Jan was sworn in, along with her ally John and old Mayor Dave, the first day of December–accompanied by fanfare and applause from her supporters.

I attended with Ian and Lucas.

Their first Council meeting took place the next night, and it erupted into what’s as close as it’s gotten in this town to mayhem at City Hall.

The issue was the construction of a parking lot for the senior center—a pet project of the mayor’s approved by the previous council majority and opposed by an agitated group of residents, mostly those who live nearby, but also others who object out of budgetary and environmental concerns.  Why pave over space that an earlier general plan designated for a community garden, especially since the paving would threaten the life of the largest heritage tree in the city.  Jan had taken a strong position opposed to the lot in her campaign, but it turns out that John supported it.  At the meeting he apparently lost his cool and attacked her.  She responded appropriately

and the newspaper took her side.

The same day in the morning I heard from Walt at the Center for Teaching and Learning that my June proposal for a Sustainability Book Club would be funded and publicized.

Claire is holding her new job in telephone sales and we have started to babysit Lucas while she’s at the office full time.  Lucas idolizes his older brother Ian and Ian is loving and patient with him.

I got an Ipod Shuffle for $49 and use it to practice Spanish while cleaning, babysitting and driving.  I’ve had some misgivings about the plan to go Colombia in February, but an email exchange with Jimmy, my high school friend who found me through this blog, inviting me to stay with his family in Bogota has strengthened my resolve to carry through.  Whenever I got away from the tourist areas in the Yucatan while we were there this summer for the wedding of our niece, I was entranced by the language and local people.  And the effort to learn a new language is taking on the challenge of my growing short-term memory deficits.

Wednesday I was on my way to the public library with Lucas, when a mother and three year-old in the garage elevator asked if we were going to Boo-boo Records for the weekly sing along.  I’d never heard of it.  Outside the store one could hear loud childrens’ voices and clapping.  There was hardly room to sit on the floor in the large back room where a woman in funny honkers, bright red lipstick and black shoes and stockings was leading a wild chorus of singing and dancing to Raffi’s “Baby Beluga.” None of the kids were older than three. I cant wait for next Wednesday.

That evening Jan and I attended an event at Steynberg Gallery hosted by our local Sierra Club.  Chad and Nancy, two students active in Focus the Nation,  gave a presentation about state and local government climate initiatives. Our new City Council members John and Jan both were invited to speak, as was one other Council Member. But like the 60 odd activists who also attended, they were there more to listen and to brainstorm about the policy specifics that have been set in motion by AB 32, the epochal legislation signed by the governor two years ago, and about another bill AB 117, which allows communities to buy electricity from anyone who produces the kind of green power that must replace CO2-creating sources instead from PG and E.  These two bills point the way to transformative rather than symbolic action and mere words.  The atmosphere was electric.  Real education taking place, and conducted by the students for professors.

Seven liberal arts faculty colleagues have expressed interest in my Culture of Sustainability panel for February 5. I’ve been doing some research for the overview I hope to present.  I may start with the subtitle from Paul Hawken’s new book, Blessed Unrest: “How the largest movement in the world came into being and no one saw it coming,” and then try to define that movement, trace some of its history back to the sixties, outline prominent strains—in higher education, the arts, film and media, eating, consumption, transportation, and generational identity–and to close with a display of paradigmatic examples: AASHE, Andy Revkin of the NYTimes, David Orr, Orion Magazine, the Santa Lucian, and Buddy Stein’s Hunts Point Express.

Kevin, my long lost former student and friend, checked in by email Thursday announcing that he’s found a tenure track job teaching writing in L.A. He hadn’t stayed in touch for years, he said, because he was waiting for news like this to relate.  We hope to meet later this month for an overnight hike and campout.  I had talked wistfully about him with Joe, his former classmate and fellow performer in our crazy Shakespeare productions, when he came by for the evening two weeks ago on a visit from London, where he works as the librarian in the British National Portrait Gallery.

I’ve been dithering around with holiday cards for weeks—first scouring the web for the best deal on sites allowing you to upload your own photos and order printed cards and then having to send back the product because the color was so poor, then going to kinkos to see if they could come up with a decent print, then buying ink for my printer to try to do this at home and discovering the printer wasn’t working right and finally settling upon Staples, where they did a fine job at an excellent price.  I finished the cutting and pasting and now have 125 cards with two pictures selected from the 2500 I’ve kept during the last year.

