Green Jobs and the Edible Schoolyard

In response to the article in the April 28 issue of East Bay Express airing the controversy about the value of Alice Waters inspired Edible Schoolyard at King Middle School, Caitlan Flanagan writing in The Atlantic misses the essential point. Children whose families raise food in their backyards are privileged children, regardless of whether their parents also send them to exclusive summer camps and travel abroad. Even Luke Tsoi, author of the article, brings his cultural baggage, opining that “the truth of the matter is that California is in crisis right now with its failure to equip so many of its students with the basic skills that they’ll need to go on to college and become successful.” Our failure as a society is this, to offer ourselves and our children one measure of privilege, one measure of success.


My experience working with at-risk kids on the Susquehanna watershed replicates what Eichorn reports in the Edible Garden. Unsurprisingly, restoration work on one’s own watershed and/or tapping into our ancient agricultural heritage in a harmonious way—seed, water, harvest, prepare and share—restores the child. And restores the human. This unrelenting focus on standardized testing to the exclusion of pursuits that make us more human are shortsighted. But then shortsightedness is perhaps the most descriptive quality of human development at this time, the one that is driving our species and other species and the planet MAD: mutually assured destruction.

Green jobs, now in its infant stage, will be the harbinger of a future that is sustainable. What a pity that Recovery dollars have focused on shovel-ready highway jobs rather than (for example) restoring the estimated 25,000 miles of West Virginia streams that have been despoiled by mountaintop removal of coal. The brief respite we and our pollinators experienced last year with State Departments of Transportations’ frugality will surely see a summer of blasted median strips, as the chemical companies restock DOT supplies for poisoning our wild verges and streams.

I still believe that Green Jobs is on Obama’s checklist and that he will get back to a National Service Program for our young people. In the meantime, Edible Schoolyard isn’t a program, it’s a movement. It can’t be stopped by the shortsighted.

Sincerely,

Destiny Kinal

Publisher, sitio/tiempopress

What makes Burning Silk a Reinhabitory Novel?

In case you wondered...
What makes Burning Silk a Reinhabitory Novel?

I had been waiting for someone to ask the question. David Simpson did.

What makes Burning Silk a reinhabitory novel and further, what makes the book ideal to introduce sitio/tiempo press? The first book should set a bar.

True, Burning Silk is fiction, while most of our writings have been poetry and nonfiction. And it features a female protagonist and a strong sensory coda. And yet Burning Silk, the first in the Textile Trilogy, is a reinhabitory novel through and through.

Adaptation to the watershed

In the voice of a member of the silkmakers’ family, the book quotes Zenuemon of Japan as their guide: “Quality of silkseed and filament can only be improved by gradually adapting a strain of moth to regional climactic and geographic conditions.” The story documents a rare instance in the history of raising silk, of moving a domesticated silkmoth to a different continent, to acclimate to a different and unique home watershed. The Duladiers, a French Huguenot silkmaking family, collaborate with their native American neighbors on the Delaware watershed to find a native silkmoth to mate successfully with their domesticated one, a risky venture that could accelerate acclimatization.

Assimilation and differing ways-of-life

This not-very-subtle metaphor is echoed between the native and European families, who also have a metis child incubating in the womb by the end of thebook. And in a syndrome that has historically plagued metis communities, problems arise between the cultures. In the second book in the Textile Trilogy, Linen Shroud, conflict also arises between the Iroquois warrior societies and Quaker pacifists regarding participation in the American Civil War. And there’s a third element: the women of the silk worship a female deity, The Black Madonna, who--cruel when necessary--abhors war.

All of these conflicts are strongly reinhabitory, as we witness the differences in ways-of-life tear apart this family who has intermarried...and witness the victory of the industrial revolution over the traditional guild way of life

The third novel, Oil and Water, set on the early oil fields in NY/PA, dramatizes the triumph of the Petroleum Age over arts-and-crafts sensibilities as oil becomes the prevailing definition of modernity.

Part of the historical analysis we are calling reinhabitory involves seeing how these conflicts and struggles have formed the legacy we have inherited.

