Can't Learn Less

Growth, Development, And The Urgent Need For a Better Way

2011-11-13T08:23:00.000-06:00

In Beyond the Limits, the twenty-year sequel to The Limits to Growth, the researchers make a distinction between development and growth, and write:

In the rich world, economic growth is believed to be necessary for employment, social mobility, and technical advance. In the poor world, economic growth seems to be the only way out of poverty. And a poor family sees that many children can be a source not only of joy, but also of hope for economic security. Until other solutions are found for the legitimate pproblems of the world, people will cling to the idea that growth is the key to a better future, and they will do all they can to produce more growth.

We should recognize that there's a certain amount of hurry-up involved too.

Beginning Beyond The Limits

2011-11-10T10:42:00.000-06:00

In 1972's The Limits to Growth, the authors made a case that, if trends in resource use, population, pollution, industrial and agricultural production continued, the world would reach its limits to growth within a century. They also showed that it would be possible to avoid this catastrophe, and that doing so would be easier the earlier the world began.

Here's a paragraph from the 1992 sequel, Beyond the Limits:

But until we started updating The Limits to Growth we had not let our minds fully absorb the message. The human world is beyond its limits. The present way of doing things is unsustainable. The future, to be viable at all, must be one of drawing back, easing down, healing. Poverty cannot be ended by indefinite material growth; it will have to be addressed while the material human economy contracts. Like everyone else, we didn't really want to come to these conclusions.

Eco-Village, Neologism, And Artifact Ecology

2011-11-02T13:24:00.000-05:00

Steve, my chief partner in writing the eco-village operating manual may have found a location.

I went to look at photovoltaic setups with neighbor, Joe Hesla, who asked me if I were planning on moving to the eco-village. I said that our neighborhood was my eco-village.

Steve likes to make up words and phrases. I believe English teachers call made-up vocabulary "neologisms." They are often Latin compounds. Steve usually makes his from scratch. His often seem to duplicate existing words, although Steve might feel that they remove some distasteful accidental meaning or emphasize something that isn't in the conventional word. "Woma" is a case in point. It really means the same thing as "woman," a mature female member of our species. The emphasis for Steve is sexual maturity, although I don't know why removing the en shows that. Inadvertently, or otherwise, it also removes the implication that a woman is a man with a womb.

One phrase of Steve's that everybody ought to adopt is artifact ecology. In artifact ecology, we consider the various materials and processes we use in providing ourselves with some means of survival or culture. Resource use, pollution, effect on community, benefit are all considered for -- say -- a person web logging.

George Papandreou And The Limits To Growth

2011-11-01T18:02:00.000-05:00

Here's a 2500 year old Greek bronze discovered in the sea the same year, 1972, that The Limits to Growth was published.

LTG was the popular summary of an MIT study that modeled the interactions between population, food production, industrialization, pollution, and non-renewable resources in the world economy. There were about a hundred variables, and the researchers were looking to see what would make the system grow, collapse, or oscillate.

St. Paul native, and Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou has called for a referendum on his country's proposed European bailout. The trade is austerity for 110 billion Euros. Service contributes 78.8% of GDP, and the public sector accounts for 40% of jobs. Oops.

If anything can save us, it probably won't come from public policy, but maybe a country with a severely straitened economy could afford to tell the industrial economy to "Take a hike. We're going to see how many of us can keep eating."

Caged Hazel

2011-10-29T16:23:00.000-05:00

Two year-old hazel, caged for winter. I lost half of my ten hazels last winter, and all ten of their predecessors. I don't understand, because deer are supposed to think they taste awful. I'm not taking any chances with the rabbits and mice this year. Notice the lid. The bit of silver immediately above is the caged Rabella.

Phone Conversation With Steve

2011-10-29T16:15:00.000-05:00

Nice phone conversation with Steve last night about eco-village project, and general premises. Good communication. Sent him a copy of the current version of the Intro and outline for the Operating Manual.

Left voice mail message for Noel about TC Daily Planet story.

Winterizing The Rabella

2011-10-29T16:12:00.000-05:00

Mellow late-October afternoon, first-season espaliered Rabella apple on dwarfing rootstock. Two three by three-and-a-half foot sheets of half-inch hardware cloth, spread with a piece of light lumber and stitched together with baling wire. Tried to anchor the cage with staples made from wire clothes hangers, but couldn't get a good grip on the ground. Scraped a groove with a garden trowel, and buried the bottom with dirt from a harvested potato tower to exclude mice.

Winterizing My Apple Trees

2011-10-28T15:25:00.000-05:00

Two apple trees, planted about a yard apart. "Freedom" on the left and "Liberty" on the right, purchased from St. Lawrence Nursery in Pottsdam, NY. The names claim freedom and liberty from disease. A couple of big, permaculture orchards I know have had good luck with them. They are not on dwarfing rootstock, and I'm expecting to have to prune them to keep them at a scale that's reasonable for their site. I plan to graft branches between them, Freedom to Liberty, to form a ladder, and train other branches to a single goblet shape.

The top photo shows the trunks wrapped with "Tree Wrap," two inch-wide paper, to protect the bark from winter cold and temperature changes. In the bottom photo, they're caged with hardware cloth to keep snow-tunneling mice from gnawing them to death.

I will do something similar with my hazel bushes, whose predecessors were victims of predator bunnies, and an espaliered Rabella apple, as well as several more established, but still young fruit trees.

Landmark Forum, Breakdown-To-Breakthrough, Eco-Village Breakdown

2011-10-26T10:22:00.000-05:00

Tuesday night was the last night of the Landmark Forum. Most of us brought guests. I didn't. Barbara was specifically not interested, and I didn't invite Sam, having made an executive decision that he should save his five hundred bucks.

Not a whole lot new. For the most part the affair was a sales presentation for the guests. It was an accurate presentation, and the guests received useful information, gratis. The value I got from the evening was a refresher of something I'd missed:

Landmark calls times when you're frustrated "breakdowns," and talks about how to turn them into "breakthroughs."

The way you do this is to work from the commitment the frustration highlights. The commitment's the important thing, and you need to act in some new way to further your commitment.

On the eco-village front, I've had a breakdown communicating with my colleagues. They are way under-capitalized (read "real broke"), and one way this manifests is e-mail accounts but no computers, pager accounts and balky voice mail, but no phones.

Breakthrough will come from initiative, persistence and creativity on my part. Use of the USPS? Regular, expected, calls to the voice mail? Regular, scheduled, meetings?

Maybe finding phones, computers and internet connections will be the ultimate answer. This will require funding, and I'm not that flush myself. A benefactor will want to believe we're capable of something beyond what little we've done so far. The Daily Planet story will help, as will production of the manual I've begun and that we will write. I've encouraged Steve to get together with the community garden in his neighborhood, so as to establish a track record.

Eco-Village.

2011-10-25T16:59:00.001-05:00

I've known a guy, Steve, for about fifteen years. He's passionate about peak oil. He's also a client of the mental health system, and lives on a disability stipend. Something brilliant about him is his idea that an eco-village would be a good home for marginalized people like himself.

I have been helping him and two of his friends. We got together to prep for an interview that Steve had landed with a public affairs program on KFAI, the local community radio station. We're also working on a story we plan to submit to Twin Cities Daily Planet.

I'm working on an operating manual for the eco-village. My winter project. The technologies and lifestyle I'll describe in it are ones that I want to promote, but as a retired bus driver, I really don't have standing to be heard. The beautiful, ironic thing about Steve and his friends is that these marginal guys have standing. These confused social dependents want to live ecologically. Creating and building this way of life would demand a level of initiative and self reliance from outcasts that few normal folk show.

Landmark Forum

2011-10-25T16:37:00.000-05:00

I complete the Landmark forum tonight. It's a seminar to help me be more effective. The thing that it's left me with is a better self-bullshit detector. Part of my bullshit -- they call it "rackets" -- is being unenergetic about the things that I want to pursue.

Planting Daffodils

2011-09-30T00:48:00.000-05:00

We planted a hundred daffodil bulbs Wednesday. Daffodils are the first fairly large flower of the spring, and it felt as though we were making an offering to the gods of pollination.

Bateson Metalogue Impinges on Life

2011-09-07T15:53:00.000-05:00

So “Father” convinced “Daughter” that things get in a muddle because there are many more ways of being muddled than of being tidy.

Flip a coin ten times, and there are 1,024 combinations of heads and tails, but in only two of them are there no heads following heads or tails following tails.

I dispatched buses. Let’s say a company drives twenty thousand miles a day, and has a breakdown or accident every hundred thousand miles. It would be preposterous to expect the problems to come every fifth day (“Hey, brother, watch your back, today’s the twenty-fifth”), so the dispatcher goes through periods of multiple crisis and periods of calm. Things don’t happen in threes, but they do bunch up.

Bateson's "Metalogues"

2011-09-01T21:36:00.002-05:00

Steps to an Ecology of Mind's first chapter is a series of "Metalogues," ostensible conversations between "Father," the author, and "Daughter," Mary Catherine Bateson. The earliest Metalogue is from 1948, when "Daughter" would have been ten, and ending in 1969.

The conversations cover several of Bateson's interests:

The reason why things inevitably get muddled,

Non-verbal communication,

Games, play, seriousness,

Measuring knowledge,

Why things have outlines,

Metaphor/sacrament/performance/pretend,

and Instinct, explanatory principles, hypotheses.

Bateson wrote that the conversations "should be such that not only do the participants discuss the problem, but the structure of the conversation as a whole is relevant to the subject."

Late in his life, Bateson's nine-year old daughter, Nora, asked him if she would understand Steps. He said that she might be able to read the Metalogues. The last two must have been tough for her. "Daughter's" voice matures over the years, even though the conversations are compositions. She asks tougher questions, and gets more complex or ambiguous answers. All of the Metalogues are full of good things to ponder.

Several more Metalogues appear in Angels Fear, Gregory's posthumously published collaboration with Mary Catherine, most composed by a middle-aged "Daughter."

From "Why Do Things Get in a Muddle?"

D: Daddy, you didn't finish. Why do my things get the way I say isn't tidy?

F: But I have finished -- it's just because there are more ways which you call "untidy" than there are which you call "tidy."

D: But that isn't a reason why --

F: But yes it is. And it is the real, and only, and very important reason.

Bateson: Creatura and Pleroma

2011-08-31T22:42:00.000-05:00

Where Basteson (1904-1980) wound up was dividing the world into pleroma and creatura, ideas he got from Jung. You see pleroma in the photograph of the badlands. Beautiful forms but it’s all uplift and erosion, physics and chemistry. Creatura is life: people, redwood forests, Congress, “mind.” Mind is made of interacting parts or circuits, requires collateral energy, is triggered by difference, and requires circular or more complex interaction. He divided existence this way to avoid the mind-matter Cartesian split that he felt had corrupted enlightenment epistemology. Cogito ergo sum, but I am thinking: something material is doing something mental. Mind isn’t separate, and is fair game for investigation.

For Bateson this was “religious” in so many words, but not mechanical or superstitious. He took a while to get there, though, and there’s a lot of it that leaves me thinking, “Huh?” or “Why does that follow?” Lipset’s biography helps, but I still fall off here and there. I’m reading Steps to an Ecology of Mind studying the building blocks slowly and painstakingly, hoping I’ll be able to make the tough connections.

More Bateson

2011-08-27T10:40:00.000-05:00

I wrote a note to an old acidhead buddy to the effect that Bateson either makes me go "wish I'd said that," "wow, I never thought of that," or "huh?" I wrote a very telegraphic five hundred or a thousand words, and only got him out of his teens. I'm less than fluent with things like the relation between logical types/contextual paradox and double-bind theory. To say nothing of the relation between all that and phylogenetic homology. Still going "huh?". So now I've begun "Steps to an Ecology of Mind," the anthology of major Bateson academic papers, and the one among his three popular books I haven't read. Hoping for sort of reverse reductionism, or something like that.

Gregory Bateson

2011-08-26T13:51:00.000-05:00

Brushing up on my Gregory Bateson for a profile in Duluth's Zenith City Weekly. Reading David Lipset's Gregory Bateson: Legacy of a Scientist.

It's nice to have a guide. It's also interesting looking forward to explaining Gregory Bateson in under a thousand words. The great systems thinker, he's all of one piece; every idea depends on all the rest.

Trolley Tracks, Jon Freise, & Peak Oil

2011-06-20T12:35:00.000-05:00

It would seem like a literary device, if it weren't something you can see half a dozen blocks from here, at the corner of Cedar Avenue and 35th Street: One of Minneapolis' many potholes, this one revealing the original brick paving and a rail from the 60 year-defunct trolley system.

A week ago I interviewed neighbor Jon Freise for the neighborhood newspaper, Corcoran News. I had heard Jon present an explanation of peak oil at the Corcoran Park building in February, and was eager to include him in my series of portraits of interesting neighbors. (Jon told me about the pothole; it's by his house.)

During our conversation, I quoted Wes Jackson to Jon as having said that those of us who conserve are making it easier for the profligate by not bidding against them in the de facto energy auction. Jon thought about this for a while, and responded that it's an accurate observation, but the rich bastards are not the only ones who need cheap oil. Operations that feed the elderly and the sick, people who have to get to work where there's no public transportation, and energy-intensive services upon which even the most conservative among us rely are examples of functions that we would not want to bid against.

