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Your Mountain Is Waiting. So...............Get On Your Merry Way!
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Your Mountain Is Waiting. So...............Get On Your Merry Way!
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Your Mountain Is Waiting. So...............Get On Your Merry Way! |
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Mistletoe Angel 
since 2000-12-17
Posts 32816Portland, Oregon |
 Blimey! My body has been bustling as boisterously as a Bokashi bin in co-coordinating Earth Day 2010, which I've been helping organize since November of last year. And this weekend, at last, we're happier than mules eating briars to deliver this gift to the Portland community, so we can begin to Re-Seed Our World. As many of you are au courant about, Earth Day celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. What you may not know is that its principle visionary, the late former Senator of Wisconsin Gaylord Nelson, had first chewed the cud and conceived the nitty gritty of Earth Day as far back as 1962, shortly after being elected to his first term as Senator of Wisconsin, when he was dismayed by the lack of environmental political agenda in Washington despite the many urgent national issues pressing the nation at the time, including the exploitation of public resources by private industry and the pollution of the nation's waterways. Having been born in the North Woods of Wisconsin in 1916............exalted for being home to the world's largest chain of inland freshwater lakes (The Eagle River Chain of Lakes), the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore and the Blue Hills Felsenmeer among many other unspoiled, scenic ecological sites...........as well as a votarient of the progressive politics of the state's famous Senator "Fighting Bob" La Follette (who was both most admired and vilified for repeatedly, with his heart of oak, bearding the lion in the den that is Washington and sticking true to his progressive convictions, even when it often meant marching up to the proverbial cannon's mouth, whether it was taking on what he sensed to be "aggregating vast corporate combinations of unexampled capital" or refusing unanimous consent to Senate resolutions calling for a declaration of war as the nation prepared to enter World War I on the reasoning that it was a scheme to line the pockets of the corporations he had fought so bitterly as a Governor and Senator years prior with a derring-do that moved even his most brazen detractors to tears)..................Nelson was cognizant in his early political career as governor of Wisconsin of the importance of conservation in that his constituents had grown increasingly concerned about their quality of life, much of which was attributed to the deteriorating ecological climate brought about by industrial expansion. It was through his overhaul of Wisconsin's natural resource program where he first made his mark as the nation's designated "Conservation Governor", and continuing piggybacking on his pertinence by earmarking $50 million for the Outdoor Recreation Action Program so he could acquire land to be converted into public parks and wilderness areas, as well as establishing a Youth Conservation Corps to create green jobs for over 1,000 unemployed young people in his state. He understood, as an eidolon of La Follette, a central truth touched on by famed ecologist and forester Aldo Leopold: * It takes all kinds of motives to make a world. If all of us were capable of beholding the burning bush, there would none left to grow bushes to burn. Doers and dreamers are the reciprocal parts of the body politic: each gives meaning and significance to the other. So also in conservation. Just now, conservation is short of doers. * Nelson was indisputably a doer who, by the time he was successfully elected to the US Senate in 1963, his lifelong commitment to conservation had evolved from something that seemed practical and necessary to him, to something all the more moral and spiritual to the core of his heart. In fact, on March 25th, 1963, when he addressed the United States Senate for the first time in his career with an indomitable tone to his voice, he was the co-sponsor of an amendment to Senate Bill 649, the Clean Water Act of 1963, which called for banning the use of alkyl benzene sulfate in household detergents, in which he argued this crude oil distillate was dangerous to public health due to the fact it wasn't biodegradable and resisted water treatment. Despite failing over the course of fourteen years to ever successfully ban sulfates and phosphates in detergents, this moment was seen as a turning point to many where urgency was being channeled into the environmental movement, and that Nelson was destined to lead it. His mission statement would indeed be spelled out only two months later, on May 16, 1963, when Nelson received a letter from Arthur Schlesinger, a member of President Kennedy's staff, in which it was suggested then-president John F. Kennedy desired Nelson's insight on what he termed as "possible new initiatives in the field of conservation." After officially replying to the memo eight days later, promising to outline his ideas for a national conservation tour to President Kennedy, he sent a five page memo to the President on August 29, 1963, where he offered practical political advice while also not soft-pedaling his no-holds-barred environmental convictions: * Recently, Brooks Atkinson, in the New York Times, reported: "No doubt, the history of Arnerican civilization could be written in terms of our changing attitudes toward nature. In 300 years we have passed through three significant stages: (I) Indifference or hostility to