny Armstrong’s most recent film The Age of Stupid. Armstrong previously co-directed the 2005 doc McLibel (1997, 2005) with Ken Loach, on the  famous 10-year McDonald’s libel trial in the UK. A long-time environmentalist and a self-proclaimed vegetarian at the age of 11, Armstrong read zoology at Camden College, where her thesis was ‘Is the human species suicidal?’  She recently told The Guardian “I read it again recently. It was the blueprint for this film.”

The film in question is the new, provocatively- titled “The Age of Stupid”. The documentary on the topic of climate change, has been in some stage of planning and production for the last six years. It was financed largely through 228 investor shares ranging between 5,000₤ and 35,000₤ in a bank-skirting “crowd-funding” scheme, and with an immense crew of 108. It also had a very dramatic opening screening, as it was simultaneously beamed via satellite to 65 cinemas,  making it technically the largest opening screening of all time. Couple this with an innovative self-distribution process, and the film looks perhaps more interesting behind the scenes than in front.

The feature-length film consists of interviews with people in seven locations around the world, including India, France, England, Nigeria, Jordan, Iran and the US. The interviewees range from an 83-year old French eco-tour guide, to a young entrepreneurial Nigerian nursing student, a frustrated British wind farm engineer (he has trouble selling the idea of wind energy to people who value ‘the view’ and ‘property values’  over sustainability), a recently-retired American geologist who worked for big oil, two pre-teen Iraq War refugees play-acting war games, and Jeh Wadia, an Indian low-cost airline magnate. The recurring, fast-paced snippets of interviews and tv news reports are book-ended by 3-d animated sequences as well as straight live-action fiction sections that set the film as coming from the perspective of a media archivist (played by actor Pete Postlethwaite ), in the year 2055. Apparently, this futuristic framing device was added rather late in the film-making process. Armstrong conceded in the same Guardian article that  “we had a pretty much finished the film about a year ago, but when I watched it, I wasn’t happy. I’d taken all these people’s money and it wasn’t good enough. So we brainstormed and decided to introduce a fictional element.”

Unfortunately, while the film’s main aim is admirable, and while it does ‘work’ in its chosen look — the whole film is infused with an internet searchbot aesthetic — spectacle overtakes content. And this, starting from the first frame: the explosive computer-animated Big Bang, with all of evolution following a sped-up timeline ranging from 13 Billion years ago to the year 2055, forming the 90-second title sequence.  As the apocalyptic archivist surfs his intranet’s historical documents from inside his lighthouse/oil rig Museum of Mankind, the 3-d computer animated dystopia around him is revealed to be in ruins, flooded, or on fire. While maintaining a somewhat crazed and alarmed look on his face, the well-kept archivist channel-surfs and fast-forwards his way through various news reports on the causes and effects of climate change. The film-maker feels it’s necessary to advise us in the pre-credit sequence that whereas “[t]he future climate events portrayed in this film are based on mainstream climate projections”, ” [e]verything from the present day and the past is real news and documentary footage”.

The poignant interviews with the French Fernand Pareau living near Mont Blanc, who laments the glacier’s shrinking seven meters each year, are greatly diminished and rendered cartoony themselves through their juxtaposition with other 2-d computer animation and simulated computer game-like interactivity sequences throughout the film.  That said, those cartoon sequences do in themselves effectively explain the magnitude of the problem of climate change due to overuse of fossil fuels, and nicely illustrate  the Global Cap concept, depicting the plan to reduce and finally bring an end to fossil fuel use in a socially-equitable way, by the year 2065. The film’s closing credit sequence quickly presents more emission equivalencies between nationalities,  while addressing the urgency of public pressure, as the important agreement  may be signed in December 2009 in Copenhagen. The overloaded frame also provides a link to this film’s web-activist persona at http://notstupid.org/