Matrilineality: agricultural societies

The proximity of matrilineal native neighbors–where everything, clan, property, land, name, comes through the maternal Archives line —lead European women directly on the path to Seneca Falls seeking similar rights and status. This buried history is
a deep reinhabitory issue which has received no attention anywhere that I can find, a task to which reinabitory fiction is well suited.

Reinhabitory fiction

My idea of reinhabitory fiction draws heavily on Milan Kundera's notion that the role of history in the novel is to reinhabit those critical crossroads in history where we buried certain values "in that vast cemetery of forgetting," and walked on with others. This definition is still a rough draft but it moved Jerry Martien to say he had a novel which he also felt was reinhabitory fiction. He describes it as a land use story.

“It re-tells the events of the Lincoln County War, takes it back to Billy the Kid’s origins in the myth of Pan, the old nature god, and forward to the assassination of his killer and biographer Pat Garrett in 1908. The story is documented by an El Paso reporter who’s a recovering war correspondent wounded in the Philippines, our first foreign adventurer in empire. It’s all the same war, re-enacts the same question, whether the land belongs to us or we belong to the land.”

We hope to raise $50,000 in the next six months, so that we can publish The Authentic Life in the manner it describes and move forward with other books waiting in the pipeline.

The Future

We plan to publish other creative reinhabitory works, such as plays that have been produced over the last three decades to enthusiastic audiences, and both children’s and young adult books.

We have extensive group experience in letterpress printing, access to print studio, and some extraordinary poets who would love to have limited edition printing of their work.

Art, music, architecture: it’s time to expand the range of bioregional thinking and practice. If the First Wave was defining bioregionalism, and the Second Wave was tying together the groups who grasped the concept immediately and imported it to their home watershed, may the Third Wave be marked by the imprint of sitio/tiempo press.

Humanifesto #2

Autumn equinox 2009

My grandson Rowan is weeping.
I wonder: Am I too late to this wake?

We’re not going to make it, I suddenly realize.
My grandson, nine years old and a nature buff, recently spent a half day weeping over a similar realization.

My optimism vanished about a week ago when I opened my mail from Reserve America, our booking agent to State and National Parks, and found a coupon for buying DEET.

To protect myself from bug bites when I am in the wilderness.

Our booking agent representing me, selling us passes to nature, our rivers, our forests--Oh drop the drama, Destiny!—are pimping heavy chemicals for Dow, Monsanto, whichever one it is...

No one’s going to read a rant, Destiny, so shape up. What purpose is it going to serve for you to fall into unredeemable depression? Unless I want to be preaching to the choir, I had better explain.

DEET goes into the environment and rips at the web of life with both hands.

DEET goes into my body and the bodies of those
near and dear to me—that grandson who had the veils torn
from his eyes at 9—and lives in our flesh. HFEN (Health Funders Environmental Network) reports over 125 chemicals in our flesh that don’t belong there, carcinogens from flame retardants to derivatives of plastic products.
The miracles of chemistry are killing us.

(Is that a rant? Depends on what you know.)

Our government requires that all mattresses sold in the US
be sprayed with flame retardant, a powerful proven carcinogen
that is one of the major chemicals found in our bodies.
Plastics derivatives have also colonized our flesh. Pthalates to soften teething rings, nipples and rubber duckies, along with estrogen mimickers in our shampoo, bubble bath and beauty products, not only poison our flesh but have also reduced the sperm count of our grandsons and sons by half compared
to that of our grandfathers. They’ve counted. This is fact.
Do the research yourself. This is the age of Google.

The cynicism of the ehemical companies dazzles. Then depresses.
How do we stop them?

A male moth works his way upwind on the trail of his ancient prerogative, his obligation to his species, following molecules of scent pumped out by his female, the very definition of species. He encounters instead a molecule of DEET, subsidized (pimped!) by our State and National Parks booking agent.

Several years ago I visited one of our continent’s fabled wilderness area, Algonquin Park in Canada. The night sky spectacle is still playing, above the Canadian wilderness, though I haven’t seen it this way since childhood, innumerable stars of every magnitude, a sky blazing with activity. No queen’s diadem comes close. On this night, packs of wolves howled to each other from proximate hills. Flocks of loons called, in haunting counterpoint.

