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Channel: Ecomusings by Sven Eberlein

Turning Waste into Wine: A Pilgrimage to the Composted Land

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It is said that Jesus was able to turn water into wine. While such truly miraculous skill to this day remains confined to the realm of saints and sages, I bring good news about a wine-making technique that is — especially in light of Pope Francis' recent warning about the destructive consequences of unbridled consumerism on the planet— no less uplifting, and most importantly, attainable by any and all:

The composting of municipal food waste into organic fertilizer to provide the nutrients necessary for soils to support healthy vines and carbon-sequestering roots that produce the kind of grapes responsible for heavenly wines, from here to eternity.

The revelation occurred to me last Saturday, when I received a last minute invitation by my garbage guru to join a congregation of the compost curious on a pilgrimage to Chateau Montelena, a vineyard located in the heart of the promised wine valley about 80 miles north of the City of St. Francis.

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Before we pop the orange cork below, a word from the Book of Garbage...

The Genesis


With the advent of an economic system in the mid-20th Century that demanded ever more rapidly increasing levels of consumption and inputs of natural resources, communities across the world were faced with the problem of what to do with the mounting heaps of discarded items that were no longer deemed valuable in a throw-away society.

plastic, waste, garbage
Mountain of plastic trash found on a beach
in Lima, Peru in one afternoon.
In countries with a lot of open space like the United States, the solution was to simply truck everything into designated open areas and create mountains of trash. Less spacious countries like France and most of Europe came up with what they thought to be a more elegant way to deal with the unwanted excess, by burning the whole steaming pile in high tech furnaces.

Countries unable to afford expensive waste disposal infrastructure largely relied on the resilience of their poorest citizens to deal with the mounting piles of consumer goods. However, with the rate of production and consumption increasing so dramatically over such a short period of time, the sheer volume of unwanted refuse overwhelmed the collective human capacity to deal with the excess in a sustainable fashion. There was so much stuff designed for one-time use only— thanks to artificially cheap oil enabling the proliferation of non-degradable plastics— that much of it began slipping through local retrieval systems and washing into the planet's oceans.

Feeding the 5000 in Nantes, France
Trash-bound food made into meals
at "Feeding the 5K" event in Nantes, France.
Moreover, one-third of the edible parts of food produced for human consumption in the world — about 1.3 billion tons per year —ended up in the trash, where it not only failed to feed the world's 852 million people suffering from chronic undernourishment but emitted a whopping 3.3 billion tons of CO2. In the United States alone, 95% of uneaten food was being thrown away, accounting for more than 20 percent of all methane emissions in landfills. If food waste were a country, it would be the 3rd largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.

In other words, humans were not only wasting a sinful amount of food, but the waste was speeding up climate chaos which led to disruptions of agriculture and global food security.

A vicious cycle if ever there was one.


Zen Monks to CA Governor Brown: "Don't even THINK about Fracking!"

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zen-buddhism

I have a sticker in my office that says "Zen Buddhism: Don't even think about it!" This kind of humorous take often leads to the (false) perception that Buddhism and its more western-palatable "mindfulness" cousin are about disengagement, a sort of blissful denial of reality in which the practitioner's magical skill is to sit there in utter peace and emptiness, able to tune out the world even while the world around is unraveling.

In an open letter to California Governor Brown published yesterday in anticipation of tomorrow's massive March for Real Climate Leadership in Oakland, dozens of leaders and members from the San Francisco Zen Center -- including the central abbesses and well-known figures such as actor Peter Coyote -- dispel the notion of the passive, agreeable monk unfazed by any earthly rumblings below or outside his or her cross-legged self.  

February 5, 2015

Dear Governor Brown,

We write to urge you to ban hydraulic fracturing -- fracking -- in California and, more generally, move away from making our state a major producer as well as a consumer of fossil fuels. We celebrate that you have, in your inaugural address, made a renewed commitment to addressing climate change.

We know -- you, and us, and many in California and elsewhere -- that hydraulic fracturing is destructive of so many things. It has a long, deep, devastating impact on many species, as well as human beings. It is a theft the present makes from the future, compromising for the sake of the few who profit in the present, longterm well-being for the many to come. It commits us to continue pursuing fossil fuel and with it climate-change emissions when we know, as you said in your inaugural, we need to take "significant amounts of carbon out of our economy." This should mean not only what we consume here in the state, but what we produce to be consumed anywhere.

That carbon goes into the upper atmosphere, wherever it is burned. Too, fracking devastates water, both in the huge amounts used in the process, and in the lasting contamination of groundwater, a terrible waste in a dry state. We can leave that oil in the soil. And we must. We ask that you sign a bill banning fracking and help turn us away from the age of fossil fuels with its immeasurable and lasting damage to the biosphere. California, with its extraordinary implementation of energy-efficiency standards during your first term as governor, with Assemblywoman Fran Pavley's emissions legislation in 2002 that set nationwide standards under the Obama administration, with the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, has often led the way for the rest of the country. What happens here matters everywhere.

California Zen Leaders Urge Gov. Brown to Ban Fracking

some unthinking thoughts below the orange meditation cushion...

We did it! Biggest Anti-Fracking Demonstration in U.S. History! (photos galore)

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So a bunch of concerned citizens of all stripes came out to Oakland yesterday to talk some fracking sense.

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More specifically, according to 350.org's count, over 8,000 of us marched...

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and gathered to call for a ban on fracking in California. To me, it seemed like a sea of people.

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The message was, specifically, for Governor Jerry Brown to put the kibosh on fracking...

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but more broadly, to use his smarts when it comes to California's energy policy.

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The good thing is that we know Governor Brown is a smart and caring guy who just called for expansive new environmental regulations and ambitious cuts to carbon emissions in his recent inaugural speech. We also know that Jerry knows something about We the People.

The problem is that in the frack-of-war between The Oil Barons and The People, Jerry is currently being pulled dangerously close to the barrel.

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photo by kimoconnor

The oil industry seems to have planted enough $eed$ in Governor Brown's head to make him believe in the fairy tale that hydraulic fracturing for natural gas is a climate-friendly alternative to coal and oil. However, when you pull the curtain on all the flowery clean-gas talk and do an honest accounting, you quickly realize that the combined effects of toxicity and greenhouse gas emissions from fracking are no better if not worse than coal and oil.

The People have done the math and spelled out the simple equation for the Governor.

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An equation whose effects rings way beyond California...

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and whose messengers are intimately familiar with how this planet works...

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It's time for Governor Brown to use his noggin and start whacking the oil demon...

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put together the pieces of the puzzle...

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so we can roll up our sleeves...

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and get serious about real solutions.

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More photos and bon mots below the orange drill bit...

Get this: science denier David Koch sits on boards of America's science museums. Let's kick him off!

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David Koch graphic for petition to kick him off the museum board
No more dinosaurs for you, Mr. Koch!
You just can't make this stuff up!

Science Museums Urged to Cut Ties With Kochs

So David Koch, he of the oil and manufacturing conglomerate Koch Industries and the Lord Voldemort to all that is good and lush and thriving on God's green Earth, sits on the Board of Directors at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and the American Museum of Natural History, all while bankrolling groups that deny climate science to the tune of $67 million since 1997.

Sign the Petition to Kick Koch Off the Board

I don't know what the correct analogy is here — wolf guarding the henhouse? too many rotten eggs in one basket? — but it looks like the chickens are coming home to roost.

41 scientists signed and sent an open letter to Museums of Science and Natural History, demanding they cut all ties with the fossil fuel industry and funders of climate science obfuscation.

When some of the biggest contributors to climate change and funders of misinformation on climate science sponsor exhibitions in museums of science and natural history, they undermine public confidence in the validity of the institutions responsible for transmitting scientific knowledge. This corporate philanthropy comes at too high a cost.

Drawing on both our scientific expertise and personal care for our planet and people, we believe that the only ethical way forward for our museums is to cut all ties with the fossil fuel industry and funders of climate science obfuscation.

Not only that, but the Natural History Museum published the letter on its website and is promoting a petition to get science deniers out of science museums and kick Koch off its Board, specifically calling out David Koch, a major donor, exhibit sponsor and trustee on the Board of Directors at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and the American Museum of Natural History.

Holy cow! That's a full-fledged mutiny and it couldn't happen to a nicer captain!

And guess what? The petition is co-sponsored by Daily Kos, so even more fun to support the mothership in some good old fashioned house cleaning.

I call that "Evolution Strikes Back!"

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Michael Mann, climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, fellow Kossack and signer of the letter, sums up the utter sham that is greedy, science-despising oilmen sitting at the controls of leading scientific educational institutions:

Cloaked in the garb of civic-mindedness, they launder their image while simultaneously and covertly influencing the content offered by those institutions.
Now go sign the petition to kick the Koch to the curb.

And because this is so much fun and going nicely viral, here's another version by the Sierra Club.

A drop in the bucket?

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In light of California's historic drought and Governor Brown's executive order to impose a 25 percent reduction on municipal water use, my partner and I thought about ways we can conserve more water than we already do.

The "problem" we have is that like many long-time California residents who have been through droughts before, water awareness and conservation is very much ingrained in our daily routines. We don't flush the toilet unless necessary (and have a low-flow toilet), we don't have house plants that need watering, we don't take showers every day (and keep them short when we do), and the three sources of water in our apartment are equipped with low-flow faucets (provided for free by the SF PUC!). The one in our kitchen sink even has a convenient switch to cut off water during dish-doing unless you absolutely need it.

water faucetlow flow shower faucet

After some brainstorming — including a wee bit of righteous indignation about how this mandatory 25% cut shouldn't really apply to those of us who have been tightening our faucets all along — we discovered a weak spot in our system:

Living on the 2nd floor of an old building where the water heater is in the garage means that it takes quite a while for warm water to move through the pipes. While that's not a big issue in the kitchen sink (plates and utensils are pretty immune to cold-water shock) or bathroom sink (no problem washing your hands or brushing your teeth with cold water), the shower is a different story. Despite my overlapping cultural heritage with the purveyors of the Kneipp therapy, I prefer to keep my full-body cold water exposure to the hottest days of the year, of which we don't have that many in foggy San Francisco.

Thus our decision, starting today, to capture the initial stream of cold shower water with a bucket.

This water, though not suited for drinking, can now be used for a variety of purposes, like flushing the toilet, doing the dishes, or watering our landlady's potted plants. And voila, we may be a step closer to squeezing out 25% more savings on our water tab!

Now, I can hear the voices all around me, including the ones in my head, screaming in bloody cynical unison, right below the orange cynicloud:  

Bombshell video shows Chevron covering up its lethal tracks in the Ecuadorian Amazon!!!

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#ChevronExposed

A week after Chevron CEO John "Hell Freezer" Watson received a "Distinguished Citizen" award from the Commonwealth Club, the gods of irony must have felt compelled to present the public with documentation of just how distinguished this man's work is when it comes to running one of the most ruthlessly irresponsible corporations in the world.  

They did it in the form of The Chevron Tapes, a treasure trove of Chevron misdeeds and corporate malfeasance shot by the oil giant's own technicians and consultants and sent by a whistleblower to rainforest watchdog group Amazon Watch.

Revealing in their own words to what length this oil giant has gone to cover up its dirty tracks that have caused so much death and misery for indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon, the company's consultants are caught on tape frustrated by their inability to find soil samples without oil, and then mocking the contamination, in an obvious attempt to pre-game the judicial inspections to defraud the court.

Here, have a look at how it's done The Chevron Way™ if you're a well-paid shill and you're finding extensive contamination in areas your sponsor has claimed to have cleaned up years ago. Wink wink!


"Good news," Dave says with apparent sarcasm. "Petroleum."

"No! No!" responds Rene. "Check it again."

"Well, do you want to smell it? I think it is," Dave says to Rene, as the two men examine a soil core sample.

Rene sniffs the sample and demurs playfully for a moment before conceding, "Okay, it is — it is, it is."

"Because I don't know what this fungus… this is," says Dave.

"Well, you might as well stop them now," puts in Rene. "Stop them. Just, uh — yeah, we're done here… We're trying to find a clean core, and we obviously we didn't go out far enough."

"Nice job, Dave," he continues. "Give you one simple task: Don't find petroleum."

"Who picked the spot, Rene?" Dave replies.

"I'm the customer," says Rene. "I'm always right."

Wow, Dave and Rene, so much for ever finding a legit science job. Then again, you're probably in the Bahamas, sipping Pina Coladas on Chevron's tab for the rest of your lives.

The second part of the video includes interviews with local residents -- ostensibly conducted by Chevrons reps -- about water contamination and health problems that they attribute to oil pollution.

In one of them, a 30-year resident named Merla talks about her cows:

"We've had our cows die there," she says. "Why did the cows die? Because they drank the water where the oil had spilled. Back then, that whole area was full of crude oil. The water there was filthy. They came and covered it up and they just left all of the crude there and it became a swamp. It's pure crude there. In the middle it's a thick ooze and you'd sink right down into it."

"When was this oil spill," asks the interviewer.

"More than 20 years ago," she responds. "But I still remember it, how there was oil over everything. The cows still die there. They came, threw some dirt on top of the crude oil, and there it stayed."

Well, I guess they just kept interviewing until they found some folks that haven't lived there long enough to be directly affected by the environmental havoc wreaked decades ago. Difficult though it would be for anyone who drinks water.

More background on this below the toppled orange oil derrick...

Ways in which your garden is like a city

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An urban ecosystem

If you’ve ever tried to grow anything in your garden you’ve probably had your share of unrealized visions. In your rookie year perhaps the tomatoes never turned red or the strawberries got munched by bugs. If those mishaps didn't deflate you enough to replace the whole yard with a bocce court, you probably rebooted your spade and tried some different approaches before the next growing season. You may have moved the tomatoes to a sunnier spot and planted some dandelion to see if it would attract ladybugs with an appetite for your unwelcome strawberry-eating visitors.

As the tomatoes got a wee bit tastier and you celebrated your first strawberry (stolen by a finch, of course!), you got inspired and started thinking a bit broader. Perhaps you planted an apple tree and added a bee hive to your garden. You got more curious about soil and water, and started experimenting with compost and catchment bins. The more attention you paid to all the individual residents — both macro and micro — the more visible the interrelatedness between them became.

After watching and listening to your new garden community for a few seasons, you realized that the best way for any individual member to thrive with as little upkeep, energy, water, or pest control as possible, the overall design had to befit and benefit everyone else proportional to their needs and capabilities. You may have moved your daily attention-grabbing strawberries closer to the house and the more resilient dandelion further away. Perhaps you acquired some chickens for their eggs, just to discover that they could also be put to work tilling the topsoil and picking weeds and bugs.

Layer by layer, you cultivated a web of life that could sustain itself on the collective strength of all its threads, making maximum use of the natural climate, soil, and vegetation surrounding your home. In the process, you may have been comparing notes with other gardeners and reading books about this kind of holistic approach to farming. You may even have started calling it permaculture, but really, all you were doing was being patient and paying careful attention to your environment and its natural rhythms.

Skip below the orange wiggler for more digging...

My ten years of American citizenship and what it means to me

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citisven-10yearsSunday (05/10/15) was my 10 year anniversary as an American citizen.

What has it meant? What have I learned?

Well, since I’ve never felt particularly patriotic in the conventional sense about my birth and growing-up country Germany (for obvious reasons), I didn’t expect a new (additional) passport to trigger my inner flag-waver all of a sudden.

What DID change though after 15 years of playing in the great American sandbox as a “resident alien” was that I felt a new sense of responsibility to help the place that has given me so much room to express myself creatively become a bit more sustainable, just, and humble.

Though humility is rarely associated with national pride, to me it’s the essential ingredient for a healthy sense of place and identity. Seeing that we’re all here for just a very short time, the thought that we could “own” anything on this planet seems, if anything, a figment of our often too fearful imagination.

For example, I have a deep connection to my German roots — the people, the landscapes, the intangible sensory familiarity that comes with being OF a place — but I know that ultimately I am but a blossom on an old cherry tree, with the potential to be delicious for a while before turning into the soil that will make new trees.

Likewise, I continue to revel in the grand American experiment — the wildness, the infinite potential, the ever-smoldering mass of regenerative lava — but I am keenly aware that I am but a ripple in a stream that will eventually flow into the sea.

Having been granted a second passport is like an extra ticket to understanding how we’re all really not that different from each other. It’s an invitation to embrace identity but never to anyone else’s exclusion. A teaser of the endless diversity of this beautiful planet and a peephole into the infinite mystery of the universe. This U.S. passport, more than anything, has served as one more certificate on my path towards universal citizenship.

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photos by debra baida


New EPA report estimates benefits of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions

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The EPA just released its new report, Climate Change in the United States: Benefits of Global Action, a hugely significant piece of research that estimates the physical and monetary benefits to the U.S. of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.

Based on the results from the Climate Change Impacts and Risks Analysis (CIRA) project, this is a peer-reviewed study "comparing impacts in a future with significant global action on climate change to a future in which current greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise."

In other words, this study gives us a clear understanding of a future in a world created by climate delayers and deniers versus a future in a world created by informed and immediate action based on scientific facts and consensus.

The entire report is massive and comprehensive, ranging from Health, Infrastructure and Electricity to Water Resources, Agriculture and Forestry, and Ecosystems.

Here's a nice video teaser:


Bay Area reduces water consumption by up to 40%, civilization does not collapse

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Good news! People are capable of conserving and scaling back when they have to and want to.

From SFGate:

The region’s widespread reductions in water use in June, which were as high as 40 percent in the Contra Costa Water District when compared to the same month in 2013, marked a vast improvement over previous months for most of the area’s big water suppliers.

According to water data reported by local suppliers, the city of San Francisco saw its consumption drop 19.5 percent in June over the same month in 2013 — the year used as a baseline by the state to track conservation.

The East Bay Municipal Utility District, meanwhile, which serves much of Alameda and Contra Costa counties, recorded a 31 percent decline. The San Jose Water Company, serving much of the South Bay, saw a 35 percent drop.

I was alerted to these encouraging numbers by Tyrone Jue, a spokesperson for SFPUC, who posted this note on our NextDoor neighborhood board:
Our SF water use is down 19% in June 2015 as compared to our June 2013 baseline. We are beating our 8% goal set by the State! That percentage is amazing given that it comes on top of our extremely low water use in SF.

The news is all a credit to each of you doing your part. So in thanks of our budding Next Door relationship I wanted to be open and honest by letting you peek into my mind of what I was really thinking when i made the following comment to the SF Chronicle....

“You have to be living under a rock not to know how bad of a drought we’re in right now.”

Keep up the great work everyone and keep looking for new ways to save. Every extra drop saved gets put into our water piggy bank for the future.

And let's continue spreading the positive encouragement and news to our neighbors!

So, I am doing my part to spread the positive encouragement and news. However, it's worth spreading not only to my neighbors but to people across the country and the world (especially rich developed nations), for this news serves as a great reminder that we humans are perfectly capable of living more modestly and still be perfectly functioning and happy.

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The one great thing coming out of Donald Trump...

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The Donald is inspiring some pretty cool art. This little pre-debate snack is courtesy of my friend Anselm Yew...

Offering tobacco and bottled water for a sea of oil, Chevron gets booted from indigenous territory

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No, this is not the 17th century: Chevron engineers, looking to frack billions of cubic feet of gas from indigenous Unist’ot’en territory in British Columbia, did indeed try to get past the tribe's roadblock a few weeks ago. Trying to keep out oil and gas pipelines from deep within their unceded traditional territories, the Unist’ot’en's concerns about the wholesale destruction of their sacred lands were met with generous offerings of bottled water and industrial tobacco:

Yesterday Chevron, the company behind the Pacific Trails fracking pipeline, attempted to enter our unceded territories. They have no consent from our chiefs and our hereditary governance system, who are standing strong in their stance against all pipelines. Next to the Wedzin Kwah river, which is pure enough to drink from, Chevron presented us with an offering of bottled water and industrial tobacco.
But hey, who would care about clean river water when you can just drink water from bottles made with the oil that's going to be sucked out of your ground? Here, have a Camel!

Everyone in the U.S. knows about the Keystone XL pipeline, and there's been a lot of attention given to its harmfulness on all fronts. However, Keystone is far from being the only battle to be waged in the fight against the greedy fossil fuel industry and their determination to fry the planet.

For a little perspective, here's the scope of the Pacific Trail Pipeline (PTP) that they want to run through Unist’ot’en territory.

The Pacific Trail Pipeline (PTP) is a $1.23 billion project that falsely hopes to link co-owners Apache and Chevron’s fracking operations in the Liard Basin and Horn River Basin with their proposed LNG processing plant in Kitimat. If completed, the pipeline would be able to transport 1 billion cubic feet of gas per day.

Totalling 473km in length, the pipeline would run from Summit Lake (where it would connect with the existing Spectra Energy pipeline) to Kitimat. The current proposed path for the pipeline has it passing directly through the Unist’ot’en territory of Talbits Kwa.

Apache and Chevron are both among the top polluting companies in the world, ranking 5th and 18th overall among oil&gas companies based on total reserves. Both companies are known for environmental atrocities where they operate.

Here's the map of all proposed pipelines through Unist’ot’en territory. Click here for an interactive map of pipelines, tarsands, fracking fields and resistance to these things.

The fact that national governments like Canada's are allowing oil companies into sovereign native territories to drill for oil and build huge pipelines without their consensus in this day and age is hard to fathom. But that's exactly what greedy companies like Chevron and their government enablers are banking on: apathy, disbelief, and ignorance.

That's why it's so important to shine a light on what's going on in these territories that are so far away from the eyes of "civilization" and yet directly affecting the industrialized world.

Even more important for us to support the Unis’tot’en, who are on the frontlines of an epochal struggle that will define the future of all life on Earth. There are many things we can do: from educating ourselves to donating to volunteering to throwing a kitchen party, visit this page to find out more.

I'll leave the last word to the Unis’tot’en on why they refuse all pipeline projects on their sacred lands...

Carsick Planet, Part 1: Why the world needs FEWER not better cars

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“Carden of Eden” at Flora Grubb Gardens, San Francisco. All photos by Sven Eberlein

With the upcoming 21st UN Climate Summit in Paris (COP21) this December promising to be a multi-lane highway towards a low carbon society, it begs the question how this lofty aspiration squares with a 1.2 billion fleet of automobiles worldwide, projected to grow to 2 billion by 2035 and double to 2.5 billion in 2050.

While the number of cars and trucks in the United States has plateaued at a chunky 253 million (that's 4000 pounds of steel, iron, rubber, plastics and aluminum for almost every man, woman, and child), global automobile sales are poised to soar to 127 millioneach year by 2035. If ownership in China catches up with the U.S. rate, there will be over a billion vehicles in that country alone.

Take a seat in the ecomobile for a moment to let those numbers sink in.

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No matter how hard I try, the math just doesn't add up.

Consider: Science suggests that in order to stay within 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) of warming and have at least some kind of a stable climate, global greenhouse gas emissions will need to be at least 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. For that to happen, industrialized countries such as the U.S. would need to cut emissions more than 90 percent. Yet at the same time, the average fleet fuel efficiency needs to double just to keep carbon emissions levels of the projected 2.5-billion vehicle "global car parc" the same as today.

Seeing that cars are one of the largest net contributors to climate change pollution, it would seem that adding over 100 million of them each year is a bad recipe for greenhouse gas reductions. They would almost have to run on air for that equation to work, and that's not even counting all the fossil fuels it takes just to make such heavy machinery available for our temporary enjoyment.

Perhaps this is a good time to re-envision the car of the future.

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Please follow me across the orange axle for a thorough look under the hood of automobility, and stay tuned for Parts 2 & 3, which will delve much deeper into the history and economics of car dependence and show creative solutions to the global gridlock.

Carsick Planet, Part 2: Reducing the fleet through personal, infrastructure & economic change

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If indeed the continued proliferation of the personal automobile is not compatible with the future we want as I have suggested in Part 1 of this series, the question naturally becomes: How exactly are we going to "disarm"?

desertcars

Let's first posit that the goal isn't to reach "zero cars," as such a drastic all-or-nothing approach is neither feasible nor necessary. There will always be a need for useful and necessary motorized transportation, from delivery, emergency, agricultural, and transit vehicles to serving residents in remote areas or people with limited physical mobility. As noted in the previous post, there are also existing suburban developments that will force its residents into car-dependence in the near term. (Whether these kinds of sprawl patterns are sustainable at all is another question).

However, with almost 70% of the world's population projected to live in urban areas by 2050, there is a large pool of car owners living close enough to basic services that could be enticed to live car-free, given the right circumstances.

What might an attainable reduction look like?