Most of the characters interviewed, like the now-retired American geologist Alvin DuVernay , are shown trying to make a living in a world that values only money, and only money right now. Under the surface, though, the well-heeled Indian entrepreneur Jeh Wadia, the Hurricane Katrina survivor geologist joins Piers Guy, a British wind farm engineer, and Layefa Malini a Nigerian nursing student who “wants to be famous” and “live like an American”, all reveal aspects of our individual attempts to work within the unchanging top-down socio-economic structure, while at the same time the planet itself dramatically changes before our eyes. It’s not very surprising then, that Ms. Malini finds relative financial success only when she starts selling petrol as opposed to petrol-polluted fish. It’s not shocking that geologist Alvin DuVernay ‘would do it [work for the oil industry for 30 years ] all again’, because, hey– you have to work! It’s also very logical that the residents of Cornwall reject even a reduced and less obtrusive plan for a wind farm with a 10-to-1 vote against it.

There is a real crisis in value and social responsibility here that is subtly addressed through most of the interviews, but they get lost when dropped amidst the film’s rampant pace and eclectic visuals. There is really no time for contemplation on why humanity is doing what it does. The supposedly over-arching thesis: ‘Is the human race itself suicidal?’ is in the end partially revealed to be just another way to maintain an irresponsible business-as-usual attitude.  While on the practical side of things, of course, one imagines that the film’s special effects and framing devices were added to increase the entertainment value that have become a part of the financially successful ‘pop-documentary’ canon, as seen through the recent works of Michael Moore (Sicko, Fahrenheit 9/11), Davis Guggenheim/Al Gore (An Inconvenient Truth), Peter Joseph (Zeitgeist, and its addendum) and Morgan Spurlock (Supersize Me, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden). In the end (or as the film shamelessly posits it: “The End?”), I feel that despite the innovative attempts to finance and distribute the film in a way that by-passes the dominant financial systems, in a world where the media has been ‘dumbed down’ enough, it looks like, if anything, The Age of Stupid reveals that it too is caught in that same crisis. But maybe the documentary film is as suicidal as the rest of us.

Doing it for ourselves.

Rabideye: encaustic on wood panel. 2008 Always-already inspired by the environment

Last night I attended the first Malaspina Land Conservancy (MLC) Annual General Meeting held at Vancouver Island University’s Powell River Campus. As a guest, I learned a lot more about the non-profit (and soon-to-be charitable) organization that started up about 15 months ago. They are now affiliated with the better-known The Land Conservancy of British Columbia (TLC), which covers all of BC. The MLC’s President, Janet Alred, displayed their new logo (below) and reviewed their wide-ranging  goals that include wanting to provide a way for land owners and conservationists in the Powell River region to access their assistance in order to donate or bequeath land to them, and to allow the Conservancy to purchase of land that they feel is environmentally, agriculturally, historically or socially valuable. Another aspect to their important work is their assistance to land-owners who want to place Conservation Covenants on their property, and that’s what I’ll focus on below.

A Conservation Covenant or Easement: “restricts real estate development, commercial and industrial uses, and certain other activities on a property to a mutually agreed-upon level.”  The land in question remains the private property of the landowner, and this legal restriction on the land can be maintained perpetually, if that is what the land owner wishes. The owner can choose to protect the land for specific uses only (i.e. as a park, or as a protected fishing area, etc.), so the range of possibility there is great! Some cool folks came across from Texada Is. where they are figuring out whether to start their own homegrown land conservancy or join an already existing one. This is another side of conservation that I rarely see: where people who already own land, choose what will happen to it while they are living and beyond, for the good of present and future generations. In a time when people concerned for the environment are largely trying to deal with the many, many battles over the (mis)use of private, Crown and corporately-owned lands and the effect on the surrounding ecosystem,  it’s refreshing to see that there are other — and in many ways easier — ways to preserve land as well. Of course, not everyone has the financial ability to own environmentally valuable land, but the MLC now provides a way to jointly purchase land, and place covenants on this, together.

Oh, and what a great example and incentive for all our levels of government, too! One imagines that it wouldn’t be such a stretch to ask for governments to conserve Crown land that happens to rest between two privately-protected plots with covenants on them.