They’re ready for Jan to address with the labels she prints, and together we will sit in the evenings and write in them to people we feel close to yet may never see again.  I’ve become addicted to this holiday card ritual as resistance to shopping frenzy and other excesses of the season, as instanced in the letter to the editor I sent yesterday:

Somehow the sight of hundreds of thousands of incandescent bulbs imported from China obscuring the stars and squandering energy fails to kindle the holiday spirit in me.  The day your Sunday edition glorified this spectacle of waste and bad taste brought the news that “Carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous dioxide concentrations reached record levels in the atmosphere in 2007, according to the World Meteorological Organization. CO2 levels now stand at 383.1 parts per million, well past the 350 ppm level scientists believe is the safe upper limit beyond which global warming will destabilize Earth’s delicate climate and lead to rising sea levels, extreme storms, heatwaves and droughts.”

Friday night was the Holiday parade featuring the members of the City Council and their families waving to the crowd from the rear balcony of the ersatz Trolley that takes tourists from the hotel districts to the downtown. Ian brought Talia, his friend from school, to our house for a play date in the afternoon, joining Lucas in the living room. I cooked dinner and lit the Friday night candles, and then we all headed downtown for the festivities.

Afterwards Claire came by for a sleepover with her two boys. 

I’ve taken on a real project: to organize a panel for Focus the Nation II on this topic, getting together some people from the College of Liberal Arts to contribute to the effort that’s moving forward elsewhere in the University.  I’m committed to make my own presentation–a definition of what this grandiose term means, a survey of what the Humanities have to offer.

I’ve started gathering ideas and assembling links from the AASHE website, but I’m having trouble continuing, even though I woke up at 4 AM with the need to get going.  How to stay on track, keep up the momentum, when first the economic crisis, and as of two days ago, the mayhem in India suddenly intrude?  I’d thought the election would get us back on track, but now the right of way seems to have been blown up.

I’ll take a walk in the dark.

Went up Buena Vista and then cut over past the water tank to a game trail on the east end of Poly Mountain. Huffed to the top as as day dawned, less breathless than expected.  Light and vegetation both unexciting. But as I looked for a trail to descend through the two year old burn, I saw movement in the brown grass.  A coyote loping silently on one path, and then another following and then doubling back, accelerating to a soft silent gallop.

Then between them a good sized doe bouncing up from the chapparal to the grassland directly below me.  For a short while I could see all three animals from above: the dance of predation.  Then the second coyote was lost in the oak woodland, and soon after the deer headed off in the same direction and disappeared into chapparal to my left, and the first animal that had come into view took off toward the west.

I took many pictures, but without the telephoto knew that they wouldnt show much. You can see the coyotes only in the larger versions found by clicking on these.

As I came back down the game trail, the clay neither hard dry nor sticky wet, just moist enough to be springy, the sun topped East Cuesta Ridge.

A time of waiting.

The email Jan sent this morning to all the people who aided in her campaign:

Thank you for all your hard work on my campaign.  All precincts have been walked, all signs posted, all letters to the editor published, all events beautifully hosted and productive, and all campaign materials distributed. We have all done our level best, and win or lose, deserve to take a bow. See you tonight at Linnea’s 8-11!

Gratefully yours,

Jan

Sunday morning I got a call from Megan, one of the students I’ve worked with on Focus the Nation at Cal Poly for the past year.  She was in Las Vegas walking precincts to get out the vote for Obama but wanted to let me know that she’d found a couple more volunteers to talk to residents and distribute flyers in student residences for Jan.  Cassidy biked over on Sunday and took a couple of hundred and spent three and a half hours canvassing Sunday night, and Tyler biked over yesterday and took 150 to pass out in Mustang Village before his 2pm class. (more…)

Hi Guys

The race in Nevada was great.  Desert.

here’s a link to the sustainability conference coming up in SV: http://www.sunvalleysustainability.org/sus_tour.php (scroll down to fifth item)
Our spec is on the tour.

If you get a chance to go to Barnes and Noble see if they have a copy of Sun Valley Home.  Our house and family is in the latest issue.  Check the last page. http://www.sunvalleymag.com/Sun-Valley-Home-and-Design/Fall-2008/Urban-Urbane/index.php?cp=2&si=1#artanc

I hope the campaign will be followed by champagne.

Love,  JOE

One email, two links.  Our son, age 37, has earned professional fame and recognition.  He’s become an architect without architecture school. The author of the article in Sun Valley Home and Design Magazine calls the staircase he created “an almost transparent work of art.”

Though still an off-road motorcyclist, he’s become a green builder. His blurb at the Sun Valley Sustainabiity Conference tour says, “We are treating LEED as a necessary component of responsible development, not an expensive additional feature.” He builds “relatively modest” homes in one of the world’s most exclusive locations.

Though still one of the boys, he’s a family man.  The magazine article brings honor to his wife and children.  And through a June article in the Idaho Statesman featuring him as outdoorsman on a backpacking trip, he brought honor to his son, his nephew and his dad.

An Address to the Estero Bay United Methodist Church
October 19 2008

Introduction

Thank you for inviting me here to speak today. I’m honored to be part of your series on Religion and the Environment.

