10% of our goal!

As we continue to teach people how to sequester carbon cheaply, efficiently and forever, we often overlook the fact that many either don't care or are frozen by their fear of the future. I have written often about how the oligarchs seek to turn our heads away from the truth, or perpetrate vast lies to get us to allow them to continue to rule us. Luckily, more and more people are waking up and realizing that it is the vast majority who hold the power to make change come. This has been somthing that has been talked about for decades. when the Hippies said, the people need to lead, then the leaders will have no choice but to follow, that's exactly what they meant. The status quo is struggling, we have them unsteady. Why, just the other day, I saw a sign that said, "Long-haired freaky people, please apply."
Our group just got a contribution from an anonymous donor of over five thousand dolars that will help us to buy land upon which we will continue teaching skills needed to build a sustainable culture. This puts us over 10% of the way toward our funding goals. We are continuing to seek a large enough acreage to hold classes, create demonstration plots for resoration agriculture and to provide a working habitat restoration project where people can come to learn in a hands-on way what they need to know to replicate our success. We have had more than a dozen teachers express a desire to teach at our facility and to share such diverse skills as wildcrafting herbs, foraging for wild edible plants, animal husbandry, building soil carbon, putting up the harvest for lean times natural home building and we will also continue taking people for the annual maple sugar harvest and wild rice encampment. Additionally, we have skilled tradespeople who have been building efficiency into our housing stock, reducing the overall consumption of resources and energy, all of which allow homeowners to live better for less. Even though we are saving up for a large land purchase, we continue to invest in the capabilities of our group to educate more people faster and create bigger impact with what resources we have available. Just last month, we got a larger biochar kiln that exponentially increases the amount of carbon we can sequester, allowing us to create enough biochar to amend larger acreages faster. we have already committed to taking it on the road to several private landholdings,to sequester carbon there, but also to set up at public demonstrations across the state where dozens of individuals can learn about the power of this ancient technology. The faster we grow, the faster we increase our effectiveness. As we continue to reach out, spreading the network of people who are excited about our work, the faster we seem to get invitations to present our work to others for the first time. Those contacts in turn lead to even more people hearing about what we do for the first time. We have also mad einroads with several larger groups and people involved with nation-wide and world-wide efforts to change course. It is not too late, but we must all learn the new rules, the old strategies that worked and renew our commitment to one another and the planet. Sticking our heads in the sane will not inspire or affect change.
https://gofund.me/52fa3b77 joing forces with one another and the natural world will have benefits that out-live us all. For the next seven genereations,Tony C. Saladino-Bioneer

