They are each sites where Americans killed Americans in a culture whose violence extends from here to places like Iraq and Afghanistan. They are symptoms of a deep problem not likely to disappear without serious intervention.

Connections exist among the violence here at home and American violence in wars abroad, which indicate a pattern. These incidents are among growing signs that we should analyze carefully, now, before additional warnings happen and perhaps even worsen. The root causes of such eruptions should be studied.

Responses to Ft. Hood could develop into what is described as a “tipping point” in the best-selling book of that title by Malcolm Gladwell. Others describe such a time as a “turning point.” Perhaps we could turn away from such extreme violence.

Where might terror strike next and who might be the perpetrator(s) and victims? More students, soldiers, or some other group? How is such domestic terrorism bred and what can we do to interrupt it? It’s time to look inside, rather than seek outside scapegoats. Raising haunting questions is more important now than rushing to facile answers and seeking revenge.

At Oklahoma City an anti-government activist detonated the bombing of a federal building. At Columbine two high school students pulled triggers on other students and a teacher. At Virginia Tech a college student killed other college students. At Ft. Hood the suspect is an Army physician who killed five other psychotherapists and an additional eight people, and wounded some 31.

What does it say that a mental health professional seems to have endured so much trauma that he broke under the stress and engaged in a mass shooting? It is too easy to just blame these individuals.

As a former Army officer whose military family gave its name to Ft. Bliss, Texas, who was raised partly near Ft. Hood, this massacre struck close to home. As a college professor, when I read about shooting at schools, I think about my responsibility to help protect students.

The American shoot-‘em-up approach to solving problems is not new, especially in Texas and the remaining Wild West. These recent tragedies have lessons to teach us, so that the likelihood of other such incidents can be reduced.

Rather then merely indict the individuals that committed these heinous crimes, we could benefit from looking beyond them to consider our own responsibilities as citizens to reduce such violence and improve the context that spawns it.

It is easier to demonize the killers, rather than try to understand why these desperate men felt driven to such violence that would likely take their own lives or lead to extreme punishment. Their anguish and agony must have been substantial.

Punishment of the perpetrator alone is unlikely to break the cycle of violence that Americans commit here at home and carry abroad. A careful study of patterns would be more helpful.

The recent violence at Ft. Hood and in the town of Killeen, where it is located, is not new. The area “has been beset by crime and violence since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began,” according to the New York Times on Nov. 10. “Reports of domestic abuse have grown by 75 percent since 2001,” it continues. Soldiers come home from combat and beat their wives, sometimes to death. 76 suicides by personnel assigned to Ft. Hood have occurred since 2003.

There is no one to blame other than Americans. We did it. Not Muslims, Arabs, or outside “terrorists.” Not external enemies. “We have met the enemy, and it is us,” asserts a famous line from a Pogo cartoon from my childhood. It is time for us to reflect on the context that breeds such self-destructiveness.

From the day after the Ft. Hood massacre on Thursday to Sunday I mainly read and clipped many articles, while continuing my regular life. I was especially struck by the heroism of civilian Sgt. Kimberly Munley, who bravely took the shooter down, even as she went down with four bullets in her body.

It was not until Sunday night that I really felt the horror. I became numb, immobilized, depressed.

Fortunately, earlier that day I emailed my Sonoma State University students to put Ft. Hood on the lesson plan for my “War and Peace” class. I wanted to gently encourage them to get beyond denial to express their feelings, develop opinions, and engage in critical thinking. The students were attentive and thought deeply about the implications of Ft. Hood and what it reflects about us as a nation and our future.

“It takes a little while before the grieving starts,” reads the last quotation in a Nov. 8 article in our local daily The Press Democrat. It opened me to my own grief. The words are those of Col. Bill Rabena, who runs the new post-Ft. Hood massacre Spiritual Fitness Center. It offers counseling, soothing music, a religious library and meditation space, among other services, to help survivors cope with psychological trauma.

While I was in the Army during the l960s and the American Wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos we did not have such centers. So I have felt mainly alone during the some 40 years after my discharge and having to de-militarize myself and deal with my own trauma. I am still recovering and easily triggered, especially by loud sounds.

We need to work to enhance the safety of our students, soldiers, and citizens as a whole, or future similar incidents are likely. Public places—such as schools, government buildings, and even military bases—have become less safe during this 21st century.

Perhaps the Ft. Hood massacre can awaken us to the pain and suffering of our military personnel and the lives that they touch overseas and in their families. On the other hand, a Nov. 16 Newsweek column on the new book American Homicide by Ohio State professor of history and criminology Randolph Roth notes “that gun and ammunition sales are up nearly 50 percent from a year ago.” What does that say about the state of our union and our future?

Now is a time to grieve our national losses and work to minimize such losses in the future. Such collective grief can inform and educate us.

“Half of British children aged 5 to 9 own a mobile phone. Some Experts are Unhappy,” headlines a June 23, 2009 article in the UK’s daily “The Times.” It reports that “Lawrie Challies, an emeritus professor of physics who has led the Government’s mobile-phone safety research, says that parents should not give children phones before secondary school.”¹ University of Melbourne pediatrics professor Michael Carr-Gregg, a leading Australian psychologist, “is worried about the power of mobile phones to distract and overexcite” and “says that no children should be allowed a mobile phone until the age of 12.” The French Government bans sales of mobile phones to children under 6.
The long-term consequences of young children already taking their gaze away from living people and constantly-changing nature to look down into and be captured by static machines concerns me. Who benefits and what is lost? What is appropriate technology use? What induces obsessive/compulsive/addictive behavior?

Though I sometimes use a cell phone, with moderation, I am concerned about the unconscious and excessive use of them, like while driving or talking so loud in a restaurant that one disturbs the peaceful meals of others. The issue is how we use technology, rather than abuse it. Some people seem always on call, slaves to their cell phones, willing to drop a live person in favor of talking into that tiny machine. The disadvantages of cell phones, including texting, warrant attention, including unintended consequences and collateral damage.

At issue is when and where and what the consequences might be at certain ages and in certain situations. What might be appropriate cell phone and texting etiquette for young people at different ages? My goal is to encourage people to engage in critical thinking about consequences before placing pulsating plastic to hand then ear, rather than using more primitive and holistic communication methods, like face-to-face.

Cell phones can be good for emergencies, convenient, functional, practical, and have some advantages, as demonstrated by the global communication from the recent twittering from Iran. They can enable even a young person to speak to a distant relative or a parent who is out of town. However, walking around in the streets texting while looking down is sometimes dangerous and at least rude.

As with Petaluma, CA, artist Sally Krah, I am concerned about “the health risks of cell phones.” She uses hers “carefully and infrequently,” so that “it doesn’t rule my life. It’s a blessing if used in moderation.”

The immediacy of cell phones and their push-button control can increase impatience with slower things, like the development of deep human relationships, lasting love, growing plants, and caring for animals. Cybertime creates unnatural time pressures, heightening stress and anxiety. The tools and technologies that we use are not neutral; they help shape who we become.

The addiction to technological progress has heightened in recent years, especially with respect to telecommunications and cybernetics. This growth further exhausts fossil fuels. The development, manufacture and maintenance of high technology tools and weapons depend upon ample cheap energy from fossil fuels. As oil supplies decline and the pace of life quickens even more rapidly, the demand for more coal extraction will increase, which will heighten pollution and speed-up global climate chaos.

“Every single machine in the nation runs on lubrication,” notes David Frindley, staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. This includes electrical and wireless tools that require crude oil byproducts. He was quoted in a recent article about Transition Towns in the weekly “North Bay Bohemian,” where he purchased a small farm in Sonoma County. Frindley is a fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, based in small town Sebastopol, Northern California.

CAUGHT IN THE CELL PHONE SNARE

Alas, I have also been caught in the cell phone snare. While speaking to my Sonoma State University students one day, mine went off, much to their delight, giggles, and snickers, as well as my embarrassment.

We may have a social epidemic on our hands. Studies reveal that American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages a month in the fourth quarter of 2008. One person reported that his 13-year-old exchanged 14,528 texts in one month.
The number of text messages rose to about 75 billion earlier this year and is going up. Downsides include declines in spelling, word choice and writing complexit and an inability to focus. Text-bullying and sending naked photos have become problematic, resulting in at least one documented suicide.

I invited a SSU freshman class off-campus for a film and dinner. The first thing that some of these teens did at the restaurant was to put their cell phones on the dinner table. Some of their little gadgets promptly vibrated, buzzed, and made a variety of demanding sounds.

My dinner guests were soon miles away texting, having what sounded like one-way conversations intruding into our dinner, and playing phone games, ignoring the rest of us at the table in front of them. What happened to old-fashioned connective meal-time conversations? When the primary relationship becomes with a talking machine, rather than with a multi-dimensional person with whom to have spontaneous, life-deepening and life-changing dialogue, something is lost.

As they multi-tasked on so-called “smartphones,” I felt annoyed and alone—a slow dinosaur at a table with fast-moving butterflies with short attention spans flickering away into cyberspace, their consciousnesses split. They are masters at quick scans of screens, rather than reading entire books. I must admit that I am old-fashioned and prefer home-made music and food to the factory-made stuff. I prefer live story-telling and the oral tradition of recited poetry to television. I resist being drawn into the need-it-yesterday world.

But I didn’t say anything to my students, though I did later circulate an article on the downsides of texting to initiate discussion. The students were defensive, but it was a good experience in critical thinking, which is what I teach and seek to practice here.
One of the students in that class, Sally-Anne Petit, helped me understand the use of cell phones from the perspective of her generation as follows: “Changes in our world have made us feel uncomfortable. Or even in danger of being without a mobile technological device. We use these devices to hide us from scary things in this world. It provides shelter, or even a friend. This is important because part of growing up is defending yourself and learning how to act in awkward, or uncomfortable, perhaps even dangerous situations.”

“Its not about the technology so much as it is how the technology is used,” added one of my Teaching Assistants, social worker Victoria Fleming, M.S.W. “It calls for a new etiquette. It is harder for us as we get older to find relevance in young technology and this creates a rift between generations. This is hardly a new phenomenon, but it is accelerated by the pace of emerging technology.”

I later walked on SSU’s beautiful redwood-lined campus. Many students had their faces buried in that consumptive machine, missing the redwoods and other humans passing by, as well as the birds above calling to them. I’ve even seen two people walking along talking to each other—on their cells phones. Those with bluetooths in their ears reminded me of the part-machine, part-human race called Borgs in Star Trek.

Some SSU students understand the downsides of texting and related phenomenon. “Digital Communication: The Death of Verbal Communication in our Society” was recently published by the campus newspaper. Brian Evans contends that “we as a society have been spoiled by the luxuries of Internet, cellular communication, iPhones, Blackberries, etc.” He laments that they have “diminished the personalization of communicating” and “texting has limited our laughter to Lol.”

The sound-bite, minimalist approach that texting and twittering employ can contract the soul and imagination, rather than expand them; they narrow the range of emotions that can be expressed. The frequency with which some fiddle with their phones, eyes down, makes it more difficult to make eye contact with them.

“TECHNO-ADDICTION”

“Techo-addiction” is how some psychologists describe this phenomenon, which includes other recent developments, such as Facebook, My Space, You Tube, and Twitter. An indication that addiction is an appropriate description is when you see someone walk across a busy street, not in the crosswalk, texting, instead of looking, thus risking their life. Texting and twittering also seem to shorten the attention span and heighten one’s vulnerability to distraction, rather than focus and concentration.

New technologies can promise a lot, and then entangle users in a growing web of products, often quite expensive. Cell phones expand the consumer culture of instant messaging and instant gratification, thus reducing the time for embodied human relations and dialogue that leads beyond data and information to depth and textured wisdom.

It is illegal to hold cell phones to one’s ear while driving in California, though I notice many violators, who thus threaten the rest of us with more accidents. Plane, train, and ship accidents have been documented to have happened while or just after pilots’ attentions were diverted while texting.

In contrast to the three-year-old with cell phone, I recently visited friends with a five-month-old bundled onto her mother’s chest, eyes locked, occasionally smiling at the rest of us, returning to absorb her mother’s warm intimacy. It comforted me. I have also been delighted to hang out with a neighbor’s seventeen-month-old, so full of vitality, splashing in water, beginning to form words. He inspires me. I worry about what is in store for these children in this high-tech, sped-up digital world.

I watch with delight as youngsters interact with chickens on my small farm, look up with awe into the giant redwoods, feel their powerful dance partner the wind, and see the birds above. My seventeen-month-old friend eagerly stuffs his mouth with berries, whose purple color ring his wide smile.

At a library, I recently also saw a small girl, probably under three, fixated on a computer screen. She skillfully moved the “mouse” around and watched the machine respond promptly. Screens radiate light, which looking at directly can be harmful, especially to young eyes and brains. Sonoma State University psychology graduate student Julie Perkins is writing her thesis partly on “the gaze” and reports that she “is concerned with the use of machines and the deleterious effect of gazing on a screen in the digital world.” This trend of children absorbed by machines rather than living beings or even picture books concerns me.

