How Long?

Back in the day, I was a community organizer with Citizens for a Better Environment. I knocked on nearly eighty doors each night and spoke with about fifty people per night. I always had five or ten "raps" that I would share with receptive folks. Those who didn't want to listen only heard one or two. Much to the chagrin of my bosses, I would err on the side of education over fund-raising, but for my part, I spoke to over 100,000 awesome people in my time there. I also raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the organization which paid researchers to study ecological issues across the Midwest as well as supporting lawyers to represent the people of Wisconsin, Illinois and Minnesota in their battles with industry over how clean they had to be. Most people were willing to hear what was being done to protect the environment on their behalf. Today, little has changed except for the political climate, the loss of groups like Citizens for a Better Environment and the desperation that has been created by the corporate sell out of our nation and subsequent bail out of so many massive corporations. Even though we are constantly told that America is more divided than ever, virtually everyone agrees that the corporate welfare that has become synonymous with the Rethuglican Party and the massive theft of wealth from the pockets of "average folks" by big banks, the military and cutbacks of environmental protections is the real problem with our country. Monsanto owning the entire soy bean crop because of genetic engineering that has leaked into other people's bean fields is criminal, not protected behavior in the America we were taught to love. My car, a 1999 model has gotten over fifty miles per gallon routinely since then and continues to save fuel as it sits in the driveway far more often today than it did when I bought it. I am much more frequently on my bike or walking, tilling the soil I have built over the past ten years, or planting native trees across the landscape while traveling by bike or canoe.

When I was young, I tried to "make friends" with less than five hundred people each month. Perhaps less than ten percent of that number gave enough money to join in a membership, but nearly half gave something to the cause. More than half of the doors that I knocked upon were sure to be in the midst of something, just not interested or unhappy to be disturbed by any "do-gooder" no matter what they might have said. In fact the twenty or so folks I met and talked to each night who were truly receptive could share what they learned from me with others, we made sure of that by leaving information that was appropriate for them. Some got fact sheets on recycling, or household hazardous waste and how to avoid it. Others got brochures about composting or how to dispose of waste oil appropriately. Chances were, if you had a specific issue that you were concerned about, I had a fact sheet to help educate you about that issue. making good decisions gets much easier when you have the right information at your disposal. Integrated pest management, no problem waste reduction strategies, that too. What later became transition town stuff or sustainability we used to call living better on less.

Today, the internet allows us to tailor a message to a world audience. Many of the friends I make today are from overseas, but the messages are often the same, the raps of two decades ago have just morphed and merged into new words for many of the same things we talked about back then. I had to spend five hours each night, during the eighties, discussing a very limited series of issues, I was able to tailor groundwater issues to communities situated each on their own well, or help educate folks just as the recycling programs in their area were coming online, but today, people can more or less pick and choose what issues they want to read about and instead of having to be face to face with a community organizer who was only out for about five hours each night, talking to folks, I can do this work in just an hour or three twice a week or so. I never have to knock on a door at an inappropriate moment and folks who don't know enough to make sense of these issues, or just don't care can continue to muddle about without looking at what I have to say.

The difficulty in the current system is that it has taken me nearly thirty months to get up to 2000 views. What I was able to accomplish in just four months has taken nearly two and a half years! Granted, the contacts and context that we share here is more detail oriented, in some ways more intimate, and relieved from the time consuming part of the former community organizer's job of fund raising. Making ends meet without fund raising is an ever more untenable position to be in. Even though I take great pains to hold my tongue on matters of my own personal finances, trying to plant large numbers of trees on less money each year than I used to raise in a week has stressed the limits of possibility. Even though we struggle to make a difference, a difference is being made by sheer will and strength of character amongst those who come to plant-ins with us. If my writing has value, let my know, donate through Paypal, our account number there is also our e-mail address: tnsaladino42@hotmail.com if you prefer to send checks via snail mail, our offices are 1445 Porlier street, Green Bay, Wisconsin 54301-3334 USA. I want to continue to share this site as well as Permaculture, ECO-Ethics, Trees on wordpress, but without funding, I am forever in an energy vortex that draws away vitality instead of amassing more power for the coming changes that are on the horizon.