Trying to Draw Like Al Hirschfeld

2011-06-04T21:01:00.000-05:00

CD cover for my friend Lisa, designed by Dawn Yema, drawings by me. I'd been sketching Lisa while she performed for a few years, and turned a decent likeness into a caricature under the influendce of Al Hirschfeld. The drawings of the other artists are mostly from photos. The exception is Linda Tennyson, the bassist behind Lisa's elbow.

Hirschfeld, born in 1903, was the NY Times Drama Caricaturist. He died, still drawing, five months shy of his hundredth birthday. Of course the fellow with the white whiskers and the eyebrows is the artist in self portrait. The sketchier stuff is Hirschfeld, studying Tom Courtenay. Hirschfeld would attend opening night, sit on the aisle, and take notes or draw in a personal shorthand in his pocket. I've seen a video of the ninety-nine year old Hirschfeld working on a finished drawing of Paul Newman as the Narrator/Stage Manager in Our Town. The Tom Courtenay studies are instructive, but I'd give a lot to see some of the pocket drawings.

Lou Gottlieb

2011-05-13T12:19:00.012-05:00

                         The Folksinger Who Hosted a Commune

The idea of communes "working," flourishing, succeeding is always brought up, but this is beside the point in the case of the communes now existing in America. What is essential is to expose ourselves to a life of voluntary poverty, or life for minimal cost, and a life of sharing...because this is what it is, alone, that makes the commune endeavor an important thing in America.

                                                                 Elia Katz, quoted by Lou Gottlieb

It's a lucky child that has a chance to be reared in an intentional community

                                                                Lou Gottlieb

Lou Gottlieb was born to immigrant parents in 1923, Jewish name, Catholic upbringing. (During his second LSD experience, he huddled in a closet and chanted Luke 1:31, "Fear not, Mary," mantra-like in Latin.) He played piano, oboe, and bass fiddle, and started college at 16. During the War, the Army Band, stationed at the Army War College, was shipped overseas. The College still wanted a band, and Gottlieb played bass in the replacement band. After the War, Gottlieb finished his education, played in jazz bands and a folk group, the Gateway Singers. He received a PhD in musicology in 1958, transposing fifteenth century masses into modern notation for his dissertation.

Post-doc, Lou continued to gig, and made a serious attempt at stand-up comedy, becoming friends with Lenny Bruce and Don Adams. He arranged tunes for the Kingston Trio, and enlisted vocalists Alex Hasselev and Glenn Yarbrough to help record a demo of his arrangements. Gottlieb, Hasselev, and Yarbrough began to tour as the Limeliters, and formed the nucleus of the ABC television folk hour, Hootenanny, with Lou arranging, playing bass, and wisecracking with the audience.

In 1962, the Limeliters took a break after walking away from a plane crash. Lou bought thirty-two acres of meadow orchard and redwoods, a former chicken ranch just north of the San Francisco Bay, with the idea of subdividing it. At the same time he was investigating yoga, Indian religion, and psychedelics. Lou and friends, Ramon Sender and Stewart Brand would visit the property to horse around. Lou moved his piano into a converted chicken shed, meaning to commit a program of classical music to memory.

In 1966 the San Francisco Diggers, accepting the responsibility for feeding the tide of young visitors to Haight Street, asked Lou if they could tend the orchard and start a garden. Somebody put up a sign inviting hippies to visit the "Digger Farm," and Lou Gottlieb's Morningstar Ranch became ground zero for the hippie commune movement. Between then and 1972, something like fifteen hundred people passed through Morningstar, some for a day, some years. Lou attended seven hippie births, and thought he had been an obstetrician or midwife in a former life.

Lou came to see "open land" as a necessity and way of ameliorating the human condition. Social wealth and automation were making some people "technologically unemployable," and some people were simply "impossibles," people whose need for leisure is more demanding than their fear of starvation. There need to be places where anybody may go, outlaw places where the impossibles are free to take their chances being impossible. Late in life, Lou said -- only half facetiously -- that this is the idea for which he should receive a Nobel Prize.

Culture shock and, we must surmise, a certain hippie fecklessness alienated Morningstar's neighbors. Over the commune's half-dozen years, petitioners and Sonoma County officials angled to evict visitors. At one point, Lou deeded the property to God. He paid $15, 000 in fines and did fifteen days in jail for contempt. Finally the county bulldozed the hippie shacks, the Morningstar adventure having cost Lou something like seven hundred thousand 2011 dollars.

The Limeliters re-formed, and Lou continued to make periodic attempts at working up a classical performance. He also continued to propose that society set aside remote sites where anybody could squat.

Lou died in 1996, diabetes having masked a malignancy until two or three weeks before the end. He faced imminent death with grace and humor.

Wes Jackson

2011-04-14T11:22:00.000-05:00

The Kansas Farm Boy Who's Breeding an Edible Prairie

Extractive economy simply means an economy based on depletion, deficit spending of the Earth's ecological capital.

Wes Jackson

Wes Jackson was born in 1936 on a farm near Topeka, Kansas. He would have been learning long division and joining the 4H while WWII was rushing to its bloody close, receiving his BS in Biology while cars still had tail fins, his MS in Botany at the Cold War's suspenseful height, and a PhD in Genetics when American citizens were beginning to realize foreign policy could be mistaken. Jackson chaired one of America's first Environmental Studies programs, at California State University in Sacramento, then returned to Kansas to found the Land Institute.

Some plants, annuals, live for one season, others, perennials, for several. In nature perennials, in mixtures, dominate. Agriculture has reversed this, and we grow acres of nothing but one or another annual (chiefly just four, rice, wheat, corn, and soy), sprawling beyond the horizon. The Land Institute is trying to get back to nature by breeding perennial versions of corn, sorghum, sunflower, and wheat, and growing them together. They are also domesticating food-producing wild perennials. This strategy saves soil and energy, because plants growing deep roots over many seasons won't require tilling, and will have greater access to minerals and water, and because mixtures of plants will be less vulnerable to diseases and pests.

Jackson describes himself not as optimistic, but hopeful.

The-Bigger-The-Belt-Buckle Department

2011-04-07T20:39:00.003-05:00

One of Barbara's and my favorite novels is Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons, published in 1918. It's a midwestern story to the bone, the story of an Indiana city, the story of a family of magnificent privilege, the story of the nineteenth century's yielding to the twentieth, the automobile, and the beginnings of urban sprawl. The identity figure for all this change is Georgie Minafer -- the least sympathetic identity figure in western literature -- the grandson of the Amberson who made the family fortune, and one volcanically self absorbed fool and petty tyrant.

George's rudeness and presumption have been so outrageous from the cradle -- and have reflected his elders' own secret attitudes -- that the family fondly indulges them. In the end, Georgie finds grace, love, and forgiveness, but not before ending his widowed mother Isabel's chances for reunion with the great love of her life, Eugene Morgan, an automobile manufacturer.

In a dinner table conversation George embarrasses himself and his family by loudly telling Eugene that "Automobiles are a useless nuisance" that should never have been invented. His grandfather corrects him, but George persists and speaks facetiously.

Then Eugene began to laugh cheerfully.

"I'm not sure he's wrong about automobiles," he said. "With all their speed forward, they may be a step backwards in civilization. -- that is in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men's souls. I am not sure. But automobiles have come, and they bring a greater change in our life than I think most of us suspect. They are here, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring."

Written in 1918! The irony is that the automobile maker can articulate this, while Georgie is just bristling at vaguely perceived threats to unearned privilege -- and trying to injure his mother's suitor.

There have been three films of The Magnificent Ambersons: a 1925 silent adaptation of a book that has a lot of speeches, the 1942 Orson Welles classic which was as faithful to the original as a movie can be to a novel, but was severely edited by the RKO brass, the deleted scenes destroyed, and a 2002 A&E version directed by Alfonso Arau, using Welles' script. The Arau Ambersons looks and sounds the more midwestern to my Illinois-bred eyes and ears, despite Arau's Mexican birth, and despite his shooting it in Ireland. Its one false note plays over and over in a series of sensuous caresses and lingering kisses between Georgie and Isabel. Tarkington couldn't have failed to know about Freud, but probably had very little patience with the idea of Oedipus complexes. George Minafer would have objected to losing centrality in any of his family's lives, and been squeamish at Isabel's sexuality.

Safe driving tip of the day: Minnesota DMV wants you to keep three seconds between yourself and the car ahead of you. You can do this by counting the seconds between the time when the other car's rear bumper passes a landmark, and when your front bumper reaches it.

But how do you help somebody you pass keep his distance from you? To help a slower driver maintain his or her interval, if the other car is going sixty, count thirty-six seconds from when your rear bumper is even with the other car's front bumper before you pull back into the right lane. To pass somebody going seventy, count forty-two seconds. This assumes you're going 5 MPH faster than the other driver.

Scary when you compare that to what we really do.

World War Robot

2011-04-06T17:36:00.001-05:00

A day of battle is a day of profit.

Darwin Rothschild

I found Ashley Wood's and T. P. Louise's World War Robot (www.idwpublishing.com) at Minneapolis' East Lake Library. It is the story of the war between expat atheists living on Mars and believers who stayed on Earth. It's told sparingly in a series of letters, reports, and diary entries, and especially in about seventy very juicy paintings. The pictures were what grabbed me.

The James Cameron Terminator movies, The Terminator and Judgment Day, are food for thought. Out-of-control robots from the future can stand for lots of human creations which have become dangerous to us. Think DDT, think the private automobile, but think especially about Earth's new dominant life form, the corporation.

Corporations were originally chartered with the idea of human or national progress. Since they are legally obliged to return a profit and little else, when faced with a choice between making a dime and sparing the commons, they won't know it was loaded.

In the story of the war between Earth and Mars, the corporate face of the enemy is more apparent than in the Terminator films. I could never decide whether WWR's authors were on the side of the believers or the non-believers (or which side was in which paintings), but supplying both armies with robots from the Moon is a guy named Darwin Rothschild.

In itty-bitty letters under the bar code, it says that WWR is "suggested for mature audiences." I'll go along with that; the book is pretty grim, but the warning is probably there because of a glimpse in one painting of a military brothel, and of pubic hair. Sordid, but not exactly titillating.

Buckminster Fuller

2011-03-31T16:34:00.001-05:00

It was never my intention to design the geodesic dome. I wanted to discover the principles at work in our universe. I could have ended up with a pair of flying slippers.

Buckminster Fuller

Richrd Buckminster Fuller remains the most fascinating member of the World War I generation. A business failure and grieving father at 32, he prepared to drown himself. It came to him that he was the product of the things he learned from everyone he knew, and from a chain of people going back to humanity's beginning, so his life was not his own to throw away. Since he had been planning to die, Fuller -- or "Bucky" as he liked to be called -- decided to comit "egocide" instead, and live dedicated to the desires of the universe and the betterment of all people.

For Bucky, humanity was going through its final exam, pass-or-fail, utopia or oblivion. He decided that it would be easier to reform the environment than people, who -- mistakenly -- believe that the world holds too few resources to let us all survive peacefully. His career was one of invention, and he died holding twenty-eight patents for devices to house and serve us better than ever, using less material and energy. He also published over thirty books. Fuller's inventions include a new geometry, a high-mileage-for-its-time car which could turn 360 degrees inside its own radius, and the geodesic dome, a structure which can cover unlimited area without any internal columns or load-bearing walls.

Toward the end of a long, productive life, Buckminster Fuller called us "four billion billionaires who are entirely unaware of their good fortune."

Steven Leblanc

2011-03-23T15:58:00.002-05:00

If we do not strive to understand what we have done in the past and why, it will only make it harder to get it right in the future.

Steven LeBlanc

Archeologist Steven LeBlanc was born in 1943, the same year as Jim Morrison, romance and mystery novelist Janet Evanovich, and Newt Gingrich. He is the director of collections at the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, and an expert on the Mimbres Culture of southwestern New Mexico.

In 2003's Constant Battles, LeBlanc and his wife and co-author Katherine Register make the case that ecological imbalance causes human warfare. People deforest or overgraze the places where we live, or breed beyond our environments' carrying capacities, then try to expand our territories by invasion. There has never been an Edenic time in which we were at peace with our environment or each other. LeBlanc's case for this includes the way ancient people sited their villages, ancient skeletons damaged by violence, anecdotes related to early European settlers by native Americans, and the behavior of other primates and remaining "stone age" farmers.

Tsunami

2011-03-14T13:01:00.000-05:00

I saw pictures of the devastation on Japan's east coast, and thought we don't need global warming to make us do the right things. The earth or the sea or the wind can well up in no time, and break our necks. Or our hearts. That could be my house or shop that the flood uprooted and dragged down the street. Planning for sure, but most important are humility and kindness.

I painted the copy of Katshushika Hokusai's Great Wave, with a diagram of four tetrahedrons arrayed to form one larger tetrahedron and enclose an octahedron, twenty-five or thirty years ago. I was into Buckminster Fuller and Hokusai both then.