My (then) sister-in-law, a sentimental woman, brought a bag of nuts to attract the local rodent population, perhaps to eat out of her hand. It began to dawn on me slowly. The blueberries that covered the island were ripe...and untouched. No little creatures came out to play with Snow White. Our chemical-based way of life had destroyed all life on the island, so remote we had to portage twice to reach it.

My nephew, an expert fisherman, couldn’t even get a nibble. Acid rain?

When I pointed this out, family members hypothesized: that perhaps a wolf had crossed the ice this winter and eaten all the small creatures. Perhaps a wolf did.

The theories about where our frogs have gone, what has flattened our honeybee populations have finally given way to a simple fact, everything else, being downstream, is a side effect:
We are poisoning the frogs and bees. And ourselves.

The chemical companies are winning, my friends.
Today I am feeling a bit more optimisitic. Call it denial. Tomorrow I will say the chemical companies have won.
While we have made our little gestures to save ourselves and save the other species and the planet, the profit imperatives of the chemical companies are winning the day.
My weeping grandson has the ill fortune to understand.
We have lost.

Those straight lines along fencelines the chemical companies have taught our farmers and ranchers to spray with herbicide? —nice straight lines marking our roadside with blasted dead plants? Lodging in the flesh of the sprayer, the animals, the farm workers, the farmer’s family, neighbors...

Chemical companies have convinced our food producers to lace their products with chemicals to gain benefits they desire like shelflife and for those qualities market researchers have found we consumers desire: chewiness, seedlessness, At what cost those seedless watermelons?

The chemical companies have convinced our highway departments that a blasted verge along our highways is necessary to our way of life.

This spring, during the recession and before the pump of government revitalization dollars back into our “infrastructure,” (the highway departments being the ones with ready-to-build projects, “green jobs,”) wildflowers bloomed along our highways again. The cost of keeping an army of poison sprayers and mowers gave way to allowing the meadows of wildflowers to present their annual procession of beauty and aliveness, the web of life with honeybees and moths and little mammals... (oh can it, Destiny! Nobody listens to these poetic flights anymore.)

Nobody listens anymore, perhaps because there is no silence left to listen in.

In New York State, the lands bordering our local interstate (an oxymoron,) I-86 as well as I-90, presented highway travelers with the glories of the seasons again, an annual procession of wildflowers hosting the honeybees, yes the web of life, get on with it, pleasing the eye at least while we rushed by at 70 mph, spraying noise and pollutants into the air. And yet resilient nature still stands up to the assault of the combustion engine. It’s the slow death versus the fast death.

Bring in the poisons, the all-out assault, results we can see.

Once stimulus money flowed to the state highways department, the I-90 barbers, butchers and sprayers of poison returned to business as usual. The ribbon of life lining I-90 this summer
has been reduced to blackened stubble. I-86, more provincial, has to wait in line apparently. The return of the mowing and spraying schedule on the Southern Tier Expressway around Olean and Bath has made only a small dent in nature’s profusion. Only a few counties--more fortunate than others--have been empowered to reduce meadow to stubble.

Hey it’s just my job, lady.

The tiny townships can flex their muscles again, spraying whatever it is Dow and Monsanto are pushing onto our rural roadsides in ditches that drain into our rivers and lodge—firmly—in our flesh and in our childrens’ flesh.

Name names, Destiny! Old River Road along the Chemung River in both Chemung and Tioga Counties, NY, lined with withered browned blasted plant life. And what of the fish, the bees and moths,the small mammals and reptiles?

This early summer, in California, what did I find walking out at the tip of Pt. Reyes National Seashore, out past the heritage dairies, past thousands of acres of organic pasture, the yellow lupine in
full bloom, filling the air with its honeyed scent? In two hours, hiking over five miles lined with wild flowering shrubs, I saw one honeybee. One.

Even my friends and family make excuses: You don’t know what you’re seeing. It was the rains. The drought. Leave it to the experts.

Denial.

