Occupy is still an infant, having been born in New York September 17 with Occupy Wall Street. It is not even five months old and already the local daily tries to editorialize it into ashes. Rumors of our death are premature. We have made mistakes, including in Oakland. We’re learning and experiencing what one activist calls “growing pains.”

Provoked by police violence in Oakland, a few cornered occupiers among the 2000 present reacted. That has not happened here. The Sonoma County Occupy Town Hall Affinity Group,of which I am a member, opposes violence, as do the overwhelming majority of Occupy groups and individuals.

I do, however, respect the right of self-defense by those cornered by the police. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, ”Violence is the voice of the unheard.”  And as President John F. Kennedy said at a 1962 speech at the White House, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

What would you do when surrounded by a large group of armed, masked, threatening, charging, and rioting armored men? I praise the brave souls willing to face such police violence. As one occupier wondered, “What’s next? Live ammunition?”

Punishing people in a democracy should be the job of the courts, not the police, which Oakland police are notorious for doing. They fan the flames.

Court-appointed monitors, according to The Bay Citizen recently wrote in their quarterly report that the police response to Occupy Oakland protests this fall raised ‘serious concerns’ about the department’s ability to ‘hold true to the best practices in American policing,’ and promised a thorough investigation of the matter. Last week, a judge moved the police department closer to a federal takeover, writing that he was in ‘disbelief’ that the department had yet to finish a series of court-ordered reforms.

Why did the Press Democrat not report these relevant facts? The PD carefully selects what to report and what to exclude. A daily newspaper should represent various voices of its community, rather than just the status quo.

Occupy has “officially overstepped its welcome,” the PD alleges. Since when has the PD ever welcomed Occupy or officiated over such matters? The argument that what a few people did in one city reduces the national Occupy movement to ashes is without merit.

The PD asks occupiers to condemn the violence in Oakland. I condemn the police brutality and criticize the much less violent behavior of a few activists. I have done so within our movement and publicly, as have other Occupy co-leaders.

Now, will the Press Democrat denounce the violence of the Oakland police, who exercise unlawful authority? Or is there a double standard here?

Burning the American flag is an inflammatory and futile act of frustration that dilutes the main messages of the majority of occupiers and our many supporters, which is to bring about fundamental changes in our economic and political systems. When I was commissioned an officer in the U.S. Army, I swore an oath to defend my country against external and internal threats. I have kept that vow, which is a big reason that I am part of the Occupy movement, as are many veterans.

Violence by occupiers is a tactical mistake. The guns, other weapons, and media are in the hands of the protectors of the wealthy 1%. Violence is also a strategic and moral error.

The real violence that we should oppose includes the following: banks that gambled and foreclosed on the homes of millions; corporations that buy politicians with their big bucks; and stripping workers’ pensions and health care benefits.

Occupy does need to mature. Young people, especially, are desperate today. Their college debts are astronomical and their job options are minimal. Desperation can lead to violence. Long-term organizing is more likely to be successful.

“Ashes,” you fantasize. Yet on February 9 the Sonoma County Town Hall will host its third of ongoing monthly gatherings in a downtown Sebastopol church; 130 to 140 people attended the previous two. On February 17 the new Occupied Press, North Bay, will show the film “Battle in Seattle,” about the l999 shut-down of the World Trade Organization. On February 25 Occupy Santa Rosa will support teachers unions in a day of action in support of public education.

These are samples of the dozens of activities lead by Sonoma County Occupy groups as we prepare to move from a reflective winter into an action-oriented spring. Do these indicate “ashes?” You wait. You watch. You see.

Perhaps your editorial represents what we can expect from the new conservative Florida owners of the Press Democrat. Perhaps we need a new newspaper here that reflects the 99%.

Sonoma County is best known for its fine wines. It has the most lucrative wine industry in the U.S. The first wine billionaire, Jess Jackson, has his wineries and vineyards here, as does the giant Gallo Corporation. Most locals, however, still tend to think of this region as the nature-based Redwood Empire, rather than the commercial Wine Country.

Occupy events in big cities like New York, Oakland, and Los Angeles receive considerable coverage in the corporate media, especially when police react. Yet in small towns and mid-size cities throughout America, peaceful occupations occur that engage people in conversations and education in public spaces and beyond.

On Veteran’s Day, for example, the uniformed police chief Jeff Weaver walked toward OS’s decision-making General Assembly (GA). Occupiers in larger cities might have been nervous. But the Chief carried a plate of brownies and said, “These are from the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW).” Praise followed him as he left. Many vets, some of them homeless, have been on the frontlines of Occupy gatherings around the nation.

Sebastopol’s City Council unanimously passed a detailed resolution with ten whereas clauses to support OS on Dec. 6, proposed by former mayor and current City Council member Sarah Gurney. She noted, “Many cities have passed resolutions to support the Occupy movement.” Mayor Guy Wilson added, “It seems clear that the community supports this resolution.” Council member Kathleen Shaffer has an occupy sign in her front yard. Dozens of people have testified at various Council meetings in favor of Occupy, with only one person questioning it.

Among the resolution’s assertions are the following: “nearly one in six Americans live in poverty,” wealth and power are concentrated “in the hands of the top one percent of the American people,” the wealthy top 1 percent of households have incomes averaging $27 million and the remaining 99 percent average $31,224, and “the Occupy Movement has changed the national dialogue and garnered enormous pubic support around the nation.”

OS began its encampment in the town square on November 5. It later reached a compromise with city officials and agreed to leave its overnight stays in exchange for a tent to display educational materials.

On December 8, Sebastopol’s largest downtown church, United Methodist, offered a Town Hall meeting on Occupy that was attended by over 125 people. Among them were young people who had camped out, farmers, co-housing residents, peace activists, retirees, teachers, a Zen priest, a philanthropist, activists from groups such as the Peace and Justice Center, Grange, and Transition Sebastopol, and members of the nearby Occupy Santa Rosa (OSR).

Occupy’s first public splash in Sonoma Country was on October 15, organized by OSR in the county’s capital. Over 3000 people gathered in front of City Hall and then marched around corporate banks, led by the raucous HubBub Band. It was the sixth largest Occupy gathering yet, according to the New York Times, and thus the most people per capita at an opening Occupy event.

Rev. Judith Stone opened the December 8 Town Hall, “When 700 people crossing the Brooklyn Bridge were arrested, I was touched by all the young people and how roughly they were treated by the police.” She affirmed “the importance of the youth in building a social movement that values radical democracy.” At a planning meeting for the event, Rev. Stone said that she “wanted more and more people to feel in their hearts that they are part of the 99 percent.”

“This is an exciting moment—a pivotal time in history,” said Town Hall organizer and former Sebastopol mayor Larry Robinson. “What we do in this moment can determine our future and that of our species. This is a time for everyone’s voices to be heard,” he added.

The intention of the Town Hall, in the New England tradition, was to widen participation in the local movement. It sought to draw people into the public conversation who had been watching from the sidelines, which it succeeded in doing. “Listening is most important. The process of change is as significant as the product,” Robinson noted. He began the evening by reciting a poem by pacifist William Stafford that concluded, “The darkness around us is deep.”

The gathering was co-sponsored by the Leadership Institute for Ecology and the Economy, which for a decade has trained local leaders, many of whom have gone on to elected positions. “We support the Occupy movement,” its Executive Director Tanya Narath noted. “We are interested in helping the community find ways to broaden the movement for sustainability.”

“Occupy is a new way of being,” Institute member Matt Stevens added. “Its consensus means of decision-making changes people. Consensus is fundamentally democratic.”

The Town Hall was also co-sponsored by the online service Waccobb.net, which has over 10,000 subscribers and posts information on Occupy regularly. “We need to make systemic changes that are long-lasting,” its founder Barry Chertov asserted.

A professional facilitator, Joseph McIntyre of Aginnovations, guided the evening in an active, graceful format called the World Café. Everyone quickly self-organized themselves into talking circles of four people and responded to the question “What has Occupy stirred up in your life?” This ignited animated conversations.

“Occupy has shown me ways of working with others and letting go of my own opinions,” 20-something activist Tim Ryan noted. “I’ve gotten more skilled at leaving my ego at the door.” He later added, “Occupy feels patriotic. Being in a rally was the most American thing that I have ever done.”

“Occupy has changed my priorities,” another young person, Justin Diehl, said. “I have become a better person. I party and drink less. I want to keep my mind sharp. Occupy has energized and given me purpose. There is so much energy in the air that it is a natural high.”

“If we want to truly speak for the 99%, we need to diversify ourselves, especially to include more of the Latino community,” noted elder David Walls of Moveon.org.

Samples of other comments during the report back to the whole group follow:

Occupy is a passion, not just an idea or concept. It is a place where people can stand up and say ‘This is wrong’.

We can now talk openly without fear.

Occupy is a living organism, like the Earth itself, an open system.

We feel better physically—more energized. We’re in touch with our anger.

Occupy is moral, seeking to implement values such as free speech, liberty, self-reliance, and dignity.

Occupy is a mystery, like a flower unfolding.

The word “hope” was the one most often expressed.

People later shifted to other tables to respond to a second question: “What is next for Occupy in our community? Where do we go from here?” Among the responses were the following:

It’s all about connecting and interacting with each other. The new relationships that we are building are important. We need to get to know our neighbors better.