Matching the IPCC's latest World Carbon Budget recommendation of 50% reduction of 2020 peak emissions by 2040, a corresponding goal could be for a 2020 automobile fleet of roughly 1.5 billion to be cut in half by 2040, to 750 million. Figuring in the improved fuel efficiency of newer fleets, let's even allow for an additional 250 million vehicles, setting the minimum target at 1 billion cars globally in 2040, one for every seven people on the planet.

Reducing the number of cars from the current 1.2 billion to 1 billion, an 18% reduction within the next 25 years, seems like a reasonable, albeit ambitious target.

Just as with international climate negotiations, the targets for reductions would be much steeper for developed nations. While developing countries would have to drastically curb their growth rate in automobile ownership, most European and North American countries would have to set much higher reduction targets than the 18% needed globally. Getting from one out of every two people driving to one in seven will require a structural and cultural paradigm shift on par with WWII mobilization in the United States or the Marshal Plan in post-war Germany, beyond even the most rosy current projections for some European cities to reduce the share of journeys by car from 50% in 1990 to 27% by mid-century.

Is a world in which people outnumber cars 7:1 really so hard to imagine? I don't think so...

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Please follow me across the orange axle for a thorough look under the hood of the automotive lifestyle, infrastructure, and economics.

Carsick Planet, Part 3: Get around. Not too fast. Mostly walk.

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Getting around not too fast on the New York High Line.

The previous segment of this series left off discussing how lifestyle choices, infrastructure, and a new economic thinking must work in tandem to change the overall trajectory from a car-first to a people-oriented mobility Zeitgeist that can lead to a reduction of the current global automobile fleet of 1.2 billion to no more than a billion by 2040.

Let's take a look at what a future inspired by this kind of a human-scale, integral transportation epoch might look like.

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Downtown Freiburg, Germany: Rebuilt after WWII with carless mobility in mind.

We're all familiar with the slogan "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle." It's a good one for sure, as it doesn't deny the fact that we live and will continue to do so in a material world while at the same time laying out an easily understood list of priorities to guide us in becoming less wasteful (a fourth "R"—Refuse— as the lead-off would be an appropriate addition). Similarly, the phrase "Eat food, Not too much, Mostly plants" coined by author Michal Pollan conveys a ranking of eating habits that connects personal well being with best practices for the planet in a non-dogmatic, progressive, and easy to digest (pun!) way.

An equivalent motto for a realistic yet meaningful transportation transformation would be "Get around. Not too fast. Mostly walk." On both policy and personal levels, it acknowledges and honors our human desire for mobility (get around) while prioritizing modes of transportation that may be slower but are more sustainable (not too fast) and encouraging the most nimble and healthy way of moving about (mostly walk) whenever possible.

Follow me across the rusted orange axle for a look at preferred transit modes and their role in pushing the lifestyle, infrastructure, and economic trifecta toward a post-auto world.

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Streets just wanna have fun! Sunday Streets in San Francisco


Postcard from Abu Dhabi: On the Road to Masdar City, a Desert Ecocity in the Making

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Masdar City, the world's first zero-carbon city under construction.

Last month saw the 11th edition of the International Ecocity Conference Series that was first held 25 years ago in Berkeley, California and since has traveled to cities across every continent of our beautiful planet, save for Antarctica. As a long-time friend and team member in various capacities of the series' conveners, Ecocity Builders, I've been able to attend the last four summits in San Francisco (2008), Istanbul (2009), Montreal (2011), and Nantes (2013). When Abu Dhabi was announced as the 2015 host two years ago at Ecocity 10, I remember feeling a mix of excitement about the prospect of visiting a place I had never been to and mystery about an area of the planet I knew very little about.

As it turned out, I wasn't alone on the latter. Almost every time I mentioned Abu Dhabi to friends, the reactions ranged from blank stares to "oh, you're going to the place with the indoor ski resort!" Well, Dubai is not that far off — 80 miles northeast along the Persian Gulf Coast, to be exact — but mentally placing the famed ski resort in Abu Dhabi is perhaps a bit like thinking Disneyland is in San Francisco. Yes, it's all California, but only someone who has never been there would think every city and town is right out of a Beach Boys song.

Come to think of it, there were more beach boys (and girls) in Abu Dhabi than on a normal (foggy) day in San Francisco...

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Here's the lowdown: Abu Dhabi and Dubai are each one of the seven constituent emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a country located on the southeastern end of the Arabian Peninsula on the Persian Gulf. The more populous Dubai often gets the most attention for its (admittedly) daring architectural stunts, but Abu Dhabi (meaning "Father of the Gazelle" in Arabic) is the largest of the seven Emirates (covering almost 90 percent of the UAE's total land area), the capital, the country's political and industrial hub, and the historical and cultural center.

Desert Construction
Human habitation in the region dates back to at least 5500 BC, but the current industrialized geopolitical entity simply known as "The Emirates" wasn't founded until 1971, when Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan of the Al Nahyan family was able to bring together different indigenous Bedouin tribes to form a new country, stepping into the vacuum between the waning colonial appetite of the British and a growing global appetite for hydrocarbons. As one of the world's largest oil producers with about 9% of the world's oil and 5% of its natural gas reserves (94 percent of them in Abu Dhabi), the late Sheikh Zayed oversaw the rapid urban growth from what used to essentially be nomadic settlements into two of the world's major cosmopolitan areas. While initially planned for 40,000 then 600,000 inhabitants, Abu Dhabi city proper had grown to a population of 1.5 million by 2014.

Which brings me to the second response everyone had upon hearing we were going to hold the Summit there: "What's so "ecocity" about a place owing its very existence to the overabundance of non-renewable resources?"

Abu Dhabi or Los Angeles?
It's a fair question, albeit one that we would all be well-advised to ask about our own places of residence. Especially those of us in the western-industrialized world need to remember that much of our current standard of living has been the result of our disproportionate use of fossil fuels, both quantitatively and for the most sustained period of time. Yes, the UAE currently has the largest per capita Ecological Footprint in the world, but it's hard to argue that Los Angeles, Las Vegas, or even the much celebrated "green" city San Francisco (with an ecological footprint 6 percent higher than the average American's) are in a position to stake the moral high ground in our common endeavor to bring human civilization back into some semblance of harmony with Earth's natural ecosystems. Not even eco-conscious Western Europe can showcase a single country whose per capita ecological footprint does not exceed its biocapacity.

So here's what I tell people as to why it was a great idea to hold the Ecocity World Summit in Abu Dhabi:

Bike lane on the Corniche, Abu Dhabi
There are currently no fully realized ecocities in the world, only cities with varying degrees of "ecocityness" in different areas, along the 15 conditions laid out by the International Ecocity Framework & Standards initiative (IEFS). The good news is that this means everyone is in the same boat, mid-journey, trying to get to a better place from where they are, depending on their own unique circumstances and according to each city's means. Ecocity Builders is committed to facilitating the process for any city willing to take the leap towards becoming more ecocity-like, educating along the way and helping to exchange knowledge and experience between urban stakeholders across the globe. And as initiatives like Eye on Earth or the Abu Dhabi Global Environmental Data Initiative (AGEDI), projects like Masdar City (more on that later), or the UAE's commitment to the UN's Sustainable Development Goals show, the leaders as well as the communities of Abu Dhabi have been serious about stirring their urban ship into more sustainable waters for some time now.

While Ecocity Summits are never just about the host city, it became abundantly clear in the run-up to and during the conference, which was aptly themed "Ecocities in challenging environments," that these hosts would leave a lasting impression on all of their visitors.

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What follows in this post and subsequent ones I plan on writing over the next few weeks are some of my personal impressions of a week that went from curious to inspiring to jawdropping; my own One Thousand and One Ecocity Nights, if you will. I will kick it off with my visit to Masdar City, an aspiring ecotropolis on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi's somewhat fluid city limits, in the middle of the Arabian desert.

Why I don't have a candidate

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Seeing that most of the American media including Daily Kos has been in full throttle about a presidential election that at this moment is almost a year away, I’ve been feeling the peer pressure to get in the race, make up my mind, and pick a horse. However, each time I follow the heated discussions in favor of or against one candidate or another, I find myself getting strangely disinterested, almost bored. At first it worried me, as I consider myself on the engaged side of the political spectrum — as a naturalized U.S. citizen I take my democratic duties very seriously. In fact, I signed up with Daily Kos in 2008 specifically to play a more active role in my first presidential election as a newly minted citisven (my name is Sven, get it?!).

Let me first get this out of the way: I think Bernie is great, I’ve been warming to Hillary, and Martin O’Malley seems like a perfectly “electable” candidate for a liberally-minded voter like myself. I don’t ever expect to be 100% in agreement or “love” with any candidate, as the simple fact that all of us humans are beautifully different and life is very nuanced and complex would make that kind of a prerequisite for a vote almost insurmountable. I probably don’t have to mention that the Republican field of candidates gives me hives, so like most sane people I cope with the clown car by laughing (though nervously at times).

So why am I not feeling the Bern, or the Hill, or the Mall?

The Personality Blues

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resorting to Germanisms at times

At first I thought I had resorted to my native German mode, in which elections are something you don’t get too wrapped up in until a couple of months before going to the polls. Though you do have individuals running against each other to some degree, in a parliamentary system it’s the parties who nominate their candidate for chancellor, so as a voter you’re probably voting as much if not more so on the party platform than for the respective leaders.

There simply isn’t as much of the extreme focus on individuals and their personal platforms or character traits that presidential systems like the American one depend on. There are no primaries, no Iowa caucuses, no endless contests spread out over months and months. Plus, the parties have set budgets for operations and election campaigning, so the hyper buzz on steroids created by all the money and advertising isn’t turned up to eleven as it is in American politics (even Bernie is dependent on the money buzz, just smaller amounts from more people). For better or worse, Germans (and most other Euros) don’t get as worked up about elections as early.

However, the more I’ve been thinking about it, the more I realize that that isn’t it, either. Just because I hail from the German Social Democratic tradition (which btw I think describes Bernie’s platform better than Democratic Socialism and would be easier branding for an American electorate, but correct me if I’m wrong) doesn’t mean I’m automatically detached from a candidate’s personal appeal or the allure of their platform. I was pretty psyched about Barack Obama as far back as 2007, and I remember feeling the “Ralph” in 2000 (I was in CA and couldn’t vote back then, so no, I didn’t elect Bush), so I’ve had my share of electoral crushes.

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but perfectly capable of Americanisms

It is, in actuality, exactly those previous crushes and what happened after those elections that have led me to back off a bit on the “my candidate is the last great hope for humanity” juice. I’ve been working in sustainable urban planning since around that 2008 election, and the more I’ve traveled to citiesacross the world and learned about planning challenges and inequities in my own Bay Area neighborhoods, the more clear it’s become that most of the work and action that not only affects people’s lives but gets them engaged in democracy at all happens locally, every week and every day, between elections.

Spending a year and a half of my time out of every four-year cycle fretting over presidential candidates is just more of a time/mindspace commitment I’m willing to make. I think this sort of round-the-clock campaigning mode sucks up too much air from a political ecosystem that needs to be nourished and energized on all ends of the spectrum. I know Bernie is the first one to say he can’t do it without a strong (and ongoing!) grassroots movement to help his agenda, but so do Hillary and Martin, so did Barack, and so do most politicians I’ve ever considered voting for. So what matters most is that we who believe this to be true actually do the arduous and non-glamorous work it takes to build these (lasting) people movements from the bottom up, and that work takes time and effort.  

It Takes A (Sustained) Ecosystem

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Biking the math of climate change to Chevron.

I’ve also been involved in environmental activism, from protesting the Keystone XL pipeline to shaming Chevron to pay for their pollution to calling for climate action more broadly. All of these movements have borne fruit, from Obama nixing Keystone to Chevron losing big at home and abroad to the U.S. finally getting serious about climate change. These weren’t things that any Democratic president could have just pulled out of his/her hat, but issues that needed critical grassroots movement to expose the polluters and generate the kind of change in public opinion that gives leaders the wave they need to ride on, not just to take a more progressive personal stance but to be able to enact policies that will stand the test of time.

I think the Keystone XL fight is actually a very good example of how this bottom-up or outside-in process works. While it was essential to have a Democrat in the oval office who would at the very least listen to the arguments on all sides, the foundation for the eventual executive rejection of the pipeline — as Ben Adler outlines in his piece The inside story of how the Keystone fight was won— was laid long before Obama ever put any ink on it.

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A movement bigger than a pipeline.

Started by First Nations tribes in Alberta and ranchers in Nebraska, it was an organically grown movement that slowly but deliberately spread from the heartland communities to climate change activists (amplified by Daily Kos blogathons!) to the big environmental non-profits and eventually to the President’s desk over a period of five years. At one point last year, 2 million people explained to President Obama and Secretary Kerry during a 30-day public comment period why the risky tar sands pipeline was not in the national interest. By the time TransCanada pulled out and President Obama submitted his official rejection last week, the political winds regarding that pipeline had shifted so drastically that basically all the President had to do was spread out his cape and fly through a wide open door.

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no problem, Mr. President.

While it’s impossible to know if and how any of the current Democratic presidential contenders would have handled this issue differently from PBO, I think it’s fair to say that the two key elements that led to the eventual rejection of KXL — aside from having an intelligent non-ideologue in the oval office — was to a) let the state department review take its full course and b) use that time to build the kind of citizen mobilization that moves public opinion and pressures decision makers to do the the right thing (which now also happened to be the popular thing).

Who knows, maybe a President Sanders would have come out against the pipeline earlier, though chances are he would have held his cards closer to his chest than he did as a senator, knowing that it would ultimately be more prudent to let the review process take its course and let the activists do their part of the work before taking a definite position. In my view, the process would have played out very similarly with Hillary or any other center-to-leftish Democrat in office, but without all the grassroots mobilization creating the right kind of tail winds, a go-it-alone rejection would have left a huge opening for the fossil fuel lobby and their Republican bidders to create a backlash to call the decision “partisan” and “radical” and begin pushing through other pipeline projects.

By staying on the sidelines for so long, President Obama’s rejection ended up being no big deal, as if it was just the most normal thing in the world, thus suffering no political damage from something that would have been highly controversial just a couple of years ago. 

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Don’t mind being called “radical” so our leaders can later be called “normal.”

As Rebecca Solnit wrote in one of her must-reads a few months ago, One magical politician won't stop climate change. It's up to all of us:

But it’s not the belief of the majority or the work of elected officials that will change the world. It will be action, most likely the actions of a minority, as it usually has been.

She goes on to put into words my own concerns about spending so much bandwidth on a single person in a single election.

As the Obama Administration nears its end, I keep hearing from the bitterly disappointed and the generally bitter, who seem to believe that one man should have reversed the status quo more or less singlehandedly. They blame, credit, and obsess about the 53-year-old in the White House. But Obama is just the weathervane, and he knew it when he was elected.

Then, he implored the great wind that lifted him up and carried him along to keep going. Instead, people believed the job was done when it had just started and went home. Had the exhilarating coalition of the young, the nonwhite, the progressive, the poor who are usually excluded from political power kept it up, had they believed the power was ours, not his, we could have had an extraordinary eight years. The failures are not his alone – we can’t expect more of politicians than of the civil society that could push them. We can expect more of ourselves.

Zen & the Art of Making Change

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Yes, voting rocks...

I’m not saying that people shouldn’t be (passionately!) advocating for their preferred candidate, whether it’s out in their communities or on a blog. I also think that it’s possible to promote a candidate while at the same time being engaged as an activist. But my experience with American politics is that people get so worked up during presidential election seasons for such an extended period of time that they crash really hard once the spectacle is over, regardless of whether their candidate won (“we crossed the finish line, time to collapse!”) or lost (“we worked so hard for nothing, time to despair!”).

So just speaking for myself, while I’m more naturally aligned with Bernie’s longstanding positions, I feel that the best service I can be of to the causes he represents is to spend my spare time advocating for them, more so than beating the drum for his candidacy. As someone who gets easily turned off by hyper partisan sales pitches on any side, I find that the added benefit of engaging with and listening to people on local issues and in the community is not only better for my own state of mind but often more effective in getting them to change theirs. Or at least look at things from a perspective that would align them with the candidate who best represents that perspective. And not just presidential candidates once every four years, but local ones, everywhere and all the time. And if they don’t find the right one, they may even choose to run themselves.

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...but pressuring your city’s retirement board to divest from fossil fuel companies brings the house down!

There are already plenty of people right here on Daily Kos and on the internet in general making better cases for Bernie, Hillary, or Martin than I ever could. So I don’t see my time spent most effectively by adding one more primary screed (except for this one, I promise!) or arguing in comment threads about candidates. I say this not to discourage those who do from doing so, but perhaps to give those folks who may feel a similar alienation from the election hoopla the permission to step away from it without feeling like bad citizens.

There are a lot of places people like us can make a HUGE difference if we choose to — just ask the seven or eight dedicated people described in Rebecca Solnit’s essay who have single-handedly kept the divestment initiative alive in San Francisco, a supposedly liberal, climate-concerned city of 850,000.

Another piece of good news is that there are great efforts and opportunities to get away from primary overload right here on Daily Kos, where we can make ourselves useful, get inspired, and have a potentially large impact not only on this but on future elections countrywide, up and down the ballot.

Chris Reeves laid it out in his post It's Time. The 50 State Strategy Returns — and We Need Your Help Crowdsourcing it:

To this end, the Crowdsourcing the 50 State Strategy Groupwill be geared to help provide information that allows Daily Kos readers to make a big impact all over the country.

  • We will highlight filing deadlines, rules and procedures in states as they come due.
  • We will discuss elected officials from your precinct race to your US congressperson.
  • Encouragement for those running races that are considered very difficult — to help grow the party where it isn't.
  • Provide an outlet for candidates to speak to the Daily Kos community to raise support for their efforts.
  • Offer support — from research and analysis.

evcoren went into great detail as to how and where we can recruit better local candidates all across the country in his post Crowdsourcing the 50 State Strategy:

The problem is a massive candidate recruiting failure that will result in many voters having no Democrat to choose when they go vote in November 2016. One example of this recruiting failure is US House races:

  • We need to pick up 30 seats to win back the House and actually have a shot at governing
  • 34 of the 79 Republican Members of the House of Representatives who represent districts where President Obama got at least 47% of the vote currently are running unopposed
  • 139 Republican Members of the House of Representatives currently have no Democrat running against them
  • In many of the seats where we have candidates, those candidates do not have the resources currently to get their message out
  • Ohio’s Congressional filing deadline is December 16, 2015 and currently 7 out of 12 Republicans in Ohio are running unopposed

Here are all the diaries from that fantastic campaign so far:

We’ve spent a year preparing, and I hope you’ll be willing to join us on this journey. How can you contribute to this effort? We need researchers by state, leaders for each of those states and down to each congressional district. We need readers to run for local office, can you run or do you know someone?

The administrators of this group are Chris ReevesevcorenMeteor Blades and navajo. If you’d like to join this group send navajo a kosmail and let her know how you want to help.

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Nothing as fun as getting into the street with fellow Kossacks

As for me, I’ll be spending my day tomorrow in Oakland, joining thousands of other concerned citizens at one of the lead-off climate rallies for the all important COP21 negotiations about to take place in Paris. If you’re in the Bay Area, you should consider joining, not only because you can hang out with fellow Daily Kos people in real life (meet at 10:30 AM at the bridge near Lake Merritt, look for kimoconnor, or at 1pm at Frank Ogawa Plaza, kosmail navajo), but with all the tension right now in the physical and the cyber world it can be quite cathartic to get together with kindred spirits (who may even support different candidates) to rally around the goals and dreams we all hold in common.

The tragedy in Paris has only strengthened our resolve to stand together for a peaceful and livable planet. This movement for climate justice has always also been a movement for peace– no matter what background or religion, a way for us to protect our common home. So as world leaders gather in Paris at the end of November for the COP global climate summit, folks around the world will be marching in their communities.

This Saturday, November 21, you're invited to the northern & central California regional march & rally in Oakland. This one of the first of many around the world, so it's especially important that we come out! It's a family & kid-friendly event, rain or shine. Here are the details:

Rally, Climate Change

Join us in a Northern California
mass mobilization in advance of the 2015
UN Conference of Parties in Paris (COP21)

Saturday Nov 21, 2015

weather forecast is clear and sunny!

10:30 am - Gather at Lake Merritt Amphitheatre
12:00 noon - March
1:00 pm - Rally at Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant Plaza

Meet: Lake Merritt Amphitheatre (map)
March to Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant Plaza (map)
[contingent assembly info | 
march route map (note route change as of 11/19)]

RSVP on Facebook

Check for shared rides or buses if you're coming from afar!

Rally program listings on NCCM's Nov 21 event page

Transportation and Parking information here.

Somehow, these kinds of engagements feel more meaningful to me, at least at this stage of the 2016 election.

As a voter, I’ll continue to stay informed about the candidates’ platforms and the most essential news items pertaining to the primary race.

As a citizen, I will try to keep my input of presidential election chatter to a minimum and be as engaged as possible in some of the less glamorous political races.

As a writer at Daily Kos, I will continue to cover what I consider important issues, especially in the environmental field, regardless of popularity.

And as a human being, I’m just trying to stay open, loving, patient, forgiving, resilient, curious, calm, and compassionate on this crazy but only planet we have to live on.

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With the People's Voice cancelled in Paris, people voicing call to climate action everywhere else

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With the main march as well as a number of other civic events that were planned to accompany official negotiations at the COP21 climate conference in Paris cancelled, organizers have called on people around the world to step in and come out onto the streets for “the biggest global climate march in history” to protest “on behalf of those who can’t.” While it is somewhat understandable (though a bummer) that the 200,000 people who were expected to show their support for Grandma Earth in the streets of Paris next week won’t be able to do so, it is looking as if this blow to all things life-affirming is only spreading new and diverse spores instead of the deathly silence and fear that terrorism seeks.

There are currently 2355 events all over the globe scheduled for next weekend, November 28/29, and the number is growing by the hour. There’s an event finder here and 350.org has a map up to help you find your local events.

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Find local groups around the world on the 350.org global map

The hope is that these collective events will surpass the People’s Climate March last year, where 700,000 people showed up around the world to make their voices heard. It would certainly be a strong statement to all the violent nihilists that their destruction evokes an even stronger thirst and commitment among the citizens of the world to advocate on behalf of healing, of resilience, of creation itself.

As Emma Ruby-Sachs, the deputy director of the Paris match organizer Avaaz noted:

“The tragic attacks in Paris have made the march there impossible. Now it’s even more important for people everywhere to march on the weekend of 29 November on behalf of those who can’t, and show that we are more determined than ever to meet the challenges facing humanity with hope, not fear.”

Well, things got off to an amazing start yesterday, at the “Defend the Earth” Northern California Climate Mobilization in Oakland. About 3000-5000 people showed up to kick things off, among them a bunch of SF Kossacks. Following are some photos taken by navajo, kimoconnor and myself. This should really whet your appetite to get in on the action in your own local communities next weekend. It felt really good to be among kindreds and to see just how strong the winds are blowing in the direction of an ever deepening commitment to push ourselves and our fellow human beings on this planet into making the big meaningful changes we need.

On my way there, I had voiced my concern to my buddy Andy that perhaps not too many people would show up because everyone was too shaken up by everything. I probably said it also to not set myself up for disappointment, but that all was forgotten as soon as we got to Lake Merritt, where a solid crowd of people were already getting amped up...

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Shortly after, we ran into our people…

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then the march began to the beat of a drum orchestra…

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This is what Daily Kos change-making looks like in the real world…

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We really do have some of the most passionate activists around here...

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Our South Bay folks even got to do some networking while marching, sorry for the blurry shot, I really shouldn’t shoot while walking…

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The march went on through downtown Oakland…

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with its beautiful backdrops…

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and stopping for occasional dance parties…

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as always, people were so creative in their expressions, some crafty…

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some witty…

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and some just very direct….

