The Green Heart of Italy

PacianoI used to have a pet the­o­ry that in a tru­ly civ­i­lized coun­try, the phone sys­tem doesn’t work. I’m updat­ing that to “there’s no broad­band in par­adise.”

La famiglia and I just had a great vis­it back to our old stomp­ing ground in Italy where we recon­nect­ed to some old friends and a dif­fer­ent way of life.
Paciano is a tiny town on the bor­der of Umbria and Tus­cany where I lived on an organ­ic olive farm set up by David McTag­gart a decade ago. It’s a medieval hill town, pop­u­la­tion 1000, with a strange and rich his­to­ry of polit­i­cal resis­tance. My friend Pad­dy the Anar­chist tells the town’s sto­ry to my son Doon this way:

Con­tin­ue read­ing “The Green Heart of Italy”

How many Hemp Hoodies does it take to change a planet?

Alex Stef­fen over at World­Chang­ing has writ­ten a fab­u­lous, com­ment-pro­vok­ing essay on indi­vid­u­al choice ver­sus large-scale actions to save the env­iorn­ment. Much to latch on to here, but one of his more con­tro­ver­sial points is that mak­ing our indi­vid­u­al lifestyle choic­es is all well and good, but it’s not fur­ther­ing the macro-agen­da: seiz­ing the bal­lot box, seiz­ing the mar­kets, elim­i­nat­ing fos­sil fuels. It’s an artic­u­late and pas­sion­ate cry:

We need to admit that we’re at war over the def­i­n­i­tion of the future. There are a lot of pow­er­ful inter­ests spend­ing a lot of mon­ey to keep peo­ple igno­rant, make them uncer­tain, post­pone action, encour­age cyn­i­cism and apa­thy, and lock them in the men­tal pris­on of think­ing that no bet­ter future is pos­si­ble. To the extent they are suc­cess­ful, noth­ing we advo­cate can hap­pen. We need to fight back. We need to speak clear­ly, intel­li­gent­ly, and, if pos­si­ble, with humor and pas­sion. We need to label our oppo­nents (from cli­mate denial­ists to apol­o­gists for the sta­tus quo) what they are — ene­mies of the future. We need to make the nature of our times crys­tal-clear for all to see. We need to hew to the demand­ing stan­dards our actu­al real sit­u­a­tion impos­es on us — that we achieve mea­sur­able sus­tain­abil­i­ty, hon­est-to-good­ness one-plan­et liv­ing, for every­one, with­in our life­times — and scorn the men­tal tyran­ny of small goals. We need to break through the mean­ing­less chat­ter around envi­ron­men­tal and social issues, and point to gen­uine alter­na­tives, hold real con­ver­sa­tions, and cre­ate a cul­ture that speaks to the soul of our times. Con­tin­ue read­ing “How many Hemp Hood­ies does it take to change a plan­et?”

Whack a mill!

whack a mill Nice one from Green­peace USA attack­ing the Ted Kennedy oppo­si­tion to the Cape Wind project. (Sor­ry, this page has an auto-load flash — adjust your speak­ers if like me you’re annoyed by a sound blast when load­ing a page).

Ted has a man­sion on Cape Cod and has sid­ed with the brain­less posi­tion that the mills will mar the view.

Since when is a wind­mill ugly? I’ve nev­er under­stood this — to me they are grace­ful sym­bols of plan­e­tary cus­to­di­an­ship. I sail in the Ijsomeer here in Hol­land, where they dot the land­scape (or the lakescape, I guess), and they make me proud.

What also makes me proud is to see Green­peace USA going after an A-list Democ­rat for an envi­ron­men­tal­ly unsound posi­tion. Trolling through Earth Day stuff I was remem­ber­ing how insis­tent we were in the 80s about Green­peace being polit­i­cal­ly neu­tral. Today every­thing in the US is so polar­ized around liberal/conservative Democrat/Republican issue splits, but the plan­et can’t afford that squab­ble, and it shouldn’t be Greenpeace’s fight.
That wind­farm will provide home grown Amer­i­can ener­gy and Ted Kennedy oppos­es it. Come on, con­ser­v­a­tives, this ought to be YOUR cause.