Go on, give them faces, name another of the places where death is being sown. On Cole Road, outside of Northeast PA, I watched Eden Roc Farms spray their nice straight fencelines. The local golfcourse. All good wellmeaning people. Blameless. Brainwashed by Dow. Poisoning their families’ and my flesh.

Down the road in Findley Lake, Mina Township, my brother’s esplanade of fifty Scotch pines, planted forty years ago, dying from “an environmental insult” (Chautauqua County Soil and Water District’s verdict.) Like salting the roads. Like spraying the roadside verge with poison. Along a road that was dirt until a decade ago. Thirteen of them dead and the rest going, a full assault now underway on their weakened state by fungi and borers, bringing down what has already been reaped.

I found purslane to harvest for my salads along the road in rural Mina Township. Two weeks later when I came back for another handful, they had been blasted, along with everything else growing in the ditch. The landowner, my neighbor, threatened by my foraging a handful of salad in the roadside ditch proximate to his acreage? The township doing due diligence against weeds on a tiny strip whose destruction started there and ended 100 yards along?

I’m ready to become an eco-terrorist.
Here, George Bush had it right with his wacky pronunciation: terre-ists. Terra for earth. Where I live, terra firma. Isn’t being an eco-terre-ist better than being terminally depressed?

Won’t my grandson feel better when his own children are weeping (...that they will never see a frog, that lightening bugs have winked out, that the apple tree doesn’t bear apples anymore, the honeybees gone...) to know that his parents and grandparents marched into WalMart and Walgreen’s and Safeway and confiscated the DEET, the plastic nookies and nipples and hauled them where, Destiny? (You’re ranting again.)

Into the landfill?
Into the ocean?
Into a sealed lead container in each of our basements? Into a hole in the backyard?
To the toxic recycling centers...who put it where?

How can we wake up from this nightmare of the petroleum age and its lethal byproducts?
Did the discovery of oil unleash viral capitalism?
Or are they coincident?

The vision! The products! Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce: The Modern Age!
Too many of us still labor under the illusion that our world, our personal space, is inviolate at the borders of our skin, that nothing enters or escapes that we don’t allow.
My own husband, whose skin reacts savagely to insect bites, buys and uses DEET which I throw away as quickly as he buys it. He sniffs at the plant-based Buzz-Off I buy.

If my husband doesn’t get it, how can I expect anyone to get it?

What you do effects me, I want to scream. Scrap PC correctness. It’s just getting in the way, making divisions between hipsters, tree huggers, rednecks, loggers, the suits. We’re all in denial.

What is the appropriate response to my grandson’s tears, to the certainty of his children’s tears?
In the face of rampant cancers?

Terminal depression? Terminal militancy? Terminal, my little voice whispers to me.

What are you going to do?

Like Rowan, I weep.

I’m getting ready to get arrested for this, just to get your attention.

Why this is personal to me I have multiple chemical sensitivities. The canary in our mine,
I suffer disproportionately from proximity to pesticides, solvents, burning plastics.

When the burgeoning chemical industry got going, I was a child. The adults who cared for me inflicted all the miraculous products of the era upon me: nose drops, Exlax, hair permanents. No modern kitchen could be without aluminum cookware.

Caracinogens had not even entered the common parlance. Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in September of 1962. My mother regularly sprayed the patio before dinner with Raid. My father died of cancer at age 46; my mother at 60. Our oldest brother, the family’s “certified” poison sprayer, at 60. My sister and her husband went to school in Niagra Falls, close by Love Canal. Three of their four children were born with life-threatening anomalies.

What is mysterious here is why we don’t get it, yet.
And when we do get it, why we continue to put up with it.

Yes, the chemicals industry is a multiheaded hydra, with a highly profitable franchise in every aspect of our lives.
I once infiltrated the food, beverage and consumer goods industries with enlightened self-interest, to support my children as a single mom, and to see how the chemicals industry had wound itself into our consumer products. Perhaps, I naively imagined, to defuse it.

Expect my report on my years in the food industry soon, to join the reports of others describing it, with the goal of unraveling the deadly investment both the chemical industry and the multinational corporations have in our food system. Perhaps we can pursue a goal of returning to a relationship with our food that has only lapsed in the past fifty to one hundred years.