nature; (2) romantic delight in nature, and now (3) fear that man, the great predator, may destroy nature and civilization at the same time." In the same review he states: "Lois and Louis Darling conclude a study of the evolution and anatomy of birds ('Birdt is their title) with a chapter in the same somber key: 'We squander in a few years the fossil fuel, coal and oil, which are the accumulation of untold ages. We poison the water and the air." * As an equally as effective addendum, Nelson proceeded to include a list of quotations from highly regarded environmental philosophers and naturalists, which he indicated in the introduction of his memo that he believed ought to be included in his speeches.......my personal favorite coming from Aldo Leopold: * "The only possible force that could be motivating the effort to preserve natural areas is the moral conviction that it is right--that we owe it to ourselves and to the good earth that supports us to curb our avarice to the extent of leaving a few spots untouched and unexploited. * The following month, on September 24th, President Kennedy, Gaylord Nelson and several others on a four-day, seventeen-city tour to promote, hand-in-hand, environmental awareness and sustainability of resources to the American public. Despite his exemplary skill and will, this initial tour failed to bring environmental awareness to the political forefront, both with the overshadowing of the issue by the Partial Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union, and the general lack of knowledge of Nelson's agenda among Kennedy's staff and the press. Bearing the disappointment he felt at the time, Nelson nonetheless stuck to his green guns, ever unflinching on volleying his environmental agenda to the forefront of American politics. Finally, by the late 1960's, his purposiveness paid off. Between 1965 and 1970, Gallup polls revealed a tripling of the percent of the public considering “reducing pollution of air and water” as one of their three top political motivators: from 17% in 1965 to a slight majority of 53% in 1970. Over that same time span, Opinion Research Corporation also placed the cards on the table, confirming that the percentage of Americans viewing air and water pollution as a “very serious or somewhat serious” problem increased from 28% to 69% for air pollution and 35% to 74% for water pollution between 1965 and 1970. Much of this tectonic shift in public attitude transpired through several highly-publicized environmental catastrophes; the first happening at 10:45 AM on the morning of January 28, 1969, when about five miles off the coast from the small coastal community of Summerland in Santa Barbara, California, on an offshore drilling rig operated by Union Oil called platform Alpha, the extraction of drill pipe from Well A-21: a 3,500 foot deep well, led to an abrupt critical increase in pressure, caused by an imbalance between the subterranean oil pressure pushing up and the weight of casing toward the top of the well.........which resulted in the straining of the casing to the point it ruptured: spewing oil an estimated ninety feet into the air at 1,100 to 1,700 pounds per square inch, as well as through the seafloor around the well................thus resulting in a calamitous oil spill, resulting in untold ecological damage of eight hundred square miles of ocean, six-inch thick coats of oil spilling upon 35 miles of California coastline,an estimated 3,600 dead ocean feeding seabirds and the poisoning of numerous marine mammals, and the devastation of vast acreages of kelp forests, among other tragedies. In spite of the inconceivable damage already done, the disaster immediately inspired an unprecedented call for community action, with communities donating bulldozers to truck contaminated beach sand away, and volunteers establishing temporary animal rescue stations to clean tarred seabirds. This emotionally moving, unconditional call to action even prompted Santa BarbaraNews Press Editor Thomas Storke to write: “Never in my long lifetime have I ever seen such an aroused populace at the grassroots level. This oil pollution has done something I have never seen before in Santa Barbara – it has united citizens of all political persuasions in a truly nonpartisan cause.” (the President of the Union Oil Company, Fred L. Hartley, said in a statement to the press at the time: "I don't like to call it a disaster, because there has been no loss of human life. I am amazed at the publicity for the loss of a few birds.” ) The second befell around noon on June 22, 1969, when the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire after sparks from a passing train landed on oil-soaked industrial debris that was floating in the river. The fire towered an estimated five stories high and lasted until a fireboat dowsed the flames nearly a half hour later. In result, Cleveland became the laughing stock of America at the time, jeered as "The Mistake By The Lake", and was mercilessly pounded into sardonic submission until the city invested hundreds of millions over the course of years to miraculously transform the once-notorious waterway into a resilient watershed where stretches of the river that were once inhabitable to fish now support over forty different species, and also inspired the Great Lakes Brewing Company, which self-depreciatively named their "Burning River Ale" after that ecological earache, to form the Burning River Fest in 2002, which mingles environmental awareness and activism with leisurely junketing and entertainment. On the beam with growing public concern over the quality of their air, land and water, Nelson them realized, though Washington was largely deaf as an adder to the evolving political climate, the precursors of the