We are always searching for partners in the building of our dream. On the horizon are several properties that can serve as a Northern Base of Operations. we have funded the retrofit of several old buildings that now sip energy and provide healthier and more liveable space, yet the rewards that are most profound are for the watersheds that we have planted, the ecotones that have come about because of our continuing tree planting efforts and the education that we have provided the hundreds of guests who have come with us to our events. In addition to expanding our base, we are ready to redouble our efforts to bring people to experience our tours, become guests in and way points along our paths to abundance. During the course of the next year or so, I am going to be working on several fronts to share my experiences with Citizens for a Better Environment and things I learned from that important part of my life as well as finalizing my book about the 1987 Bicycle Tour Around the five Great Lakes. If you are interested in a collection of stories that I am putting together, please let me know. I'm not sure how to market such works, but I do know that those who are lucky enough to hear them always say that they should be available to a wider audience.

I would like to find a way to let the person who becomes my two thousandth reader to know how much I appreciate their interest in these things, perhaps offer them a free overnight tour with us. Instead, i will just say that someone accessing the blog this second half of February 2012,will surely put me over two-thousand views. Thank-you and please invite your friends and family to explore the ideas that I write about, get to know me and to take the time to engineer their own sustainable life way.

No title. I'm sick of it. Trying to fit into words what must be said. How can I break the news to you about any topic when many folks scroll through the headlines and refuse to dig in. Take a big juicy bite of my writing, chew on it for a while. Get back to me, or not about what it made you think and/or feel. Make what you will or let me know what you would have put on as a title. Learning to read blank space, or penciling in times to do nothing are often more important than the days events, errands or "work". Leaving blank space is necessary for rest and recovery. Gardeners frequently speak of having some areas left completely alone, where what wants to grow can have a chance without being managed, pruned or trod upon. Our minds are much the same, they need respite as surely as they need stimulation. In honor of that simple fact, I'm finally shutting up about it. Don't keep surfing the net, turn off your electronics and sit under a tree or something. Relax and enjoy some peace and quiet.

You Are The Love Of My Life

Honestly, I can't say how much I love you, the special, nay unique force for our Loving Mother/Father God that you represent. The many ways you touch people's lives and the gift of yourself to others amazes me. When many repeat these words to one another on this greeting card invention of a holiday, think for a moment on that sentiment. Not only are we a unique manifestation of the human genome, we also pick up cues from our environment from the earliest age. Although we have been carefully taught, it is time for us to bequeath upon future generations an end to hatred and misunderstanding. It is time to transcend the "generation gap", the "war between the sexes" and the very idea of race, these things are not only figments of our imagination, but fallacies, adherents of which wrought insufferable pain on many of their fellow humans. But I digress. This post is about the deep and abiding love that I have for you.

Many feel that it is pretentious to say so, but I would never have devoted a lifetime to teaching, or spent all of my hours learning, if not for the want of perspective and with such comes great responsibility to share and attempt to integrate, interpolate perhaps, the terrain that we call love. come with me if you will on a tourist map to love and in some of the most challenging territory, I'll try to talk you through, lend a hand. When necessary, I can put you on belay. I really do love you and would feel lost in the world without the sharing that you allow me. For some, using the term love means a sort of wanting, or desire, what in retrospect might be beast seen as a sort of infatuation. Like a foodie in search of the purrfect cheesecake or creme brulee, for some odd reason, the desire runs rampant with out imagination and what we want, may never seem to be in the offing so more and better always loom large. Acting as a foil. Some people see themselves and others as a sort of trash receptacle, you know, the garbage in, garbage out sort of thing. this is the "grown up" version of I'll show you mine if you show me yours. Relationships devolve rapidly into I'm no good and you can't be any better if you're with me, blah.blah,blah. I have recently seen proof that this approach to a thing called love is still very much alive and kicking. The vast majority of power and control issues go unresolved out of a resentment that builds between "lovers" who have "bared their deepest secrets with one another", only to feel that they have lost part of who they thought they were or that they themselves are untrustworthy with the secrets of others. This is like the roots of jealousy only springing from two sources, I'm not good enough, or since I might cheat, so would they. Duplicity to one self seems to be the order of the day amongst these sorts of "love".