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Meanwhile, navajo and Meteor Blades who were meeting us at Frank Ogawa Plaza, were not only getting some great views of the head of the march…

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photo: navajo

but were invited to join in at the front by their friend Penny Opal Plant and the Idle No More peops…

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photo: navajo

She even captured the moment we met. I’m telling ya, those Plumbers…

L-R: norm, Glen The Plumber (wanting a hug), kimoconnor and citisven
photo: navajo

they’re feisty ones…

Ah! There’s my posse! L-R: remembrance, TLO, Glen The Plumber, kimoconnor and citisven
photo: navajo

I quickly got to catch up with Meteor Blades on the meaning of Democratic Socialism, all while the cops looked on, of course…

The Notorious Meteor Blades being followed by cop cars, as usual, conspiring with citisven.
photo: navajo

before he moved on to impart some wisdom on Glen The Plumber…

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while TLO and kimoconnor got to rest their weary bones for a bit…

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after a selfie (or is it a “groupie?”)…

Selfie time! Front L-R: citisven and navajo. Back L-R: Meteor Blades, kimoconnor, remembrance and norm
photo: navajo

we hung out at Frank Ogawa Plaza, checking out a bunch of great speakers…

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photo: navajo

like this gentleman, who was speaking on behalf of the Ecuadorian rainforest…

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photo: navajo

and yup, their mics were all pedal-powered by Rock the Bike

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This being a bunch of SF Kossacks, we capped the almost 5 hour event with a visit to a bar…

L-R: kimoconnor and navajo

Now, if that doesn’t want to make you get out and march, I don’t know. Here’s the info again for next week, I hope y’all will get out and beat the drums for some climate change sanity!

There are currently 2355 events all over the globe scheduled for next weekend, November 28/29, and the number is growing by the hour. There’s an event finder here and 350.org has a map up to help you find your local events.

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Find local groups around the world on the 350.org global map

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court deals a severe blow to humanity's future. Google it.

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Those are the exact words of a text message I got from one of my friends at the EPA last night, in response to this:

In a major setback for President Obama’s climate change agenda, the Supreme Court on Tuesday temporarily blocked the administration’s effort to combat global warming by regulating emissions from coal-fired power plants.

It puts yesterday’s New York Times headline into a larger context of what the Supreme Court’s decision to issue a stay on the Obama Administration’s efforts to regulate coal powered plants could really mean. If this holds, it’s not only going to derail the EPA’s comprehensive efforts to clean up the worst CO2 emitters in this country, but the effects of this reckless decision will ripple throughout the world, right into the painstaking details of an already fickle climate agreement negotiated in Paris. If the US has to renege on its commitment to get serious about curbing its own emissions, it is quite possibly going to undo the thousands upon thousands of pieces put into place across the global board like a flick of the first domino.

“It’s a stunning development,” Jody Freeman, a Harvard law professor and former environmental legal counsel to the Obama administration, said in an email. She added that “the order certainly indicates a high degree of initial judicial skepticism from five justices on the court,” and that the ruling would raise serious questions from nations that signed on to the landmark Paris climate change pact in December.

I’m trying to stay out of the primary wars and here’s one of the reasons (bolding mine):

The 5-to-4 vote, with the court’s four liberal members dissenting, was unprecedented — the Supreme Court had never before granted a request to halt a regulation before review by a federal appeals court.

I get the the whole desire for revolution and all, but seriously folks, when the will of the people (70 percent of Americans now believe that global warming is real) is trumped (hey, pun!) by whatever errant molecules are wreaking havoc on the brains of the likes of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, I think it’s fair to say that replacing one of these jokers with a half-way rational and educated legal mind (which both Bernie and Hillary would nominate) gives you about as much bang for your survival-on-earth-buck as you can get at this point in U.S. governance. I’ll see your revolution and raise you a non-zombie Supreme Court Justice.

And lest we forget who’s behind all this:

“There’s a lot of people who are celebrating,” said Jeff Holmstead, a lawyer with Bracewell & Giuliani, a firm representing energy companies, which are party to the lawsuit. “It sends a pretty strong signal that ultimately it’s pretty likely to be invalidated.”

But tell me how we’re going to get these selfish greedy bastards from spiking their giant lumps of coal in the end(of life on earth)zone other than electing a President that’s to the left of at least Dick Nixon who, give him credit, created the EPA? I mean, really, not even Che Guevara would be able to do anything about the bankrupt morass that is the moral compass of Sam Alito and John Roberts.

Here’s the thing: In this existential struggle to keep the living systems of this beautiful magical planet from collapsing, we’ve witnessed world leaders from center right Angela Merkel to hard left Evo Morales come together to help hammer out an agreement that has us at least moving in a healing direction all together. It does really take a grand coalition to get big things done, and from my experience it works that way in international as well as national politics.

So, no matter who the candidate of our heart is, I think it’s important to remember that coalitions must and will be formed to keep moving that churning cruise ship of human relations with Planet Earth into stable waters.

In that spirit, I say: Go Bernie! Go Hillary! Be Gone Dinosaur Supremes!

The chance the Birdie missed (but is still within grasp of a reusable mug)

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By now, everyone has seen the iconic photo of the bird landing on Bernie Sanders’ podium at a recent rally in Portland. While the reactions to what’s come to be known as the “Birdie Sanders” incident have ranged from “the universe is rooting for Bernie” to “it’s a bird, alright,” depending, I suppose, on the observer’s affiliation in the Democratic primary, the spontaneous and synergistic convergence of natural world with human emotion undoubtedly made for an iconic image.

Personally, I thought it was a genuinely sweet moment. However, as someone who cares deeply about said natural world I couldn’t help but feel disturbed by something in the image that was smaller than Bernie but larger than the bird: the single-use plastic water bottle.

Before I go further, let me just say that this would have been the exact same scene had it been a Hillary Clinton or any other political rally in this country. (Or a State of the Union response, for that matter). Single-use plastic bottles have become so commonplace in our society that they’re just normal props that very few think about twice. Ironically, plastic bottles seem to be about as close to bipartisan as it gets among our bickering elected officials and constituents, outside of San Francisco.

And yet, most people are also simultaneously aware of the multitudinous problems associated with single use plastic containers. At least those of us who identify very broadly as progressive or environmentally concerned know about some of these alarming plastic facts:

  • Plastic never goes away.

Plastic is a durable material made to last forever, yet illogically, 33 percent of it is used once and then thrown away. Plastic cannot biodegrade; it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces.

  • Plastic piles up in the environment.

Americans discard more than 30 million tons of plastic a year. Only 8 percent of that gets recycled. The rest ends up in landfills, is incinerated, or becomes the invasive species known as  'litter.'

  • Plastic spoils our groundwater.

There are thousands of landfills in the United States. Buried beneath each one of them, plastic leachate full of toxic chemicals is seeping into groundwater and flowing downstream into lakes and rivers.

  • Plastic poisons our food chain.

Even plankton, the tiniest creatures in our oceans and waterways, are eating microplastics and absorbing their toxins. The substance displaces nutritive algae that creatures up the food chain require.

  • Plastic attracts other pollutants.

Manufacturers' additives in plastics, like flame retardants, BPAs and PVCs, can leach their own toxins. These oily poisons repel water and stick to petroleum-based objects like plastic debris.

  • Plastic affects human health.

Chemicals leached by plastics are in the blood and tissue of nearly all of us. Exposure to them is linked to cancers, birth defects, impaired immunity, endocrine disruption and other ailments.

  • Plastic threatens wildlife.

Entanglement, ingestion and habitat disruption all result from plastic ending up in the spaces where animals live. In our oceans alone, plastic debris outweighs zooplankton by a ratio of 36-to-1.

  • Plastic costs billions to abate.

Everything suffers: tourism, recreation, business, the health of humans, animals, fish and birds—because of plastic pollution. The financial damage continuously being inflicted is inestimable.

Also, most of us are aware of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and have seen the heartbreaking photos by Chris Jordan from his “Midway: Message from the Gyre” series of the remains of dead baby albatrosses that reveal the far-reaches of plastic pollution, 2000 miles from any mainland.

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Yes, that really is what happens when birds come in contact with plastics.

And yet, somehow it is possible that countless tweets and retweets of an iconic photo from a rally of what’s possibly the most progressive candidate to ever have made it this far into a Presidential race are completely oblivious to the largest object on that podium that embodies so many of the systemic problems the candidate so passionately talks about. Made entirely from fossil fuels? Check. Greedy corporations profiting off a common good? Check. Corporations rigging the system? Check. Environmental calamity? Check.

Again, while a certain ignorance regarding the severe consequences of the proliferation of single-use plastic and bottled water should come as no surprise from the average politician, it did strike me as somewhat ironic that a campaign as attuned to this country’s and the world’s systemic economic and environmental ills as Bernie Sanders’ would be okay with a plastic bottle as the object most prominently displayed and closest to their candidate in his biggest spotlight moments. For me, at least, it creates a dissonance with Bernie’s otherwise admirably principled image.

When the photo first started going viral, I decided to just let it go. I like Bernie, and far be it from me to be a party pooper or a scold, especially during one of his campaign’s most joyful and inspiring moments. I also thought to myself what most people do when they see something that doesn’t quite look right in such a large public setting: This must be just how that venue operates; there’s nothing Bernie or anyone could do about it; that plastic bottle on the podium is just standard operating procedure and you’d literally have to throw it away for it not to be there. But that’s what all the powerful plastic interests want us to think, right?

Then I saw this article about how Jack Johnson has been transforming the entire live music industry by handing each venue a detailed rider— a list of demands that need to be met for him to play the show — before agreeing to play there. Among many other environmental impacts the concert industry has, the top 100 tours in 2015 sold an estimated 60 million plastic water bottles (the equivalent of 48,000 barrels of oil) and Johnson was getting tired of leaving such a huge environmental footprint in his trail.

For the next five years, they used environmentally focused riders to force venues into “greening” up their spaces with reusable beer pints, water refill stations and energy-saving equipment. They traveled on tour buses and used generators that were powered by biodiesel fuel. He insisted on using caterers who use locally sourced, organic foods and encouraged fans to take alternative transportation to the shows by setting up bike valets or promoting mobile carpool apps.

During his most recent tour, Johnson’s entourage was able to offset 2.3 million pounds of CO2 emissions, divert 489 pounds of waste from landfills and prevent 18,392 single-use plastic bottles from being used. And his efforts have been paying dividends, as many of the venues actually like a lot of these changes (most music people really do care about environmental issues) and ended up instituting these new ways for all their other events, sometimes transforming their facilities permanently.

Johnson’s spirited endeavor to nudge a very inert and wasteful mainstream way of doing things into new directions in fact strikes me as the physical manifestation of what Bernie Sanders is talking about when he says that the revolution is up to all of us. Now, I understand that the Bernie show hasn’t been on the circuit long enough to bring about this kind of tangible change, but with the main criticism of his ideas being that they are just pie in the sky fantasies, I think it would set a powerful example if the drinking vessel in front of Bernie at his upcoming rallies were reusable. (And if Hillary beats him to it, that’s the kind of healthy competition I can believe in).

In the spirit of making my politicians do it, I raise my glass to Bubbly Sanders! Wink wink, nudge nudge.

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Cheers to birds, Bernie and bubbles in a glass!

How to transform a burst of Bernie Power into a renewable source of Bernergie

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An article posted a few weeks ago at The Atlantic entitled What Americans Don’t Get About Nordic Countries by Finnish native Anu Partanen offers some great insights into Northern European democracies that I don’t think have been addressed in any depth during this historic Democratic primary. Not that Finland, Norway, Denmark, or Sweden should have to be at the center of a U.S. election, but since Bernie Sanders has used them rhetorically — to great applause from millions of Americans — as models of what his reforms/revolution might look like in their full manifestation, I think it’s worth taking a closer look at what has made these countries’ models successful in their own citizens’ eyes and how Americans might find their own version of it, independent of this Democratic primary’s electoral outcome.

The question I — and I think many other folks who care about making the United States more economically, socially, and environmentally equitable — have is whether the enthusiasm for Senator Sanders’ vision for this country, especially among young people, can be harnessed into a sustained engine for change, and if so, how best to present and distribute this “renewable Bernergy” so it can be delivered to a majority of Americans in the sort of base load capacity required to operate a functioning clean-powered political, cultural, and psychological grid.

Framing it this way in my view serves two important purposes at this point in the ongoing political race:

  1. It puts the case Bernie is making into a context of larger systemic change that can’t just depend on the outcome of one presidential primary, so that the message can keep thriving even if this particular messenger doesn’t deliver, at least electorally speaking.
  2. It evokes the same challenges that the transformation to a comprehensive clean energy system is facing, namely the need for a radical overhaul of a default infrastructure that may be unsustainable but also happens to provide immediate comfort and reliability for the vast majority of the population.
Changing the power grid.

With that said, allow me to jam a bit on the article. Let me preface that Partanen, who immigrated to the U.S. seven years ago, speaks of “Nordic countries,” but as a native German (and dual U.S. citizen) I can confirm that the basic premise of her piece pointing out a fundamental American misunderstanding of Euro-style social democracy applies not only to Scandinavian countries but my own country of birth and youth, as well as most other European democracies.

She begins her essay by describing this misconception among the Democratic primary candidates…

Bernie Sanders is hanging on, still pushing his vision of a Nordic-like socialist utopia for America, and his supporters love him for it. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, is chalking up victories by sounding more sensible. “We are not Denmark,” she said in the first Democratic debate, pointing instead to America’s strengths as a land of freedom for entrepreneurs and businesses.

as well as among the Americans she talks to…

I hear these kinds of comments from Americans all the time—at cocktail parties and at panel discussions, in town hall meetings and on the opinion pages. Nordic countries are the way they are, I’m told, because they are small, homogeneous “nanny states” where everyone looks alike, thinks alike, and belongs to a big extended family. This, in turn, makes Nordic citizens willing to sacrifice their own interests to help their neighbors. Americans don’t feel a similar kinship with other Americans, I’m told, and thus will never sacrifice their own interests for the common good.

Basically, the thinking goes, these Northern Europeans are just a lot more enlightened, generous and community-oriented keepers of their sisters and brothers than Americans, which is touted as a great virtue in Sanders World, a bit naive and too-hard-to-achieve in Clinton World, and I may add, weak-kneed surrender milk by the ultimate DYI-survivalist wannabes in Trump & Cruz Cave.

The problem is that this entire narrative is based on a crucial fallacy, namely that Europeans are less selfish than Americans.

But this vision of homogenous, altruistic Nordic lands is mostly a fantasy. The choices Nordic countries have made have little to do with altruism or kinship. Rather, Nordic people have made their decisions out of self-interest. Nordic nations offer their citizens—all of their citizens, but especially the middle class—high-quality services that save people a lot of money, time, and trouble. This is what Americans fail to understand: My taxes in Finland were used to pay for top-notch services for me.

Could it really be that Europeans are just as selfish, if not more so, than Americans? Partanen goes on to list the things she gets in return for the marginally higher sales and income tax she pays in Finland, compared to her current place of residence in New York: a full year of parental leave, daycare for her kids, free college, grad school, nearly free health care, and a full year of partially paid disability leave. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me if you’re looking out for Number One, and at this point very much in line with what Bernie Sanders is trying to sell the American people.

Europeans, selfishly enjoying not working.

Why then, all the excitement for Bernie’s message not withstanding, are the majority of Democratic voters (so far) not buying it?

There certainly are some institutional disadvantages the Sanders campaign has had to contend with, but one of the major reasons, in my opinion, why Bernie now looks to be falling just short of the delegate threshold in the Democratic primary is that he has shied away just a bit too much from appealing to people’s self-interest.

Partanen assures Bernie and those who support him that his policy proposals, which have been proven to work in Nordic countries where people are just as selfish as in the United States, are not the least bit naive. And yet, I agree with her that the way he packaged his vision, while admittedly bold and courageous, turned out to be counterintuitive.

The problem is the way Sanders has talked about it. The way he’s embraced the term socialist has reinforced the American misunderstanding that universal social policies always require sacrifice for the good of others, and that such policies are anathema to the entrepreneurial, individualistic American spirit. It’s actually the other way around. For people to support a Nordic-style approach is not an act of altruism but of self-promotion. It’s also the future.

Europeans certainly don’t cringe at the term socialism the way Americans do, but speaking from my own experience in Germany, socialism is not exactly en vogue. In fact, most Europeans are pretty darn capitalistic. As Partanen points out, global capitalists from Ikea, H&M and Volvo to Lego, Carlsberg and Nokia are all Northern Europe based. Heck, my hometown alone is home to mega-corporations like Mercedez-Benz, Porsche, and Bosch. Europeans love making and spending money; in fact, the consumption, waste and traffic I see back home often feels excessive to me when I visit.

Europeans engaging in one of their favorite pastimes: buying stuff.

That doesn’t mean that the individual policies that also happen to fit into a socialist philosophy aren’t popular. In fact, as mentioned above, things like universal health care, free college, or parental leave are beyond popular — they’re just standard. They simply make good old-fashioned selfish fiscal sense for everybody. Having an intimately-nurtured, educated, healthy, and well-rested general population is ultimately so much cheaper and more advantageous for everyone, both individuals and businesses. The fewer people that fall through the cracks, the less expensive the societal burden to carry for everyone else. It is notable that a proposal for a Universal Basic Income (UBI) for every citizen is currently not only being considered in Finland, but gaining steam right here in America, even among Conservatives, for its appeal to reduce government spending and intrusion while reducing poverty.

But here’s the thing: you don’t need socialism to create this kind of equity that makes your personal life better. As Partanen points out:

Americans are not wrong to abhor the specters of socialism and big government. In fact, as a proud Finn, I often like to remind my American friends that my countrymen in Finland fought two brutal wars against the Soviet Union to preserve Finland’s freedom and independence against socialism. No one wants to live in a society that doesn’t support individual liberty, entrepreneurship, and open markets. But the truth is that free-market capitalism and universal social policies go well together—this isn’t about big government, it’s about smart government.

And so this is where I think Bernie Sanders is behind the times: Socialism, democratic or not, is pretty passé in Northern Europe. Don’t believe me? Just look at the most recent election results for the Democratic Socialist parties in those Nordic countries, with Germany thrown in for good measure:

  • Finland: Left Alliance 7.1% (2015)
  • Sweden: Left Party 5.7% (2014)
  • Norway: Socialist Left 4.1% (2013)
  • Denmark: Red-Green Alliance 7.8% (2015)
  • Germany: The Left 8.6% (2013)

Basically, no party that calls itself socialist breaks 10% of the vote anymore these days. All those great “socialist” things like paid family leave, better public schools, and affordable day care, health care and college for all (which happen to also be part of Hillary Clinton’s platform) are pretty much supported by the main centrist parties like the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats. While socialism is just another label that means different things to different people, I still don’t understand why Bernie chose to use the Democratic Socialism identification in conjunction with Northern European models when it was neither necessary nor accurate.

Certainly, it’s an honorable mission to reclaim a term that has been so maligned during the latter half of the 20th century. And I get that the younger generation couldn’t care less whether you call something socialist or not. But exactly because millennials — whether they’re American or European — don’t care what you call it I don’t understand why Bernie felt the need to climb that hill when he could have framed the exact same platform in more contemporary terms. For example, if he had run as a Social Democrat in the Northern European mold, I think he not only would have gained more open ears among the Democratic Party’s faithfuls to win the primaries but put himself in a much more favorable position for a general election contest.

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Socialism? Or just getting around faster?

Assuming Bernie will be unable to stage a miraculous comeback after this week’s New York primary, where does this leave the movement that has been propelling him thus far?

In some ways, Bernie falling short of the nomination may be a blessing in disguise, as his inspiring campaign has created a huge opening for — as Meteor Blades posits —100s, 1000s, or even 10000s of newly energized citizens to step into. If this coalition of new change seekers and seasoned activists can sustain the “street fight” while at the same time transforming that energy into a broadening and long-term electoral fight, then the bright light that is Bernie Power will ultimately become known as the catalyst that sparked an epochal movement. Conversely, if people walk away and stop putting new logs on the Bernie flame because they couldn’t get it high enough the first time, it will fizzle, or perhaps worse, a few stray embers will set off random forest fires.

This brings me back to the renewable energy analogy. Allow me to use my native Germany and its much-celebrated Energiewende (energy transition) as an example of how to harness an extraordinary burst of activist, anti-establishment energy into a healthy, well distributed and gradually expanding base of power, both political and social, which in this case is also fueling an energy revolution quite literally.

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Building a new grid, one step at a time.

By now, we all have become accustomed to seeing photos of solar roofs and reading stories of record-setting renewable energy usage out of Germany. However, what most people aren’t aware of is that this revolution transition did not happen overnight but is the result of almost four decades of grassroots activism and political fights filled with a plethora of setbacks, compromises, big events, and small steps forward. You can check out the specific milestones for yourself, but suffice it to say that to get from the oil crisis and the birth of the anti-nuclear movement in the early 1970s to a center-right chancellor (Angela Merkel) finalizing the phase out of nuclear power and making an aggressive push for an eventual transition to 100% renewable energy in the early 2010s was as far from an easy and seamless task as one could imagine.

There are many political parallels of this 40 year odyssey as it relates to Bernie and the issue of economic inequality he is fighting for an ocean and several decades apart, despite the differences between the German multi-party parliamentary and the American two-party systems. In many ways the anti-establishment political Zeitgeist embodied by Bernie Sanders resembles that of the German Green Party, which was founded and quickly entered a number of state parliaments in the early 1980s, culminating in its 1983 election to the federal parliament as a somewhat eccentric and often belittled newcomer. Sound familiar?

In 1986, the meltdown at the Chernobyl reactor catapulted the core issues of the Green Party — including the dangers of nuclear energy and the need for renewable alternatives — into the German mainstream in the same way the 2008 crash would awake the American public to the extreme inequities in their economic system 20 years later. The Greens’ ensuing popularity increased their share of the vote in the 1987 federal election, but their meteoric rise also forced them to address a question that had been simmering between the two factions in the party, the Realos (Realists) and the Fundis (Fundamentalists): Should we work within the system and form coalitions with the Social Democrats, or is compromising with any of the big-tent parties akin to abandoning our principles?

This is a similar junction Bernie and his supporters find themselves in right now (or once all the primary votes are counted, pending a major electoral earthquake). Do you go Fundi by refusing to join the Democratic big tent you perceive to be too systemically compromised to bring about any meaningful change? Or do you go Realo by getting on board as the junior coalition partner with the party to your right, working towards amplifying your agenda little by little within that power arrangement?

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Getting your pastors on board is a good sign that the coalition has broadened.

I don’t know what will happen, but I can tell you what happened in Germany: The Realos eventually prevailed, and under the leadership of Joschka Fischer, who would go on to become Germany’s first Green Vice-Chancellor and Foreign Minister (famously telling Donald Rumsfeld “Sorry, I’m not convinced” in the run-up to the Iraq war) as a junior coalition partner with the Social Democrats, they played an important role in shaping the energy transition, including the 2000 Renewable Energy Sources Act that stipulated significant, fixed feed-in tariffs for renewable energy production and priority for green energy in the energy markets.

By the time Angela Merkel came into power in 2005, the wheels for a complete infrastructural energy shift had been set in motion, leaving her conservative coalition no choice but to keep pursuing the renewable path. By the time the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster occurred in 2011, it was simply a calculation of political expediency for Merkel to authorize the final phase out of nuclear power in Germany and commit to ambitious targets of 80% of national renewable electricity and 60% of national renewable energy by 2050 that would include a complete transformation of the power grid.

At the same time the Green Party kept working within the system to make its key issues cornerstones of the national debate, citizens and communities all across the country kept pushing local initiatives and candidates to build the widespread grassroots support needed to give national politicians cover to push for ever more bold and systemic change.

For example, groups like the Energy Rebels in the small black forest town of Schönau started their own renewable energy cooperatives and became powerful and effective advocates for a fundamental transformation of how things are done in Germany. Citizens began running in local elections as Greens or other progressive candidates, filling more and more seats in city and state governments. Most recently, my own notoriously conservative state of Baden-Württemberg reelected its Green governor, making the Green Party a senior coalition partner with the center-right CDU.

Obviously, there have been setbacks and less than perfect compromises in the German Greens’ flirtations with the halls of power, but warts and all I think it can be said that taking the long view has served the overarching goal of making the deeper structural changes to create a new playing field in the energy sector remarkably well. Basically, what once was considered a revolutionary hippie fantasy has now become completely mainstream. The primary purpose of solar and wind energy is no longer to save the world (though a nice “side benefit”) but to save money. For better or worse, the appeal of personal gain is what propelled the issue of renewable energy from the activist fringe into the German mainstream, from where it has rippled across the world.

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“Honey, our barn roof could help us pay the bills!”

While the US winner-take-all electoral system is not set up to accommodate third parties in a constructive way, I think the Bernie Sanders campaign and its broad appeal to deeper systemic changes offers a huge potential to affect American politics in the long run, not only within the Democratic Party, but across all party lines. Similar to the German Green movement of the 1980s, one of the key questions will be whether this sudden burst of progressive energy can be sustained in lasting and effective ways, and for that to happen Bernie and his passionate supporters need to build the kind of political grid from the bottom up that will store and distribute this powerful renewable Bernergie they have harnessed.