Betty Edwards

2011-03-13T22:03:00.002-05:00

The left hemisphere has no patience with this detailed perception, and says, in effect, "It's a chair, I tell you. That's enough to know. In fact, don't bother to look at it, because I've got a ready-made symbol for you. Here it is; add a few details if you want, but don't bother me with this looking business."

Betty Edwards

Art educator, Betty Edwards was born in 1926, roughly contemporary with Pop artists like Andy Warhol, not to mention cartoonist and Mad Magazine founder Harvey Kurtzman. She graduated from UCLA in 1947, and would have crossed paths there with the first vets returning to college from Europe and the Pacific on the GI Bill.

Edwards is the author of the standard drawing instruction book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Drawing's thesis is that, while language and analysis are functions of our brains' left hemispheres, good drawing is done by the right hemisphere. Our untrained impulse is to use symbols -- circles for eyes, upside-down sevens for noses -- to represent things, but to represent them well, we need to draw what we see, not what we "know" is there. Edwards provides exercises to train us to do just that.

All very interesting, and useful if drawing's your thing, but of no wider consequence. Except...in our moment of history we're encountering entirely novel challenges, with stakes never higher. And we're digging in to meet them, believing we already know all the answers. We get to make mistakes (I drew Edward's mouth more widely open than it is in the photograph, and with a fuller lower lip), but we have to try to draw what we see, not what we know is there.

Frances Moore Lappe

2011-03-07T21:33:00.001-06:00

My whole mission in life is to help us find the power we lack to create the world we want.

Frances Moore Lappe

Frances Moore Lappe was born early in 1944, when the Allies were beginning to organize the Normandy Invasion, and Allied troops were still bogged down at Anzio. She came to prominence in 1971 with the publication of her best selling book, Diet for a Small Planet, in which she made the case that livestock require many times the protein, in the form of legumes and grains, than they yield, and that it would be more economical for the world to consume the corn and beans directly. (Lappe included nutritional information to assure that readers who changed their diets would get enough protein, and recipes for the unfamiliar new ingredients.)

With co-author Joseph Collins, Lappe followed Diet with World Hunger (Ten Myths), then expanded Ten Myths into Food First, in which she and Collins posed and answered fifty questions which mostly represented misconceptions about hunger and how it might be conquered. The misconceptions include the notion that there are too little arable land and too many people. With copious references, Food First shows that landowning elites make hunger inevitable by planting luxury crops and commodities for export (sugar, coffee, cocoa, beef, corn for ethanol) instead of the crops that would feed local sharecroppers and farm laborers. The book finishes with recommendations for American readers concerned about world hunger:

Don't accept conventional wisdom, be empirical about hunger, and communicate your understanding; work for our own food self reliance; work for American land reform (for instance by changing tax laws so that heirs don't have to sell the farm to pay onerous taxes); eliminate American support for corporations and governments whose agricultural policies starve people.

Lappe has gone on to write and advocate for democracy and justice. She advocates for what she calls "living democracy" as opposed to "thin democracy." The difference is that thin democracy is limited to elections and supporting candidates -- the democracy of consumers -- while living democracy is a way of behaving -- the democracy of doers. It happens in our culture and at work. Living democracy is an "enlivening culture in which the values of inclusion, fairness, and mutual, accountability show up in a wide range of human relationships."

Tuesday Night's Drawings & Gossip

2011-03-06T20:56:00.001-06:00

Drawings of Jill from Tuesday night's drawing group. Two-minute drawings, fifteens, and twenties.

Kathy was missing, on retreat with her husband on the family farm, up north. The gossip was that Kathy's husband, an engineer -- of a certain age -- for a German multinational, had been laid off. The company has been moving work from Minnesota to India for some time, and Rick had been able to stay on board until now.

The tribe has claims on its members. In hard times, you share the hardship. In a pinch you work long hours. If it comes to that, you walk the Trail of Tears. Employers usurp the tribe's prerogatives, but aren't bound by the tribe's bond with its member. Work is your life, the biggest single hunk of your precious, finite life. Your colleagues are who you know, your friends. But if the bastards get tired of you, or can get a better offer from some other poor son of a bitch, kiss your friends goodbye. (The "bastards" aren't necessarily wicked. They're clinging for survival to what Paul Hawken calls the planets "new dominant life form.")

In a world that lives on its capital, the irreplaceable stuff we dig or pump out of the ground, nobody's creating wealth. Rick's employer is just a gatekeeper, and so is yours, trying to corner as much as it can of the wealth that belongs to all of us, Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans, Australians, naked Amazonians with bows and arrows. If you can get hired and you cooperate, they'll dole a little of it out to you every two weeks.

It isn't just the money that matters. It's the ownership, the position, the power. Humans are creative, each of us a born genius. Employers train it out of us, beginning with their proxies, the schools. You have to work, and you're incredibly, ninety-ninth percentile, lucky if your job exercises your kind of genius. If you jump ship, try finding capital for your brilliant idea. Guess who has it. Humans don't need corporations.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQrguc6q90k

Rachel Carson

2011-02-25T15:37:00.000-06:00

We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress at great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road -- the one less traveled by -- offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.

Rachel Carson

Rachel Carson was born to a farming family in western Pennsylvania in 1907, and died in 1964. There was never an election in her adult life in which she was ineligible to vote, and she was old enough to have been glad when the United States ratified the Nineteenth Amendment. She was the smartest kid in her class, and enjoyed nature and literature. Her college graduated her with honors, but she delayed graduate school because of family financial difficulties. Carson did receive a master's degree in zoology from John Hopkins, but further financial difficulties, including her father's death kept her from continuing.

Carson went to work for the Bureau of Fisheries, and wrote and edited Fisheries publications and radio broadcasts. She went on to write for newspapers and The Atlantic Monthly, and published a trilogy of books about the ocean, Under Sea and Wind, The Sea around Us, and The Edge of the Sea.

We remember Rachel Carson for her 1962 book, Silent Spring, which is one source for the environmental movement. Silent Spring documented pesticide -- particularly DDT -- damage to the environment. Bald eagles, which are fairly common now, were once threatened with extinction because pesticides, concentrating at the higher end of the food chain, made eagle eggs fragile. Carson took a lot of heat, particularly from the chemical industry,

The chief criticism of Carson and Silent Spring was that banning DDT would condemn people in the tropics to death from malaria, although Carson had argued for study and judicious use, rather than abandonment. The criticism continues half a century later, although a lot of that time has been spent trying to understand relationships and context, the workings of systems. Carson should be remembered as a pioneer in systematic thinking about problems, in a time of pure purposiveness.

Warming Up For Rachel Carson

2011-02-24T19:41:00.000-06:00

I've heard and read artists and illustrators who can draw from life crowing about people who use photographic references. I'm here to tell you drawing from life and drawing from pictures are separate -- if related -- skills. My study of Rachel Carson for my Faces of Wisdom series, has given me fits. I just don't know how to draw from pictures. Picking up that skill is one point of the series.

There was an earlier study that I didn't include in this post. It used a different source photo, and was even further from being a likeness than the top drawing. The story of the drawings you see here is this:

Pencil underdrawing for the top study. It's interesting that I didn't realize how far from a likeness it was until I'd inked it. My hypothesis explaining that is that getting a likeness and recognizing one probably use different parts of the brain, parts that don't work at the same time. Okay, I said, if I'm not getting it, I'll use a crutch, and maybe learn something from the crutch. The crutch was a pair of compass dividers and a ruler. The grid or diagram you see below and to the right of the face is the measured layout for the final drawing, and you can see how I took the measurements on the source photo of Rachel Carson. Next you see me thinking out loud, below some quotes from Rob Hopkins. Next the measured layout for the final drawing. Then a quick try with a similar layout. Finally the pencil underdrawing for the finished product.

Tomorrow, Rachel Carson.

If you want to see some really great drawings from photographs, take a look at my friend Julie Rathmann's website. http://www.julierathmann.com/

Hazel Henderson

2011-02-18T12:58:00.001-06:00

What I have been trying to do for 20 years is to change the debate about development and move it outside of the box marked "economics."...Trying to run an economy using only such economic indicators as the gross national product is rather like trying to fly a Boeing 747 with a single oil pressure gauge. What we need to do is fill out the instrument panel.

Hazel Henderson (in a 1988 interview)

Hazel Henderson is a British-born (1933) American citizen who is concerned with how the technological changes of our time alter how we live. Some of the alterations are pernicious, but some are merely confusing. For instance, academia business and government are adapted to analysis and reductionism -- to things instead of relationships -- but our understanding of the world increasingly demands synthesis. Henderson is essentially conservative, but according to the perversity of our time, any "conservatives" who even know her name would know that she believes economics is subsumed by ecology, and think of her as as leftist.

Henderson believes that industrialism and free-market economics represent a brief anomaly in human history. She rejects the belief that human well being demands technological progress. Simultaneously experiencing a more global understanding of existence and the limits of industrialism shocks us and seems paradoxical. Increased technological complexity makes laissez-faire economics unworkable and makes democracy difficult, because none of the players -- you, me, Obama, the Tea Partiers, al Quaeda -- has enough information to make intelligent analyses. She sees alternative movements forming to replace the dominant economic model -- alternative publishing, cooperatives, renewable energy, etc.

Rob Hopkins

2011-02-15T16:22:00.001-06:00

Change need not be a hair shirt exercise. It can be something which is exhilarating, has a feel of being a historic process, a collective call to adventure. What Transition is about is unlocking the collective genius of the community.

Rob Hopkins

Without cheap oil you wouldn't be reading this book now.

Rob Hopkins

Rob Hopkins was born in London in tumultuous 1968, the year of Prague Spring, the beginning of Ulster's "Troubles," and rioting assassination and abdication in the United States. He came of age with the collapse of the Soviet Empire. He is the author of the Transition movement, an effort to deal with the end of cheap fossil fuels by cultivating resilience in communities.

The idea of the Transition Movement is that peak oil, global warming, and various other serious challenges will inevitably change the global economy, and that the best way to affect the nature of that change is locally, by strengthening communities. Specifics necessarily come from individual communities, but some strategies are:

* Community gardens;

* Learning skills that we have largely abandoned because of abundant high-quality fuel;

* 100% recycling;

* Obtaining supplies locally;

* Getting to know our neighbors;

* Local currencies.

Many in the movement believe that living post-peak will be more fulfilling and enjoyable than the alienation and stress of the consumer economy.

In 2005 Transition came out of a class project in 2005 when Hopkins was a permaculture instructor at the Kinsale Further Education College in Kinsale, Ireland. He went on to co-found Transition Town Totnes in Totnes, Devon, England, and to publish The Transition Handbook. He gardens in Totnes and blogs at http://transitionculture.org.

M. King Hubbert

2011-02-09T23:19:00.000-06:00

In terms of human history, the episode of fossil fuels is a very brief epoch.

M. King Hubbert

Marion King Hubbert was a geologist whose life spanned from the year the Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk to the collapse of the Soviet Union. A native Texan, Hubbert received his BS, MS, and PhD from the University of Chicago, and worked for Shell Oil from 1943 until 1964, was a research geophysicist for the US Geological Survey, and taught at Columbia University, Stanford, and UC Berkeley.

In 1956, Hubbert ssuggested that production in a geographic area -- ranging from a single oil field to the planet -- will follow a bell curve, and predicted that production in the United States would peak around 1970, which proved to be the case. Later he predicted a global peak around 1995, a little earlier than what happend, but close. The so-called Hubbert Curve is based on historical trends rather than estimates of reserves and consumption. Subsequent researchers have found similar curves in fisheries.

Hubbert also showed that rock in the Earth's crust is plastic -- it changes shape under pressure -- and formulated the correct statement for Darcy's Law, which describes the relationship between the rate flow of a fluid through a permeable medium and permeability, area, pressure drop, viscosity, and length.

He was a Technocrat, a founder of a Depression-era movement that advocated that scientists and engineers, not politicians, coordinate the economy. Hubbert believed in an economy in which goods and services were priced according to the energy consumed in their production.

Drawing Method

2011-02-09T22:32:00.001-06:00

I'm trying, with intermittent success, to make a concentrated effort with my drawing. I'm working on a series of forty or so portraits of people who have been sources for the ideas that make up my worldview, the "Faces of Wisdom Series" ten or so of which I've already published.

Above: three scans to demonstrate my method, a photograph of geologist M. King Hubbert, a pencil copy of the photo, and the beginning lines of the ink rendering. Besides the chance to personify ideas I wish were more common in society, what I get from this series is practice at catching proportions, a skill I need to work on, and practice making clean and meaningful lines with a fairly shaky hand. And, I'm learning a lot about the relief of the human face by making the lines I shade with wrap around the forms.

The real surprise is that drawing from photos is harder for me than drawing from life. I never make pencil under-drawings when I draw from life. I've used snapshots of subjects for my newspaper profiles, to spare my subjects the tiresome chore of sitting still for half an hour or more, but it takes a lot longer for me to get things right. Hubbert's head, for instance, started out about the length of his hair longer, and it still looks a little tall.

Dorothy Day

2011-02-07T13:17:00.001-06:00

First of all, let it be remembered that I speak as an ex-Communist and one who has not testified before Congressional Committees, nor written works on the Communist conspiracy.