What I get from you is beyond compare to these mental cages and calisthenics of the mind over our emotions. What I have for you is most closely called agape love, the sort that you would have for a deity. In my worldview, we are each made of stardust and as such are the living creation of God/ess. Yes, Virginia, we really are incarnations of the Godhead and it is high time we started loving one another as such. I love you as the river loves the rocks it plays over as it tumbles to the sea. It is a love similar to that with which the last breath of oceans gives up water to the skies, it is a melding of mine and yours, even beyond what is ours. The love itself becomes a spectacular thing between us like a temporal rift between worlds, a sculpture that can only be seen through a prism of ages. Like waves breaking at sunset, alight, but not from within. We are like specialized lenses to one another, leaving one another gleaming with not only our light, but the combined intensity of one another. We are like conduit for spirit, alive in the world.  I have friends who say that nothing of a spiritual nature has ever happened to them that they can recollect. I contend that anyone who opens their senses to nature has seen countless miracles. That one organism can live amongst the trials and tribulations of a single day can be miraculous at times. This love, it is spirit to spirit. No ifs-ands or buts. If you really need a miracle, look at the fact that these words are capable of being read round the world.

Happiest of Valentines! Until next year...May the wind bring you the freshest of air, the cozy fires get you through winter's bite and may the coming Spring greet you with open arms!

Kittens and Kardashians

Wow! This might look to be something silly at first, but remember two things. One is that there are many amongst us, who in most other respects seem quite normal, that really do Google search these terms together. What I am doing here is well down the path to the "second thing", which is actually the first thing, as my regular readership knows quite well by now. The game changer for powers that seek stability and business as usual seems to be a rather innocent or naive. The belief that we will be more likely to click on ideas and images that we have clicked on before has been borne out through research. Our organism, like neural pathways that after stimulation continue to exhibit propensity to firing along those same "routes" in the future, seems to have a desire to seek information that affirms our prior beliefs. Research shows that those who like certain sites will click more quickly and more often on specific types of content. Part of Google's algorithm tailors our search results to what we have looked at before, lest we have to reacquaint ourselves with what is actually "out there". I like to pick search results for nearly any topic as long as they have a map or chart to help interpret what I am about to research. See I'm a Geo-guy, always have been. The maps that I carry with me in my head help me to navigate the sometimes tricky terrain of our modern culture. Thus, the total oddity of my title, but wait! There is a certain relevance.

The regions #occupied have to be, everywhere, in the blogosphere, in the entertainment industry, politics and public discourse need to be #occupied in the truest sense of the world. Not just Wall street, not just the Capitol, state Houses and local government offices, but the public discourse. It may not thrill the Kittens and Kardashians searchers, but they must hear at least once the voices of truth about where we are in the world and how our part fits into a world-wide puzzle. It is also crucial to know that none of us get to see the box of what the finished puzzle will look like. Two things are certain, it won't be anything like either Kittens or Kardashians. The broadest sense of being one, rather than apart is what helps us to "fit in", not the trendy boots or phraseology. Those who create trends or capitalize on them have only passing interest in any of it. They would feed us anything to gain our dollars. Instead they want to drive people to Kardashians, Kittens, race cars and certain flavors of beer. They want to know what we will be willing to accept before even we know what is inside us, desiring it. The manufacturers of "truth", trends and "the news" we hear and see all about us is actually an amalgamation of decisions made by very small groups of people and in some cases individuals. They have always made the claim that they are giving the market what it wants, but more and more it is what has worked in the past. Take, for example, our recent exposure to the expose' about JFK's former lover. Just as a man's legacy is becoming more and more revered, there is great cache' in pulling out the most graphic and tawdry occurrences that none of us can change, nay integrate into the idea of the possibility of a truly great man. This scores points for those who want to prove that no leader can be trusted when morals are at stake. It also unduly undermines our sense of who we are and what we have the power to become. It seems that the powerful have even developed a system of shooting down even the glimmers of hope that we cultivate to keep us warm out here in our dark lonely cages.