Personally, I don’t think it has to be a choice between going Realo and Fundi, but rather about applying each of them in strategic and smart ways. When it comes to the upcoming 2016 election, there is nothing to be gained for Bernie Sanders to oppose Hillary Clinton beyond the last primary, or for his supporters to refuse to vote for or actively work against her in November. It’ll be much more effective to leverage the political clout gained during this primary season in a constructively critical yet mutually supportive intra-party coalition. At the same time, it’ll be vitally important to continue pushing for the issues raised in this campaign through new and expanded grassroots movements, as well as the pursuit of local and state offices by this new wave of politically engaged constituents.

There is nothing that says you can’t be exceedingly idealistic at heart while also picking your battles wisely. In fact, I’d argue it’s the most effective way to align current reality with your own vision of the change you seek. For in the end, making the world, or your country, or your community a better place for everyone is the ultimate act of selfishness in the eyes of an idealist.


Photos by Sven Eberlein

Crossposted at A World of Words

Springtime at Joshua Tree (a National Park Week Photo Story)

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As National Park Week is coming to an end, I thought I’d share some of the photos I took last week during a visit to Joshua Tree National Park.

In light of Congress’Anti-Parks Caucus dedicated to the incomprehensible task of wrecking our park system I think it’s more important than ever to give visual presentations of the great natural life and beauty that still exists all across this country, thanks in large part to the history of the National Parks system.

As if that weren’t enough, on August 25, 2016 the National Park Service turns 100, so even more reason to celebrate. Here’s to another 100, but preferably a million.

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I hadn’t been down there in about twenty years, but when our dear friend John asked his peoples if we wanted to celebrate his 50th birthday with him in the desert, it was an offer we couldn’t refuse.

So we dug out our old tent and sleeping pads from the back of our closet and sojourned down to Southern California, desert on our minds.

John had booked a group campsite on the Southern and less popular Cottonwood side of the park, and when we rolled in on a late afternoon we instantly felt like we had arrived.

Our campsite consisted of a view shaded picnic areas, around which we all set up our tents. Deb and I immediately climbed up the hill to document our home for the next two days. If you look closely, you can spot us in the picture.

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It became clear right away that this place was pretty lively…

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and that we were just a tiny fraction of inhabitants…

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After a beautiful first night under the great desert sky and in the kind of silence that almost knocked my city dweller self off my feet when I got up to pee, a bunch of us piled into three cars the next morning and headed north. Along Pinto Basin Road we stopped to check out the ocotillos.

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John’s sister in law studies herbal medicine and she was telling us about some of the ocotillo’s (Fouquieria splendens) healing powers, including for lymphatic and venous congestions of the pelvic area. But some of us were also drawn in by the desert sage.

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Of course, what’s a desert without cacti? (Hello Moon!)

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They really come in all shapes and forms, and some of them have a foot-like feel to them, though I would strongly advise against stepping on one.

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Our first hiking destination was Hidden Valley, where I saw my first Joshua Tree.

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If you’ve never been into rocks, this is the place where resistance is futile.

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They remind us just how small we really are…

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while also providing great comfort for a lunch break.

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They bring out the ape in us…

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and not to forget, they make for fantastic shelters as well as inspirations for joy.

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After our morning hike, we spent the later half of the day way up top at Keys Point, where we got to enjoy an expansive view of the Coachella Valley…

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and celebrate the incredible lightness of being…

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before descending again for some more Joshua Tree explorations.

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By the way, did you know that the iconic Joshua tree’s botanical name is Yucca brevifolia and that it was named by Mormon settlers? Crossing the Mojave Desert in the mid-19th century, the tree’s unique shape reminded them of a biblical story in which Joshua reaches his hands up to the sky in prayer.

Well, I can definitely see how they would have reached that kind of conclusion, as we humans are known for seeing what we want to see…

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It was time for some musical processing back at our camp.

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The following morning, Deb and I split off from the group to do some more microcosmic exploring. We went back up Pinto Basin Road and stopped to hike down into a particularly luscious looking desert cove. The vegetation really takes on a whole different sheen when you let it sink in for a while.

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Not to mention all the wildflowers…

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Next we stopped at the Cholla cactus garden, which I think may have been our favorite stop.

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There’s just something so surreal yet comfortable about the Chollas that you just want to bathe in them…

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metaphorically speaking, that is…

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Our next stop was at Skull Rock. Skull Rock itself is pretty neat and exactly what you’d think it is: a rock that looks like a skull. Since that’s where all the people were, Deb and I decided to take the trail on the opposite side of the road, and lo and behold, the trail led us through a landscape of magnificent rocks with nary a soul in sight.

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I really loved the simplicity of this one…

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and the softness of this one…

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oh..hello!

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Deb was going for the lizard perspective, as she’s wont to do…

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You really have to look sometimes to see…

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Prickly!

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We finished our day at Split Rock, which looks like, well…

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The rock itself is worth the trip, but the general area really rocked my world. I was going for the panoramic view on my phone camera but I couldn’t get all of it in there. You get the idea though…

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This would have made for an amazing afternoon napping spot…

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but unfortunately we were scheduled to be in Palm Springs that evening, which ended up being a wonderfully windy affair…


The Day Liberals Reclaimed Patriotism

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I think my favorite part about last night’s Democratic convention — right after President Obama’s oratory master class and VP Joe Biden’s no-nonsense takedown of the clueless orange wanna-be dictator — was the whole arena erupting into chants of USA USA USA at one point.

Not because I love those chants or even the sentiment behind them — even if you think you’re the greatest nation on Earth or “merely” exceptional, the way to show your greatness in my opinion would be to lead by example and not by implicitly talking down to everyone else in the world — but because after having to endure decades of Republicans’ faux patriotism that paints anyone who doesn’t feel like bombing the world to pieces for every slight provocation as a weak-kneed coward, it was a true in-your-face moment.

I’ve heard there were some in the crowd who implored their fellow delegates to stop because those chants belong to Trump and his Republican party (Trumpublican!), but they miss the point. This was not only payback for all the years of the cynical and shameful questioning of their political opponents’ love of country — think decorated war hero John Kerry getting swiftboated by chickenhawk draft dodgers Bush/Cheney or Barack Obama getting harangued for not wearing a stupid flag pin, not to mention the witch hunt for his birth certificate (never forget Drumpf was the head of the birther brigade) — but it was a moment of deep catharsis where a beaten and battered collective subconscious of an entire generation of liberals reclaimed dignity, courage, and truth.

This was not a shallow battle cry to show that Democrats are bigger and louder ass kickers than Republicans. I did not perceive it as a chest-thumping our-guns-are-bigger-than-yours type tit for tat. No, what this was was an affirmation that nobody owns the idea of America, that we each have an equal voice in shaping what it means to be American, and that it’s the very diversity of people, backgrounds and experiences on display for the past 3 days in Philly that defines the country’s strength and greatness.

Or as Barack Obama said it, “I see Americans of every party, every background, every faith who believe that we are stronger together -- black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American; young, old; gay, straight; men, women, folks with disabilities, all pledging allegiance, under the same proud flag, to this big, bold country that we love.”

While I personally hope that someday humanity will evolve from nation-state patriotism to whole earth matriotism where instead of saying “God bless America” we can say “May all Beings be blessed unconditionally,” for now I think this could be a seminal moment to reclaim people’s love of country and its underlying spirit from the oppressive and manipulative fangs of false patriots. If nothing else, I raise my glass to nobody ever getting browbeaten again over a flag pin.

Separated in San Francisco

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There are very few situations in life in which the idea of being separated would seem attractive. However, on Polk Street in San Francisco, right in the heart of one of the most bustling corridors between Market Street and City Hall, cyclists for the past two years or so have been enjoying the ultimate liberation: they've been safely kept apart from the dangers of automotive traffic by separated bike lanes.

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separated but not yet equal.

As I was loving me this stretch of cyclist nirvana yesterday on my way to visiting a friend in the Russian Hill neighborhood, it occurred to me just how transformational of a scope such a relatively minor adjustment to our urban infrastructure represents, not just physically, but culturally and psychologically.

Riding along without my usual defensive don't-get-killed-by-large-hostile-objects-video-game state of mind, I was thinking about just how much progress is being made on so many levels when I can simply pedal across my city feeling safe, healthy and happy, keeping a small footprint, and moving as quickly if not quicker than by car.

When cities invest financial and political capital to create an infrastructure that recognizes non-motorized commuters as (at least) equal citizens, everyone benefits: less traffic, fewer injuries, less road maintenance costs, better public health, more community, fewer fossil fuels to exploit and greenhouse gases to emit, less acrimony, and a lot more space on our streets for things other than liveless big metal boxes.

I get the whole hype about self-driving cars. If we figure out a way to make them a public asset available to everyone (a BIG IF) they could be a beneficial part of a future urban transportation system. However, all too often I find that the solutions are much less complex, expensive and futuristic than we imagine them to be.

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newly raised bike lane on Market St.

Sometimes all it takes to create a safety zone that encourages thousands of new folks to move from the driver to cyclist column is a slightly raised bike lane like the one recently added to Market Street between Octavia and Gough. Just that little bit of spatial separation creates an extra barrier for distracted drivers who often thoughtlessly meander into painted bike lanes, as well as just the teeny bit of mental reassurance to cyclists that you indeed have the right to exist on your city's streets without fearing for your life.

That's why we are officially calling these re-imagined pathways for cyclists not separated but protected bike lanes. And, in fact, it's all part of a larger plan to better connect the city in a more human-powered, holistic, and ecologically healthy way.

In a way, you could say that providing cyclists adequate respect through public infrastructure improvements like protected bike lanes and dedicated traffic signals is a huge step towards equal rights and protections for all citizens who wish to move about our streets freely and safely, not just those choosing to do so in a car.

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civilized: protected bike lane and dedicated bike signal

But in a country whose physical and mental environment is still dominated to a large degree by the personal automobile, the first step towards protection and ultimately connection is just a little bit of beautiful separation.

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it’s so much nicer over in the bike lane of life, guys.

all photos by Sven Eberlein

crossposted at A World of Words

“Have You Noticed Your Energy is Cleaner?”

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“Have You Noticed Your Energy is Cleaner?” is the subject line of an email I recently received from San Francisco Water Power Sewer, the public utility service that administers the city's recently adopted CleanPowerSF service. Programs like these are known as Community Choice Aggregation, allowing cities and counties to partner with their investor-owned utility to deliver cleaner energy to residents and businesses.

The message continues:

Your CleanPowerSF Service is Now Active

Thanks to you, San Francisco's energy sources are getting cleaner. As one of the first CleanPowerSF customers, you began receiving cleaner energy at competitive rates starting with your May billing cycle. While you may not have noticed because you're still getting the same service and monthly bill from PG&E, your carbon footprint has reduced!

Yay, I like the sound of that.

After a decade-long struggle to shake off fierce opposition to the public power program by what used to be our energy monopoly Pacific Gas & Electric, CleanPowerSF finally began serving its first customers about 3 months ago. In addition to the 7,400 customers (400 residential) who were auto-enrolled in the first phase of the program, I am one of 633 customers who voluntarily signed up to join and receive energy with a 35 percent renewable energy mix, greater than the 29 percent offered by PG&E.

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More clean electricity at the same cost? Sounds like a bargain.

This may not sound like a huge difference, but considering that CleanPowerSF's rates are the same as PG&E's but with an increased share of clean energy, it's no surprise that the opt-out rate so far has been much lower than projected. In fact, according to Barbara Hale, assistant general manager of the SFPUC’s power enterprise, the opt-out rate so far has been 1.8 percent, a fraction of the 20 percent they had planned for.

“There’s been a lot of interest in the program launching. Now that we are actually underway, we are seeing customers stay committed to it,” Hale told members of the Board of Supervisors during a Friday public meeting.

But it gets better! If you're one of those folks who don't mind spending a couple of extra bucks a month to invest in the future of life on Earth, there is the option of signing up for SuperGreen, CleanPowerSF’s 100% renewable energy option.

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Being a Superhero has never been this easy.

For customers who wish to eliminate their electric greenhouse-gas emissions and contribute to local renewable energy infrastructure, CleanPowerSF offers SuperGreen – 100% California-certified renewable energy – for a slight premium over current PG&E rates.

Because CleanPowerSF is not-for-profit, SuperGreen ratepayer funds will be reinvested locally in energy efficiency programs and new renewable energy facilities. Your choice will localize energy, create jobs and stabilize energy prices.

So really, if you're into reducing greenhouse gases, fighting climate change, and investing in local, renewable energy infrastructure that creates local jobs and stabilizes energy prices over time, going SuperGreen is a no-brainer. Personally, the idea of being able to cut my electricity carbon footprint to zero with such minimal effort and investment almost sounds too good to be true. Being called a "Clean Energy Super Hero" for it by your city is almost embarrassing, but if it helps getting more folks on board I'll gladly take it.

From their newsletter:

Become a Clean Energy Super Hero with SuperGreen!

When it comes to improving our environment, it doesn’t take much to be a super hero. For just a few dollars more than our basic Green energy service, CleanPowerSF will when you choose SuperGreen – our 100% renewable energy option.

If you haven’t already signed up, it’s never too late. SuperGreen energy 100% renewable and completely greenhouse gas-free. Your ratepayer funds will be reinvested locally in energy efficiency programs and new, renewable energy infrastructure. This is how we build a sustainable community.

Become a SuperGreen Hero Today!

Recruit a Friend for our Next Enrollment!

The faster we grow participation in CleanPowerSF, the sooner our community can move toward energy independence and curb our impact on climate change.

I think there's still time to sign-up early to be included in the second enrollment this fall, so if you live in San Francisco or know people who do, please help spread the word about this unique opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with just a few clicks. For any such large-scale transformational endeavor to succeed, we need strength in numbers, so let's get this Clean Power to the People!

You may not physically notice that your energy just got cleaner, but if you're like me, you'll feel a few butterflies in your tummy.


crossposted at A World of Words

Small victories: San Francisco poised to recycle almost everything the material world spits out

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A few weeks ago I went on a tour of the new state-of-the-art upgrade at Recycle Central, San Francisco's 200,000-square-foot recycling plant on Pier 96 run by San Francisco's garbage resource recovery company Recology.

Ever since I wrote Where No City Has Gone Before: San Francisco Will Be World’s First Zero-Waste Town by 2020, I've had the opportunity to delve more deeply into the composting component of my city's efforts to make the very idea of garbage obsolete, but up until this year I hadn't set foot in the place where the contents of our blue bins go to get reborn.

When they go neutering EPA with fossil fools, we go building clean and resilient cities everywhere

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Okay, so I admit that the orange plunderer-in-thief’s nomination of science-denying, oil-soaked, climate change-causing polluter Scott Pruitt to head the EPA gave me a little extra acid reflux in addition to what has become our normal daily dose of gasps and gulps. I think anyone who cares about the planet can grok the setback this portends for all kinds of environmental progress we’ve made in the past eight years, with the challenging-enough-as-it-is uphill battle of averting the worst effects of climate change at the top of the “oh shit” list.  

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Deliveries by e-trike: Now happening in Portland. UPS won’t be needing Donnie and Scottie’s extra oil, thank you very much.

After the initial sucker punch accompanied by a text message from my friend at EPA sending me his soon to be boss’little whinefest about being so horribly oppressed by clean power, I collected what’s left of my brain cells in these stupefying times and started thinking about the long game. While a fox like Pruitt in the henhouse certainly poses a serious risk not only to the hard-fought progress that has been made on the federal level in regards to clean energy and climate change but perhaps the very idea of environmental protection (though my gut tells me there will be some defense mechanisms at work to try to eschew the worst possible scenarios), the U.S. Government is far from being the lone cowboy that can make or break the planet all on its own.

It is powerful for sure, but especially in regard to the intricacies and complexities of the various ecological crises we are facing around the planet, it’s always been questionable in my mind as to exactly what share of the solution a concentrated, inflexible, top-down power structure like that represents.

That’s why Dave Roberts’ piece Cities are central to any serious plan to tackle climate change over at Vox resonated with me. In it, Roberts argues that “now that the US federal government is getting out of the climate protection business, at least for four years, subnational actors are more important than ever.”

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San Francisco’s Sunset Reservoir Solar Project has installed 25,000 solar panels on the 480,000 sq ft roof of the reservoir. The 5-megawatt plant more than tripled the city's 2-megawatt solar generation capacity.

As cities are not only “responsible for about 75 percent of global energy-related CO2 emissions” but “first in line to feel the effects of climate change,” he accurately points out that it’s on those subnational levels where the most impactful battles for a livable planet must take place. In other words, if you create local infrastructure that allows what will be 70% of the world’s population in 2050 to live and move about more efficiently and sustainably, you are significantly reducing the demand for more fossil fuels in the first place.

Just as the coal industry isn’t coming back due to shrinking international markets coupled with rapid growth of renewable energy demand across the globe, even a raging fossil fuel lover at the helm of the EPA can’t fulfill his dirty fantasies when the demand from the most populous places in this country and pretty much everywhere else in the world is going to be increasingly for bike lanes, solar roofs, walkability, wind turbines and public transit instead of more oil and coal.

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Tilikum Crossing, Portland's recently opened pedestrian, bicycle and public transit bridge, aka the Bridge of the People.

In what may come as a surprise to Donnie, Scottie and the rest of their Fossil Fools is that a global group of 86 affiliated cities (including 12 American cities including Seattle, Washington, DC, New York, Chicaco, LA, SF, Boston, Houston) representing 650 million people and a quarter of the world’s GDP have already laid out and are following a roadmap to decarbonization through the C40 initiative. To stay within the more ambitious 1.5 degree temperature increase trajectory that countries agreed to in Paris last year, C40 cities have pledged to cut their current average per capita emissions by almost half by 2030. What’s more, the biggest reductions must come from high carbon cities in the developed world and actions taken in the next four years will determine whether 1.5 degrees will even be possible.

In other words, every major metropolitan area in America is gearing upBIGLY right at this very moment to reduce their need for fossil fuels. And to be clear, We The People living in those cities who represent the popular vote in America have been and will continue to do everything in our power to speed up the transition to a post-carbon world. 

Sure, it would be great to have a federal government that’s at least not standing in the way of — much less actively sabotage — progress, but people in cities everywhere are going to continue to ramp up our efforts in making sure that there will never be a market for what Trump and Pruitt envision in their feverish fossil dreams.

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“Urban areas are first in line to feel the effects of climate change. About 90 percent of urban areas in the world are coastal, so they will deal with sea level rise. Some 70 percent already report dealing with climate impacts.”

Politics, Live and Unplugged (A photo essay to #DefendDemocracy)

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Here’s the thing about being a citizen and making your voice heard. Getting exactly what you’re asking for is just a small part of why you do it. Monday’s #Dec19 #DefendDemocracy #StopTrump event across the nation was as much about connecting with like-minded people face to face, becoming energized, sharing a moment of hope and sanity, reaffirming our right to peaceful assembly, and starting the people’s mobilization we’ll need in order to weather the coming storms, as it was about getting 37 Republican electors to switch their votes.

Just the energy of being surrounded by a spirited crowd of patriots airing their dismay at the prospect of this epic error of a president was enough to get me out of bed early and on a three hour train pilgrimage from San Francisco to Sacramento.

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At one point I was talking to a college student from Ohio who said he wasn’t political but felt like he needed to come out to learn more about what’s going on in his country. I asked him what he was into and he said he was working on a permaculture project, getting his hands dirty trying to grow food. I said to him that what he is doing is in fact a political act, as our entire industrial food system as it exists today is the result of countless decisions made by all kinds of different people throughout the last century setting the gears not just on how we eat but how we relate to the very earth our eating depends on.

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By learning about the importance of soil, insects, and water he was also becoming more aware of how the civilization he was born into has managed to temporarily circumvent many of nature’s fundamental functioning mechanisms in order to create short-term comfort at the expense of future generations and the only planet we have to live on. Just the act of being curious and engaging your fellow human beings in finding out what works, what doesn’t, and how we can come up with strategies for solutions that work for everyone, that’s politics.

By the way his eyes were lighting up I could tell that something clicked with him at that moment: He had come to reach for a remote object that he was already holding in his hand. The hug that followed felt like a political resolution.

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This exchange reminded me again how much we have collectively internalized the concept that “Politics” is this thing that only happens in cold and distant chambers among powerful professional elites and interests. We’ve allowed it to become a dirty word, reduced to an image of petty squabbling among hyper partisans out to destroy each other. And so we instinctively - and understandably - dissociate from it in our personal lives, because most of us just want to get along and it’s hard to do that when you feel like anything beyond small talk will paint you in the dreaded partisan corner.

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Then there’s so-called “social” media, which was supposed to provide the platform for more open dialog but has led to even more caution among those of us who might like to have constructive, good-faith political exchanges because you don’t know anymore whom you’re talking to and who might take things in ways you didn’t intend. In the process, we’ve given all the power of how we want to live together to the most cynical and ruthless among us, which leads us to withdraw and become disenfranchised even more, with the occasional complaint about the cynicalness and ruthlessness of it all.

This, of course, plays 100 percent into the cards of someone like the guy about to trample into the highest office in the land, a vulgar, incurious, and self-obsessed ignoramus who gets all his oxygen from pissing in the well and making people walk away in disgust.

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And yet, the Greek word “politikos” from which the word is derived simply means "of, for, or relating to citizens" which includes but is not limited to achieving and exercising positions of governance and power. To me, being “political” is an innate and essential part of being human, as we have no choice but to live with and depend on each other. It starts in our homes and how we negotiate living together with our closest friends and family, but it also extends into who we are in our communities and how we relate to the world at large, including those distant chambers of power where important decisions are made regarding our collective fate as states, nations, or indeed, our global family of nations.

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A lot of folks choose not to engage in anything outside their immediate environment, and that’s okay and understandable — it’s hard enough to keep your own kitchen clean in an ever more turbulent and rapidly changing world. However, I feel like it’s important to point out that this in itself is a political statement. What you’re telling the commons is not that you’re non-political but that your choice is to let others hash out the details of our social contracts and you’ll be fine with whatever gets decided. Again, that’s a perfectly valid position to take, but it’s a political one, just like not voting.

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For me personally, the question ever since I realized that everything I do (or choose not to do) is inherently political, I’ve decided to be as out and open about my internal political process as possible. Not only to be more aware of my own belief system (as well as its blind spots) but to inspire in others the sort of small “p” politics that I consider to be the essential ingredient of a functioning democracy. I’ve found that as long as you approach any subject matter with empathy, compassion, and the willingness to listen and learn you can have a constructive exchange with almost anybody.

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It’s these kinds of open and widespread public dialogs that I believe to be the antidote to the autocratic, authoritarian gale forces blowing in our faces right now. For when we’re interacting directly with each other, there’s less of a distorting filter, not just from media and other intermediary channels, but our own preconceived notions of each other.

While the internet can be a great platform to organize, share knowledge, and have some basic discussion, there’s nothing quite like being out in a public square, face to face, exposed and accountable. And it works both ways — the more people are fully, openly and honestly engaged in the democratic process, the harder it becomes for the autocrat to hide behind the curtain of fake populism, news, mandate, etc.

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This is why coming out and being part of the dialog is more important than ever, even if our first instinct might be to curl up, withdraw, be bitter, or despair. For better or worse, people throughout history have shown themselves to be at their most courageous, resilient, generous, and resourceful in times of crisis, and so now we are getting the invitation — or rather emergency call — to show what we know we’re capable of: the highest expression of our humanity.

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This doesn’t mean everyone will or should go to rallies, or drop any of their daily routines. Likewise, it also doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be angry, frustrated, fed up, depressed, or feel whichever way we’re feeling. There are as many ways of stepping it up and deepening our purpose as there are people.

But for all those of us who sense that we are looking at an abuse of executive power beyond anything we’ve ever seen in America, with all its potential ramifications especially for the lives of the most vulnerable among us, it is incumbent that we channel our unique individual energies towards the greatest and most effective common good.

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For me, that means all the energy embodied in taking it to the street: raw but concerted, personal but amplified, fierce but loving, contentious but unifying, unkempt but honest, collective but freeing.

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In other words, politics live and unplugged.

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Saving the EPA from the Grave (A Protest Funeral Photo Essay)

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Yesterday's Protest Funeral for EPA, the climate, and environmental justiceat the EPA’s regional office in downtown San Francisco was just another little piece in the multi-dimensional grassroots movement to push back against this pitiful administration's all out assault on our most sacred civic institutions and inspire participation and creative agitation. After sending an epic message to the world from Ocean Beach a couple of weeks ago, which I haven’t gotten around to posting about but here’s a little teaser anyway…

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...the task at hand yesterday was to get together our most functional funeral attire, get a bouquet of flowers, and gather on the sidewalk to mourn the new chief’s lifeless relationship with all living things and lend our moral support to the agency’s employees who will have to endure that train wreck of a new administration first hand. As always, people amplified their sentiments with markers and cardboard.