We need a local food co-op to replace the corporate Whole Foods.

We need local barter groups to trade things.

We need to organize ourselves into smaller affinity groups for strategic nonviolent direct action.

People have lost their voices. We need to provide a place for people to speak up.

We need to put pressure on the political system.

Two days later, a founding editor of the Occupied New York Wall Street Journal, Michael Levitin, met with nearly two dozen occupiers in Santa Rosa to plan publishing a local Occupy newspaper. He is in the area partly to attend the December 12 shut-down of the Oakland Port and other ports on the West Coast.

“We need to frame the movement globally,” Levitin asserted. “The world sees America as inward. The mass media has gotten out front to tell our narrative. We need to tell our own narrative in our own publications.”

Levitin displayed the first National Edition of their broadsheet four-page newspaper, which is the fifth edition of the publication. The front page includes articles by best-selling novelist Barbara Kingsolver and African-American Princeton Professor Cornell West. Most of the articles report the news of specific things that the Occupy movement has been doing around the U.S and beyond. Among the article’s titles are the following: “Why We Fight,” “The College Debt Trap,” “We Are Not Alone,” and “Enacting the Impossible.”

Levitin reported that the energy of the Occupy movement, which burst upon the scene in New York City on September 17, seems to be moving West. The Bay Area, in particular, has become one of its most active areas.

The next Town Hall in Sebastopol is being planned for early 2012. Former mayor Robinson concluded the evening by reciting another poem, this one from Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney from Ireland. It includes the following: “…once in a lifetime/ the longed for tidal wave/ of justice can rise up,/…so hope for a great sea-change/…believe in miracles.”

Occupy is still a baby. This infant is not even three-months-old yet. Patience and nurturing, so that it may grow during the coming year, into toddlerhood, and perhaps beyond, would help it. Winter is likely to be a hibernating time of reflection, followed by bursts of energy in the spring.

Though large cities and police assaults on peaceful occupations fill mass media reports, many smaller and mid-size cities continue with successful, vigorous occupations around the United States.

What follows are excerpts from my testimony to the Council, whose five members I know. As former mayor Larry Robinson says, “Local government is not the arm of the state but the hands of the people.”

Today is an historic day of action celebrating the two-month anniversary of OWS. There is no turning back this mass movement. It is democratic, experimental, evolving, open-hearted, celebratory, at times angry, magical, amazing, juicy, miraculous, passionate, and imaginative.

Today’s actions around the U.S. began at the New York Stock Exchange early this morning. Actions have occurred at bridges and other public spaces in Brooklyn, Portland, Los Angeles and elsewhere.

I’ve felt more alive and vital in the last two months than I have in decades. In recent years my despair has grown as I’ve watched the U.S. elites’ Death Machine continue its foreign and domestic wars, strangling, robbing and killing its own people and the peoples of the world, as well as further destroying the environment and creating chaotic climate change.

But now? It’s on the run. There’s no turning back the 99%. We’re out of the closet.

There will be difficulties and setbacks. Many of us may be beaten and imprisoned. But a great tidal wave of liberation sweeps across the U.S. and the world. The 99% are standing up to the 1%. We have been having dialogues within the 99%. We are building community and unity. That is our strength.

Even defectors from the 1% are joining us in a spiritual awakening that is our greatest hope for a better future than I have experienced in my nearly 70 years.

I want to make a plea to all of the 99%. Let’s continue to practice strategic non-violent direct action, especially in the face of, and in contrast to, the violence that comes toward us by the 1% protected by para-military police forces.

Let’s not be provoked by agents, infiltrators, and those who have lost faith in the historic legacy and successful efforts of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and other revolutionaries who helped set their people free.

Lets stay in our town plazas and on city hall lawns. Let’s make music, not war. Let beauty reign over domination. Let’s take back the public spaces and commons that are rightfully ours—here in Sebastopol and elsewhere.

Let Americans once again inspire the world, rather than oppress its people. Let’s replace our shame at what has been done in our name with pride and planetary patriotism.

There has been much talk at city councils about laws, rules, and ordinances. OWS should follow higher, ancient laws, such as Thou Shalt Not Kill & Thou Shalt Not Steal.

The silent criminals and killers within protected Wall Street rooms must be exposed. Those who horde human labor and natural resources for private and personal gain must be exposed.

Let’s continue to reclaim public spaces, resist evictions, and recreate beautiful community. As Code Pink says Reclaim, Resist, & Recreate. You can’t evict an idea whose time has come. However, the strategies and tactics to promote this mass movement need to evolve.

Let me leave you with my favorite memory of Occupy Sebastopol.

It happened on what is now called Veteran’s Day and used to be called Armistice Day—the end of war. We’re at a General Assembly. Sebastopol police chief Jeff Weaver walks toward us. We notice a plate of brownies in his hands. He presents them to us from the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), much to our delight. As he leaves, words of praise follow.

Power to the Peaceful!

… once in a lifetime/ the longed for tidal wave/ of justice can rise up…
So hope for a great sea-change…
Believe in miracles…

– Irish Nobel Prize laureate Seamus Heaney, from the poem “The Cure”

The miraculous and magical rise of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) tidal wave has suspended us in a threshold between a no-longer and a not-yet. The call for justice initiated by American youth echoes around the globe. Ours is a time of transition; exploring similar transitional moments in history could be instructive.

I recently watched the acclaimed fictionalized film Battle of Seattle with a 22-year-old who has been at Occupy Santa Rosa numerous times, here in Sonoma County, Northern California. The film evoked memories from the l968 Chicago National Democratic Convention, where I was in the streets and then briefly in jail. I was not in Seattle for the 1999 actions against the international gathering of the World Trade Organization, though I followed them in the media. By studying those two historical events, we can apply lessons from them to today’s rapidly unfolding national and global OWS movement.

What might their differences and similarities be and how can we avoid the problems of those previous events and harvest wisdom from them? All three have been mass mobilizations that dramatically changed history. They are each a battle for better futures that are possible.

I began visiting Occupy Santa Rosa on Oct. 15, when some 3000 energized people gathered outside City Hall and went on a march through downtown. Though Santa Rosa is a medium-sized city of some 165,000, our gathering was the sixth largest in the United States at that time.

The differences in the Chicago, Seattle, and Occupy events are numerous, including geographical, chronological, and duration. Chicago and Seattle failed to remain non-violent, for a variety of reasons, thus limiting their successes. Though some Occupy sites have experienced police violence–such as Oakland, New York, and San Francisco—here in Sonoma County and in other sites at least the protestors have tended to remain non-violent. If that peacefulness continues, the movement will grow and include more of the 99 percent.

One similarity in these three eruptions is that they have been mass uprisings of direct democracy challenging the domination of the many by the few. Then the state used its police power to subdue the constitutional First Amendment freedoms of speech and assembly exercised by those seeking justice.

In l968 I participated in activities in Grant Park and elsewhere in Chicago. This was after the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., during the history-changing l960s. Our peace movement eventually helped force the U.S. military out of the Vietnam War.

At the time I was a 24-year-old graduate student at the University of Chicago.

Seattle

Not having been in Seattle, I do not know how historically accurate Battle in Seattle is. I welcome feedback from those who were there or have studied this four-day event. The film has a ring of truth to it and reminds us how easily something conceived to follow the principles of non-violence as practiced by Gandhi, King, Quakers, and others can be re-directed by a few police agents and violence-promoting activists. If that were to happen in the Occupation movement, it would loose much of the support that it currently has. Its potential to gain more support among the 99 percent would be limited.

“I was thrilled and grateful to see the next generation picking up the mantle of activism,” said Angela Ford, a Seattle resident in 1999. “I knew that nothing would be the same in the country. At last, the issues of global corporate greed and plunder had surfaced here in the United States. It could no longer be ignored. It became part of public conversation.”

While watching Battle in Seattle, I thought about how unintended consequences can be numerous and far-reaching. Some people will get hurt. A pregnant wife of a police officer played by Woody Harrelson was accidentally caught up in a police attack on demonstrators and hit in the stomach by a policeman. She lost her beloved child.

Two of the strongest scenes in the film involve that policeman and one of the activist leaders. The policeman chases the young man and beats him without mercy, as revenge for his child’s death, until another policeman pulls him off. He later goes to the jail to apologize. “I don’t blame you,” the activist says, facing a third strike and life in prison. He stays on the high ground. His target is the WTO, not the police.

“If you don’t stand up and fight, everything that is beautiful will be taken away,” one of the women jailed in the Seattle film says to her partner, both of them bleeding from the police brutality.

The final scene in the film is inspiring; the activists are released from prison without charges. This happened to me when I was released from Cook County Jail in Chicago after my participation in the 1968 activities. A judge in Nashville, Tennessee, recently released occupiers illegally incarcerated by the police there.

People whose memories include Chicago’68 and Seattle’99 have been active in Occupy 2011, raising questions and concerns. A big difference between the current Occupy movement and the other two historical movements is that OWS occurs not only in one city but is national and increasingly global. It is also ongoing, rather than limited to a short time. All three have been youth-led.

At first the U.S. corporate press ignored OWS, even as the world press was covering it. Then they tried to ridicule it and reduce it with demeaning descriptions, such as “dirty hippies.” They are finally being forced to give it more balanced coverage, though they continue to fail in the responsibility of the media to offer context and analysis.