On the other hand, I’ve heard of toddlers who throw cell phones into toilets. Good for them! This could be a direct way of communicating “Pay attention to me!” Such spontaneous play is a healthy alternative to the beginning of consumerism. Technophiles seek to protect their expensive hand-held devices, whereas I am more concerned to protect children from pre-mature technology and the addiction to a cell phone culture that is not age appropriate. One toddler’s mother explained that cell phones can have a candy-like appeal, which can lead to a child wanting to consume too much, unless appropriate limits are discerned and established.

THE FLICKERING MIND

The Flickering Mind titles a book by award-winning journalist Todd Oppenheimer, sub-titled The False Promises of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved. Though published in, what some now consider long ago, 2003, its nearly 500 pages document the downsides of computers in education long before texting became so popular and disruptive. His chapters include “Hidden Troubles,” “Bulldozing the Imagination,” and “The Human Touch.”

“Time poverty is now a recognized psychological and social stressor,” according to psychotherapist Linda Buzzell, co-editor of the new Sierra Club Book’s Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind. She adds, “We struggle with diminishing success to adapt to the strange mechanical and disembodied world we have created,” including “endless 24/7 online communications… constantly rushing to keep up as we inevitably fall further behind.” In that machine-driven process “we find ourselves destroying not only our own health, but our habitat and the habitat of the people, plants and animals with whom we share the planet.”

My college students tend to be sweet and open-hearted. They also have more trouble reading entire books and sustaining attention than they did even a few years ago; they appear more distant and distracted. Their emails have gotten briefer and are not always in standard English; they employ abbreviations that I do not understand. They seem to have less patience for ambiguity and paradox, preferring a machine-like yes and no and making overstatements like “always” and “never.”

I do not allow cell phones to be on during class. The tapping while texting can be as annoying as cross-talking and insulting to whoever is speaking. However, I still sometimes hear them vibrate and know that some students are so addicted that they are adept at concealing these tools—which can become almost like armor or weapons–under their clothes and desks the way earlier generations of youth would carefully conceal cigarette smoking.

It took a long time to make cigarette smoking illegal in certain public places, though the dangers had been clearly documented for decades. I hope that it does not take as long to make cell phones illegal in some places, especially moving vehicles, as well as elsewhere. Cell phones can be powerful forces in expanding the consumer culture and reducing embodied human relations and deep communication with others that involves texture, emotion, and nuances.

The critique of soulless machines implicit in this article echoes a tradition reaching back more than a century that includes British novelist D.H. Lawrence, German-speaking poet Rilke, German-American psychologist Erich Fromm, American gardeners Scott and Helen Nearing, and French sociologist Jacques Ellul. Contemporary American advocates of this tradition include psychotherapist Chellis Glendinning (When Technology Wounds), public relations expert Jerry Mander (In the Absence of the Sacred), and farmer Wendell Berry (In the Presence of Fear).

The three-year-old witnessed by the pediatrician was being conditioned for an adult life of consumption with an early onset cell phone addiction. Instead of speeding up to follow the commands of goal-oriented machines such as cell phones, we humans could benefit from slowing down to nature’s meandering pace, especially here in the gorgeous Redwood Empire.

1. ”Mobile phones for children: a boon or a peril?” Times Online – UK

Tables and straw bales appeared in the heart of the city’s Civic Center around a victory garden on about a quarter of an acre that had replaced a lawn. It was surrounded by a huge marketplace, which was like an old-fashioned farmers’ market that gets food directly from the farm to the fork, bypassing corporate super-markets.

A couple of miles away by the Bay at Ft. Mason — inside an old military hangar stretching over the length of a couple of football field — people strolled down a long aisle to taste fresh seafood, chocolate, wine, olives, ice cream, Indian bread and other delightful options. They could also attend free film showings and rock concerts at the former military base transformed into a cultural center.

Meanwhile, inside large auditoriums and smaller meeting rooms people discussed the growing global food crisis, how to respond to it, and imagined possible futures for farming. The final panel included the following key voices in the growing world-wide sustainable agriculture movement: Italian Carlo Petri, the founder of Slow Food in l986, physicist Vandana Shiva from India, Kentucky poet and author Wendell Berry, UC Berkeley professor Michael Pollan, Alice Waters of Chez Panisse Restaurant, and Fast Food Nation author Eric Schloesser.

Petri emerged as a storytelling organizer, Shiva as a radical scientist, Berry as an elder statesman, Pollan as a teacher with a broad theoretical frame, Waters as an inspiring chef, and Schloesser as a reporter from the field.

“Good, Clean, and Fair”

“Good, clean, and fair” are Slow Food Nation’s (SFN) goals, described in a panel as the “Triple Bottom Line.” Good means food that has a welcoming taste and fair means that the farmworkers and others are treated well. Clean is more difficult to describe, so a panel “Exploring the Meaning of Clean” was offered.

SFN was fortunate to be covered by more than a couple hundred daily newspapers and other corporate media. However, this coverage by the fast press gave little or not attention to the substance beneath the pleasurable, attractive surface. This article focuses more on the critique of our food system that many of SFN’s Food for Thought speakers articulated.

“We’re not the leaders,” the elder Berry asserted. “We’re the catalysts. More and more people are talking to each other and doing things for each other. This is the cooperation principle.” Berry focused on the importance of being thrifty, growing a local economy, and being a good neighbor.

“We’ve made terrible mistakes in this country in terms of exploitation,” Berry admitted, echoing one of SFN’s main themes of social justice. “We continue to do so with the migrant population of Mexico.”

“The themes here are the themes of the next century,” Petri declared, painting a larger picture in Italian, which was translated into English. “If they are not, there will not be a future. Sooner or later these issues will arrive on the tables of all politicians.”

“Lets get rid of the heavy coat of being consumers, which destroys our lives,” Petri continued. “It allows all the injustices we have been hearing about. Enough of being consumers. Try to consume less every day. Lets all start wasting less. Lets free ourselves from this consumptive disease.” Frequently waving his arms, the bearded, grandfatherly Petri often brought humor and laughs to serious matters with compelling stories.

“Food Matters”

“Food matters,” Pollan asserted. “It is about politics and our health. The food issue has gotten on the national agenda because of the world food crisis. Food prices are high and the era of cheap food is over. Yet politicians have not been talking about food; they need to deal with it. It involves all the issues — energy, the price of oil, climate change, and health.”

Pollan continued, “We have been eating oil for 30 years now. We don’t have the oil any more. Agriculture is the original solar energy. We can eat without oil. We need to return to a diet of contemporary sunlight.”

“Markets are being stolen from farmers,” the activist physicist Shiva asserted, indicting industrial agriculture corporations. “The Gates Foundation is doing everything wrong in India. It continues the obsolete paradigm of getting pesticides into Africa and elsewhere. I think that the Gates Foundation is criminal. Monsanto and Cargill are killing people. We need to enforce anti-trust laws against them.” Shiva described the large number of farmers in India who are committing suicide because they are being displaced and loosing meaning in life.

Wes Jackson of the Land Institute in Kansas echoed Shiva’s concerns, “What the Gates Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation are proposing is a new Green Revolution. The data is in about its (negative) consequences.”

“The U.S. shapes global appetites and is destroying our laws in India. GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms) are being placed on fast forward. Your local solutions need global consciousness.”

“You cannot underestimate the powers of those who will resist change,” Schloesser commented. “We need to create and broaden a real movement. We need a Slow Food Nation in Des Moines, Iowa. Our policies and companies cause harm to thousands who have not had a seat at the table.”

In an earlier panel that he moderated with workers and their advocates, Schloesser noted, “The sustainable agriculture movement has been successful in the last ten years.” He pointed to the growth of farmers’ markets, organic food, animal rights, and “a renewed appreciation for the taste of food.”

“But something has been missing,” Schloesser contended, “human rights. The people who harvest, process and prepare the food” have not been given their fair share. Schloesser and other panelists described the slavery involved in the tomato industry in Florida and the particular difficulties of meatpackers. Farmworkers and restaurant workers are among the poorest paid in the U.S.

International activists such as Petri and Shiva and their U.S. colleagues help pull down the veil placed by the corporate fast media in this country. It conceals much of the deadly action of our food system (which one government official described as “acceptable risks”) that systematically exploits workers in the U.S and world-wide, drains natural resources from around the globe, and exports our deadly chemicals and practices that thwart traditional agriculture.

As such notables discussed food inside to sold out crowds sitting in comfortable chairs, a soap box was set up outside in the Victory Garden where farmers and others educated the tourists and casual observers who came there just by chance or deliberately and sat down on straw bales. The marketplace surrounding the garden on about a quarter of an acre often had long lines at booths where farmers from around California offered their diverse foods. One felt like they were in an old-fashioned village where people were enjoying themselves with slow conversations, bumping into each other in a crowded plaza.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom strolled by the garden and explained, “Both Alice Waters and I got down and helped plant the garden. We plan to leave it up at least through Thanksgiving and the end of November. Then we will decide what to do.” Waters added, “I’ve been wanting a garden on the White House lawn for a long time.”

At the soapbox orchardist Peter Jacobson of Yountville, California, spoke about “Learning from Chefs.” He advocated and described the growing trend of chefs developing relationships with local farmers. Both farmers and chefs are under a lot of pressure — usually at different times of the day. Farmers often begin their work before sun-up and chefs often continue past sundown.

50 Million More Farmers Needed

“We need 50 million more farmers if we are going to be able to farm sustainably” in the U.S. Jacobson asserted, echoing a theme raised at SFN and by Wendell Berry in his l977 The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, published by Sierra Club Books.

SFN offered a specific panel on “Edible Education,” which focused on schools for children. The long weekend itself also became an educational process. People learned about food and agriculture by what they heard and saw, as well as by what they tasted. Musicians reminded participants that agriculture and the food that it produces is a basis of culture.

RSK Arts and Drumming played traditional Nigerian drums and told stories, including one about a native doctor who used food as medicine. They sang a ”A Farmer’s Song” and Rasaki Aladokun explained, “We mean real farmer’s labor, not mechanized.” The drums sent out a heart beat rhythm throughout the victory garden that could surely be heard in downtown offices and which inspired little blonde girls to dance among the vegetables. The drums themselves were made of plants and animal skins, which provide us nourishment in other ways as well.

“We all eat everyday,” master chef Waters noted. “There are consequences to the choices we make with respect to our health, environment, and culture. Edible education is to help children understand those consequences.”

African American Van Jones of Green for All in Oakland was one of the most applauded panelists at SFN. “The clean energy wave is what I focus on — replacing pollution-based energy,” Jones said. “We have a crisis in our public school system. The schools fail to teach kids about how to get jobs and how to eat. We need to change how we fuel our buildings, as well as our bodies. The green economy that we are building can pull everyone together. We need to put the hungry kids without resources at the center. We need a movement to go from diesel to soul.”

“The interests of big business is a big part of why agriculture is failing. We need to put the interests of big business to the side,” the chair of SFN’s board, Katrina Heron, noted. “Big likes to talk to big,” noted SFN Executive Director Anya Fernald. This makes it difficult for small family farmers to be selected to provide food to the massive school lunch programs.

The Climate Change and Food panel was opened by moderator and author Mark Hertsgaard as follows: “We are gathered here today three years and a day after Hurricane Katrina. Today Hurricane Gustav is roaring through the Caribbean and headed toward New Orleans. It reminds us of the enormous power weather events have on food. How do we feed the world as we look out over the next 25 to 50 years?” The deadly specter of famine was raised.

Hertsgaard continued, “The rising temperatures will have ominous impacts on our food production. Yields of corn and other staples are projected to decline 10-20 percent in the Mid-West.” He added that projections in Africa are up to a 50% decline in the next 20 years. He said that there are now 800 million people in water-stressed parts of the world, which is projected to rise to some three billion people in 25 years.

Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, noted that, “fossil fuel-based civilization is unsustainable. The uncertainty of climate change is what is problematic. The farm bill locks the U.S. into five years of unparalleled disaster. There is a profound denial about food in American politics. Politicians do not get it.”

“The thunderstorms that hit the Mid-West last year are creating soil erosion in Iowa and elsewhere,” the Land Institute’s Wes Jackson noted. “For future generations this could be more significant that Katrina. We have to get back to the stuff that we are made of, which is soil.”

“What scares me about this historical moment is that some of the big bio-technology and agribusiness corporations are presenting themselves as solutions to the problems,” revealed author Anna Lappe of the Small Planet Institute. “But biotechnology neither increases yields or diversity nor does it democratize the food system.” She later added, “Organic agriculture can match or pass the yield of chemical, industrial agriculture. Industrial-style agriculture depletes resources in ways that are not accounted for.”

Echoing what her mother Frances Moore Lappe wrote about in Diet for a Small Planet, her daughter asserted that “the problem today on the planet with respect to hunger is not a question of scarcity. We have enough food to feed us all. It is a crisis of democracy, as my mother wrote thirty years ago.”