Without Words

Many ancient cultures had wisdom that we just can't fathom. How do we put into words ideas that spring from parts of ourselves we no longer have awareness of? Two days ago, I was in an area where the ground itelf was rotten, there was something at work in the soil that smelled every bit as bad as a decomposing corpse, but the grass was thick and green, lush and seemed to be what most people would call "healthy". The stench was sickening, like a combination of baby vomit, stinky feet and musty basement with a hint of rotting food. If I were a "primitive" person, I would have fled the area and had I been a shepherd, I would have moved my flock away in short order. Instead, because it was my work zone for the day, I just tried to stay as far away from the grassy areas as much as possible, sequestering myself to the large paved areas whose runoff flooded that foetid soil even in light rains. I was attending to something that most people might not even recognize as a problem. It took me two days to come up with words to describe my experience and the only reason I did that is because it disturbed me so profoundly. It is not hard to imagine that most people, if they smelled it at all would forget about it as soon as they were out of the wafting aroma. Some may have even overlooked it completely but been distracted enough by the area and the development around that grass to think it would be a good idea to come back, or bring their children to play on the stinky grass because it is a center of recreational activity in our town, underwritten and supported by the local NFL team.
The striking thing about my experience is that I may pay closer attention to my environs than some, but I also understand that many thousands of years ago, humans had to be aware of these things, or they might perish. In recent study, I was reading about pastoral cultures that lived (and some who still live) for countless generations by moving livestock across vast ranges. In most of the rest of the world, the herding culture brings their livestock into corral at night. Small paddocks that are reinforced against intrusion by predators. These areas are easily guarded and the concentration of creatures gets unnatually high. We have these same sorts of things in our modern, industrial animal production and milk production facilities, but there are a series of fundamental differences. First, pastoral cultures ranged over large areas, their corrals were not used every day, or some times, even once a week. Animals were allowed to graze widely and occasionally, they would be penned up in these spots temporarily, something not possible on finite and fenced ranges or under grazing regimes allowed under the rules of "private" property. The corrals of more sensitive cultures were established in areas where the land was particularly inhospitable, damaged or more in need of recovery. The herds got put up for the night in places where the browse was substandard. Where the cattle or sheep or goats would not choose for themselves. We can postulate as modern science geeks are loathe to do that there was some awareness in the minds of ancient or "less educated" people that concentrating manure and urine in these areas would eventually help build the soils and create rich browse later on, but it may also have been in an attempt to put the creatures where there was little manure or urine to protect them during the "unnaturally" long periods they would spend there from disease and illness that might come had the area been more fecund. On some level it may have even been an attempt to avoid predators who had become habituated to seeing herds in the more rich areas during the day. We can't hope to understand the reality of people who would never make a long line of corrals, leaving the livstock in tight spaces for weeks or months on end, working the soils into mire and either trampling or eating every shred of greenery out of existence. Under the management scheme used by the ancients, worrying about keeping feed or green chopped food supplementation up out of the muck was not only unknown, but unheard of, because their reality was so different than our own.
Yesterday I was speaking to a friend about a class I took, Participant Observation and Interviewing Skills. It was in the school of Anthropology and was focused on being able to interact with various cultures without damaging them and/or gathering information from people from other cultures without bias, or putting our particular cultural spin on information. So many things can be conveyed without words, that when we select words, we have to be careful. Communication can be blocked in so many ways that as researchers Anthropologists need to be wary of how they approach the information they are interested in gathering. One of the assignments we had was to discuss with people from at least three different cultures that were not the dominant one we call "our own", some of their native language idiomatic phrases and some of their proverbial wisdom. Idioms are hard enough to explain to someone who has not learned to speak our language as a native speaker. "I'm pulling your leg", for example has nothing to do with what might be going on under the table for instance. Words that don't have anything to do with reality can be difficult to understand/explain if you are not part of the in crowd. I mean "in" what and I thought it was just the two of us, What crowd? It may be clear to us, but we are all coming from a similar perspective, so how do we communicate these same ideas, in other cultures, perhaps even without words? There is a story about a family that always cut off the dark meat of their turkey, placing it in a separate roasting pan. Generations followed the tradition until one Thanksgiving, the young daughter or son who was being trained to cook the turkey asked "WHY?" "Why do we cut off the wings and legs and thighs?"
The mother didn't know, the grandmother didn't know, but it was, after all Thanksgiving and the great grandmother came to dinner that night and she was asked about it. "We did that because our oven was too small for the turkey." she said, "We had a tiny little apartment and a tiny little oven back then. When your grandmother moved out, that is how she saw us make the turkey every year." Sometimes even within the same family or culture, we never get around to talking about the why or how. How did the words come to represent something so far divorced from the literal meaning. How did they gain a significance all their own? "In like Flynn", "Going like gang busters" or "To beat the ban" don't rely on knowing who Flynn actually was, which gang was being busted or what ban they were talking about, the meaning comes from beyond the words. What is interesting is some of the things you learn about other cultures by trying to find a similar meaning beyond words in our culture that is a corrolary to ones from other cultures. In the Netherlands, "He tripped but his nose went in butter" can roughly be translated to "He always comes out smelling like a rose." In essence, no matter what his trouble, he always comes out on top. Due to possible translation difficulties, we may not always get the correct words, but the meanings sometimes shine through. Also in the Netherlands, if something is starkly or plainly obvious, "I could feel it through my clog" is a rough equivalent to "Plain as the nose on your face", something undeniable and when something tastes really, really good we might say that it tastes sublime, but again, in the Netherlands it might be said, "It tastes like angels peeing on my tongue." The meaning is often and sometimes, hopefully, divorced from reality in a unique way, although many languages have idiomatic speech, it is one of the hardest parts of the language to explore. All I know is that now that I have learned about where "primitive" people place their corrals, I will be doing the same thing if I ever have a herd to tend. Proverbial language can be similar, but not quite the same. "A stitch in time, saves nine" may make sense but often bears no relation to the circumstances in which it is used. Arabic speakers may recognize, "We taught him to beg and he beat us to the doors." but in my culture we say, he's a real go-getter or sometimes we call people brown-noser or ass-kisser. A friend just said yesterday, something that may be on its way to becoming a proverb, "If you teach a man a trade, chances are he'll do it." Proverbial wisdom sidles up often extremely cose to the literal meaning, but it has implications for other situations as well. Coming down off your high horse and/or becoming a fisher of men were never about horses or bait, but about concepts that are often difficult to explain, complex or borderline offensive. Words used as shorthand for other ideas. Sometimes cultures develop that do things a certain way long enough that no one asks why, actions and activities just happen and no reasons are needed for them. When we begin to accept the excuse, that's just the way we do it, we may lose vital understanding about how appropriate that way of life is or why our ancestors were motivated to do things the way they did. It may sound odd, because I see myself as a writer, but these ways without words are as important to me as the strings of symbols I piece together, cut and paste and labor over for hours to express a single idea. When the grass looks pretty, lush and green, but reeks of death, run the other way! Don't wait for someone to tell you or to put a sign up warning you of the hazard.