–b

Of all the Earth Day stuff I saw

I looked at a lot of Earth Day stuff this week­end. This is the image that drilled into my brain the most:
leaving a light on destroys the planet
The post that got to me emo­tion­al­ly, though, was Lisa Vick­ers’ let­ter to her unborn child.

The piece I wrote for the Greenpeace.org site was an oppor­tu­ni­ty to get Alex Tingle’s Google Maps of sea lev­el rise up there on the GP site, a rec­om­men­da­tion that came from a com­ment on this blog from Lam­na Nasus and which I took to heart.
I also threw the trail­er to Al Gore’s True Hor­ror film, An Incon­ve­nient Truth, into the mix. If you haven’t seen it, check it out. If the film lives up to its pro­mo­tion, it could raise up the cli­mate chaos issue in the States the way “The Day After” did for the nuclear dis­ar­ma­ment issue back in the 80s. Fin­gers crossed.

–b

Hey, I can see my house from space!

Adm de RuijterwegI HATE Google Earth. I real­ly get lost in it. See­ing places you’ve been from a heav­en­ly per­spec­tive just shouldn’t be this addict­ing, but it is.

They’ve recent­ly upgrad­ed their maps of my adopt­ed home, Ams­ter­dam, and gol­ly, I can actu­al­ly see the blue tarp roof of my son Doon’s fort in the postage-stamp gar­den in back of our house!

I’ve been work­ing for a while to make a kind of trav­el­ogue of places I’ve been. It’s still way incom­plete, but so much fun.
(That link will only work if you have Google Earth installed. It’s out for Mac as well now. Get it here: earth.google.com)
There’s the water tow­er I climbed as a kid. There’s the place I learned that after a long time at sea, land smells like baby­food. There’s “Loy­oloa Beach” the roof of my col­lege dorm where we used to sun­bathe. And there, in all their scary moon­scap­ery, are the craters in the Nevada Desert where the US and UK used to test nuclear weapons above ground. Have a look at that and then decide if you think it’s a good idea to Nuke Iran.

Don’t Nuke Iran

Escorting missiles outDid you know that the Nether­lands is a nuclear pow­er, and the con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ment here might join the US in a nuclear strike on Iran?

Absurd as this seems, the fact is that the US plans for a nuclear strike on Iran, revealed in Sey­mour Hersh’s New York­er piece, would rely on US nukes sta­tioned in Nether­lands, Italy, Ger­many, the UK, Bel­gium, and Turkey.

And under the terms of the­se weapons place­ments, the US could do it with­out ask­ing any of those coun­tries if they’d mind ter­ri­bly enabling that attack, being com­plic­it in the deaths of up to 3 mil­lion peo­ple, and bring­ing down the inevitable reprisals and pos­si­bly a glob­al jihad down on their own heads.

Regard­less of how things go in Iran, it’s time to get those mis­siles out of Europe. They’re a cold war lega­cy, a dan­ger to peo­ple who have no say in the elec­tion of the guy who decides if they’re used, poten­tial ter­ror tar­gets, and (as if it mat­tered) com­plete­ly ille­gal under inter­na­tion­al law. (The Non­Pro­lif­er­a­tion Treaty, which the US loves and hates selec­tive­ly did declare that no land-based nukes are to be sta­tioned out­side a country’s own ter­ri­to­ry.)

It’s time that those of us who believe in Peace made our own pre-emp­tive strike. Let’s get those NATO nukes out of the equa­tion. Demand an assur­ance from the Defence Min­is­ters of the UK, Bel­gium, Nether­lands, Ger­many, Italy, and Turkey that they won’t play at the game of nuk­ing Iran. And tell them to wise up: US Nukes out of NATO.

–b

Tagging Air Force One?

air force one tagged fakeOK, this video of a grafit­ti artist tag­gin Air Force One is a fake. Marc Ecko’s speech about “Why I Tagged Air Force One” is pedan­tic and bor­ing. And instead of using the oppor­tu­ni­ty for mes­sage, he uses it for mar­ket­ing.

But what a great idea, and what a chal­lenge for some enter­pris­ing young tag­ger or polit­i­cal activist out there.
And don’t talk to me about secu­ri­ty. Back in my days of Break­ing and Enter­ing for a Good Cause, I learned a vari­a­tion on that old God­fa­ther saw: “If his­to­ry teach­es us any­thing, it’s that you can always get around secu­ri­ty.”