The Food for Thought speakers’ series took a systems approach. It related food and agriculture to issues such as climate change, social justice, re-localizing food, and the policy and planning needed to replace our current food system with a more sustainable one. Food security, energy security, and climate security were approached as intimately linked.

“Food is a universal right, not a privilege,” declared Josh Verteil, the new president of Slow Food USA. He will coordinate the some 200 Slow Food chapters in the United States, which has around 16,000 members among the more than 80,000 members in the international organization.

Six hundred leaders in the food industry were invited to come to a Changemakers Day at the beginning of SFN to discuss key issues. At these sessions one could hear lively conversations between different groups of people, including farmers and government regulators.

Local, National, and International Implications

SFN’s agenda was local, national, and international. On the local level the intention was to turn people toward what they can eat from local farmers, especially at a time when gasoline prices are rising, which contributes to a rise in food prices. The average travel distance from field to fork in the U.S. is 1500 miles.

On the national level, the draft of a Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture of slightly over 500 distilled words was released. Six months in the writing, the intention is to gather some 300,000 endorsers and take the document to Washington, D.C., in the fall of 2009 to influence the next farm bill.

The author of Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to a Food and Farm Bill, Daniel Imhoff, was the originating author and primary editor of the Declaration. Among its editors and framers were Pollan, Berry, Waters, Former Deputy Secretary of the USDA Richard Rominger, and Michael Dimock, who is the president of Roots of Change, one of SFN’s co-sponsors. The Declaration is now posted on www.fooddeclaration.org and seeks comments and endorsers before a final version appears.

“The driving force behind the Declaration,” explained Imhoff while at a Taste Pavilion at Ft. Mason, “was to describe what healthy food is. We want to make the link between health and food.” Imhoff seeks to involve the medical community more in drafting the U.S.’s next farm bill and making the connection between food and health clearer.

The active presence of the Italian Petri and the scientist Shiva helped place SFN within an international context. SFN was modeled after the Terra Madre and Salon de Gusto gatherings that happen regularly in Italy. SFN had a European flavor, especially as people walked down the promenade at Ft. Mason, as if they were on Las Ramblas in Barcelona, or similar strolls in European cities.

Slow Food Nation (SFN) was unlike the dozens of agricultural and food-related gatherings this reporter has attended for over a decade, such as the informative annual Eco-Farm and Bioneer conferences. Those tend to have a couple of thousand committed activists who pay and meet inside. Many of them were also at SFN, but they were joined by thousands of others, some of whom were merely curious, found themselves attracted, and dropped in to free events. Most of those attending SFN did so outside on sunny days in what is usually foggy San Francisco at this time of year. Sold-out SFN tours left for farms to the north and south, including to the Russian River in this reporter’s home county.

Walking through the victory garden were many parents with infants in their arms and strollers. It was a truly family event with people of all ages. The lines at the booths at the marketplace were often long where people could buy the kinds of food and lunches that the gathering advocated. Members of the Youth Food Movement delegation seemed to even out-number the gray-hairs at the Edible Education panel. Some of them planned to stay around for a gigantic Eat-In scheduled for Labor Day in a large San Francisco park.

SFN was a major networking event with so many people interested in food coming together. “Stop the Spray: Support Healthy Food Systems” flyers were passed out on the sidewalk to protest the Light Brown Apple Moth eradication program currently happening in parts of California. A flyer promoting the showing at a local theatre of the film The World According to Monsanto was distributed. It will be screened by Jeffrey M. Smith, author of the book Seeds of Deception: Exposing Industry and Government Lies about the Safety of Genetically Engineered Foods You’re Eating.

During the weekend both corporate leaders and anti-corporate activists were together in discussions. SFN’s most controversial partner is Whole Foods Market, which is criticized for its union-busting activities and running small local grocery stores and small farmers out of business. In contrast, among SFN’s media partners was the progressive Mother Jones magazine.

“Whole Foods does not live up to Slow Food’s standards of good, clean, and fair,” asserted Sebastopol Farmer’s Market manager Paula Downing. “I went to a panel where a Mexican worker reported that they had negotiated a one cent a pound raise for their tomato picking in Florida with corporations like Taco Bell and Wal-Mart. Yet Whole Foods has not agreed to that raise. The difference is $45 for a ten-hour day, rather than $40. Rather than partner with Whole Foods, Slow Found should confine itself to stores that do comply with its standards, like Berkeley Bowl and Olivers in Sonoma County.”

“The role of Slow Food Nation,” according to one of its organizers, Michael Dimock, president of Roots of Change, “was to convene people and be a convergence.” A test of its effectiveness will be what happens in coming months as endorsers of the Declaration are solicited and then when it is presented to Congress.

Some SFN organizers are already considering hosting another such gathering, either next year or the following year.

Organizers of the Labor Day weekend celebration to follow expect to draw over 50,000 people to a variety of events, including a victory garden, food tastings, a Food for Thought speakers’ series, a marketplace, and chef demonstrations. It could be the largest food event in American history.

Some of the leading voices in “the good food movement” have drafted the petition. It seeks to change the food policy of the United States and is described as a “national call for a new, sustainable food system.” It intends to provide “a clear and commonly held framework for future action to educate citizens and policy makers.”

The president of Roots of Change (ROC), a San Francisco-based group, and former chairman of Slow Food USA, Michael Dimock, initiated the concept of such a petition. “This declaration is a call to action by and for all Americans,” he said. “The purpose of U.S. food and agriculture must change and it can no longer focus on the production of cheap calories. Conditions demand a more holistic approach to human and community health that begins on our farms and ranches,” he added.

Among the drafting team and original framers were the following: UC Berkeley professor Michael Pollan, Dan Imhoff, author of “Food Fight,” and Chez Panisse Restaurant founder Alice Waters. Additional contributors to the final draft to be presented at SFN included Kentucky author and farmer Wendell Berry, environmentalist Bll McKibbon, and Native American leader Winona LaDuke.

Former Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Richard Rominger, a farmer, helped draft the petition and said, “This Declaration, which is being crafted by a broad coalition, is the preamble for the next generation of farm policy, and we hope it will stimulate the discussion to help get us there.”

“Behind us stands a half-century of industrial food production, underwritten by cheap fossil fuels, abundant land and water resources, and a drive to maximize the global harvest of cheap calories,” the Declaration’s first paragraph asserts. “Ahead lie rising energy and food costs, a changing climate, declining water supplies, a growing population, and the paradox of widespread hunger and obesity,” it continues.

Such claims were documented at the weeklong Stockholm International Water Conference attended by 2,400 water experts and government officials. “A spectre is haunting the cities and villages of most developing nations, warns a senior official of a World Bank-affiliated organization,” begins an Aug. 22 Inter Press Service (IPS) article by Thalif Deen.

“’It’s the spectre of a food, fuel and water crisis,’ says Lars Thunell,” the IPS article continues. He is the executive vice president of the Washington-based International Finance Corporation. Agriculture is the most water-intensive sector. The decline in fresh water threatens the food supply. Thunell described recent riots over food prices, growing hunger, and rising malnutrition. Current estimates are that the world will not have enough water to feed itself within 40 years.

“Keeping water under local, public and democratic control is the most just way to insure the greatest degree of water access for the greatest number of people,” according to Patti Lynn of Corporate Accountability International, the IPS article concludes.

This is the context within which the Food Declaration will be unveiled in San Francisco. Endorsements and comments will be solicited. The public will be given 90 days to comment before the drafting team creates the final document. The goal is to get at least 300,000 signatures to present it in Washington, D.C. to Congress in the Fall of 2009.

“The movement to create better food and agriculture in the U.S. has been slowly and steadily gaining ground for well over a decade,” according to a recent Roots of Change (ROC) statement. “The public’s increasing interest and the media’s deepening coverage of climate change, energy, agriculture, labor issues, food costs, food quality and obesity may finally illuminate the interrelationship of these crises and provide a context for urgently needed changes,” ROC continues.

The intention is to influence the next national farm bill. “The last farm bill cycle,” ROC maintains, “confirmed that a tight cadre of lobbyists control the debate to protect the status quo rather than aid the population of the nation.” The current farm policy “is mired in a 20th Century industrial paradigm” that benefits “entrenched interests,” ROC asserts.

The Declaration calls “for a radically different approach to food and agriculture. We believe that the food system must be reorganized on a foundation of health.”

A healthy food and agriculture policy, according to the Declaration, would follow twelve foundational principles. Among them are the following:

• Provides access to affordable, nutritious food for everyone;
• Prevents the exploitation of farmers, workers and natural resources and the cruel treatment of animals;
• Informs customers of how food is produced, where it comes from, and what it contains;
• Protects the finite resources of productive soils, fresh water, and biological diversity;
• Strives to remove fossil fuel from every link in the food chain and replace it with renewable resources and energy;
• Originates from a biological rather than an industrial framework;
• Requires a national dialog concerning technologies used in production.

The final principle affirms “the development of just and sustainable regional farm and food networks.”

“Most all the major organizations seeking reform in agriculture in the U.S. have signed on to the Declaration. The challenge remains to bring in more of the current mainstream,” ROC president Dimock explained in a phone interview from his home in Santa Rosa, Northern California. “Slow Food Nation is part of a mosaic that can help change food policy in the U.S.,” according to Dimock.

“We want to lift a loud voice to change our food system,” Waters responded when asked about SFN, where over 50,000 people are expected. “We need to change the ways we grow, distribute, and eat food, which needs to be good, clean, and fair. Things are at a crisis point with respect to health and the environment.”

Waters described how the lawn in front of San Francisco’s Civic Center, one of the sites for SFN, has been replaced with a victory garden. “We have been talking about a vegetable garden on the White House lawn. This would be a way to talk about stewardship and nourishment. Thomas Jefferson had such a garden.”

“A big message of Slow Food Nation is that we all need to be planting gardens,” Waters noted. Addressing global climate change issues, she commented, “We need to have more greenhouses in the future, whether it gets too hot or too cold.”

“How we eat can change the world,” Waters has said elsewhere. By combining fresh produce from local farms with European cuisine, Waters helped create a food revolution and transform eating habits. At the Sebastopol market she also signed copies of her newest book The Art of Simple Food.

Waters helped kick-off the Gravenstein Apple Month, which has been declared by both the Sebastopol City Council and the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors. This is the time of year in this semi-rural area where one gets invitations such as the following: “If you want to help grind up large quantities of Gravenstein apples to make fresh juice, drink lots of juice, join a pot luck BBQ lunch, and get covered in apple pulp=come on over!”

“Gravensteins are a tasty apple that got left behind,” Waters explained. The delicious “Grav” apple is at risk of becoming an endangered species. “Save the Gravensteins!” bumper stickers made by Slow Food and Community Alliance with Family Famers (CAFF) are popping up around the country. Slow Food has accepted the Sebastopol Grav as one of the traditional foods to which it gives attention to protect it from extinction.

SFN’s “Come to the Table” call has garnered significant media attention. The New York Times (July 23) and San Francisco Chronicle (June 30) have each published long articles about the gathering that has a budget of some $2 million dollars. Some of its public events have already sold out.

Its main events are a Food for Thought speaker series, taste pavilions, a marketplace showcasing 60 local farmers and artisans, and the victory garden. Live music will be performed across town at the Ft. Mason meadow, an appropriate place to make “swords into plowshares.” Special events include dinners, art, journeys, and hikes. Some are free, whereas others require tickets.

Slow Food was started by the Italian Carlo Petrini in l986 to protest McDonald’s and its fast food culture. It advocates traditional agriculture and food preparation and consumption, which differ from how many in the U.S. deal with food. SFN is the first such large gathering in the U.S.; it is modeled after events in Europe that have drawn thousands to Terra Madre gatherings.

The speaker series includes some of the leading voices in the growing global sustainable agriculture and food movement, such as Petrini, physicist Vandana Shiva of India, Kentucky author and farmer Wendell Berry, University of California at Berkeley professor and author Michael Pollan, author Raj Patel, Native American leader Winona LaDuke, Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser, and the Land Institute’s Wes Jackson of Kansas.

Their topics include “The World Food Crisis,” “Building a New Food System,” “Re-Localizing Food,” “Climate Change and Food,” and “Edible Education.” Award-winning short films and documentaries will also be shown.

The “New, Fair Food System,” as an example, will feature “activists who campaign on behalf of farm workers and meatpacking workers.” It will focus on “how do you create a system in which eating well and treating people well are inextricably linked?”

A Call to Participate went out for a Youth Food Movement “to empower networks of students and young farmers, cooks, artisans, activists and eaters.” Among those attending will be members of Sonoma State University’s Slow Food Club, including its president, Robin Temple, a psychology student. While pruning on a local farm one day in late July, Temple described some of his group’s plans, “We will speak in classes during the last week of August to inform students of the event. We will make a film of the youth program there that will be shown at the October Terra Madre gathering in Italy. We have been working to get Michael Pollan and some of the other key speakers to come to campus.”