Now, I'm not sure if you have heard all about it, but the words are not at issue here, the ideas underlying them and the conceptualization of what Kittens, Kardashians as well as the idea Kennedy represent is the topic of the day. Please indulge me for a moment...The conceptual matrix that we develop can be seen as a sort of map. Ideas and beliefs are the signposts and important intersections of our "reality". These places on our own personal "network" are like a large mountain or line of bluffs. Normally, we do not observe them at close range but they give us great insight into where we are, allowing us to navigate vast areas without getting lost. The mental effort required to tear down one of these waypoints takes massive energy and effort and without the stability that they lend to the landscape, we tend to drift in great arcs, following greater forces than I can delineate here. Suffice it to say, when a concept that looms as large as Kennedy, for most of the "Boomers", it has the potential to devastate millions of individuals who have continued to learn and grow from a point of knowing that JFK was truly on the right track, after all, that is why they had to kill him. Okay, that being said, the man has become legendary, so let's bring up fifty year old myths and stereotypes that we now judge harshly, behavior unbecoming and add a blow job or two for good measure and the walls come tumbling down around us. Not only are we set adrift relative to where we think we are, but broken loose from the moorings of that solid and monolithic map feature. It is at this very vulnerable moment that we can be hustled into other realms of ideation, beliefs and morality.

If you think that is scary, just think of being told something that I saw as a screen saver, "Every time you masturbate, a kitten dies." The ideas that we hold most dear, comfort us in unimaginable ways. They give us solace and direction in a turbulent and often frightening world, jerking at the foundations of our beliefs is as traumatic as actual physical harm. Ameliorating the sense of dislocation and disorientation that results from losing our way is what our existing capitalistic system does so well. The news will always be finding murder suicides, no matter how far afield their cameras have to intrude. That guarantees our return to the predictable and cuddly. Most of what pushes our buttons has been known since the advent of communication. Placating the reptilian brain inside us all is about the four Fs, Flight, Fighting, Feeding and Fornication, not always in that order. The higher brain usually takes a backseat while participating in these activities. Only through practice can we train ourselves to use our higher brain. A major turning point in my life came when I realized that even our mentors can teach us things not to do. If there ever becomes a perfect person, let me know.  Ha Fiz- the ancient poet said that the fish trap exists because of the fish, once you have gotten the fish, you can forget the trap. Ram Dass went further and said, words exist because of meaning, once you have gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. For now I will have to settle for meetings of the mind with men who have forgotten words.

Bless you and may you walk in peace with the knowledge that you are moving in a great arc of time and that the thread of your own consciousness strengthens us all. Namaste'.

How To Live On Nothing

A favorite book of my youth by this title had these first words to say, right up front in the introduction, "First steal this book." In essence that is what most folks on the internet do, they steal information, often information that was produced by at least one other person. So it is in life as well and before we go too deeply into practicing this skill, let me say that at best it is somewhat rhetorical. Nothing but air, food water...and you are off to the races down many long and slippery slopes. We must always consume some things and exchange gasses, that is part of what animates us. I think we learned in Science Class in seventh grade, that all organisms eat, excrete, exchange gasses and reproduce. So, apart from these things, which can each be entered into in ways that may or may not have either positive or negative consequences. In fact, some methods for doing each of these defining acts, can have both positive and negative consequences. However, entire books could be written about each of these matrices and those tomes are for the most part written.

As many are fond of saying, "Don't sweat the small stuff, it is all small stuff." In relation to interplanetary and galactic scale, that may be true, but within the ionosphere, on this planet, there are important forces and trends that we need to take into account for quality of life to remain constant or improve. A very dear friend from college days dropped in and taught me that "If you can play with the kids, bake bread and do dishes, you will never go homeless." this, I have found to be true. What I would like to know is why so few people know about it or are unwilling to learn these basic skills. The small stuff really matters more than we can know because an endless series of relationships passes from our simple actions through chains of causation to create the environment that we must face daily. When I buy an item made with sweatshop labor, or that has been produced with a tremendous toxic legacy or requires vast stores of energy to produce, all of the ramifications of creating that product are an accepted "cost" of making that choice. The very device I am using now may have been produced with little more than high tech slave labor, sadly I don't even know if it was. Each of us must make certain choices and we will each be responsible for our own part in making the world of tomorrow.

I cannot possibly tell anyone what to do, but certain things that I have studied led me to make certain choices that worked and I can share them with you for better or for worse, you may not want to try them, but they may spark your own creativity into finding ways to live better on less in your life that will enrich your quality of life while greatly increasing your standard of living. When I was young, a trip to the dump or a junk picking run seemed a great way to both keep things from being land filled, or when I was really young incinerated. I even graduated to dumpster jumping for food when I became an adult. Certain rules apply, especially if you do not want to get sick, but I would estimate that hundreds of thousands of meals are thrown away each day in our country alone. Many pigs in our country eat better than people in some parts of the world. Being people of privilege, you would think that we would have more of a sense of obligation toward more equitable distribution of our great wealth.

