Category: People Helping People

By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, poverty, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , ,

In the South Bronx, once a deeply distressed urban area of New York City that the cops had dubbed “Fort Apache” because it had been so dangerous, a lot of the comeback has been around sustainability (thanks in no small measure to years of terrific organizing by Majora Carter and Sustainable South Bronx). A new initiative I just learned about creates three wins at once:

  • Cleans up polluted water
  • Creates clean and usable biofuel that doesn’t sacrifice agricultural land
  • Creates jobs and a general economic boost in a depressed area

Read about this triple win here. More and more, I think we’ll be seeing development projects like this. (I know of many others around the country and around the world.) The key is to look at waste from one process and see how it could be used as an ingredient for the next process. Another great example is The Intervale, in Burlington and South Burlington, Vermont, where beer waste becomes a growing medium for mushrooms, which in turn feeds fish. This thinking shift is one of the major principles of true sustainability.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, People Helping People, poverty, Shel's Personal Life

Guest Post by Steve Jennings

[Editor’s Note: Steve, good and gracious person that he is, sent me an advance copy of this post to make sure I didn’t have any issues with him posting it. I wrote back that I was honored, loved the post, and would welcome permission to use it as a guest post, which he granted. And my life is richer for knowing him, as well. It Unlikely Friends

Sometimes you meet someone and you become instant friends.  That happened to me awhile back.  I went to Massachusetts for some training on media interviews with one of the more brilliant marketing experts in the country, Shel Horowitz (https://shelhorowitz.com/).   He’s the author of Principled Profit, Grassroots Marketing (a must-have for bootstrap marketers), The Penny Pinching Hedonist, Marketing without Megabucks and his latest, Guerilla Marketing Goes Green.  He’s a true wordsmith and a master at getting the most bang for your marketing buck.

The odd thing about our friendship is that Shel and I disagree on a whole host of issues.  Shel is liberal on most issues.  I’m mostly conservative. Our religious views are quite different.  Yet despite our apparent incompatibility, our friendship quickly flourished.

Why?

First, we found our common ground.  Shel and I both believe in leading a simple, responsible lifestyle.  We both enjoy hiking and drinking in nature’s wonders as we go.  We both get riled at the sight of injustice and corruption. It didn’t take us long to find lots of other areas where we agreed.

Second is integrity.  Shel lives what he believes.  He does what he says he’ll do, and he won’t be shy about telling the truth.   I try to be the same way in my life.  Unfortunately, integrity seems to be a dying value in much of our culture.  So when I meet someone who has it, I am drawn to them.

Third, it’s OK to disagree.  We accepted our differences and voiced our positions in friendly, reasonable conversation.  You can’t bring everybody to your side.  Jesus didn’t even reach everybody he came in contact with.  So Shel and I both took time to listen and learn from each other. We didn’t change each other’s opinions, but we broadened our minds.

It’s not hard to get along with people.  Instead of focusing on our differences, try to find some common ground.  There’s more of that kind of real estate than you can imagine.  From that starting point, make an effort to truly listen.  Digest what the other person is saying.  In far too many discussions we humans are guilty of concentrating on how we will advance our position and fail to truly hear the views of the other person.  You don’t have to agree, but you must try to understand.

Yes, Shel and I are unlikely friends. I can’t speak for him, but my life is richer for it.

God’s grace to you,

Steve Jennings, Executive Director

www.TeensOpposingPoverty.org

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Diversity, Peace and War, People Helping People, Protests and Crackdowns, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Watching the fireworks from my lawn last night, I found myself thinking about a long-ago July 4th, and how it helped shape who I am today.

The year was 1976. I was a scrawny, long-haired, 19-year-old peace and human rights activist who had just finished my senior term at Antioch College.

I was broke and jobless. And, not having any better plan, I was going to hitchhike around the United States for the summer, shifting my itinerary depending on where the rides were going. Though I was pretty sure I wanted to see Denver and San Francisco, at least, I knew it was a big country with lots to explore, and I hadn’t seen very much of it so far. I didn’t know a thing about hitchhiking, and I hadn’t done any research about what to bring—though I did hook up briefly with a friend who was a very experienced hitchhiker, who showed me the basics of where to stand safely.