One way people will care more for the land is for them to become more familiar with it and how it affects our well-being. Lesley Thorsell was another guest at the AGM last night. She revealed her “Naturally in Nature” 2010 Calendar project featuring amazing photos of local people in the buff in local natural settings, taken by local photographers. Profits from the tastefully-done calendar will  go both to the MLC and also to help fight breast cancer. This would make a great Christmas gift, no? You can buy the calendar online or at Breakwater Books and elsewhere in and around town. Check it out:

Naturally In Nature 2010 Calendar

2010 Calendar

Spectacle and its malcontents

spectacle

It comes up often enough, but lately less so: my so-called ‘TV rant’. Maybe it was the (by now-viral) report that came out two weeks ago regarding the statistic that Americans on average spend more than 8 hours a day watching television. This apparently always-increasing figure doesn’t include internet and computer-based gaming. But while it could be argued that with the financial climate as it is, the west is looking for consolation in the escapism and spectacle, it remains unnerving to me that at a time when taking care of each other and nurturing community while acquiring useful practical skills in the face of environmental, public health and financial doom is more important than ever, we’re stuck on the ‘tube’. There are probably many causes that feed into this statistic: joblessness and lower levels of disposable income, being two factors that are keeping people at home more (assuming they still have a home). But the overwhelmingly upward trend in TV viewership in the US and Canada has been discussed for years by media critics and organizations. One important figure named Guy Debord, in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle*, presented a manifesto against what he saw as the encroaching dumbing-down of culture through the proliferation of commercial mass media. Much like his predecessor Walter Benjamin in his 1935 essay “The Word of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Debord poetically rails against the dehumanizing aspects he sees as inherent to the automation of everything in society, where value is reduced to spectacle due to its ability to generate capital.

so, what are YOUR cumes? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cume)

Many others, including Mark Crispin-Miller and Jerry Mander added their voices to the argument in the 1970’s and 80’s. Mander’s provocatively-titled book “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television” presents his case that:

[...] the technology of television is not a neutral, benign instrument or tool. The author argues that in varied technologies and institutions such the military, automobiles, nuclear power plants, mass production, and advertising, the basic form of the institution and the technology determines its interaction with the world, the way it will be used, the kind of people who use it, and to what ends.

1. The author’s first argument is that while television may seem useful, interesting, and worthwhile, at the same time it further boxes people into a physical and mental condition appropriate for the emergence of autocratic control.
2. The second argument concerns the emergence of the controllers. That television would be used and expanded by the present powers-that-be was inevitable, and should have been predictable at the outset. The technology permits of no other controllers.
3. The third argument concerns the effects of television upon individual human bodies and minds, effects which fit the purposes of the people who control the medium.
4. The fourth argument demonstrates that television has no democratic potential. The technology itself places absolute limits on what may pass through it. The medium, in effect, chooses its own content from a very narrow field of possibilities. The effect is to drastically confine all human understanding within a rigid channel. What binds the four arguments together is that they deal with aspects of television that are not reformable. -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction

Taking these ideas a bit further, one stumbles across the social conditions that have caused television and/or spectacle to become so successful, such as (sub)urban planning that keeps people apart and community-enhancing activities distant and hard to get to without cars. Plus, it’s getting really expensive to get your spectacle fix elsewhere these days. Another aspect of this situation is the inability for many to distinguish between real artistic expression and what is basically advertising fodder, largely due to the homogeneity of mass-produced TV (and increasingly, film) culture.

More recently, the Vancouver-based non-profit magazine Adbusters along with others like Screentime (aka tvturnoff.org) have helped keep up a pro-active protest against the media tsunami. Adbusters’  “tv-turn off” and “digital detox” week campaigns and media toolkits help address the insidious and environmental aspects of television. The methods and visual language used by Adbusters is not unproblematic in its mimicking the methods of that which it critiques. That said, it is arguable that using methods to communicate that do not approach the slickness of for-profit mass media, can even enter the current consciousness.