Santa Rosa

“Once the tents went up,” said Santa Rosa occupier Heather Williamson, 22, “it became more of a community and at times even a party feeling.” Encampments have also been described as evolving into villages that occupy public space. Others describe them as “learning communities of direct democracy.” People can learn how to disagree without being disagreeable and how to deal with their anger appropriately, as well as how to manage conflict and let things go. An historical example of such encampments might be during the Great Depression, when so many people were homeless, as they are today.

Among the many things that OWS does is to function as a school. One can learn the following: peer leadership, communication, setting boundaries, dealing with opponents not as enemies, building trust and relationships, living together with diverse people, developing self-confidence and one’s own voice, letting things go, dealing with difficult people, self-policing, speaking publicly, remaining calm, developing a sense of group identity and unity. OWS provides a public space within which people can have various kinds of encounters with each other.

“My voice is coming out easier,” explained Williamson, who is visiting Sonoma County from San Diego. “I’m learning to speak loud enough.” She and others attend classes and workshops on things such as non-violence, yoga, and how to interact with the police.

A sleeping giant, the so-called “Me Generation” or “Millennial Generation,” which I reached in college, seems to be awakening. Many are passive in class and some feel hopeless about their futures with substantial college debts, few jobs, and often having to move back home.

“This ain’t over yet,” wrote one 71-year-old friend on Oct. 30, as the Occupy Santa Rosa General Assembly decided to continue staying overnight, in spite of the threat of police eviction.

“Santa Rosa has the potential to be an early role model for other communities across the country,” he adds, “where the climate is right for the local governments and the Occupiers to find common ground and to energize many people in these communities to get involved. If this movement is going to be successful, it needs many people marching, making democratic decisions in General Assemblies, and taking action.” He later notes, “Democracy is never perfect, but we need to get as close to it as we can.”

He then concludes with some insights from depth psychology: “There is the wisdom of the elders who may advise against rash actions, but there is the wisdom of the youth that can carry the ball forward to new ground. Hopefully, the elder energy can check the reckless Puer Aeternus (eternal youth) energy and the youthful energy can check the stuck elder Senex ( cynical) energy. We need a full-throated debate about these important issues so that all of these energies can find a proper balance. Step by step we must discover how to refine the Occupy democratic process.”

Seattle apparently had conflicts among elected officials, like between its mayor and the governor of Washington, and between electeds and the police chief. Such conflicts have happened in the San Francisco Bay Area. Occupations here have received significant support from San Francisco supervisors, some of whom have attended, as well as support from other elected officials and politically powerful people. If the Occupation movement can develop further allies from members of labor unions, faith and community groups, and others, this will serve it well.

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan was once an activist herself, but she authorized what became the most vicious police riot against occupiers to date, seriously wounding an Iraq Marine veteran, Scott Olsen. Her former allies are calling on her to resign and her authority has eroded.

“Creating confrontations with supporters is a tactical and strategic mistake,” said former Sebastopol mayor Larry Robinson at a recent meeting. “Most everyone here in local government gets it. What the occupiers do is bear witness to the injustices and moral issues. The concentration of wealth and income distribution is morally wrong. It is leading to the downfall of what could be a great civilization. We should not alienate natural allies, which includes local businesses.” Robinson added that it is important not to demonize Santa Rosa and local government, but to keep the focus on Wall Street.

“From Arab Spring and the Occupy movement we need to learn that we cannot predict when things will open,” Robinson said. “There is a tipping point, and we need to be prepared for that opening.” He has been studying chaos theory and speaking to groups about it and the importance of accepting uncertainty.

Police weapons since Seattle’99 have evolved and gotten more violent, as revealed by the some 400 policemen from 17 precincts that were mobilized and used helicopters, armored vehicles, and shotguns firing projectiles against a much smaller, unarmed citizenry. Tactics used by the police in the film “Battle in Seattle” are currently being used or may soon be used against the occupations, including martial law, police infiltrators, declaring States of Emergency and curfews, and sending in the National Guard, some of whom will have been in combat in Iraq and/or Afghanistan.

America has become more violent since Chicago’68 and Seattle’99. As its morality has declined, its firepower has increased. Let’s not be naïve and innocent, especially given the enthusiasm of the youth, which has already been dashed by President Barak Obama becoming a manager of the wealthy 1 per cent.

As someone who lived in Chile during the democratically-elected government of President Salvador Allende in the early l970s, I experienced how quickly a country can go from having hundreds of thousands of people mobilized in the streets to a brutal dictatorship. In Chile I first heard the chant “The people united will never be defeated. (El pueble unido jamas sera vencido.) It was good to hear it again in the Seattle film and now at OWS occupations around the world, thus linking them to Chile.

Since Chicago’68 and Seattle’99 the gap between the rich and the poor in the U.S. has risen. Though the U.S. military has expanded its reach—with a budget about the same size as all the rest of the militaries in the world combined—U.S. power and prestige have declined with the rise of the rest, especially China, India, Russia, and Brazil. American power is possible only because of its world-wide fortress.

The Occupy movement could either stimulate a growth of more oppressive control of the 99 per cent by the 1 percent or a weakening or even overthrow of the Wall Street stranglehold. The rich and their protectors are certainly carefully calculating how to turn back the Occupy tide and continue exploiting the labor of the rest of us and the Earth’s bounty.

Chicago’68 was a turning point. Seattle’99 was a turning point. Now Occupy’11 continues that legacy of a mass uprising of democracy. If Occupy continues to grow, it has the potential to recall the U.S. back to some of its original democratic values of freedom, liberty, and justice for all.

There are those who are trying to set fire to the world.
We are in danger.
There is time only to work slowly.
There is no time now to love.

– Deena Metzger

Some 1500 people later attended a daily General Assembly and voted for a general strike on November 2. It would be the first one in the United States since l946, which was also in Oakland. Such a strike calls on workers and students to stay home from work and school and try to shut down the city. Downtown banks were also encouraged to close and demonstrators vowed to enter them if they did not.

“The whole world is watching Oakland” chants can be heard at various occupations around the United States and read in their communications.

In Oakland’s police riot, shotguns fired projectiles and helicopters and armored personnel carriers were employed by the some 400 police officers. They created a martial law environment to intimidate unarmed citizens as they mobilized against multiple social injustices. Some described it as a “drill” for what could happen at other occupation sites. But this repression is stimulating more resistance around the Bay Area and elsewhere.

In San Francisco, police gathered on the morning of October 27 with their masks and riot gear, with the apparent intention of evicting occupiers. They were met by 1000 protestors and backed down. As with the threat by New York City’s mayor, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who ordered police to evict Occupy Wall Street, there have now been three important coast-to-coast victories for the 99% in the growing struggle against the 1%.

Four San Francisco Board of Supervisors, a California state senator, and other elected officials joined the protestors. They called for negotiations with the occupiers, rather than force. In two weeks San Francisco will vote for mayor. The current interim Mayor Ed Lee is running. A failed attempt to evict the emboldened occupiers would doom his campaign.
In all three Bay Area occupy sites that this reporter attended or watched, including Santa Rosa, some elected officials have supported the occupiers by pressuring mayors, city administrators, and police chiefs not to use force. The new occupation movement is using not only its street smarts but also more traditional political routes to increase allies among elected officials, unions, and neighborhood, church, and community groups.

“Oakland is the vanguard and epicenter of the Occupy movement,” Clarence Thomas, was quoted in the daily Oakland Tribune as saying. He is a member of the powerful International Longshoreman and Warehouse Union and urged people to support the strike. Other unions have also come forward with support, though some have reservations.

Labor historian Fred Glass of San Francisco City College was recently interviewed on Pacifica’s KPFA radio. He said that to be successful a general strike needs four things: anger, a spark, leadership willing to call the strike, and an organizational structure to implement it.

The occupation movement has already demonstrated the first three components. Mass discontent exists throughout the U.S. by the 99% that are ruled by the 1%. The police wounding of Iraq vet and Marine Scott Olsen on October 26 in Oakland provided the spark that ignited the calling of the strike.

It remains to be seen how well Occupy Oakland can organize the general strike. It is a risky tactic, especially since the unions that once called for such strikes are now weaker. Whereas most unions in l946 represented workers from private companies, most unions today represent service workers. For example, I am a member of the California Faculty Association, which represents teachers at Sonoma State University.
Oakland’s 1946 general strike brought 100,000 people into the streets and shut down the city for 56 hours. The largest gathering at any of the current occupations here in the U.S. was apparently some 20,000 people. However, ccupations in Madrid and Rome have had over 100,000 participants.

Professor Glass reviewed the history of general strikes in the U.S., which have been few and far in between. Elsewhere in the world, like in Latin America where I have lived, and in Europe, general strikes called by labor unions are more common.

“The biggest general strike waves in the U.S. have been after World War I and World War II,” Glass explained. “Veterans came home to many promises, which were not fulfilled,” he added. This is happening again with vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Groups like Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans for Peace rallied to support Olsen and have been active at many occupations.

October 26 started as a sad day for veterans and others when we heard in the morning of Olsen’s serious wounding. We were somewhat relieved when we heard of the strong response to the police brutality that forced Oakland Mayor Jean Quan to back off her troops. Some of Quan’s allies have been highly critical of her role and even have called for her resignation.