So off I went, with $200 in travelers checks in my pocket, and a bunch of inappropriate stuff packed in three inappropriate daypacks. I didn’t have a traveler’s frame pack, a sleeping bag, decent rain protection, a sun hat, or a lot of other things I should have thought about. Instead, I had an entire daypack filled with my creative output: poetry notebooks, my dream journal, and such. Plus a bare minimum of clothing and a bit of food.

I did, however, have a supply of thick markers for making hitchhiking signs that people could read at 60 miles per hour; even back then, I understood some basic marketing principles. 🙂

Setting off from my college town, Yellow Springs, Ohio, in late June, I stopped to visit family in New York before heading to Washington for the Bicentennial.

For weeks, I’d been growing more and more disgusted with the insane commercialism around the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—stuff like “Happy birthday, America, we’re having a sale on our new Fords because it’s your birthday,” accompanied by various patriotic songs.

I was, at that time, very alienated from mainstream American culture. The United States had finally pulled its last soldiers out of the Vietnam quagmire (which I’d been actively protesting since 1969), and Saigon had fallen only 14 months earlier. Examples of racism and sexism and homophobia and oppression of various minorities were easy to find. Police violence against progressives and racial minorities was a part of daily life, and we assumed we were being spied on.

I’d recently completed an internship at a socialist newspaper in Georgia, where the sense of “us against them” was palpable—and where the advertising base had largely abandoned the paper as soon as a safe, bourgeois counterculture paper started publishing, providing access to the lucrative hippie market around Atlanta without funding anti-government journalism. I saw business as the enemy of progress, and could not have named a single example of a business trying to do good, other than a couple of leftist bookstores and healthfood co-ops. I’d been a vegetarian for almost three years, and had discovered that this made me unwelcome in many restaurants.

In short, I was disenfranchised, cynical, militant, and even hostile. I had a pretty big chip on my shoulder.

There were a lot of events in Washington on July 4, 1976, including the grand opening of Union Station as a National Visitors Center, and of course, a huge birthday celebration. As I recall, there were several large public events around different parts of the Mall.

The one I was there to attend was a peace and take-back-the-government rally called by the People’s Bicentennial Commission—and organized, interestingly enough, under the “Don’t Tread on Me” rattlesnake banner that we’ve seen at a lot of Tea Party events in the past few years.

Aside: Columnist Ed Tant, who covered the event for the Athens, GA Observer, remembers the flag as quite integral to the demonstration:

The People’s Bicentennial rally 34 years ago still stands out in my memory for its hopeful patriotism and its message against the predations of plutocracy symbolized by the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag flying from the stage and from the crowd more than a generation before the same flag was appropriated by the tea party crew.

The Gadsden flag was named for Christopher Gadsden, a Revolutionary War hero from South Carolina. It was flown by American sailors and marines during the revolution, but the first political group to feature the rattlesnake flag at a Washington rally was the People’s Bicentennial Commission that flew the flag to warn against the growing power of multinational corporations…

During the People’s Bicentennial rally in 1976, activist Mary Murphy explained the symbolism of the rattlesnake flag, saying, “The rattlesnake has no eyelids, so it is ever-vigilant. Also, it never attacks without warning.”

I seem to remember seeing it at many rallies over the early 1970s, but it may be that the July 4, 1976 demonstration was the first to make it the rally’s official symbol. Somewhere, I might still have my copy of that button.[Aside ends]

Although some conservatives had worried publicly that this anniversary would be a magnet for terrorism and violence, what impressed me above all was the lack of that kind of drama. Only a few years after hard-hat construction workers had attacked war protestors in New York, after Chicago police had attacked protestors at the Democratic Convention, and after the country had been split into opposing camps on so many issues—multiple large gatherings, each representing a different segment of the political landscape from ultraprogressive to ultraconservative, and a huge apolitical middle that was just there to party out on the Bicentennial, all coexisting. All peacefully listening to their own sets of speakers and performers, sometimes coming into contact with each other at the edges, and even sharing food. As far as I could tell, there was no violence, no overt conflict at all, even as hippies in torn flag t-shirts encountered flag-waving conservatives.

