Metro escalator hack in Paris

[Music by Air: La Femme d’Argent]

Iranian Grafitti

Some awesome Iranian street art on this Flickr site – makes you wonder how much worse the Mullahs’ attitude is to this kind of street art than the already bad one here in the West …

SCEC – Solidarity and Local Complementary Currency in Italy

An interesting concept: a complementary currency to the Euro trialled in parts of Italy that encourages discount trading in local communities.

SCEC stands for Solidarietà che Cammina – Solidarity that walks. It is a complementary currency that is designed to start its life circulating in parallel to the official currency, the Euro. Adapted to the Italian situation where alternative currencies are looked upon as competition to the official one, SCEC defines itself as a complementary currency. It circulates together with the official currency.

SCEC comes in the form of a discount chit denominated in Euro equivalents (in denominations of 0.50 Euro, 1, 2, 5, 10 and 50 Euro). It is distributed for free and acquires value only when used. Businesses and professionals agree to give a discount to buyers who pay (in part) with SCEC, usually around 20 %, but ranging mostly between 10 and 30 %.

SCEC is putting first emphasis on actually supporting local production and commerce over imports from far away and world wide commerce by multinationals. The currency makes local exchanges more convenient for people who use the system by virtue of getting substantial discounts on the normal price.

Building a new democrcay – from the bottom up

A new mobilisation could revitalise politics in the UK – but only if you get involved.

For the first time in my life I resent paying my taxes. Until now I have seen this annual amputation as a civic duty – like giving blood – necessary to sustain the life of a fair society. Suddenly I see it as an imposition. Its purpose has reverted to that of the middle ages: subsidising the excesses of a parasitic class. A high proportion of the taxes I pay will be used to bail out companies which, as the Guardian’s current investigation shows, have used every imaginable ruse to avoid paying any themselves.

I think that for many people this is the final blow: the insult which seals their alienation from the political process. The small Welsh town where I live, many of whose inhabitants are among the very poor, was once a haven of progressive politics, built from nonconformist religious sects and a long tradition of social solidarity. People from these valleys were transported to Van Diemen’s Land for demanding the vote.

Now almost everyone I speak to says the same thing – “what’s the point? They’re all as bad as each other” – and I can find no argument to refute it. Had their forebears been told that, 125 years after the first agricultural workers got the vote (1), the poor would be bailing out the rich and (thanks to the first-past-the-post system) the votes of only a few thousand citizens would count, I doubt they would have bothered.

We are trapped in a spiral of political alienation. Politics isn’t working for us, so we leave it to the politicians. The political vacuum is then filled with heartless, soulless, gutless technocrats: under what other circumstances could political ghosts like Jack Straw, Geoff Hoon, Alistair Darling, Hazel Blears, Peter Mandelson or John Hutton remain in office? Unmolested by the public, corporate lobbyists collaborate with this empty political class to turn parliament into a conspiracy against the public. Revolted by these phantoms, seeing nowhere to turn, we withdraw altogether, granting them even richer opportunities to exploit us.

The government talks of re-igniting public enthusiasm for politics, of bringing out the vote, but balks at any measure which might make this happen. The reform of the House of Lords has again been postponed until after the next election, if at all (2). The promise, in Labour’s 1997 manifesto, of a referendum on electoral reform is long-forgotten. It now looks as if nothing will be done to stop MPs from moonlighting, as our representatives argue that they cannot possibly get by on £63,000 a year (plus lavish expenses) (3). I wonder whether they have any idea how that plays in a town like this.

Consultations are rigged. Citizens’ juries are used to lend a sheen of retrospective legitimacy to decisions already taken. The Big Conversation turned into a lecture. LabourList, mercilessly satirised by Catherine Bennett in this week’s Observer (4), seeks to create a grassroots movement where no grassroots exist.

But I doubt that the government could revitalise politics, even if it had the best intentions. If the people of this country are to be mobilised, if new life is to be breathed into politics, we have to do it ourselves. As soon as you acknowledge this, you see the problem: we have lost our base. The affiliated trade unions have turned into the government’s nodding dogs, continuing to fund the Labour Party even as it destroys everything they claim to stand for. The old social democratic and non-conformist movements have gone. All we have left are the NGOs and a series of informal direct action movements. They have proved to be good at raising public awareness, less good at building sustained, multi-faceted campaigns. We require a permanent mobilisation, and it might be just about to begin.