   Dorothy Day

Knitting is very conducive to thought. It is nice to knit a while, put down the needles, write a while, then take up the sock again.

Dorothy Day

I believe that we must reach our brother, never toning down our fundamental oppositions, but meeting him when he asks to be met, with a reason for the faith that is in us, as well as with a loving sympathy for them as brothers.

   Dorothy Day

The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?

   Dorothy Day

We believe in loving our brothers regardless of race, color or creed and we believe in showing this love by working for better conditions immediately and the ultimate owning by the workers of their means of production.

   Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day was born in 1897, and lived until 1980. She was an atheist and a Communist who converted to Catholicism in 1927, and who founded the Catholic Worker movement. The Catholic Workers are pacifist servants of the poor, self-reliant, and adamant opponents of big government and big business. Day was a (Federal) tax protester, and was arrested repeatedly for ignoring nuclear air raid drills in New York City. She opposed all the American wars of her lifetime. She was a distributist, a believer in a "third way" -- between capitalism and socialism -- in which land and machinery are owned by those who use them, as opposed to business or state ownership and largesse.

The Vatican has allowed the Archdiocese of New York to open Dorothy Day's case for canonization. My understanding of canonization is that in declaring a person a saint the church recognizes the force of God's grace in her. It's easy to believe that the integrity of Day's Christian life was too strong for religious bureaucrats ever to acknowledge. (In fact, people called Day a saint during her life. She said she didn't want to be dismissed so easily.)

This non-believer recognizes something that we might call sainthood in Day, though. She has become for me the focus for an unresolved personal controversy: As near as we are to the limits of Earth's carrying capacity, can we afford to meet in loving sympathy with sincere wrongdoers and call them brothers? Steven LeBlanc and Garrett Hardin make my case for force.

Wealth, Slavery, And Tuberculosis

2011-01-26T15:58:00.000-06:00

John C. Calhoun died of tuberculosis in 1850. TB was shown to be contagious in 1869, and the responsible bacterium identified in 1882. Quarantining infected people reduced the incidence of the disease, and a vaccine was first used on humans in 1921. Streptomycin, developed in 1944, and subsequent antibiotics, Isoniazid and Rifampin improved results and hastened recovery.

Calhoun said, "I hold then, that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other." Six years after his death, Edwin Drake drilled the first oil well near Titusville, Pennsylvania. In the subsequent century and a half, fossil wealth, and the technology it allowed, more than replaced the emancipated slaves. High quality fuels and powerful technology have fed more people, made more comfortable, and spared more from disease than Calhoun could have imagined. We can condescendingly understand his apology for slavery as coming from someone without our advantages.

And yet, at this moment of peak human wealth, some of us still live on the labor of others, people starve, and we foul our planetary nest. Frightening, when you think that we are near the limits of growth, and must soon do better with less. Absent an unprecedented technological save -- or saves -- we can expect relative impoverishment, post peak. We can't bathe in the same river twice, so slavery as Calhoun understood it probably isn't in our future, but we must anticipate that decreased wealth will tempt us, or our descendants, to thrive at each other's expense, and plan to avoid it.

Donella Meadows

2011-01-25T17:55:00.002-06:00

Your paradigm is so intrinsic to your mental process that you are hardly aware of its existence, until you try to communicate with someone with a different paradigm.

Donella Meadows

Donella Meadows lived from 1941 until 2001. She studied Chemistry as an undergraduate at Carleton College, and received a doctorate in Biophysics from Harvard. She went as a researcher to MIT, and worked there with Jay Forrester, the inventor of magnetic data storage, in the early days of computer modeling.

In 1972, Meadows published the book The Limits to Growth with her husband, Dennis Meadows, as well as Jorgen Randers and William Behrens. The book was a report to a private group, the Club of Rome, that is interested in challenges facing all of humanity. Limits modeled the consequences of a rapidly growing world population using finite resources, and predicted economic behavior.

Limits' conclusions indicated that humanity's situation is perilous. It has been criticized by commentators of widely ranging sincerity and understanding, and twenty- and thirty-year updates have been published.

The thing to take away from Limits and from Donella Meadows, though, is a way of thinking. For instance, predicting how long a resource, say oil, will last takes more than just dividing known reserves by barrels per year. Modelers need to predict discoveries of new reserves, relative difficulty of getting existing and predicted reserves, increases in population and industrialization, and changes in consumption due to new technologies. Good citizenship may not require fluency with modeling these variables, but it does demand that we know they are there and how they interact.

Meadows' Places to Intervene in a System is probably her best know paper (about two thousand words). It is available as a PDF at http://www.sustainer.org/?page_id=106,

As html at http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/places_intervene_system.html,

in the Winter, 1997 Whole Earth Review, in her posthumous book Thinking in Systems: A Primer, and outlined at Wikipedia. She wrote a syndicated column, Voice of a Global Citizen, which is archived at http://www.sustainer.org/dhm_archive/.

John C. Calhoun

2011-01-17T09:51:00.002-06:00

I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good.

I hold then, that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other.

John C. Calhoun

I wanted to begin this post with something like "John Caldwell Calhoun is my favorite villain from American history, villain because he believed that slavery was a positive good, favorite because he understood, unlike most of his contemporaries and ours, that the wealthy always live on the labor of others." Calhoun was deeper than a simple-minded cracker insisting on racial prerogatives.

Calhoun lived from 1782 until 1850. (Delegates to the Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and Cornwallis surrendered in 1781, but British troops remained in America until late in 1783. The War between the States began in 1861.) He represented South Carolina's 6th District in Congress from 1811 until 1817, served as Monroe's Secretary of War, Vice President for Presidents John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, and as Senator from South Carolina from 1832 until 1843, and then from 1845 until his death. He was also John Tyler's Secretary of State, was eager for the War of 1812, and founded the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Although he was only born late in the Revolution, we can see Calhoun as one of the founders. He began as a nationalist and advocated for public works like roads, canals, harbors, and for a national bank, and for tariffs to pay for improvements, and to protect the nation's infant economy. As the country grew, he came to see these same institutions enriching the northern states at the expense of the South. His mature positions -- nullification, concurrent majority, and expansion -- come from a need to defend his home. In the same 1837 speech I've quoted, Calhoun says apparently without irony, "...encroachments must be met at the beginning, and that those who act on the opposite principle are prepared to become slaves." He's speaking specifically about abolition -- although the hypothetical slaves mentioned would be southern planters. But abolition is a just a special case of federal policy designed to favor the North.

Calhoun seems to have believed, with evidence, that humans will seek their individual survival and advantage, at each others costs, and that our duty is to protect ourselves. Defense requires security and resources seized from other hands.

Monday Night Drawing And James Lovelock

2011-01-13T14:17:00.001-06:00

My live drawing has been in a slump. It's been hard for me to keep my proportions straight, and it's mystified me. I thought I knew how to do this. When this drawing started coming together Monday, it was like the spell had broken.

Thinking about James Lovelock, after drawing his portrait a few days ago, I kept remembering his notion that we're experiencing a Gaian immune response, and before too long those of us still on the scene will be too busy surviving to do much else -- like draw pictures or blog about them. Lovelock thinks that climate change due to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and positive feedbacks like methane released from thawed permafrost have gone too far for civilization to continue as we know it.

I'd misplaced my copy of Lovelock's 1979 Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, so I refreshed my memory by noodling around on line. Among other things, I found this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Vip-PbuZQ

Lovelock's 90, so I cross my fingers and hope that his pessimism is an instance of the world's seeming old to an old man.

Paul Hawken

2011-01-12T12:56:00.002-06:00

We cannot turn back the clock or return to any prior state on the planet, but we will never know ourselves until we know where we are on the land. There is no reason we cannot build an exquisitely designed economy that matches biology in its diversity and integrates complexity rather than extinguishing it.

Paul Hawken

Paul Hawken was born in California in 1946, and attended UC Berkely and San Francisco State without taking a degree. He was active in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and was Martin Luther King's press coordinator for the Selma march, and staff photographer for the Congress of Racial Equality in Louisiana.

Hawken turned a Boston health food store into a national natural foods brand, Erewhon Foods, and co-founded Smith & Hawken, manufacturer of quality garden tools. These days he heads One Sun LLC, an energy company that works with biomimicry, and Highwater Global, an equity fund that invests in companies working to solve environmental challenges. He is the author of a number of books, including The Next Economy, which came out of essays about economics written in the mid-eighties for CoEvolution Quarterly and interviews with Stewart Brand. Other titles include Natural Capitalism, How to Grow a Business, and The Ecology of Commerce. He has collaborated with Amory and Hunter Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute.

Paul Hawken's current book is Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World. Blessed Unrest describes a movement made of thousands or millions of non-profits acting for the environment, the rights of indigenous peoples, and social justice. It describes this movement as a worldwide social immune system.

http://naturalcapital.org/

http://wiseearth.org/

James Lovelock

2011-01-04T15:40:00.001-06:00

I realized it was life that looked after the climate and the atmosphere.

James Lovelock

James Lovelock was born in 1919 in the English county of Hertfordshire. He was a conscientious objector at the beginning of World War II, but Nazi atrocities convinced him to enlist. The military turned him down because he was engaged in medical research. He is the inventor of the electron capture detector, which can detect CFCs or pesticides in quantities as low a one part per trillion.

In the 1960s Lovelock was working for NASA, developing ways to detect life on other planets. He reasoned that chemical reactions would have stopped in the atmospheres of planets without life. This is the case on Mars and Venus, planets NASA thought might have life. Earth has lots of reactions in the atmosphere. For instance, methane and oxygen are constantly reacting in the air. But the composition of our atmosphere remains constant.

This was the beginning of Lovelock's "Gaia Hypothesis." (Say Guy-uh) Gases like oxygen and methane come from living things, so living things must be regulating their relative amounts. Beyond this, the Gaia Hypothesis says that life actively controls the temperature and composition of the Earth's atmosphere, and other parts of the Earth's surface. If the temperature or the atmospheric composition is disturbed, life will correct it by changes in the ecosystem. The climate, the air, the rocks, the ocean, and life are a single system.

Lynn Margulis

2010-12-31T16:57:00.002-06:00

I never believed what they told me, I believed what I saw myself.

Lynn Margulis

Lynn Margulis was born in 1938. She is a biologist and teaches in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Margulis is interested in how the cells that we're made of came to have parts called "organelles." She believes that complex cells, called "eukaryotes," are the descendants of simpler cells. The ancient, simpler cells tried to eat each other. Instead they began working relationships. They became parts of something new. Margulis says a cell isn't like a bacterium. It's "a microbial community."

When Margulis first published these ideas, scientists didn't believe them. Now they are accepted by most biologists.

She believes that new species happen when existing species take on genes from other species. The traditional theory says that genes mutate, and if the mutations help, the new species survive. Margulis also helped originate the Gaia Hypothesis. The Gaia Hypothesis says that life works to keep the world's oxygen and other elements at the levels that life needs.

Marie Curie's Beauty Tips Department: Margulis was married to the late astronomer and television personality Carl Sagan, and is the mother of five.

Julian Assange And Marshall McLuhan

2010-12-27T22:21:00.002-06:00

Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian scholar, born in 1911, died 1980, author of the books The Mechanical Bride, Gutenberg Galaxy, and Understanding Media among others. He is the author also of the statement "the medium is the message," and the phrase "global village." In fact another of his books is titled The Medium is the Massage, its idea being that media are extensions of our senses, whose use condition our nervous systems differently from each other. In other words, a television watcher will be have different, but no less real strengths than readers. McLuhan claimed that electronic media condition people in this culture to behave more like pre-literate villagers than like our great grandparents.

Julian Assange is an Australian-born activist and journalist, the editor of Wikileaks, the publisher of government and corporate files submitted by whistleblowers. Assange is currently in England battling extradition to Sweden to face charges of multiple sexual assaults. He asserts that he is resisting extradition because Sweden would be more likely than the UK to extradite him in turn to the United
States. PayPal and various credit cards have stopped handling donations to Wikileaks, Wikileak apps are verbotten on the iPhone, and Wikileaks' Swiss bank has frozen its accounts. My take on it is that Wikileaks is the first of a phenomenon -- along with Stuxnet, improvised explosive devices, and extraordinary rendition, part of war as the planet now wages it -- and that whatever happens to it, the idea of an internet platform for whistleblowers to publish documents from the vaults of transgressing governments and companies is established and will co-evolve with efforts to defend against it.

There is a systematic tendency on the part of human beings to avoid accountability for their own decisions. That's why there are so many missing feedback loops -- and why this kind of leverage point is so often popular with the masses and unpopular with the powers that be, and effective, if you can get the powers that be to permit it to happen or go around them and make it happen anyway.

                                  Donella Meadows, "Places to Intervene in a System"

In 1986, the US government required that every factory releasing hazardous air pollutants report these emissions publicly. Suddenly everyone could find out what was coming out of the smokestacks in town. There was no law against these emissions, no fines,no determination of "safe" levels, just information. But by 1990 emissions dropped by 40 percent. One chemical company that found itself on the Top Ten Polluters list reduced its emissions by 90 percent just to "get off that list."

