In Activists to Grassroots, Tony discusses how activists need to start working with grassroots and create a new hybrid radical activist-grassroots persona.
Poor people and communities of color are the most impacted by the dramatic ecological crises currently facing our planet.
In April of this year, Movement Generation and the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center convened nearly 30 activists and organizers representing various grassroots and social justice organizations from throughout California to participate in a two-week Liberation Permaculture Design Course.
Liberation Permaculture, a framework and design science that invokes the traditional knowledge of land-based peoples, provides organizers with a methodology to resist systems of oppression through building resiliency in our communities. It is a means to prepare oppressed communities for the oncoming environmental disasters while building the world we want and need now.
Come hear these course participants report back about how they are implementing Liberation Permaculture into their organizing work and how it can provide us with a critical framework for the necessary and just transition from a carbon, consumption, and profit-based economy to the participatory and life-affirming, need-based society we envision for the future.
In this video he talks about the rewarding, practical experience he enjoyed. To book your place in the upcoming RegenAG Workshop Series, visit www.RegenAG.com
Costa’s Garden Odyssey
Costa is a man of the people. A man who can connect with all. His infectious character and passion for his subject puts people at ease and makes them shine.
A Landscape Architect with an all-consuming passion for plants and people – Costa knows how to find the best in both of them, and takes great pleasure in bringing them together.
Costa’s Garden Odyssey is a groundbreaking magazine style series that allows this unique Greek Garden Guru an opportunity to do what he does best – spread his green wisdom while communicating with people and celebrating cultures and community in a way never seen before on Australian television.
Costa’s Garden Odyssey shows us how to tread lightly – embracing nature’s cycles and seasons, investigating and championing our local produce from it’s source, and illustrating that in gardens, plants aren’t the only things that grow… people do to.
Costa will take you to the joyous, harmonious heart of the garden. It’s about gardening the soil and the soul.
We have been brought up to believe that the mind is located inside the head. But there are good reasons for thinking that this view is too limited. Recent experimental results show that people can influence others at a distance just by looking at them, even if they look from behind and if all sensory clues are eliminated. And people’s intentions can be detected by animals from miles away. The commonest kind of non-local interaction mental influence occurs in connection with telephone calls, where most people have had the experience of thinking of someone shortly before they ring. Controlled, randomized tests on telephone telepathy have given highly significant positive results. Research techniques have now been automated and experiments on telepathy are now being conducted through the internet and cell phones, enabling widespread participation.
Speaker: Rupert Sheldrake
Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D. is a biologist and author of more than 75 technical papers and ten books, the most recent being The Sense of Being Stared At. He studied at Cambridge and Harvard Universities, was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge and a Research Fellow of the Royal Society. He is currently Director of the Perrott-Warrick project, funded from Trinity College Cambridge.
This workshop outlines a vision for a democratic, worker-owned, advanced industrial ecology society. We seek pathways to provide the burgeoning food education/justice movement with the tools to become economically sustainable, and to link the emerging green industrial worker cooperatives with them into sovereign networks. Once active, such networks can become the basis for sustainable, socially just communities that revitalize locales via open source sustainable agriculture and manufacturing methods. Our panel — with academic, commercial, and school of hard knocks experience — will frame the demonstrated solutions, numerous pieces of the puzzle that we as a society need to put together.
Pathways to Sustainable Self-Governance: Democratic Open-Source Food and Manufacturing Networks
Short Description
Worker Cooperative Networks for Sovereignty of Food, Commerce, & Community: Panel/Breakouts/Discussion to Envision & Chart Implementation Framework of Industrial Permaculture Ecology
The Arizmendi Association of Cooperatives is itself a cooperative made up of five member businesses: four cooperative bakeries and a development and support collective. Members share a common mission, share ongoing accounting, legal, educational and other support services, and support the development of new member cooperatives by the Association. http://arizmendi.coop
Mandela Market Place is a pioneer in development, application and assessment of community food systems. The organization evolved since 2001, first as a project of the Environmental Justice Institute – Tides Center, until incorporating in 2005 as a stand-alone 501c3 organization with a goal to strengthen community health, integrity and indentity by providing economic opportunity and empowerment for inner-city Oakland residents and businesses, and local family farms. Mandela MarketPlace works directly with community residents, local, state and federal agencies, non-profits, small business owners, and farmers to support strategies to meet food needs, expand economic opportunity and increase self-reliance of low-income and disenfranchised people. http://mandelamarketplace.org
Planting Justice is a non-profit organization based in Oakland, CA dedicated to food justice, economic justice, and sustainable local food systems. We are the first organization of our kind to combine ecological training and urban food production with a grassroots door-to-door organizing model that will vastly increase our educational community outreach, help us to recruit volunteers, decentralize our fundraising sources, and provide local jobs that also train young community organizers. http://www.plantingjustice.org
Mandela Foods Cooperative is a locally-owned and operated full-service grocery store and nutrition education center located in West Oakland, a community long underserved in grocery retail. The present undersupply of food retail in West Oakland represents an opportunity to leverage untapped local buying power into new business and employment opportunities and healthy eating options for West Oakland residents. The Cooperative will offer local goods, wholesome, fresh and affordable foods grown on family farms, nutrition education classes and a cooperative economic investment program that provides multi-level investment for community residents. http://www.mandelafoods.com
Abolish Human Rentals is dedicated to bringing an old idea into the public conscience, that the standard employment relationship, a contract for the rental of people, is invalid due to the inalienable rights of humans. It is based on the already widely held principle of the non-transferability of responsibility for one’s actions. That principle, taken to its logical conclusion, means the rental of humans have no more legitimacy than their sale. http://www.abolishhumanrentals.org
Language(s): English
Tracks:
Climate Justice: sustainability, resources and land
Democracy and Governance
Important pieces that will be presented here include the successful strategies employed in the worker cooperative networks/alliances of Mondragon, Ohio, and the San Francisco Bay Area, Permaculture design strategies implemented even in harsh climate zones, Denmark’s national industrial symbiosis program, non-parasitic capitalization of non-hierarchical enterprises, and regenerative urban food justice paradigms.
