The White House honors five young leaders as Champions of Change for outstanding leadership on their college campuses, chosen by the public for their projects that embody the President’s goal to win the future. March 15, 2012. Source: Umass Permaculture.com
As we all know, the United Nations was founded “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” The words can only elicit deep regret when we consider how we have acted to fulfill that aspiration, though there have been a few significant successes, notably in Europe.
Source: Sydney Peace Prize, Noam Chomsky ABC Mary Kostakidis
Consistent with Muste’s “revolutionary pacifism,” the Sydney Peace Foundation has always emphasized peace with justice. The demands of justice can remain unfulfilled long after peace has been declared. The Santa Cruz massacre 20 years ago can serve as an illustration. One year after the massacre the United Nations adopted The Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, which states that “Acts constituting enforced disappearance shall be considered a continuing offence as long as the perpetrators continue to conceal the fate and the whereabouts of persons who have disappeared and these facts remain unclarified.”
The massacre is therefore a continuing offence: the fate of the disappeared is unknown, and the offenders have not been brought to justice, including those who continue to conceal the crimes of complicity and participation. Only one indication of how far we must go to rise to some respectable level of civilized behavior.
http://www.vimeo.com/32935433
Since the early weeks of the protest, regional farmers have been coming down independently to Occupy Wall Street to donate fruits and vegetables. In those days, meals were prepared in volunteers’ homes. Yet, as the protest quickly gained momentum, food preparation needed to get more organized, and Occupy Wall Street set up a daily dinner operation out of a soup kitchen in East New York, Brooklyn.
Source: WYNC
Bihar leaves one exhausted. Before poverty kills, millions brave hopelessness. And yes, that depends on where you are placed in the complex web of caste and exclusion that can be so numbing that one can even forget that one exists in any other form than feeding a parasitical system that runs deep.
It is a place where logic collapses and theories get contradicted in each Dalit village that you spend time in. People are fighting and struggling from one day to another, but if you are not in that fight you can get disoriented very fast with a linear approach.
The Dalit and Mushar communities have been fighting for homestead and agricultural land. Some have gone and even occupied land that should have been allocated to them. But the struggle has just begun. With scores of children displaying varying degrees of malnutrition and several generations living in small cramped huts, these daring mobilisations seem larger than life. So from being farm workers to some becoming share croppers, or as they refer to here as collective farming, and from landless workers to marginal landholders, the change is promising for some. But this is far from euphoria, when you talk to the communities there is visible frustration from not being able to translate the promise of land, as the basic tools and conditions needed for growing their own crop are missing. When you ask what if this does not work, the answer is what you would expect in this state of frustration. Things can’t go back where it were at least in terms of struggle for land and dignity.
by Parvinder Singh
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.
Filmed by Patrick O’Conner of Oaklandsol.org for permaculture.coop
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.
Presentations will be provided by individuals representing Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project, Urban Tilth, Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice, Ella Baker Center, Catalyst Project, People Organized to Win Employment Rights, Communities for a Better Environment and others.
Source: Oakland Local
Bill Mollison Permaculture Design Course 1983, Courtesy of Jeff Nugent
“Hunger is rising, absolute hunger is rising, food’s badly distributed, not distributed at all often. The waste of food, the whole deal of it….its eh, a shocking situation, it’s just inhuman. It’s what nobody would intend, and somehow what we’ve arrived at, and we arrived at it by the erection of financial structures, totally divorced from resources. So that the fiscal economy has been a runaway system. We’ve gotta tackle that head on. That is, what I’m trying to tell you, it’s no good any longer just being an organic gardener or farmer, we have to be effective financial and political units. And we’re gonna have to face that. Just as it was very hard for us to learn to garden, then hard for us to learn to collect seeds, once the multinationals took over the open-pollinated seed market; we had to become seed growers. Now its very difficult, we have to become bankers.There’s no good trying to pretend we don’t have to. We can run away to the bush, build a mud hut and grow ducks in the garden, it’s not gonna do it. The coal will still be burnt, the land will still be eroded, and the forests will still be cleared for newsprint if we run away to the bush. So, there’s no escape, we’ve just gotta stop running away, stay where we are and start to face up and fight.” 1983 pdc bill mollison
Permaculture at Occupy Wall Street
Confrontation of the criminal class responsible for the corporate coup of the US, is vital and long overdue. But there is also a need to take responsibility and design intelligent, local strategies, to prevent the same problems of scale from repeating themselves. The notion of self sufficiency is key. We can only properly protest something, when we have reduced our dependancy on it. Permaculture offers a vast resource of practical solutions for sustainable, self sufficient living. Permies were sure not to miss the exciting opportunity to share their knowledge with those who can use it most.