                                  Donella Meadows, "Places to Intervene in a System"

Missing feedback is a common cause of system malfunction. Adding or rerouting information can be a powerful intervention, usually easier and cheaper than rebuilding physical structure.

                                  Donella Meadows, "Places to Intervene in a System"

Real total war has become information war. It is being fought by subtle electric informational media -- under cold conditions, and constantly.

                                  Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

A new form of politics is emerging and in ways we haven't yet noticed. The living room has become a voting booth. Participation via television in Freedom Marches, in war, revolution, pollution, and other events is changing everything.

                                  Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

The instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all of us, all at once. No detachment or frame is possible.

                                   Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

                                   Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

(Wikileaks defends itself against litigation) by using every trick in the book that multinational companies use to route money through tax havens, Instead we route information.

                                   Julian Assange

Altgeld Portfolio

2010-12-10T15:18:00.001-06:00

In 1986, I rode my bicycle from Minneapolis to Macomb, Illinois. In Macomb, I spent a week cleaning stalls at the Pres Oder Stables, and seeing friends. I spent a lot of time thinking about permaculture -- although I didn't know the word -- and the adventure energized me. Back in Minneapolis, I did a comic I called "Altgeld Portfolio" about Altlgeld, a fictional college town which had found a way to thrive in a time when other small towns were dying. (John Peter Altgeld was an Illinois governor who sacrificed his career to behave with integrity toward labor, and toward three condemned activists who were framed for murder.)

I showed this thing all over the Twin Cities energy and environmentalist scene, but the nicest reaction I got was back in Macomb, where Rick Meloan told Joe Alexander that they should get John Long to travel around West Central Illinois buying up derelict VW Bugs, and bring them back to Alexander's farm for rehab.

Permaculture Comic Book (1987)

2010-12-10T15:04:00.000-06:00

Honor a Neighbor Sketch

2010-12-07T16:15:00.002-06:00

Sean Gosiewski and Rachel Hefte came to the Corcoran Neighborhood, a decade ago, to be near the Farmers’ Market and the Midtown YWCA. They and their eight-year old, Marianna, live with books cats and a piano, on a block where life-long Minnesotans like themselves (White Bear Lake and Fergus Falls) rub shoulders with transplants from Morales, Mexico.

Marianna is a lively kid, learning piano from her mother, and ballet (she wants to switch to tap), and swimming outside. She is a student at Dowling Urban Environmental School, and fascinated by her class’ current unit on “Westward Expansion.” While we talked, Marianna showed me a Conestoga wagon she had made from other toys and household odds and ends. She enjoys working in the family garden, and is a champion bean and carrot harvester.

In 1987, Rachel, in her middle twenties, picked Nicaraguan coffee. Her labor was useful, but another reason for the presence of young gringo coffee pickers, in Nicaragua, during that country’s civil war, was to make the Contra revolutionaries think twice about attacking the laborers. Rachel protected by young men with Kalishnikovs, and escaped massacre by one village. Since then she has taught, traveled to Namibia, and trained Anoka County workers in alternatives to violence. She is part of Garden Matters, working with community gardeners, and works as a professional facilitator, helping groups do vision and strategic planning.

Sean is the program director for Alliance for Sustainability, a Twin Cities-based organization whose mission is to promote just, humane, and ecologically and economically sound projects that will help civilization through its current rough patch. I met with the Hefte-Gosiewski household the day after the Sustainability Networking Fair at South High, organized by Sean. The Fair’s keynote speaker was Richard Heinberg, author of The Party’s Over and other books about energy and economics, a thinker who is planning for a sustainable energy mix around 2075. The Fair also hosted break-out sessions that discussed solar power, the Midtown Market, raising city chickens, and more. Sean says he likes making linkages between people and organizations. He’s a member of Corcoran Grows, this neighborhood’s Transition group, and one of his goals for Saturday was to see other Twin Cities neighborhoods form similar organizations. I asked him how he organizes an event like the Sustainability Networking Fair. He said that it takes “holding a vision of the day, and getting people to come.”

I came away from chatting with Rachel, Sean, and Marianna impressed and a little jealous of a family whose life together seems of a piece, and dedicated to a world which Marianna will see mature, peaceful and prosperous with solar income.

Hags and Hagiography

2010-12-07T15:49:00.000-06:00

I write and draw a monthly neighbor profile for my neighborhood paper. I think of it as a sort of people magazine for ordinary people. I'm interested in people who do interesting things, and especially people who have ideas or have made things that will let civilization endure.

The three scans come from Grosset and Dunlap's 1931 offering, Minute Biographies: Intimate Glimpses into the Lives or 150 Famous Men and Women by Samuel Nisenson and Alfred Parker, and from a show of paintings by Rob Shetterely, Americans Who Tell the Truth. Some of those 150 men's and women's stock has gone up, and some down, in the seventy-nine years since Santa gave my eleven year old father Minute Biographies; Adolph Hitler is not among the 150, but Vladimir Lenin is included as the "Russian Emancipator." Shetterly's oil portraits are attractive, and his choices are exemplars of integrity and justice. My own preferences would be of people who know how to expedite those virtues in society.

Monday Night Drawings

2010-12-07T15:08:00.001-06:00

My live drawing is going through a slump. I'd like to think that there's something happening that's inaccessible to my conscious notice, some synthesis or growth, so I keep plugging away.

These are drawings from Monday night. The young man, Garrett from Brisbane, was kind enough to model for our group, kept nicely still, and was in good humor throughout something like ninety uninterrupted minutes. Emma gave him the watercolor she painted, and Lisa photographed everybody's efforts for Garrett to take back to Oz. I feel like I'm coming along, and this drawing has its moments (look at the hands), but my measuring is uneven, and what I see is too raw.

The other drawings are of regular, Laura. Laura posed with a blanket-sized piece of tule, the stuff of bridal veils, looking to push us to new levels of composition. The damned stuff is stiff, transparent, white, and makes many complicated folds that rearrange themselves with the model's slightest fidgets. Even the mass's silhouette kept changing. I really do want to learn to draw drapery, but if I were going after tule, I'd start by setting it up in a series of still lives, and use scratchboard.

Tom Roark

2010-12-07T14:49:00.000-06:00

I'm planning to expand this series of drawings, that includes Odum, Schumacher, Teilhard, and Hardin. The one above is a self portrait. The point of the exercise is to get adept at drawing from photographs, although my choice of subjects so far is fairly tendentious.

Garrett Hardin

2010-12-07T14:38:00.001-06:00

The laws of our society follow the pattern of ancient ethics, and therefore are poorly suited to governing a complex, crowded, changeable world.

Garrett Hardin

Garrett Hardin was a Texas ecologist (b. 1915, d. 2003), whose most widely read work is called The Tragedy of the Commons. In it, he discusses population, and lets population stand for any human choice that affects the environment's carrying capacity for humans.

His metaphor is a pasture (a "common") upon which a community of herdsmen feed their families' flocks. Each herdsman, as a rational being, will try to maximize the common's benefit to him by increasing the number of animals he runs. Any one of these pastoralists would be responsible for only marginal wear and tear on the pasture, but together, the community overgrazes it, and reduces the number of animals it can support, ultimately wrecking it.

This is parallel to human overpopulation, and to various other issues in which the interests of communities, or humanity as a whole, are different from those of individual, rational, economic beings. Hardin urged us to arrive at and regulate a consensus to regulate population, and those other issues.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

2010-11-29T10:05:00.001-06:00

It is our duty as men and women to behave as though limits to our ability do not exist. We are collaborators in creation of the Universe.

Pierre Teilhard

Teilhard was a French Jesuit and paleontologist, born in 1881. He participated in the discovery of Peking Man, Homo erectus, in China in 1923.

Teilhard was the author of several books, reconciling evolution and Christianity, his masterwork being The Phenomenon of Man. When the Vatican and his Jesuit superiors forbade him from publishing, Father Teilhard was faithful to his vow of obedience. After his death in 1955, friends published his work.

To Teilhard, Christ is the personality of the Universe, and evolution is a process of convergence and complexification. We are drawn toward union with each other, and an ultimate union with God, which he called the Omega Point.

E. F. Schumacher

2010-11-27T10:50:00.001-06:00

Today, a person has to be wealthy to enjoy this simple thing, this very great luxury (to have hands and brain productively engaged): he has to be able to afford space and good tools; he has to be lucky enough to find a good teacher and plenty of time to learn and practice. He has to be rich enough not to need a job; for the number of jobs that would be satisfactory in these respects is very small indeed.

E. F. Schumacher

It took me thirty-plus years to get around to reading Small Is Beautiful, the book that made E. F. Schumacher famous. I figured it must be smarmy, new-age something-or-other, but an economist-engineer I interviewed told me Schumacher was tough.

Schumacher was a German economist, born in 1911, who rejected the Third Reich, and fled to England. He became the British Coal Board's chief economist, and went on to consult with developing economies and the Carter White House.

If you get only two things out of Small Is Beautiful, they should be that modern commerce's abundance is based on capital, not income, and that "the chance to work is the greatest of all needs, and even poorly paid and relatively unproductive work is better than idleness."

Howard Odum

2010-11-25T15:31:00.001-06:00

A whole generation of citizens thought that the carrying capacity of the earth was proportional to the amount of land under cultivation and that higher efficiencies in using the energy of the sun had arrived. This is a sad hoax, for industrial man no longe eats potatoes made from solar energy, now he eats potatoes partly made of oil.

Howard Odum

I got two ideas from Howard Odum, an ecologist and member of the World War II generation who died in 2002.

If an energy source -- be it fossil fuel, nuclear, or solar -- produces a calorie of energy, that calorie isn't its yield, because of all the energy costs of obtaining, transporting, storing and using it. The yield is what it makes, minus what it takes to get it.

Embodied energy is the energy available to us, or that we can use to obtain other energy in some resource: oil, the sun, wind, gravity, manure, water, and so on.

Drawings Of The Bergstrom Kids

2010-11-23T12:36:00.001-06:00

I expected these drawings to take about eight hours. These are the Bergstrom kids, grand niece and nephews of a friend from one of my drawing groups, Gillian, Ike, Gary, and Mikey. Instead it surprised me that I couldn't get the proportions right. Working from snapshots seems like a separate skill from drawing live models, and I unknowingly seem to have come to rely on the proportions and landmarks of adult faces. And I just couldn't catch the perspective of Mikey's far eye. The stakes were higher than usual, because I was drawing pictures of a stranger's beloved children. Freaked me out, and took half a year.

These are great kids, bright and polite. I especially enjoyed meeting Gillian, who is a fearless and outgoing baby. I am enormously pleased to get them off my easel!

Richard Heinberg, Short Version

2010-11-20T15:31:00.000-06:00

I forgot to put on my hat the Saturday of the big wet snowstorm, and walked to South High for the Neighborhood Sustainability Networking Fair, “Building Resilient Communities: Preparing Together for an Changed World.” I was thinking I wouldn’t mind if the world waited a couple of years to change, but I do have ideas about how I’d like it to be, so I went looking for allies.

Alliance for Sustainability organized the event: vendor displays (energy conservation, gardening, electric cars, environmental justice, local food), topical and neighborhood discussions, and keynote speaker Richard Heinberg. Heinberg is a journalist, Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, and author of The Party’s Over and other books about scarce oil and its economic consequences. His talk gave the day its subtitle, “Preparing Together for a Changed World.”

Heinberg’s a sturdy sixty-year old with spectacles and wispy sandy hair. He spoke for about an hour, with slides of diagrams and pictures to dramatize his remarks.

We’re living at a critical moment in history. Heinberg’s case runs something like this: The US and the world have a debt that we can never retire. The housing bubble that burst in 2008 was four times as large as any before. The bail out cost in the trillions, compared to The Vietnam War’s $600 some billion price tag. US productivity has nearly doubled since 1975, but household income has stayed flat, with households compensating with debt. All this debt assumes growth, but the end of oil, with no adequate alternatives ready, assures us there will be no more growth. Heinberg quoted Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, that the economy is resetting to a lower level of spending and consuming. (I would refer skeptics to Saul Griffith, who has calculated that the world would need an area the size of Australia, “Renewistan,” devoted to alternatives, including nuclear, to replace all but a fifth or sixth of our current fossil fuel use.)

Heinberg says it is up to us to invent a new normal, imagining how we’d like to see the world in 2050 (I’ll be 101), and filling in the steps from here to there. He had a list of areas to work on. We need to emphasize what is positive: community, satisfaction from honest work, intergenerational solidarity, cooperation, free time, happiness, artistry, and beauty in the built environment. We need to reduce spending and consumption, grow our own food, get to know our neighbors, and imagine the best-case scenario. This crisis is our opportunity.

Our communities need resilience:

    * Redundancy in critical systems, in other words different ways and places to get what we need, and to get around, so we can endure loss of one or some parts;
    * Dispersed system control points, meaning, I think, that commerce and government get spread around, not eliminated;
    * Dispersed inventories: no more big-box bargains, but more work and less vulnerability to disaster;
    * Balanced feedback loops, for instance concentrated wealth would not be able to organize to further concentrate.