And then, after all the rallies were over, we all left our separate public events and gathered around the Washington Monument—to peacefully watch one of the best fireworks displays I’ve ever seen. For one magical night, there seemed to be no great divide. Just a whole lot of people watching a grand fireworks display.

Hitching out of Washington on my way west the next morning, I encountered the generosity of people from both the protests and the parties. I made it back to Yellow Springs in three rides, with very little waiting time. It took only about a half-hour longer than driving would have taken.

And that was the beginning of my summer-long lesson that most Americans are good people who want to do the right thing…that the world is abundant and people will help others when they need it…and that the hostility I thought mainstream America had felt toward the counterculture was at least in large measure, confined to my own imagination.

I have taken the lessons of that day of unity and that summer of hope with me for 35 years now, and I trace a lot of who I am today and how I act in the world to the revelations of that time.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, censorship, Democracy, People Helping People, Protests and Crackdowns, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with ,

In this Web 2.0 Age of Transparency, being stupid about being criticized is, well, more stupid than it used to be. Word gets around. Fast.

A Seattle organization called Reel Grrls, which teaches teens how to become filmmakers, criticized the revolving-door hiring by Comcast of FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker. (Lots of other people raised a public eyebrow on this one.)

In a truly idiotic move, Comcast then announced it was yanking $18,000 it had planned to fund Real Grrls’ summer camp to teach filmmaking, editing and screenwriting. Then, when the media got hold of the story and the public squawked, Comcast recanted and said the fund withdrawal was unauthorized.

But then Real Grrls said it didn’t want the money if there were going to be issues about corporate censorship. They’re using Web 2.0 channels, including a fundraising blast from media watchdog FreePress.net, to raise the money from outside  the corporate world.

With 42,600 Google search results for “reel grrls” comcast as of Monday when I’m actually writing this, Comcast’s PR is clearly taking a hit.One it could have avoided completely by not doing something stupid.

Want to help? Here’s the link to donate.

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, media-general, National Conference on Media Reform, People Helping People, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

By Shel Horowitz, GreenAndProfitable.com

Are bloggers really journalists or are they simply ranting without regard for such concepts as “journalistic objectivity”?

Are traditional journalists still able to tap into the pulse of their community beat, or have they been pushed aside by bloggers who are part of the stories they report?

In an age when radio and print journalists go into the field with cameras and post stories online before they ever see a newspaper or a radio studio, does the instant news cycle of events reported on Twitter and other social media pressure traditional journalists to cut out the analysis, sifting, and curating role they’ve often played in the past?

Is the deprofessionalization of news a good thing because it furthers the democratic impulse, or a bad thing because newsroom budgets are being slashed and if we lose professional journalism, we lose one of the most important balances against runaway government and corporate power?

As AOL prepares to swallow Huffington Post, these questions were much discussed at the National Conference on Media Reform, held in Boston in April, 2011. And since I’ve been both a journalist and a blogger, I’m paying attention.

Traditional journalism platforms can convey legitimacy to bloggers who partner with them, and at the same time make the stodgy and distant institution of a mainstream newspaper much more accessible and contemporary.

The Seattle Times, for example, partners with 39 bloggers. Without promoting or even announcing the partnership at all, the paper surveyed its readers about these partnerships, and found that:

  • 84% valued the partnership
  • 78% valued the Times for the connection
  • 52% improved opinion of seattletimes.com

Perhaps most remarkable of all, out of more than 900 responses, 324 wrote long open-ended replies; being heard about these relationships mattered enough to them that they took significant time to sound off.

According to David Cohn of Spot.Us, a site that allows journalists to solicit funding for specific investigative reporting projects, tapping the community can provide resources that couldn’t exist without crowdsourcing. For example, the Guardian, a well-regarded British newspaper with a strong investigative history, divided up the analysis of a large and complex document to 1000 different volunteers, each taking on a single page.

This has obvious efficiencies in analyzing a document that’s too big for normal channels; most journalistic organizations can’t devote a single reporter to something so resource-intensive.

