An Address to Focus the Nation II Cal Poly
February 5 2009

The words of Bob Dylan’s 1964 anthem, “The Times They Are A Changin'” have never rung truer than during the last few years of apocalyptic uncertainty, threat, and promise. It’s been a period of sudden collapse–from the Twin Towers and the Global financial system to species diversity and climate stability–and of miraculous growth”from the Internet and biological research to community organizations and acceptance of diversity.

Change, when you’re in the middle of it, is mysterious, lacking adequate name or narrative. The package isn’t labeled, the story is still unfolding. In the sixties, before the words “hippy,” and “counterculture” were coined, we referred to our transformations of consciousness simply as “the Movement.” The positive change going on today remains unnamed. In his latest book, Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken calls it “the largest social movement in all of human history.” He claims “noone saw it coming.”

But Hawken is one of the visionaries who have seen what’s coming and have provided it with various names and stories. His earlier books, The Ecology of Commerce, and Natural Capitalism, envisioned the present as one of “Restorative Economy” and “A Second Industrial Revolution.” E. J. Dionne calls it “The Revival of Civil Society,” Thomas Berry, “The Great Work,” David Korten, “The Great Turning.” I’m calling it the Sustainability movement.

One way to make sense of this movement is to place it in historical context.  As I look back at my own story, I remember childhood in the nineteen forties and fifties governed by postwar, coldwar, economic expansion, consumerism, suburbanization, homogenizing TV, and patriarchy. The sixties and seventies rejected all that in favor of peace, community living, spirituality and ecology. The eighties and nineties reacted again, privileging individualism, greed, branding and technology over nature. The new millennium took those tendencies to an extreme and then reversed direction toward where we are now.

Such a pattern of oscillations was characterized by Friedrich Hegel as thesis-antithesis-synthesis. He believed history was driven by the progress of the collective spirit of humanity expressed in science, art, and philosophy. Changes in ideas were then manifested as material progress in technology, economics and politics. Karl Marx famously turned the pattern on its head, claiming that economic arrangements, particularly the flow of financial capital, provided the base that determined the rest, which he called superstructure.

This dialectical pattern can apply today. The movement we call Sustainability seems to synthesize the sometimes unrealistic idealism of the sixties and seventies with the shrewd yet often short-sighted materialism that followed. Sustainability is grounded in science and deals with resources, technology and business, but it’s also grounded in consciousness and deals with morality, aesthetics, and religion. Its trinity of values”Environment, Equity, Economy”can be emblematized not as base and superstructure, but rather as a triangular recycling moebius.

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Back in December Claire got a job in a phone center marketing upgrades to web orders.  To support her efforts at achieving independence and paying rent, we have taken on babysitting for Lucas while she works.  He takes a two to three hour midday nap and otherwise is easy to look after and fun to be with.

We’ve been going to the Singalong at Boo Boo records, a fifteen year institution I happened to hear about last month from a lady in the City Hall Parking Structure elevator. It’s not publicized.

The woman who leads it is named Heidi.  She wears funny glasses and shoes and passes the hat afterward. I dont think BooBoo’s charges for the space.   An underground club scene Wednesdays  10:15 to 10:45 A.M.

I woke up this morning with a cough, stomachache, headache and sore back.  No appointments today except babysitting, and I wanted to see the inauguration.   Jan needed the day to prepare for the long city council meeting tonight.  I decided to stay in bed watching on our snowy, cable-less TV as long as possible.  Claire got here with Lucas during the oath of office.  The baby was happy to sit next to me with his two Thomas train cars, though he kept looking at me anxiously when I cried, before, during and after the speech.

Obama carries the public pain of these last eight years along with the historical pain of African-Americans on light and supple shoulders.  The evocations of Martin Luther King and Lincoln mix with those of Michael Jordan. His language is exquisite. His sternness and smiles overpower me like my father’s when I was two.

What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility – a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

I believe every word of this. But I only feel that satisfaction sometimes, because I know how hard it is to give my all, and I cant always do it.

Last night I finished work on a speech for the Focus the Nation Teach-In on February 5. To juxtapose it with the President’s utterance today is  hybris.  But at various moments while I watched and wept this morning, pieces of it came into my mind and made me both ashamed and proud.

After an hour and a half of igloo building in the deep snow of the front yard, Ethan and I slouched on the sofa with the current issue of Sun Valley Homes magazine I’d purchased for five dollars in Atkinson’s. On the slickest, brightest paper I’d ever seen, it displayed six pages of beautiful photographs of the house around us and reported the story of its design and construction by Joe and Amy. The inside back cover was a full-page picture of Ethan on the skateboard ramp they’d made in the back yard.

We compared the descriptions and pictures to our cozy surroundings, and Ethan recalled the day the reporter and photographer spent with them. Then we leafed through ads for lavish condos and articles about custom-made lamps and hand-carved front doors.  Ethan was struck by the picture of a wooden bas-relief depicting the Garden of Eden with a naked Adam and Eve holding hands surrounded by a menagerie of tame animals. Though he’d spent three years in the Wood River Presbyterian Church pre-school, he apparently had never heard the opening of Genesis, so we put the magazine down, cuddled deeper into the sofa, and I started with “in the beginning.”

After the fourth day, I interrupted the narrative to let him know that I regarded this as a story not the literal truth, though many people thought it actually happened just this way.  He countered that the world had to have been made by somebody. I said maybe so, but there are some folks who think it was made by a big raven, or a turtle or an old woman, and others who think it just is, with no creator, since what created the creator?  He said maybe God just created Himself, and I said, maybe, though that’s hard for me to imagine.