“Slow food is the opposite of fast food. It is food that comes from local, sustainable farms,” Temple writes in the SSU campus newspaper. “We intend to raise awareness about the profound effects of our food choices on the environment, on our health and on issues of social justice,” he adds.

Some have criticized Slow Food for being elitist and catering to an older crowd that can afford better food and attend its sometimes-expensive dinners and gatherings. Temple represents a younger generation in the Slow Food Movement raising various challenges. “The current industrial model will soon fail for its heavy dependency on homogeneity and petroleum. As such, slow food is about survival,” asserts Temple.

The Youth Food Movement invitation contends that “good, clean and fair food is a universal right.” The youth gathering starts with an overnight retreat August 27 at a teaching farm on the California coast north of San Francisco, includes meeting at an art gallery that seeks to “build community through food and art,” and concludes with an Eat-In at Dolores Park “on a long, 200-person table for a meal curated by Outstanding in the Field.”

By-invitation-only events include a Changemakers Day and a National Congress. Around 600 participants will attend the August 29 Changemakers Day “designed for our nation’s food system leaders.” It will include “26 dynamic presentations on topics ranging from the viability of rare breeds to the nuts and bolts of engaging our isolated urban and rural communities in the sustainable food movement.” Its seeks “to inspire leaders to knit new and diverse networks” and “lay the groundwork for more concrete, inclusive and effective collaboration in the sustainable food and farming movement,” according to its website.

The organizers expect “the clash of ideas, critical thinking from incisive minds, and inspiring dialog.” The Changemakers Day emerged from a February Town Hall meeting composed of people from SFN and Roots of Change, a San Francisco co-sponsor of SFN.

Panels include the following: “Rising Seas, Shrinking Catch;” “Triple-Bottom Line,” referring to social, environmental, and financial return to investors; “Preserving the Land Base;” “Ensuring Diversity;” “Nutrition for All: Improving Community Health;” “Rich Diet, Poor Communities;” “Going Local;” “Help Wanted: 50 Million New Farmers;” and “Reframing the Slow Food Conversation” to work more for social justice.

“I’ll be a panelist on Changemakers Day,” explained Steve Schwartz, while selling mushrooms from his New Carpati Farm at the Sebastopol Farmers’ Market. “More people are thinking about what they eat these days. Passing by McDonalds my four-year-old says, ‘That’s junk food. It’s bad for you.’”

Watching Schwartz and other farmers at the market talk about their crops, one can see that they are creating food-based relationships. “I’m proud to be a small part of this movement with a vision for a better food system. It can help activate people to work to change food policies.”

Food, after all, is much more than something you just eat. It has traditionally drawn families, friends, and communities together. Agri-culture is at the base of culture. The preparation and sharing of food and drink creates and sustains culture.

“I went to Slow Food Nation’s parent, Terra Madre in Italy,” explained the manager of the Sebastopol Farmers’ Market, Paula Downing. “It was life-changing. I plan to go to Slow Food Nation because I do not want to miss another chance for a life-changing event.”

“Terra Madre was a heart event. It was a thrill to see families still making the food they have made for centuries. You feel this human thing. It was very emotional and made me cry. Some recipes for corn bread, for example, had been handed down for twenty generations,” Downing continued. “I love the apple farmers here in Sonoma County. They are courageous. There is a history here that we need to remember.”

“Slow Food is an opportunity to re-connect with our food and local growers and to understand the plight our planet is in. Our immunity and the immune system of the Earth are linked; building from here is a source of our healing,” explained Ana Stayton of Golden Nectar Farm. “It helps create a sense of what real nourishment is. It brings farmers, children, and the community back into the food system, rather than leaving it in the hands of large corporations. Slow Food encourages people to grow and cook their own food and remember the pleasure in that.”

“Being at Terra Madre was a powerful bonding experience,” Stayton added. “It was intense being around people from over 150 countries in their traditional dress who have this common bond and language of the land, growing food, preserving local food cultures, preparing, serving and nourishing others.”

“I discovered Tierra Vegetables last December while shopping,” Mary Killian explained near the Slow Food table. “They have a delicious heritage bean. They so inspired me that I bought them as Christmas presents and included information about Slow Food.” Slow Food also provides heritage turkeys from Sonoma County, one of its most active chapters.

Networking is common at Slow Food events. One grower at the Sebastopol market, Deborah Ramelli-Toth of Gratitude Gardens, was proudly carrying a couple dozen free-range eggs, though she has no chickens. “I traded them for tomatoes, of which I have many,” she explained. She also made arrangements to share her canning equipment with a friend, Deb Kindy, who lives nearby in another town.

Waters spoke about the need to do something with all the food that is wasted, “We need to do more foraging and gleaning. Lots of food is wasted on the ground which is very edible.”

On the land where Ramelli-Toth lives there will be a Sebastopol Gravenstein Apple Slow Dinner the week before SFN, hosted by the Culinary Underground and Voluptuous Smoke under the apple trees at Nana Mae’s orchard. According to the invitation the Gravs “have a long history yet are mostly ignored by the culinary mainstream.” It adds, “Eating is a political act. Eat your view!”

“We’ve been writing a declaration and petition calling for a new national food policy,” explained Michael Dimock at the SFN table at the Sebastopol Farmers’ Market on July 27. Dimock has chaired Slow Food USA, been active in California Alliance for Family Farmers (CAFF), and is president of Roots of Change. “We need healthy food and agriculture,” Dimock asserted. The declaration will be released Aug. 28 and will include a preamble, set of principles, and call to action.

The August 28 National Congress is composed of 300 delegates who represent the 16,000 U.S. members of the international Slow Food Movement, which has over 86,000 members in more than 100 countries. They are organized into what internationally are called convivium and are beginning to be called chapters here in the U.S., where there are around 200.

The Congress takes place every four years. Participants will engage in peer-to-peer networking and in leadership training and professional development. They will also vote on revisions to the National Statue. This year, for the first time, 35 Slow Food in Schools projects leaders will meet to discuss their garden-to-table efforts.

“When kids grow and cook their own food, they all want to eat it,” Waters explained from her experiences with edible education programs. “They want an interactive education. They are happy to be in the garden. Kids are not just hungry for food. They are hungry for people to take care of them and for nature.”

Direct democracy is important to the Slow Food Movement. When asked about the leadership of the Russian River Slow Food chapter in Sonoma County, Paula Shatkin explained that they have a leadership team of eleven persons, who do not have a hierarchy.

Industrial societies with their industrial agriculture are dependent upon fossil fuels such as petroleum, natural gas, and coal for many things, including transportation, electricity, and making plastics and other modern essentials. Oil is the main ingredient in conventional food. As the supply of petroleum and other fossil fuels decline Peak Water and Peak Food will follow. In recent months we have seen the return of food riots in the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa.

In April food prices in the United States saw their biggest jump in 18 years, according to the Labor Department. Prices are up an average of 41% from last year for commodities such as corn and cotton. Fertilizer prices are up a dramatic 65% from a year ago.

“Saving Water: From Field to Fork” titles a new study reported in the article “Food Security Requires New Approach to Water” in a May 24 Inter Press Service (IPS) article. A growing scarcity of water threatens food supplies. Food production and agriculture are the largest uses of fresh water, consuming about 70% of water globally, according to the study by the Stockholm International Water Institute. In his book “Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines,” Heinberg says that over 80% of fresh water goes toward agriculture in the United States.

Scare supplies of water, according to the IPS article, “will be a key constraint to food production.” If there is no change in current practices in food production and consumption, according to a contributor to the Stockholm report, “it is likely that twice as much water as that used today would be required by 2015 to produce the world’s required food.” But that amount of water would not be available, indicating the possibility of widespread food fights and even famine.

“Peak Food” is a term that California farmer and author John Jeavons uses in workshops. Jeavons “says peak food is actually related to four other intertwined crises: peak farmable land, peak water, peak oil, and global warming,” according to the article “Monocrops Bring Food Crisis” by Alex Roslin in the Canadian publication www.straight.com.

A solution–according to Jeavons in his classic book How to Grow More Vegetables–is to revive small-scale farming, such as used to prevail in the United States. In addition to Jeavon’s biointensive farming, others advocate the system referred to as permaculture. Heinberg calls for the de-industrialization of agriculture. He says that a key will be getting more farmers and re-ruralization and re-localization.

“Food Banks Face Rising Costs,” headlines a May 26 MSNBC article. “While demand is up, supplies and donations are down,” the article reveals. “The way it’s going, we’re going to have a food disaster pretty soon,” the MSNBC article quotes Phyllis Legg of the Merced Food Bank in the foreclosure-ravaged Merced County in California.

“If gas keeps going up, its going to be catastrophic in every possible way,” the article quotes Ross Fraser, a spokesperson for America’s Second Harvest—The Nation’s Food Bank Network. “The price of gasoline is going to drive the price of everything else,” Fraser asserts.

A food bank in Albuquerque, N.M., runs out of food and turns people away. Public school students in Baton Rouge, La. bring home some of their lunches to have something to eat for dinner. A food bank in Lorain, Ohio, meets only 25 to 30% of the need for food. In Stockton, Ca., which has the highest foreclosure rate in the country, customers line up several hours before the food bank’s 10 a.m. opening.

“When people go to the gas pump and watch that dial roll over, there goes breakfast, lunch and dinner. People are living on the edge,” Don Lindsay is quoted in a May 26 article in the New York Times-owned daily Press Democrat of Sonoma County, where this reporter lives in Northern California. Lindsay is operations director of the Redwood Empire Food Bank. It feeds 50,000 people in our semi-rural county of around 500,000. Such pantries are an essential aspect of the safety net that is diminishing.

“Present and future generations may become acquainted with that old, formerly familiar but unwelcome houseguest—famine,” writes Heinberg.

The electrical grid in Baghdad is not expected to be restored for many years and is already down in other parts of the world, making electricity and it many benefits unavailable. An increasing number of people in parts of Hawai’i, California’s North Coast, and elsewhere are planning for the future by making homes that are off the electrical grid. Industrial societies run on electricity powered by the cheap energy of fossil fuels. As the supply of those energy sources decline and world-wide competition for them through wars and other means heighten, more electrical grids will fail, and with them access to both food and water.

The pace quickens. The signs are more numerous. We need even more than food security; we need food sovereignty. Who controls your food? Growing at least part of one’s own food–and having something to trade–will be essential to survival.

Let’s face it: our world has become increasingly maddening. Bad news mounts each day: unending wars, financial crises, earthquakes, hurricanes and cyclones killing thousands, chaotic climate change, vanishing pollinating bees and polar bears, rising oceans, thinning forests and a host of human-created or — worsened threats. We live in uncertain times with an even more uncertain future. We face unprecedented, unpredictable converging threats. What can one do to remain somewhat sane? The ostrich approach of denial by burying one’s head in the sand will not be effective or life enhancing.

It is a good time for an increasing number of people to return to the multiple benefits and pleasures of growing at least part of their own food by gardening and farming. In addition to satisfying the need to eat and drink, farming can also help deal with depression, passivity, and other forms of psychological suffering. It can help treat both the body and the soul.

One of the many good things that farms based on nature’s patterns can do is help balance people. Much psychological suffering and even mental illnesses have to do with imbalances, which characterize modern society. Before turning to drugs, one can at least try visiting farms and perhaps volunteering to work there. Or one can connect with farms in collaboration with other treatment programs.

Farming can be done in ways that preserve the Earth and put humans in direct contact with it. “Small farms are the most productive on earth,” according to the May 11 New York Times article, “Change We Can Stomach,” by farmer and chef Dan Barber. “A four-acre farm in the United States nets, on average, $1,400 per acre; a 1,364-acre farm nets $39 an acre,” he writes. “Farming has the potential to go through the greatest upheaval since the Green Revolution, bringing harvests that are more meaningful, sustainable, and, yes, even more flavorful,” Barber contends.

Since growing one’s own food is not possible for everyone, it is also a good time to establish direct relationships with local farmers and shop more at farmers’ markets, farm stands, and by subscribing to Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs). Urban agriculture, farms on the urban fringe, and rooftop gardening are becoming increasingly popular. The large city of Havana, Cuba, grows 70% of its own food. Necessity will change how people get their food in the near future.

Many Americans take their food sources for granted, assuming that super-markets will be able to always supply them with what they need. Having lived in Hawai’i when delivery disruptions and the lack of transportation across the ocean left bare shelves in food stores, I know the panic this can cause.

The “Silent Tsunami,” “Misery Index,” and Mud Cakes

A “silent tsunami” of hunger sweeps the globe, reports the head of the United Nation’s World Food Program, Josette Sheeran, speaking in late April at a food summit in London. The heightened hunger threat endangers 20 million of the world’s poorest children and is pushing 100 million people into poverty.

“This is the new face of hunger — the millions of people who were not in the urgent hunger category six months ago but now are,” Sheeran reports. “The world’s misery index is rising.”