I’ve taught courses at Cal Poly on Environmental Literature and on the Bible as Literature and in Literature. This is a place where those topics converge.

Two Books: Scripture and Nature

There’s a powerful idea set forth in the writings of St. Augustine and earlier, that God created the universe as two books: the book of Scripture and the book of Nature. Scripture and Nature are both expressions of God’s word; both are intelligible codes that decipher and reinforce one another. This idea of the two books has been propounded by thinkers who attempt to reconcile theology and science, from St. Thomas Aquinas in the twelfth century and Galileo in the seventeenth, to present day exponents of creationism and intelligent design.

But rather than as philosophy or theology, I’d like to explore the idea of the two books as a poetic metaphor—a figure of speech that stimulates the imagination. Here it is elaborated in Psalm 19:

The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they display knowledge.
There is no speech or language
where their voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.
In the heavens he has pitched a tent for the sun,
which is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion,
like a champion rejoicing to run his course.

The statement that the heavens express the greatness of God includes an enthusiastic outpouring of figurative descriptions of the sun: it’s a bridegroom before or after consummating his love, it’s a race horse in action. These go beyond just elaborating the point about God. With sound effects and imagery they awaken the experience of the sun’s brilliance and energy in the reader’s mind. Both nature and the author of scripture are exuberant poets. Both the world and the word are books of poetry.

A close look at its language as poetry illuminates the first chapter of the Bible, Genesis 1. It chronicles the process of the creation as an orderly, intelligible, symmetric, and progressively more complex sequence of steps, each building upon the previous one.

And it characterizes the process as the creative effort of a poet:

the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.”

The creator starts with a dark confusion over which he hovers tentatively, gathering his wits, perhaps waiting for inspiration. Then he finds words, then he utters words, then he materializes the words, then he evaluates the outcome, then he names his first creation like the title, or a section of a larger structure.

Genesis dramatizes the work of the creator in carrying out this process: it is deeply satisfying. He regards each of his accomplishments separately as “good,” and at the conclusion of the whole process, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” The effort is also depicted as tiring. “By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work.”

The language of the narrative draws attention to itself, becoming more expansive and lyrical as the story proceeds from the 48 sparse words of the first day, which differentiate light and darkness, to the sixth day’s 260-word description of the ecological web of relationships among all living creatures. Yet it also retains a uniform pattern of meter and parallelism to emphasize the coherence between the parts and the whole.

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Yesterday was the equinox.  I planted lettuce mix in the shadiest corner of the new vegetable bed I built next to the deck, with Chris’ help.  We dismantled the ziggurat on the top of the hill I constructed out of railroad ties to get additional materials for this and the two additional beds I’ll put in just below it.  Doing this physical work is an antidote for my growing sense of personal futility stemming from:

• the less than erratic progress of the Cal Poly sustainability projects I’m involved with
• my inability to get adequate mastery of SC accounting and fundraising
• the demands of Jan’s electoral campaign, even though I’m not taking any real responsibility and just doing support work
• several weeks of computer foulups
• the impending doom of one more stage of takeover of the country by a syndicate of mafiosi–this time the Wall Street crooks commanded by Paulson and Bernanke. What’s been going on this week is a sequel to the hair-raising horror story by Naomi Klein I’ve been reading for the last month: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Days to germination: 7-10

Days to Harvest: 40-60

This planting is about hope and the illusion that I can do something to provide for our needs outside the collapsing system.

The terrace for the beds next to the front deck is the only place on this north-facing lot that gets enough sun to grow any vegetables.  I put in the first bed to grow cherry tomatoes when I took out the ivy and first built the ziggurat. Here’s Ian getting into them six years ago:

Basil and lettuce and snow peas and chard have done fine.  Pole beans and squash and peppers not very well because of the lack of sun.  I put in another bed after extending the terrace with fill from the excavation of Jan’s office extension two years ago. But I never properly leveled or fastened the railroad ties, and lately they started separating as a result of the ground settling and soil expansion with watering. I pounded in fence posts to stabilize them temporarily, but that fix didnt work and looked terrible.  I got sloppy about planting and watering and harvesting, so for the last few months, all that remained was a patch of chard that I wouldnt even bother to harvest.  I also refused to water the gardens all summer to see how far they could be stressed.  The front didnt look that bad, a range of dry colors and textures offset by the brilliance of the California Fuschia.  But the back hill looks wasted, in the side yard the fifteen foot redwood died, and cobwebs covered plants and every nook and cranny of the house, many of them around the front door. While precinct walking I’ve noticed how sad those cobwebs look on other people’s places.