Yeah, but, like the widower said at the funeral, what am I gonna do tonight? We need conservation and activism. There’s no excuse not to insulate our houses. Neighborhoods can afford what individuals can’t, so we can share expensive tools. We can relearn the skills that got our parents and grandparents through the Great Depression and war rationing, gardening, canning,
different kinds of repair. Walk, ride bikes, get away from the fastest and cheapest. Pay attention to the block clubs. Get to know Corcoran GROWS. Buy locally, Tom said, in his WalMart jeans and sweatshirt, sipping a cup of Colombian coffee.

In the medium term, we need better rail, cellphone and GPS facilitated ride sharing, local food processing, some way of getting people and businesses into idle buildings, local currencies, and neighborhood economic laboratories, which could also be sites for car sharing, credit union, job center, and clinic.

After Richard Heinberg’s presentation, came the topical breakout sessions, then we met with people from our neighborhoods.

I chose local food because of our household’s almond business. That was a useful choice. Community Table Cooperative was soliciting ideas from local food processors, and I got to brainstorm about how that organization could help us thrive. There was a hazel nut grower from Lake City in my group, and it was good to exchange names with him, since we’ve talked about using local hazels in addition to Californian almonds. (Another member of my group -- somebody I think I recognized from way back in my weatherization days -- told me I should realize that I’m an elder, and I said “Speak for yourself, brother.” I think the world is finally catching up with me.)

The neighborhood session was less immediately profitable, but sitting down and sharing ideas about what we’d like to see in Corcoran forty years from now was fun. I think we made progress.

Joan, Kit, And Stony

2010-11-20T15:29:00.000-06:00

Richard Heinberg Notes, 9/16

2010-11-20T15:26:00.000-06:00

Richard Heinberg: “Preparing Together for a Changed World”

Richard Heinberg was keynote speaker for November 13’s Transition Towns and Neighborhood Sustainability Fair, sponsored by Alliance for Sustainability, and at South High. Heinberg is a journalist, Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, and author of The Party’s Over and other books about scarce oil and its economic consequences.His talk was titled “Preparing Together for a Changed World.”

Heinberg’s a sturdy sixty-year old with spectacles and whispy sandy hair. He spoke for about an hour, with slides of graphs and photos to dramatize his remarks.

2008’s economic crash is ongoing. The housing bubble was four times as big as any previous bubbles, and when it collapsed, $50 trillion dollars disappeared. We’re not in a recovery. Parodying commentators who speculate about the shape of the recovery, Heinberg said we are in an “L-shaped” recovery. “It is up to us to invent a new normal.”

Heinberg said that the total cost of the bailout is $8.5 trillion. I’m sure this number is somehow meaningful, but SourceWatch says government and the Fed together disbursed $4.86 trillion, with a maximum at-risk of $13.86 trillion, and $1.93 trillion outstanding as of September.Sorry to make your eyes glaze, but I wanted to be scrupulous, since I’m with Heinberg.

It’s big money. World War II cost us $3.2 trillion, and Vietnam came in at a bargain $670 billion. To give us perspective, Heinberg included a series of graphics, with a trillion dollars being what looked like a football field coverd by warehouse pallets of bundled hundred dollar bills.

Productivity has increased steadily, with household income keeping pace until 1975. Since then productivity has nearly doubled, but household income has remained flat. We’ve increased household debt since then, but we’re about maxed out, and people can’t buy stuff if they don’t have money. Heinberg quoted Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, that the economy is resetting to a lower level of spending and consuming.

Economic theory depends on the belief that the economy will grow. Heinberg had a number of graphs illustrating spending and consumption, all of which were J-shaped. Until the mid or late nineteenth century everything sloped up gradually. Then every trend Heinberg graphed spiked. This is when we invented our economic theories, assuming that the volcano of wealth would continue. Compund interest, fractional reserve banking, and debt leverage require growth for monetary health.

We built a growth economy because of easy energy. In 1850, 65% of work was done by animals, 15% by people, and 20% by fuel. The first oil well, near Titusville, PA, was drilled in 1856. After 1865, human and animal work began to be replaced by fuel. Since 1970, virtually all work is done by fuel.

Heinberg referenced Shell geologist, and MIT and UCLA professor, M. K. Hubbert, who predicted peaks and decline in oil discovery and production for the United States and the world. So far, Hubbert has proved prescient. The US has already seen both peaks, and the world saw a discovery peak in 1964, with the production peak probably now, give or take five years.

We pumped the easiest oil first. Heinberg illustrated this with side-by-side photos of a nineteenth century oil well, looking like a set for Gunsmoke, and a deep water oil platform. Deep water oil and tar sand oil are marginal sources, it takes large fractions of the energy they yield to go get them.

Charles Schlumberger, the World Bank’s principal air transport specialist believes there will be a gradual disappearance of commercial aviation. No more body scans. Peak oil means peak food, because agriculture now has a seven-to-one calorie ratio: seven calories inot the tractor, semi, etc., and one into your mouth.

Conventional wisdom has it that when the price of oil makes it unavailable, a competitor will replace it. We are “searching for a miracle.” There is no credible alternative energy scenario that makes up for a loss of fossil fuels. We have choices between planning the life we want post-oil and responding to crisis. Either scenario can be top-down from government, or bottom up grass-roots organizing. How do the grass roots design post-oil life? Conservation and activism; envision 2050, then “backcast” the way to get there. We need to shoot for a mix of fuels that can continue and a partly (which parts?) de-industrialized economy for 2075. “We need to be driven by vision, not crisis.”

Our communities need resilience:

    * Redundancy in critical systems;
    * Dispersed system control points;
    * Dispersed inventories;
    * Balanced feedback loops;

Co-operative power: “Neighborhoods can afford what individuals can’t;”

Rail;

Cellphone- and GPS-facilitated ride-sharing;

Local food processing;

Organized squatting: some way of getting people and businesses into idle buildings;

Behavior change away from cheapest and fastest;

Neighborhood watches;

Bicycle transport;

Community currencies;

Transition towns, the movement of which Corcoran GROWS is part;

Community economic laboratories: One-stop for car share, food co-op, credit union, job center, free clinic, etc.

We need to emphasize what is positive, community, satisfaction from honest work, intergenerational solidarity, cooperation, free time, happiness, artistry, and beauty in the built environment. We need to reduce spending and consumption, grow our own food, get to know our neighbors, and imagine the best-case scenario. This crisis is our opportunity.

After Richard Heinberg’s presentation, there were break-out sessions about transition towns, solar heat and power, electric vehicles, how to enjoy more and spend less, local food, and more, including youth groups. Late in the afternoon, we met with people from our neighborhoods.

I chose local food because of our household almond business. It was useful because Community Table Coperative was soliciting ideas from local food processors, and I got to brainstorm about how that organization could help us thrive. There was a hazel nut grower from Lake City in my group, and it was good to exchange names with him, since we’ve talked about baking local hazels in addition to California almonds.

The neighborhood session was less immediately profitable, but sitting down and sharing ideas about what we’d like to see in Corcoran forty years from now was fun. I think we made progress.

Liberatianism: Greatest Idea Of The Nineteenth Century

2010-11-04T17:26:00.000-05:00

Maybe a little too tendentious. Since the captions are there: Drivers don't know what they're doing, and when they do -- and the cops aren't around -- they cheat.

Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons makes a case against libertarianism that deserves attention: Eventually a society of individuals who -- even marginally -- rationally maximize their own benefits exceeds carrying capacity.

The Morning After The Night Before

2010-11-03T13:17:00.000-05:00

Error doesn't need to be acknowledged, but it must be corrected.
Dee Hock, Visa creator

Before, I was giving sixty-forty odds that civilization would crash, and ninety-ten that the US economy would. Now it's eighty-twenty, and near certainty.

Portrait of Donna

2010-11-02T13:55:00.000-05:00

Donna, from Monday night. I modeled during the second to hours, so this is it. I made two false starts, confused by the sweater opening. The scallops finally misfired, but the shape is right. After the two dud beginnings, I started looking around to see if any of my colleagues was in possession of a simple Ticonderoga #2. No such luck, and I had to suck it up and draw the thing directly.

Modeling, I put Jonathan Richman's Action Packed on Lisa's Colwell's sound system, and had to leave it behind so everybody could put it on their thingummies.

Jill From Tuesday Night

2010-10-29T14:35:00.000-05:00

I'm getting more confidant, and minding clumsinesses like the hands in the bottom study less. The humanoid smudge is a fifteen-minute blind contour, using the same pen as the other drawing on the page.

Discovered with Patrica at Drawing Group that we both have spent time following the instructions of Kimon Niccolaides' The Natural Way to Draw, she more than I, and with a student of Niccolaides, and at the Art Students' League.

I rediscovered Marshall McLuhan a few weeks ago, and thinking about media as environments and massages has been really juicy. It's been a no-brainer (snicker) to sort of map McLuhan onto more recent brain research: f'rinstance, Germans got volunteers to learn to juggle, and found that they started making new brain tissue. We're tripping across similar info frequently these days. So that's how the massage works. Anything you do is a skill, including understanding a television commercial.

Now I need to map that onto ecology, limits to growth, sexual liberty, etc., etcetera being Teilhard's and Soleri's notion that we will take conscious, somatic control of evolution.

Still Crazy After...What Was I Talking About?

2010-10-26T11:05:00.001-05:00

I'm a hippie. A good friend and an acquaintance have both pointed out that that was then and now is now. The acquaintance went on to say something like, "The pot and sex were good, but that's over." He went on to outline some neo-conservative shit, and imply that I'd sign on to it too, if I were intellectually honest and courageous.

Here are two hippie sources, Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth brand, and Paul Krassner...uh, gadfly. The hip odd couple.

Sidearms At Wounded Knee

2010-10-26T10:59:00.000-05:00

Stony says art shouldn’t tell you things; a work of art should invite you to consider something.

The Balinese have a saying, sayeth McLuhan: We have no art; we do everything as well as we can. Lovelock says life optimizes conditions for life, and he shows how life on Earth affects various planetary material cycles. I train my own nervous system, and I train my environment the way I think will optimize conditions for human growth.

Dennis Banks At Wounded Knee

2010-10-26T10:56:00.000-05:00

Part Of Our Moment's Dilemma

2010-10-26T10:54:00.001-05:00

I don't remember where I got this, but it's important.

Boffing With Stewart Brand

2010-10-26T10:50:00.001-05:00

Stewart Brand with a Boffer. These things were foam swords for working out your aggressions. The theory was that violence is instinctive in us, and we could reduce the real thing by playfully ritualizing it. Brand introduced me to a lot of things through the Whole Earth Catalog, and its descendants, including Boffers — which got my thigh seriously chomped by a friend’s dog. More lately, Brand has introduced me to Steven LeBlanc’s archeological history of human violence, Constant Battles. We’re violent when we exceed carrying capacity.

The Cavalry At Wounded Knee

2010-10-26T10:47:00.000-05:00

Maybe Jesus and the Buddha teach us how to be content.

But real oppressors and thieves replace you. That means that they select themselves to shape humanity and the world from now on. I had a 1-O draft deferment during the Viet Nam War, and I was serious, but I can’t be a pacifist anymore. If desire for human peace is hell, the moral thing is to go to hell.

Portrait of Jan

2010-10-26T10:45:00.000-05:00

One of two drawings from Monday night. Let's just write the other one off to exercise.

Portrait of Liz

2010-10-20T07:54:00.000-05:00

There were more drawings from my Tuesday night co-op, but this was the best page. Two two-minute poses, one okay and one clumsy, plus a nice little vignette.

Monday I was either playing at the top of my game, or over my head. With drawing -- as with everything -- I'm training my nervous system. There's a slippery medium.

Portrait of Lisa

2010-10-19T10:08:00.000-05:00

The second of two Monday night drawings. This is a better likeness than the drawing of Emma.

I'm beginning to draw with assurance, which is good, because my hand doesn't have a lot of fine control. The brain's gotta do it. I'm starting to keep track of relationships: "This is on a vertical line with that, and a horizontal line with this other thing;" "If I extend that line, it will hit that;" "That's about as long as this." I'd like to speed the process up, so that I just see those things instead of having to look for them. I'm training my nervous system.

An interesting thing happened: I got the distance from the seat to the floor way wrong, but was able to correct it, and camouflage the bad marks.

Portrait Of Emma

2010-10-19T09:52:00.000-05:00

The first of two drawings from Monday night. This is the co-op in which we rotate modeling duties. Two forty-five minute sittings per pose. I usually work with Sharpies on a 9x12 sketchbook.

This one is of Emma, and only those who know who it is will recognize her, but I like the melancholy--giantess look. I thought of putting in a horizon, about the level of the trouser cuff, maybe some surf too, but there isn't room, and that would be kind of fakey.

The Week Reports On Cyberwar

2010-10-19T09:32:00.000-05:00

I can't believe I'm reading The Week. This issue summarized The Nation, The Christian Science Monitor, and Forbes.com on the Stuxnet worm, which has invaded the Iranian nuclear infrastructure.

Nation: "Requires the expertise of a nation state. US? Israel?"

CSM: "First true cyberweapon. Designed to cross from the digital realm to the physical world and destroy something."

Forbes: "Frightening new era."