Participants will self-organize into groups to construct models that put some of the pieces together. Workshop participants will then seek to bolster viability of the proposed models, emphasizing possible pilot programs in Detroit, Oakland and in Brooklyn.
Panel members include Quinton Sankofa of Mandela Marketplace and James Berk of Mandela Foods Cooperative, Mike Leung of the embryonic Worker Cooperative Credit Union, and Gavin Raiders of Planting Justice. Facilitator: Kirstie Stramler of Permaculture Cooperative.
For updates leading up to USSF 2010, see the panel and workshop group pages on http://organize.ussf2010.org and videos on http://permaculture.tv/tag/ussf2010/ .
Alemany Farm is a 4 acre, fully functioning urban farm nestled between a major highway intersection, a newly gentrified neighborhood on a hill and a housing project- the perfect place to grow some food! We got a tour (and some amazing fruit) from Antonio Roman-Alcalá, Volunteer Coordinator and soon to be videoblogger/documentarian extraordinaire. The work being done at Alemany Farm proves the point that urban farming and local food production is totally possible and necessary for the health and well being of a city and its inhabitants. Local farming and gardening are great motivators for people to get acquainted, eat more healthily and become more connected with where their food comes from and what it actually is (olives grow on trees? broccoli is a flower?). If you live in the SF Bay area, you can visit or volunteer at Alemany Farm on the weekends- check out AlemanyFarm.org.
This is not a dooms day post about the world ending at all but rather a post about our many evolutions, the great power of synergy, and esspecially of compassion. 2012 is not only about a great astrological alignment as perdicted by the mayan calender not seen for over 25,000 years in which our solar system will be in line with the exact meridian and center of the Milky Way Galaxy, but also a alignment of human beings with a new positive intention for the planet. In my mind is a vision of huge numbers of people working harmoniously together and cooperating as a united but diverse global force for good. This is just so much doom out there about 2012 it is hard find anything reliable unless you know what your looking at. I like this animated video below because it’s easy to understand and very nicely gives you the idea. It is up to each of us to create as much interconnective sharing as possible as creative enegry sparks a new conciousness emerging all over the world. Digital media and mobile technology are making this even easier to facilitate, but most importantly, we have to connect with our hearts to our work and those we work with and love. Please comment if this video ressonates with you or anyone you know in anyway or if you just think it’s hippy dippy b.s. I would still want to know …..Gaia punks unite!
The battle lines on geoengineering have begun to take shape: Hack the Planet, a new book about geoengineering by science journalist Eli Kinitisch
The battle lines on geoengineering have begun to take shape. On one side are modern-day romantics, who consider geoengineering an a priori violation of humans’ role as planetary citizens to let nature be natural and take a humble place within it. Better to solve the climate problem by reducing our impact on the planet, they say. Prominent among their antecedents is American forestry ecologist and writer Aldo Leopold, who asserted in A Sand County Almanac in 1949 that environmental problems demanded that man change his role from “conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it.”
Extending this common trope of American environmentalism to the question of climate engineering would be writer and climate activist Bill McKibben, who views geoengineering as the “junkie logic” of a culture addicted to technological solutions. He has urged humanity “to truly and viscerally think of ourselves as just one species among many.”
And then there are the rationalists, who believe that to minimize suffering, it just may be more technological hubris that our species needs. In The Whole Earth Catalog, first published in 1968, Brand wrote of humanity’s responsibility as Earth’s gardeners and caretakers, “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.” Recently he updated his thinking. “Those were innocent times. New situation, new motto: ‘ We are as gods and have to get good at it.’
Control may be comforting, but it’s also an illusory burden we should not fall into the trap of seeking. We have no choice but to understand it. Maybe we’ll succeed. But hacking our planet is not yet our fate. We might be able to avoid it. Perhaps David Brower, a modern-day romantic if there ever was one, was right: technology does make the world into a cage. Maybe geoengineering makes it more like a terrarium, an enclosed, controlled garden. Even if geoengineering helps us one day stave off the worst of the climate crisis, we’ll still be inside its walls.
ELI KINTISCH is a reporter for Science magazine, and he has also written for Slate, Discover, MIT Technology Reviewand The New Republic. He has worked as a Washington correspondent for the Forward anda science reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In 2005 he won the Space Journalism prize for a series of articles on private spaceflight.
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