A few packets of seed can, when carefully tended, produce many bags full of food I have found packets of viable seed for as little as $.05. What is the return on that investment? sorry to do the math thing again, but it helps to illustrate that although you may not really live on nothing, that living in abundance with plenty to give away can be done for a pittance if you allocate your time appropriately. Say each bag of food weighs in at 10 pounds. With some crops it might be less, but many other crops would be more than ten pounds per grocery bag. Conservatively, there would be a bag for each seed packet, again many would be more than that but some would be fewer. So fifteen cents investment could yield three bags or thirty pounds of produce. now, overt he past year or two, groceries have gone up tremendously. what used to average less than a dollar per pound has risen, in some cases to over three! Again let us take a conservative number like two dollars per pound. $0.15 yields then, $60.00, a four-hundred fold increase in value! Having tended gardens, three packets of seed could not take more than about an hour to plant, an hour to thin, perhaps another few hours through the growing season to weed and top dress with some compost. Even if you spent a few hours watering , which would be a lot, you could assume that you were paying yourself very conservatively at a rate of 7-10 dollars per hour. Not at all shabby if all your needs are met through playing with the children, baking bread and washing up the dishes.

Living on nothing then is more about cultivating a way of life that is of service to others and rewarding to yourself. Often, when I go to work, it is more for the fun and camaraderie than for the paycheck. If I just wanted the cash, there are more regular things that I could do but I probably wouldn't enjoy them nearly as much. For a time, I kept a small notebook and when conversing, I would note things that other people liked or enjoyed, needed or were on the prowl for. Perhaps, in the days of big old TVs with their wooden stands, someone would see my fish tank displayed in the cabinet and want one. I would take on part of their desire and perhaps find one for them, noting the size aquarium they wanted to put in it. I would hear that someone wanted to start hanging their clothes out to dry and within a week I would find clothespins at a rummage sale, things like that. even providing the service of shopping for a shut in in your neighborhood can bring unfathomable joys that cannot be bought with currency. A favorite saying that I heard when I was very young, but that always stays with me is, Desire is a trap, and liberation from desire is moksha (enlightenment). Living the truth of that statement is a challenge, but one that pays great rewards.

I could go on about hundreds of other ways to conserve and collect massive rewards for minimal effort. However, I was warned against throwing out too many ideas, so as not to disorient the potential newbies. instead, if you want more ideas send a SASE and five dollars (or something of equivalent value) to me at: one, double four, five Porlier Street Green Bay, Wisconsin five, four, three-0-one. We can also make the transaction on Paypal, just use my email once you get there for the account. (tnsaladino42@hotmail.com I will return a list of 100 things that one can do to save at least five dollars each over the next year. That alone, if you practiced every one would be a payback of 100 fold, again conservatively. Where the real value accrues is in getting your life back and truly, what is the real value of that? Priceless.

Okay, one more, just so you know I'm not fooling around. during the eighties, we began to get upset by the cost of canned beans, we ate a fair amount of them, primarily because they were reasonably priced, but the cost kept escalating. We began to buy fifty pound sacks of dry beans and cook them quickly in a large pressure cooker, to save fuel. Then we would can them in quart jars. Our accounting was that the quarts cost us about $0.25. At the time I believe that twelve ounce cans were $1.60. this was a bit more than 1/3 as much for over six times the cost. It took a few hours, but would feed us for many weeks on what we would spend for a few days of food from the store. The keys to all of these techniques are many, to think outside the box, invest in your own time, learn something and find ways to get better quality for less cost. This, in turn, usually creates opportunities to share deep connections with others by having more to share, examples of the ways your life is enriched and provide examples for others to follow on their way to their own process of living more lightly on the planet.