10% Funded And Building!

When we made the commitment to create an outdoor school, the idea was a culmination of many years of taking ECO-Tourists out for day trips and a few overnights here and there where we would plant trees or native wild edibles, restore habitat and regenerate native plants where they had been lost. Sometimes for many decades the land had been abused and we learned many techniques for breathing life back into soil. When I was a young man, I had worked as an educator at College Settlement Camps of Philadelphia, teaching many of the same ideas and skills to young people, but as I continue to learn, many adults have never learned these important things either. As I have gotten older, the desire to start a sort of summer camp for all ages that would focus on not only rest and relaxation, but learning in a supportive and beautiful environment became my passion. I have never accepted a penny for my work in this regard. The pay offs for me come in ways that cannot be monetized. In fact, my life's savings are going into the pot as well as all the contributions that are coming in. Teaching about mutualism and the give back are far too important to hold hostage to money.
At the start of the global pandemic, I decided to change the way I thought about what I wanted to create and focused my effort on brining this outdoor school to fruition. Our group, ECO-Tours of Wisconsin, Inc. has begun to reach out to other groups, guest teachers who will share their skills and in an attempt to find the location for this new project, have poured over real estate listings for over a year. When we sold our property, more than three dozen wild edible plants filled the yard. The only real management required was to harvest some of nature's bounty each year and every few years, find others who we could give new shoots or cuttings, bulbs, corms or seeds. The profusion of life that sprung up under these plantings was amazing, the many hundreds of pounds of relatively free food we got to harvest was simply amazing and the soil these plants lived in matured as well, holding more nutrients, more water and more life than we could have imagined when we started. Now, we want to teach these same techniques to many hundreds, even thousands more people who come away to the wilds to experience first-hand what permaculture, carbon-smart farming and restoration biology can accomplish. Of course, it is not free or easy to bring together so many diverse groups and voices, so many skills and ideas into one experience, but we are on our way to doing so.
If you would like to manage your property in ways that give back to Mother Nature, that use no man-made chemicals, that revere rather than destroy natural systems, please contact us and/or contribute to our gofundme page. If you would like to learn how to store and sequester carbon in living soil, you can contact us as well. I will include a few photos of our gardens, but seeing them in person says more than the photos can capture. By teaching through actual experiences, rather than with just words, our students come away with skills and thought processes that help build community, honor the circular nature of life itself and to support diversity for the sake of all organisms involved.