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Organized by EPA Resist SF, one of the countless local groups that have sprung up since the orange wrecking crew has been given the keys to the bulldozer, the mission was as multi-faceted as the environmental problems we are facing.

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Telling him how we really feel.

Scott Pruitt, new head of the EPA, is a climate denier who believes the federal government shouldn't regulate environmental issues. This is urgent because the climate crisis requires a coordinated response. We are already seeing grave effects from our changing climate, and it is expected to get worse. If there was ever an issue that deserved our action, global catastrophe is it. We also know that environmental degradation often affects marginalized communities and communities of color first and hardest. We need to respond to Pruitt's plans and demand not just a halt to the rollbacks of protections but a strong commitment to advancing the kinds of policies that will protect all people, especially the most vulnerable.

After our "funeral" services, we'll share an uplifting message of support and empowerment for EPA employees and other organizations whose work is essential to protecting our environment and communities.

Yes sure, this was going to be a funeral, and I personally decided to go full-on death panel in my outfit…

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photos: liberated spaces

but rest assured, this funeral was anything but surrender.

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As has become a common marker of the orange resistance, there were so many thoughtful and creative details, from the two-dimensional…

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to the 3-dimensional.

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The handwritten notes of gratitude and encouragement we wrote, to be delivered to EPA employees…

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made you feel part of something much larger than just a protest.

These were my spontaneous scribbles…

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We proceeded to pick up the bullhorn one by one, read out our notes to everybody, and laid them on the coffin along with the flowers we brought.

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Of course, aside from being fun and meaningful, a mock funeral also makes for great theater, which is a pretty good recipe for attracting local media. In this case, it was ABC7 News that showed up to document the proceedings and interview participants.

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After a few “This is what Democracy looks like” and “Hey hey, Hey ho, Scott Pruitt has got to go” chants, there were four local speakers who reminded us that this funeral was much more of a beginning than an ending.

Lizzy Pyle, a Half Moon Bay high school Action Fellow with the Alliance for Climate Education, represented a new generation of engaged environmentalists who aren’t going to let a fossil fuel shill like Scott Pruitt destroy their future and the planet. 

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Rand Wrobel, Co-Founder and Director of 350 Bay Area and fellow Daily Kos blogger lifted everyone’s spirit with a witty eulogy that pointed to the crucial importance of continued and sustained local actions, in legislative campaigns and on the streets. His “Lament for Epa” hit the spot:

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Rand’s lament for Epa.

Dearly beloved, friends and supporters of Epa, we are gathered here to day to pay our respects to the Epa we have known. And to acknowledge all of her (or his - did anyone ever did figure out Epa's gender?)  great works protecting the environment where all that we hold dear live.  

We are here to grieve and mourn Epa's death. Epa, there is perhaps no worse death for a government agency than to be hollowed out from the inside. Trump's denialist assassin, sent to "deconstruct" you and your reason for existence, may force you to criminally ignore your mission, against the law of the land.

Epa, even though you might live on in name, you will be but a shell, a ghost of your former self. And people might call you names, like "Oil Protection Agency" or  "Environmental Pollution Agency", even as your employees of good faith struggle to continue your work.

But we will take our sadness at your passing, and turn it into action. Epa, your work will continue, as we apply scrutiny and - what did you call that methodology you used? - oh yeah, science, to the battles for clean lands, for air healthy for people and the planet, and safe water. We will speak for those whose voice is hard to hear: the disadvantaged communities and future generations. We will speak truth to power, however dirty, ugly and poisonous that truth or power is. Epa, we are your spirit, and we will not stop until you are whole again and your work is replete.

Indira Phukan, environmental educator from the Stanford Graduate School of Education, talked about her experience of learning about ecological issues as a young person of color and the importance of cultural understanding in connecting minority youth with science and nature.

Speaking of youth, Michael Green, CEO of the Center for Environmental Health, was accompanied by his two kids while pointing out the Toxic Shell Game in which American companies that use more than 84,000 chemicals today manage to evade and bypass regulations. While it’s already hard for the EPA to keep track of all these shenanigans, you know that with Scott Pruitt at the helm the CEOs of these companies are already rubbing their hands. Michael also gave a powerful crash course in the Trump/Russia/Oil axis and urged everyone to support the courageous whistle blowers at the EPA that we will all depend on in the coming weeks and months to derail the regime’s attempts to wreak as much havoc on mother Earth as they possibly can, just to make a few fat cats even fatter. 

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And yet, in all these direct actions I am sensing a collective soul that is about a lot more than just rejecting the dystopian, nihilistic trumper tantrum we are being subjected to. The vibe I am getting is that for every act of NO there is also a message of YES. Each rejection of the ugly and divisive is accompanied by an example of the beautiful and uplifting, as if people aren’t just content with holding the line against the regressive forces of the past but drawing a big circle for the vision of the future.

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The primal roar by the moral majority to convert the energy that's been unleashed into an unstoppable wave of people power toward the more inclusive, equitable and sustainable world we wish to see has only begun to sound. Its echo will be heard far and wide, in all corners of the country, for generations to come. 

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What do we do now? TOMORROW documentary shows what's possible today

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Those of us concerned about the planetary challenges of our time know the varying degrees of trepidation that can accompany a showing of yet another documentary attempting to address the world's problems. There is, for one, the much dreaded gloom and doom screening that leaves you so overwhelmed and hopeless that you just want to shrivel up and disappear from the face of the earth. Then there's the gloom-and-doom-plus-five-minutes-of-personal-action-bullet-points-at-the-end (Recycle! Eat less meat!) formula that's supposed to leave you feeling empowered but the "solutions" offered are so general and clichéd that you forget all about them by the time you get through telling your friends how screwed we are.

In response, environmental documentaries in recent years have attempted to offer a more optimistic outlook, one in which the focus is on people doing something about a particular problem, with the obvious objective to make you leave the theater feeling like you could do the same thing or something like it in your own neck of the woods. While well intentioned, the do-good storyline carries its own risks: from the overzealous protagonist whose quest to live completely without this or that facet of modern day life makes for good entertainment (that you would never try at home) to the flowery salvation story following a subject's miraculous transformation from problematic to resolved in 90 minutes, solutions-oriented documentaries gone wrong can come across as overbearing, preachy, or starry-eyed.

Tomorrow is one of those rare gems that not only dodges the various trappings of aspirational filmmaking with quiet elegance but it gently dispels the conventional wisdom that change must be brought about by someone more capable, ambitious, organized, or well connected than ourselves. Titled "Demain" in its original French version, the story follows French actress and director Mélanie Laurent (Inglorious Basterds) and her friend, activist Cyril Dion, around the world in search of concrete solutions to our fragile planet's current unsustainable trajectory. Their "holy crap, this is bad!" moment is a study published in Nature predicting that humankind could disappear within the next century, but they get off on the right foot by not taking up much precious reel with the how's and why's of our looming demise. For Laurent, being a new parent is enough to look to the future with the urgency of now. And besides, the Sixth Extinction documentary has already been made.

With the acknowledgment out of the way that humans have done a total number on the planet, Dion, Laurent, and their crew set off on their journey to talk to the people who are doing things in ways that are more aligned with the Earth's natural speed and complexity. We don't know yet that the film will delve into the areas of food, energy, finance, democracy, and education, but there is something grounding about the fact that the first stop in the agriculture segment takes us through the abandoned industrial landscapes of Detroit. Listening to Malik Yakini and Kadiri Sennefer, Co-Managers at D-Town Farm, a seven acre organic farm that is part of the larger Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, pop the bubble on the romanticized notion of urban farming as a hip and sexy new thing to do is reassuring in that it sets the tone for the entire movie.

Yakini and Sennefer acknowledge that the practice of growing food closer to the people who eat it certainly checks off a number of hot button items on the save-the-planet list, but they point out that it's first and foremost hard, unglamorous work that is as much if not more so about reclaiming access to and ownership of land for disenfranchised communities as it is about combating climate change or species extinction. The message, it seems, is that before you can even think about saving the planet you have to learn how to love getting your hands dirty. If you've come looking for silver bullets, this is not your flick, but if you'd like to find out more about how to move the needle spade by spade to power a transformation one community at a time, stick around for a while.

Speaking of powering things, after a couple more trips to a permaculture farm in Normandy and a Community Benefit Society in Todmorden, U.K. highlighting how a diverse network of small farms and community plots are quite capable of meeting most of the local food needs (70 percent of the world's food is already grown by small farmers), a natural question arises: does the world really need industrial, fossil fueled agriculture? After a brief reminder by Dion that five of the six largest companies in the world are oil companies and an impassioned prelude by economist Jeremy Rifkin on how the infiltration of fossil fuels into almost every facet of modern life has led to unprecedented disruptions of the Earth's climate and water cycles, we are off to the next series of living laboratories, this time on how to reduce our fossil footprint.

At this point in the film I'm really starting to groove on the soundtrack.  The voice that has been weaving through the tapestry of these consequential subjects with Feist-like sweetness and Ani DiFranco-like feistiness belongs to Fredrika Stahl, a Swedish singer and songwriter based in France who I have a feeling we'll be hearing a lot more of.

Stahl's ode-to-action Pull Up Your Sleeves sets the mood as the camera introduces us to the renewable energy mavens of Copenhagen, Malmo, and Reykjavík:

Step by step we've gathered all the keys and now we're standing at your door.
Now the time has come to give some back, we can't keep taking anymore.
So what do we do now?
Pull up your sleeves, make a move, do something we need.

Once again, Tomorrow manages to tackle the segment in nuanced, multidimensional fashion. All too often, when people talk about energy all they can think of is solar panels and windmills. And sure, those are certainly a big part of the equation, but as someone very skeptical of one-size-fits-all technological panaceas without also significantly transforming our infrastructure, values and lifestyles, I applaud the filmmakers' foray into the finer points of urban planning. As Jan Gehl, the great Danish architect whose simple but profound guiding principle is that cities are for people, elucidates in the Copenhagen clip, investing in human-scale infrastructure that prioritizes walking and biking not only solves congestion problems and reduces energy needs but also creates healthier people, a more vibrant social life, and by the way, is significantly cheaper to build than automobile infrastructure.

I'd be remiss to mention that Laurent and Dion also make a pit stop in my own stomping grounds of San Francisco, exploring how the city has been able to make the creation of zero waste its official policy and capturing this ambitious undertaking in practice. The main protagonist is the intrepid resource recovery champion Robert Reed, who shows us how his employer Recology closes the waste cycles between the city's disposed goods, the company's state-of-the-art recycling and composting facilities, and Northern California's farms and vineyards.

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Robert Reed testing the quality of San Francisco compost. Photo: Tomorrow Documentary

About halfway into Tomorrow, the focus shifts from the physical aspects of the transition we need to the shift in consciousness necessary to reimagine how we want to live together with and on this planet. I mean transition quite literally, as my personal highlight in the next segment on economy is the interview with the ever-engaging founder of the Transition Movement, Rob Hopkins. There are now over a thousand transition towns in over 50 countries, including a few in my own backyard, using their own creative and cultural resources to build the kind of resilient communities that can be sustained beyond the age of fossil fuels, but the oldest ones in the U.K. including Hopkins' original Totnes show just how profound the changes can be when these alternative ways of sharing physical and mental spaces are allowed to be explored and refined over time.

Hopkins' explanation for why Totnes has a £21 bill ("Because you can, why not?") may sound cheeky but cuts to the heart of the matter that money is just a mental construct. While we've let big financial institutions and corporations define the meaning of money in a way that allows the bulk of it to funnel in one direction (theirs, surprise!), a properly matured local currency like the Totnes Pound shows how much power We the People actually have to re-construct its meaning and flow to reflect a healthy human and ecological organism in which the greatest good is brought to the greatest number of residents. It's important to note that re-envisioning money is not only an economic game changer but can really bring the "fun" back into the fundamentals, as Totnes' neighboring transitioners demonstrate with their Brixton Pound.

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Each paper Brixton Pound note commemorates a local hero, voted on by the people of Brixton, and celebrates their history, art, politics and culture.

Perhaps the most important and relevant aspects of the systemic changes needed and the logical next themes the documentary seamlessly transitions to — especially for an American audience — are Democracy and Education. I won't give away too much, but suffice it to say that there are living breathing examples — from Iceland to India to Finland — of how we can build the kinds of civic structures and institutions that not only provide the foundation for a populace committed to changing ingrained assumptions about our physical conditions but that are replicable and scaleable enough as to be useful for future generations. And while the hope is that these local models will catch on everywhere tomorrow, Tomorrow clearly shows that we already have most of the solutions to our problems today.


  • Tomorrow has drawn over a million viewers in France and gave its debut on Bay Area big screens last weekend to capacity audiences. It will debut in New York, Los Angeles and Portland this weekend. For more info and showtimes, visit the website.
  • Crossposted at A World of Words.

SciCli Blogathon: "I can't believe we're marching for facts" Edition (#ScienceMarchSF Photo Essay)

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Yup, this is, in fact (or is it a fact? who knows anymore), the year 2017 we find ourselves in, and thanks to the extraordinary verbal manure spreading machine posing as president that is America’s latest export, millions of rational people across the globe found it necessary yesterday to spend their Saturday getting up early, making a boatload of signs, and taking to the streets to insist that science, in essence, exists and has done some pretty helpful things.

As a friend of mine wrote on Facebook: 

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You guys this Earth Day is heavier than most. It is 2017 and we are forced to have a March for Science. Think about that. The basic concept of knowledge is being questioned. That scientists have to defend the very idea of science is something I'd expect in the Dark Ages. But this is not underground alchemy. This is what leads to cures for diseases, stable food crops, clean water and the technology we all rely on. And the same people who would deny climate science use these other things everyday. We must see through this sham and call it out for what it is.

“The same people who would deny climate science use these other things everyday.”

Think about that: some of the same people who have enough trust in science to unquestioningly reap its benefits almost every moment of their lives — from driving their car or getting a cancer screening to shopping online or flicking on a light switch — can simply not bring themselves to trust scientists when they tell us about the overwhelming evidence that the Earth’s climate is heating up so fast due to our human fossil burning activities that we only have a few decades (at most) left to dramatically reduce our carbon footprint and have a chance of surviving on this planet. I don’t even blame most of them, for as on so many other issues in this fake news world we live in, they are being intentionally misled by a few cynical players like the fossil fuel industry and their Republican cronies in Congress. 

Here’s what gets me though. The consequences of this willful denial will affect the families of all those oil execs, Republican congresscritters, and Mr. Chinese Hoax himself, not to mention all the constituents whose eyes they’re pulling the wool over.

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You’d think that even if you had some genuine skepticism regarding the realities of climate change and you’re in a position of power and responsibility, you’d err on the side of caution and at least not sabotage the mechanisms that have already been put into place to deal with the problem and that don’t hurt anybody, like the Paris Climate Treaty, Emissions Standards for Vehicles, or a booming clean energy industry. But no, Mr. Ferret Top and his ilk have made it their mission to latch on to that single mutated cell in the forsaken nether region of their brains where non-existing immigrant and terrorist threats can make their knees buckle while the looming mass extinction of life on Earth elicits a pathetic “look at me pissing off the liberals” meh.

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And so it happened that almost 150 years after the invention of the light bulb and 50 years after a man walked on the moon, scientists of all stripes and from sea to shining rising sea felt it necessary to come out of their labs, stations, classrooms, and retirement…

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to say that science really holds an indispensable place in our world, because, well...

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But it wasn’t just scientists that took to the streets, and it wasn’t just in America that they did it. The utter ignorance and idiocy that Trump has bullhorned across the globe in his unpresidented ego trip brought out millions of people from all walks of life in over 500 cities and 130 countries, trying to fight the alternative fact virus that seems to be spreading like crazy (pun!).

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In my stomping grounds of San Francisco, an estimated 50,000 marchers had come out to revel in a sea of sanity with each other.

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It was, as usual in our lively town, a fun and celebratory affair.

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with lots of quirky signs...

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super artistic ones…

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great costumes…

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and quintessential San Francisco…

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Of course, Furor’s Hair is always a fun target, but it takes a scientist to come up with an equation for it. Or rather, a noquation...

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The tiny hands department also had an abundance of riches. I liked this one for a good geeky zinger...

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and this one for its wishful thinking... (I bet just the carbon footprint to protect the Trump clown show exceeds that of most towns in America)

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but this one won me over for its sheer mischief.

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Personally, I went with a hearty Trump mockery for the backside of my sign…

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while keepin’ it real on the front...

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while my partner in signage went deep and beautiful with a Wendell Berry quote:

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It was great to see so many kids out, demanding accountability...

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and raking dying industries over the coals.

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The little ones also had some pretty excellent electoral suggestions...

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as did the big ones…

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I can see the official campaign slogan…

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No matter who runs, this just seems like a really good idea in general…

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Because only the most uneducated and ignorant pols would shrink the agency that makes sure your citizens have clean air and water…

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and cut funding for the very researchers that might come up with the cure for your disease. 

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The message was quite simple: facts matter and without an educated citizenry we will continue to give away our collective stewardship over the public good.

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Science, clean energy, and grassroots engagement will continue to be a force to be reckoned with, more so now than before.

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But it won’t come easy and will take all of us to not let up and give in to the chaos fatigue that popular voter loser trump is trying to sow.

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Whether we like it or not, there is no choice but to keep fighting for a more healthy and truthful relationship with this earthly paradise we’re so fortunate to be living and thriving on. For not even the power of science will enable us to create a Planet B.  

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SciCli Blogathon: April 22-28, 2017 (all times are Pacific)

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Support the Daily Kos SciCli blogathon during the April 22-28 week of action promoting the April 29 People’s Climate March with stories on how science and climate change are affecting our lives and our planet.

For background on the SciCli Blogathon and the Week of action visit boatsie’s diary from 4/17, Besame’s from 4/20, and onomastic’s from 4/21.

Sign up for the Washington, D.C. march or find a march near you.

If you’d like to march with other readers of Daily Kos, visit Connect! Unite! Act! (7:30 AM Pacific) for march locations. Send Navajo a Kos mail or leave a message in the comments.

On April 29, let’s march for jobs, justice, and the climate!

  • Saturday, April 22

2:30 pm: Cracks in Greenland ice-sheet may link up and break off

5:00 pm: Peoples Climate March just one piece of the resistance against lethal eco-policies.

  • Sunday, April 23

2:30 pm: citisven

5:00 pm: John Crapper

  • Monday, April 24

2:30 pm: Pakalolo

5:00 pm: 2thanks

  • Tuesday, April 25

10:45 am: samanthab

5:00 pm: Besame

  • Wednesday, April 26

2:30 pm: Dartagnan

5:00 pm: peregrine kate

  • Thursday, April 27

2:30 pm: Bill McKibben

5:00 pm: WarrenS

  • Friday, April 28

2:30 pm: Tamar

5:00 pm: annieli

The Incredible Lightness of Being... Eclipsed

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In this age of instant news and its inevitable twin, “instant olds,” I was debating with myself whether it’s even worth posting about Monday morning’s eclipse two days late when every conceivable angle, situation, and perspective of the rare celestial event had been disseminated and ingested by afternoon through the fiber optic cable-enhanced hive mind of modern human communication. In fact, this sort of boom-and-bust news cycle where we collectively skip from one crowdsourced mega event to another, in a sort of call and response mode of newsmaking by the few and instant critique by the millions, has often left me feeling mentally exhausted, to the point of psychically whiplashed, unable to summon a coherent thought.

Here I was, a person who used to think of himself as a civically engaged denizen with a knack for sparking as well as responding to thoughtful dialog, feeling like every possible entry point into a topic was already so crowded (with loads of great content amidst the endless chatter, to be sure) that I’d just be filling up the bandwidth with more noise and repetition. So, for the past year or so, I’ve been doing what so many of us who find ourselves immersed in a round world projected onto a flat screen do these days: I shared and amplified other people’s thoughts, sprinkled with the occasional comment about a comment about a comment.

The good thing about feeling like you don’t have anything original to say is that it affords you the chance to learn how to embrace being quiet and listen to others. Once you get over the socially networked yet ultimately self-imposed pressure that you need to chime in on every issue-du-jour lest you come across as thoughtless or uncaring, you begin reclaiming the spaces in your heart and mind necessary for processing information on a deeper, less binary, more nuanced level. By allowing yourself to take a step back, breathe, and reflect before reacting, you are adding nutrients like patience and equanimity to your soul palette that are perhaps not as high yield as other, more outward expressions of oneself, but as vital to any long-term strategy of a caring, resilient human existence as minerals are to a soil’s health and longevity. As above, so below.

Which brings me to the eclipse. Laying there on a patch of Northern California earth, surrounded by a canopy of perennials permeating just enough partially eclipsed sunlight to project a disco ball worthy stream of little sickles onto my body, my mind left the realm of instathoughts and just settled into the Big Boundless. The feeling of quiet awe it evoked wasn’t so much about the unique geometric alignment of sun and moon with its accompanying rarity factor, but the cyclical nature of everything, including our own little selves.

I know science has come a long way in explaining how the universe works, including what have become pretty standard predictions of the kinds of conjunctions like the one we witnessed this week that enabled millions of people to buy eclipse glasses and plan for their trek towards totality. But there are a lot of questions unanswered, and the part of me that connects with the slow and vast rhythm of the universe is quite alright with that. In fact, it’s the not knowing that is often the greatest source of peace and joy, for when you allow your mind to let go of the lifeboat of certainty, it loses its fear of swimming freely.

Even when contemplating cosmic-level entities of space and time, our intellect likes to put demarcations around it. We know the Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago and the diameter of the (observable) universe is about 28.5 gigaparsecs, or 93 billion light-years. There’s something soothing to our brains to think of our cosmic home in quantifiable terms the same way we would think of the square footage of our house or the time and length of our commute. But what was there before the Big Bang and what happens outside the perimeter of the known universe? Isn’t the idea of “nothing” simply a mental construct to signify that we don’t know?

Science keeps expanding the search for answers within the realm of rational thought, and it is an important exercise of our physical composition to explain our existence within our cognitive abilities. There are currently fascinating theories about what’s going to happen to the universe, from the Big Freeze to the Big Rip to the Big Crunch. Personally, I like the Big Bounce theory, as it posits that the universe will continuously repeat the cycle of a Big Bang, followed up with a Big Crunch in which the universe collapses into a dimensionless singularity from which another Big Bang can arise. It’s as if the universe were a big lung, breathing in and out.

And yet, as much as we yearn for an ultimate, absolute frame around our existence affording our tender egos the security and comfort they crave, my personal hunch is that there really is no such frame. While, or perhaps because the very concept of spatial and temporal infinity is inconceivable in the true sense of the word, it is also incredibly liberating. If the world is without limits, then so are we, as parts of that limitless world. If distance is beyond measurement, then there’s no distance between anyone or anything at all. If there’s no beginning and no end to all there is, then we too are eternal and need not be afraid of endings. In the words of a famous Liverpoodlian cosmologist, “imagine there’s no heaven. It’s easy if you try.”

As I was zooming back into my body right there on the mothership, I felt a lightness of being that I hadn’t felt in a while. On the drive back to the city, my mind firmly planted in the earth’s atmosphere with the soul still dangling out in space, I felt an inspiration to share my experience of the eclipse, but assumed that by the time I could even organize my thoughts, my story would already have been told many times over. The next morning, however, I was still feeling so wide-open and limitless, I just started to write it all down anyway.

The haters came, saw and went to someone's apartment. Meanwhile, San Franciscans danced and hugged.

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So that was fun. Yesterday I joined some good friends at the #NoHateSF rally that converged marches from the Castro, the Mission and what seemed like everywhere in San Francisco to counter this “Patriot Prayer” thing that was supposed to bring scary Nazi dudes to the city known for its love and tolerance for humans of all stripes. In the run-up to this invasive species threat there had been a lot of discussion among San Franciscans of how to respond to whatever version of white persecution complex these particular snowflakes were going to visit upon us. Dancing or Dog Poop? However, it was ultimately decided to avoid the confrontation and outnumber them with a big love fest at Civic Center as far away as possible from their fashy lamentations.

