Andrew, our local Sierra Club Chapter director, sent out an email several days ago headed “All Hands on Deck,” urging members to attend the County Board of Supervisors meeting scheduled for Election Day.

It was considering a proposal for a vast and ill-planned subdivision on the Santa Margarita Ranch, the last intact old Spanish Rancho in California, a splendid tract of land just a few miles out of town.  The proposal, which required a 1200 page Environmental Impact Report including the revelation of 10 class one unmitigable negative impacts, had been presented before the Planning Commission a month ago, drawing spirited opposition from neighbors and environmentalists among others.

The Chair of the Commission had pulled a procedural ploy to force a vote after only a couple of hours of hearing, requiring the rest of the Commissioners to either approve or reject the application before considering the Environmental Impact Report in detail.  The majority rejected the plan, but either way, the developer won, since the project could immediately be appealed to the Supervisors.

The current Board majority was recently voted out of office because of their outrageous bias in favor of developers, but still could approve this project in the month before their terms ended and the new, more environmentally friendly board was seated.

The item was placed at the end of the agenda, close to the time that the Board would have to adjourn to allow for the ballots to be counted in the County Building.  Jan dropped me off there around 3:00, on the way to setting up her Election Night party at Linnea’s. I sat in the Chambers and wrote down what I wanted to say.  It turned out that the County Staff’s rebuttal of the Developer’s appeal was so lengthy that the meeting was adjourned before public comment even started, and the hearing was continued until November 18.  But at that point my remarks will have lost their timeliness, so I’m recording them here:

It’s an ironic coincidence that the Board of Supervisors is considering this proposal after many years of controversy on a day that marks the end of an era in our country.

It’s an era that’s been repudiated by most candidates for public office up for election, including both candidates for President.

The era that’s ending is one of private gain over public interest, an era of mortgaging the future assets of our children and grandchildren for the present benefit of the wealthy and well-connected few.

It’s an era of ignoring the consequences of untrammeled economic growth for our immediate environment and our global climate system.

Thankfully that era is coming to conclusion.

The strategy of the appeal in front of you is to get the present Board to act today to overrule the determinations of its own Planning Commission and staff in favor of land developers before the newly elected Board is seated in two months.

This strategy is a desperate effort to avoid the kind of change that the nation, the state and the county are now eager for. This strategy is an effort to allow the loosening hand of the past to retighten its grip on the future.

I ask the Board to reject this backward-looking appeal.  Doing so will allow time for the developers to create a new proposal that will not create ten class-one negative environmental impacts nor require an appeal of staff and Planning Commission findings.

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…)

On Sep 25, 2008, at 10:58 PM, Scott wrote:

SHOCK (Bush) doctrine all over again — good lord, no shame?

I replied:

Yes, but does this perspective now put us in bed with the right wingers that McCain is playing to?

Naomi Klein says:

“What Gingrich’s wish list tells us is that the dumping of private debt into the public coffers is only stage one of the current shock. The second comes when the debt crisis currently being created by this bailout becomes the excuse to privatize social security, lower corporate taxes and cut spending on the poor. A President McCain would embrace these policies willingly.”

But the right wingers now are blocking that dump.  Do they want to force the markets to drop further to increase Shock enough to not only cancel debate but cancel the election?

Is any of this going according to plan, or are the plans off?  Are Cheny and Bush and Paulson being outflanked by their own buddies?

What unthinkables are now being thought?

Please do not vote for a blank check to be provided to Paulson and company.  He and his cohorts are the problem not the solution.  Their insistence on the present emergency and the need for a gift of  700 billion dollars of taxpayer money is the latest and most outrageous example of  “Disaster Capitalism.”  The U.S. Congress has fallen for this before: the Patriot Act, Iraq, the Surge, to our growing regret.

It is your job to check and balance the Executive Branch, especially in cases like this when that branch is attempting an economic coup d’etat.  This amount of taxpayer money could do more good for the economy by being distributed to pay off people’s mortgages and providing them with health insurance rather than being handed over to those carrying out an immense extortion scheme.

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.

Dear Lois,

As my beloved representative in Congress, I beg you not to be stampeded into accepting the swindle proposed by Paulson, Bush and their cronies.  This is pure crisis manipulation, just like 9/11 and the rush to bomb Iraq.

The accompanying article from The Nation is the first sensible proposal I’ve seen on this crisis.  Please join others in Congress to slow down this insane rush to reward the villains and create even more profound and lasting damage.