modern environmental movement were germinating among the grassroots groves. Upon reading an article in Ramparts Magazine in the summer of 1969 during a speaking tour in the American West, shortly after visiting Santa Barbara, California, which featured eyewitness accounts of anti-Vietnam war sit-ins and teach-ins which were taking American college campuses by storm, Nelson realized, because the American public was well ahead of Washington and the press on environmental awareness, that it would be the people that were destined to put his plans to motion. From there, he raised money in the hopes of rousing a riveting eco-conscious risorgimento.............then announced his vision at a speech in Seattle on September 20, 1969, where several campuses at Dickinson College, the University of Michigan and San Jose State were already one step ahead in announcing teach-ins centered around eco-consciousness. All that Nelson had left to do was to decide the proper course in whipping the mass teach-in into shape. Interestingly enough, shortly after Nelson established an independent organization, Environmental Teach-In, Inc., to respond to the opulence of queries that clogged up his mailbox, the Earth Day that might have been was formally introduced to him by Fred Dutton, who had served as one of President Kennedy's assistant secretaries of state, as Robert F. Kennedy's presidential campaign manager and as a speechwriter for President Johnson. Dutton's overture called for a top-down modus operandi...........resembling a political campaign in that: * 1) It called for a staff director to be appointed, who would see to it a "detailed scenario for the entire proiect should be prepared between November 15th and December 20th." 2) A "National Board of Sponsors" would be established "to provide legitimacy, diversity of representation and a national frame of reference for the project." with possible nominations including Ralph Nader, Gloria Steinem and Jesse Jackson. 3) A "National Steering Committee" would be established as "the actual working group to run the teach-in" and "should be based in Washington, D. C., in order to facilitate the group's working together easily and often.", possibly including a lawyer and a "first-class publicist." 4) Forty key campuses would be selected by four student volunteers between November 15th and December 20th, with a "campus student and faculty coordinator screened, designated and operating on each by January 1st." 5) Student involvement was seen as risky, and the "over-all effort should also be sponsored by some prominent student or-group of student leaders." He considered having the NSA "take on the teach-in as a major project for the year under the direction of the proposed national sponsors board, which is still needed in order to give the teach-in an even broader and more respected base than a student organization can provide." 6) "Have perhaps 50,000 campaign buttons and 50,000 auto stickers prepared in December for distribution by late March, just as a token that the over-all project is getting going, becoming tangible, turning visual." 7) "Stimulate TV coverage of environmental problems and the teach-in. These should be solicited among the networks, NET and some major individual stations in November and December in order to assure production and release in early April. Key spokesmen should also be scheduled in early April on the Today Show, CBS Morning News, Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, etc." 8) "A song celebrating conservation and for release early next year might be stimulated with Simon and Garfunkel, the Rolling Stones or a dozen other such groups, most of whom should be highly sympathetic to this effort." * In plain English, Dunton argued that the hype these national measures would create through a media blitz would prove more important than "the quality of the local teach-ins" themselves. Not surprisingly, Nelson cast aside Dunton's proposal, decorously counterclaiming that a one-size-fits-all Earth Day would inevitably be unsuccessful and that each community ought to take their appreciation of Earth Day into their own hands. Rather than play an authoritative role in dictating these functions, he chose not to be in charge and instead establish an office to promote all the various teach-ins all across the nation, insisting that a decentralized, grassroots Earth Day was, far and away, the most effective way to ensure its success. Finally, on November 11, 1969, Nelson and his staff announced that April 22, 1970 would be the day designated the “National Teach-In on the Crisis of the Environment.” (the rationale being it was a date that fit best in college schedules between spring break and final exams).  His predilection proved to be a magnificent master stroke. While Dutton had proposed reaching out to a thousand schools and 40 colleges, an estimated 20 million Americans, 10,000 schools and 2,000 colleges participated on the nation's first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, making up about 10% of America's population at the time.........doing everything from organizing litter pick-ups to producing seminars to listening to speeches. In Washington, Congress adjourned for the entire day, with many representatives and Senators giving environmental speeches for the first time in their lives, while the governors of New York and New Jersey signing into law new pieces of legislation creating new state environmental agencies and the Massachusetts legislature clearing the way for an environmental bill of rights. But even though Congress had called it a day, citizens were not resting on their laurels, as 1,700 peoplemarched to the Interior Department offices to leave symbolic puddles of oil on the doorstep, while