During 2008 food riots broke out in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. “You are seeing the return of the food riot, one of the oldest forms of collective action,” commented Raj Patel in an April 25 San Francisco Chronicle article. The University of California at Berkeley scholar wrote the new book Stuffed and Starved: Power and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System.

The World Bank estimates that food prices have risen 83% in three years; other estimates are in the 60 and 70 percent range. Even in the wealthy United States we have recently seen rationing of rice and other staples by food giants such as Costco and Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Clubs, the two biggest warehouse retail chains. Such trends are likely to continue and are creating stockpiling and hoarding.

“In the poorest districts (of Haiti), there is now a brisk trade in mud cakes,” writes Patel in an article titled “The Troubles with Food,” published at www.redpepper.org.uk. “Mothers feed the biscuits, made with water, salt, margarine and clay, to their children. The cake puts a dampener on hunger, at least for a couple of hours, but leaves your mouth dry and bitter for several hours more,” he continues.

Industrial agriculture will be one of the many aspects of human life on the planet hit by the dwindle/demand oil trend and the related peaks of other fossil fuels, such as natural gas. Industrial agriculture depends upon petroleum in many ways — to run tractors and other machines, to make chemical pesticides and fertilizers, and to fuel the trucks that transport food an average of 1,500 miles from field to fork. Oil is the most important ingredient in most of conventional food. As the dwindle/demand rate intensifies, food will be less available and more expensive. Famine is likely.

Survival will require that more people return to an earlier energy supply — muscle power. As someone who made a transition in the early 1990s (while in my late 40s) from a livelihood based on college teaching and related intellectual activities to one based on farming, I can report that there are many advantages to such a change. I feel better as a result of living on the land, growing some of my own food, and sharing that organic food and the farm itself with others.

I have found my local place. In 2003 I accepted a great job offer in Hawai’i, but after a couple of wonderful years, I felt so homesick that I returned to my farm.

So this is a report from the farm front, which focuses on some of the psychological benefits of farming.

The multiple consequences of a diminishing supply of humanity’s major energy source at this point in history will include hardships, stress, and suffering. There are many ways of dealing psychologically with such matters, including with family, friends and professional counselors. This article will explore what I have come to describe as agropsychology and agrotherapy.

I was trained to be a counselor. Quite frankly, I was not good at doing individual therapy. I got too emotional and involved. I did not adequately develop the necessary professional armor and shield. I did not take enough distance from the people I was working with or have enough “impulse control.” So I shifted more to teaching, group work, and writing. In the time since my more conventional psychological training some forty years ago, self-disclosure and emotional men have become more acceptable as sex roles and professional codes have evolved.

Ecopsychology and Ecotherapy

Sierra Club Books published Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind in l996. The term refers to the emerging synthesis of the psychological and the ecological. The book’s editor, Theodore Roszak, writes that “ecology needs psychology, psychology needs ecology.” Roszak reports on a l990 conference entitled “Psychology as if the Whole Earth Mattered.”

The Sierra Club plans to publish the book’s sequel Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind in March of 2009. My chapter “Farming, Sweet Darkness, Poetry, and Healing” is scheduled to be part of that book. After finishing my contribution I began to realize that what I was writing about could be called agrotherapy, which is the practice of agropsychology, which are sub-sets of ecopsychology and ecotherapy. Farms have historically been healing places, for both those who live and work there and those who visit. Farm tours and even overnight farm stays are becoming increasingly popular as examples of ecotourism. The Small Farm Program at the University of California at Davis, Sonoma County Farm Trails, and Daily Acts are among the many groups that promote such tours.

Simply put, by living on a farm and working the land on a regular basis, I have become a healthier person — physically and mentally. In recent years I have been hosting an increasing number of farm tours at Kokopelli Farm in the Sebastopol countryside, Sonoma County, Northern California. Community, school, and religious groups, as well as families and friends, come to the farm, which grows mainly organic berries and fruit and cares for chickens.

My visitors tend to feel better from their time on this traditional farm; something positive usually happens to them. Being outside in nature can benefit people. People typically loose sight of chronological time. They can fall into berry time or chicken time, which tend to be slower than the human-made clock, and often more fun and stress reducing. They sometimes lose their restraint and order, wanting to sprint ahead, or go off the path, as if they were animals, which they are.

Chicken Wisdom and Agrotherapy

This year I returned to teaching psychology, part-time, at Sonoma State University. I sometimes take chickens as Teaching Assistants (TAs). For example, I took two sweet silkies on Valentine’s Day; they modeled being love birds as they cooed and cuddled, one even feeling safe enough to lay an egg.

Chickens can teach many things, such as surrender to what is, joy at the dawn, transformation of throwaways into jewels, and love of the Earth within which chickens take their dust baths to help them get rid of parasites. Chickens offer incredible eggs, humor, joy, and beauty. That other two-legged can teach chicken wisdom, that of a prey, to humans, who are predators. It includes, but is not limited to, the following: delight in simple things (like worms), keep dancing, recycle, snuggle into the earth, slow down, combine vulnerability and hardiness.

Agrotherapy is not therapy-as-usual. It happens mainly in the open, outside an office, a building, a city and without a defined time limit. The freedom to wonder and to meander characterize being outside. One does not enter the same human-made setting each time; farms are seasonal, as humans are, and are constantly changing. The therapists-of-the-outdoors include trees, berries, birds, bees, chickens, the moon and stars, the clouds, crow congresses and others who can help relieve stress, anxiety, suffering, and even sickness.

Tears sometimes come to the eyes of city folk when they sit on the ground beneath the giant redwoods or sprawling oaks at my farm. Something from their personal or collective memory seems to get activated. We listen to the wind and hear various sounds within it. Within just a few minutes I can usually feel a change in my guests. This is not a “talking cure.” It is non-talking, opening to the other senses. There is not therapeutic couch or chair; the forest provides a comforting bed upon which one can relax and reduce their stress.

My presence on such tours is more as a guide who can point things out, including patterns in nature and persons, and pose strategic questions, than as an expert to make book-based diagnoses and human-devised treatments. Farming — like therapy or personal growth — is a process with no clear beginning or end. There are products along the way, but the topsoil, for example, takes thousands of years to make. Perennial trees and berries planted by one family member can endure far beyond his or her lifetime into that of descendents, continuing to provide beauty and healing.

An email I sent to a local online listserve about agropsychology generated the following response from Jennifer York, the owner of the Bamboo Sorcery outside my hometown of Sebastopol:

“I can vouch for what you call “agropsychology.’ It saved me as a youth in my recovery from a traumatic childhood, and now in middle age. I am once again finding great healing, joy, and contentment in growing my own garden and raising my own farm animals (chickens, rabbits, and someday dairy goats, I hope!) for food, fun and deep connection with the cycles of life and death. For me it is a spiritual, as well as a practical avocation. I recommend it. Besides, it may come in very handy someday.

“In the meantime I am having fun, and feel good about sharing the experience with my six-year-old daughter. I believe it is creating a sound foundation in her for the future. I have great gratitude to my deceased parents who were Back-to-Landers in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, and who exposed me to this rich and life affirming way of life.

“My husband says he can tell how happy I am by how much dirt is under my finger nails…and it’s true.”

In his book Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines Peak Oil theorist Richard Heinberg includes a chapter titled “The Psychology of Peak Oil and Climate Change.” He writes, “The next few decades will be traumatic.” One resource that Heinberg refers to is the work of eco-philosopher Joanna Macy with respect to workshops on “despair and empowerment.” In them people are encouraged to deal with their grief, and thus feel their connection to the Earth.

Ecopsychology and ecotherapy can take many forms, including agropsychology and agrotherapy. These recently conceptualized fields can make a contribution to the larger fields of psychology and psychotherapy and thus to the healing of people and of the nature of which we are an integral part. Humans often seem to battle nature, whereas participation and collaboration with it seem more healthy, which these developing forms can support.

The Federal Reserve cut its short-term interest rate by an
unprecedented .75% on Jan. 22. This is its largest single day slash
since the central bank started disclosing its policy moves over two
decades ago. Ben Bernanke’s cut and the Bush-Democrats alliance to give
taxpayers a $800 gift so consumers can spend the economy back to growth
will fail. Our leaders are driving the Republic to ruin—by their
over-extended war-making and by depleting our natural and human
resources. Other empires, including the Roman Empire, have gone this
route.

Where was the National Guard when it was needed after the Hurricane
Katrina hit? This will not be the last “natural disaster” provoked
partly by an increasingly chaotic global climate. If Hurricane Katrina
taught us anything, it is that we cannot depend on this government in
the face of crises. It contributes to making catastrophes by supporting
polluting, climate-changing behavior and in other disaster-making ways.

Our domestic scene is unraveling, economically and in other ways. As
people get more anxious about their futures, the media’s propaganda
machine encourages them to rush out and spend, rather than look at the
root, systemic causes of the failing economy.

A Chronicle economics columnist reports the following: “A Bloomberg
survey of 35 economists published Jan. 9 put the odds of a recession at
40 percent.” Dream on. Once again, the public, which is experiencing
the recession, is far ahead of the corporate media’s economists.

Don’t look to our conniving government to get us out of the US’s
current mess, which is far more than merely economic, and could develop
into a major depression. Such futile attempts at quick fixes mask how
desperate the false US economy has become. It will probably plunge
further down, down, down, and perhaps out.

It’s bad enough that some banks are beginning to fall. As someone who
has lived in remote Hawai’i when the grocery shelves were almost bare,
when that happens to food suppliers on the continent, we will know how
bad the situation is. We will feel it in our stomachs.

It’s time to return to some traditional, basic American values, such as
cooperation, community, sharing, courage, and integrity. We would
benefit by moving from understanding ourselves as consumers and
investors to seeing ourselves as citizens and producers. Consumers
typically respond, whereas citizens can take action and become
activists, which is what we need. Producers can grow some of their own
food in backyard, rooftop, and community gardens.

“Monetary medicine” the Chronicle article describes the cut. Surgery
would be a better response. The bloated military budget needs to be
slashed. US military spending exceeds that of all the other nations of
the world combined, and we are still losing a war against tiny, weak
Iraq. This patient is sick to the bone, not just in the limbs; heroic
topical methods are not likely to revive it. A systemic solution will
be necessary—one that gets to the heart of the problems.

Attempts to prop up the economy to continue its growth are likely to
fail. The US needs to powerdown—militarily, politically, and
economically. (See Richard Heinberg’s book “Powerdown: Options and
Actions for a Post-Carbon World.”)

“This foolishness is actually a calculated attempt to bait, bribe and
placate the American public,” comments the depth psychologist Craig
Chalquist, Ph.D. “The people who came up with it know full well it
isn’t going to fix anything. It’s just one more example of the ongoing
campaign of psychological abuse directed at the public to keep us from
waking up.”

This fall will be far more than economic. As long as the US continues
to batter Iraq and threaten Iran with a pre-emptive nuclear strike, the
global economy that the US uses to suck natural resources (like oil)
and labor from the lands and peoples of the globe will continue to
fall. The worse is yet to come. (See Richard Heinberg’s new “Peak
Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines.”)

If you thought the housing and credit hits were bad, wait until the oil
hit arrives more fully. If you thought the brief stint at $100 a barrel
for crude oil was bad, wait until it approaches $200 a barrel and
gasoline rises above $5 a gallon.

Losing a war should be warning enough, though “heroes” seldom admit
that they have lost until they are truly down and out. The US’s
growth-oriented, exploitive financial system is broken. It is paying
the price of years of over-spending and dependence upon outside
resources, such as oil. The rich have been getting richer in the US and
the poor have been getting poorer.

Bush’s “go out and shop” response to Sept. 11, followed by invading
both Afghanistan and Iraq, has failed to stabilize the US. The wound
was more after Sept. 11; it was self-inflicted when Washington reacted
with vengeance, which may prove to be a mortal wound to the
now-declining American Empire. Washington’s bellicose actions expose
the US–as does its predatory financial practices–to be acting as a
wounded beast, cowboy style.

Our last recession was provoked by Sept. 11. To continue the attempt to
bomb our way out of a recession will bring greater disaster. Yet
Washington continues to rattle its high-tech sabers at Iran, an
opponent who would be far more formidable than the weak Iraq; Iran has
powerful allies.

Washington’s Eastern adversaries may be wisely watching and taking
their time, as the Russians did when Napoleon sacked Moscow at the
beginning of the 19th century and lost most of his army trying to get
back to France. Here at the beginning of the 21st century, we seem to
have another empire in decline, partly because of its foolish forays
into the East.

In recent months I have read hundreds of article in the mainstream
media about the US economy. They do not make the essential connection
between our losing war efforts and our failing economy. To do so would
certainly not fit the US’s heroic Western mentality. The resources
being employed overseas to occupy another nation need to be brought
home and applied to our substantial domestic problems.

In addition to analyzing the current situation of the US economy and
attempting to put it in an historical and international context for
readers and students, I have also been taking personal steps to enhance
my own financial security. Readers often ask what can be done, so I
want to briefly share what I have been doing.