That’s what I think most days. Is it denial? Because other days, I think only that they have won. Is this a reality I can live with? Can you?

Humanifesto

is an occasional publication
produced to influence the way you think, my dear friends, family and neighbors.

Please enter into a dialog with me.

Humanifesto #1

Autumn equinox, 2008 A Humanifesto

To those of my friends and family who are still undecided about this US Presidential election of 2008.

I believe that your vote in this election will determine the future of this country and the planet.

What is coming up is not just a vote between two political parties but between two distinct ways-of-life that currently divide our country into two warring halves, not unlike the time just before our Civil War nearly 150 years ago, or the time of our Revolutionary War in which 1/3 of the population was for the rule of King George, 1/3 for the risks of freedom and independence, and 1/3 undecided. Sound familiar?

I’ll typify the two ways-of-life with these phrases: the “I’ve got mine and I’m going to defend my right to get more” way-of-life (the way we HAVE been conducting ourselves) and the “evolving into being more human way-of-life and encouraging others” way of life.

The “I’ve got mine” way-of-life has proven in the last eight years that it doesn’t work in our time and in this place. The “free hand of capitalism”—with its unregulated greed and corruption, often set up by the earlier Dem/Rep administrations, e.g. Clinton and Reagan—has resulted in a host of plagues: from the drill-drill-drill like there’s no tomorrow philosophy, to the American-the- Global-Bully philosophy, to the “benefit the most wealthy and the corporations and it will trickle down to the people” philosophy.

The planet and our people aren’t going to be able to suffer any more of this. Systems—ecosystems (including water and air, inalienable human rights), financial systems,. housing, public health (cancer clusters from toxins)--are already collapsing.

Many of you have heard me say that perhaps it will be best if the global financial systems collapses, if the petroleum-based transportation systems become unaffordable, if our chemical-based food systems collapse. Then we’ll be forced to live off the land again, in communities that are at a human scale, within walking, bicycling. and donkey-cart distance.

We might have a shot at becoming natives in our home watersheds. If we return to local rule, will we become cooperating communities or will we guard the boundaries of our property with shotguns? Will we hoard or will we give our excess production to the weaker members of our communities, the elderly, the children, the disabled?

I can imagine downsides to this scenario. A collapse of our global economy could aggravate our fearfulness, lack of compassion and stifle our collective vision. The attendant suffering that would accompany a worldwide collapse of the industrial way-of-life would be gruesome both to witness and experience.

The corporate-government cabal (particularly the greedy, “I have mine...and I have yours!” way-of-life, runamok capitalism) may be even freer to pursue their dreams of empire and conquest, mining resources and conducting warfare and intimidation from satellites and outer space.

I know this lies behind the fear many have of gun control. If a totalitarian government takes over this country and the planet, how will we defend ourselves if we don’t have an armed local militia? In our country’s past, we have faced this serious concern, often with disastrous results (local posses after the Civil War, for instance.)

What’s the possibility we could have a totalitarian government in our lifetime? Frankly, I believe this to be one of the grave possibilities at stake from the consequences of this election. Once significant time passes, and this window of closes, as our freedoms are eroded in the name of national security, the military and corporate interests will continue to consolidate their power. This scenario— freedom fighters in the countryside and a totalitarian government in control—as sci-fi as it seems today, could become reality in the near-term future. For now, we still have a chance to turn back the forces that consolidate power to themselves, a chance to return power to the people. There are those who think this assessment is too optimistic, that we, a manipulated and fearful population, have already lost our freedom. Many credible scientists think that we are already living on a planet that is dying, slowly but surely.

I suspect that many who are against gun control are those who may want to defend themselves from their neighbors, if the going gets tough. THIS is what I am calling the way-of-life that must pass if we are to move on: the fear of each other, of our neighbors. The “I’ve got mine” and the need to defend it at any cost way-of-life will kill us all. The fear they have fed us feeds paranoia. Is it too late to imagine peace, as John Lennon suggested?