The police wounding of Olsen has galvanized occupation encampments in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and elsewhere, where vigils have been held for him. A tribute to Olsen has been constructed around a flagpole in Oakland with the words “Pray 4 Scott.” Photos of his face with a dog appear on the internet. Groups such as Amnesty International have condemned the use of tear gas on unarmed citizens, as well as the actions of Oakland Mayor Quan.

Even the corporate media, which has tried to paint negative images of the occupiers with terms such as “dirty hippies,” has had to report the substantial presence of veterans and other patriotic Americans in the growing movement.

Olsen woke up on October 27, though he was apparently still unable to speak. His parents have arrived from Wisconsin and he has been upgraded to fair condition and moved from the emergency room to an intensive care unit at Highland Hospital.

Santa Rosa’s occupation on October 15 was the sixth largest in the nation, though this Sonoma County city only has around 150,000 people. A constant presence at city hall has occurred since then, as well as daily decision-making General Assemblies. The protestors and police have been collaborating and working well together in Santa Rosa. However, that may change as Occupy Santa Rosa is considering engaging in civil disobedience. They plan to erect a tent city to facilitate better overnight stays. That might cause a police reaction.

The first Occupy Petaluma, also in Sonoma County, is scheduled for October 29. An earlier one in the small town of Sonoma on October 14 drew some 500 people.

Such events happening in the San Francisco Bay Area represent many people in the region thinking deeply about what is happening in the U.S. and taking direct action to change the course of events. An uprising of old-fashioned democracy is happening. This is not the first time that this has happened.

As someone who moved to Chile, after serving in the U.S. Army, during the democratically-elected government of President Salvador Allende in the early l970s, today’s events evoke memories. The current victories of the Occupy movement are substantial. But the 1% is carefully calculating its next steps to quell this movement that threatens their domination and horded treasures.

In Chile I experienced hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets for democracy. They were eventually struck down by the U.S.-supported dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. A reign of terror was initiated throughout South America that took thousands of lives and dashed the hopes of a democratic, nonviolent revolution.

Let’s not be naïve and innocent to expect that the 1% will give up their substantial wealth exploited from the labor of the rest of us and nature’s bounty. The struggle has only entered its next stages. There is likely to be setbacks, but victory is still possible.

“I have been haunted by voices from the other side of death,” wrote Chilean-American author Ariel Dorfman on October 10 as the Occupy movement unfolded. He wrote of “that other September 11th,” I have also been haunted by those voices, given the torture and assassination of my good friend Frank Teruggi by the Chilean military. If it is to successfully challenge power, the Occupy movement is likely to experience deaths, as we did in the l960s with the Kent State murders. Then what? Some will retreat to their private lives.

There is much to learn from defeat, as Dorfman writes. There have been “many who tried and failed.” They “gave their lives to change the world.”

Might the Occupy movement be a next step in the fall of the American Empire? After the mighty U.S. defeats in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Wounded beasts can be deadly. What might be left after such a fall? Could we return to the American Republic and its values of liberty, freedom, and equality for all?

“Go down fighting,” Dorfman advises. Better than groveling on one’s knees for crumbs.

Olsen, 24, had his skull fractured by a police projectile and is experiencing traumatic brain swelling. He apparently sustained the most serious injury nationwide among occupiers and is at risk for brain damage.

Olsen’s roommate and buddy Keith Shannon, who served with him in Iraq, rushed to Highland Hospital, as did other friends. The hospital described him as being in a “serious but stable” condition. He apparently had been unable to say his surname and was sedated on a respirator. “They are waiting for a neurosurgeon to examine him to see if he needs surgery,” Shannon told the press.

“He doesn’t agree with the way the banks aren’t regulated, the way they drove the economy in the ground,” Shannon added. Olsen apparently wants people who think that they are above the law—like bankers—to be brought to justice for their crimes.

Riot police from some 17 forces participated in the unprovoked attack that led to some 200 arrests of members of a determined, focused but restrained crowd. The estimated cost of the overwhelming force using shock and awe tactics was some $2 million. Some protestors walked straight from jail back to the occupation, defiantly chanting “We’re Still Here.”

Over 1000 demonstrators took to the streets the day after the violent attack. Rather than being intimidated by the police violence, they are responding by exercising their constitutional right of assembly. Chanting “Whose Park? Our Park!” demonstrators tore down a police fence last night.

Some consider the attack to be a practice drill for things to come. The mayors of at least two other large California cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles, have threatened similar evictions of occupiers. In New York a group of police refused to move against protestors and Occupy Wall Street is chanting “Oakland is New York” in solidarity. Chants such as “Occupy America” and “Occupy Together” can be heard around the U.S.

Various videos documenting the assault on Olsen have been posted on YouTube. One reveals that he was hit in the head at close range. Demonstrators rush to his aid, as an Oakland cop fires a second canister at the crowd. Wearing his Marine jacket, Olsen is carried through tear-gas smoke to the sounds of shrieking people. The footage reveals that the explosion that downed Olsen came from a flash bang grenade, which the police deny they used. At a press conference they say they only used tear gas and baton rounds.

The injury to Olsen is a shot being heard around the world, like the Kent State murders during the Vietnam War, though so far less deadly. Occupiers and supporters are calling for the prosecution of the police responsible for this brutality, which could impede future police violence.

Iraq Veterans Against the War, of which Olsen is a member, writes that he “is one of many veterans who have returned home and gotten involved in the Occupy protests taking place in hundreds of cities around the nation. Veterans like Scott recognize that they are part of the 99% who face uncertain economic futures, including few job prospects and rising tuition costs. Rates of homelessness and unemployment are higher for veterans than for their civilian counterparts.”

“I’m absolutely devastated that someone who did two tours of Iraq and came home safely is now lying in a US hospital because of the domestic police force,” his friend and hospital visitor Adele Carpenter told the UK’s Guardian. Olsen served in Iraq in 2006 and 2007 with the 3^rd Battalion, 4^th Marines and left the military in 2010. It is ironic that Olsen’s injury was sustained in the streets of Oakland, which the police transformed into a war zone.

This incident disproves lies told by the corporate media who try to demonize the diverse members of the Occupy movement with words like “hippies.” In the four times that I have been at Occupy Santa Rosa, I have seen numerous Veterans for Peace, professors, physicians, families, and many students and others who do not fit that demeaning stereotype. Diversity is the signature of this movement for the 99% against the 1% who rule the United States.

Olsen’s parents have rushed from Wisconsin to be at his side. His friend Dottie Guy, also an Iraq War vet, is one of those maintaining an overnight vigil at the hospital. “He always had a smile on his face,” she said. Others have described him as a “peaceful man with an angelic face.”

The attack on Olsen and many others has been met by the resolve of the Occupy movement to intensify its struggle. Oakland’s historic Ella Baker Center for Human Rights sent out an email telling the story of another person, Pete, 31, also wounded that night.

His response:  ”I can’t believe Oakland would take that level of aggression against people doing nothing threatening. I still can’t believe it. But I will go back. This is our city, I hella love Oakland, and I am going to fight to protect our freedoms.”

“We’re not leaving,” demonstrators chant. Meanwhile, contradictions within the Oakland City Council are developing, with some members supporting the demonstrators and criticizing the mayor.

Here in Sonoma County, where I live, an hour from Oakland by car, Occupy Santa Rosa, which began on October 15, continues to have a daily presence outside City Hall. Police and occupiers have collaborated to keep the occupation legal and peaceful. In fact, the occupiers called on police recently to clear the area of transients passing through while intoxicated and stealing things.

I first heard about a Marine being downed from a radio report while on my way to one of the vets groups in which I participate. I stopped  the car. Images flashed through my mind of how important vets were to stopping the war of my generation—Vietnam. We will have more injuries and losses in this struggle, but we were successful in finally pulling the U.S. out of Vietnam. Now we have another task here in the 21st century–vets and others working together for a government “by the people, for the people, and of the people.” It’s time to take back America.

The Occupy movement brings hope, enthusiasm, determination, anger, joy, and the possibility of a better world. But we should expect the 1% and their managers, including President Barack Obama, to begin firing, in various ways, on this Second American Revolution.

The Occupy movement did an accurate structural sociology analysis to target Wall Street. It went from those wounded downstream, in this case Olsen, to upstream to find where the wounding originated—Wall Street. It then developed a mass movement based not on a single event but on the development of ongoing learning and action democratic communities.

The Occupy movement is beyond merely political action or social action. It is cultural action that seeks a change in consciousness and deeper change. Its tools include conversation and dialogue among the many, which has the possibility of changing history. We are still be at the beginning of this movement, rather than the end that the violence tries to enforce. The Oakland police are likely to be defeated, as was the all-powerful U.S. military in Vietnam, and now in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is one thing to talk about democracy, as President Barack Obama does so freely, and another thing to practice it directly, as the growing Occupation movement does on a daily basis.

Many aspects of that historic occasion were impressive. People were genuinely joyous to be together, as well as angry at the 1% who rule the United States, extracting their excessive wealth from the labor of the rest of us and the Earth’s natural resources. Yes, it is a class conflict, started by the 1%, which the 99% is finally mobilizing to struggle against. This has been building for a long time—locally, nationally, and internationally.

Of over 100 October 15 occupation sites in the United States, small Santa Rosa was the sixth largest. Go Sonoma County!