Connecticut Girl Scouts went full gallop by using donated canoes to sail out upon the Potomac River and hoist tires and other garbage sullying the stream. In New York City, Mayor John Lindsey ordained the city to close Fifth Avenue between 14th Street and 59th Street and 14th Street from 7th Avenue to 3rd Avenue to vehicles for two hours, with only one horse-drawn buggy carrying members of a neighborhood association being present in those streets at the time.It was there tens of thousands of Americans held a rally carrying dead fish in a net to call attention to the massive fish losses caused by water pollution, chanting “You’re next, people,”, while 14th Street between 3rd and 7th Avenues became an ecological safari park that magnetized massive crowds to Union Square where Consolidated Edison supplied rakes and shovels used by school children to clean up the vicinity, in the largest outpouring there since the socialist rallies of the 1930s, and culminated in over a hundred thousand people estimated to have attended an ecology fair in Central Park. Beyond the Big Apple, Iowa State University and Syracuse University students formed human barricades to keep cars from entering their campuses, while students slapped “This is a Polluter” stickers on automobiles left and right in Ohio and students at San Jose State University going even further andburying cars altogether. In Chicago, with the city’s monitoring devices indicating levels of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere above the danger point for infants and the elderly, several thousand took to the streets in protest at Civic Center Plaza. which prompted Illinois Attorney General William Scott to declare action, as well as adding that he would sue the City of Milwaukee for dumping sewage into Lake Michigan. The Chicago Tribune subsequently published a front page column featuring split-screen photos taken during and after the rally, revealing the complete absence of post-rally litter, or litter in general, on site. In West Virginia. a group of neighbors banded together to collect five tons of garbage off a local highway, where they then proceeded to plunk the bags down on the steps of their county courthouse. A St. Louis activist coalition known as Black Survival staged pasquinades to dramatize the role of rats, poisonous lead paint, treeless streets, inferior garbage service, and neighborhoods divided by freeways, among other things, as the environment they identified with. And, in Clear Lake, Wisconsin, Gaylord Nelson’s hometown, junior and senior high school students observed Earth Day at a school assembly with a salmagundi of speeches and performance art skits, then spent the remainder of the day filling stuffing more than 250 bags full of litter from the streets and highways in and around the village. Finally, Earth Day arranged the dominoes for what has been termed the "Environmental Decade": an unparalleled period of legislative and grassroots activity both on and beyond the nation's Capitol to protect the nation’s environment. In fact, more significant environmental legislation was signed into law between 1970-1980 than during the 170-year period prior to Earth Day. It was in the course of this epoch that Congress passed twenty-eight major environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act, amendments strengthening the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Air and Water Acts, the Occupational Health and Safety Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, and the National Hiking Trails and the National Scenic Trails Acts—along with hundreds of other pieces of public land legislation to protect and conserve natural resources. In addition, the military halted the use of mutagenic defoliants in Southeast Asia, more than half of the "Dirty Dozen" (representatives indicted by Earth Day organizers as having the poorest environmental records) were defeated in the 1970 mid-term elections, the Environmental Protection Agency was established, and inspired even larger gatherings in later years, including a first-ever global Earth Day in 2000, which mobilized hundreds of millions in 184 countries worldwide. Shortly before receiving his posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom on September 29th, 1995, Gaylord Nelson said in an interview marking the 25th anniversary of Earth Day 2010 before his death the following: * "Earth Day worked because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level. We had neither the time nor resources to organize 20 million demonstrators and the thousands of schools and local communities that participated. That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day. It organized itself." * Nelson also said the following in a speech he gave commemorating the 25th anniversary of Earth Day that same year: * "The opportunity for a gradual but complete break with our destructive environmental history and a new beginning is at hand…. We can measure up to the challenge if we have the will to do so—that is the only question. I am optimistic that this generation will have the foresight and the will to begin the task of forging a sustainable society." * *  And now, me and the City Repair Project are doing our part in helping re-organize Earth Day, as we are proud to mark its 40th anniversary this weekend with the auroral advent of Earth Day 2010! The City Repair Project clings like ivy to the maxim that a sustainable society is best guaranteed through localization (namely resilience, social capital, personal responsibility and environmental stewardship), neighbor-originated placemaking and community. It is a multi-disciplinary, non-profit organization which works with place-based communities in numerous, illimitable ways to improve their