After 25 years of teaching college, in the early l990s I bought a small
farm, sensing an economic crash might be in process. Not everyone can
move to a farm, but those willing to return to the Earth and grow their
own food in gardens and with others are more likely to thrive as the
US’s false economy goes down. Here in semi-rural Sonoma County,
Northern California, more community gardens are being planted.

My main teacher in recent years has been a farm with plants and
animals. I wanted to study the real economy of nature. “A chicken in
every backyard” is one idea that I have been promoting. Not everyone
has a backyard, of course, but many suburban dwellers do. They can
plant perennials, such as trees and berries, as well as vegetables.
Rooftop and sidewalk gardens are growing in many cities.

Though Maine and Vermont are among the coldest places in the US, two of
my teachers, Scott and Helen Nearing, lived there and managed to grow
80% of their own food. In their classic book “Living the Good Life”
they write about how to do it. If more of us returned to the farming
and gardening of our ancestors, we would be better able to weather the
coming storms.

We need to return to a real economy based on nature, rather than the
current false economy based on financial paper transactions,
speculations, and manipulations by ruthless, clever people. Getting
from here to there will involve substantial hardships in the coming
years. We should not expect the corporate media to be very helpful. The
collapse of the false economy could stimulate more people to create
real economies.

My main work for the last fifteen years has been on the organic Kokopelli Farm in Northern California. Watching the US economy descend, while caring for boysenberry vines, apple trees, and chickens, I’ve noticed a sharp contrast between nature’s ways of a real economy and the US’s false economy. Nature guides my farming, with permaculture being one system that I employ.

The US economy, unfortunately, is not nature-based. In fact, it conflicts harshly with nature’s rhythms and is now paying the price. The chickens are coming home to roost, unhappy with the all-growth pressure, wanting to take a break and rest.

“Things change,” the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus declared some 2500 years ago. They go up; they come back down. The US has had its ups; it’s now on a down cycle. Pump, pump, pump go the corporations, their media and governments, trying to inflate it back up. I don’t think so. The well is running dry.

Even a military budget larger than those of all the other nations in the world combined cannot protect our fortress. We are besieged, but more internally by our threatening practices than by terrorists or anything external.

Oh, our rulers may stimulate it back up a little, for a while. Throwing money at something can have a short-term impact. But it will come back down, and may all fall down. Gravity is a basic law of physics. Things go up, then they come back down, sooner or eventually. Sometimes it feels like a crash, unless one is aware of the inevitable downturn. Once things fall apart, they can re-assemble, often in an improved form.

All things carry their opposites, Heraclitus taught. Death is inherent to life. Transitions and impermanence prevail. This is not bad news; it just is. Birth/growth/contraction/death is nature’s way. All living things follow this natural cycle. Everything that lives perishes.

The growth-based US economy is contracting. Media economists are alarmed, even panicky. They describe this as a “recession” and wring their hands with woe. They should have expected this downturn and we should accept it. Lets see what will happen. Maybe the Earth will benefit from the declining US economy? Perhaps its pollution and other threats to the global climate and environment will lessen?

There are too many variables to accurately predict what will happen, or when. But I am planning for a radically different future. It is time to “powerdown,” to use the word that Richard Heinberg employs in the title of one of his books on Peak Oil. We should expect some chaos. The manufactured US economy is failing.

President Bush has proposed yet another “growth package” of $145 billion to boost the flagging economy by giving each taxpayer up to $800 each. Supported by many Democrats, the plan is to spend our way out of this mess. Go shopping. What a fantasy. This may worsen things, digging the hole deeper, rather than stepping out of it.

The government’s so-called “economic stimulus” is a false solution, attempting to further prop up the false economy. Giving people more money to spend — many of whom are already spending beyond their means — will not solve what is becoming our most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Trying to avoid the economic fall seems futile. A better approach would be to roll with the punches and figure out how to even thrive during this transition from a no longer to a not yet. Those who do can even benefit from the changing reality.

The US economy has expanded for the last seven years. It’s time to contract, in spite of the wailing of economists. Economic growth slowed to barely 1% in the final three months of 2007 — a big drop from 4.9% in the third quarter. Growth may now be dipping into negative territory, according to a Jan. 17 Associated Press article.

Mainstream economists do not want to publicly utter words like “depression” or “collapse,” which may happen, if the contraction deepens. This will bring great changes, including inconveniences and difficulties. But that is inevitable, as opposed to bad.

As the US goes down, it can be a time for others to be up in the sun. A gracious fall is better than a bitter, ballistic, hostile one. The flexibility of bamboo would be a better model for our fall than rigid, fossilized bones likely to break and shatter. Then we may come back up, though hopefully in a different, more mature way.

The indigenous University of Hawai’i at Hilo professor Manu Meyer, who hails from an ancient culture, describes the US as “adolescent.” Since setbacks often help a person mature, perhaps this economic fall will help the US evolve.

Reinventing Collapse titles a provocative book by Dmitry Orlov, a Russian living in the US, scheduled by New Society Publishers to appear in April. He compares the evolving US collapse to that of the Soviet Union. Parts of this new book have been posted at www.energybulletin.net and elsewhere. The book’s final three chapters are “Collapse Mitigation,” “Adaptation,” and “Career Opportunities.” Orlov draws on his experiences observing the Soviet collapse to help people manage what might happen here in the only remaining superpower.

Now let me root this analysis in two quite different sources: the farming author Wendell Berry and the humorous gardener Chance, played by Peter Sellers in the classic 1979 film “Being There.”

For over 50 years now Berry has been publishing farm-based essays, poetry, and fiction. Since at least his 1977 book The Unsettling of America, published by the Sierra Club, he has been writing about the US economy. His field-based analysis is outside the box — based on farm-fresh wisdom rather than merely book learning or crunching numbers.

“The human household or economy is in conflict at almost every point with the household of nature,” Berry writes in his essay “The Total Economy.” Humans tend to look to nature as “merely a supply of ‘raw materials,’” Berry bemoans. The results are what he describes as “economic oversimplification” and “the folly” of a “foolish economy.” We fail to see the larger picture that one can sometimes see when they lift their eyes up from working in a field to see the sky and clouds above, as well as the expanse between the ground and our majestic blue covering.

“The global economy,” Berry asserts, “is based upon cheap long-distance transportation, without which it is not possible to move goods from the point of cheapest origin to the point of highest sale.” Now that the price for crude oil has surpassed the $100 a barrel ceiling, we are becoming increasingly aware of the decline of cheap oil and the rising price of this black gold that fuels industrialism’s food, plastics, transportation, war-making, and much of modern life.

We need what Berry describes as a “real economy,” rather than this house of cards (the cover of Heinberg’s new Peak Everything book) under which we live. Berry suggests that we work “to preserve things other than money” and advances “the idea of a local economy” based on “neighborhood and subsistence.”

“Did you see that old Peter Sellers film ‘Being There?’” a farm hand recently asked while we lay wool around the base of berry vines as mulch to suppress the weeds and stimulate activity in the soil. While working with our hands Jeff Snook and I had been talking about the litany of economic woes for banks, housing, the dollar, unemployment, retail sales, consumer confidence, etc.

Farmers sometimes talk about such things in fields and elsewhere. My Uncle Dale on his farm in Iowa in the early l950s, before electricity had reached parts of the rural Mid-West, used to talk about the economy. Since I have already lived without electricity — we had an icebox, root cellar, and gaslights — I can imagine doing it again. Instead of TV, we had night-time stories and day-time farm animals to entertain us. It was a good life, even without all the modern conveniences, some of which we may soon have to do without as we powerdown and make a forced transition with less available energy.

Many signs of contraction were visible as Jeff and I recently worked — leaves falling from nearby valley oaks, boysenberry vines shriveling, and beautiful chickens taking their annual break from egg-laying. These things are predictable and happen every year. I plan my yearly cycle accordingly, as do the wise birds and squirrels, putting acorns away.

“Chance in “Being There” is a simple-minded gardener who observed nature’s cycles and acted accordingly,” Jeff noted. “He knew that things should be planted in the spring and will then grow and die — a basic, natural rhythm.”

A fictional US president in the film comes to visit a financial advisor and meets Chance. The president is proposing a temporary economic growth plan. “As long as the roots are not severed, all is well in the garden,” Chance responds. “Some things must whither,” he adds. The “president” wisely takes Chance’s simple advice, which our current real president is unlikely to do. He accepts the seasonal, Earth-based wisdom, realizing that a long-term solution is needed, rather than a band-aid.

Our economy, in fact, has been “severed” from its “roots,” the Earth itself. We need a down-to-the-Earth approach to the economy, rather than the sugar pill “economic growth stimulus” that Bush is proposing with his tax break.

We need to get back to basics in the US. Our expectations of being permanently on top, always in control, forever the dominating ruler and evermore the superpower have been excessive. We need to do more than try to shore up a failing economy that requires so much war-making and destruction to keep it growing artificially, at the expense of the environment and other humans, animals, plants, and the elements such as clean water and air that sustain life. We need to accept the natural limits to growth.

Less than 2% of US citizens now farm. This number must increase, if we are to survive. Farming can be fun and educational, as well as put food on our tables and build communities. Agriculture, after all, is a basis of culture. May ours continue to prosper, but not by being based on a false, foolish economy, like the one that is now falling. R.I.P.

We need to re-align the US economy more around nature’s economy.

The loud, ugly, industrial sounds and smells made by gas-operated mowers do not appeal to me. Beautiful sounds like swishing grass and recited poetry relax me. I love the multiple utterances that my chickens release from their joyful beaks as they ecstatically celebrate their appreciations of the new day and still being alive. When the wind sweeps through the tall grass and bamboo I planted on my Kokopelli Farm here in the Redwood Empire of Northern California, it soothes me as if it were a harp. I hear Orpheus—the father of ancient Greek poetry and music–playing his enchanting lyre. The wind and the redwoods make incredible dance partners.

An incense cedar and giant sequoia on the land where I also live lean on each other and inspire me. I call them “the couple.” At night I sometimes sleep out in the cozy forest bed beneath them and drink in the fragrant, sweet darkness revealed by the diffuse light of the moon and stars. I benefit from and bask beneath their leaning.

Everything that lives dies—individuals, nations, and even planets. The Grim Reaper gets all of us, even empires. The United States seems to be at the end of its rope in many ways—loosing wars, a falling dollar and declining economy, decreasing prestige among the peoples of the world. A key question now is how to live during the transition from the no longer of the American Empire, trying to salvage the best of America, and make it to whatever not yet we can create. The deepening darkness can be more manageable if we lean on each other.

MOVING TO KOKOPELLI FARM

After 25 years of college teaching and administration, I left college as my primary work environment for agriculture in the early l990s. I sensed that many of humanity’s support systems and the natural capital that sustains us were breaking down. I wanted to learn more about the basics of food, water, plants, animals, the soil, climate, and the elements. I wanted to be able to feed myself and others with good, nourishing food during an uncertain future of diminishing natural resources and heightening conflicts.

After a search I decided to move to Sonoma County, remaining in the state of my birth. Whenever this native son tries to leave my home state, California, my body goes where I direct it, but only for a while; then my feet take me back home. Sonoma has nearly 500,000 people and is within the creative San Francisco Bay Area. I bought land with berry vines, apple trees, oaks, redwoods and a tiny house in the uplands of the Cunningham Marsh near the small town of Sebastopol, where less than 8000 souls live.

Our community actively deals with issues such as making a transition to alternative energy sources and the increasingly chaotic global climate. We have active neighborhood groups and support each other to buy local and re-localize. Among the effective groups here are the Climate Protection Campaign and the Post-Carbon Institute. Sebastopol citizens regularly elect well-informed officials who seek to deal with the real issues. We welcome newcomers as we work together to build community during this transition to a post-carbon future.

As the US begins to have more political, economic, and social problems, certain geographical areas where people have gathered to pursue sustainability and relocalization are more likely to prosper. Thinking strategically about where to live—where there is enough food, water, and the social capital of community—is crucial.

I recently returned to part-time college teaching. I sense that we are approaching a tipping point, so I decided to re-embed myself within institutions to have more contact with people and resources to help make a transition to whatever we can create to thrive during the changing times. I have also recently returned to working within religious institutions. I have been appointed to the arts and spirituality board of a local Episcopal church and have preached about the themes in this essay at three Unitarian Universalist churches in our region.

Kokopelli Farm is what I decided to call the place that I have inhabited with animals, plants, the elements and a few people for most of the last 15 years. I named it after the legendary humpbacked flute player of the pueblo Anasazi people. He went from village to village— even those who were fighting each other—and brought peace. Kokopelli is an agrarian deity, man of peace, and trickster. Known as the great sprinkler and fertilizer, with his antenna, Kokopelli is a member of the insect clan. I wanted the blessings of the insects on my food growing. They can have their part, as can the deer and others who also need to eat. I was, however, glad when a mountain lion returned a few years ago and thinned out the deer. Too much of even a good thing can be problematic. The old but short oaks—made into bonsai by too many deer–shot up tall in a few years, leaping with joy from their sturdy and deep taproots. Plants have so much to teach us about survival and adaptation, as do animals.