For several years, activists have been proposing a MoveOn campaign for the United Kingdom. MoveOn.org is an web-based coalition in the United States that has mobilised around three million people to demand progressive change. It was launched in 1998 as a petition to Congress “to censure President Clinton and move on”, rather than impeach him (5). Since then, it has been credited with revitalising the Democratic Party and changing the face of American politics. Some of the claims its promoters make are exaggerated, but no one disputes that it has inspired hundreds of thousands of alienated people to re-engage.

At the beginning of every year, MoveOn polls its members on their political priorities and then mobilises them around those demands (6). It encourages them to bombard their representatives with emails and phone calls, to raise political funds and to propose new legislation. Every year it scores small victories, on issues as diverse as Medicare reform and Facebook privacy (7). It also appears to have contributed to some very large ones: some people claim that neither the candidacy nor the presidency of Barack Obama would have been possible without it. MoveOn has made mistakes – its position on the Iraq war, for example, has been hopeless ( 8) – but it’s obvious that the model works.

There have been campaigns a bit like this in the United Kingdom, but they have tended to concentrate on a single outcome and to disperse or relax when it has been achieved. The Big Ask, run by Friends of the Earth, mobilised 200,000 people to demand a climate change bill – and got it (9). The Local Works coalition drove the Sustainable Communities Bill through parliament (10). The closest relative of MoveOn in the UK so far is Unlock Democracy, which, with far smaller resources than its American cousin, has already changed the way we are governed. Last month, for example, working with groups like enoughsenough.org and mySociety, it managed to stop MPs from hiding their expenses from the public (11).

Today Nick O’Donovan, a British academic working in the US, launches a movement in the United Kingdom built overtly on the MoveOn model. Dosomethingaboutit.org.uk is a rolling petition which seeks to ensure that the people who sign up don’t lose touch with each other. When there’s an important vote in parliament or when the government is threatening to shut down a useful public service or to waste our money on subsidising the rich, it will set up a petition and mobilise its members. Like MoveOn, it will also poll them over the issues they want to champion. At elections it will help people to decide which candidate in their constituency to support, in order to avoid splitting the progressive vote. Its purpose is to strike fear into the hearts of our self-serving technocrats and, it says, to make “the moral high ground electorally viable” (12).

I hope O’Donovan and his colleagues know how much they are taking on. They will be fighting party machines which have refined every dirty trick in politics; the hopelessness that arises from 12 years of broken promises; a labour movement that seems to have abandoned every political aim except driving foreigners out of the workplace; an electorate that has ceased to believe in itself. But none of this is a reason not to try.

Dosomethingaboutit is a bold and wildly ambitious scheme. Can it work? That’s up to you.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. The Representation of the People Act 1884. This extended the vote to some rural men, but only if they owned land worth £10 or paid £10 a year in rent.
2. George Parker, 14th July 2008. Straw seeks to defer Lords reform. Financial Times.
3. Sam Coates, 2nd February 2009. Peers can carry on lobbying despite payments row. The Times.
4. Catherine Bennett, 1st February 2009. Does Labour really think John Prescott is the new Obama? The Observer.
5. http://www.moveon.org/about.html
6. http://pol.moveon.org/2009/agenda/results/?rc=homepage
7. http://www.moveon.org/success_stories.html
8. Norman Solomon, 13th March 2007. The Pragmatism of Prolonged War. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3054 <http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3054>
9. http://www.foe.co.uk/campaigns/climate/success_stories/climate_law_world_first_16014.html
10. http://www.localworks.org/
11. Unlock Democracy, 21st January 2009. People power forces Government to back down on MPs’ expenses. http://www.unlockdemocracy.org.uk/?p=1808
12. http://dosomethingaboutit.org.uk/dowhat.php
     

Published in the Guardian, 3rd February 2009

[Source: George Monbiot’s ZSpace Page]

Free Download: Thriving on Less – Simplifying in a Tough Economy

If this is not an idea for a New Year’s resolution … the author of the upcoming book The Power of Less Leo Babauta offers a companion ebook that’s free to download now. Thriving on Less – Simplifying in a Tough Economy tells you how to do just that.

The 27-page PDF describes advice garnered from Babauta’s own journey from clutter, debt, and scarcity to a simpler, frugal lifestyle that focuses on the essentials and cuts away the extras.

Like Babauta’s popular Zen Habits blog, this book offers calm, peaceful straight talk that makes the super-busy and overwhelmed think “I want to live like that.” Looks like a great preview of what’s to come in his print volume, which gets released this week.