But what could get lost with this wonderful collaborative process is the big picture. I think of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein slogging through the evidence that eventually forced Richard Nixon from the presidency of the United States, fitting together the pieces of a complex puzzle. Who can put these pieces together in the crowdsourced model?

And what happens to the world of journalism when the journalists performing primary research see their funding wither away, and thus no longer provide the raw material that bloggers often depend on for their reportage?

One answer may be provided by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, https://necir-bu.org. Under the auspices of Boston University and fueled largely by free student labor, the center claims to be the only New England news organization with an ongoing commitment to investigative reporting outside of the Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team. The institute promises its paid subscribers at least one new investigative news story every month, and also raises revenue with a certificate program in investigative journalism, aimed largely at training bloggers.

But not every journalism resource has the luxury of an unpaid labor force. When newsrooms cut back on both salaries and investigative resources in favor of cheaper infotainment like reality TV, how will we get our news?

 

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Democracy, Diversity, Ethics in Government, National Conference on Media Reform, People Helping People, Politics, poverty Tagged with , , , , , ,

By Shel Horowitz, GreenAndProfitable.com

Michael Copps: There’s no larger question in the US right now than how do we get the media back?

We started out in 2002, 03, opposing Michael Powell’s plan to loosen media ownership rules. I said the people have a real interest in this, and thanks to FreePress and other groups, three million people contacted the FCC. We’ve conducted some good holding actions, but it’s time to win the battle.

The real question is, shouldn’t consumers be deciding where they want to go and what they want to do online, and that’s what Net Neutrality is about.

We’ve lost a lot of public interest territory over the years, and you don’t get that back an inch at a time.

How do we ensure that everyone has access to broadband? It’s the future of democracy. The facts are gone; the investigative journalism is gone. Thousands of journalists no longer walk the beat. How many facts are buried so deep that the few journalists left can’t find them? Let’s have the data. I have watched the evisceration of the public interest all of these years. I think it’s the most important issue facing the country. The resolution of all of those other issues rides on how they are depicted by the media—and if the facts are told to the American people so they can make a decision. You can’t get that from the starvation diet, the journalism lite that we get from the traditional newsrooms now.

We should bring back a licensing regimen where the public interest is actually included. Where the public interest controls. Where the localism, the news of our various communities, is actually covered. Where minorities are not caricatured but their real issues are covered. Where we can say, “if you’re not serving your community, we’ll take that license back and give it to someone who will.”

Citizen action can still work. Very few people hold outrageous amounts of power, and control what goes on in this country. But citizen action can still make a difference. Look at women’s rights, labor, minority rights, they all had uphill fight, but they all persevered. It never happens easily. We should rededicate and recommit ourselves, and we can make some real down payments on media democracy in the months ahead. And then we can get real progress in getting media that is of and by and for the people.

 

Mignon Clyburn (former South Carolina State Commissioner and activist)

You reaffirm to me how important it is to fight for parity when I put my head on the chopping block. Remember what people were doing 10 years ago while waiting for flights? Reading a book or staring at the ceiling? Now they’re playing a game with a friend in New Zealand, tweeting, texting, IMing. Count the number of wireless activities next time. I hear about the fast approaching mobile TV and mobile broadband. Wireless availability and ease of use is no longer a fun novelty. It’s an essential part of everyday routines. An overwhelming majority would say they couldn’t live without their cell phones. This is especially true in lower income communities. It may be far more economical to communicate in short text messages than taking up too many voice minutes. Wireless is becoming the choice for students, under 30, families with small discretionary incomes. They are relying on them to find bus arrival times and weather forecasts, and to mange  smoother ways of living. But this ease that many of us take for granted is at risk, for others.

1 in 4 households rely solely on wireless. They’re cutting costs and cutting the cord. Data apps on wireless are far more common in Afro-American and Latino communities, and they take advantage of a much wider array of the data than their white counterparts.

And we must be mindful of the effects of this on the ecosystem. If the costs become prohibitive, we have failed.

Small businesses pay significantly more per user (than big) for wireless.