Since then I’ve returned to City Hall four times, including for the first weekly anniversary rally on October 22, which drew around 300 people. A steady crew of rotating persons have maintained a 24-hour presence. Rallies and marches are planned for each Saturday and General Assemblies to make decisions each day at 3:30 until at least Christmas Eve.

As an organic farmer, I appreciated the original October 15 occupation for inviting people to walk over to nearby Juilliard Park to attend an informative report on Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and the damage they do to the environment and farming based on nature rather than against it.

We were invited to Juilliard on October 22 again, but this time for music, poetry, and dance. You cannot have a real people’s movement without music and other art forms. Being angry and just complaining is not enough to change things. You must also attract people to your work and ideas.

Upon arriving at City Hall on October 22 a man on the corner greeted us by waving a large American flag and holding the sign “Federal Reserve Bank Steals Your Money Every Day.” The Occupy movement is genuinely patriotic, trying to recover the country from those who stole it.

“When They Execute a Corporation,” read a sign held by activist Gary Abreim, 69, “You Know They Are Real People.” When asked why he had been coming to the occupations, Abreim explained, “There are seeds being planted here. I’m here to water those seeds. They are a yearning, a passion on the part of Americans to return to a democracy that we have lost.”

Only one uniformed policeman was at the occupation. He did not even have a helmet or hat on and was talking amiably with demonstrators and often laughing or smiling. At the nearby park where people were listening to music, many with baby blue Occupy Santa Rosa T-shirts, there were no visible police.

“Police should be seen as potential recruits to the movement, not as adversaries. Ultimately, they are accountable to the people,” according to a handout at the gathering. This is one of the seven non-violence principles guiding the occupiers, which was drafted by Cynthia Boaz, a Sonoma State University professor, who spoke at the October 15 launch of the occupation.

Occupy Wall Street, the first of the world-wide occupations at over 1,500 sites, has continued strong for over a month, with people joining it from all over. This is in spite of the threatening police presence there in the besieged financial capital of the world.

A Sonoma County friend who visited the New York occupation reported the following:

“I was in NYC last week and went to the OWS site. It was very moving to see so many people, the home-made signs, the diversity of voices and the determination.  Police presence was high, police cars and security ringing the park to create a menacing air but the protesters were conscious of staying within the law.  The media is trying to paint this movement as fringe but that is exactly the point if the 1% think that the 99% are the margins!”

Ah, those “home-made signs,” a distinguishing characteristic of this movement. Some of the ones seen recently include the following: “Lost My Job, Found an Occupation,” “More Equality and Empathy,” and “It’s Time.”

“I come to help out,” explained high school student Lorca Blanco, who has spent some nights outside City Hall and others nearby at the supportive Peace and Justice Center. “I like taking care of people. I remind them that they need to drink water regularly to hydrate themselves.”

“We go around the world pushing democracy,” Garick Rood, 27, explained, “but we do not practice it here. Corporate America is selling out the American dream, with interest.”

“Our judicial system has been corrupted,” Abreim added. We lack transparency and integrity. Since judges must run for office, that requires money and donors. So the system is biased. We see it even in the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas being an example.’

At Juilliard Park I encountered three generations of one family. “I’m here because I’m sick of the dictatorship of the rich and the endless wars,” explained network engineer Kevin Ryan, 58. “I’m sick of casino capitalism, where the 1% win and take it all. When they lose they make the 99% pay. We are here to change this.”

His daughter Simone Harris, 40, a public school teacher, played with her son Asher, 3, and commented, “This is the most exciting thing that has happened in this country and the world in my lifetime. It’s both a protest and an alternative community. The organizers have insight into what we need. It had to be a continuous community rather than a one-time event.”

“All the cuts to education are the direct prioritizing of Wall Street over Main Street,” Harris continued. “Corporate interests have taken over education, reducing authentic student-teacher interactions. We now have a factory approach to education.” On her blog, theedutalk.blogspot.com, she has the slogan “No Public Education, No Democracy!”

Her partner, Shanti Cabinaw, 34, a nurse, described “the sense of overwhelm” in contemporary society and being worn down “by the daily grind. There is a feeling of being stuck with nowhere to go. This movement changes that. It is the antidote to fear.”

“This reclaiming public space by citizens is essential,” Ryan noted. “The physical environment is too often for consumers and we need to occupy it.”

On the day after the rally I drove to a meeting of the North Bay Organizing Project (NBOP), where they expected 600 people, which I doubted they would get. NBOP describes itself as “a grassroots, multi-racial, and multi-issue organization comprised of 15 faith, labor, environmental, immigrant student and community-based organizations.” It is composed of some of the most politically active and connected groups in Sonoma County, some of whose members have been at Occupy Santa Rosa.

Within a few blocks of the Santa Rosa High School Auditorium where NBOP would meet, I noticed a large contingent of occupiers with signs headed to the meeting.

Over a dozen elected officials were introduced at this gathering inside doors, which had an over-flow crowd of more than 800. But it was the Occupy Santa Rosa youth who received the most rousing standing ovation. In addition to their street activities, some of the occupiers also seem to be trying more traditional routes of developing power and influencing political decisions by making alliances with a wide range of politically-active groups.

At the NBOP gathering, Ben Boyce of the Living Wage Coalition, who had been a featured speaker at the October 15 rally, handed me what he described as a “manifesto,” which had the headline “Make Wall Street Pay. Jobs Not Cuts! Occupy America.” He noted, “The openness of the Occupy movement is an invitation to be creative.” He gave “a shout-out to the courageous young folks in New York who have inaugurated the American Autumn.” Others have called it an Awakening.

As people gathered peacefully in Santa Rosa, tension mounted elsewhere in the Bay Area in larger cities like Oakland and San Francisco, where city officials have issued eviction orders. But occupiers continue to ignore them. In Oakland they marched for three hours on October 22, closing thoroughfares and freeway ramps and entering two banks, before returning to City Hall.

On the night before the first Santa Rosa occupation, some 500 persons occupied the nearby smaller town of Sonoma. Occupy Petaluma has scheduled its grand opening for October 29, Saturday at noon in Penry Park at Washington Street and Petaluma Blvd. North, near Bank of America. More information at occupypetaluma.com.

The Occupy movement is a teaching moment. Among the analysts writing about it are UC Berkeley linguist George Lakoff. In a widely circulated article he describes the moral position of Wall Street as “the primacy of self-interest, individual responsibility.”

The 99% movement, in contrast, takes a moral position of social responsibility, as well as individual rights, where “democracy starts with citizens caring about one another and acting responsibly on that sense of care.” He sees “OWS as a patriotic movement, based on a deep and abiding love of country…The Public is what makes the Private possible.”

Conservative blogger Erick Erickson has started a reactionary “53 percent” project, which is the percent that pays federal income taxes.  Its message is that the movement fails to take personal responsibility and blames economic troubles on others. “Suck it up you whiners,” Erickson contends, adding that “there is still value in hard work, and individual self-reliance.” Others on his blog add that the protesters should “get a job” and “get a life.”

The 99% movement and the contrasting 53% project seem to exemplify the differences that Lakoff describes between two distinct moral perspectives.

A recent poll released by Quinnipiac University reveals that 67% of New York City voters agree with the protestors. A separate poll by Siena College reveals that 72% of New York State voters favor more tax on those earning more than $1 million.

The Occupy movement has already changed the U.S.’s political landscape, as well as the world situation. Some, especially among the 1%, think that it will soon fade. However, it shows signs of continuing and inspiring change. Stay tuned to see how things evolve.

May a thousand flowers (occupations) bloom around Sonoma County, California, the U.S., and our threatened globe, thus breaking the monopolistic hold of the 1%.

Creative signs were displayed at the Occupy Santa Rosa gatherings in Northern California outside City Hall, which I attended on October 15, 16, and 17. For example, pink-clad, three-year-old Liliana Averill described her sign as “a love heart because I love my mom and my dad,” who is apparently unemployed. Her older, also pink-clad sister Jasmine sported a “Big Sister” t-shirt and a “Be Good” sign. These are among the many essential and diverse messages of this movement, which is more than merely a demonstration or protest.

“Fight the Big Cats,” read one dog’s sign. Other signs included the following: “The People are Too Big to Fail,” “They Got Bailed Out; We Got Sold Out,” “This is So Not Over,” “History is Made by Those Who Show Up,” and “Prepare for the Beginning.”

Young people have been leading this movement. They lead by doing and attracting a diversity of others to their good work. Many occupying over-night here are students at the Santa Rosa Junior College. Some of my Sonoma State University students were there, as well as some of our current and retired faculty, such as David Walls, an activist with moveon.org. I wore my California Faculty Association t-shirt, which says “Save public education! Keep the doors open!”

What can college students expect of their futures if the 1% continue to rule the 99% of us? Huge debts, few jobs, and many moving back with their parents. Why not occupy, go to the streets, and elsewhere to speak one’s truths?

“We don’t need to waste more time being miserable, watching injustice happen,” observed occupier Heather Williamson, 22, who currently works on an organic farm. “This movement is a first brave step, a very loud, bold step—saying that it really isn’t fine to bow our heads and pretend that everything is OK. This is the beginning of a new world.”

“In contrast to many protests where signs are pre-made,” gardener Steve Fowler, 71, noted at a meeting of a group called Earth Elders, “these signs were home-made. Many voices were heard. They have occupied political space and they are not going to give it up.”