Storm Clouds Over the Cultural Divide

At this pivotal moment in history, there are powerful forces that think we are meant to feel threatened from every side by news of impending economic collapse, if we don't implement austerity measures, get the government out of the business of regulation of commercial interests or elect our leaders by the measure of their "morality". We find that in several regions, all around the world, social upheaval continues to disrupt daily life and dethrone leaders who have ruled with iron fists for decades. Ironically, in the United States, the failed policies of the recent past (nay, a generation or more) are being trotted out as our only salvation from a road to hell. Politically charged ill winds have brought some of the most heavily laden rhetoric in generations to decision-making tables. The very rhetoric often verges on terrorism itself, proclaiming dire consequences if action is not taken. (or certain other actions are.) With greater frequency religious zealots rear up to claim political power. They use the same charged rhetoric and encourage a return to failed policies, isolationism or "end time" myths to inform their approach to both social policy and international relations. Long estranged and disenfranchised people in many countries and regions are pushing for their turn in the driver's seat of power and control. These dark skies have been roiling for decades, but the storms that they are spawning are larger than any that have come before.

The deluge of change that we experience next will be beyond any military power to stop or any government to guide. The fallout from decades of abuse and neglect will overwhelm any attempt to control it, the social levees and dikes that have been constructed, between class, ethnicities, cultures even between the sexes cannot stand. we are one people, sharing one finite planet. Collectively we must address this fact.  When we do, it will not be possible to hold back the tide of humanity that will come crashing down around governments, worldwide. This is not territory that we can claim to know, for it has never been traversed. The shock of the new that we have lived through will pale in comparison to the tide of mounting change that will sweep clean much of the political landscape across the planet. If every finger were to be placed in the figurative dike, it would not be enough to stop truth from leaking out into the population. Every attempt to stop real and meaningful change will be overwhelmed by people power. Those who have benefited from manufactured fear and loathing of all that is different, misunderstood and deemed threatening and fear whatever they do not know, are about to have to take a backseat to decision-making of a totally different kind. The lies and hate that they have manufactured is melting under the intense light of instant global communication. The lies that were constantly propped up under the old paradigm, with more lies and lies on top of that, are falling like dominoes stacked in concentric circles around the shaky foundations of power that have served them for generations.

One discreet part of this manufactured mental landscape, the dying world view of Servoglobe (the technocrats whirring buzzing machine) requires us to believe that an electron that we send hurling through a wire for but a moment of usefulness is worth the poisoning the planet with nuclear waste that will be hazardous and require the utmost security measures for tens of thousands of generations.

The calm before the storm lasted nearly a century and the powerful changes that have been wrought worldwide have finally combined to create the most difficult time for human beings in history. Not only are we seeing the results of unbridled lust for money, but the concomitant raping of the landscape. Not only have we been thoroughly inculcated with the myth that humans are naturally brutish and offensive, but told the softer lies that "Nice guys finish last", that there is a "war" between the sexes and that "Boys will be boys."  Having lived in over a dozen cities, I can tell you that there is not a single one that has benefited from sequestering their poor in food deserts, mega development schemes, the changing economy or the gentrification of our great land. Chances are, that worldwide, the changes brought on by wealth management, human resources and the dehumanizing influence of capital have been similarly destructive elsewhere. Our beautiful walkable city, complete with electric street cars and train service through the urban Fox River Valley down to Milwaukee, over 100 miles away, the same train service that linked our town to the two biggest ones sixty miles (100Km) to our North, has been gone for two generations now and it looks as if, without major change, we will never get that sensible and beautiful lifestyle back. Instead we have poured ourselves into growing numbers of automobiles that continue to choke the ever widening roads at unmanageable cost. Instead of having a gem of a city with a distinct core, walkable neighborhoods and grocers on nearly every corner, we have to drive over a mile to get expensive food and more than five miles to get good food at reasonable prices. The food desert that has been established over the center of Green Bay has created more and more difficult conditions for larger and larger numbers of people as the cost of transportation has escalated. The "nice" hospital has been established outside the beltway and as wealth disappears from the cities, the tax burdens associated with aging infrastructure and social programs falls on smaller and smaller numbers of poorer and poorer people. In days of old, even slaves had to be treated well enough to make them healthy and strong, otherwise slave owners would have invested foolishly. Today, we are told that there are ten workers for every job opening and that we need to scale back our expectations for salary, hours, vacations and/or flex-time and keep our heads down if we want to remain employed.