There was an interview a couple of weeks ago on NPR. Two computer experts said that it would take the expertise of computer, nuclear, and industrial engineers to do this, as well as logistical support. They got a little cryptic, saying they believed that Stuxnet was a message from unknown parties to someone, not necessarily Iran, which could be understood only by sender and recipient.

Barbara suggested the message was between Iranian factions, or that the worm is part of a protection racket. Sam, our family tech guy, believes it's five guys in Russia, doing it for kicks.

The same issue of the week holds a dozen-page, pull-out ad for a television mini-series about Carlos "The Jackal." Terror is the weapon of the disenfranchised, and Carlos had a pretty good run as the outsiders' military-industrial complex.

To further add to the disquiet, the magazine notes a hedge fund, designed to profit from an Israeli-Iranian war. The Atlantic, reportedly, gives an Israeli attack by summer a better than fifty-fifty chance.

There was an obit for Roald Dahl, too.

Farmers' Market, Peak Oil, And The Midnight Knock On The Door

2010-10-18T09:35:00.001-05:00

Saturday's Farmers' Market was our last outdoor market of the year. Sam and Marissa manned the booth for a while, both being great outgoing Barsy's Almonds personalities. A pair of activists were leafleting people entering, passing out the "Scare the Spooks" piece, and later another group had an anti-war demonstration.

The Scare-the-spooks thing is so creepy (FBI conduct sounds more like the KGB of grade school propaganda), I asked the canvassers if they didn't think the targeted activists might not have been up to some mischief. They said not. The peace demonstrators were in good humor, with chicken (chicken?) costumes and a trumpeter. Friendly car horn responses were almost constant. It seemed like the organizers had some economic understanding, which is good, but their emphasis was on protest.

Unlike neighbor Sean Gosiewski, who was leafletting for his organization Alliance for Sustainability's November 13 Transition Towns & Neighborhood Sustainability Networking Fair. I'd like to see a strong protestor presence at the Fair. The protesters' analysis of our Afghan occupation is that we need a base in the region to secure petroleum flow. So far so good, but what are we going to do instead? Sean's barking up the right tree, but not loudly enough. The protesters are barking loudly (and getting a lot of agreement, given the honking horns), but they're under the wrong tree.

Artistic Observation, Representation, And Narrative

2010-10-15T13:39:00.001-05:00

Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) is the presumed inventor of scientific perspective, around 1425. Johannes Gutenberg (1398-1468) invented (European) movable type around 1450.

Marshall McLuhan connected print technology and perspective in art. He seems to have believed that perspective derives from print, but their order of appearance -- a generation apart -- would have them merely coincidental, or deriving from third source. McLuhan wrote:

The Renaissance Legacy.

The Vanishing Point=Self Effacement.
The Detached Observer.
No Involvement!

The viewer of Renaissance art is systematically placed outside the frame of experience. A piazza for everything, and everything in its piazza.

The instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all of us, all at once. No detachment of frame is possible.

The first example is a modern child's drawing, taken from Betty Edward's Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. The drawing tells us what the artist thinks we need to know: People have a cap of hair, eyelashes, pairs of arms and legs; clothes have edges, and houses have doors and windows; smoke comes out of chimneys; there is a man in the moon. There's a narrative, given the unusual circumstance of a child's being outdoors alone at night, or of the moon's being visible by day (not an unusual event, but something a seven year-old might have only just noticed). Things are sized hierarchically. (This drawing is by an unusual child, or an adult, given the signature, written in confident, non-standard cursive.)

The second example is an etching by Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer. Durer, using scientific perspective, is illustrating a gadget for drawing objects in a cold-blooded way. McLuhan would have said the picture also illustrated his point.

The third example is a portrait of Ambrose Vollard by Pablo Picasso, done in 1910. The artist and his subject would have known electric lights, telegraphs, telephones, phonograph records, and cinema, but not radio. The artist has deconstructed Vollard's image, and put it back together, in a cloud of impressions, forming something new. We get to share various moments of perception, recalled or invented by Picasso.

The fourth example is a page from Saul Steinberg's The Passport, published in 1954. This may be one drawing, or it may be two, fortuitously combined for the book. In any case, we have a narrative, as we did with the child's drawing: These are men sleeping on a night flight, not noticing as their airplane passes over a desert town.

Cartoon

2010-10-14T10:59:00.001-05:00

Bread and butter cartoon for Marissa's parents. My drawing, Barbara's caption. She says captions should come first, but I think she did pretty well working the other way.

A Visit To An Outsider

2010-10-14T10:31:00.000-05:00

I drove a friend to the Mall of America to buy dress clothes. On the way back we passed the outsider-art house at 33rd and Bloomington. I remarked on the installation, saying that it was ugly. Steve said that that was my opinion. I disagreed, and we dropped the subject.

The installation is a front yard full of cast-off dolls, furniture, and painted hoses. Think of the ditch where everybody in the county tosses their old bed springs. My friend Steve is an outsider himself, given to producing zines full of redundant neologisms and often correct but usually unsupported assertions. Everybody is entitled to his own pattern language, but understanding requires coherence, and something there is that doesn't love a mess.

And yet... My urban permaculture plantation must offend some minority among my neighbors, and ears there are that don't hear what I think coherent.

I went by the installation yesterday afternoon with my camera, and got a tour from the artist. I didn't take pictures, and I didn't ask the man his name. He is a tall black man of fifty or so, lived between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six in prison for B&E, and affiliates with the Black Panther Party. The word "gentrification"features prominently in the installation, painted in letters eight or ten inches high on the upstairs porch's asbestos shingles. A nylon tarp covers the front yard, and is covered in turn by painted lettering making connections between racism, war, economics, and community development. Red-painted pipes and hoses run between each other and various dolls, masks, and cabinets. A retail display case contains a Hilary Clinton puppet, and a cabinet television which plays a tape loop of the World Trade Center attack. There are concealed speakers which play crowd noises, including screams. The video and audio were not on during my visit.

According to my host, people who benefit from injustice have no reason to end it.

The artist was coherent, but not receptive to ideas which from me would have been supportive and informative. We parted easily, the ease making me feel a little objectified: I was an audience, someone who needed to be informed, and with no dimension or importance of my own. He wasn't going to miss me. I'm not going to judge somebody who has probably felt like that a lot, himself, but it stung a little. And, if I lived on the same block, I would think that my freedom was limited by my neighbor's vehement exercise of his.

Sketches

2010-10-13T13:13:00.000-05:00

Tuesday and Monday studies. I also did a New Yorker-style cartoon as bread-and-butter note for Marissa's parents. The weather's a little scared here. I lay awake between three and four, thoughts flying faster than I could catch them, but not letting me go. Everything had too many exceptions, qualifications, and implication. Reminded me of a bad acid trip of forty years ago. Deep breathing and a body scan finally let me drop back to sleep.

Thermotats And Voter Literacy

2010-10-11T11:48:00.000-05:00

More on my snarky theme, Literacy Tests for Voters and Public Servants.

Are thermostats valves or switches? The way they work is to sense room temperature, and to switch the furnace on or off, depending on the setting a human chooses. This one has a feature that changes the setting depending on time. Most of us, including me, treat thermosstats like valves: set the thing higher, and more heat might come out, but the furnace only has one setting. (What's really happening is that we're cheating, getting a little warmer until somebody more responsible comes along and busts us.)

Why is this important? Thermostats are an example of negative feedback, and an introduction to thinking accurately about how the world works.

Yoga's European Origins

2010-10-11T11:35:00.001-05:00

I found an article in the November Yoga Journal strangely comforting. Mark Singleton, whom I surmise to be an British academic and yoga student, wrote in Yoga's Greater Truth that what you and I think of as "yoga" has a nineteenth century origin in a Danish system called "Primitive Gymnastics." So "Yoga" is part of our own lebensreform movement. Asana is one of the limbs of Patanjali's Eightfold Path, but what we're doing the Indians got from us, and recently. The Indians who introduced us to yoga a century or so ago were interested in breathing and meditation, and looked down their schnozzes at the gymnastic stuff for class reasons.

Upper photo taken because the Swiss ball looked mysterious and surreal next to the plumbing. This is the downstairs bath, the tub and shower mostly unused. The dangling hose is part of Sam's brewing apparatus.

Belief, Thomas Merton, And The Rabbi's Cat

2010-10-09T14:55:00.001-05:00

One of the sources that moved Thomas Merton toward belief was a book by somebody named Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy. Merton was initially skeptical of it because of its Nihil Obstat (Catholic certification that it contained "nothing objectionable"). That would have been my reaction. Merton thought of the Nihil Obstat as "Catholic censorship."

In the Sussemans' telling, it was Gilson's relaying the Medieval scholars' idea that "God is Being itself" that moved Merton.

But how do you get from God-as-pure-being to the Resurrection, and to a vow of obedience to lesser men? (Trappists also take vows of "stability," staying put, and "conversion of manners," which includes the well known vows of poverty and chastity.)

Comic book frame from The Rabbi's Cat, by Joann Sfar.

A Story About My Brother And Father Kelly

2010-10-09T14:35:00.000-05:00

Left to right, Tom, Bridgid, Denny, Tim. Here's a story about Tim.

In the fifth or sixth grade, Sister Assissium told Tim's class that the people in some part of the world were poor because they were Communists. Tim ventured the opinion that these folk might be Communists because they were poor. Assissium made Tim stand out in the hall.

Father Kelly, the young assistant pastor came along, and asked Tim why he was out there. He told Tim that he didn't want to see him there again.

This happened in 1961 or so. Father Kelly -- "call me Joe" -- went on to become the local radical priest, and a friend of the family. When I heard the story about Tim, it included a story about Joe Kelly's hearing the story, and saying, "Tell Tim I'm sorry."

Thomas Merton

2010-10-09T14:24:00.000-05:00

I read a good part of this short bio of Thomas Merton while waiting for the auto shop to fix an exhaust leak and some other stuff. Merton was the smart and cosmopolitan scion of American and New Zealand expats. In his twenties he converted to Roman Catholicism, and became a Trappist priest, as well as a hermit who carried on conversations and correspondences with the likes of Aldous Huxley, Brahmachari, and D. T. Suzuki.

I'd read it before, and done some underlining I'd forgotten. Quotes:

"If I pray for peace, that prayer is only justified if it means one thing." -- it had to mean that he himself could sacrifice affluence, the things that made for greed. Just praying for a cessation of war wasn't enough.

"I am scared to take a proprietary interest in anything, for fear that my love of what I own may be killing someone somewhere."

"How can I write about poverty when, though I am in a way poor, yet I still live as though in a country club?"

"Thank God, thank God that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others."

"Biblical eschatology must not be confused with the vague and anxious eschatology of human foreboding."

And in regard to the above foreboding, Now here was Father Louis (Merton) their teacher, telling them that this was a pathological fear, and that such fears were really a thinly disguised hope for violence, a hope for a violent end, in opposition to the true force of eschatology."

He repeated over and over that nonviolence does not make sense "if one does not also have faith in God."

Do I believe that last one, and does it square the earlier statements about poverty? If scarcity is the germ of war, doesn't that make war's elimination a purely practical problem. And what if there is no god.

Monday and Tuesday Drawing Groups

2010-10-09T13:52:00.000-05:00

Drawings from Monday and Tuesday, the gestures from Tuesday. Tuesday was a problem I didn't solve, and still don't understand. There were a lot of us in a member's living room, and crammed close to the model. In the longer poses, I didn't get the proportions right, while thinking that I was doing a good job measuring. Do we have a zoom function in our vision that rationalizes close up distortion? Or was I measuring wrong?

The more finished drawing is of Laura from Monday night. That group was talking for a while about deep stuff: heaven, hell, belief, doubt, Christianity, and Buddhism (both American and Asian). I was surprised to hear someone express her deeply felt belief that the early deaths of worthy people argue against the existence of God.

Solar Boats, Fidel Castro, And Political Repression

2010-10-07T22:33:00.000-05:00

A political cartoon I did when I was editing the Minnesota Renewable Energy Society's Newsletter, plus pics of three kid-built solar boats, from a dozen or so years ago.

Speaking of Fidel Castro, a gay friend sent me the following links, the first in Spanish, the second a partial translation of the interview. In them, Fidel says that persecution of Cuban homosexuals was wrong, and takes responsibility. Mao murdered his way to the top, and Stalin committed greater genocide than Hitler. Castro treated obstructionists the way I probably would, a good reason to keep me off the throne, but conundrum-raising history.

http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2010/08/31/index.php?section=mundo&article=026e1mun

http://blabbeando.blogspot.com/2010/08/fidel-castro-on-persecution-against.html

A Systems Approach To Economic Recovery

2010-10-05T14:11:00.000-05:00

If the rich aren't burdened with regulatory and tax burdens, this will free them to create wealth for society. In times when society's back is against the economic wall, we are foolish to so burden them. That's the theory, anyway.

It's more like they're children who tell their parents the family won't have to hire a plumber to fix the toilet, if the parents let them shit on the floor. Forgetting for a minute that resource limits play a big part in current economic stresses, the business cycle has periods of growth and recession because need for goods is saturated.