quality of life, not just in an infrastructural sense but a social sense as well. They intentionally plan and showcase projects in highly visible public right of ways and intersections for the purpose of exposing urban communities to highly developed, yet grossly overlooked, prototypes and concepts, whether ephemerally or in perpetuum that, in effect, cultivate community networks, allow each community to become familiarized with democratic and co-creative processes, and put those newly-realized social, cultural and economic principles into practice. The City Repair Project was founded in 1996 after a covey of concerned citizens, dismayed by how the dismantling of community fabrics has left many in the lurch living isolated lifestyles with blasé, bromidic attitudes on society (they cite the Continental Congress's 1785 passage of the National Land Trust as the source of what first "pre-empted the natural development of such places (public spaces that grow organically) and neglected to provide for them within the mandated grid." in our country, and where the modern city grid plan was derived from) conjoined under the wondermongering Weltanschauung that the revolution, in order to be successful, must take place with people in a place using what they have..........which both Gaylord Nelson, and his hero "Fighting Bob" La Follette, and the many luminaries that preceded him, emblematized themselves. Influenced by the teachings of Fritjof Capra and her publication "The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture", the founding organizers of the City Repair Project believed, and believe to this day, that despite living in a so-called democracy, in the true sense of the word we do not inhabit a democratic lifestyle, because we stilp in an illusion that someone other than ourselves and our community has most of the power and ability to maintain our communities, and that we have proscribed sustainability in all forms from our squirrel cage of a life. Indeed, isolation is what spurs artificial barriers in all forms, whether they be physical (race, gender), economic (class, accessibility, property values) social (sexism, political labeling, homogenization, oligopoly) and spiritually (ennui, judgment), and the only tried-and-true way to meliorate these maddening maculations is by transcending isolation and working together: plastering over the unconscious wallpaper in our minds and subverting the paradigmatic nodes of our society by re-claiming our crossroads, by applying the principles of permaculture to our own realities by building bridges between one another and proliferating the marrow of mutuality. It's about retroactively flirting with our grid infrastructure and converting it into a vibrant social center, strumming a sonancy of sustainability and egalitarianism across the physical, social and ecological diapasons of existence within the lingering context of social isolation, manifesting melodious magnum opuses time after time, with City Repair Projects since expanding to over a dozen other cities with efficacious results. My participation with Earth Day 2010, and the City Repair Project, originated on November 14th of last year, when I was poring over the daily Sacred Circle Dance digest on their mailing list from my home computer, and the fourth listing from the top struck my eye from Colin McLeod, the Main Event Coordinator of Earth Day 2010 and a fellow friend in the Sacred Circle Dance community: * "Earth Day 2010 is beginning to sow the seeds for the next years event. If you want to help, we are currently picking a site, filling lead coordinator positions, funding strategy and doing some strategic planning. Every bit of this work will be filled with joy and fun and wonderful people... * At the time I knew virtually nothing about what the City Repair Project represented, but having become much more dexterous with event organizing following ErosFest Northwest and numerous Hands On Greater Portland projects primarily, and having appreciated the splendors of nature and the essence of sustainability since I was born, I was ensnared with intrigue. Though I actually was unable to attend that first meeting, I met Colin in person just several days later at the Alberta Street Townshend's Teahouse, where we talked for an hour and fifteen minutes sharing a glass pot of their Mint Cream Latte, where I broached my interest in taking on the Volunteer Coordinator position, which was also delectably delineated in the digest: * *Volunteer Coordinator* Working real close with all the other coordinators, makin sure everyone is real fulfilled and doin what they can. Helping the other coordinators to fill in the spots they need help with on the day of and preceedin days, getting together set up fellows, cleanin up fellows, and day of organized and knowin what’s goin on fellows! Going to all the meetings, once a week or every other week, calling dudes ladies mamas and babies, saving time to play and bein sweet sweet sweet like popsicle sticks!" * Oh razzberries! Great Colin, now you've got me salivating after one of those Cucumber Lime Jalapeno Popsicles at the Sol Pops Cart again! :P Anywhoooooooooooo.....I attended subsequent meetings, we devised an early greenprint together, we crossed all the T's and dotted all the lower-case J's and, by the time March breezed in like a Cascade wind, we decided on this year's theme: "Re-Seeding Our World", and I commenced the call-out for volunteers: espousing an epistle of sorts asking ourselves: "How we all can positively contribute to creating the world we want..............a world with a healthy, ethical infrastructure that is sustainable, community focused, empowering to its citizens, acknowledges and respects the natural balance of creation