When obstacles to appropriate growth are dealt with, amazing growth spurts are possible. We need such growth spurts in public awareness to deal with the substantial problems created by over-population, war-making, increasingly extreme climate, and the depletion of natural resources such as fossil fuels.

As I write in my redwood cabin built with wood salvaged over a decade from old chicken coops, I hear my neighbor’s dairy cows bellowing in the distance and I see his large, gentle workhorses calmly eating grass. The majority of people used to farm and live in the countryside. Now less than 2% farm in the US and most people live in urban areas. As our high tech energy sources diminish more people will have to turn to farming to survive. It is not such a bad option. Agriculture, after all, is a basis of culture, which is more important than agri-business, in my opinion.

THE ORAL TRADITION OF RECITED POETRY

We have a small group of minstrels and troubadours who call ourselves the Kokopelli Players. Some of us met through the Sons of Orpheus, a group that gathered weekly for years to tell our stories, recite poetry, and play music. The oral, musical, movement, and artistic traditions take on a special importance during a time—such as ours—of cultural change. Political and social change are not enough; we need what Brazilian educator Paulo Freire describes as “cultural action” to dig deeper to craft new stories and ways of being to lead us into a better future where humanity can live in balance with nature.

The blind French resistance member Jacques Lusseyran was condemned to Buchenwald concentration camp by the Nazis. He survived by reciting poetry and helping organize other prisoners to do so. In “Poetry in Buchenwald,” translated by Noelle Oxenhandler, Lusseyran writes the following:

“I saw the lines of prisoners who trudged toward the central square to report for work. I saw the cold, the hunger, the fear…I began to recite verses…Little by little, another voice was added to mine… the verses were being repeated in the darkness… More men came. They formed a circle. They echoed the words…They leaned toward me, gesturing, swaying, beating their chests, lisping, muttering, crying out, seized by a sudden passion. I was dumbstruck, happy like a child.”

“One dark winter morning…we were about thirty exhausted men, shivering…Boris suddenly…recited from Peguy’s ‘The Tapestry of Notre Dame’…when the poem was over, a little man…said to me, ‘Touch my forehead. It’s sweat! That’s what warms us up, poetry!’ In fact, the iciness had disappeared. We no longer felt our exhaustion.”

“…poetry is an act, an incantation, a kiss of peace, a medicine, one of the rare things in the world which can prevail over cold and hatred…To nourish the desire to live, to make it burn… Man is nourished by the invisible…Man is nourished by that which is beyond the personal.”

The blind, young Lusseyran was one of the few to survive Buchenwald.

IN PRAISE OF SWEET DARKNESS

Our Kokopelli Players roam around blending earthy sounds with recited poetry in the oral tradition. We offer sermons at local churches on subjects such as “In Praise of Sweet Darkness, Luscious Berries, and Endarkenment.” We honor the night, sleep, dreams, and chocolate, seeking to recover the benevolent aspects of the darkness that the ancients, mystics and indigenous people seem to understand. Some contemporary poets–including Wendell Berry, David Whyte, and Mary Oliver—also embrace sweet darkness. Industrial culture often hides in the glare of too much brilliant light, which combat needs.

The current over-emphasis on industrialism’s bright lights needs to be balanced by the multiple gifts that the dark offers, which many 21st century Western people fear. As the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote in the 6th century BCE, “Darkness is the gateway to all understanding.” The Greek poet Noonus requested the following in the 6th century A.D.: “Make long the sweet darkness.” In his poem during the Vietnam War, “In a Dark Time,” l966, the American poet Theodore Roethke wrote, “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.” We once again live in such a dark time when global war-making threatens us; would that more of our eyes would begin to open and see.

In his song “Darkness, Darkness” Jessie Colin Young longs for darkness “to ease the day that brings me pain.” As the great German-speaking poet Rainer Maria Rilke affirms, “I love the dark hours of my being/ in which my senses drop into the deep.” From those depths we can create better futures.

THE VETERANS’ WRITING GROUP

This past summer an attorney summoned me to Chile to appear in the torture and execution case of my good friend Frank Teruggi. We lived there during the democratic government of Pres. Salvador Allende. When Gen. Augusto Pinochet took over on Sept. 11, l973, he began killing many people, including Frank, and continued his reign of terror for nearly 20 years.

The prompt for me to write this essay was the Veterans’ Writing Group that I have been meeting with for over a dozen years. Initiated by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn, it has been skillfully lead by Maxine Hong Kingston. We recently published our first book, Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace. Knowing that I would sit in circle again with these men and women evoked certain memories. Storytelling—both orally and on the page—can heal and help set us free. In our vets group we investigate, reveal, and write from our memories, attempting to integrate them. We seek to distill the sweetness hidden within the darkness.

LEANING ON EACH OTHER

“I know I won’t always be here,” the co-host of our vets group comments as she looks out the window from her hilltop home into a marvelous Redwood Empire valley. “So I want to appreciate and care for the Earth while I can,” she adds, leaning on her World War II veteran husband. We recently celebrated his 80th birthday.

“I see when I walk how well all things lean on each other,” Robert Bly begins his poem “In the Month of May.” As our vets group goes on its afternoon walking meditation, I notice how well the trees and other vegetation lean on each other. Such leaning can create great joy and capacity to endure pain and suffering. The reverence and humor of our being together enable me to speak more of my truth, ask for help, and lean toward others, thus breaking the isolation that characterizes industrialism.

I talk and write about my memories from Chile in order to replace them with sweet winter images of leaning on each other. It is warmer that way. I recently received a load of wool, which I am placing around the berry vines as mulch to help them through the winter and to suppress the weeds. Stories and poems can help us mulch and compost our experiences.

As we walk on our meditation through the giant trees, a women vet takes my arm as we go down the hill. “You can lean on me,” I think. “May I lean on you?” I wonder.

Rampant consumption, our addiction to growth, and our failure to accept limits to growth damage us. The headline beneath the banner-”Cleanup Response Criticized”-reveals one of the saddest results. We are not adequately cleaning up the San Francisco Bay after a recent oil spill. Many other aspects of our environment need cleaning up. Without a healthy natural environment and climate conducive to humans, no economy can endure. Over-consumption drives the increasingly extreme and chaotic climate.

We have contaminated our air and waterways, clear-cut our forests, and our inner cities are dying. The pollution of such natural resources often preceeds economic and societal collapses.

I appreciate the Press Democrat for recently reporting the emerging economic trends in numerous articles. What I miss is more analysis, connecting the dots and providing context. The shrinking dollar, soaring gas prices, housing slump and stock market fall, though inconvenient, are not the biggest threats to the economy. These are symptoms caused by deeper systemic problems. We need to learn from these events and discover how to build more sustainable societies. Otherwise, these “hits” are likely to increase and spread.

We need to quickly evolve from our destructive individual consumption patterns that damage not only the economy but the Earth itself. We need to consider their many negative impacts and work together as active citizens concerned with the whole economy and the environment on which it is dependent.

Look around. Things are falling down and apart in the US, including cities like New Orleans, the Minneapolis bridge, and the Twin Towers. An increasing number of high-level government officials-like Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales-have been forced out of office. The cuts are likely to go deeper. One can try to ignore, deny, or seek revenge for these events, all of which invite more disasters. Prudent planning would be a better alternative. These are not isolated events but point to systemic causes.

These are more than the “economic cycle of advance and retreat” that the Nov. 10 article reports. It is not just “things (that) have come together in the last 10 days.” The US’s false economy has been de-stabilizing for years and is now reaching a more degraded stage. We have become vulnerable to a variety of “hits” and should expect even more. Our economy has been described by some as a “house of cards,” which is likely to fall. An unraveling is occurring, creating a time of great uncertainty and fear.

Many major American institutions are in crisis, including healthcare, religion, transportation, political systems, energy, and education.

The Iron Curtain came down and the Berlin Wall seemed to suddenly fall, as did the Soviet Union. The US economy may suddenly fail.

Protecting markets and “consumers” from the truth of how bad our economic reality is will backfire. We do not need to “panic.” But citizens do need accurate news and analysis to get ready for the potential of a radically diminished economy. We are living in a time of unprecedented planetary crisis. People need to prepare physically and psychologically for massive changes.

It is not enough to write about a “silver lining” and report the perilous optimism of an economist wishing that “hopefully this week is not a microcosm of where we will be a year from now.” We need more than false hope to get us through the coming hard times.

Most of the US population continues destructive, over-consuming behaviors that harm all of us. We are not merely victims of the problems; we cause them. We cannot merely blame outside “terrorists.”

Among the facts left out of recent articles in the mainstream press on the declining US economy is the Iraq War. With so many resources dedicated to war-making, dealing with events like Katrina and cleaning up oil spills are more difficult.

“The Hidden Costs of the Iraq War” is a congressional report recently released. It states that the economic costs to the US of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are already around $1.5 trillion. For the average U.S. family of four that is more than $20,000.

We are experiencing more than what headlines describe as a “slowdown.” It could be a “meltdown.” We might be approaching what James Howard Kunstler describes in his book “The Long Emergency” as “catastrophe.”

Santa Rosa author Richard Heinberg’s “Peak Everything” describes our situation well. “Waking Up to the Century of Decline” he sub-titles this new book. This sounds like bad news, but when we face changes early enough, we have more opportunities to cope with them and transform them into opportunities.

Helpful responses include reducing our consumption, accepting that we are contracting, and understanding ourselves as citizens able to take action, rather than as merely passive consumers who can only react. Citizen activism is what me most need at this point in history.

Humans can be far more than objects whose purpose is to buy, shop, spend, and grow the economy. We are threatened more by our own behavior than by any outside terrorists.

That which Heinberg and other Peak Oil theorists have been predicting for years seems to be entering its next stage. With the supply of petroleum and other fossil fuels diminishing and the demand for them increasing–especially from rapidly industrializing China and India–we are moving toward a radically worsened US economy.

When the mainstream press fails to report news and offer analyses that a large number of people are aware of, we can turn to citizen journalists on the web. The mainstream press is loosing readers because it no longer adequately investigates and reports some of the important stories. Fortunately, we now have other places to go to be informed and educated.

“Closing the ‘Collapse Gap’: The USSR Was Better Prepared for Collapse than the US” was published by the authoritative www.energybulletin.net. A Russian, Dmitry Orlov, who now lives in the US, wrote, “The US economy is poised to perform something like a disappearing act.” Orlov compares the “two 20th century superpowers.” An extended version of his analysis will be published as the book “Reinventing Collapse” in May by New Society Publishers.

Orlov examines the arms race, the space race, the jails race, and the “Hated Evil Empire Race.” He concludes that “many of the problems that sunk the Soviet Union are now endangering the US.” So we should “expect shortages of fuel, food, medicine, and countless consumer items, outages of electricity, gas, and water.” If we plan for such possibilities now, we will be better able to deal with them.

Though Orlov details the threats to the US economy, he and his editors at EnergyBulletin remain optimistic. Orlov writes about the possibilities for an expansion of “enlightenment, fulfillment, and freedom” during times of collapse. Russia, after all, did recover. It may be more difficult for the US.

Helpful responses include strengthening local economies, being less dependent upon globalization, outside corporations and things distant, and knowing and preserving the sources of the basics–such as food and water. “There are many things we can do to navigate down and around” our problems, Heinberg writes, “so as to enhance human sanity and security and happiness.”

Canada is one of the many countries whose citizens are ahead of the US in prudent planning for pending crises caused by extreme climate, Peak Oil, and related matters. The Vancouver City Planning Commission has posted a report on a 2006 seminar on collapse at www.plancanada.com. Videos of such ongoing seminars to get ready are available at www.peakmoment.org.

Too many Americans selfishly believe that they have a God-given right to consume whatever their wealth can purchase, without regard to the consequences to other people and the Earth. They take, rather than give, even the natural resources of other peoples. As a farmer, I know that you reap what you sow and that chickens come home to roost.

Our economy is paying and will continue to pay the consequences of over-consumption and the over-purchasing of people reaching beyond their resources that characterized the housing market. We have been greedy. There are limits to growth and those limits are crashing in on us.

Yet many piles of rubble have been rebuilt-often more beautiful than before they fell. Phoenixes have risen from the ashes before. Yet our future is uncertain, without guarantees.

It is time to think and write about more than the probability of a recession and consider the real possibility of a depression or even collapse. Then people can get ready, be active citizens, and prepare their personal, social, and political responses. We must do this together.

“Frank was like a younger brother,” I confided to Judge Jorge Zepeda’s staff on August 1 of this year. “I want to tell you about the sweet, nonviolent, idealistic person that he was.” I feel that I was heard by the attentive law clerk taking careful notes.

If I could speak to the judge again, I would add the following: “Frank was a man of peace and an anti-war activist. He was trained in and participated in nonviolent actions. Frank was one of thousands of young people who went to Chile to participate in an historic moment of a country choosing peaceful solutions to its problems. Frank saw himself as part of that struggle.”