The alternate way-of-life being proposed, that I will call a more human way-of- life, holds a lot of unknowns, much as the Jews freed from Pharaoh faced the

uncertainty of a free life in the desert compared to the certainty of being fed and housed while enslaved. To me, it’s understandable that a good half of the country are fearful of an unknown future, preferring a status quo that harms them to the uncertainty of freedom. Of choice.

I have to ask: would it be possible to have some compassion for each other rather than villain-izing each other? We are all one family.

In the 2000 election, I was among those who said there was too little difference between Republics and Democrats. I voted Green Party for Nader, putting the election of Al Gore at risk.

Eight years ago, the political process appeared to me to corrupt those involved absolutely. During the 2000 campaign, where was the Al Gore who rose up after he lost the election to make us aware of the accelerating pace of climate change? If he had been elected president, would that Al Gore, champion of our planet, have been able to surface? Not if his conduct during the campaign speaks to the fetters the political process puts on candidates in the presidential race and after, on the presidency. I and others felt it was time to get a measure of those who thought outside of the party lines, a growing minority.

I justified the riskiness of my vote for Nader this way: a Bush presidency might snap citizens out of their apathy and feelings of helplessness and despair. That for ordinary people to witness what Bush and Rove and Cheney would do with a free hand might move things along in the direction of reform.

Who knew? In retrospect, I don’t think I could be that coldblooded again. Independent sources estimate that one million Iraqi men, women and children have died. These Iraqis, plus our own dead and maimed—all mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, sons and daughters—are human casualties from a war launched on deliberate lies (no WMD, a red herring), fear (fanning the fires after 9/11), and yes, greed (hegemony over the oil fields.)

The evidence is there: they had this planned well before 9/11, back in the administration of Bush I. All they need to do what they want is the slimmest pretext.

And so while important differences may have existed between Dems and Reps as they were in 2000, those differences are falling apart. The differences that divide us now as a country run really deep between two ways-of-life, two visions of the future.

I’ve typified the two ways-of-life with these phrases: the “I’ve got mine and I’m going to defend my right to get more” way-of-life (the way we HAVE been conducting ourselves) and the “evolving into being more human way-of-life and encouraging others” way of life. (Yes, scary and uncertain.) I stand behind my assertion that the two political parties don’t mean what they used to anymore.

The Reps’ charge that Dems only want to tax and spend is laughable after the last eight years. The entire cost of this mismanaged war in Iraq has been funded on money we’ve borrowed from China and other countries. Where is the cost of the bailout of Wall Street coming from?—from us, the taxpayers we are told, to the tune of twice the cost of the war in Iraq. How do I define a mismanaged war?— not enough body armor, poorly equipped vehicles, gross corruption among the corporations/mercenaries in Iraq, poor VA services supporting returning vets and their families, repeated mandated tours of duty.

The Reps’ charge that Dems favor Big Government would be laughable if I were that cynical. Bush and his cronies have consolidated power in the presidency to the point that he could declare a state of national emergency and suspend all our rights if they were able to engineer another 9/11 before the election. I am holding my breath until after the election is decided, praying that they do not take this route to consolidate power in their empire/regime. They have set up the legal precedent for it, which we have allowed.

How do I define a mismanaged economy? No/little regulation on corporations and financial institutions, a “mortgage crisis” in which they say millions of Americans will and are losing their homes, A dollar not worth much and staggering debt. (Put Bush on the dollar, someone quipped.) We WILL be paying this bill and our children and their children, for Wall’s Street’s failure (greed) and the cost of Iraq. And not just in dollars.

We’ve got deeper shared values than the traditional divide between the two political parties: children, rivers, forests, clean air and water...the list goes on.

I don’t want to hear another Dem or Rep debate the value of hunting and fishing. We may be depending on those skills to eat and hope that the environmental rapists (“I’ve got mine...and yours!”) have left us with enough clean water and deep forest for games and fisheries to be responsibly managed to give us some protein.

I don’t want to hear another Dem or Rep debate the best way to keep our current food systems going, one that—thro NAFTA and globalization—has destroyed other local food cultures around the world with our subsidized commodities being dumped into local economies with no court of appeal. In the World Court at the Hague, “free trade rules!”