Back To Work

It has been over a year since the entertainment industry closed down. I have worked nearly all my life in the business and last March, around the middle of the month, we just got sent home. From the beginning those of us who knew something about science and especially epidemiology prepared for the worst. I sold my homes because I knew that here would be at least a year of no work. Many of us were expecting a more likey two-and-a-half years of no income, especially considering the fact that we had an anti-science Administration in control of our government back then. The wealthy people who fund most television, concerts, industrial and trade shows and the theater industry started blowing smoke up our asses almost immediately. Some said that within months we would be back to work, a few said they would start up again in the fall. The implication was that by the time autumn rolled around, the worst would be over. Then, we had the low-end companies, the ones known for paying the least and working their people the hardest with the least benefits want to start up around the holidays and we all know what happenned then. Now, we are about halfway vaccinated as a population and there are some jobs coming back, slowly. The sad part has been the very vocal and ignorant people who think the stock market is the economy, and those who claim that some of us are "essential workers" when what they actually mean is they want to buy cigarettes and gatorade every day on their way to work and the only place they know they can do that is at the local stop and rob gas station. If we would have had done what the entertainment industry did right away at the start, stayed home, away from all people, refusing to breathe the air of others, we could have been done with the virus in a few weeks. Instead, we allowed access to our human Petri dishes to continue throughout the past year. We have had cheerleaders for a "return to normal" pushing, pushing, pushing for us to go back to work, back to our jobs, back into social situations before anyone was ready.Now we have just enough people vaccinated to not be sure whether the people we see out in the world are safe or not. There are still people who claim tha tthey don't want to be part of an experiment or take some "unproven" vaccination, but these same people don't realize that once more than a hundred million doses have been given, the trial size is many hundreds of times larger than any other drug ever gets tested on before being allowed into the marketplace. Clinging to the lies of the former Administration and denying science even as we continue to have people become infected with a preventable disease just makes these folks sound ignorant to those who have been paying attention. They say that a stopped clock is still right twice a day, but in the case of science deniers and Q-bots, they have not been right for more than a year. I feel for every person who was mad eto work during this time and I am watching closely what happens over the coming month or so, because as people begin to mix it up again and return to work, school and the nightclubs, we must not forget that as a nation, we are barely half vaccinated. Some parts of the country are still not even to that point yet. In my state alone, there are still places where the infection rates are high and this week I went through the data. There is a direct correlation between places that still think Deceitful Traitor won the election and the high rates. Often those in rural areas don't understand that if there are ony four hundred people in their town and two people get covid-19, their case rate is still higher than if 40 or 400 people get sick in a town of hundreds of thousands. Just because you do not understand the life cycle or natural history of a virus does not mean that it can't use you as a host. Once you are infected, it is too late to do anything about it either, so unless you isolate yourself completely and remain in quarantine until the illness has run its course, the only thing you can do is pass it on. I will be going back to work in an outdoor environment, and I am fully vaccinated, but I will continue to mask up and wash my hands often. I will continue to stay at least six feet away form people I'm not sure have been fully vaccinated, not because I'm fearful of catching the virus, but because I want others to understand that they need to get their heads around this issue, accept the science and stop listening to people who don't care about them. As much as I want a paycheck, I refuse to endanger your life for my freedom. As much as I want to "return to normal", what we had before was not working. I want everyone to understand that to get past this terrible illness, we all have to be considerat of others and do whatever it takes to create positive change for all of our neighbors, friends and families.