I am an unlikely candidate for this job.  A non-lawyer from a small, poor, “interesting” state. But I am a person who saw the disconnects, the inequities from the day she was born that minimize the potential in her communities. I know that these technologies, the potential for unlocking the spirit and the hope and desires and the excellence in all of us—we have that potential as commissioners, and you have the potential to not let us get away with anything less than our best.

Response to government shutdown:
Copps: we’re wasting all this time on the high noon shootout when there are all these bigger issues.

Clyburn: A lessons we learned in our household that we can disagree without being disagreeable. We don’t see that in our public spaces and places, and because of that, we’re unable and unwilling to compromise.

Oversight of broadband

Clyburn: We are to ensure a robust telecommunications industry. People expect that when they sign up for a service, that they can access information. We established high-level rules to do just that. They’re not onerous rules. I am comfortable with that direction. At the end of the day, we talk about this consolidation. The majority of Americans have two or fewer Internet providers, and that does not stimulate competition. I’m a substitute for competition.

Copps: Internet users should be very worried, because the Net Neutrality we passed is a partial measure. It does not include wireless telecom and there’s the potential for companies to do mischief. Long-term, we should be more worried. Every new telecom technology starts out as the dawn of an era of openness and freedom, but control gets tighter and tighter. That’s the danger to the future of the Internet, probably the most liberating technology since the printing press, and it’s going down the same road as the rest. We’re talking about keeping this technology free, and not letting a few telecoms put up a toll booth. Of course we have authority to do this. The telecoms convinced previous FCCs to call it information services (not regulatable).

State regulators vs. municipal

Clyburn: There are significant donut holes in this nation. 95% has high-speed access, but that means 14-24 MILLION have no broadband access available. The companies say the economic case can’t be made. So cities and towns should have the flexibility to wire those communities.

Copps: We have a spectrum shortage, we need more for wireless. But that should not translate into taking it from broadcast. We have a democracy crisis in large pat due to the state of our media. Let’s look at how broadcasters are using the people’s spectrum. There’s room for both wireless and broadcast.

What would it take for ATT/TMobile merger to be in the public interest?

Copps: A hell of a lot more than I’ve seen before. We have to say, what about competition? What they’re looking for is deregulated monopoly and I hope that’s not the course of American history.

Clyburn: I look at broadband access as a human rights issue. This is the last opportunity—the TV airwaves are unaffordable and almost unreachable. Those traditional platforms are too expensive. If we let this go, what do we have left? It is the pathway forward.

Copps: I think you can justify access to broadband as a civil right very easily. You’re not going to be a young person who can’t get a job because you can’t apply online. You can’t monitor your kids’ learning, your health. We’re 15th or 20th in the world, and that means all these kids are growing up without that opportunity. You think we’ve got outsourcing now…

License renewals:

We used to have 14 guidelines. I don’t think we need to have that many, but you need an honest-to-god licensing system. I’d have the renewals every three years, and you make a judgment about whether the station is serving the public. And if not, you put them on probation for a year or two, and if not, plenty of other people would like to have access to bandwidth.

Diversity:

Copps: Diversity is one of our mandates, but station ownership doesn’t reflect that diversity. We’ve had a committee that has proposed 70-75 measures we could take. I’ve proposed that we take one of them up each month.

Free Expression:

Clyburn: We have to make space for viewpoints we disagree with. But if we diversify, people have more venues to get their voices across. They get drowned out and we cannot be satisfied with that. We have to push this agency and our lawmakers to be creative thinkers. And the advertisers will follow, and the voices we have problems with become less popular. Speak with your clickers and those voices will be gone.

Copps: I’d like to see the FCC require full disclosure on political advertisements. You hear, “brought to you by Citizens for Spacious Skies and Amber Waves of Grain,” and you don’t know it’s a chemical company.

The FCC is one of many agencies with a revolving door. We should say, for x number of years [former regulators can’t work as industry lobbyists]. It’s the crushing influence of money in Washington.

Clyburn: Reaffirmations that public-private partnerships are the way to go. I am not satisfied about our diversity initiatives. I don’t hear enough southern accents. [race, gender]. The revolving door works both ways. I’m the beneficiary of the expertise of my staffer on mergers, from the outside.