Is there anyone out there who still trusts the free hand of capitalism (and yes, I tar Clinton and Bush with the same brush) after recent displays of the clumsiness of that free hand, from eroding our labor rights including gainful employment with wages, reasonable vacation and benefit...to the destruction of local economies both in America and around the world?

The veil is off, revealing the corruption of the chemicals’ (petroleum) industry in its insidious infiltration of our food systems. Consumer protections that European countries provide to their citizens have been eroded by a bought USDA. (Where else but in the land of the free hand of capitalism could consumer protection testing be funded by the companies that produce the products being tested? And tested by our universities!)

Our childrens’ flesh holds over 100 types of chemicals that don’t belong there, including flame retardants (all mattresses sold in this country must be coated with this carcinogen,) as well as various plastic derivatives and estrogen mimickers like BPA and phthalates, found in baby bottles, rubber duckies and shampoos. Where is our outrage?

We have to take responsibility from bringing this to a halt now before it is too late. In the last 150 years, both communism and capitalism have shown themselves to be, in their pure undiluted state, failed experiments, with terrible costs to humanity and the planet.

Haven’t our brains grown subtle enough to envision some mix of the two, along with some wisdom from those who were/are native on each continent and watershed, to make a commitment to peace, to compassion, to enlightened self- and-other interest, to producing enough to take care of the physically weakest among us, children, disabled and elderly? These are the ones who have built and will build our past, our present and our future. (Have you seen the estimates of disabled coming home from Iraq?)

Isn’t it time we grew away from our terrible experiments with primitive technologies, from our two-party political system masquerading as democracy...to exporting our petroleum-based culture via corporate giants like Monsanto and Rand and Cargill...to allowing our food, water and air to be compromised, sold off to profit the short-sighted “I’ve got mine...and I’ve got yours!”

Isn’t it time we grew up as humans, time to throw off the unregulated greed of capitalism and the totalitarian excesses of fascism and communism? Are you still willing to forfeit your rights in order to be “taken care of?” Are we awake enough now to believe that can participate in our government, whether local or national, by voting, by staying informed, by integrating our political life into our daily life, by letting those we’ve elected know what we want—without fear?

We have breezed uncomfortably close to letting (what Eisenhower warned against) “the military-industrial complex” take over. We have this opportunity to vote for becoming more human, for evolving with harmony into the life of this planet and the other beings who live here.

I understand that we have had fear spoon fed to us. It has served our rulers well. They have grown fat off our fear.

I appreciate that letting go of the way-of-life that has made the gears of our culture turn for the past 150 years or more is frightening.

Can we move away from our petroleum-dependency, to technologies based on local weather and climate and the untapped renewable resources given to us there? Yes we can.

Can we move way from being the Big Stick on the planet, to reinvest in our own country, to invest in our children’s education, our aging infrastructure, our vast forests and waterways? Can we do this without becoming isolationists, without seeing all resources as exploitable, as our God-given right? Can we move away from dominating the planet, as we dominated women and people of color? Can we study the web of life and take our place in it with respect, with responsibility? Yes we can and you know we can!

They say we have allies in the spirit world, that an opportune time has come to evolve again. And we must.

If we are going to be conservative, let’s conserve our forests and streams. Let’s revitalize and empower local government. (Gender parity on boards!) Let’s conserve the health of our farmlands.

If we’re going to be responsible investors, let’s be like our Native American forebearers and invest in the next eight generations. (Look at what the “I’ve got mine...and I’ve got yours!” way-of-life has left for the generations to come.)

If we’re going to be risk-takers, let’s step away from this old way-of-life together- -the industrial model of domination, the petroleum era, the unbridled capitalism, totalitarianism, imperialism and war—to a future that is unknowable, yes, and a little frightening, together.

Let’s move together with peace and harmony and compassion for our fellow man. This is the only great experiment that is left for us to choose: to see if we can choose to evolve to become more human.

I deliver this humanifesto as a matriot. A matriot is someone who cares for the health, education, and wellbeing of every person in her/his country...and the world. (Google poet Fran Adler who coined the term.) Thanks to Barack Obama for insisting that one can disagree with the current government and love one’s country .

With great love and faith in our humanity, Destiny Kinal