Over the course of many generations, the wealthy have enslaved us. The cultural divide itself is a manifestation of their wish to remain segregated from those they oppress. The higher the mountain separating them from us the better, at least for them. Forget the fact that with great privilege comes great responsibility. Many have been fooled into thinking that the ultra wealthy had something on their side that was preferable to what we were allowed to have on our side. Rather like the valley people in the theme from Billy Jack, many swore that they would have it for their very own. Hundreds of billions of tiny pains have resulted from the century of striving to get "ours". Countless children have been neglected while Mommy and Daddy have run off in pursuit of wealth. The familiar but tired strains of the cultural elite to "pull ourselves up by the bootstraps" rely on having the ability to buy expensive boots. Even our language is based on exploitation and long held beliefs that the poor deserve their lot in life. The term "wrong side of the tracks" comes from the fact that prevailing winds would blow coal ash, clinkers and the acrid smoke of the railroad into neighborhoods that were unlucky enough to be downwind. There now exists a tool called a toxic release inventory which allows us to get a company by company breakdown, a business by business estimation of how much pollution is released into our neighborhoods. Of course the regulated community are the ones who compile the data, but I'm sure these reporting requirements are being proposed by the current batch of uneducated fanatics. We all need to look it up and learn how to read it. TRI Toxic Release Inventory TRI. Don't forget, I want you to know about poison in your air! Without knowing, you can't do much about it.  That's how bad things happen, people don't know enough to be scared. Even though this database can help us to understand the nature of our exploitation, many feel powerless to change things, when we account for the toxic and carcinogenic compounds that routinely flow through our neighborhoods and not unusually, the poor are often closer to the plume and less able to be able to afford to pick up and move, do we not have the responsibility to speak out against the causes of cancer and disease?

Rather than running from these problems, or hiding our heads in the sand, the coming storms will require us to capture the high ground and begin the long process of sorting out the difference between needs and wants, wresting power from the people who have had their way with us for generations and finally acting in accord with the logical approach that acts as if the future generations were depending on us. There have been breakthrough moments like this throughout the arc of time between ages where this has been done on a tiny scale, nearly forever. Everyone in the tribe had to adapt to new information. With more power beneath our fingers today than a dozen Guttenberg Presses could have given you in 1450, we are able to snap our attention to hundreds of concepts per hour and discover discreet elements of disparate disciplines at will. Now don't consider me rash, I don't expect everyone to even pursue enough data to make coherent arguments, but as the inevitability for change becomes available to more and more folks, we will hit the perfect concentration of ideas at just the right pressure and suspended angst will crystallize around things akin to condensation nuclei in atmospheric physics and meteorology. some of these crystallizations will be schools, farms and new lending institutions, not-for-profit groups, pagan groups and loacalizers, those who work as agents for mediating the flows of goods and services in more local economic structures.

The potential for jobs in an economy based on people, profits and the planet is nearly infinite. Unlike what the technocrats would have us believe, treating the planet as if we just have one means learning to organically adapt, learn to live lives of grace, leave little impact and enrich each location that we pass. Humans were made to walk, just doing that more can transform society. In fact, in some parts of the world it is about the most revolutionary thing you can do! walk and ride bike, take the billions of gallons of gasoline off the table as a bargaining chip. Stop feeding the beast. Petrodollars are hemorrhaged out of nearly every State in the USA. Likewise, with coal (read electricity) eighty percent of our fossilized carbon, coal comes from just six states. (over 50% comes from the top three coal-mining states.) The more demand we create, the deeper we will dig into the earth's crust for more. Sustainability demands sipping from finite reserves while spending our time building better lifestyles that inhibit waste and throughput. Throughput is the resources that do not accrue as investments but transform themselves into waste within our budgets, our bodies, our families and our homes. The limits don't end there though, it has reverberations through our neighborhoods, our workplaces and the community. Of course, the tendrils of this new way of being extend to the ends of the Earth as we slow the devastation, redirect the dollars and start to make sense.