http://www.occupy-wallstreet.com/permaculture/
http://www.occupy-wallstreet.com/permaculture/what-is-permaculture/
Sources: Jeff Nugent’s audio DVD of the Stanley, Tasmania, Bill Mollison 1983 PDC, In Grave Danger of Falling Food and the permies of occupy-wallstreet.com
Permaculture at Occupy Wall Street
Confrontation of the criminal class responsible for the corporate coup of the US, is vital and long overdue. But there is also a need to take responsibility and design intelligent, local strategies, to prevent the same problems of scale from repeating themselves. The notion of self sufficiency is key. We can only properly protest something, when we have reduced our dependancy on it. Permaculture offers a vast resource of practical solutions for sustainable, self sufficient living. Permies were sure not to miss the exciting opportunity to share their knowledge with those who can use it most.
http://www.occupy-wallstreet.com/permaculture/
http://www.vimeo.com/30401811I can’t express how happy it makes me to learn that the implementation of sustainability and permaculture principles is spreading to many Occupy encampments –and spreading with the same momentum as the Occupy Movement itself.
Many of the Occupy encampments have set up committees to analyze their own environmental impact, and conceive of practical solutions. Since Mobile Design Lab first installed a grey water system (more below), sustainability committees in different parts of the country have introduced peddle powered generators, solar panels, bike sharing programs and permaculture workshops. There are also pottery classes, as part of an effort to reduce waste in the form of discarded Styrofoam. There are even long term projects, such as composting and gardening.
What is happening is bigger than Permaculture, even bigger than Sustainability: it is real Democracy. OWS is proving that we, the 99%, are perfectly capable of creating our own, truly democratic systems. We are very efficient when it comes to getting things done, when we decide to take care of business ourselves. We are proving that horizontal organization works great. Change doesn’t need to be squeezed through a hierarchical bottleneck; nor does it need to trickle down to us, we can do it together. Via Permaculture Occupy Wall St & Campus Progress
Bill Mollison Permaculture Design Course 1983
“Hunger is rising, absolute hunger is rising, food’s badly distributed, not distributed at all often. The waste of food, the whole deal of it….its eh, a shocking situation, it’s just inhuman. It’s what nobody would intend, and somehow what we’ve arrived at, and we arrived at it by the erection of financial structures, totally divorced from resources. So that the fiscal economy has been a runaway system. We’ve gotta tackle that head on. That is, what I’m trying to tell you, it’s no good any longer just being an organic gardener or farmer, we have to be effective financial and political units. And we’re gonna have to face that. Just as it was very hard for us to learn to garden, then hard for us to learn to collect seeds, once the multinationals took over the open-pollinated seed market; we had to become seed growers. Now its very difficult, we have to become bankers.There’s no good trying to pretend we don’t have to. We can run away to the bush, build a mud hut and grow ducks in the garden, it’s not gonna do it. The coals will still be burnt, the land will still be eroded, and the forests will still be cleared for newsprint if we run away to the bush. So, there’s no escape, we’ve just gotta stop running away, stay where we are and start to face up and fight.” 1983 pdc bill mollison
The Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral has resigned in protest over the proposed removal by force of the Occupy London protesters.
Occupy Berkeley October 15th
Asking Questions of Fox News
Occupy Wall Street GA In Washington Square October 8, 2011
http://www.vimeo.com/30284368Source: Chris Spannos, The New Significance
This video documents just one of the massive general assemblies (GA) that occurred during the current historic Occupy Wall Street events with thousands of participants, and that is still unfolding.
Topics covered in this GA include:
- Introduction
- Assembly Process
- Peoples Mic
- Working Group Report Backs from:
*Labor
*Info
*Media
*Comfort
*Shipping
*Speak Easy
*Direct Action
*Arts & Culture
*Others…
The assembly also included an address from Egyptian activist Mohamed Ezzeldin. A call to action from Direct Action. And finally, the closing of the GA.
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