Another Earth Elder, Bill Wadsworth, 70, said “I went without thinking I would stay over-night, and decided to. We have to keep this going. The support is inspiring. Neighboring stores gave lots of food. Pizzas arrived from out-of-state. The whole consensus decision-making really works. They use hand gestures and sign language.”

Decision-making that occurs at General Assemblies provides laboratories for learning and practicing democracy that is all-inclusive and leaderless, or “leaderful,” as some would say. In Santa Rosa and at most sites, occupiers have worked cooperatively with police. One inspiring video circulating is titled “Marine Defends Occupy Wall Street.”

The movement’s signs, slogans, and themes are communicated with ingenuity and the expressive potency of many grievances. Their diversity reveals an underlying commitment to values such as social justice, direct democracy, engaged learning, and decentralization. At circles, we dealt with issues related to power, privilege, oppression, and class analysis. Such circles facilitate vital conversations and sharing stories. People build relationships and explore their dreams and alternatives. This movement encourages, challenges, stimulates, provokes, catalyzes and convenes.

With around 3000 participants, the Santa Rosa occupation, according to the New York Times, was the sixth largest in the nation. This is in a small city of some 150,000. Local organizers say that they plan to stay at least until December 24, which is the date that the national movement has set to end the occupations and evolve into its next step, whatever that may be. The learning and action communities can be expected to continue in various forms. A gathering of people from the many General Assemblies is scheduled for July 4, 2012.

It was good to see some friends in the streets that I had not seen in years. Amidst the joy of being in a multi-generational and multi-cultural gathering, we were able to catch up. We have a strong GoLocal group here and they were there with signs, as were members of the Living Wage Coalition, Unitarian Universalist churches, Peace and Justice Center, North Bay Labor Council, and other long-time groups.

As a college teacher, I am glad to see signs with quotes from the classics, such as Goethe’s “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” The movement’s activists contend that they represent the 99% who are ruled by the 1% who dominate here in the United States.

Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz writes that we now have a government that is of the one percent, by the one percent, and for the one percent. What happened to “of the people, by the people, and for the people”?

Some members of the 1% have joined the movement. Robert S. Halpen, for example, is a retired Wall Street trader who has been helping fund Occupy’s nonprofit magazine. Defectors from the 1% are welcomed into the movement. The Canadian magazine Adbusters is credited with stimulating the movement when it sent an email this summer to its 90,000 readers. Halpen has been a long-time funder of the anticorporate magazine and its spoofs.

Former Sebastopol Mayor and city council member Larry Robinson attended and posted the following comment online: “Washington’s failures are a direct result of policies directed by Wall Street and for the benefit of Wall Street. Most Americans know this in their guts. We may have finally reached the tipping point!”

If this occupancy movement remains peaceful, it will grow and attract many millions around the world. It has chosen a worthy target, Wall Street, and appropriate strategies and tactics. It currently focuses on defining the problems here in the 21st century, which are numerous, as the gap between the rich and the poor grows. It is being patient and not jumping prematurely into solutions.

Readers might consider a visit to an occupation nearby where they live, see for themselves, and converse with those occupying. From sitting in circles of people of many generations and cultures with different ideas, one can participate in democratic learning/action communities. Food donations are welcome.

The U.S. government has been steadily loosing moral authority, which the occupy movement is helping the American people gain with its burst of energy. In less than a month, it has already dramatically changed global political power arrangements.

A New Story is unfolding before our eyes. One thing that may be sure is that its future and our futures are uncertain. A better future is possible.

“The Life of the Mind” is the motto of the University of Chicago, where I earned my doctorate. It was a good book-based education. But after a couple of decades teaching college, I felt something missing. So I left full-time teaching, bought rural land, and established a farm outside the small town of Sebastopol in Sonoma County, Northern California. I want to communicate some of the things I have learned from agri-culture–the basis of culture and community. “You are what you eat,” as the saying goes.

Farming has moved energy from my brain into the rest of my body. I enjoy this regular manual labor, which provides health insurance as important as my insurance policy. I read fewer books than before, but I learn a lot from plants, animals, soil, water, wind, and what eco-philosopher David Abram describes as “other-than-human” in his book The Spell of the Sensuous.

Farming with Nature in Mind

I farm with nature in mind, rather than against it. Permaculture is a helpful design system for this kind of agriculture. It teaches placing cardboard, burlap bags and newspapers around the berries, on top of which I put composted manure. This fertilizes, reduces weeds, and keeps moisture in the ground, as well as builds soil. The Earth does not want to be bare, so when factory farms strip it with chemical herbicides, it throws up a new covering, called “weeds,” not wanting to be naked, seeking protection.

The boysenberries with which I share this land are the under-story within a forest. That diversity provides beauty and protects my main crop from pests, as well as providing fallen leaves for mulch. The redwoods, oaks and other tall trees draw moisture from the atmosphere onto the farm. I put large, flexible used flour bags as bedding for the chickens, which catch their manure. I then put those manure-enriched bags around the berries and add other compost.

By the words “the land” I mean more than just the surface. It includes the entire community that makes that land from below, on the ground, and from above. This includes four-legged creatures and those that crawl and fly, those that are feathered, horned, big/small/hidden, hairy and slimy. Gophers on my farm can be pests, but they also aerate the soil; poison oak is inconvenient to humans, but it could also be considered a forest guardian, keeping human predators out, who can do a lot of damage, which we are doing to our planet. The many gophers in our area carry a message—better to plant perennials like berries and trees than annuals like vegetables. Listening to the land where one lives, rather than trying to make it something it is not, is key.

Glorious raptors circle above, including screeching hawks, as do graceful turkey vultures, adding to the community. Humorous wild turkeys and busy bees pollinating berries as I reach in to tend them, never getting stung, are members of our diverse community. Yellow jackets are another thing; when I accidentally get too close to their nests, I am stung and swell up. “Beware,” certain creatures communicate, including those cute skunks. Streams on the other hand, seem to beckon humans into the water, which connects us all, the blood of the community.

Much is ongoing, only some of which is visible. Together, this is the community of the land, of which humans are only a part. We too often over-play our role and under-estimate the importance of other community members. Among the good writers about such “land” are Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry, and Mary Oliver. Land communicates. Years ago I spoke at a “Language of the Land” conference which met on an active volcano in Hawaii. Our job is to listen to the land.

Land has become my primary teacher, as it has been for most people over most of history. We need to return more to the land’s inherent wisdom, if we are to survive the multiple problems caused by chaotic climate changes, thawing ice caps, rising sea levels, the diminishing supply of oil, and other crises. Books are important, but most come mainly from human minds, rather than from the more diverse and abundant land of which humans are an integral, though sometimes damaging, part. Words are important, but knowing in the body can transcend what can be put into human words. Most of my words here were first written longhand with a pen on page on an outside picnic table while taking breaks from farming. Only eventually did I transfer this to a computer, for editing. Machines can get in the way.

Land is both inclusive and specific. My Native Hawaiian teacher Manu Meyer took a group to experience an elder who lives on a wild Big Island coast. He explained that the Hawaiian word “aina,” which is usually translated as meaning “land,” is quite specific. He had us stand in one spot and notice a strong wind, whereas a few feet away there was no wind. The presence or lack of that wind defined the aina in those distinct spots.

The Hawaiian elder expressed what the Welsh language has a specific word for, which means “love of the land.” Ancient Greek has words for distinct forms of love—eros, agape, and philia, all of what are person-centered. “Don’t ever sell the farm,” my Uncle Dale in Iowa would say, thus expressing his intense love of the land on which he lived for decades and died in his 80s. After that, following his will, his house was burned to the ground, part of the aina, and went with him.

Farms Create Relationships

Communities are based on relationships. Good farming requires creating and maintaining good relationships—with people, plants, animals, the soil, water and other elements.

Developing loyal customers and co-workers is essential to the stability of small-scale farms. In Sonoma County we have a helpful group called Farm Trails, which makes a map to guide people coming directly to farms to purchase their food and fiber.

Some of our farms have a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) component, where families pay the farm in advance and come weekly to receive a box of fresh food. Laguna Farm, for example, has over 500 families that it feeds. Part of the motivation of some CSA members is to have on-farm experiences. Laguna hosts harvest dances and meetings of groups such as Transition Sebastopol, Sonoma Beyond Oil, and the Grange. Farms can be important gathering places within nature to learn about humans and the rest of nature. Another local farm, Singing Frogs, hosts art shows.

The Grange is the United States oldest farm organization, going back 140 years. It has been experiencing a renaissance the last year or so as long-time Grange families have recruited new members into their communities. The Sebastopol Grange, for example, has been hosting breakfasts that draw over 100 people. Much of the food for these breakfasts is donated by local farmers, who then even cook and serve it. The Grange Hall is a popular place that hosts speakers such as author Richard Heinberg talking about Peak Oil and his recent book The End of Growth. We have even hosted an old-fashioned barn dance.

Brock Dolman of the long-time local intentional community the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center recently brought a group of permaculture students to the Sebastopol Grange to re-design its two and a half acres. Their plans were posted in the hall and discussed at meetings. Implementation has begun, which may include adding a playground for the many children who come to events and add their play.

Each kind of plant requires a particular relationship and care in order to be nurtured to produce its best crop. Some, for example, need irrigation, whereas others are better if dry farmed. Water management is an essential element of permaculture, since much water that is often wasted can be put to good use.