[source: Lifehacker]

Tucson Community Food Bank – From handouts to DIY

This is the final example from Orion’s November/December magazine for how people work towards sustainability in their own communities or in their own lives. Here people are working on getting away from foodbank handouts by growing their produce and establishing urban farming and gardening practices. [image inserted by me]

BY KYLE BOELTE, TUCSON, AZ
Published in the November/December 2008 issue of Orion magazine

TUCSON, ARIZONA—Everywhere you go in America, prices are rising: of gas, goods, and especially food. It’s getting tough for many Americans, and even food banks are having a hard time getting by—their prices are rising, too. But at this time of economic downturn, the  Tucson Community Food Bank is demonstrating how long-term thinking can solve food insecurity. The Food Bank believes that gardening isn’t just a pastime for the well-to-do, but that it’s an important adaptation that anyone with access to a little space, water, and sunlight can make.

I recently attended a gardening workshop at the Tucson Community Food Bank. The event took place in a beautiful seven-thousand-square-foot organic demonstration garden next to the Food Bank, in an industrial part of town. The garden was filled with tomatoes, beans, chiles, and other vegetables, proving that good food can be grown anywhere. The chicken coop was bustling with chickens eating garden scraps, and the compost pile stood off to the side, a testament to efficient “waste” management.

The workshop, this one in English but they also offer them in Spanish, taught the basics of how to start your own garden, from picking the best spot in your yard and selecting appropriate plants, to how to water efficiently. We learned how to compost kitchen scraps and how to be more self-sufficient in general. And the program extends its reach beyond the classroom walls. The Food Bank gives away free compost to new gardeners until they can develop their own supply, and even offers free on-site consultations; an expert will come to your house to help you design a garden that works for you. It also holds weekly farmers’ markets where fresh vegetables and eggs can be purchased at affordable prices. The Tucson Community Food Bank isn’t just offering food, it’s offering good food.

The best part of these programs is that they facilitate a shift in thinking from handouts to how-to. By creating your own garden and growing your own food, you learn skills that improve your quality of life while also improving your economic situation. Gardening at home reduces the need for fossil-fuel-derived fertilizer and fuel for transportation. And it builds community too, since many gardeners end up sharing their excess harvest with neighbors.

The Pedal People of Northhampton

This is a very interesting example for actively working towards achieving a sustainable society – it’s something I wouldn’t have thought of in a million years: peddling rubbish. [images inserted by me]

BY ELISSA ALFORD, NORTHAMPTON, MA
Published in the November/December 2008 issue of Orion magazine

NORTHAMPTON, MASSACHUSETTS—The Pedal People troll our streets almost every day, bicycling not for play but for work. They tow six- and eight-foot trailers behind their bikes, each stacked with eight plastic containers roughly the size of recycling bins, and collect neighborhood garbage and recycling to haul to the local transfer station. The program is popular enough that on some streets the garbage truck need visit only a single address or two—leaving the rest of trash collection to a bicycle quietly rolling from house to house.

Last year the Pedal People moved beyond individual service and won a contract with the city to collect garbage from downtown waste cans. Stores have begun using them for local deliveries of furniture, and residents can call on the trailers for house moves within town (they can carry up to three hundred pounds). Their website boasts that they’ve moved everything from cats to solar panels.

Six years into the business, the two founders, Ruthy Woodring and Alex Jarrett, have expanded their operation to a cooperative of eleven, and now they’re offering a new service: pickup of compostable material. If you can’t or don’t want to compost yourself, you can leave a bucket of scraps out with the garbage. And for those who prefer the smell of cut grass to mowers and blowers, they do gas-free, chemical-free yard care, with all tools, including human-powered mowers, brought by bicycle. It’s a message in action: look what we can do gas-free.

Since signing up, my own household has become much more conscious of how much we throw out each week. It’s impossible not to be when we see the Pedal People folks sweating in the summer and toiling uphill through slush in the winter, pulling the weight of everyone’s leavings.

The Sustainability Revolution

This is a great story – from war and oppression to building and living in a peaceful, sustainable community. It’s remarkable what people can achieve when they come together as collaborators and co-operators, with a yearning for peace on their minds and a sense of something bigger than their individual and even human-species existence. [images inserted by me]

BY GREG GORDON
Published in the November/December 2008 issue of Orion magazine

NUEVO HORIZONTE, GUATEMALA —Nothing particularly remarkable strikes a visitor stepping off the bus and into the small village of Nuevo Horizonte in northern Guatemala. Clustered along a flat stretch of highway slicing through cleared rainforest, it appears to be a typical collection of cinder-block houses and dirt streets frequented by children and chickens—at first.