and values inclusiveness to all its citizens?" Obviously, that is a rhetorical question and, much like Gaylord Nelson knew it was ideal for each community to decide what Earth Day meant to them and which issues resonated to them most of all, we did not expect a singular answer to the question we postured, or even expecting anyone to give a straight answer. Thus, inclusiveness, above all else, is what we wanted infused into Earth Day 2010...............featuring everything from a Main Stage featuring half a dozen musical acts including the March Fourth Marching Band, SaraTone and the Earth Tribe Gospel, Fruition, Off The Grid and Medicine For The People and speeches from Mayor Sam Adams and environmental activist Tre Arrow..........an Acoustic Stage (powered entirely by a Hybrid Renewable Energy Power Trailer from Tom’s Renewable Energy Laboratory in Milwaukie, which uses 10,000 watts of inverted energy at 220 volts being replenished by 600 watt Photovoltaic Electrical Panels and a ten-bladed 400 watt wind Turbine Generator) featuring fourteen different acts including Zulu Nation, Worth and Wild Berry Wine and the Belly Break Dance group Ali Mah..............over 115 booths including a cob sculpture building demo by Tryon Life Community Farm..............interactive art activities including the creation of flags using recycled fabrics, an ambitious mosaic project and the hands-on wonder that is a huge paper mache heart sculpture to be fructified in the center of the Earth Day 2010 festival grounds to serve as a metaphor for the City Repair Project representing the heartbeat of the crossroads............educational workshops including one by Teryani Riggs of the Living Awareness Institute titled "Sowing the Seeds of Social Change" which proposes how weunconsciously perpetuate the artifices of patriarchy and hierarchy in our lives and how we can transcend them and germinate a societal shift both locally and globally...............and an appearance by Jenny Leonard, the founder of Bicycles For Humanity's Portland chapter, among many other features of the festival................who is organizing a bike collection drive using a forty-foot shipping container she successfully raised $9,000 for last year, large enough to send 400 used bicycles she hopes to collect to an organization in South Africa, which will distribute the bikes to needy school children in rural areas, which we are honored to be at the marrow of her munificent mission.................among a conscious cornucopia of features!  Given this is my first time tackling the title of Volunteer Coordinator for a festival, needless to say, I've learned a lot and am all thrills, wills and giggles. Yonder my responsibilities of recruiting volunteers and facilitating the needs of each of my fellow Core teamsters, I organized a Kerns-Buckman Neighborhood Clean-Up with G.T. Meili last Saturday morning (owner of the Goodfoot Lounge and Main Coordinator of the Kerns/Buckman Neighborhood Cleanup) and Mike Whitmore (Day of Event Coordinator) that encompassed Washington High School at Southeast 12th & Stark Street at its westernmost point to East 26th & Burnside at its easternmost point across both neighborhoods, where we picked up at least eighteen bags of litter over the course of three hours........a Sign Painting Party that took place in downtown Portland outside of the Reware Upcycle headquarters on Everett Street between 6th Avenue and Broadway................as well as a Volunteer Orientation & "Slap Happy Clambake", which no ifs and buts and candy and nuts about it had nothing remotely to do with clams whatsoever and I later admitted it was meant to elicit "squid and giggles", but nonetheless got the inspiration for from those quaint Apple Jack's commercials I used to watch on television as a child growing up, where the subjects devouring the cereal are abreast of the naked truth that is that Apple Jacks don't taste anything even paranthetically like apples, then are asked why they eat them, which instigates a lengthy, aphonic response with Jeopardy-esque incidental music playing in the background, until one of the subjects replies quixotically "We just do!" with roars of approving yeahs following (I've since stopped watching television, but after leafing through YouTube's viral vault, apparently successive advertisements depict an animated apple and cinnamon stick being the best of buddies that regularly head out together, but the apple is regularly lost whether it is being "kidnapped" or "late for work")...........I thought I'd brush up on my pa ra pun pun puns, reload that annomination ammunition and, rather than kowtow to formula and call the gathering a party, to instead call it a "Slap-Happy Clambake" and regularly promote it via digital social networking with cartoons and photography of clams, as well as people dressed in clam suits. Whether they were Pacific razors, Atlantic jackknifes or any scallop in-between, I flexed my mussels and went quahog wild, just to prove I wasn't just pitter patterin' plankton in spite of the fact clams have nothing to do whatsoever with Earth Day 2010............................................because I just love them! Volunteering on behalf of the City Repair Project has truly opened me a lot, above all else, to the axiom that complementarity between unity and diversity is how sustainability achieves its full potential. I'm currently reading "Evolution's End: Claiming the Potential of Our Intelligence" by Joseph Chilton Pearce, and in Chapter 10, "Who Remembers?", Pearce speaks of our "hidden observer", which "may be connected with our casual system, 'observing' the actions of the subtle-physical systems." (91) and "which 'breathes' the archer in Zen, moving the body without employing the