Sincerely,

Steven

Paulson Bailout Plan a Historic Swindle
by William Greider

Financial-market wise guys, who had been seized with fear, are suddenly drunk with hope. They are rallying explosively because they think they have successfully stampeded Washington into accepting the Wall StreetJournal solution to the crisis: dump it all on the taxpayers. That is the meaning of the massive bailout Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has shopped around Congress. It would relieve the major banks and investment firms of their mountainous rotten assets and make the public swallow their losses–many hundreds of billions, maybe much more. What’s not to like if you are a financial titan threatened with extinction?

If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historicswindle of the American public–all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims. My advice to Washington politicians: Stop, take a deep breath and examine what you are being told to do by so-called “responsible opinion.” If this deal succeeds, I predict it will become a transforming event in American politics–exposing the deep deformities in our democracy and launching a tidal wave of righteous anger and popular rebellion. As I have been saying for several months, this crisis has the potential to bring down one or both political parties, take your choice. (more…)

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

(more…)

Hat’s off to SLO Tribune for some investigative journalism and analysis of a quality rare these days in the mass media or elsewhere.

The McClatchey series on Guantanamo alerts us to the dangers and follies of the secret coup afflicting the judicial systems of the nation, both civilian and military, and exposes the dark heart of the Bush administration.

Closer to home, Bob Cuddy’s article last week on the money spent per vote by candidates for County Supervisor shows how the democratic process has been outsourced to questionable business interests. Whether it’s the low of $18.98 per vote spent by Mecham or the whopping $52.64 spent by Lenthall, almost all that money ends up in the pockets of professional campaign consultants, advertisers and the producers of junk mail. Its encouraging that, as Cuddy says, “money¦cant buy a county supervisor seat,” but until we set reasonable spending limits and public financing of campaigns, it still looks like the elections are for sale.

Sunday morning, Jan and I bade farewell to Middle Village and drove with Peter back to Morningside Heights. He found a parking space near our former apartment at 423 W. 120 St. in front of which sat two little girls selling some of their old books–a nice selection of Berenstain’s Bears to bring home for the grandchildren.

We passed huge construction cranes filling the airspace at the corner of Broadway and on to Earl Hall, the venue for the morning’s programs. Entering the upstairs rotunda we heard the last part of an extraordinary soprano saxophone rendition of “Amazing Grace” closing the memorial celebration for those of the strikers who had died in the last 40 years.

As I stepped inside I remembered this space 38 years ago, filled with paintings, sculptures, photographs, a great inflatable transparent tepee and 180 or so students participating in the three day final-exam festival of performance and ritual that concluded my Pastoral and Utopia class and my University teaching career before we headed for the end of the road in Canada. The poster for that event had been framed by a large Omega, suggesting its apocalyptic overtones but also signifying Ohm, the logo of “The Resistance,” an organization for civil disobedience opposing the draft. In the open-mike session that followed the memorial, Peter spoke earnestly about that group, which preceded and outlasted the Columbia strike–of its assistance to those fleeing the country or going underground, of its sit-ins at draft boards, of its members who went to jail for long periods, of its commitment to non-violence, of the predicament of young males at the time personally oppressed not by sexism but by militarism. (more…)

Saturday morning back in Queens I drove with Peter past immense cemeteries to the center of Middle Village where, since his birth, his mother had bought groceries. The clerks in the small supermarket went out of their way to provide us with empty boxes. These were neighborhood folks, sounding like characters in Mafia movies, and so were the residents of the small tidy row houses sporting American flags we passed on the way back. “Police and firemen mostly,” said Peter, “90% white. I grew up with these people. That’s why I never believed in the working class revolution.”

Jan was still sorting documents upstairs, and there was nothing for me to do till decisions were made about how to dispose of the furnishings. I sat on one of the plastic covered sofas and started reading my signed copy of Busy Dying, Hilton Obenzinger’s delicious new memoir centered on Columbia 68, while Peter conferred with the real estate agent in the dining room.

Meticulously dressed and coiffed, the young man, who also worked as a marriage counselor, had lived down the street all his life and cherished the place. He told Peter that the house could be made beautiful for the virtual tour he’d put online, but suggested gently that some items be cleared. After he left, Peter asked me to help move a bookcase to the basement, and I suggested we put it in the Goodwill room so that no further decision about that item would be required. When he agreed, I knew we were getting somewhere. Within the next two hours the ugly lamps, coffee tables, nylon curtains, artificial ferns, plastic slipcovers were removed, and the original, quaint design of the place emerged, ready for its internet debut. (more…)