As an experiment, you can try the ‘detox’ method anytime you like. Turn it off and leave it off for at least two weeks. Throw a nice piece of fabric over the screen and unplug your tv all together. You may notice how much tv affects your moods and temperament, and how much more free time you have. This can translate into walks outside, visiting or making new friends, reduced mindless TV-snacking, more conversation in the home, more winter gardening, increased arts and craft production, and more reading! Never mind how much more peaceful your life can be without TV’s clownish, violent and hyper-real influence.

*(read an English translation of Guy Debord’s entire book online here for free).

Huge amounts of material critical of television can be found at http://www.turnoffyourtv.com/ as links. Also, check out their podcast: http://www.turnoffyourtv.com/radio/

Looking to the beyond…

Doing the walk

I was in Montreal for almost all of September trying to attend to my parents’ needs. My father had a small heart attack that happened to also exacerbate his advanced dementia/Alzheimer’s-like condition. Apart from the alarming mental degeneration, the attack affected his ability to walk, for the first time. My father is a walker, having come to this pass-time rather late in his life, he’d walk daily, and for hours on end. To see him unable to get up and walk by himself was difficult for us all. No matter how much we wished that the day wouldn’t come when he couldn’t walk, it came anyhow. The signs were all there, and we were told to prepare for the inevitable, but we hoped it would turn out otherwise. Of course, it’s human nature to put up with things over which we feel we have little or no control, until we just can’t anymore. Along a not dissimilar vein, I was listening to the C-Realm Podcast the other day, when an idea I had encountered before somehow gained new resonance with me.

In episode 173, the program’s host (KMO) was engaging in conversation with James Howard Kunstler (he also has a podcast) when the idea came up: The real possibility of a massive human, animal and vegetable die-off due to the effects of dramatic climate change or any of the other doomsday scenarios, is starting to gel for some people. The value in engaging in activities that reduce the amount of energy we use and waste we produce will not really effect any real change to the cultural mindset or to the environment right now, because the great masses will do what they are doing until they can’t anymore (and not by choice).  But rather than despair at the ineffectual and even cynical ‘green’ efforts around us, maybe there is some transitioning value in, for example, learning to do without plastic bags. The value in conservation, reduction and repurposing as well as in setting up new social infrastructures like community gardens, intentional communities, co-ops and barter systems may simply be to provide working models. These small-scale functioning examples or patterns of ‘another way to be’ would serve as templates for the remaining society after the ‘great fall’. What might seem like tiny steps when measured against the task of reversing the ill effects we’ve inflicted upon the environment and humanity, might actually be large shifts in consciousness that will make us more resilient to dealing with the damage ahead.

Everybody Knows It (but nobody’s saying)

Revolution: It's what's for dinner

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died

-excerpt from Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows”

It’s often heard that we live in a ‘culture of consumption’. And yes, as we all know in North America, we consume more per capita than anyone else, ever. But the ‘culture’ part of the term also implies that our identities are linked and maybe even formed by consumption. Even our self-value as derived from employment as producers is ever-diminishing, while what we can call ‘consumption-enabling’ and service jobs that can’t easily be outsourced, are always increasing.

The world-wide free trade environments necessarily feature products emerging from dramatically different settings where standards of living, minimum wages, work ethics, education, labour, environmental and health laws that are essentially impossible for the average shopper to navigate. The system’s complexity serves its purpose, whether intentional or not: when faced with what’s presented as basically unknowable, we lose interest and measure value by price alone. Everybody knows it. Most of us in (over-)developed nations are managing to attain a lifestyle unrivaled in history, and as such, we have logically become the model for every so-called ‘civilized society’ in the world today. The idea that we are still using the colonial model, but as applied to finished products coming from abroad, instead of the more traditional import of natural resources, is rarely addressed. The genius of the capitalist status quo is that it’s able to accommodate, repackage and sell even critiques of the system itself, to itself.

So, having outsourced the actual production of almost everything we use, many of our resulting jobs are geared towards trying to covertly and overtly sway, coerce and (at worst) swindle each other into paying the asking price for products or services we decide as a culture that we need and even deserve. We have had to even become experts at generating need where none exists naturally, selling things to each other and devising legal structures whereby we are able to use realize our fullest potential for consumption, as via credit. Of course, the mass media has always expertly adapted to our expanding tolerance for the reshaping of our value system, and we have arguably attained such synergy with corporate goals, that we have almost completely transformed from citizens with responsibilities, into infantilized consumers.