Silent Sports Park

When I spend time in the woods, it is amazing how many people I find out there, bringing the outside world along with them. Some do it ingeniously, but others just blunder about frogetting to unplug, desiring to see it all at a blur, passing by while flying through the trails on their smelly vehicles, spewing dust and fumes in a giant plume behind them. There are also those who choose to be so bugged about the few things they left behind that they cannot seem to relax and enjoy the moment. I must admit to being rather impressed by the guy who configured half a dozen car batteries in a wagon with a car tape deck and speakers on top, then dragging that whole apparatus over a mile back down the footpath into a State Natural Area to blast hair metal all night long. I had wished he would have stayed home, but weekend warriors being what they are, I was just glad he dragged the whole system back out when they left. It was not the same for the several cases of beer cans he and his friends brought so they could enjoy nature.
Imagine finding a place that was planned and executed to be a silent sports park instead. No 4X4s tearing away at the paths, no internal combution engines and no electrical devices to blast sounds from town. A place you could be lulled to sleep by nothing but the sound of a loon perhaps, awakened by the throaty call of a bullfrog or reminded midday whose land you were on by the shriek of a hawk high above. I have enjoyed times like this, sometimes literally miles from nowhere. In the Quetico region of Canada or the Boundary Waters, but they were many hours drive into the bush and even a dozen miles or more of paddling out past the furthest reaches of motorized traffic. Few hearty souls are willing to portage extra gear beyond the first thousand meter portage. I would like to propose somethnig much closer to home, a place where the hurly burley of the outside world is held at arm's length. A place where you might find peace and quiet without keeping one ear tuned to the whine of engines or be assured that you would not be distracted by the buzzing of chainsaws while you tried to relax and unwind. I am tired of seeing people try to get away from it all while being addicted to their gasoline powered generators or only being able to see nature down the barrel of their guns. This week I have found such a parcel of land, one that can be protected forever and held in trust perpetually to allow silent sports to rule the day. If you would like to bike, or hike, canoe or cavort, you can do it without worry of being run over or coated in a plume of dust from passing vehicles. It is quazi-public space already, but privately held and for sale. Thousands of acres stretching over headwaters of two river systems and a handful of lakes, waiting to be protected from the heavy hand of humankind. I always see opportunity in these sorts of places, a chance to have something better grow where even the remoteness had not protected it fully in the past. Places where, without being protected, more forests will fall and get carted away for pulp or lumber to feed faraway people from what is left of the woods. In my heart of hearts, I have always sought out places like this in hopes of giving back to them in ways that show Mother Nature that I value them. My tiny breaths of carbon rich air, feeding the trees which provide me shelter with a living roof of branches. Most of my travels which were never about getting anywhere but to a moment unmolested, where I could feel time unfold at the pace it always has. A place to reflect upon my self and how it fits into the puzzle pieces of nature surrounding me and to realize that all of it was fine before we came along to appreciate it and will exist long after my body returns to the earth as worm food.
I would like to share this place with as many people as possible, to secure it from the possibility of further noise and haste, quiet the wilds in a profound way that lasts forever, creating a hush that will extend through generations allowing native creatures their voice. https://americanforestmanagement.com/real-estate/properties/twin-lakes/2419 This link will take you to the site digitally, but if you want to help purchase this property, we ask you to give as generously as you are able. It may not be sub-divided and will only be for non-consumptive uses if we can raise the capital to purchase it. Unlike other investments, we are not doing this for money and will not be treating any contributions as investments, but we will manage the land to restore the soil, plant trees, expand the carbon sink that is the soil resource, bring back beaver and slow the flow of water from the landscape. The purpose of our efforts are solely to protect the headwaters of the rivers that flow from this relatively unmolested area, to recover the areas that have been denuded, planted into monocultures and exploited for timber harvest in the past. Our long term goal, as we begin is to use a minimal amount of highly selective cutting to appease the current management plans on file with the USFS and the State of Wisconsin, but to also enshrine the area as a memeorial forest to the ancient ones who once passed this way and did not leave waste or destructuon in their wake. We seek to hold this land as sacred and to encourage those who come to enjoy it to forget about the "outside" world for a while. Our intention is to use it to teach sustainability through imersion and practical, respectful enjoyment, not tearing it up as so many other places allow folks to do. Our intention is to save just under 22 square miles as a pocket of highly protected landscape and to slowly coax climax forest to re-establish itself in the Northwoods. Our goal is to use this property to sequester over 42,000 tons of carbon there over the coming years and to show as many people as possible how to use regenerative agriculture and restorative forestry practices to leave something better than what we found in the wake of our passing. We also intend to do it

without wholeale extraction and without ignoring the voice of the wind in the trees.