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Well, let’s just say the “Patriot Prayer” had neither patriots nor a prayer. First, the organizer guy who had put together their Free (Hate) Speech rally at Crissy Field (white grievance posing with the Golden Gate Bridge? Nope!) rescheduled at the last minute for some sort of a press conference at Alamo Square (white grievance posing with the Painted Ladies? Nope!). When that didn’t bring out too much hospitality in the neighborhood, dude and a few of his buds trudged 15 miles south to someone’s apartment in the small town of Pacifica to whine about (Mayor) Ed Lee, Nancy Pelosi, and San Francisco’s left, for painting him as a “crypto-racist” before stating that he’s “known racists that are good, law abiding” and who “have raised good families.” Okay, whatever dude, your 15 minutes are up.

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What it comes down to is that — just like in Boston last week— the racists, outnumbered by the tens of thousands, flailed and fizzled like fireworks in a bath tub. So rather than waste more of all our time with these pathetic basement kvetchers, I’d like to showcase my creative, loving, and resisting fellow San Franciscans with some photos that my partner-in-not-really-digging-on-trumpofascism, liberated spaces, and I took during the course of the afternoon.

It all started early with some good general reminders…

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fantastic adornments…

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and just plain old fun…

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My own warning sign from someone whose people have been there before (No Power to Hate!) got a lot of great matches, from the quirky…

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to the in-your-face…

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The energy level really spiked when the marchers from the Castro arrived…

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with a lot of powerful imagery!

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There were a lot of people who’d decided to dedicate this picture-perfect Saturday afternoon to pounding the pavement for peace, love, and understanding...

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and to punctuate it with San Francisco values…

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When Michael Franti & Spearhead came on, the crowd went absolutely wild…

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People were synced up with the songs’ messages of tolerance and inclusion…

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Michael kept coming out into the crowd, firing us up to love each other and all those on the receiving end of injustices even harder. He kept bringing up people on the little podium, hugging and dancing together. No hips remained unswingin’, not even the security guards’…

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Liberated spaces got really close to Michael and his well worn guitar…

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before all the kids got to go on stage to sing the last song with the band…

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There remained no doubt that San Francisco had come down 100% on the side of diversity and inclusion, but with this kind of a showing one could almost sense an even more fabulous manifestation...

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In the end, we all left feeling like these two guys…

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However, the last and lasting impression belonged to the clean-up crew, who seemed to be quite happy to finally be putting the alt-right into the dustbin of history.

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Jimmy Kimmel gets Trumpublicans to admit they dig Obamacare as long as you don't call it Obamacare

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Jimmy Kimmel's brilliant little Jujitsu act on his show Tuesday night to troll people into signing up for the Affordable Care Act is as much a lesson in human psychology (at least the Homo Trumpus Insapiens kind) as it is a PSA to get Americans health-insured. What it shows is that Trumpublicans will literally risk their own, their families' and their fellow citizens' lives because of the name on the health care program (that they themselves cynically concocted).

Kimmel didn’t crack many jokes during his pitch. In fact, he was quite sincere about it as he described the program’s many benefits and urged people to sign up during the open enrollment period. The only change was the name, which Kimmel justified by noting that the Trump administration was now in charge of the program.

What a difference five letters can make!

In this case, the reasons for Obama Derangement Syndrome are not that hard to explain (look no further than the birther-in-chief currently squatting in the oval office), but it begs the question of how other irrational wedge issues that shouldn't be controversial could be similarly repackaged to avoid triggering the panic button in the modern conservative's fragile ego.

In the case of climate change, you'd think that shifting policy and conversation towards the economic benefits of clean energy would be the ticket, but as recent reports of federal jobs retraining program sign-up rates in coal country below 20 percent show, programs like that alone won't do.

What it will probably take is for Trump's cynical promise to bring back coal jobs to go up in flames like the foolhardy repeal attempts of "Obamacare.” At that point folks like Jimmy Kimmel can start rebranding the federal retraining programs instituted under Obama into “TrumpTraining” or something.

Likewise, the U.S. would rejoin the Paris Accord but it would be called the “Trump Accord.” The Iran Nuclear Deal will be the “Trump Nuclear Deal,” and Comprehensive Immigration Reform will be “Trumpigration.”

However, TrumpRussia will always be TrumpRussia, so once this blowhard goes down, the names on these common sense policies will have to be replaced with whatever reactionary flavor-du-jour comes next.


Sign up now through December 15 for ObamacareTrumpcare Affordable Care at Healthcare.gov

Do people still care about climate change? #RiseForClimate says (HELL) YES! (PHOTOS)

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I was wondering if there was enough room left in the “finite pool of worry” for a good turnout for the #RiseForClimate action taking place yesterday, considering all the first responses and triage needed in this current toxic state of regressive politics, not just here in the U.S., but in many other places across the world.

Well, the verdict was pretty resounding: hundreds of thousands of people on 7 continents and in 95 countries showed up to display the growing strength and diversity of the climate movement and demand real climate action from their local leaders, with 900+ actions.

At our march here in San Francisco that was billed as the (unofficial) kickoff to the Global Climate Action Summit slated to take place this week in and around the City by the Bay, not only did over 30,000 people show up, but the atmosphere felt more energized and determined than ever. And I’ve been to a lot of these marches.

What I think is happening and could be seen in the different groups and themes represented is that we’ve moved beyond climate change as an isolated, remote, and abstract issue but one that directly impacts and is impacted by issues that affect people across the world in their daily lives: justice, economy, pollution, ‘natural’ disasters, and a host of other tangible problems that are perpetuated and accelerated by the causes as well as the effects of climate change.

Rather than further analyze what’s happening (I’ve been having a hard time with words since you know WhoZeeWhat started squatting in the people’s house) I’ll just share some impressions from the march.

Instead of marching the whole way as we’ve doing for all the protests since November 2016 (Defend Democracy, Women’s March x 2, No Ban No Wall, Native Nations Rise, Tax March, Science March, No Hate SF, Families Belong Together, plus Resist on Ocean Beach, EPA Funeral, Youth v Gov, Twitter protest, National Walkout Day and prolly a few more), my demo buddies and I decided to station ourselves at 5th and Market to document the movement from beginning to end.

From the opening groups led by various American Indian tribes to the final climate parachute it took 45 minutes and there really weren’t many open spaces in between. Now that’s a lot of people to pass by. At the end we hopped on the parachute team and helped bring in the tail end to Civic Center, where the march culminated in a massive and spectacular mosaic of people-powered mural art.

I left feeling that there’s not only a blue wave coming, but a green one.

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CA Recycling Company Says They’re Drowning in Plastic, Calls for Referendum on Single Use Ban

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It’s no secret that the world has a plastic problem. By now, most people have been made aware of the magnitude of this crisis, thanks to recent high profile features by National Geographic, UN Environment, and 60 Minutes.

The numbers on how much plastic has ended up in the world’s oceans (and will remain there as a thin soup for centuries to come) since the petrochemical industry first mass-marketed it as a mainstream staple a mere 60 years ago are staggering and well documented.

Beyond the stats and graphs, all it takes to grasp the extent of the problem is to look around our immediate environment, where our daily routes and routines reveal the vicious cycle of this plastic epidemic.

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from the packaging plant to the store shelf into the shopping cart and down the drain it goes en route to the ocean

The simple fact is, there is just too much plastic— and too many different types of plastics — being produced; and there exist few, if any, viable end markets for the material. Which makes reuse impossible.

– Michael J. Sangiacomo, President & CEO, Recology. Source: It is time to cut use of plastics

While the problem is in plain sight, it’s the solutions that are proving more elusive.

On the behavioral end, there have been many valiant efforts to educate willing consumers on how to change their habits. Personal quests like My Plastic-Free Life or crowdsourced campaigns like Plastic Free July have inspired people the world over to become more aware of and reduce their plastic intake. But with fossil fuel companies poised to spike plastic production by another 40% in the next decade, behavior change alone will not suffice to stem this coming plastic tide. Just in the minute it took you to read these opening paragraphs, a million plastic bottles were bought around the world, a number projected to rise another 20% by 2021.

On the technological end, a young Dutch inventor named Boyan Slat has embarked on scooping out half of the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic currently residing in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch with a giant floating boom. While certainly admirable and a potential boon to mitigating some of the worst effects of the largest ongoing (and unpenalized) petrochemical dumps in history, dealing with pollution on a scale as massive as this one at the end of the chain can only get you so far, even without the complications inherent in picking slimy plastic bits out of erratically moving water.

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Plastic-free educator Beth Terry demonstrating the power of a reusable mug during the Lunchbox Project.

One player that has been at the forefront of both the behavioral and technological aspects of dealing with our global plastic explosion has now come out to call for urgent action on the third, often neglected pillar of change: policy.

In an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle entitled It is time to cut use of plastics, Michael J. Sangiacomo, President & CEO of West Coast resource recovery company Recology, puts the kibosh on the idea that we might recycle ourselves out of the crisis.

For decades, Recology has captured plastic materials through our  recycling programs in California, Oregon and Washington state, and  marketed much of that material for reuse, principally throughout Asia. In other words, we had a place to send plastics.

However, a number of global policy reforms — most notably China’s National Sword program, which banned mixed plastic imports — have closed nearly all end markets for many plastic products.

– Michael J. Sangiacomo

As a San Francisco resident and concerned citizen, I have followed Recology’s unparalleled pursuit of the city’s zero waste mandate for years. I’ve reported on their compost trailblazing as well as state-of-the-art recycling facility. I even starred on the PBS News Hour to showcase how composting works in a San Francisco household. Most recently I attended the unveiling of the worker-owned company’s creative Better at the Bin campaign to educate residents about the importance of sorting their compostables and recyclables into the right bin to minimize the kind of mixed content bales that no longer have a market.

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Michael J. Sangiacomo (left) with SF Environment Director Deborah Raphael, local youth environmental leaders, and Zero Waste advocate Kathryn Kellogg (right) revealing the new Recology recycling truck sporting a mural by local artist Sirron Norris (3rd from left).

I’ve also visited Recycle Central twice, and quite frankly, if the longest presort line in the U.S. — featuring an advanced metering system for inbound materials, two new lines of spinning disk screens to separate paper from plastic containers, and high-tech optical sorters capable of separating different types of plastic — can’t yield end products that are pure enough for the Chinese recycling market, then it simply can’t be done.

Recology’s state-of-the-art optical sorter is capable of ejecting seven different commodities including different kinds of hard plastics.

Lest we get tempted to blame the plastic recycling quandary on China, it’s important to note that even before the new policy, a whopping 91% of all plastics in the world wasn’t getting recycled.

Sangiacomo admits as much by recounting how Recology has always struggled with the flurry of different polymers that are constantly being introduced into new products and ultimately end up on the company’s sorting lines. He says they’ve tried to reverse-engineer the plastics manufacturing process to reclaim the petroleum products and even hired a chemical engineer to come up with something that could be done with single-use plastic waste, but to no avail.

The simple fact is, there is just too much plastic— and too many different types of plastics — being produced; and there exist few, if any, viable end markets for the material. Which makes reuse impossible.

– Michael J. Sangiacomo

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Film plastic vacuums on Recycle Central’s extended sort conveyor allows Recology to accept a wider variety of commodities in the co-mingled recycling streams and San Franciscans to put soft plastics in their recycling bins. But it doesn’t guarantee a secondary market for the material.

So if the market is continuously being flooded with non-recyclable, single use plastic items and their sheer quantity and institutionalized inevitability would require nothing short of a large scale global popular revolt to make a consumer-based dent in demand, the only effective way to curb this scourge on the planet’s ecosystems is to stop the pollution at the source — by regulating the manufacturers of these petrochemicals.

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Didcha have to wrap the plastic toy in another plastic package?

Sangiacomo says Recology has made a good faith effort to collaborate with the plastics industry to develop technologies that might lead to the genuine recycling of plastic products, and good on them for trying. But let’s be honest here — can you think of a single industry that has given anything beyond lip service to a voluntary request for transforming their business model when it conflicted with their quarterly profits? Me neither.

So while waiting to hear for a response from the American Chemistry Council, Recology is getting serious about campaigning for the only thing that has ever succeeded in protecting people and the environment over profits: laws and regulations.

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How do you clean up this mess?

Inspired by the recently passed single-use plastic ban in the EU set to take effect in 2021 with the most common ocean-polluting plastics like single-use cutlery, cotton buds, straws and stirrers, Sangiacomo says Recology is ready to help the U.S. catch up, via Californians’ tried and true political pioneering spirit.

I do feel we are nearly out of time, as the planet’s oceans and wildlife are increasingly overrun by plastic waste. If the plastics industry is unable to step forward with a set of policies and programs that reverses these unfortunate trends, Recology will work to place a comprehensive policy on the next statewide California ballot — building off the EU model. We are prepared to commit $1 million toward a signature-gathering effort to that end and will work with all who are willing to move this effort forward.

- Michael J. Sangiacomo

For those of us who have been following this issue for a while, it’s been clear that there’s no way we’re going to recycle our way out of the plastic pollution crisis. This is not to say we shouldn’t continue to try to recycle as many existing items as possible, including whatever semi-solid pieces Boyan Slat manages to pull out of the ocean, but the answer to plastic pollution is to not create waste in the first place.

As any doctor worth her salt will tell you, prevention is the best medicine. Prevention, of course, applies to all of us on a personal level, and by all means we should continue to refuse as much of the unnecessary bags and bottles and wrappers as possible, as well as educate and inspire others to do the same. But the time has come to go straight to the source in our efforts to prevent our planet from completely drowning in the polymer pile — it’s time to treat the symptoms by addressing the cause.


State of the Union to be dwarfed by Green New Deal, says God

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With all the talk about God's preferences for political candidates it should come as no surprise that the Almighty would feel compelled to make a statement of the highest divine order. By relegating what promises to be the most hatefully ignorant State of the Union address in the history of the universe to the same night as hundreds of Green New Deallivestream watch parties, the big boss woman is showing not only her sense of sweet irony but a commitment to keep reminding Americans of the message in her ancient #1 bestseller:

Take care of creation, and each other!

So while most sentient beings are already pledging to skip straight to Stacey Abrams, according to the Executive Producer of Planet Earth the flagship prime time show tomorrow night will not be the broken slot machine of lies but the movement to build the political and public consensus that a Green New Deal is the solution anyone serious about climate change needs to support.

With the recent blockbuster announcement strategically timed by the Divine Office of Public Exaltation (DOPE) that legislation by Senator Markey and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez laying out a Green New Deal would be unveiled this week, all doubts about which show the gal upstairs was going to tune in to (and spike ratings into the stratosphere!) were removed. To emphasize the point, she had one of her many wise sisters commit to boosting the signal tomorrow.

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As bills like these live or die in the first few weeks based on how much support they receive, the timing of this nationwide call to rally and organize the Green New Deal troops can only be attributed to a coincidence of the third kind.

To implement her clear preference for an intelligent path forward for humans to continue to live on her creation for the indefinite future over the nihilistic dystopia of fear and carnage leaking from an orange gasbag, the Lordess is raining down an extra offering of mobilizing opportunities. In addition to the Sunrise Movement's Green New Deal watch parties that will overshadow the dirty-energy State of the Union address, she has arranged for a coalition of her favorite groups to organize a call for climate leadership from congresspeople that all of us can and should participate in, from February 4-8.

While the Supreme Being sometimes bestows upon us what appear to be grand errors, regrettable own goals, or cruel jokes, the real reason behind them clearly is to remind her beloved humans of how bad things can get in the absence of a moral compass (and popular vote) and to get their asses in gear to do something about it. She is hoping the lesson has been learned and has hyper-charged a new generation of young and outspoken activists to lead the way in fulfilling her long-term vision of all creatures living equitably and sustainably on her little round pet project. 

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God's master plan for 2019

To that end, these godsends are committed to cementing the Green New Deal at the top of the political agenda for the next three years. They will follow creation's sacred penchant for progress and evolution by touring every region of the country to spread the GND gospel before descending upon (and bird-dogging) the primary debates by the thousands to make sure 2020 presidential candidates talk about climate change beyond whether it exists.

Divine providence decrees that they shall inspire Americans to elect a President and Congress that will pass the Green New Deal into law in 2021. However, since it is be very ungodlike for anything to be easy, all dreamers of a just and sustainable world are called upon to get their hands and minds on deck and help navigate this ark of a vision into safe waters.   


  • Find a Green New Deal Livestream Watch Party!
  • Register to watch online

"Democracy isn't dying in darkness, it's being murdered in broad daylight" | #FakeNationalEmergency

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I went to the #FakeNationalEmergency protest today at the SF Federal Building and was heartened to see so many folks taking the time out of their day to express just how grave of a situation we find ourselves in.

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I understand the temptation of just turning off the daily barrage of orange bile (and do so myself most days), as the human mind can only take so much outrage before needing a reprieve. However, it's important to remember that sowing constant chaos is part of the con-man's strategy to deflect from his own crimes and his regime's atrocities, and that exhaustion and complacency of citizens is a feature of the democracy heist, not a bug.

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So, I think during key moments of this reign of horror such as this made up "emergency" it is incumbent upon all of us to "un-numb" ourselves and be shocked by just how brazen these attempts at overthrowing democracy really are.

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As the woman's sign in the cover photo notes ("Democracy isn't dying in darkness, it's being murdered in broad daylight"), the conspiracy of stealing the election and ensuing cover-ups has been happening in broad daylight, aka on Twitter and whenever else the Russian asset opens his big mouth or meets with his Russian handlers. It's a sinister but savvy strategy to normalize the unthinkable, not too different from the "Big Lie" propaganda technique employed by history's most infamous fascist.

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As we're marching toward the inexorable clash between delusion and reality, it behooves those of us who are not fooled (aka the vast majority of Americans and our international allies) by the tin pot dictator to be warned that the increasing frequency of seemingly gratuitous gaslightings of our democratic institutions and safeguards is the inevitable result of the criminal madman's deranged mind that sees only one way out of being held to account for the crimes he's committed: to destroy the constitutional checks and balances enshrined in the American constitution.

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PS: And if you want to talk about a real emergency…

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16 yr old GND activist: "I shouldn’t have to think about survival, I should be making 10 yr plans."

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After attending the rally on Friday that preceded the now-viral exchange about the Green New Deal resolution between the local youth group Youth Vs. Apocalypse and CA Senator Diane Feinstein, I once again went to the Senator’s San Francisco office this morning for a follow up press conference.

Since the debate about the substance of the exchange quickly became overshadowed by a fight over whether the video was doctored edited (full version here) or the kids were being used as props (they weren’t), Y vs A along with another local youth group, Bay Area Earth Guardians, thought it constructive to use their sudden notoriety to steer the conversation back to where it needs to be: which plan best addresses the existential threat of a rapidly warming planet with all its environmental and social ramifications.

16-year young Isha Clarke, a junior at MetWest High School in Oakland, was just one of many passionate speakers, eloquently explaining why the Senator’s own climate change resolution (published after the encounter on Friday) does not adequately address the scale and time frame of the problem.

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While too many of us adults have been busy bickering over whether the Senator was too condescending or the kids too disrespectful, Isha showed how to get a debate back on track.

Senator Feinstein, I could care less about your tone, I care about your vote.

Rather than being defensive about the accusation that they are nothing but little children used as props in someone else’s agenda, these young activists used a moral framework to explain why this issue is so important to them personally.

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I stand here to say that I am representing no agenda but my own, and that agenda is that I want to live. I shouldn’t have to think about survival, I should be making 10 year plans.

The 10 year plan, of course, is the key point here. As Bill McKibben points out about Senator Feinstein’s “warmed-over versions of Obama-era environmental policy” in response to the fracas,

It’s not that these things are wrong. It’s that they are insufficient, impossibly so. Not insufficient—and here’s the important point—to meet the demands of hopelessly idealistic youth but because of the point that the kids were trying to make, which is that the passage of time is changing the calculations around climate change.

There you have it: “...the passage of time is changing the calculations around climate change.”

The IPCC reports we have 12 years left to limit climate catastrophe. Another study suggests we’re nearly at a tipping point. So really, at this very point, a measured, incremental plan such as Senator Feinstein’s is simply too little, too late. Ironically, the time for that was 30 years ago, the exact duration of her tenure she so eagerly impressed upon her non not yet voting constituents.

These kids are basically having a rational and natural human reaction, doing the 1st grade math of subtracting 12 years from the average person’s life expectancy and realizing that they will have a half century-plus of chaos and misery to contend with if we as a society don’t act quickly and boldly.

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, co-sponsor of the Real Green New Deal resolution and fellow young person bound to meet that runaway climate train head on if we don’t get our heads out of the sand really soon, nails it (taking a page out of the Meteor Blades“Delay is Denial” book of poetry):

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Republicans won’t vote for either a watered-down or transformational Green New Deal, so we may as well go with the one that gives the next generations a fighting chance to have an inhabitable planet. Support for the Green New Deal is polling at over 80 percent support across party lines, so it would be self-defeating not to use that momentum to encourage as many 2020 candidates as possible to run on that platform, so the resolution can be turned into legislation, which — if we all work on it as if our lives depended on it — may be passed into life-sustaining law.

Senator Feinstein has shown us her plan and it’s incompatible with what science tells us. Rather than splinter Senate Democrats, she could carve her legacy as a climate champion by putting her weight behind a bold, healthy, and visionary transformation of American society, as FDR did with the original New Deal.

That’s all the kids are saying... give the Real Green New Deal a chance!


Send a letter to Diane Feinstein to demand she withdraw her watered down resolution

24 Signs of Democracy: A Resistance Photo Journey

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I’ve always liked going to rallies and protests, because the energy created by direct citizen participation is so raw and genuine. In the age of constant media filtering and digital middlemen for so many of our interactions, being in the midst of chanting, laughing, and singing people makes me feel alive and human.

My earliest memories of rallies were the anti-nuclear and anti-nazi protests I went to in the mid-80s in my native Germany. I took my first protest snapshots at the mobilizations against the first Gulf War and then again in the lead-up to the Iraq War in early 2003. But it wasn’t until the tea party induced “Obamacare” disinformation wars in the fall of 2009 that I began to be more deliberate in my documentation. Paying witness to the energy and creative genius of activists pushing back against the inane death panel meme, I began building an archive of people who engage directly in democracy.

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Around the same time, I was excited to finally see public outcry over what I consider to be the most consequential issue we’ve ever ignored, climate change. The nascent climate movement was providing me with amazing material to visually support the storytelling. Shortly thereafter, the Occupy movement arose to give voice and canvas to the inequities at the heart of most problems in the modern world.

I realized that a handwritten sign passionately held by its creator — if captured at the right moment — was a powerful tool for documenting social change for the same reason it tickled my soul: it encapsulates art, the written word, and human connection, three of the most essential and timeless ingredients for our cultural and spiritual survival.

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Since then, displays of public participation seem to have been finding me.  Whether it’s stumbling upon a human rights rally for Tibet or an anti-eviction demo in my neighborhood, it has become part of my DNA to be roaming in large (and sometimes small) crowds of animated (though always friendly) people.

Nothing though could have prepared me for the outpouring of public expression set off by the “election” of Donald Trump. Since that fateful day in November 2016, I’ve felt compelled to document — as well as participate in — rallies of all stripes, at a rate appearing too fast to even count. Roughly falling under the umbrella of “The Resistance”, these incidents of organized mobilization have spanned a wide array of concerns, commensurate with the breadth of atrocities committed by the wannabe autocrat and his minions who are currently occupying the People’s House.

As I was uploading the photos for a recent street report chronicling the young activists calling for Senator Feinstein to support the Green New Deal resolution, I not only counted 22 folders of protest photos that have accumulated in my activism vault over the past 2 years but noticed that the themes since the 2018 midterm election — itself the result of nationwide acts of direct democracy — have been shifting from pure resistance to a more proactive, visionary energy.  

It occurred to me that these bold new forward-thinking demands like the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, or expanded voting rights that are now under serious consideration would never even have made it into mainstream debate if it weren’t for all the activists whose outrage over a flood of regressive Trump policies not only stopped the most egregious overreaches but unleashed a thirst for change not seen in this country since perhaps the civil rights era in the 1960s.  

With history unfolding at a breakneck pace, I thought this might be a good moment to take a breath and pay tribute to the people and organizations whose spirited resistance and tireless advocacy have helped bring us to this point of renewed hope. And true to the accelerating Zeitgeist, two more rallies — the March 15 Youth Climate Strike and yesterday’s #ReleaseTheReport march — have taken place since I first started this documentary project, for a whopping total of 24 signs of democracy!

November 11, 2016: And so it begins

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San Francisco High School students voice their opinion about the President-"elect"

November 19, 2016: First signs of the resistance

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Rally at UN Plaza, SF

December 19, 2016: #DefendDemocracy

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Rally in Sacramento urging the members of California electors to vote no.