muscular system, which only a subtle-casual energy can do." (91) He argues that loss of contact with the hidden observer in favor of ego-self is what invokes feelings of isolation and loneliness in the individual, and that a "re-union with our hidden observer may be a major part of true maturation." (92). Finally, in referring to the Sanskrit word "Maya", meaning that which is measurable..................and in reminding us that the Latin word for reality is "res", meaning "thing".............that the Latin word for illusion is "illudere", meaning "inner play"...........and that the Latin word for play is "plicate", meaning "folded in measurable units or acts.".....................the world is truly a "great creative play that unfolds out in measurable, discrete units or acts from an unfolded potential." (94) and that the conscious creative process is a self-contained play unfolding out from itself. Pearce finally writes: * "So our intuition of an underlying wholeness shouldn't imply melting into a homogenous mass. Our need as individuals is for appropriate relationship, a challenge of far greater magnitude and difficulty than dissolving into a homogenized unity. Maturana and Varela write, 'If we want to coexist with the other person, we must see that his certainty---however undesirable it may seem to us---is as legitimate and valid as our own because, like our own, that certainty expresses his conservation of structural-coupling in a domain of existence...' We share the same domain, but the coupling can never be quite the same, wherein lies the diversity that gives unity its life. * I first tripped my light fantastic toe into the Earth Day 2010 Coordinating Team like pole vaulting world record holder Sergei Bubka just because I love what Earth Day stands for and wanted to do my part in making this 40th anniversary of Earth Day as relevant and polychromatic as ever. But amidst this entire experience, I have come to extol everything the City Repair Project stands for, and am already looking ahead beyond Earth Day 2010 to assign my allegiance to their autophanous, alveolate aisling of agape. Over and above Earth Day, the City Repair Project also is the driving force of the Village Building Convergence: a ten-day placemaking paroxysm that takes place annually in Portland at the end of May, where hundreds of people from all around the world gather with a polyphiloprogenitive pyrexia second to none to inspire communities to reengage ecologically without even having to leave their front porches. The Village Building Convergence is about natural building, first and foremost, under the belief that the best way to build structures and kinships that are sustainable and devise the world we choose to live in is by, truly, building it to our heart's content; nail by nail, board by board, cob by cob, straw bale by straw bale. Permaculture, after all, is more a holistic approach than anything which, at its pith, is about looking at any given solution, understanding how the parts relate just would a botanist study how all the parts of a plant relate, apply tried-and-true sustainability examples to the situation at hand and then finally perceive the new connections present between each of the parts. This applies to shelter as well, as it encourages us to make the most of what we have available locally, and I can tell you the possibilities are limitless. You just have to give that Weltanschauung a little wag of its tail! Permaculture and natural building also germinates opportunities to engage the community, increase collective ownership of OUR communities, increase representation and forge democratic decision making. Often with city planning, especially in grid system instances, much of the community is relegated from the planning stages and has no say in what kind of structure they want, thus they're left with results that do not reflect them naturally. Natural building incorporates all members of the community, and considers all members valuable, capable individuals through each and every phase of the project at hand. Much like Gaylord Nelson understood all too well meritocracy inevitably wields poor results because of the lack of civic involvement and both personal and historical representation to their communities, and championed the DIY approach...........natural building is all about inclusivity in a world that attempts to conform us into a one-size-fits-all, instant-oatmeal, one-hour-photo monoculture. Skeptics may continue to be in denial, claiming that such a concept is naivete and you can only go so far with it. And yet many projects brought about by the Village Building Convergence have stood the tests of time with thunderously positive forte. Take Dignity Village for instance: a legalized transitional village in northeast Portland near the Riverside Country Club on Sunderland Road............run for and by homeless people that chose the use of natural materials not only to signify their ecological values, but also with the intent to democratically engage the villagers in the building process. Now, to this day, Dignity Village bears the awe-inspiring accolade of being the most ecological and affordable built structure per capita of any community within Portland..........and all it took to snag that standing ovation was one straw bale, ten straw clay dwellings and a league of extraordinary ladies, gentlemen and rugrats. The Village Building Convergence believes, just as I do, that localization and permaculture helps spiritualize our communities but, more importantly, spiritualizes relationships between neighbors and neighborhoods, between farmers and city dwellers, between flora and fauna, etc. A healthy social ecology is based on healthy and sustainable relationships. It unifies