Where are there unmet needs? If we know, we can direct capital toward them, most effectively stimulating the economy. Here are two good places:

* Building an industrial base for a civilization that runs ecologically and on solar-power;

* Poor people -- a demographic whose need for goods is not saturated.

Where will we get the dough? Not by borrowing. We won't ever be able to repay. Not from the government's non-military discretionary budget. There's not much there. It has to come from the military, and to a lesser extent, from the wealthy.

H- Bomb graphic from Makers of the Nuclear Holocaust (A Guide to the Nuclear Weapons Complex and Citizen Action), edited by Sam Day (1981, 2nd edition, 24 pp.; $1.50 (then) postpaid from AFSC, Rocky Flats/Nuclear Weapons Facilities Project, 1660 Lafayette, Denver, CO 80218). AFSC is the American Friends Sevice Committee.

Sam's Wedding

2010-10-04T12:51:00.001-05:00

We married Sam off on Saturday, the wedding in our immature urban permaculture plantation. From top to bottom:

     *The bride, Marissa Bremer of the Plymouth (Minnesota) Bremers. Dig that dress! She's standing on the street side of the hedge. On the ground behind Marissa, you can see a plant in a short cage. This is a hazel nut bush. Shortly before the wedding, some animal ate one of the baby hazels. We're lucky to live in a neighborhood in which you can call somebody up and ask, "Do you have any spare hazel bushes?" as though you were borrowing a cup of sugar.

     * The wedding party at the rehearsal. Note the "dude of honor" and the "groom's woman." (Guess which witness is a Minnesota state cop.)

     * The mothers, Barbara Spenader, and Mary Kay Bremer.

     * Father of the bride, Larry Bremer.

     * The groom.

Aphorisms

2010-10-01T17:35:00.000-05:00

There's freedom of the press if you own one.

Somebody

Teilhard said that we were gonna take conscious and somatic control of evolution; he didn't say it would be this tough.

Me

The environment as a processor of information is propaganda. Propaganda ends where dialogue begins. You must talk to the media, not to the programmer. To talk to the programmer is like complaining to the hot dog vendor at a ball park about how badly your favorite team is playing.

Marshall McLuhan

EU Sanctions Member Debtors, Protects Upperclass Twits

2010-09-29T13:29:00.001-05:00

The European Union is planning sanctions for member nations which don't get control of their debt. The object is to prevent crises like Greece's. Of course. Of course.

The problem is the shock the belt-tightening measures will have on European workers who are just doing a good-faith job, believing in a social contract that can't last. And you know that the Ferrari-driving numbnutzes, the real problem, are gonna keep on truckin'.

What's needed, there and here, is a different paradigm. Universal ownership, instead of wages and welfare distributed as largesse. Mimicking and integrating with world ecology, instead of waste, pollution, and (soon to be out-of-reach) sticking plasters for the wounds.

Three studies of Jill. Good likenesses, but I missed something that's girlish about the woman herself. Jill speaks three languages I know about (English, Romanian, and Japanese). In the rest of the world, that might be standard, but in the US, what's somebody with brains doing pulling two-hour life modeling gigs to pad her income?

Mark Dayton For Governor

2010-09-29T12:50:00.000-05:00

In Minnesota's three-way race for governor, my candidate is Mark Dayton, the Democrat.

The Republican, Tom Emmer seems a little dim and thuggish.

Tom Horner, the Independent, is bright and fair-minded, but adamantly centrist. Born in 1950, his career has been as reporter for suburban shopper-stoppers, press flack for former Republican Senator Dave Durenberger, press agent, and university communications perfesser. Eschewing radical solutions, and groomed as somebody who could run for governor, he represents the discredited, square paradigm. I never got high with this guy.

Dayton, a department store heir, formerly married to a Pillsbury, is a child of privilege who wants to increase taxes on the privileged. He recognizes that the money -- and a lot of it -- has to come from somewhere, but the thing that persuades me is his privilege. This guy has had the leisure to think about something besides a political career. Usually, I'd be happy to send the richest candidate to Terra Haute for the Indiana hot shot, but if one of these characters understands the Whole Earth/CoEvolution take on intervening in the system we laughingly call our society, it's Mark Dayton. And he's been State Auditor.

Five gestures of Jill. I used a brush, which had the contrary effect of making these quick studies less elegant.

Joe And Bonnie: Neighbors Involved In Transition

2010-09-29T12:21:00.000-05:00

From the October issue of the Corcoran Neighborhood News. I do one of these every month. I posted this as a scan from the paper, rather than pulling the drawing and copy from my hard drive because I didn't want to scoop my publisher. Just spread the article a little further.

Ferrrari, Slowest Car On The Road

2010-09-29T12:14:00.001-05:00

"No... No, Jack, it's a beautiful car. It just seems like ya got a lotta capital tied up in it."

Ivan Illich is supposed to have figured out how fast a car will go, if you account for all the time you spend earning the money you need to operate it. Something like six miles per. I wonder how fast this thing goes. (Yeah, yeah, I know, but I said "earning.")

Scan from the September 24 issue of The Week, which can be a fun read over your cornflakes.

Little Boxes Still Made Of Ticky Tacky

2010-09-28T17:03:00.001-05:00

I took these pictures at a Woodbury, MN strip mall. It was tricked out to look like it's just down the street from Beaver Cleaver's house -- there's even a bank pretending to be Louis Sullivan's Owatonna Farmer's National -- but most of the businesses are national franchises.

There's a lot of recent residential building nearby, but this is not the only commercial development seeking those people's custom. Find the steeple on the horizon in the top picture. It's about an inch in from the margin. That church used to be out in the country (we're looking back toward Saint Paul). Now it's at the west end of this commercial building spree.

All built on credit that could have gone toward wind turbines, photovoltaics, permaculture, etc., the kind of development that could create wealth instead of sharing it out. How many of these buildings will be shuttered in ten years?

How many apple trees or hazelnut bushes could I have put in the ground for what that planter costs per year?

Minnesota Auditor Candidate Proposes Adopting Genuine Progress Index

2010-09-28T16:40:00.001-05:00

I've known Annie Young for twenty-five or thirty years. Annie's on the Minneapolis Park Board, and she's a Green party stalwart. When Sam was a baby, she and I were on the board of a since-winnowed food co-op. Annie was the spark plug for the Green Institute. The city wanted to park a garbage transfer station in one of Minneapolis' poorest neighborhoods, and one that was already home to an asphalt plant. Instead of just protesting, Annie and colleagues proposed an alternative for the site, an energy-efficient business incubator built with renewable and recycled materials. That's the green roof and solar panels behind her in the photo.

Now she's running for State Auditor. There was a piece of campaign literature at a co-op where I was delivering Barsy's Almonds. The piece said Annie's for:

     * Sustainability

     * Life Cycle Cost Accounting

     * More holistic economic indicators.

I had a hard time with how she put that last one -- although I knew right away what she's after, and approve wholeheartedly. I still haven't come up with a better bullet point. I can imagine some rube suggesting that Annie wants to print the GDP numbers on hemp paper, or arm wrestle over whether the economy's an Aries or a Sagittarius. That guy wasn't gonna vote for her anyway, but I'd like folks who might to know what holistic economic indicators might be.

Barbara suggested "least cost accounting," but I'm not sold.

The idea is that indices like Gross Domestic Product treat all economic activity the same. If a dollar changes hands over a loaf of bread, blasting the peak off a West Virginia mountain, or a nudie cutie ice cube tray, it registers the same. So a flattened United States where everybody sells pornographic novelties is humming along nicely.

What the candidate is proposing is rating the economy according to how people and our environment are doing. Read an overview at Annie's website, or go to http://www.gpiatlantic.org/gpi.htm to read about the Genuine Progress Index.

Drawings, Aches And Pains, And The Second Worst Bank In The World

2010-09-23T11:12:00.000-05:00

I've been icing an aching back. What I think is a cramp started in my hip, and migrated to just a little southwest of my left shoulder blade. At one point I was afraid the Stillwater police would have to stick their oar in, because an old guy, in distress, was trying unsuccessfully to lie down on a riverfront picnic table. Beautiful day in a beautiful town: antique downtown buildings; sailboats moored nearby; frisky young dog chasing a tennis ball.

Barbara, executrix of her mother's will, learned in conversation with the Distelfink, PA, Recorder of Wills, that her mother's bank was "the second worst bank in the world." What is your obligation, if you are an employee of the the second worst bank in the world?

Above, four drawings done in Monday and Tuesday drawing sessions. Between the two, I made eight drawings, only one I would call "good," the reclining nude. The unfinished clothed model, whose hand grasps the tubular chair, is typical of the eight. I was making an effort to measure, and get everything in its right place, a skill that comes and goes with me. I abandoned this attempt when I realized that different parts disagreed. The portrait and the standing nude are two middling-quality examples. The portrait is a near likeness, and is a little overworked. The standing nude is fairly solid, which I like, and is a decent likeness, but has some real proportion problems, a dinky left hand and the top half's being too small for the bottom being most obvious.

Hippie Survivalism

2010-09-20T12:14:00.000-05:00

Another picture of the New Alchemists, circa 1973. It had fallen out of its own book, and I just found it tucked into one of my art books.

The text on the rest of the page reads: We find that there are resources, often in the strangest places, as we become less concerned with high energy and more concerned with diverse wholes. If we are willing to change the way we live, tghen we can begin to restore and reconstruct. By passing through the portals of nature, we can begin to work with or through her so that the scares begin to heal. The path will involve the three strands of practicality, science, and a wisdom that is philosophical, even mystical. Separately change cannot come about, but perhaps... and this is only perhaps, together the world will begin to sing.

It is easy to begin. The Ark and the Backyard Fish Farms reflect wholistic and small-scale thinking, and although they are early explorations into man in nature, they will help give confidence and directions.

Time is not on our side. Hence the urgency and tone of the "Journal" (The Journal of the New Alchemists). To some, like Odum (Howard Odum, a biologist and one of the few sensible members of the WWII generation), our survival is at stake; should they be proved wrong, we will stand to gain. If they are right, there can be virtually no alternative that is not hell, until the living order of the earth's mantle is restored.

Rubens: Negro Head Studies

2010-09-20T11:57:00.000-05:00

We were at the bakery yesterday (record day!), and a caterer was working alongside us briefly. She told us that she was working at the Renaissance Festival, a commercial affair featuring lots of jester's hats, sword fights, and hey-nonny-nonny. Her being at the Ren Fest was remarkable only in that she is black. Who cares, right? There really was nothing remarkable about it.

It reminded me of these Rubens studies, and that Africans in Renaissance Europe would have been about as exotic as it gets. It also reminded me that the people of five hundred years ago believed a lot of baloney, and tortured you to death if you didn't share their superstition. In fact, within living memory, only Europeans and Africans were allowed to become US citizens, and not that much further back, it was only Europeans.

Did you know that a fifth of Americans agree that the universe revolves around Earth, and another tenth aren't sure? (I could find my source if I had to.) I'm becoming less charitable about people who are full of beans. The Constitution may allow us to believe any dumb thing we want, but there is no unalienable, Creator-endowed right to perverse opinion.

A Jaundiced Look At Mitch McConnell's Agenda For America

2010-09-18T12:09:00.002-05:00

Back of the envelope calculations by one Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center -- clear-eyed analysis of the right-wing agenda, as exemplified by Senate Republican Leader, Mitch McConnell. McConnell wants to extend the Bush-era tax cuts, wants to maintain Pentagon and Medicare spending, and he favors a constitutional balanced-budget amendment. Target year: 2020. I'll be 71. My son will be 39.

The Congressional Budget Office projects a $1.2 trillion deficit for 2020, and $5.5 trillion spending, of which three trillion Gleckman says would be for defense, Medicare, interest ($100 billion for interest on the extended tax cuts), military retirement, and veterans' benefits. Subtract the 1.2 trillion whose payment the proposed amendment would require, and you get about the same amount as projected Social Security payments. In other words, the government would be reduced to military, interest payments, and benefits to people my age.

When I was in Stillwater a week ago -- the upscale end of Minnesota's Sixth Congressional District, home of Representative Michele Bachman -- I walked past a t-shirt store with a front window full of cute slogans. One said, "Vegetarian: The member of the tribe who can't hunt, fish, or ride." Dat's pretty funny, Ole. You should put it on a t-shirt, doncha know.

Max Ernst And Found Patterns

2010-09-15T13:45:00.001-05:00

For some acidheads it was the trails, some were -- puerile as it sounds -- trying to expand their consciousnesses. For me, it was the way random textures seemed to organize themselves into elusive geometries.

I met a girl in Galesburg, Illinois, forty years ago -- Meg. Her aunt was Dorothea Tanning, Max Ernst's wife. Meg, who didn't like me, was gracious enough to take me to her house, and show me a gallery of Tanning paintings and Ernst collages. She made a point of telling me something like, "a lot of people think that Uncle Max gets his images from taking psychedelics, but you don't need to take drugs to make pictures like these."

Tuesday Night Sketch

2010-09-15T13:33:00.000-05:00

I decided to try yer basic Ticonderoga Number Two. These things bring out the worst in my drawing: Because they lend themselves to modeling, and because of that pink thing the other end, they make me unsure of myself. Next pencil will be a softer one, one whose value range goes darker. Scary.