On another September 11, 1973, Gen. Pinochet — with the proven support of US President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger — toppled the democratically elected government of Chilean President Salvador Allende.

I worked in Chile as a Methodist minister in 1971 and returned this year for the first time. I had been summoned back to testify in the kidnapping, torture and execution of my good friend Frank, whose case is slowly making its way through the legal system.

Two US citizens, Charles Horman and Frank, were executed that September. They were among thousands killed by the Pinochet junta. Tens of thousands were tortured and many were desaparecidos (disappeared), whose families still do not know what happened to them. Horman’s case is more known because of Costa-Gavras’ Oscar-winning film Missing, which portrays his story and also mentions Frank.

Pinochet became Latin America’s most famous dictator — the model of evil.

He exported his state terrorism elsewhere in South America through Operation Condor. Pinochet wounded Chile and its people, though a few wealthy people continue to sing his praise. He did succeed in bringing order with his authoritarian rule. One can still enter some homes and offices in Chile and see photos of Pinochet.

Pinochet’s knife went to the heart and soul of Chile. Many people merely want to forget what happened under Pinochet. But such forgetfulness makes it difficult to build an authentic future based on historic memory.

My recent time in Chile convinced me of two important facts: Frank was not killed by a patrol for violating a curfew, as the military contends, but was executed intentionally at the National Stadium where he had been imprisoned. In addition to that crime, its still ongoing cover-up is a second crime. The brutality of the Pinochet dictatorship and its continued impunity has created what international law considers “a crime against humanity.”

After the judge and his staff met with Frank’s sister — Janis Teruggi Page, who was in Chile for the first time — and myself, articles about our testimony appeared in the daily La Nacion and in the Santiago Times. Our presence seems to have stimulated heightened attention to Frank’s case and moved it forward after so many years of scant activity. The Teruggi case does not stand alone. Work on such high profile cases can help the many other families seeking information and justice, according to attorney Corvalan.

The Chilean press identified four retired generals who allegedly facilitated the killings of Teruggi and Horman: Gen. Augusto Lutz, Gen. Sergio Arellano Stark, Gen. Herman Brady, and Gen. Cesar Benavides. Several Navy intelligence officials who had been monitoring the movements of Teruggi and Horman were also identified.

“We are now receiving a huge amount of new information which should reveal what happened in the National Stadium.” (Corvalan, quoted in La Nacion, Aug. 2)

Pedro Alejandro Matta was one of the many inspiring exiles I interviewed who has returned to Chile. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees wrote the following about Matta in a document entitled, “Prominent Refugees”: “Matta was arrested, taken to two different torture centers…and then imprisoned for over 13 months. He was never brought before a court of law or charged with any crime.” He was eventually granted asylum in the US. After fifteen years in exile and the fall of Pinochet, he returned to Chile in 1991.

Matta took Frank’s sister and me to some of Chile’s notorious torture centers. “I’m going to give you a collective history,” Matta began at Villa Grimaldi, which has since been turned into a peace park. I could tell from Matta’s eyes and demeanor that this trip differed from the others on which he had guided us during the previous week.

“The Chilean coup was one of the most violent events in the history of Latin America,” Matta began. “The bombing of the Presidential Palace spread out over the entire country. Helicopters with machine guns fired on the poblaciones (shanty towns of poor people). The junta declared an internal war on half the population — a search-and- destroy mission against unarmed civilians. This produced a massacre. When the jails were full, military bases were used. Then sports stadiums.” Matta proceeded to give a day-by-day account of torture at Villa Grimaldi, a large private residence that the military took over.

Even with many years as a professional journalist listening to other horror stories, Matta’s details were almost unbearable to hear. The only way I could force myself to listen was to bow my head and take copious notes; I have still been unable to fully read them. In 2000 Matta wrote a booklet, A Walk Through a 20th Century Torture Center: Villa Grimaldi, Santiago de Chile, A Visitor’s Guide, which is available from p.matta@vtr.net.

As I listened to Matta and toured the torture center, I also thought about Frank. Images of his terrible death have returned over the years.

“Impunity” was a word I heard often in Chile; it literally means exemption from punishment. Pinochet established an Amnesty Law in 1978 to protect the criminal behavior of his dictatorship that has made it difficult for courts to convict military or police officials of their crimes. Pinochet’s Constitution still governs Chile.

In December of 2004 — after interviewing 35,000 survivors of human rights abuse — a Chilean commission reported that torture was a habitual practice of the dictatorship. Some of those survivors have entered a bank or other office to find themselves facing their torturer. The names of some torturers are known, but they have not all been charged. Such impunity keeps the trauma alive.

Here in the US our current president and the head of the “Justice” Department take actions that indicate they feel above and beyond the law.

Chile may seem a long ways from the US, and Frank’s execution may seem long ago, but it is important that US citizens pay attention to the matter at this historic and challenging moment in our history. Chile contains lessons for US citizens, including understanding the Iraq War today. By studying Chile, we may better understand what is happening in the US, as our civil rights diminish and torture occurs in Guantanamo and elsewhere.

Among the issues raised in Chile today are the following: When to judge and when to forgive? How can a nation deal with collective trauma? Remembering or forgetting? When to seek justice and when to seek peace?

These are not simple questions. It is one thing to think about them abstractly from a distance, another to be in the middle of them.

Restorative justice is what a close colleague of Frank’s in Chile in the early 1970s, Mishy Lesser, who now lives in the Boston area, advocates: “Restorative justice is a set of principles used for addressing conflict and harm. It focuses on what needs to be done to repair harm and who is responsible for that repair. Offenders have personal obligations to victims and the community at large. Restorative practices heal the people and relationships that were violated, and thus they provide an opportunity to offenders to right the wrong.”

Justice is an end in itself. It would benefit the families of those tortured, executed, and disappeared, as well as the society as a whole.

It also deters future tyrants. Authentic justice should not be sacrificed, in my opinion, for a false harmony. It is long past time to bring the generals and others responsible for the deaths of Frank Teruggi, Charles Horman, and thousands of others to justice. Some of their names are known and they should be tried.

Futures must be built upon the past. Though those pasts cannot change, our understandings of them and learning from them can evolve.

The attorney is gathering testimony in a slow-moving court case against those who kidnapped, tortured and executed my young, idealistic friend Frank and another American, Charles Horman, whom I did not know. He represents survivors of the Teruggi and Horman families and wants me to testify before a judge about what Frank was doing in Chile.

As someone who was raised in the prominent military family that gave its name to Fort Bliss, Texas, and served as a U.S. Army officer myself, I could be a credible witness to counter the generals being tried who seek to justify their atrocities and murders.

Soon after graduating from divinity school and being ordained a United Methodist minister I worked in Chile during 1971-72 on a church-funded mission. Dr. Salvador Allende had recently been democratically elected president. On Sept. 11, 1973, Gen. Augusto Pinochet toppled his government, with the well-documented support of the U. S.

Frank and Horman were among thousands slaughtered during the coup’s brutal aftermath, which continued for years and still haunts the surviving families and friends of those touched by that state terrorism. Horman’s shocking story was graphically revealed in the award-winning l982 film Missing by Costa-Garvas.

I have thought often of returning to Chile since that bloody event, but my traumatized body and soul have not yet followed those travel directives from my mind.

Unfinished business awaits me in Chile. Returning to the scene of that terrible crime and the massive trauma that it caused could support justice and promote my own healing. So I will probably go, but I have doubts and fears. My goal would be to help uncover what has been concealed these many years and report it widely.

Pres. Allende’s Chile had become a gathering place for those — especially young people — wanting to participate in a non-violent, democratic process of a progressive government that was not dominated by the U.S. Our innocence was shattered by Pinochet’s unrelenting violence. As Welsh poet Dylan Thomas writes, “After the first death, there is no other.”

I worked in Chile on religious, educational, artistic and journalistic projects and Frank was one of my closest associates. A common interest in spirituality, especially during times of change, connected us. Substantial change was occurring in the U.S. with a growing peace movement, and in Chile with the election of Dr. Allende.

The summons to come to Chile surprised me. I had given up hope of justice in Frank’s case. My patience these 34 years of waiting had ebbed. The legal, political, and social obstacles standing in the way of justice have been substantial.

Pinochet died Dec. 10, 2006, at the age of 91. Though he finally confessed to his crimes, he was never brought to justice. His power and wealth protected this U.S.-supported dictator and enabled him to escape the justice that would have benefited many survivors and set a precedent for other vicious dictators.

Courts in Chile, Europe, and the U.S — into which Pinochet’s long killing arm reached — have failed the families and friends of those hurt by this assassin and his accomplices. Justice for Pinochet was delayed and denied, which has been happening also in the cases of Frank and Horman.

I remember Frank and think often of him — a playful and creative artist. At times memories overwhelm me. The request to return to Chile now brings tears to my eyes. Then I freeze, suppress the feelings. I shiver and shudder, though it is not cold outside on this California summer day.

I remember walking toward my office at Harvard University when I first heard of the military coup in 1973. Crushed, I fell to my knees on the sidewalk, knowing that some of my friends were probably hurt and possibly killed. Sept. 11 has been a Memorial Day for me since.

When I learned of Frank’s death, much of my life came to a halt. His family invited me to be a pallbearer at his funeral in Chicago, but initially I did not respond. When a plane ticket from his girlfriend Annie arrived, I realized that I had to go and carry Frank’s body. It had been so butchered that the casket was closed. What was I doing, at twenty-something, carrying the tortured-to-death body of my good friend?

One might expect that I would appreciate the summons to return to Chile to contribute to a long-denied act of justice. But rather than respond immediately from the heart or mind, my initial response was in my traumatized body — a body that partly had shut down. A familiar numbness returned.

Even my tongue had lost its fluency in Spanish, a language that I had begun hearing as a child living in the Panama Canal Zone with my military family. My mind no longer thought clearly in Spanish.

Psychologists call such a defense mechanism “psychic numbing” — a protection of the psyche from feelings too powerful to endure. My memories of Frank and others were in Spanish, so by losing Spanish I was being protected from that terrible loss and enabled to continue living at least a partial life. Only decades later, when giving a paper at a psychology conference in Spain, did my Spanish begin to return. In Chile I will need to speak Spanish and deal with whatever memories return.

I write about this personal experience to honor my dear friend and to dilute the continuing hold that the horror of his death has had on me. Perhaps speaking my truth may help educate and remind others about that tragic Sept. 11, l973.

You may not have consciously met anyone who was literally tortured by a professional. You can read about torture by the U.S. military going on right now, but that is different from feeling it in your body. The multiple effects of torture reach far beyond the immediate victims to their families and friends, even to the torturer and his (or her) family members and to the nation itself that sponsors or condones torture.

Today’s Chile differs from that of the Pinochet regime. Its current president, Michelle Bachelet, was imprisoned and tortured by the Pinochet junta. Her father was a general who did not support the coup, so Pincohet killed him.

Chile no longer kidnaps, imprisons in secret jails, or tortures people. However, the U.S. can no longer make such a moral claim. Pinochet’s Chile parallels what has been happening today in Guantanamo Bay, at Abu Ghraib, and in numerous secrets prisons maintained by Washington in many countries.

It is now the U.S. that sequesters people — many of them innocent of any crimes — in secret places and detains them for years without charging them or giving them access to attorneys. Their families do not even know where they are. Can you imagine how you would feel if this happened to a member of your family?

The cases of Frank and Chile are hence instructive to us here in the U.S., especially since Henry Kissinger and the Nixon administration helped orchestrate Pinochet’s coup. Justice for Frank and Horman could have meaning for others currently held by the U.S. and help strengthen an international legal precedent.

By writing my story I seek to expose and speak out against the long-term traumatic effects of torture on its multiple survivors. Washington’s current torture of people from Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere is not new. The U.S. has trained torturers from around the world for decades at the School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, Georgia. Some of Pinochet’s worst torturers were trained there. HR 1701 is a bill to close that torture school, introduced to the U.S. Congress by Rep. James McGovern (D-Mass.).

The Chile summons came a couple of days before our Veterans’ Writing Group met again. We’ve gathered regularly for nearly 15 years, told our stories to each other, wrote the award-winning book Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, edited by Maxine Hong Kingston, and recently spent an hour on Bill Moyers’ PBS-TV program. The veterans supported me to go to Chile, though I still feel some internal resistance.

I lost more than Frank in Chile; part of my soul perished, which I seek to recover. As I listen to stories of veterans returning to Vietnam and finding healing there, I am inclined to go to Chile. It is time to release and express more of my feelings and speak more of my truth, especially as Washington admittedly engages in torture, thus staining our nation and weakening our relationship with other countries and hence our national security. I have business to complete, both for myself and for society.

I would carry Frank with me to Chile, since he remains always with me. Frank’s life was stolen, because of his love of liberty, freedom, and authentic democracy. I want resolution about his death so I can more fully remember his life — youthful, playful, imaginative, and idealistic.

Frank Teruggi, Presente!