But soon, even an obtuse observer such as myself, strolling past the tightly clustered houses surrounded by fruit trees and flowers, notices something is missing. The streets are nearly devoid of trash as well as the advertising so ubiquitous throughout Latin America. Nor are there any cars other than a small pickup parked in the plaza. There are no police here. Even the dogs look healthy and content, a quality that seems to pervade the human population as well. Little more than a grassy field, the plaza hosts a community center where a lively meeting is taking place, a youth center where a teenager is giving a haircut to a younger boy, and a plain cinder-block church. Nearby a large mural depicts four women guerrilla leaders.

In 1954, a U.S.-initiated coup that overthrew the elected president of Guatemala served as the catalyst to a thirty-six-year civil war that pitted a succession of military dictatorships against leftist political organizations. The Guatemalan government’s response to community organizing was to label the opposition as “Communist” and send in the army. During the 1980s, the government began targeting the rural Mayan people, burning fields, razing entire villages, massacring men, women, and children, and assassinating priests. After years of suffering political oppression, economic injustice, and racial violence, many of the Mayan farmers organized an armed resistance movement using the jungles as a base. Finally, in 1996, the peace accords between the rebels and the government ended the war and provided an opportunity for the revolutionaries to continue their efforts, but without their guns.

Tono Figuero, a quiet, serious man in his late forties, introduces me to this cooperative community founded ten years ago. Hundreds of displaced refugees and former guerrillas came together and found an old ranch that had been cleared and burned. Arriving with nothing but the rags on their backs, they began to forge a community based upon their revolutionary principles of social equality and communal land ownership. Viewing machismo as a form of oppression, women had assumed positions of leadership in the resistance; one of those women guerrillas is now president of the co-op.

While each family owns their house and farm plot, the co-op retains ownership of pasturelands, the forest, the lake, and plantations of pine, pineapple, and lime trees. The co-op provides free day care, primary and secondary education, adult vocational training, and operates a pharmacy and clinic, charging as little as twelve cents per visit. Nuevo Horizonte also maintains two pickups and a minivan for anyone’s use.

The co-op’s explicit economic goal is to provide alternatives to the Central American Free Trade Agreement and demonstrate how communities can be less vulnerable to the negative effects of globalization. To this end, the co-op provides low-interest microfinancing. To encourage collective enterprises, the loans’ interest rates drop with every partner who joins. The community now boasts a welding shop and two corn mills, and maintains its own seed bank to counter efforts by corporations to control crop production.

The residents of Nuevo Horizonte seem particularly proud of their efforts to preserve a small, 250-acre chunk of intact rainforest. When the ex-guerrillas arrived ten years ago, they quickly recognized this remnant for both its ecological value in preventing siltation of the local lake, as well as its historical and cultural significance. Flashing a grin, Juan, a villager in his seventies, leads us into the forest. Every few hundred yards he stops and points out an edible palm, fruit, or nut tree. “Es historico,” he insists, because it provided food during “la epoca guerrilla.” One palm yields cooking oil, and another tree produces nuts that can be roasted and ground into flour. The jungle served as the guerrillas’ home for many years, providing food, shelter, and safety, and it is doing so again.

The revolution of Nuevo Horizonte is no longer being fought with guns, but with education, sustainability, and the integrity of the natural and human community. “The fight is not over,” Tono says.

The inscrription reads: “Many small people, in many small places, doing many small things….can change the world”

The homegrown revolution – urban farming

There are parts in me that recoil a bit from the sprinkled-in bits of American culture (like the TV reporter’s gooey superficiality), the romantic yet ‘primitive’ hippie-roots lifestyle and certainly the drudgery of gardening (for example battling pests or droughts or committing to the huge amount of establishment work when the climate is less benign than in southern California). On the other hand though I know of the sensual delights of harvesting and eating fresh food or the wonderous, patient amazement when seeing the tiny seed unfold into a stout and potent plant. All those aspects of beauty in the end pulled me into the power field of the ‘homegrown revolution’, making me see what is possible and feeling the urge to act stirring in the anaesthesia of the ‘easy life’ of shopping and consuming. It’s a much deeper and endlessly more meanigful dream, I have to admit.