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By Posted on Posted in Demographics/Psychographics, General Commentary, media-general, People Helping People Tagged with , ,

Re-examining the “Media Ecosystem”: Reflections on the National Conference on Media Reform #NCMR11

By Shel Horowitz, GreenAndProfitable.com

 

At the fifth National Conference on Media Reform (NCMR) since 2003, the media landscape was repeatedly described as a rapidly evolving ecosystem—a metaphor I don’t remember at the two previous conferences I attended, in 2005 and 2008.

Looking at the mainstream media, the ecosystem is in tough shape. Massive cutbacks to news resources, a crippling of expensive investigative reporting at the expense of infotainment, rapid dropoffs in newspaper subscribership and ad revenues, and a lot of journalists working for free or almost free are some of the outcomes of massive consolidation and deregulation over the past 30 years or so—combined by a major rightward shift in the politics of media owners that is reflected in the way stories are covered, or if they’re covered at all.

Yes, the Internet is partly responsible. Many people seek out alternative news channels from their local bloggers on up to international outlets like the UK Guardian and Al Jazeera. And people under 30, growing up with computers in the home, never got into the habit of curling up with the morning paper over breakfast. And yes, Craigslist has hurt newspaper classified sections, hard.

But the Internet also made possible the incredible renaissance of alternate media. Anyone can be a publisher or a journalist now, and hundreds of thousands have done so. Many have built strong communities across geographical or interest-group commonalities.

And the collapse of mainstream news was predicted decades ago by George Orwell and Ray Bradbury, among others. The infotainment focus of broadcasters bringing technology to bear in order to dumb down popular culture was clearly laid out in their books, 1984 (published in the 1940s) and Fahrenheit 451 (1950s). The Internet was not even a dream yet.

Although I didn’t go with a press pass this time, I did take extensive notes. Over the next few weeks, I’ll try to pull out some highlights and share them

Shel Horowitz’s latest book is Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green. He writes the Green And Profitable and Green And Practical monthly columns, https://greenandprofitable.com. Permission granted to reprint this post as long as this bio is included and any edits are approved by the author.

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By Posted on Posted in Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , ,

I have lived in a housing project of 55,000 people in New York City—so insignificant in the city’s eyes that we didn’t even have a subway stop; we had to bus or walk a mile to one of two different trains, one of which could have easily been extended a mile over Interstate 95. In all, I lived in New York City for about 20 years, including birth to 16. In my early 20s, I lived in four of the five boroughs: Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn.

At the other extreme, for the past 12+ years, I’ve lived on a working farm in a village of about 200 within Hadley, Massachusetts—a town of 4753 people—part of Hampshire County, whose 20 “cities” and towns within 545 square miles increased over the past decade to 152,251. (City, as Massachusetts defines it, refers to a municipality administered by a mayor and council rather than Selectboard and Town Meeting, and has nothing to do with population.) And I actually serve on an official town land-use committee, where we wrestle constantly with shaping the future of our town.

New York City’s five densely populated boroughs comprise just under 305 square miles, and hold 8,391,881 residents. You could move NYC to my county and still have almost half the land area left —maybe to grow enough food for all those residents. My county has 1/55 as many people as NYC, spread out over 1.78 times as much land.

Between the time I first lived outside of New York, in 1973, and settled in Hampshire County, in 1981, I lived in various cities and towns ranging from under 5000 to 1,688,210. All of these communities can offer sustainability wisdom from which other places can learn—either by doing it right, or by doing it wrong (so much so that I could write a book on this—maybe I will, some day). Here are a few of the insights:

  • Vibrant neighborhoods require mixed use. In every city I’ve ever lived in, the exciting neighborhoods are those where people live, work, play, and shop in close proximity. The best US examples I know are Northampton and Amherst, MA, New York’s Upper West Side and Park Slope, and the Fox Point area of Providence. Much of Europe uses this model, and European cities are highly livable.
  • Car-centered cultures adversely affect quality of life. Strong mass transit usually enhances it. In New York City (where a car is a liability), commuting time on public transit is productive. People read, write, get through their e-mail, walk a few blocks to their destination, and don’t feel like they’ve wasted the time. Sometimes they even build friendships with the people they see every day on their commute. In Hadley, the shopping district is suburban-style, with big malls and strip malls along a state highway. Almost no one lives on that road, and it’s not a place for cultural events, other than movies. While the largest food stores actually do provide chances to hang out a bit with neighbors (all arriving in separate cars), having a brief chat with an acquaintance you run into in the produce aisle is not the same kind of community building as you can get in a cafe or a bookstore.
  • A corollary: planning must take into account the existing transportation patterns. Mass-transit thinking can’t just be grafted onto a car-oriented culture, and car-oriented thinking won’t work in crowded urban areas. Those patterns can change over time, but it’s a slow process.
  • A real community transcends ethnic and cultural differences. My current neighborhood of Hockanum  Village has a number of families that have been on the same land for 200 years or more. Some of them trace their lineage to the Mayflower. The whole neighborhood gets together every year for a Christmas party that attracts former residents from as far as Florida, and sometimes a summer picnic along the river. A few neighbors gather at the local coffee shop for breakfast once a week. I could knock on any door in the neighborhood with a request, and people would try to help me.
  • Cities lend themselves well to centralized renewable energy collection—but this potential to make a big difference in climate change and oil dependency has barely been tapped. Instead, many centrally heated buildings in New York are overheated to the point where tenants need to open windows on cold winter days, and that’s crazy.
  • Cities could supply a significant portion of their own food, but again, this potential is not tapped much.
  • Farmers and gardeners understand the food cycle. They know what it’s like to grow food for themselves, their families, and their livestock. They’ve seen crop failure. They pay close attention to weather patterns. Localism is not a theoretical construct; it’s an everyday reality.
  • Homeowners and farmers notice details and patterns, so, for instance, they anticipate and address maintenance issues before they become failures. They don’t expect anyone else to do things for them, though they might ask for help on a big project. Tenants (especially in urban areas) are much less likely to have this attitude.
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By Posted on Posted in Peace and War, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with

I received a notice today about a photo exhibit of Albanian Muslim rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust—taken by a Jewish photographer, Norman H. Gershman. This rescue took place while the country was under Nazi occupation:

When Hitler’s troops began invading the Balkan States in the early 1940s, Muslims across Albania took an estimated 2,000 Jewish refugees into their homes en masse and welcomed them not as refugees, but as guests.  They disguised these Jews as Muslims, took them to mosque, called them Muslim names, gave them Muslim passports, hid them when they needed to, and then ferried them to inaccessible mountain hamlets.  “In fact, Albania is the only Nazi-occupied country that sheltered Jews,” says Gershman.  The Jewish population in Albania grew by ten-fold during World War II, and it became the only country in occupied Europe to have more Jews at the end of the war than at the beginning.  Records from the International School for Holocaust Studies show that not one Albanian Jew or any of the other thousands of refugees were given up to the Nazis by Albanian Muslims.  “They did this in the name of their religion,” Gershman said.  “They absolutely had no prejudice what so ever.”

If I can manage to get to NYC before January 29, I am so there! I see two key takeaways in this story:

1. Even in the face of unspeakable evil, there will be people who do the right thing, even at great personal risk.

2. This is one of many pieces of historical evidence that Jews and Muslims can coexist, yet another reason to disbelieve the racists on both sides who say such a thing is impossible.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , ,

Nuclear Information and Resource Service reports in a recent newsletter that Congress received 15,000 letters and countless phone calls opposing the inclusion of $8 billion in bailouts (a/k/a “loan guarantees”) for new nuclear plant construction—and that the final interim funding bill to keep the government running did NOT include this boondoggle. The item is not on the NIRS website but you can find the entire newsletter reprinted here.

In other words, the power of an organized populace resulted in a victory, something that’s getting less frequent all the time but is still very much possible. Let’s hope for many more in the coming year.

Do not let anyone try to tell you that nuclear fission is in any way green. It’s an environmental disaster under the best of circumstances, and at its worst, it could make the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico look like a spilled cup of coffee. Here’s a post I wrote some time back that gives some among many reasons to oppose nuclear power (scroll past the feed from this blog).

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