Chickens can appear batty and loony, but one human trying to catch a chicken is likely to fail, unless he or she has a tool. Chickens have mastered the martial art of aikido, knowing to avoid direct contact with more powerful forces and go to the sides. I also must establish relationships with many wild animals, including gophers, feral cats, deer, many kinds of insects and birds, snakes, raccoons, possums and many four-leggeds. Otherwise some will eat my chickens and berries.

A farmer’s relationship to dirt is important. I remember enjoying playing in the dirt, mud, and puddles as a boy. Farming gives me an excuse to continue such play. Though difficult work, farming is rewarding—being outside and able to observe how things change. The composted manure that I regularly spread is transformed into life-giving soil.

Soil is precious, as the recent documentary Dirt! The Movie reveals. Much of my activity throughout the year is to build soil and retain the topsoil, so it does not wash away during the rainy season down the gentle slop and become sediment in the Cunningham Marsh. Weeds can help one’s crops compete, up to a certain point. Then one needs to know when to remove them. I tend to do so by hand, though I do have a self-propelled mower that I use between the berry rows, bagging the cuttings, which I then compost, to spread later.

I prefer simple hand tools to motorized machines. I enjoy pruning and then sculpting berry plants and trees to improve their appearance and production. My approach to so-called weeds is not conventional. I learned from master farmer Bob Cannard, Jr., that weeds are not always the enemy that some think. The aesthetics that guides me would not be described as tidy. I do not mind the look that some would describe as “weedy.” California’s Mediterranean climate of winter rains and summer heat means that most grasses tend to die back over the summer. So I let that seasonal reality save me the labor of too much time weeding.

A “farmer’s shadow” refers to the farmer regularly walking the land and noticing what is happening. I have lists of things to do when I go on these saunters, to use the word of Henry David Thoreau. However, as I meander observe things that are not on the list, but need to be prioritized. By circling her or his farm, a farmer stays in touch with the community of the land and how it is evolving, which it does seasonally and otherwise. One of the many joys of farming is watching things grow, both those one has planted, as well as volunteers.

Farms do far more than just produce food. For example, they can be healing places. I have published chapters in various books describing agrotherapy, which is an example of ecotherapy. Nature can heal, as can farms. Two such books are the Sierra Club’s Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind and Enduring War: Stories of What We’ve Learned.

Kokopelli Farm

I named the pace where I live Kokopelli Farm, after the legendary humpbacked flute player of the pueblo peoples of the Southwest. A wounded healer, he is also known as the Great Sprinkler and Great Fertilizer, a man of the ground who went peacefully from village to village and was accepted even by people who were warring against each other. Kokopelli could be described as a “trickster,” an important figure to many indigenous peoples.

The hump on Kokopelli’s back may also have been a bag of seeds. He is an agrarian figure, what one might consider a “god of the ground,” rather than a sky deity atop Mt. Zion or Mt. Olympus. Kokopelli’s antenna reveals that he is a member of the lowly insect clan; I wanted the blessings of the insects. Most are beneficial, not pests. I explain to new workers at the farm that the many spiders are helpful to my crops, as are gopher snakes.

The farm is on the edge of wild land. It includes redwood and oak stands. Trees are celebrated by Mary Oliver in her poem “Sleeping in the Forest.” She begins, “I thought the earth remembered me,/ she took me back so tenderly.” By living on, caring for, and working on a small acreage my life is filled by visible and mysterious energies that guide my thinking, learning, writing, and teaching.

The two-year-old son of one of my Sonoma State University colleagues on a recent farm tour started picking up little sticks from the ground and breaking them in two. I followed Evan, which stimulated him to laugh. Other adults were soon breaking sticks. The boy felt empowered and lead us out of the redwoods into the field and the chicken village. He later led us on a hike into the wild area.

Evan fell down frequently, laughed, and jumped right back up, with the help of his flexible spine. Environmentalists could benefit from more such flexibility. He became our teacher, as chickens and plants are teachers. Children often have more immediate and intimate relations with nature, I’ve noticed here at Kokopelli, before they assume adult work and responsibilities.

The Cunningham Marsh–in whose uplands my farm rests–provides mystery and magic to the farm. It has a different order, more natural, than that of the built zone and the farmed zone. I hear sounds made by Great Horned Owls, coyote, migrating birds, and even a mountain lion down there, especially when I sleep out beneath the redwoods and under the stars on the soft forest ground.

Thinking Like a Chicken

In his classic essay “Thinking Like a Mountain” ecologist Aldo Leopold tells the story of hunting and killing a wolf. He later noticed how the exploding deer population, without that predator, ravaged the mountain. Those lovely deer think roses are candy and make decades-old oaks look like bonsai.

When I take guests onto the land that I share with farm animals by day and wild animals by night, I ask them to “think like a chicken” and “think like a berry.” I request that they observe, perceive and adapt to the animal or plant with which they can communicate. We could all benefit from an animal of choice and a plant of choice. Mine are the chicken and the boysenberry.

“Chicken Wisdom” titles an essay I wrote in the psychology book Held In Love. Chickens are prey, whereas humans are predators. Humans have much to learn from this other two-legged creature, including how to be alert and survive. Too many humans, on the other hand, are not doing such a good job in those areas, as we further pollute our air and water and cause chaotic climate change. Among the many things that chickens teach are the following: greet each day with enthusiasm, enjoy the flight, delight in simple things, jump for joy, keep dancing, recycle, snuggle into the Earth, cuddle at night, be a companion, persist and endure, show gratitude, and be prepared to surrender and let go.

By twenty years of preparing the soil that feeds berries with chicken, cow, horse, lama and goat manure (“shoveling shit” farmers call it), as well as the green manure of decaying plants, the soil at my farm is rich with life-giving vitality. Life goes on all around us, and it is good.

But wait! While at their home recently a siren-pitched, shrieking scream interrupted that serenity—a leaf blower, which some call a debris blower, since it kicks up far more than leaves. The couple had bought three different kinds of leaf blowers, not to use, but to demonstrate how much noise and air pollution they make, even the allegedly quieter ones.

The Kendalls founded Quiet Orinda in 2009 in order to educate their neighbors about the multiple hazards of leaf blower pollution and gather support for taking defensive actions.

Over a dozen people, mainly from around California, came to an afternoon summit on June 26 to coordinate efforts against blower hazards. New Yorker magazine flew in a staff writer from Brooklyn to cover the potentially-historic gathering. He spent the weekend interviewing the Kendalls and others. He accompanied them as they passed out information and engaged people at the local otutside farmers market.

Susan Kendall greeted her guests warmly at the door of her neat, modest home and told stories of their hometown efforts. “We think we’ve been making an impact,” she noted, though she also described resistance. “I am willing to talk to strangers about this issue in our grassroots campaign. It does seem quieter than before we started explaining to others what we have learned,” she added.

On their small deck Peter Kendall opened the summit convened to found an umbrella group. He spoke of the benefits of sharing resources and expertise. Kendall related their efforts in this town of some 17,500 people and dealing with the “pro-blow crowd.” They have already pulled together a local group, established the website www.quietorinda.com, and created a short film that premiered in May at the California Documentary Film Festival.

The growing movement’s young grandmother, Diane Wolfberg, then spoke. She works with Zero Air Pollution (ZAP) in Los Angeles, which began organizing in 1996 and successfully pressured the Los Angeles City Council to pass a partial leaf blower ban in l997.

Wolfberg emphasized that blowers are primarily a health and safety issue and that restrictions are essential for the common good. Given the lobby of the powerful blower manufacturers, she described the struggle as a David and Goliath one.

A health scientist with the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District, David Lighthall, Ph.D., spoke just for himself. He summarized a large body of “empirical evidence” about how hazardous leaf blowers are. “The benefits (of blowers) are less than the risks,” he noted. “There is a high ratio of harm to benefit. The dust kicked up has a powerful mix that extends risks, especially to people with compromised immune systems.”

Dr. Lighthall described “a perfect storm of regulatory failure here” and called for enforcing the Clean Air Act. He was particularly concerned about the impact of blowers on respiratory diseases such as asthma.

Among the many documents circulated at the meeting was a Feb. 24, 2010, letter from the Executive Officer of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, Jack Broadbent, who noted, “The Air District recommends that leaf blowers not be used in local communities to avoid causing difficulty for people with breathing difficulties.”

Psychiatrist Michael Kron, M.D., contended that “leaf blowers are a health problem written large.” He highlighted some of the multiple health consequences of particulate matter kicked up by blowers, especially with respect to how they endanger vulnerable children whose lungs are developing.

Workers who use leaf blowers, Dr. Kron contended, are like coal miners who breathe in toxic dust that causes black lung disease. He described these workers as having a hazardous job.

Following the gathering, there was a flurry of emails between some of the participants, most of whom were meeting each other for the first time. “One thing I cannot stop thinking about is the injustice perpetrated on the hard-working gardeners,” wrote Peter Kendall. “They desperately need the money, and someone needs to advocate for their health. This might be one of our missions – beyond just improving our communities. Keeping these people employed, while giving them safer tools and time to do yard maintenance, is clearly the right thing to do.”

Steve Davies of Maryland was scheduled to speak about his attempts since 2008 in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Takoma Park to restrict leaf blowers. However, he faced transportation difficulties and did not arrive.