What does it really mean to our system of self-value, that we are ‘consumers’ first? How do we really feel about being willing versions of factory farm animals, meant to consume as much as we are given, and in turn feed the corporate machine in which we blindly invest? From the looks of it, we’re pretty comfortable with this closed system, largely because the real ill effects occur elsewhere in the producer countries, or are imposed upon our natural environments that are sacrificed to the mantra of increased employment. That is, we’re happy except for that ill-defined, nagging feeling that we’re unhappy: that ‘broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died’.

But what if deep down, we all know we have made ourselves expendable, that we’ve lost confidence and pride in our ability to take care of our most basic needs for food, clothing and shelter in favor of our designing high-tech ways to market foreign-made products. Our disconnection from what we eat or use comes from an ambivalence toward its quality, anonymity, uniformity, its real usefulness and ultimate value in our lives. The result is a rupture between what we buy and who we are, and once we recognize that we are most certainly not what we buy, the better off we will be. In the meantime, we’re caught in a crisis of value through which we are compelled to either self-medicate, or (ironically) further buy our way out of. But if we see the economic environment for what it is: an artificial construction built over many years and through hundreds of hours of value(s)-generating media exposure, we can begin to learn to recognize our neighbours and revaluate our very existence: maybe Buddhahood is just around the corner from MacDo.

Buddha di Tante Belle Cose (Buddha of so many nice things)

Plateau Mont-Royal/Mile End: Evolving Streetlife

Typical Plateau Alley

I have just returned from a trip to Montreal, and in the spirit of James Howard Kunstler’s weekly podcast (subscribe through http://www.kunstlercast.com/) I tried to re-examine my hometown to see what is it that makes that old Mile End/ Plateau Mont-Royal area “so different, so appealing?” (to coin Richard Hamilton). Montreal, like most large and older cities, is a city of neighbourhoods that range from the ultra suburban to the nitty gritty downtown experience. But even the poorer areas tend not to be as slummy as most cities this size for various reasons including the fact that it’s in Canada. One of the nicest aspects of this particular naighbourhood is its lanes and not overly-wide tree-lined streets. It seems to be a constant in Urban Design that this design pattern is just naturally pleasant, but it remains a sad mystery to me why the concept is consistently set aside in favour of extra-wide streets providing two lanes of two-way traffic as well as another two lanes of parking, with no room for trees. Today, we seem to design streets to enable views, to accommodate the grossly unsustainable one-car-per-person model, and to further alienate ourselves from  the environment and from our neighbours.

This older, dynamic neighbourhood is a cultural mix of Hasidic Jews, French Canadians, Anglos, newer Spanish-speaking immigrants, and (to an ever-decreasing extent) Greeks, Portuguese and Italians. Mile End was where Mordecai Richler grew up, and the area he often wrote about in his books. Both my parents worked in the now-decimated clothing manufacturing industry in this area. They clearly remember buying live chickens on St. Laurent Boulevard (a.k.a The Main) and having the famous smoked meat sandwiches or bagels for lunch on special occasions. Yet this area was seen by their generation and culture as somehow just a landing point for immigrants.The goal was always to move into suburban areas. And when that area also became ‘urban’, to keep moving farther and farther away to areas advertised as country-living; sub-divisions that ironically took on the area’s former natural splendor and used it as a moniker to help sell the now-treeless land. Think “Emerald Lane”, “Twin Pines”, etc.