January 21, 2017: The first Women's March

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The first Women's March introduced the pussy hat on a rainy but joyful day in San Francisco.

February 4, 2017: #NoBanNoWall

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Protesting Trump's unconstitutional Muslim ban at #NoBanNoWall rally in SF.

February 11, 2017: #RESIST

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1000s of people gather at Ocean Beach to spell RESIST captured by a helicopter camera.

February 25, 2017: R.I.P. EPA

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At a mock funeral in front of the EPA building in SF, protestors mourn the coming loss of environmental stewardship under new chief Scott Pruitt.

March 10, 2017: #NativeNationsRise

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Indigenous communities at the frontlines of Trump administration assaults gather at #NativeNationsRise rally outside Federal Building in SF.

April 15, 2017: #TaxMarch

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At the #TaxMarch down Market Street, taxpayers let their feelings be known about the pResident's refusal to show his returns.

April 22, 2017: #ScienceMarch

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Thousands of fact-loving citizens push back against the liar-in-chief at the #ScienceMarch.

August 26, 2017: #NoHate

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Michael Franti gets everyone dancing with each other at a #NoHate rally.

December 17, 2017: Juliana Vs United States

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The youth plaintiffs in the landmark "Juliana Vs United States" climate suit hold a rally outside the SF federal Courthouse on their way to attend a hearing.

January 3, 2018: Delete @RealDonaldTrump

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Rally and projections outside Twitter HQ to demand @RealDonaldTrump be deleted for inciting violence.

January 20, 2018: 2nd Women's March

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Participants in the 2nd Women's March demonstrate they're more energized than ever.

March 14, 2018: #NationalWalkoutDay

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Students around the country participate in #NationalWalkoutDay in solidarity with Parkland students.

June 30, 2018: #FamiliesBelongTogether

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#FamiliesBelongTogether marchers protest the administration's inhumane child separation policies at the Southern border.

September 9, 2018: #RiseForClimate

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#RiseForClimate march ends with crowdsourced indigenous street art.

October 4, 2018: #StopKavanaugh

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National outcry to #StopKavanaugh during confirmation hearings.

November 8, 2018: #ProtectMueller

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After the firing of AG Jeff Session people take to the streets outside SF City Hall in a call to #ProtectMueller.

February 18, 2019: #FakeNationalEmergency

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Protesting the #FakeNationalEmergency outside SF Federal Building.

February 22, 2019: #GreenNewDeal — Episode 1

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Youth groups calling on Senator Feinstein to sign the Green New Deal resolution outside her SF office.

February 25, 2019: #GreenNewDeal — Episode 2

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Youth Vs Apocalypse and Earth Guardians return to Senator Feinstein's office (successfully) calling for the withdrawal of her watered down GND alternative.

March 15, 2019: School Strike for Climate

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Students in San Francisco join a worldwide day of rallies in calling for climate action

April 4, 2019: #ReleaseTheReport

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San Franciscans gathering at Market & Powell making sure the Mueller report will be made public as sure as the cable car is going to end up at fisherman's wharf.

Signs of a Climate Emergency

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The Great Highway, one of San Francisco's iconic roads that runs along the city's Pacific coastline, has been closed intermittently for the last several months due to sand intrusion and flooding from the relentless waves of storms visited upon California throughout this winter.

Now, when the City says "closed", they mean closed to cars, as American roads by default have been prioritized in favor of motorized vehicles to such a degree that any other modes of transportation often aren't even worth a special mention.

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However, commuters and revelers unburdened by 4000 pound machinery are usually pretty good at interpreting car culture’s “sign” language. So on a recent visit the Great Highway had unsurprisingly been turned into the Great People Way.

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While this is not the first time this road has had problems because of particular storms, it’s hard to argue that the speed and intensity with which coastal erosion has been happening in recent years — like so many other changes in natural rhythms all over the world — is due to anything but the effects of climate change.  

When they say sea levels are rising, it’s not an abstract term from an academic paper anymore, as my wife — and human measuring tape — demonstrated in an impromptu “scale of sand migration” analysis.

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SF Supervisor Rafael Mandelman’s recently introduced climate change emergency declaration puts what we can all see with our own eyes into writing:

We  are declaring emergency, because, simply put, there is no more time to waste. San Francisco, like the rest of California, is already suffering impacts of climate change in the form of droughts, air pollution, extreme heat, and lowland flooding. On our current path, projections show up to eight feet of sea level rise in the Bay over the next 100 years, but even at three feet, we know the Ferry Building would be flooding twice daily and the Embarcadero, Mission Bay and Marina will all be at risk.  Already we are planning to permanently close two lanes of the Great Highway in response to rising tides.

The effects of climate change in many cases are dra- as well as traumatic. In California alone, people are losing their lives and homes in mega wildfires on a regular basis now, and the rising fluctuations and extremes in temperatures with its feedback loops of increased floods, droughts, heat/cold waves, and coastal erosion is expected to set off ever more crises, from public health to agriculture.

However, not all manifestations of the climate emergency result in dramatic footage from disaster areas. Imagery of any particular climate disruption process can run from punching us in the cerebral cortex… 

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…to signs of blissful adaptation.

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While it can be argued that people often don’t respond to crisis until their proverbial house is on fire, climate change presents one of those vexing paradoxes where the house is on fire but it’s on such a large spatial and temporal scale that our brains would rather dally about the premises looking for a smoke-free room than grab an extinguisher and call 911. In fact, according to George Marshall, author of Why our brains are wired to ignore climate change and what to do about it, climate-related trauma seems to make people even less likely to acknowledge, much less do something about the threat.

And this is where a less humanly tragic climate event such as the closure of the Great Highway might actually be a good catalyst for the kind of brain rewiring needed in the shift towards human living arrangements that are more in balance with the atmosphere’s CO2 budget. Rather than causing people to shut down completely to escape from the loss and suffering endured during a major disaster, these less extreme but eminently visible events afford us the chance to experience and reflect on climate change without the psychological trauma but close enough to be personally affected and moved to look at the menu of solutions.

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Especially in San Francisco, where we have managed to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent since 1990 while during the same period the transportation sector’s share of those emissions has ballooned from 33 to 45 percent with over 70 percent of that number attributable to automobiles and trucks, all of us can benefit from such a well placed reminder by mother nature to rethink our mobility.  

If nothing else, there’s a certain poetic logic to a road built for a mode of transit that is responsible for causing the conditions that are now making that same road inaccessible to said mode of transit… becoming available exclusively to the modes of transit that will improve said conditions.

Now if only our road signs could tell that story…

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crossposted at a world of words

Shifting culture towards nourishing a just and sustainable society, or The Art of the Green New Deal

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Sometimes it’s truly uncanny how synergistic human consciousness can be. I’ve always thought that the world as it exists is the result of what we collectively dream into being, and if a lot of people dream the same thing at the same time, this dream and all its interconnected threads is bound to rapidly and visibly manifest in the waking world.

Still, as comfortable as I consider myself to be with such sublime convergences, I admit that it threw me for a galactic loop when Congresswoman and Green New Deal resolution co-author Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently tweeted “a very special + secret #GreenNewDeal project” announcement mere minutes before I sent the draft of the creation story you’re about to read to my collaborating editors.

“Holy cow,” I thought to myself. “A creative Green New Deal storytelling project! This is exactly the kind of stuff we’ve been building our hub for.”

When the surprise — a beautiful, visionary video entitled A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez— was revealed the next morning, I was stunned by how much the storyline, the visuals, and the aspirational nature of this moving piece of contemporary art fit into what we’d been dreaming up over the last several months.

The Art of the Green New Deal

The idea for some sort of a creative hub that would turn the hapless U.S. president’s iconic paean to selfishness and greed into a playfully subversive ode to possibility and regeneration had initially come to me during a weekend in the woods in November 2018. It began to take real shape during a Green New Deal Create-a-thon a month after the resolution had been released. During a weekend of collective brainstorming, we fleshed out the framework for The Art of the Green New Dealas “a journal of creative culture shift that would collect andchronicle the creative endeavors in support of the adoption and implementation of the Green New Deal.”

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Left: Green New Deal Create-a-thon. Right: Create-a-thon art group designing baby GND shirt / Photo: Aaron Perry-Zucker

One of the many common threads between A Message from the Future and our vision for the journal are the references to the art programs that flourished during the original New Deal era. In Naomi Klein’s clarion call accompanying the video, she not only muses that a Green New Deal could “galvanize artists into that kind of social mission again,” but that the time to crank up the turbines of inspiration is in fact right now, because we’ll need all artistic hands on deck to “help win the battle for hearts and minds that will determine whether it has a fighting chance in the first place.”

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Growing Strong Together. By Sarah Bloom, Creative Action Network

Speaking of Naomi Klein, I can’t help but wonder if she was writing those lines at the exact moment I added the quote about the “ethos of care and repair” from her previous Green New Deal article to this story (see below). Also, did we somehow tune into the wavelength of the Message from the Future crew when we came up with a Letters from the Future column during the create-a-thon?

Whether it’s all providence I’m not sure, but with all the existential social, economic, and environmental challenges we’re facing on this planet it seems significant that so many of the same powerful ideas are suddenly bubbling up from sea to shining sea. And The Art of the Green New Deal, in a nutshell, is poised to catch the most beautiful, diverse, and expressive of those bubbles that tell the stories of how a Green New Deal will help transition our nation into a society that lives within Earth’s carrying capacity and where everyone can thrive.

A showcase for the creative human engagement needed to bring about the shift, the idea is to start this project as a well curated online journal. From photo essays and creative non-fiction to video, audio and media yet unseen, it will stream the resolution’s various interconnected pillars — from clean energy and sustainable food systems to social/economic equity and community resiliency — through the portals of Works, Movements, and Narratives. There is no shortage of ideas of what it could become in the long run.

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The 3 portals of The Art of the Green New Deal. Credits: Marc Osborne/Creative Action Network, Poster Syndicate, Anne Hamersky/The Food Change

If you’re ready to jump aboard, you can follow us now on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram where we’ll keep you posted on when the site will launch, how to contribute, and other updates.

Perhaps we might also start a group here on Daily Kos dedicated to telling the creative stories of the GND. Hit me up in the comments.

If you want to go deeper, read on…

Turn the orange blues into action: California about to pass important climate bills, with your help!

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It’s so easy these days to get either distracted or depressed by the daily barrage of orange madness raining down on us, ranging in significance from hopelessly vapid to humanly atrocious. Coupled with what seems to be an ever sprawling and accelerating onslaught of social media on our senses, an almost instinctive reaction I witness in myself as well as many of my friends is to want to hide in our cocoons and withdraw from public discussion of important issues altogether. What good is another deep dive into the ignorant policy manifestations of a deranged mind when all it does is get your blood boiling?

Whenever I get into this space I remind myself that the temptation to check out because of the perceived futility of it all existed long before the current occupant of the White House and his wrecking crew slithered onto the scene, and will continue to be beckoning long after they’re gone.

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Me, during my more “reflective” times.

Just take climate change, an issue so complex, protracted, and wrought with dynamics ostensibly out of my own hands that it had me flirting with despair long before the Chinese-hoax barker ever got to appoint shady climate deniers and coal-industry lobbyists as EPA chiefs. And while there’s no denying that the current (mal)administration represents a new nadir in its brazen nihilism towards all things human and vibrant and alive — at least in my 30+ years in this country — it is also true that a lot of the current disasters like the burning Amazon forests, record heat waves across the globe, and a melting arctic full of microplastics aren’t easily pinned on just one bad actor.  

The good news in all this, if any, is that for those of us who refused to stick our heads in the sand before the orange hot air balloon started to stink up the place, there really is no good reason to do so now. The structural challenges to curbing global carbon emissions to where future (and at this point in the game, current) generations will have a fighting chance at life on a habitable planet were always going to be daunting, ever since we (and the fossil fuel industry) have known the trajectory we’re on.

So while the spiteful buffoonery of bailing from the Paris Climate Agreement or sabotaging Obama’s fuel economy standards is undoubtedly a major setback on the road to progress, it doesn’t really change the task at hand. In fact, if there’s anything this moment in history teaches us, it’s that the need for action towards systemic change has never been more urgent. Immediate, concrete and strategic action in service of big picture transformation, I’ve found, is not only what the battered planet needs from us, but it’s also the antidote to the frustration-induced inertia  beckoning with each new outrage du jour.

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350 Bay Area volunteers celebrating the collection of 50,000 signatures for SB100, California’s landmark 100% clean electricity bill passed in 2018.

It’s why I decided to volunteer this year with 350 Bay Area Action, the branch of 350 Bay Area that tracks and advocates for meaningful climate bills passing through the California state legislature each year. As we all know, things that happen in California eventually catch on across the country (or alternately, block federal overreach), so your personal impact of getting involved in the sausage making of state legislation is instantly multiplied by a factor of 50.

As part of the communications team (I post and update the latest action items, action toolkit, and letter templates on the legislative page) I get to amplify and carry to fruition the work of the many amazing volunteers who have been tracking bills as they get changed and amended (current list of priority bills here). A few of these bills have now passed muster, and with just a couple of weeks left till the end of this year’s legislative session (California Legislature comes to an end September 12!) there is a mad scramble underway to push them over the finish line, i.e. get them passed through both the Assembly and Senate before getting signed by the Governor.

Right now there are three bills that need immediate help from YOU:

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    SB 54 & AB 1080 to reduce single-use plastic packaging and products. The SB54 & AB1080 companion bills require manufacturers and retailers in California to reduce single-use plastic packaging and products by 75 percent by 2030. After 2030, all single-use plastics sold in the state would need to be compostable or recyclable, making plastic resale value sufficient enough to be economically worth recycling.
  • SB 210 to require trucks to pass smog tests. SB210 requires the state Air Resources Board to develop a smog check program for heavy trucks similar to the program that has existed for decades for cars and light trucks. This is a critical air pollution control bill, climate bill (reduces emissions and black carbon) and an important environmental justice bill to protect communities with disproportionate exposure to truck emissions.
  • SB 1 to protect California environmental standards from Trump’s rollback of federal laws. SB 1 would make current federal clean air, climate, clean water, worker safety, and endangered species standards enforceable under state law, even if the federal government rolls back and weakens those standards, as he has already attempted to do with the Endangered Species Act.

We need ALL OF US to help push these critical bills over the finish line! The best way to do that is to call, send a letter, or tag your state representatives TODAY!

To call your rep, check out the 350 Bay Area Action toolkit.

To send a letter, all you have to do is go to the following links, provide your name and address, and hit submit, and the letter is on its way to your Assembly member and Senator (SB1 coming soon, check for updates here).

Write a Letter in Support of SB 54 & AB 1080

Write a Letter in Support of SB210

FB, tweet or otherwise tag your reps (mine in SF are @Scott_Wiener & @DavidChiu, find yours in the  toolkit) with the following sample tweets:

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I’m proud to support #SB54 + #AB1080. If they pass, California has a huge opportunity to dramatically reduce single-use plastics by 2030. Call your state representatives, tell them to vote YES on both! #YesonSB54 #YesonAB1080 @350BAA #CAMustLead #CloseTheLoopCA


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California lawmakers should implement a smog check program for heavy duty trucks & buses like we already have for cars… Pass the test or get off the road. The state’s air quality and the health of our residents are at stake #SB210 #YesonSB210 #CAMustLead @350BAA


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Resist #Trump and keep our air, water, and wildlife clean and protected! Tell the CA State Assembly and @GavinNewsom to support SB 1! #SB1 #SupportSB1 #endangeredspecies @SenToniAtkins @GavinNewsom @350BAA


There are more fun action items in the toolkit but these are some quick and simple steps that will have a huge impact.

Watching Greta Thunberg sail into New York City as I’m writing these lines serves as a perfect inspiration to recommit myself to the small acts of change that can ripple out and magnify in scope yet unknown to me. It reminds me of a quote by Vaclav Havel that I’ve always come back to, especially in times of doubt and inadequacy:

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

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Hope! Greta Thunberg sailing past the Statue of Liberty, Aug 28, 2019

Originally published at A World of Words


#GlobalClimateStrike: A March for a Livable Planet is a March for Justice

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As I was assembling the posters I had printed from the 350.org Arts Kit to make signs for tomorrow’sGlobal Climate Strike, I was reflecting back on a week in which the themes of justice so powerfully laid out in the Green New Deal resolution were all around me.

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Artist statement from the 350.org Green New Deal Arts Kit: “I became an artist, navigating the currents of mass social movements I got involved with as a young person. Anti-colonial struggle, labor and farmers rights, anti-racist and cultural activism have contributed to my understandings of art as a powerful dimension of organizing. Humans are story-driven. We make choices according to how we understand the world to be. Art speaks directly to those deep inner spaces where the stories are stored. I use art to support people’s ability to believe in possibilities that go beyond the boundaries that are acceptable to the rulers. This image illustrates the relationship among creating alternatives, aligning with nature and opposing the forces of oppression and destruction.”

It started last Thursday at UC Berkeley, where I was fortunate enough to catch Professor Ibram X. Kendi discuss his new book How to Be an Antiracist, a powerful excursion into the deepest wounds of this nation’s soul. Among so many deeply resonating points about the historical and institutional injustices that keep holding this nation back from healing and building a society and environment where all can coexist and thrive, the key point I took away from Dr. Kendi’s talk and the following discussion was that in order to uproot racism — and thus the very idea of supremacy that has not only ravaged communities across the country and the world but the very biosphere we depend on to live — each of us must continuously hold up a mirror to examine our own internalized biases in order to unlearn them.

On Monday, when I joined hundreds of my fellow humans at the Close The Campsmarch in San Francisco , I thought to myself how apropos it was to be marching against our own government’s officially sanctioned barbarism on the heels of such a deep examination of ancient roots of oppression within us and in the run-up to support a new generation’s cry to unshackle itself from the extractive system we’ve adapted to.

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Close The Camps march, San Francisco, 9/16/19

As someone who has been wondering for a long time why we humans would trash our own and only home, it has become increasingly clear that the only way to remedy what is destroying the planet's living systems is to get to the root of what got us into this extractive mindset in the first place: the brutal engines of colonialism that used the vicious divide-and-conquer mechanisms of racism to dehumanize whole swaths of populations in order to profit a "chosen" minority. 

Aside from this mindset being just plain immoral and sinister, it has also led us to a place where not only the discarded and forgotten victims bear the cruel consequences of the oppression, but the oppressor himself is now threatened with extinction, due to a finite planet with finite resources and very fragile and interconnected biospheric systems that can only take so much abuse and overexertion before they collapse. 

As Naomi Klein points out in an interview about her latest book "ON Fire", white supremacy emerged not just because people felt like thinking up ideas that were going to get a lot of people killed but because it was useful to protect barbaric but highly profitable actions.

The age of scientific racism begins alongside the transatlantic slave trade, it is a rationale for that brutality. If we are going to respond to climate change by fortressing our borders, then of course the theories that would justify that, that create these hierarchies of humanity, will come surging back. There have been signs of that for years, but it is getting harder to deny because you have killers who are screaming it from the rooftops.

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Close The Camps march, San Francisco, 9/16/19

Then last night, I was invited to an event by Voice of Witness, an amazing nonprofit organization with the vision to bring the crucial oral histories of marginalized communities to audiences nationwide. The stories told by several narrators ranged from grappling with the aftermath of Hurricane Maria to the dark cruelty of being in the U.S. prison system to the unspeakable hardships and injustices experienced by as a gay refugee from Honduras. They were so powerful because we could feel in our own hearts how deeply affected these people had been by their tribulations. It elicited the kind of empathy needed to see yourself in your fellow human being’s struggle, open your heart, and become activated to become an ally in breaking down the system of division and oppression our collective consciousness has been holding us prisoners in for too long.

So this is the mindset with which I’ll be joining millions of youth around the world who will be taking to the streets tomorrow to demand urgent action on the most existential threat humanity as a whole has ever faced. In full awareness that the imbalance and destruction of our natural systems is not a new and out of the blue phenomenon, but the culmination of all the oppression and destruction that so many frontline communities across the world have had to experience for centuries at the hands of a colonial raison d'être that seeks to subdue and dominate nature in the name of short-term power and profit.

The Planet or The Humans: Michael Moore’s false choice a lesson in how not to build a movement

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I meant to write about the Michael Moore produced documentary Planet of the Humans right after watching it last weekend. But over the course of the week all of the wild distortions and misrepresentations in it got debunked quite expertly by dozens of people with much more knowledge on the current state of renewable energy than me (including our very own A Siegel), so I decided it wasn’t worth spending any more time on. My bottom line was that even though it makes a few good points, this film is so amateurish, dated, and in such bad faith that the highest award it could aspire to is to be forgotten. The End.

But then Bill McKibben, who gets caricatured in the film as the nefarious eco-profiteering mastermind in bed with evil polluting corporations, wrote a piece in Rolling Stone that gets to the core of why this is so much worse than what Josh Fox calls“an unsubstantiated, unscientific, poorly made piece of yellow journalism which attacks proven renewable energy and science.” (Side note: having followed Bill’s work, interviewed him, done a bunch of DK climate blogathons with him, and been involved in various campaigns he and others have inspired since 10/10/10, the very notion that he has a parallel shadow life as a corporate shill is actually LOL hilarious in its outlandishness).

The key point is this:

Much has been made over the years about the way that progressives eat their own, about circular firing squads and the like. I think there’s truth to it: there’s a collection of showmen like Moore who enjoy attracting attention to themselves by endlessly picking fights. They’re generally not people who actually try to organize, to build power, to bring people together. That’s the real, and difficult, work — not purity tests or calling people out, but calling them in.

Thing is, there are examples of Michael Moore’s films in the past that have — if not directly, but at least by education and inspiration — brought people in to rally around a cause. You could say that his films exposing corporate greed and the inequities built into American capitalism — from Roger & Me to Capitalism, A Love Story— were part of the gradual awakening that resulted in the Occupy movement.

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Occupy Oakland, 2011.

Bowling for Columbine brought to light the NRA and weapons manufacturers’ cynical exploitation of America’s deeply complicated and disturbing psychological and cultural relationship with guns, giving context and expression to the ever growing gun control movement.

Sicko pulled back the curtain on the country’s for-profit health industry, exposing its dystopian absurdity and making the case for Medicare for All long before it became a unifying progressive rallying cry. At the time, I wrote enthusiastically about how the latter inspired a former Signa executive — who has since become a committed advocate for universal health care — to affirm every claim in the movie about his industry.

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Michael Moore taking on health care on CNN

What all these documentaries had in common was that even though Michael Moore was always in the lead role as the provocateur extraordinaire, he was a quirky and likable underdog you wanted to root for because he was fighting for something larger than himself. He was able to make the viewer feel that ultimately this is about all (or at least 99%) of us, and if enough of us speak out and come together to address a particular injustice, we can hold the small but powerful cadre of profiteers and oppressors accountable and change the system that allowed them to get into their positions of exploitation in the first place.

Planet of the Humans, on the other hand, has it all backwards. With the infinitely less charismatic Jeff Gibbs filling in as a sad sack protagonist to chase after cheap, cringe-inducing gotcha moments from its opening “Chevy Volt is coal powered, nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah!” scene that must have been recorded 10 years ago (several lifetimes in renewable energy development), the film loses any kind of relatability other than perhaps for fellow aggrieved old white dudes. (Incidentally, right wing media and the fossil fuel industry are psyched about a self-proclaimed veteran environmentalist saying fossil fuels are no worse than renewables). If you’re going to be using outdated footage to make a false indictment of the current state of affairs, at least give us a non navel-gazing messenger who we can laugh with.

However, it’s the other reversal that is much more grave, and, as Bill McKibben points out, damaging not just to the climate but all grassroots movements. How on god’s green earth did we get from hard-hitting investigations of powerful industries profiting off the little guy’s misery to punching down on an emerging industry and its supporters across all civic sectors who are doing the best they can to change the economic paradigm that has kept fossil fuel companies and their investors from paying the true cost of their product to people and planet? What’s next? Sicko Revisited, where Michael Moore goes to Cuba and craps on their public health system because it uses hospitals and people still die?

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Bill McKibben (2nd from right) helping to build a movement.

What McKibben is saying is that right now, when a broad, diverse, and rapidly growing coalition of climate and justice movements are finally coming together for a critical mass of support for a Green New Deal as well as a just and green recovery (perhaps the same?) and Michael Moore could be using his significant resources and influence to aim his fire at the remaining yet formidable corporate and political players sabotaging any chance we might have at an inhabitable planet, he is instead choosing to drive a wedge between the very people that need each other to win this uphill battle.