Roof of the Cana­di­an Embassy in Boston? Fire escape could be pulled to ground lev­el with a sim­ple hook and rope.

Nuclear Test Site in Nevada? They relied on noth­ing but desert to pro­tect that in 1983. Four of us walked over salt lakes and aban­doned min­ing trails and we were in for a four –day camp­ing trip. “A secu­ri­ty guard out here would make the May­tag Repair­man look like an over­achiev­er” jest­ed Jon Hinck.

Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty? The guard watched TV in his trail­er and made his walk around the base on the hour like clock­work. We land­ed zodi­acs at quar­ter past the hour and put a Hiroshi­ma anniver­sary mes­sage up.
The US Capi­tol build­ing? We dis­tract­ed secu­ri­ty with a decoy and scaled some scaf­fold­ing to put an anti-nuclear mes­sage on the dome.

Oth­ers in Green­peace have got­ten into UK mis­sile bases, nuclear pow­er plants, and put ban­ners on the Eif­fel Tow­er, Big Ben, the Pyra­mid of Ghiza, the stat­ue of Christ over­look­ing Rio… you name it, Green­peace has ban­nered it.
Mon­u­men­tal Ban­ners are Free Speech Crimes: not unlike the art crime of grafit­ti.

So let’s con­sid­er. If we could tag Air Force One with any mes­sage, what would it be???

Weapon of Mass Decep­tion
No Nukes (except for mine)
Osama was here 😉
If you can read this, you still live in a free coun­try
I brake for noth­ing. Iraq body count: 35,000
Ter­ror­ist on board
Best I can do on one cup of cof­fee. Help me out here!

–b

P.S. When news of my involve­ment in the ban­ner­ing of the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty in 85 reached my moth­er, she told a friend that I did it “to prove how eas­i­ly ter­ror­ists could get to the stat­ue.” I still haven’t had the con­ver­sa­tion with her that begins “Umm­mm, actu­al­ly, Mom.…”

Patrick Moore: More Chernobyls!

Many moons ago, when I worked with then-Green­peace Board Chair David McTag­gart, “Green­peace co-founder” Patrick Moore was on the board. He was a like­able enough guy if you could get past the ego (but hey, after hang­ing out with McTag­gart and his pals for a while, you get used to big egos), quick wit­ted, good with a sound bite, per­son­able.

We had one of our board meet­ings in Van­cou­ver some time after he’d resigned/got boot­ed, and we went to vis­it him at his home, where he was show­ing off his brand new, fire-engine red TR-7 sports car, pur­chased with the gains from his … fish farm.

And we were sup­posed to be impressed?

Patrick was rais­ing salmon for prof­it, not fish for food. As a young ide­al­ist, I’d real­ly looked up to Patrick. But I changed my mind that day.

As a sci­en­tist, he knew exact­ly the ecosys­tem com­pro­mis­es he made to amass the lit­tle pot of gold that bought him that car. As an envi­ron­men­tal­ist he knew exact­ly how much “green spir­it” he was show­ing off tool­ing around town in a fire-breath­ing vam­pire of pre­toleum. And as a role mod­el, he damn well should have known bet­ter than to try to impress any of us who had looked up to him in any way, shape, or form. (The salmon farm, appro­pri­ate­ly enough, failed, as most mono­cul­tures do, when a sin­gle inva­sive infec­tion wiped out his entire stock.)
Well, Patrick has lived up to and sur­passed that dis­ap­point­ment in the years since. As a paid apol­o­gist for the forest indus­try, he changed his mot­to from “A flow­er is your broth­er” to “A clearcut is just a tem­po­rary mead­ow,” and inspired the “Patrick Moore is a big fat liar” web­site as he bat­tled again­st pro­tec­tion of the Great Bear Rain­forest.
Patrick lost the “war in the woods” when less extrem­ist (and unpaid for) views pre­vailed and pro­tect­ed the most impor­tant parts of North America’s last tem­per­ate rain­forest. He was wrong about the Great Bear forest. He was wrong about his fish farm. And he was wrong when the French gov­ern­ment bombed the Green­peace ves­sel Rain­bow War­rior to think (and SAY, to a New Zealand jour­nal­ist) that it was an assas­i­na­tion attempt again­st him per­son­al­ly and “that bomb was meant for me.”
Now he’s get­ting a piece of the mul­ti-mil­lion-dol­lar PR offen­sive the Nuclear Indus­try is putting out there to say Nukes are the Answer to Cli­mate Change in the Wash­ing­ton Post.