Marin County cities Mill Valley, Belvedere, and Tiburon already restrict leaf blowers. Though no Sonoma, Napa, or Mendocino County town currently restricts them, individuals and groups in Sebastopol, Healdsburg, Sonoma, and Ukiah are among those seeking healthy remedies to their gross pollution.

In my hometown, Sebastopol, citizens complained to various City Council members about their concerns and in November 2009, now Vice Mayor Guy Wilson suggested a blower ordinance. At numerous Council meetings since then, and at a June 6 Small Town Hall Forum, many residents spoke in favor of a ban. It is currently scheduled to come before the Council in November.

One Sebastopol resident, Jonathan Greenberg, has posted various informative videos and links on leaf blower use.

During the hour and a half that it took me to drive back from Orinda to my Sebastopol farm, I recalled the beginning of a similar group about a decade ago—No Spray. That group managed to prevent the powerful wine industry from spraying homes and land against the glassy-winged sharpshooter pest without owner’s permissions.

The early days of the campaign against the hazards of second-hand cigarette smoke also came to mind. Though this idea was originally dismissed, laws eventually were passed against such deadly smoke. No one has the right to blow hazardous smoke into our faces, or hazardous toxins into our common air and our ears.

People certainly have the right to make a fist, but they do not have the right to put it in someone’s face.

The Orinda Summit may have been the birthplace of a national movement that will struggle against one machine, the leaf blower, and probably expand its restriction beyond the dozens of California cities and hundreds of U.S. cities that already restrict its use, dating back to Carmel in l975.

Broom and rake, don’t blow!

In addition to the more political articles that I’ve published locally on leaf blowers, the following praises leaves. Two websites with further information are Zero Air Pollution at www.zapla.org and www.nonoise.org.)

As late Autumn matures into early Winter here in the Redwood Empire, some leaves leave their dignified, upright positions and glide harmlessly to the ground. I watch them spiral down. Valley and Black Oaks on the land where I live will soon be stripped naked—mere skeletons without protective, warm clothing. This allows the sun’s rays to reach the ground and visually expose the lush waterway at the bottom of my small, organic farm. Conifers drop sharp needles gradually over time.

I look and listen quietly to the music the leaves sometimes make as they fall. Humans named this season after their important, life-giving descent. The planet’s rich forest floor maintains us all.

Leaves seem to delight in the arrival of their favorite dance partner—the wind that blows in from the Pacific Ocean and takes multiple partners for a spin on the forest dance floor. Dear leaves, I love you so, in your many forms, shapes, colors, kinds, sizes, and smells. I relish the soft outside bed that you make during this season, onto which I will recline and sleep out during Spring and Summer, as you feed my dreams during your decline. You generate our futures. I appreciate your delicacy.

Trees and leaves are wedded in a deep connection; one cannot survive without the other regenerating them, though their forms change. Humans could not survive without life-giving trees that offer fruit, beauty, moisture, and oxygen. They help clean up the messes that industrial humans make and the chaotic climate changes that we stimulate by our over-use of fossil fuels to drive the machines that we use to control, manipulate, and dominate nature.

Leaves transform the sun’s energy, breaking CO2 down into carbon and oxygen. Humans need a constant supply of air to survive. Leaves are the ultimate source of life for all plants and animals on the Earth through food-manufacturing, photosynthesis, and transpiration. Leaves bring the breath of life to us. They capture water and bring it to the ground. They provide cover for seeds, protecting them and enabling them to grow into the trees and other plants that sustain us. Though small, leaves are an essential part of the food chain in many ways, which I realize when a see a Blue Jay grab a worm from a pile of leaves on my farm.

Yet we continue to cut down rainforests in the Amazon and elsewhere—described by some as “the Earth’s lungs”–at alarming rates and blow life-giving leaves into sterile plastic body bags. Leaves warrant more respect and gratitude. Instead, some treat them as a nuisance and abuse them. In addition to all the good work they do for humans and the rest of creation, they are wondrous, mystical, and beautiful. A pile of leaves can be quite beautiful and compelling to children and other creatures, if the adults would just let them be.

Sure, leaves can sometimes get in the way. Leaves are not perfect all the time, or appropriate everywhere. Though I sing their praise, I do not mean to deify them. But many good things do come in small packages, especially at this time of year. Leaves can be moved by brooms and rakes, gently, from an undesired place into compost piles into which they will joyously release their helpful contributions.

My gardener friend Jay Pedersen, who works at Sonoma State University, where I teach, has written a “Blowers Away Recipe” for a “Peaceful and Healthy Garden Culture (Serves many).” He notes that the ingredients include “gloves, rakes, brooms, scoop shovels, tarps, pitch forks.” Studies reveal that these simple tools can be even faster than the industrial alternative.

But wait. What do I see? Someone has strapped a heavy, vibrating machine to his back. What is it that now thunders? He pulls a cord and the machine erupts explosively into action. The leaves seem to bother him. So he arms himself for battle and blows them around and around and around. So much firepower against such sweet and giving creatures that merely seek to bed down together on the comfort of the ground. The wind returns to play with its partners. The man shoots at them again. To what end?

Dear leaves, please forgive the fearful leaf blower warrior.

A life without visible fallen leaves afoot, especially in the Fall, is missing something important. A leafless town is a lifeless town. Fallen leaves remind us of the natural birth/growth/death cycle.

Poets have been inspired by and praised leaves for centuries. Walt Whitman worked most of his adult life on his one book of poems—Leaves of Grass. There are things that we do not much notice, like the leaves afoot, without which we could not survive.

Robert Frost also wrote about leaves and grass. Contemporary American poet Mary Oliver, in “Song for Autumn,” speculated “…don’t you imagine the leaves think how/ comfortable it will be to touch/ the earth…” Such great American poets would shudder at our 21st century disregard and disrespect of leaves and their essential role in the environment.

Leaves circulate through our lives in various ways and forms, connecting us. They return to the “feet of the trees,” W.S. Merwin writes in his poem “To a Leaf Falling in Winter.” Then they “…enter the big corridors/ of the roots into which they/ pass…” –the tree roots and our human roots, at the base of which is a nourishing bed of leaves, unless we blow them away. They may be “forgotten,” Merwin reports, but we should remember and celebrate their multiple gifts.

Trees are rooted, stationary; leaves are their mobile, other dimension. Sometimes a tree rains its leaves to the ground. Other times they fall one at a time, joining their family of leaves, resting for a while, until returning to duty in some other form. Grounded leaves absorb and witness.

Where would we be without leaves and their natural cycle of birth to death, which for some happens during the seasons of a single year? I do not understand the passion of some to use leaf blowers.

Perhaps partly what bothers the man with the hand-held, loud weapon is the death that the leaves expose. As the leaves decay, perhaps they remind him of his own pending demise. Perhaps this helps explain some of his hostility toward leaves and his unprovoked attacks. “Out, out damn leaves,” to paraphrase Lady Macbeth. But, alas, the blown away leaves often return, brought back by their dance partner—the natural wind. Or perhaps he is unaware of the deeper impacts of the machine?

In British poet Gerard Manley Hopkin’s famous poem “Spring and Fall: To A Young Child.” He writes about “…grieving /over Goldengrove unleaving.” But it was really Margaret that was being mourned as the leaves fell.

On my small farm I gather leaves each year and respectfully retire them in a final resting place on the berms of my boysenberry plants as mulch, which breaks down into compost, makes topsoil and feeds the berries. Oh, lovely leaf-fed berries. Leaves do many helpful things for humans and the Earth. The least we could do for them is let them rest in peace on the ground to which they gravitated and thus continue their contributions to the whole. Breaking such natural cycles of our ecosystem is not wise and produces unintended consequences.

As I look at piles of leaves, they sometimes seem like clouds. I see other creatures within them, perhaps those who came before them and made them or will come after them and be made of them. We are all connected, according to both mystics and physicists.

I even light up leaf piles, further transforming them. They snap, crackle, and pop, as if having a message for me. I respond. On my Uncle Dale’s Iowa farm in the late l940s we would collect wood ashes from the fireplace and stove and spread them on our fields. Ashes are like fallen leaves—that which remains. Ashes are alkaline, a good balance to the un-composted redwood needles, which are acidic. Everything that lives eventually falls apart and breaks down, even people.

I like to visit Robert Frost’s New England in the Fall, where I first noticed brilliant color. As the leaves change, I see how I can also change, imitating the patterns of nature. Leaves were my teacher; they have much to teach about nature, ourselves, and transformation. The foliage visibly evolves in New England. How beautiful the sugar maples are with their autumnal shine.

Do we really need to work so hard to control and dominate leaves? Must we spread the human war-making tendency to this gentle, defenseless creature?

I have an invitation. Bring your tired leaves to my farm. We will provide them an honorable place to rest in peace. We welcome them with open arms, knowing that they will devolve from mulch, to compost to topsoil. To paraphrase the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, poor, and huddled masses (of leaves),” and I will give them sanctuary.

I enjoy watching birds and squirrels scamper about playfully in leaves. My nearly two-year-old friend River Alfieri likes to pounce on life piles and offer me leaf gifts.

“Leaf blowers are weapons of mass destruction that do substantial collateral damage—to humans, bees, insects, plants, and the ground itself,” a friend noted. We should do something about them.

“Though I try hard to be conciliatory,” another friend noted, “you have convinced me that I must take sides. With the leaves!” Which side are you on?

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.