We have been teaching people to make and use biochar for more than a decade, but the past year we have turned almost exclusively to online classes. It has been much easier and more efficient in many respects, but there are still a number of people who would rather have in-person classes. That is why we are fundraising to buy land on which we can teach about this and other skills important to become more sustainably oriented. Permaculture design, foraging classes, animal husbandry and regenerative ag. skills, even home economics and other sustainable living skills are more necessary now than ever and there are dozens of great teachers who have offered to teach at our facility. Things from knitting to soap and candle making, canning, drying and putting up th eharves during the fat times so we still can appreciate Earth's abundance during the lean times, etc.
Making and use of biochar can be taught in a fairly comprehensive way in just two or three hours, but some of the other skills we teach can take considerably longer to learn. For guests who want or need to stay longer, we have a plan to offer glamping opportunities as well. Just enough "roughing it" with just enough luxury to have fun and stretch to the limits of our comfort level. That is why we are developing a broader plan to purchase a significant acreage upon which we can offer opportunities fo rno trace camping while teaching a variety of management strategies that layer functions, emulate nature by closing the loop on nutrients, energy, carbon, water and other "resources" and adapt creatively to our rapidly changing world. In our experience, we find that appreciating the gifts of the nature and investing in them often pay dividends that are not necessarily financial, but are every bit as important to our quality of life. what we put in, or give away often comes with unimaginable rewards.
One of the most important aspects of permaculture is that one needs to look, listen and learn, really get down to the level of what goes on in nature, before ever trying to make change happen. The often quoted belief that native people have that every decision needs to be weighed for the good of the next seven generations may seem like far too long a timeline to consider seeing as many are predicting that human actions may make our species extinct within a decade or two, but for those people who have been paying attention, we know that even if people don't want to change, they are going to have to. Far from being a drag, or predicting destruction of society as we know it, we teach ways that the recovery of sound ecological practices will enhance quality of life, jobs and the sense of community that seems to have evaporated under the powerful, but often nearly invisible hand of capitalism.

Far too many use words to describe themselves that were arrived at by focus group or polling data, so I try to refrain from naming myself, our group or the direction our guests are headed. A wise older gentleman laughed at me once, when I was struggling to give him a word to describe myself. I know that far too often descriptors can be pejorative. He said, "I know what you are, a bioneeer!" and at first it felt a bit like the same slap in the face that tree hugger had always been, but as I learned the depth of meaning behind the term and came to understand that he meant nothing negative about it, I took it to heart and more and more have grown to like it. After all, pioneers are eternally optimistic that perhaps over the next rise will be some sort of Shangrila, a place where the cool fresh springs will be plentiful enough that our livestock will have water and that the lush, green grasses will feed them abundantly, the winds and snows won't be too harsh and that we can find straight, tall and strong timbers with which to build shelters that will serve the coming generations. Bioneers do the same, but they can find their lush abundance right where they are, without packing all of our worldly goods in a prarie schooner and striking out across a vast sea of grass to get there. We often find rich abundance by turning over a single rock, or collecting enough from nearby to build the foundations of a new, rich and abundant life, through interaction with the natural world. We invest time required to turn wast to resources or trash to treasure, getting creative to save money and eliminate waste. When I was first called a bioneer, I was still a young man. I had explored hundreds of thousands of places, slept out under the stars in hundreds of them, gotten to know biota on their terms and within their various biomes. I had come to find many dozens of wild foods that thrive where I live and learned how to propagate ones that were finding it difficult to thrive, learning what they needed that had been missing, creating more stable and habitable niches not only for myself, but hundreds of thousands of other species even though I could not name them all.
At this point in my life, I may be an elder, but the motivation I have is not the same as the elders I met and saw when I was young. Most of them had exuded a holier than thou attitude and explicitly said that things were "My way or the highway." Many of the elders I had when I was growing up taught me far more abotu the wrong way to be than how to grow adapt and create meaningful positive change in the world around them.
I choose to continue to strive toward something better, more fulfilling, to learn and grow, even though it sometimes brings painful consequences. Yes, I am sometimes forced to admit I was wrong or to stretch my boundaries, adapt and change. That hope for a better place, for the bioneer lies in the same space we are in today, the same culture, the same location, we don't find it by traversing a vast wilderness. More likely it lives within us already and by digging deeply into the difference between needs and wants, understanding that there is no "away" and that once we discover how to help nature to be abundant, the hardest task becomes equitably redistributing the abundance. I have written at length about the give away, or the give back. The time I have left may be short, but the depth of experience I bring to the table will not die with me. Stories allow us to transcend death, as long as people continue to tell them and find the meaning worth putting into practice. When I teach people to make and use biochar, it is a story that was told over nine thousand years ago. Before humans had developed written language, there were those who knew how important it was to give back to the soil. The only thing that has really changed is that today it is far more important to know, instead of me speaking, think of it as our long dead human ancestors, reaching out across time to show you how to make the soil healthy and life thrive.