individuals while celebrating our diverse social makeup and, through natural building and other democratic engagements such as this, we look beyond diversity as well. For, in the end, part of the American dream has always been about having a comfortable roof over our heads, to have a home that we actually feel at home in. That's the Village Building Convergence in a nutshell. It's about the renaissance of community responsibility and ownership, it's about speaking in the vernacular of "we" instead of "I", it's about discerning that situation and opportunity are innately two sides of the exact same coin, and all possibility is borne through mutuality. Next month, twenty-five different Portland communities will build their own projects in observance of the 2010 Village Building Convergence, with the focal point of this year's season stemming from Saint David of Wales Episcopal Church at Southeast 28th & Harrison in Portland where, after spending a long hard day engaging in natural building and girding up our loins, we use the exact, brand spanking-new backdrop as a ganglion of gaiety, guidance and glowing gregariousness, where anyone who has volunteered to work four or more hours that day through work-trade is given free admission to that evening's festivities at the Village Building Convergence's chief site, which includes homegrown raw food suppers, a festive farrago of folk singers, musicians and other performance art, and a rallying point for community members to chum around, rub shoulders and make new connections, to ensure a sustainable tapestry continues to be woven and the vices of isolation are transcended. I will be actively volunteering throughout these ten days, and will keep you abreast with anecdotes and art as the yarn rolls out late next month! In addition to Earth Day 2010 and the Village Building Convergence, the City Repair Project has brought the Portland community the T-Horse: a mobile tea house that is credited for jotting the City Repair Project on the map in that it was one of their earliest projects inspired by the1996 Sellwood T-Hows, which uses a 1979 Toyota pick-up and has had its original interior converted into a kitchen-like space and also sports four twenty-foot snazzy attachable wings, where comfortable blankets, pillows and other donated cloth provides seating arrangements under the T-Horse's wings to invite social camaraderie and tea parties in the most public of places.............the City ReWare Upcycle Market, where everyone is encouraged to look beyond our consumer culture and instead cultivate a post-consumer culture centered around the "3 R's", in addition to thrifting and what they term as "upcycling" where, with a zero-waste ethic, any product that may seem like "trash" at the surface or devoid of function undergoes an ingenious metamorphosis and is literally reincarnated as something of higher quality and artistic value, whether it be purses designed from orange juice cartons or bracelets made from soda bottle plastic among many other illustrious, innovative inseminations (who knows, we might be able to fudge together a pogo stick designed from apple cores, you name it!).................and a goulash of other gumptious game plans on queue..............and so I am certain that Earth Day 2010 marks only the beginning of a long epic, epodic escapade, and life-long friendship, with the City Repair Project. After all, the American Native ecologist, teacher and visionary Brooke Medicine Eagle has said: "There is hope if people will begin to awaken that spiritual part of themselves, that heartfelt knowledge that we are caretakers of this planet." Though I believe we owe it to Gaylord Nelson in continuing to observe Earth Day in that it is just as relevant a spiritual celebration as ever..........I nonetheless also have believed all my life that, warts and all.............Every Day Is Earth Day just as Nelson and all twenty million Americans who turned out for the original Earth Day in 1970 certainly did............and that, if Nelson were alive today to witness the example alliances of Cheerleading Caretakers of Creation like the Village Building Convergence have been grounding, constructing, sustaining and lionizing day after day after day............he would say his optimism has been confirmed, in that our generation has demonstrated the foresight, and will, to begin forging a sustainable society for the world that, in the words of Jeremy Rifkin..........relates to the welfare and well-being of the seventh generation to come, not just our own and for our children.  But you've licked enough of my lolly loquacity for one day. So I'll leave it to Dr. Seuss to whoop: "Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So... get on your way!" Onward, fellow Dazzling Dervishes of Divinity, onward! XOXO, Noah Eaton (Lisping Hibiscus) "If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other" Mother Teresa [This message has been edited by Mistletoe Angel (04-25-2010 07:19 PM).] |
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| © Copyright 2010 Nadia Lockheart - All Rights Reserved | |||
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JamesMichael Member Empyrean
since 1999-11-16
Posts 33336Kapolei, Hawaii, USA |
Fine writing...you have a gift of research as well as writing...James |
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latearrival Member Ascendant
since 2003-03-21
Posts 5499Florida |
WOW, I tried to read as fast as you wrote butno use.I admit to skipping a few areas by scrolling slowly as I read. You are a master planner, writer and putting it all together guy. You will go far. latearrival/jo |
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Your Mountain Is Waiting. So...............Get On Your Merry Way!