Federal Regulators Run Amok

The long hand of the law has reached into my home twice this week. The resulting confusion it has created in me as well as the utterly deceitful approach with which the government has taken their actions begs the question, "What part of taxation without representation do they not understand?" Those of us who have been paying attention, wonder why we are paying taxes for that kind of "service". As the wealthiest members of our society find more efficient ways to capture evermore wealth, evermore power and reduce risk factors resulting from their revolting behavior, the best actors,  people of conscience, and the general public find it more and more difficult to protect themselves or compete with the greedy and deceitful corporados. Knowing that regulators seem to be siding more and more with those who would risk our health and well being for the almighty buck is driving more and more people to take drastic action that puts them outside the law in order to protect their own health or that of their loved ones. This week I have bumped up against at least two hideous miscarriages of justice from just one agency, the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) First was the recent crack down by them on a product called Hcg, human chorionic gonadatropin, this hormone, naturally present in humans, encourages fat metabolism and was what I used to lose over sixty pounds last year. Not only did it reduce my "bad cholesterol", blood pressure, risk factors for heart disease, and all that extra weight, but losing that weight safely made me feel twenty years younger. The FDA did not receive a single health complaint about this product, but banned production and sale of it based on what seem to be claims by the multi-billion dollar weight loss industry because of the threat that an effective product like Hcg poses to their livelihood. If you check out the FDA website, you will find them actively soliciting complaints about this hormone and supposed side-effects that have resulted from its use. In the rest of the world, outside the taxpayer funded regulatory agencies, we make changes based on facts, not imaginary consequences, hazards rather than ghosts and fact rather than fiction.

I wanted to write a letter to the FDA on their website, directly stating the health benefits that Hcg provided me, but there is no clear way to offer the truth of my experience unless I would willing to say that the loss of sixty pounds was a negative health impact. Whatever doctors and scientists are running the FDA, must either be incompetent or on the dole of the moneid class because they certainly are not caring or compassionate in the way they discharge their responsibility to the American people. We have a horrendous situation here in the US, the obesity epidemic is killing us slowly, but the fast food nation that we have become operates freely, addicting children to sugar and fat, even though the food pyramid tells us to eat less of both. We often find it a struggle to eat more fresh vegetables because of the growing food deserts that have engulfed most major cities and even more rural towns. To top it off,  science tells us to eat less meat and carbohydrates as well, but the rampant over production of grain and the continued subsidies to the meat industry continue to offer these products at artificially low cost. I recently came across a burger that weighs in at over 4,000 calories, but even though it should over-feed a person for two days, there is no health warning or even a batted eye over the true danger that eating such an obscenity represents for the casual diner. This sort of irresponsibility in the name of a "free market" could be understandable if the second prong of the regulators approach  was absent, but the crack down on Hcg proves that the agency is not at all interested in the dangers of the food supply, only the corporate welfare that is behind the removal of effective weight loss options for the general public.

The second heinous act of the FDA this week is actually inaction. They have found a banned fungicide in orange juice. As we are told repeatedly, we are now a global economy, but our food supply is supposed to be protected from dangerous chemicals by FDA regulations. Banning of chemicals that have deleterious effects is one of the responsibilities the FDA is charged with, it is their purpose. Instead, large quantities of tainted juice, contaminated with a banned fungicide, has found a route from Brazil's rainforests into our juice glasses. Instead of regulating, like they are supposed to, it seems that the agency is taking a hands off approach, allowing the remaining juice to flow for several more weeks as it "makes its way out of the supply chain". This reminds me of the police officer who asks the person pulled over for speeding down the highway, "You will stop speeding when you get to your destination, Right?" and then lets them take off again without a ticket. Is it too much ask for our regulators to do their job? Can we not expect a reasonable level of protection from the regulations we have on the books? How can these agents, paid for by our hard earned money, utterly ignore their responsibility to us? Perhaps when we are forced into a doctor's office to get prescriptions for multi-vitamins, or arrested for having naturally occurring chemicals in our blood, we will find that a better approach to protecting the American public from dangers posed by unregulated food and drugs would have been to cut off funding for the very regulators who are supposed to do that job.

The developing science of social control is leading to some pretty scary territory. When the FDA was first envisioned, you could find snake oil salesmen on nearly every corner and I do not advocate a return to the wild west mentality that sanctioned the selling of who knows what for nearly every malady. Continuing threats to public health do need to be addressed.  When we find real and present danger, turning our heads cannot be an option, just as importantly, we cannot find fault with things that are used safely and effectively either. One has to wonder if there is not something in our constitution that would allow us to rise up and fight when our government allows "acceptable levels" of poisoning to occur and denies us the means to live healthy lives in spite of the onslaught of bad choices and harmful products offered by corporate interests. There must be a better way that will not make criminals out of people who are trying to help people get more healthy and we certainly cannot reward those who would roll the dice with our lives either.