FDR

When we did have a Democratic Socialist, he was voted to be our President four times. The oligarchs were so afraid of people like him getting into office again that they implemented term limits. Of course, FDR brought us out of the Great Depression, The Dust Bowl and virtually all of World War II. He did it with style, compassion and in many ways more honor and respect than we have seemingly been able to muster for any President since. Many parks and libraries, infrastructure and aspects of our society that make life better to this day were funded unde the alphabet soup of agencies that he helped to create. If you are unfamiliar, it is worth going back to the speeches he gave to Congress, not telling them what to do, but what our nation needed and the elected officials got to work in order to make it so.
The Dust Bowl that blew away the single greatest resource our nation had, the very soil itself was stopped by planting over 3.5 billion trees. Under his Administration he also built over 3,000 fire towers to look after our forests. Not because he was a draconian and power hungry leader who thought it was a good idea, but because We The People banded together with common purpose and said with one voice, this is where we put our foot down, here this will end, and together, we made something that seemed impossible not only possibly but real. We rebuilt and refurbished water supply systems, modernized roads and bridges, expanded the links between and among our great cities and beat back the rising tide of poverty that threatened to mire our nation for decades. our future is still made possible by programs he signed off on. Social Security, perhaps the greatest humanitarian program ever conceived was signed into law under his term in th ehighest office in our nation. He was beloved and today, many of us still celebrate his life. Of course he was limited by the times he was living in and there were a few things he did that were not the best, but at least he had the guts to strike out, creating the CCC (Civilian conservation Corps) which paid unemployed people to improve and protect our soils, the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) and the REA (Rural Electrification Act)to bring the majority of U.S. households into the Twentieth Century. Hundreds of programs that led to increased quality of life came about bnecause of his leadership and the drive which he exhibited and was able to get the people of our nation to get excited abotu as well. It is interesting that we don't have a holiday to celebrate the birth of this great leader. He was born, January 30, 1882 and sadly passed away while still serving as President April 12, 1945. Less than four months later, his successor Harry Truman ended WWII by dropping bombs, developed under the Presidency of FDR, on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima, August 6th and Nagasaki, August 9th of that same year, killing between 130,000 and 230,000 innocents. There is no doubt that he had saved more than that many lives in this nation during the course of his three full terms in office and the American People were so greatful that they rewarded him with an unprescedented fourth term. now, when a political figure tries to make sweeping changest that improve the lives of the entire nation's citizens, he is called names. Socialist has come to mean something unrecognizeable. terms like bleeding heart and dso-gooder are thrown at him almost as if the ultra-rich are spitting in the face of decent leaders. their right to serve in office is questioned, or their transgressions are magnified as if that makes their decent and logical policies suspect. The fact is that ownership of nearly all of our media has been transferred to the very oligarchs FDR taxed to pay fo rthe improvement of the lives of all our citizens. At this point, those ultra-wealthy folks have had fifty years of fighting in court, being allowed to buy candidatres who know better than to bite the hand of those who feed them and to consolidate their positions and offshore their obscene wealth.
Americans for Tax Fairness points out that: The number of Billionaires has increased more than nine fold during the three decades between 1990 and 2020. Increasing from just 66 individuals to over 615. This unfathomable amount of money had to come from somewhare and it is directly seen in th eerosion of our middle class and th ecomplete collapse of our social safety net. We need anothe rleader like FDR to put this nation back on course.

this image is just one of thousands of park shelters in use today that were built with labor provided under one of th emany programs FDR signed off on. I'm sure there are places in your town that have the hand of his Presidency upon them and we are all better off because of the sacrifices made by people who were actively participating in making our country better for generations they knew that they would never see.