Instead of sparking a rigorous and much needed discussion about the details of the transformation we need — How much wood pellet burning is sustainable within our shrinking carbon budget? What levels of efficiency in solar panels do we need and can we get by when? Who gets to benefit and how from the new economy? — Moore is telling the activists of all different ages and backgrounds who’ve poured their blood, sweat and tears into getting us to the brink of major societal and political breakthroughs to stop bothering because they’re making things worse (which of course is a lie). Hey kids, focus on consuming less and having no children. Womp womp.

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Young activists getting some skin in the game. School Strike for Climate 2019, SF.

Really, Planet of the Humans is so damn frustrating because it not only attempts to take the wind out of the sails of the only energy sources that give us a fighting chance at living a modern-ish life without wrecking the planet for good (and yes, we need to consume less in all regards, everyone I know who advocates for wind and solar is also into conservation, big time!), but its underlying message is this extreme binary choice: if we can’t beam ourselves back to the stone age we may as well let the fossil fuel industry drive us off the cliff. Nothing in between. No room for process or progress. If you’re not a hundred percent right, you’re a hundred percent wrong. You get either a planet or the humans.

But really, with the whole film hinging on the easily disproved lie that wind and solar not only are currently as dirty as coal and oil but will irredeemably be stuck in that trajectory forever, it’s impossible to even find an entry point for discussion. So rather than go full Escher in trying to make sense of what motivated Michael Moore to put his name on this unnatural disaster of a movie, I’ll just leave it at where it first began for me: just forget about it.

Feels like we’ve been in the wrong movie. Let’s make a better one together!

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What the hell was that? I don’t know about you, but the last five and a half years have felt like I’ve been in the wrong movie, a German idiom (“Ich glaub ich bin im falschen Film”) to describe the sensation of being pulled into a reality you didn’t choose but have to navigate through nonetheless. As someone who tends toward the thought-, joy-, play-, and soulful, this disjointed, nihilistic, villainous mess of a Film NoirOrange script was problematic from the gaudy downhill escalator opening scene to the never-quite-ending final chase out of office. But just like the majority of Americans who were cast in unsupporting roles when the Electoral Academy decided to award this whopper of a picture, I put on my best acting (secretary) face and jumped in as an extra to see if we could crowdsource a plot twist: Vive la résistance!      

At first it looked like this dud about a cantankerous but ultimately boring and vacuous Cruello de Vil and his posse of groveling boors could be brought to life by injecting some sparkling humanity and artistic touches. We tried pink pussy hats, sassy scientists, and inflatable chickens to spiff up the set and lighten the mood, and for a while it seemed like our merry band of razzle dazzle resistance swashbucklers might be able to shake up the storyline at least enough to get a worldwide audience to unbury their faces from their hands. But the longer this production droned on, the further the plot unraveled into a Groundhog Day of needy mobster schtick, tossing what was left of our joie de vivre into the cold, dark B-roll vaults.

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Now, we may all have had different points of exasperation at which we realized we were stuck in an ever-looping B-rated horror movie — kids in cages? Very fine people on all sides? Upside down bible scene? Pandemic clown show carnage? But no matter at what exact moment each of us threw in the towel on any soul nourishing pursuits in favor of spending every last ounce of energy on helping the country fly out of this cuckoo’s nest, if this moronic remake of All the President’s Men didn’t leave you drained of all creative juices you probably have some Vulcan in you. Which is a fancy way of saying that feeling a crushing void after being forced into a soul sucking alternate reality for several precious years of our lives is a perfectly normal human response, even if we finally managed to change the reel.

Before tackling the task of changing my inner dialog back from permanent insult comic dog towards something resembling higher human aspiration, allow me to acknowledge that this particular drama we found ourselves in over the past five plus years was not the first — and certainly is far from the worst — ill-conceived script in the annals of human history. Getting a taste of being involuntarily yanked into a madman’s grotesque interpretation of reality, I can’t help but think of Indigenous peoples across the world during the times when European colonialists first superimposed themselves onto their sets. Of the brave African souls at the prospect of being dragged into slave ships, their lives of self determination about to be unmoored forever. Or of my Jewish sisters and brothers in my native Germany, thrust into a plot so evil it was unbelievable until it was too late for so many.

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And just as the scars of these historic horror movies have outlived their original unwilling casts, we will not be able to ever unsee this doozy of a flop. Underneath the cheap makeup, tacky wardrobe, and bad hair, the real life consequences of this tragicomedy — that made doubling down on punching down its leitmotif — will be felt for years, if not generations. Inserting a sociopathic tin-pot dictator into a democratic screenplay may make for good dramatic effect, but the long-term damage it does to the franchise is incalculable. Hundreds of thousands of people losing their loved ones due to criminal negligence, hundreds of refugee children cruelly ripped away from their parents forever, millions of citizens bamboozled into distrusting the electoral process — taking a chance on a juvenile game show host to play the lead role in these epic times when we could have had the most veteran, accomplished woman ever to have auditioned for the role turns out to be a real flop.

And yet, here we are, and forward we must look. While this twisted train wreck of a picture is far from over and there should never be a time in the future when we don’t pan its premise and hound its antagonists, if we are to refocus on depicting the true challenges and opportunities of our time, we have to begin to unspool the creepy clown show from our mental reel and reclaim our own storyline. Thus, as the discredits roll across a final foreshadowing in Georgia, I am granting myself the creative space to hit pause for an overture of what’s to come next. Sure, we’re all tired of this lousy flick, but let’s admit it, like the umpteenth season of Survivor, we’ve all got hooked on it, jonesing for one more conniving scheme to blow up and another deplorable wannabe kingpin to get kicked off the island. So, if we are to truly get out of this Theatre of the Absurd, our hearts and minds have to create new screens onto which much better frames can be projected.

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So what can we do to flip the script? Well, for one, if you want to stop watching this flaccid Sopranos spin-off, you’ve got to change the channel. In my case, no more snarky tweet replies to the washed up mob boss and his trollish sidekicks. No more wasting of time with reviews about the crappy acting. No more reading of books about the movie. No more dinner table conversations descending into an orange hole of bottomless exasperation. Better yet, if you’re looking to not just get sucked into another movie, hit the off button to make room for your own storyline to develop. Pick up the old guitar collecting dust in the corner. Look out the window and — depending on your latitude — listen to the birds and bees or watch the snowflakes fall. Take longer than usual walks with intentional “wrong turns”. Grab a piece of paper and write down random thoughts and ideas. Don’t worry about “producing” anything… yet.

If you’re like me, you will find that it is much harder to extract yourself from this movie than you thought. You catch yourself refreshing your browser in the hopes that the villain finally had his comeuppance… in the last ten minutes. Your mind wanders back to the beginning to fret over what could have been done to avert so much gratuitous violence in the plot. You’re engulfed by the rage you feel about the pointless abuse inflicted upon innocent extras just to produce a rambling string of vacuous soliloquies with no happy ending. You really want to give the bombing lead role actor who has already been fired but is still serving out his contract with petty sore loser rants a piece of your mind. Instead, you hit the “donate” button to chip in another 50 bucks to Fair Fight.

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That’s all good. If you find yourself going through similar withdrawal, don’t beat yourself up over our innate human challenge to escape a familiar scene. It’s okay to let go of these junk outtakes gradually. Also realize that this cult film will stay with us for posterity. Whether we like it or not, it does hold important insights about ourselves, our country, and our culture in this moment of time. It also tells us a lot about how variations of this same sordid screenplay run through our history and are guaranteed to resurface in the future. In fact, there are 74 million Americans who not only liked this fictional portrayal of a self-made real estate magnate who bragged he could fix a country all by himself, but they didn’t realize it was a mockumentary and are willing to pay money for a sequel. So we have no choice but to stay awake and make sure we don’t get a remake.

All that said, right now really is the time to pitch not only another movie, but a radically new franchise with the capacity to tell an entirely different story of what it means to be successful on Earth. One whose very premise can transcend the scarcity and conquest that are not only the allegorical devices of this particular clunker but that run through almost all storylines of modern civilization. One that can hold our attention without constant overproduced explosions and cheap emotional manipulations by developing characters whose motivations keep us at the edge of our seat because of the high ground they are on. One that can carry multiple plot lines without having to resort to binary hero/villain archetypes, reflecting the complexity of expressions of our humanity without losing the simple truth that we’re all on this little round ball together. And one that plays out against a backdrop of reality, addressing the very real challenges that real people face in overcoming and repairing the impacts of exploited eco-nomic and -logical systems, but driven by a bold creative vision conjuring new and previously unimagined realities.  

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For this new story to take hold, it can’t be written by a single person or the usual suspects who shape our imagination. To move beyond the zero sum myth of winners and losers that is holding sway over our collective consciousness and is eagerly perpetuated by the few who see themselves on the winning side, more of us will have to start sharing our own stories so we can change the depth of field to include a wider, deeper, and more representative angle of what truly matters to most people in the short time they have on this planet. The more we shift our focus from outsized individual “success” stories to a more kaleidoscopic reflection of diverse experiences, the more heart and soul oriented our vision for living together can become. As the overexposed stars fade out of our mental spotlight, the rest of us get to clear the storyboard and visualize characters, scenes, and sequences of events that can harmonize over the evocative soundtrack of justice, equity, and restoration.  

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The good news then about this fresh genre of being is that not only do we have the superpower to walk out of a shitty movie but we all get to play leading roles in our own blockbuster production. For me, this little short right here feels like a first step out of the schlocky horror show we’ve been trapped in, an attempt to reclaim my prose from the firehose of pointless chatter that’s been drowning out the real plot. If it resonates, perhaps I’ll throw in a few extra scenes in my next venture. I’m also tickled by the idea of panning my camera toward the objects that give me joy and hope — like daily mundane jubilation, creative exploration, and the prospect of a cooler planet through green new dealings — and zooming in on fellow solutionary storytellers in their own process of rediscovering their voices. Who knows, if we all do that for each other, we may finally end up in the right movie together.

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Also screening on Medium, A World of Words, and The Art of the Green New Deal

Yes, the IPCC report is dire. But it's not too late if we turn despair into action, together.

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The IPCC report released today concludes: “Unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5°C or even 2°C will be beyond reach.” The good news is that it is not too late, and if we collectively wake up and take action now, we can save a lot.
And yet, it's going to get worse before it gets better. So the temptation for denial, deflection, and despair is great. I get it and struggle with it all the time. But I am reminded that throughout our history humanity has managed to make big and rapid changes that seemed impossible in times of great darkness. Think of all the suffering and injustices that were ended because generations of people determined to end those conditions did not let the odds of success dissuade them.
Yes, it's tempting to think that the problem is too large for you personally to even try to solve it. But here too, there is good news: in this moment of crisis we find ourselves in, going it alone is not what's required of us. As the recent “How to fight climate despair” article in Vox states, the key to turning despair into action is to think beyond the individual and seek community support and solutions — especially those that put pressure on governments and companies to make the large-scale changes that are necessary to truly curtail emissions. Or as Mary Annaïse Heglar puts it, “the most detrimental thing to climate action is this feeling that we’re all in it alone.”

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Whether you've been involved in the fight to preserve and protect the planet's life-giving ecosystems for decades or you're just starting to get worried and wondering what you can do in light of the current extreme weather events all across the globe, I like the invitation Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, co-editor of "All We Can Save", extends to all of us to bring our superpowers to this work:  

Asking everyone to do the same thing: everyone march, everyone spread the word, everyone reduce your own carbon footprint, and donate, and vote. And, yes, do all those things — I do them! But what an enormous miss for the environmental movement to not have been, this whole time, inviting people to bring their superpowers to this work. So instead of all following the same exact checklist, I encourage people to figure out the special things they can contribute to climate solutions.

And one way to do that is to draw a climate action Venn diagram with three circles. One circle is “What are you good at?”, the next is “What part of the climate problem do you want to help solve?”, and the third is “What brings you joy?” And then figure out how you can work at the epicenter of that Venn diagram for as many minutes of your life as you can."

For our work as agents of change I think it's important to ponder those questions, because we not only need all hands on deck, but for our hands to be locking together at their most constructive, effective, and creative. So it does start out with these personal questions of what we are good at and what gives our lives the most meaning, but they really are in service of a cause that's larger than any of us individually. And that ultimately, when all the noise in our heads is tuned out, we are all in this together!

ClimateBrief: Now that Germans are at risk of drowning, we are all balancing in the same lifeboat.

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With historic floods hitting one of the last bastions of perceived immunity against the effects of climate change, people in financially wealthy countries are finally forced to reckon with the global scale of the crisis.

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Dixie Fire, Northern California

As a native German living in California, the first time I got concerned inquiries about my well being from back home was in 2017. The Tubbs Fire had just blazed through Napa County and into the City of Santa Rosa sixty miles north of my adopted home of San Francisco, killing 23 and taking out over 5,000 structures in a matter of hours. “Are you okay? How far are the fires from San Francisco? How bad is the smoke where you are?” My friends, who had seen the shocking images of charred landscapes lined with zombie chimneys, burned-out cars and cooked trees that were going around the world, nervously wondered.

Hard to imagine this was only four years ago, as the fires in California have only become more frequent, fierce, and freaky. The loss of Paradise, “Orange Day,” and this summer’s Dixie and Caldor megafires have added “pyrocumulous” and “The Pyrocene” to our vernacular. Along with all the other conflagrations up and down the American West and across Australia, Siberia, Southern Europe, and North Africa, they’ve also instilled a sense of the new normal (or as the keepers of the doomsday clock like to call it, the new abnormal). My friends in Germany no longer check in about fire conditions in California, as the novelty has worn off and it’s perceived to be a chronic condition.

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Orange Day in SF, August 23rd 2020.

They also have their own disasters to contend with now, turning the tables in my inbox and message threads. After images of cars and houses getting washed down picturesque German village streets like bathtub toys began circulating across the news and social media this summer, the messages from my American friends started pouring in almost instantly: “Are your family and friends okay? How far away are they from the flood zones? Is there more rain in the forecast?”

While the concern was genuine and caring (Thanks, all my folks live south of the hardest hit areas, but a friend’s sister had to be evacuated from the Ahr River Valley in Rhineland-Palatinate), the worried tone also suggested an uncomfortable quandary: How could this level of impact and breakdown happen to the poster child of stability and preparedness? Even scientists were stunned.

This kind of disbelief didn’t just reverberate around the world, but it hit home just as hard. Germans were caught off guard, their belief in their own ingenuity and invincibility shaken. This is not supposed to happen here!

Flooding in Altenahr, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.
Flooding in Altenahr, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.

Soccer star Kai Havertz — who is now aiding in the recovery efforts— expressed the sentiment many of his compatriots were feeling. “I could never imagine that something like this would ever happen in Germany, with so many people dying. When you hear or I hear about things like this – for example, thunderstorms – you can only imagine them far away. But right now, it has happened to us.”

For those of us who have been aware of the impending climate breakdown for a while, these ever more frequent and extreme weather events don’t feel unimaginable at all, even in Germany. However, with a major study now officially confirming that the climate crisis made deadly German floods up to nine times more likely in addition to what everyone is seeing with their own eyes, the good news is that we can no longer say these floods are an act of God.

“These floods have shown us that even developed countries are not safe from the severe impacts of extreme weather that we have seen and that are known to get worse with climate change,” says Friederike Otto, one of the study’s authors.

This checks out with my personal, unscientific research, aka conversations and chats with my circle of friends: even the usually most stoic purveyors of a “Heile Welt”— the concept of an innately wholesome, orderly, and unflappable world — are rattled. When climate leapfrogs all the usual personal topics to the top of the conversation chain, you know there’s been a shift. People are paying attention.

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Wangen im Allgäu: unflappable since 815.

While it’s not assured that the shock will last long enough for Germans to keep themselves out of their primal comfort zones of situational denial — which seems to be the preferred default for self-preservation purposes in most humans — this is, by all accounts, a game changer. This summer’s devastating wildfires and heat domes, along with warnings of a collapsing gulf stream, the first ever rain on the peak of Greenland’s ice sheet, Siberian wildfires threatening Russia’s top-secret nuclear weapons research center, and an IPCC report to spell it all out for those in the back of the room, only confirm what the floods across Germany — and Europe — portend: there is no personal safe zone anymore.

What so many of the more vulnerable and historically ignored people in the Global South have experienced for decades has now unmistakably arrived on the shores and in the collective consciousness of those who contributed by far the most to the problem— the world’s richest countries.

As of this summer at the very latest, those of us privileged enough to be residing in these places will no longer be able to tell ourselves, without at least a healthy dose of unease, that we’ll just move to climate-proof Kopenhagen, retire on a quaint Greek island, escape to tranquil Lake Tahoe, or settle in temperate British Columbia. As these relocation dreams are set in a more genial epoch with relatively stable weather patterns we are rapidly leaving behind, nobody gets to slip out the back door anymore.

At long last, we are all in this together. And that’s the good news.

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New solar roofs in Southern Germany

With the last citadels of perceived shelter from the consequences of our unsustainable ways burning down and washing away, we are finally forced to lean into the truth that our personal fates are all intertwined and the only way to preserve a semblance of the life on Earth we know and love is to preserve it for everyone else, too. Sure, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson won’t stop swinging their dirty little rockets around the solar system any time soon (eventually even those geniuses will find that Mars is a hellhole), but for the rest of us, there has never been a more opportune time to band together to keep the Earthship from irrevocably spinning out of control.

What’s hopeful about this promise of a giant collective leap is that we are all released from the burden of solving the world’s problems by ourselves, or even thinking that we have to. As Rebecca Solnit points out in her compelling case to hold Big Oil accountable for their carbon footprint rather than spending too much energy on fretting about our personal ones, climate-conscious individual choices are good, but not nearly enough to save the planet. “Climate chaos demands we recognize how everything is connected. Seeing yourself as a citizen means seeing yourself as connected to social and political systems.”

So from now on, our best personal moves are the ones that also benefit everyone else and can set off the collective political, economic, and cultural shifts needed to steer us into the most optimistic of the five scenarios that form the backbone of the latest IPCC report.

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The 5 scenarios from the IPCC report.

As we now live in the midst of what futurist Alex Steffen describes as an all-encompassing discontinuity, there is no blueprint for what these paradigm-shifting moves should look like. But whatever area of our human existence we choose for our personal entry into the realm of collective transformation, it must come with the awareness that all the established ways of thinking are the ones that got us into this mess in the first place. “To be alive right now,” Steffen points out, “is to find ourselves flattened against the fact that the entire human world—our cities and infrastructure, our economy and education system, our farms and factories, our laws and politics—was built for a different planet.”

When considering the enormity of the task, it helps to know that every contribution matters, no matter how small. Just like a single vote does not make or break an election, without a collection of a whole lot of single votes there is no democracy. And the good news is that no matter where we choose to engage, others have already begun depaving the path.

Seeking to phase out fossil fuels and support a just transition in your community and around the world? Join People vs Fossil Fuels, your local 350 group, the SAFE Cities movement, or the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. Looking to move the pursuit of health away from the individualist model to a culture of care and repair? Connect with the Transition Network, Deep Medicine, The People’s WPA, or the Life Reimagined Collective. Worried about the strength of the only political system we have to achieve climate justice? Join the fight to protect voting rights and expand democracy. Looking to make a big impact with your investment? Support We Can’t Wait, the Climate Emergency Fund, Active Allies, or Third Act.

In other words, find a tribe (or several) that tackles the climate problem and bring your own knowledge and life force to it. Whichever way we choose to get involved in the fight to save all we can save, now is the time to do so.

German election signs
Social Democrats (SPD) and Green Party campaign posters on top, with the far right AfD lurking below.

As for my native country, the summer of 2021 will go down as the mother of all wakeup calls. No longer able to rise above it all, Germany is now an official member of the family of nations that have suffered severe loss and damage for the victims of human-induced climate change. The inability to meet the moment not only sank Angela Merkel’s sad sack heir to the business-as-usual throne, but put new wind in the sails of more reality based agents of change, like Fridays for Future or Ende Gelände. Polling ahead of the recent federal elections showed that climate change and the environment were the most pressing issue for 43% of respondents, about the same number who voted for the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) and Green Party, currently in talks to form the next government.

Receiving lessons on how to be prepared from more “established” at-risk nations like Bangladesh may feel disorienting to the German psyche, but here too, the lesson is the same: When the waters rise from climate-charged floods, we’re all balancing in the same boat.


Crossposted at A World of Words.

Observations from an immigrant on the American gun apocalypse

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Each culture has its blind spots as it is part of our humanness to get used to ways of being within a lot of unspoken social norms and constructs. Just as sometimes it can be helpful to get feedback from a friend (or even a stranger) to hear an alternate story from the one we’ve become used to telling about ourselves, my hope is that my views as an immigrant who grew up in Germany and has lived in the US for most of my adult life might be valuable to some Americans looking to break out of the status quo of accepting mass gun terror as an inexplicable yet accepted price we pay for living in this country. 
After Columbine in 1999, I was at first perplexed about why Americans seem to be so hopelessly lost on dealing with a problem for which there is an obvious, proven, and relatively straight forward policy solution that most other countries in the world have either figured out or never had to worry about in the first place. From a rational standpoint, it makes zero sense that a civilized nation would continue to allow its citizens to get massacred when you could just regulate these military style weapons to stay out of civilians' hands.
But the longer I've lived in this country and the more I absorb the almost spiritual dimension that guns inhabit in the collective consciousness, the more obvious it seems that there is a lot of unresolved trauma lodged deeply in the violent history of this nation and passed on through generations. Seeing a significant amount of the public discourse after each mass shooting seamlessly shift towards escalatory "solutions" such as arming teachers and fortressing schools rather than eliminating civilian access to weapons of mass murder feels like such a red flag to someone not born into this mindset that there is something in the cultural psyche that is paralyzing this nation into reliving and acting out the same unresolved trauma over and over.
At its very core, I see fear. Lots of it and all the time, symbolized by 400 million guns, purchased presumably due to some perceived threat to protect oneself against. The deadly guns seem like a perfect way of turning the fear of the other into threatening, dominating, and conquering others — fear is still at the root, but it can now be turned outward.
Threats, domination, and conquest are, of course, also at the root of this country's European genesis, from genocide of Indigenous peoples to the brutal subjugation of African slaves to the very construct of white supremacy to the racist compromises in the constitution. And this violent, frightened, and oppressive mindset has never been honestly processed for healing or reconciliation to occur on a broad societal basis.
That is not for trying. Every time there is a reckoning — from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights movement to BLM — there's a huge white backlash, rooted in... fear. Fear of the other, fear of losing control and power, fear of fear itself. And ever since there have been guns, they have been a great tool for the nervous oppressors to wrest back the power and control they're so afraid of losing. Sometimes, just as in Buffalo, it's quite literally a white man living up to the oppressed aggressor archetype by acting out his fear of being replaced with lethal deadly force.
But massacres like the one in Uvalde, where the shooter profile is less ideological, are still incubated within the much larger organism of conquest: from the NRA droning on and on about (assumed to be white) people's absolute right to be armed to the teeth (to hell with the well regulated militia!), to Cruz, Abbott and all the other shameless Republican power brokers invoking "good guys with guns" to justify passing laws to get even more guns into people's hands, to the town spending 40% of its budget on arming cops, to the gun shop owner selling an AR15 to a fickle 18 year old, to that 18 year old mowing down 19 innocent children, to media talking heads wondering how to better "harden" targets, train police, and if lucky very meekly ask for "common sense" gun reform, it's all part of an operating system that runs on an endless supply of fear, denial, and destruction.
So while in the past I thought it was just a matter of getting a few reasonable lawmakers together to pass some sort of gun reform bill to stop these massacres, I now believe that the only way this can happen is if there's also a significant shift in the collective psyche, a backlash to the backlash, if you will, a bending of the arc on all the other interconnected issues, from racial justice to money in politics to democracy reforms.
The good news is that I think the majority of Americans are interested to varying degrees in breaking the vicious cycles of fear and violence. But to break the stranglehold of power held disproportionately by the fearmongers whose minority rule was written into the country's DNA from the beginning, a lot of people will have to overcome the political inertia and resignation they have learned to internalize and get some skin in the game.
It's time, especially for white Americans, to shout that the emperor — including the one within — has no clothes, and to sustain that noise until a deeper transformation towards a more perfect union becomes inevitable.

I ❤️ DK Guild: A German Gingerbread Heart in Solidarity With the Workers of Daily Kos

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Help DKG Solidarity Group celebrate Valentine's Day!  This story is part of a series of “I ❤️ DK Guild” posts written by Community members to show their support for the writing, activism, and site services work of DK Guild members. All of us together make Daily Kos the most vibrant progressive community on the net. Let's do everything we can to keep it that way!






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