Front view of the street

One way the streets in the Mile End area and much of older Montreal got to maintain  the intimate tree-canopied street life with large numbers of pedestrians, was through the existence of backyard lanes. This provides an additional informal street to help locals better navigate the ‘hood by bike or even (small) car, while also providing backyard access and trash collection, keeping the mess off the streets. And, as you can see in the image above, it provides a quiet, green area for kids and cats to wander more or less undisturbed. Strict parking permits on the street side help to dissuade residents from even owning cars, as the built up area was constructed during a virutally car-less time the parking is very limited. Instead, bikes are used extensively, and by some brave souls, year-round. The city has for several years been actively developing bike paths that run alongside the mostly one-way streets in this area, making the bicycle a great cheap and healthy choice for residents of all ages who have the physical capacity to use them. Older residents tend to walk instead, which again adds to the vibrant and friendly street life. Walkers beware of the overly-friendly cats– they can steal hours away from your schedule as they lay there belly-up just begging for a rub.

It's Bixi!

One new development on the bike front is Bixi (see: http://www.bixi.com/home) , one of two new ventures this year whereby visitors or residents can rent bicycles both short and long-term, and use the numerous Bixi drop off points to ensure the bike’s safety in a city where bike theft runs rampant. This European model really helps to shift the perception of a neighbourhood, and if you do visit this mostly level Plateau Mont-Royal area from May-October, it’s a great way to see the city if you don’t have the time and energy to walk. When you consider the very efficient and easy-to-find subway stops in the area, as well as frequent buses that are often given dedicated bus lanes, this part of Montreal quite car-unfriendly, so do watch out for the frustrated drivers as they slowly come to accept the new reality.

Powell River’s 50-mile Eat Local Challenge : Microcosm of Global Shift or Bourgeois Idealism?

50 Mile email contact: powellriver50@gmail.com

Main site and Blog and (soon) Podcast link

Facebook Group (and event)

50-mile Challenge Twitter page

So, it’s time to think about Powell River’s unique 50-mile version of now-familiar the 100-mile Diet.

This brings up many questions, such as “are we that self-sufficient that we can afford a 50-mile version” ? Answer: Erm, no. Not by a long shot. Estimates vary, but some suggest that only 3-4% of the food we eat here is locally produced.

Then there’s the situation where we have limited availability of local food in our supermarkets that also tends to be more expensive than imported food. This goes against what one might initially think: “why should I pay MORE for garlic that comes from my own neighbourhood than what I can buy from the supermarket that comes all the way from China?” Of course, that’s just a symptom of the dysfunction in the global food system. That system will probably end someday soon when we realize that the artificially cheap oil, Genetically-Modified and pesticide-riddled food, factory farms and global trade networks we are subsidizing with our tax dollars, coupled with the costs of cleaning up (or worse, living and dying with) the pollution caused by the 2,000 mile garlic head, makes its actual cost obvious. But as long as we push the negative impacts farther ahead of us, we feel we’re getting a good deal. Our children might think differently, as they will be paying the real-cost tab.

So, yes the 50-mile challenge is one way to raise awareness of this concept, as well as helping people to generally think about where our food comes from, the excessive processing and packaging and transportation, and how we can either grow something ourselves (ANYTHING!), buy from local farmers, trade food-for-food, trade work-for-food, or just plain give food away and accept it from others.

But what is local food; what counts as local?

The 50-mile Food Challenge considers food raised or grown within a 50-mile radius. For Powell River, the range is seen below or click here to see the google map

But there are shades of local as well: the Challenge this year is to sign up to eat at least 50% of your diet from within 50 miles for 50 days (Aug 9 – Sept 27).

Some familiar food items like coffee, citrus, and many grains are not grown within our region, so you can choose to lump these within the 50% non-local part of your diet, find local alternatives or simply do without them. At worst, you’ll come to re-appreciate the flavour of chocolate and coffee.

Is this a bourgeois pipe-dream?

Eating local food certainly can be more expensive, just as generally eating a plant-based diet can be more costly than a processed food diet. That’s just part of the system we’re in, where highly processed quasi-food-like products are usually cheap and on sale, while local, organic non-GM carrots can set you back a few bucks, but this food is life-giving while those corn chips and frozen pizza pockets…

Everyone has to make their choices in life depending on their own circumstances, but if nutrition is important to you, you tend to choose local or grow it yourself. It takes some imagination and time, and a little bit of money up-front, but the payback is enormous

The 50-mile blog (http://pr50.wordpress.com) aims to help with the challenge this year providing personal stories, art, recipes, ideas, multimedia (video/audio) and encouragement. There are so many ideas already out there, and there’s room for more. Come out to the 2009 Organizational meeting/Kale Force Potluck on Wed. June 10th at the CRC in Powell River (4752 Joyce Ave.) and help promote the Challenge. It’s something we can all do that is positive, fun and will have an impact on our own food choices throughout the year. Check out the 50 reasons to eat/grow local as well:  click here.