[Thanks to my wonderful friend Helena, who drew my attention to the Dervaes family, the ‘Urban Homesteaders’ in Pasadena, California]

Attachment Parenting: TRUST YOUR CHILDREN

I’ve been busy lately uploading 1.500 photos onto my Flickr site 🙂 and therefore totally neglected my blog; hopefully I’ll be able to devote a bit more time to it again. Here’s a great article from an equally wonderful site called “The Natural Child Project“. I came across it coz Gunda practices this concept with what it requires and deserves: love and dedication; I wish I could have had parents with that philosophy …

What is Attachment Parenting?

by Jan Hunt, M.Sc.

Attachment parenting, to put it most simply, is believing what we know in our heart to be true. And if we do that, we find that we trust the child. We trust him in these ways:

• We trust that he is doing the very best he can at every given moment, given all of his experiences up to that time.
• We trust that though he may be small in size, he is as fully human as we are, and as deserving as we are to have his needs taken seriously.
• We trust that he has been born innocent, loving, and trusting. We do not need to “turn him around”, to teach him that life is difficult, or train him to be a loving human being – he is that at birth and all we need to do is celebrate that, and support and sustain it.
• We don’t have to give him lessons about life – life brings its own lessons and its own frustrations.
• We recognize that in a very beautiful way, our child teaches us – if we listen – what love is.¹
• We understand that if a child “misbehaves”, instead of reacting to the behavior, we should always examine what has been taking place in his life: what stresses, frustrations or frightening, confusing, or difficult situations he has just experienced. We also need to examine whether we have brought about any of these experiences, intentionally or not. It is our job to be responsive parents, meeting the needs of our child; it is not the child’s job to meet our needs for a quiet and perfectly well-behaved child.
• We understand that It is unfair and unrealistic to expect a child to behave perfectly at all times; after all, no adult can do this either. Yet behind all punishment is the unstated expectation that a child can and should behave perfectly at all times; there is no leeway.
• We see that so-called “bad behavior” is in reality nothing more than the child’s attempt to communicate an important need in the best way he can, given the present circumstances and all of his prior experience. “Misbehavior” is a signal to us that important needs are not being met. – by us or by others in the child’s life. We should not ignore that behavior any more than we should ignore the sound of a smoke detector. We should instead see “bad behavior” as an opportunity – an opportunity to reevaluate our own behavior, to learn about our child’s needs, and to meet those needs in the best way possible.

As Albert Einstein wrote, “Behind every difficulty lies an opportunity.” This is true in general, but it is profoundly true in parenting. For example, if a child chases a ball into the road, that is an opportunity to teach him safety measures by practicing for similar situations in the future. The parent could ask the child to purposely throw the ball into the road, then come to the parent and report the situation. In this way, the real lesson can be learned: it is the parent who needs to spend more time teaching safety, not the child who should somehow have known this information, and obviously does not yet know. Punishment is the most damaging response: it is unfair, upsetting, and confusing, and distracts the child from the learning that needs to take place. Instead we should give gentle, respectful instruction at the time the behavior occurs – this is exactly when the child can relate it to his life. In this way the best learning can take place.

Through attachment parenting, children learn to trust themselves, understand themselves, and eventually will be able to use their time as adults in a meaningful and creative way, rather than spending it in an attempt to deal with past childhood hurts, in a way that hurts themselves or others. If an adult has no need to deal with the past, he can live fully in the present.

As the Golden Rule suggests, attachment parenting is parenting the child the way we wish we had been treated in childhood, the way we wish we were treated by everyone now, and the way we want our grandchildren to be treated. With attachment parenting, we are giving an example of love and trust.

Our children deserve to learn what compassion is, and they learn that most of all by our example. If our children do not learn compassion from us, when will they learn it? The bottom line is that all children behave as well as they are treated – by their parents and by everyone else in their life.

Dr. Elliott Barker is a Canadian psychiatrist and the Director of the Canadian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty for Children. He describes attachment parenting as having these two facets:

• Being willing and able to put yourself in your child’s shoes in order to correctly identify his/her feelings.
• Being willing and able to behave toward your child in ways which take those feelings into account.

In short, attachment parenting is loving and trusting our children. If we can do that, they will be able to trust us and in turn, trust others and be trustworthy persons themselves. The educator John Holt once said that everything he wrote could be summed up in two words: “trust children”. This is the most precious gift we can give as parents.

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^{1 See The Little Goo-Roo by Jan and Tracy Kirschner (Atlas Press, 1997).}