As we got to the sixth day and the animal kingdom, which brought us back to the carved wooden door, I mentioned that the animals were all made in pairs, male and female, and I asked if he knew why.  He said yes, a man and woman get married and then they have children.  And I said yes, and that’s also the way animals have babies and make more animals. So in the beginning, according to the story, God created the animals and then they all created more animals and so did people.

New Year’s morning the rising sun kindled pea vines that grasped the bent bamboo stakes over the vegetable bed.

At 8:45, my teaching partner Jim and student activist friend Eric arrived to join Jan and me for a ride to the Guadalupe Dunes, site of the 25th annual New Years Day hike originated by Bill Denneen and this year organized in his honor by Kara B., San Luis Obispo’s first lady of Land Conservancy.

More than 40 people showed up including 85 year old Bill, son and grandchildren.  The further south we went, the more pristine and dramatic the landscape, low dunes giving way to taller ones sloping steeply down to the ocean, gradually revealing longer stretches of coast and Coast Mountains, the small human settlements in appropriate proportion to the immense land, sea and sky.

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For the last six years Jan and I have flown to Idaho on December 25 in order to celebrate the holiday with both the San Luis Obispo branch of the family on Christmas Eve and with the Ketchum children and grandchildren on Christmas Day.  This year, back in September, we decided not to make the trip until after the first week in January, to allow ourselves some down-time at home and save money on air fare.  This meant that both of us would be absent when our colleagues were getting back to work.  I had to schedule the first meeting of the Sustainability Faculty Colloquium at Cal Poly the Friday before the first meeting of classes, and Jan has to miss a community workshop on budget priorities”though no City Council meetings.

I felt a duty to use the time as intended–for contact with friends and family”but neglected to plan for that. Nevertheless it so happened. Claire started a full-time job at the beginning of December and I became the primary daycare provider for twenty month old Lucas.

We went on hikes along up Stenner road to gather rocks for the border of a new vegetable bed and pine cones for the fireplace. We went to see the calves at the Dairy and the aqueduct excavations and the sheep at Cheda Ranch. We took a birding expedition with Johanna at Oso Flaco lake.  His long midday naps and the morning hours before his arrival gave me time for work. Even up and around in the house he made few demands.

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When the house of cards started to fall in September, I tripled the size of my vegetable patch and ordered the movie “Wall Street” from Netflix. It had made an impression that stayed in my porous memory since I saw it twenty years ago, and I had a hunch it would shed some light on the present from a long perspective. Netflix said it wasnt available–the first time that’s happened–and I couldnt find it in any local video store. Yesterday morning it finally arrived. Jan said she’d mentioned that to the City Manager at the afternoon holiday party, and he told her he’d also been looking for the film and been puzzled by its unavailability. Another sign of the times.

Rather than write holiday cards as planned, we watched it in bed and drank whiskey. I wasnt disappointed. “Greed is good,” proclaims Gordon Gecko, the ruthless stock trader who gets his comeuppance at the end. That growling grasping creed has epitomized the mainstream values of American culture in the era starting with Reagan’s election in 1980, just after we returned from Canada, and now catastrophically concluding. The film’s economic analysis and social criticism are as simplistic as Naomi Klein’s in The Shock Doctrine, but it nevertheless captures the emotions I feel whenever see the ads for golf resorts and fancy hotels in airline magazines, the New York Times “Styles” section, the pounds of throwaway newsprint on my driveway every morning.

Repeatedly we are told that the crisis around us is caused by depressed demand for stuff, that Christmas has been spoiled by not enough buying, and that public wealth has to be funneled into the economy to promote consumption of junk. I think this idea originates in the Gecko view of the world. The film sets it against the position of Carl Fox, the father of “Bud,” the young protagonist who worships Gecko. A capable machinist and union steward, Carl despises the whole culture of Wall Street finance–the “Rulers of the Universe”–who neither produce nor create but use their talent to parasitise those who generate society’s real wealth. When I heard recently that CitiCorps is putting 55,000 people out of work, I experienced compassion for these  folks–most of them I’m sure no more greedy than average–but I also felt that this downsizing will benefit everyone in the long run.

It was startling to discover at the beginning of the film that it was made by Oliver Stone and even more startling to read the dedication at the end to his father, whom he identified as a stockbroker.  That adds to the richness of the parallel father-son relationships in the film–Bud and Carl, Bud and Gordon–reminding me of Shakespeare’s Prince Hal and his two fathers Henry Bolingbroke and Falstaff.  And it motivates me to see Stone’s latest production, W.

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.

I’m sitting in Reddy (our red Prius, which says “READY” on the control panel before you can start moving) in Steve Caldwell’s driveway, waiting for Ellen to complete the three hour bowel protocol she performs on him three mornings a week.

I’ve just spent two hours in the Starbucks around the corner drinking coffee, using their wireless to read the news, answer email from Nepal, Canada, Lund, San Luis Obispo and L.A., and upload a set of pictures of the hike with Ian’s school I led through the “Grand Canyon of San Luis Creek” just before leaving on this adventure.

My glimpse of him lying on the bed on his side naked below the waist reading a paperback while she carried a basin of foamy liquid with an unmistakeable whiff  toward the bathroom was all it took to make me say, “I’ll wait outside and let you finish your business.”  I don’t mind undressing under a towel at the beach or changing the baby’s diapers, but Steve has repeatedly exposed my true squeamishness.  His written descriptions of the miracle of sex and masturbation he experienced as a quadiplegic in his unpublished books pushed my head aside, and even though we’ve corresponded at length about the books, this is a theme I try to avoid.  He asked me to proofread his forthcoming review of “Private Dicks,” an HBO documentary about men talking about their sexuality.  It’s a terrific piece of writing, but I have trouble uttering its apt title, “Speaking of my Penis.”  This, despite the fact that the topic has been no less primary a concern in my life than in his, or than in the lives of the film’s many subjects.

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