The Return of the Lasagna Garden

those red splotches are red orach, which supposedly grows as big as a bush.

Lasagna Garden 2.0; Romaine lettuce, rapini, potatoes in the far distance

Just an update on the lasagna garden; it ended up being half the size than originally planned, but it’s keeping me busy. The trench is working well, although it is harboring some slug action. Yet, the area gets so warm and dry that few survive that and my scissors (“Gianni Scissorhands”, they call me… those voices in my head). We needed more soil, though… always more since the 8 huge garbage bags of seaweed just dissolved and the straw smooshed down too.

The grass underneath is now brown and the worms are all over the place, doing their good work. I have planted heat-lovers in here including zucchini and basil and cukes. I had hoped to put tomatoes here too, but the wind is a bit much, and they like to be covered to avoid rainfall(and the splash-back that gives them this fungus disease); they are nestled on the side of the house where the dark green paint also collects heat and radiates it to them in the night.

Out now to plant some beans I have soaking.

Seedballs Workshop at Kaleforce May 13 2009: Mix, Form, Dry, Fling

We made about 300 seedballs at the Kaleforce potluck gathering this past week;

it’s fast, easy, fun and cheap (about 3 cents/ball).

Here is a look at the handout for the event:

seedballsHandout

Resilience

The 10-steps poster: click image to see large (8.5" x 14") version

To design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light or turning on a tap.  The Architecture of Happiness- Alain deBotton 2006.

10 Steps to Redesign your Life for Resiliency

1. Turn off your TV set and instead help create and maintain local alternative media that reflects you and your life, not the hopes of corporations or governments. Humanity has always relied on stories that tell us who we are and what is important to us. It is only recently that we have been bombarded by stories that don’t have shared values at their core, but myopic corporate agendas based only on increased profit.

2. Buy local products from locally-owned businesses. Eat locally-grown food. Live close to where you work. Make it easy for yourself to do these by planning ahead.

3. Pay attention to nature and the society surrounding you; act accordingly. Make sure every action you take has more than one positive result.

4. Get out of debt, and stay out. Live beneath your means and save some money every month for the rainier days. Never buy advertised products (you are paying to be told what to buy) and avoid buying new. Reuse, Re purpose, Give it away, Recycle.

5. Think and act with your community in mind; create or become a member of a co-op, credit union, and if you are able, invest in or create local businesses that promote your values. Even “Ethical” funds have a loose definition of what “ethical” means. Invest in your community.

6. Avoid your car. Use every other possible means of transport (walk, bike, take a bus). Design your life so as to make it easy to NOT use a car.

7. Have more than one good reason for everything you do; have three: a- it’s good for me; b-it’s good for my community; c- it’s good for the planet. Remember that however small, your actions will always serve as a powerful example for people of all ages, and especially for the younger among us.

8. Design for resiliency: Have back-ups for every crucial aspect of life. Have a stock of non-perishable food, water, alternate energy forms and close friends you can rely on (and who can rely on you too). Think community-wide; encourage others to value community by creating venues and events that form or strengthen human relationships.  Be open to helping people who come to you for knowledge; this is the most powerful way to affect change. Ask a real person a question today!

9. Trust in your own thinking and abilities; know that almost everyone — even those in the highest positions — actually don’t know if what they are doing is the right thing. Sometimes they fool themselves into thinking they do know, but mostly they are trying to fool us into thinking they know what they are doing.

10. Formulate a “big picture future” for yourself. Visualize a reality you want to inhabit and make it as real as you can; paint it, draw it, and write poems or stories about it. Pretend that it is already here and share this with your community through your creative self.