So cleaning them up and reviving the garden and planting vegetables is serving as my bailout. Today I put in spinach and trimmed the carex in the side yard and started watering it and the strawberries and the remaining redwood and the dried up Fremont Iris and the Yerba Buena.  Tomorrow I’ll complete the planting with Arugula.  I’m heartened by the survival of the chard.  I’d transplanted it to the lower bed while demolishing the top one and then two weeks later retransplanted it back.  With regular watering during the interval, it produced enough fresh leaves to supply the main dish for supper last night.

I wanted to stay focussed on the pure pleasure of placing those seeds in the soil–this activity being the goal of much preparation–but it wasnt easy to stay in the present.  I tried to revere those little bundles of promise and and ask for their blessing.

A Presentation to the UC/CSU/CCC Sustainability Conference
July 31-August 3 2008

Introduction

Ecocomposition is a new subfield in teaching English.*

I’m motivated to practise Ecocomposition by two principles, the first enunciated by David Orr in 1994: “All education is environmental education,” the second by George Orwell in 1946: “When I sit down to write …, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write … because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”

An essential element of Ecocomposition is local knowledge–engagement with one’s own particular place and time. Preparation for Ecocomposition requires teachers to be interested in their surroundings—the academic institution as not an ivory tower, but rather a physical, economic and political entity in history, situated on the land and in the community.

In keeping with these principles I’ll talk about Ecocomposition locally rather than abstractly: my experience of teaching it during the last three years here at Cal Poly.

In 2005, as the environmental crisis deepened and the Sustainability movement grew, I thought I could make an impact by reaching first year students and by framing the subject matter in the context of rhetoric—that is, the power of persuasion. So I designed a section of our first quarter required English composition course and called it Writing About Place

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Eban

Here’s a sample of the kind of responses we’ve received
____

To the organizers of Focus the Nation:

I just wanted to congratulate all of you who worked so long and hard to put together the Focus the Nation event. I must say that in the 25 years I have been at Cal Poly, this was the most impressive, relevant, important, professional, and well coordinated student run event I have ever seen on our campus. You are all to be congratulated for an amazing job – the energy and passion you brought to the event was truly inspiring. Thank you for advancing the message of sustainability to our faculty, staff, students, community, and political leaders. And thank you for the opportunity to participate and share some of the things going on within Facility Services. Kudos!

Thanks,
Dennis
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I want, personally, to pass on some of this gratitude to you.

The first time I encountered you was in the elevator in the motel across the street from ASU November 2006. It was late at night and you were pulling your suitcase. No words were exchanged but I got a sense of being in presence of a furious intensity that made me both curious and uncomfortable. When I heard you introduce Focus the Nation at the AASHE conference the next day, I got it. That suitcase was carrying a time bomb of an idea. Of all the enlightening and inspiring material shared at the conference and the energy it stirred up, yours was the only outlet, the only immediate action item. At the organizing meeting you called afterwards, I had mixed feelings. I wished that you had offered more to rely on: financial backing, a staff, a sense of irresistible power like David Orr or Ray Anderson’s, but instead it was only a perfect name, a practical idea, and an agonized personal urgency that said you were going to give all you had to make it happen. The rest was up to us. From the small-scale experiences I’ve had of starting things up and getting people going, I recognized that this was what it takes.

Over the intervening months, my confidence in the progress of the project lagged, but my sense that it was the right thing to do didnt falter. After returning from Las Vegas with our Cal Poly delegation, the sense that it was up to us was even stronger. Regardless of what happened nationally, we were going to make it happen at Cal Poly. We presented the idea first to a group of faculty who said yes, came to a few meetings and drifted off. At the same time Chad and Matt, the two students who were in Las Vegas, decided to take more initiative. They invited their friends and took over calling and planning meetings. They got it: this is about action, not deliberation. The claim that to me seemed a bit overblown–”the largest teach-in in American history”–became their warcry. They were going to add a job fair, poetry slam, rockband, carshow, art exhibit, expensive dinner for decision makers, zero waste organic lunch, landscape installation. I offered some practical suggestions of who, how, and where, got early necessary arrangements out of the way, and urged the necessity for organizing strategy and program design. As a last resort we opted for sticking as close as possible to the exact models that you had devised. As we followed them in succeeding months, my appreciation steadily grew. At a certain point, I realized that you had this figured out to a T from day one.

In late Fall 2007, the national organization started looking more substantial, despite the absence of any serious media presence. But the idea that we could get a significant number of political figures involved seemed a pipe dream, let alone have any influence over the presidential primaries. Though our congresswoman Lois Capps was amenable, and so were local officials, where were the big endorsements? By the time they started flooding in, after the New Year, we neither expected nor needed them. But the unexpected flurry of national support toward the end must have been incubating for a long time, and I suspected that behind the scenes you’d been making it happen all along. That surge elevated the last stages of organizing to a level of joyful confidence that I never dreamed of when we first started.

Where this will go next remains to be seen. But I now have an easy confidence that you will lead it there.