They aren’t. And sci­en­tists who aren’t paid to have an opin­ion about nukes and car­bon pro­duc­tion know that Patrick is wrong again.

Worse, he’s a smart enough cook­ie to KNOW he’s wrong. Appro­pri­ate that his piece in the Wash­ing­ton Post appeared on East­er. He’s been ter­med an Eco-Judas before, and it looks like he’s found a new source for his 30 pieces of sil­ver.

–b

Better pictures through social software

Well I think this is just too cool. I post­ed a pic­ture at Flickr and got feed­back from Lisa (“I’ve got a Canon EOS”) Kit­son about how I might improve it: Crop the top, con­vert to black and white.

Damn. Snap­shot turns into a piece of art. This is a new expe­ri­ence for me — putting a cre­ative work out into a social envi­ron­ment in which the crowd can shape it.

And this post is com­ing to you via Flickr’s “Blog It” func­tion, a spiffy lit­tle gim­mick that writes image and post into Word­Press right from the Flickr inter­face. Except I end­ed up with a bunch of CSS in the post that I had to clean up, which takes a bit away from the auto­mat­i­cal­i­ty of the whole she­bang.

Stress. Sharks.

Jeep­ers, things at the Green­peace office have been in non-stop high gear for a while now, and I’m in that hor­ri­ble place where my to-do list is expand­ing out beyond the bound­aries of avail­able time. And that’s INCLUDING the twice a week in the office until mid­night rou­tine, which ain’t gonna hap­pen this week.

Between the (some­what) unex­pect­ed Sey­mour Her­sh rev­e­la­tions about US nuclear attack plans for Iran that kicked our Nukes-out-of-NATO cam­paign into high gear, the McDonald’s Mon­key-Mur­der­ing-McNuggets sto­ry, a new site build for our Dis­ar­ma­ment cam­paign, ongo­ing Oceans work and more than the usu­al num­ber of trains to be kept run­ning for more than the usu­al num­ber of peo­ple, the com­pe­ti­tion for the front page of the Green­peace web­site has been fierce, the dead­li­nes have been rolling in one on top of anoth­er, and things (and your hum­ble diarist) get a bit tetchy when the pace starts exceed­ing the speed lim­it — and that’s an Auto­bahn-gen­er­ous num­ber at the best of times.

I’m soooooooooooooo ready for a hol­i­day. East­er, bring it on!!!

But today is a big day for my eldest sprout, Doon, who will be going on his first can­vass­ing expe­di­tion. Those damn World Wildlife Fund peo­ple have infil­trat­ed his school with an out­stand­ing kid’s cam­paign to save the sharks (jeal­ous of their web­site, moi?) and we fig­ured a prime loca­tion for him to pick up his quo­ta of fif­teen 3 euro dona­tions would be the Green­peace Office.

I gave a talk yes­ter­day to 14 US uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents who were here with the Green­peace activist train­ing pro­gram­me. Brought them down into the base­ment to set the scene for what a Green­peace office looked like in the ear­ly 80s, and talked about can­vass­ing, and what great activist train­ing that is. You have two min­utes, max, to state your objec­tive and win your audi­ence over before that door clos­es on you. (An eter­ni­ty, now that I think about it, com­pared to the grab win­dow on the web.)

It was great to see signs of intel­li­gent life, and active rad­i­cal­ism, among Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents, and one of them came up to me after­words and said it was the first time he’d had a “pass­ing the torch” speech and that he’d found that inspir­ing — so many of the “old­er peo­ple” (ouch) that he knew who had been active in their youth were now bit­ter and dis­mis­sive of those efforts. The lat­ter is hard to hear, but the for­mer warmed the cock­les.
It’s so hard in this job to keep the long view — remem­ber­ing that the activism that is hap­pen­ing now, the action that needs to be out the door, the mes­sag­ing that needs to be rel­e­vant to a par­tic­u­lar audi­ence, also has a role in the future of activism as a whole. And that when we for­get to speak to youth, and to kids, we’re doing a dis­ser­vice to those who will fol­low.

WWF (or World Nature Fund, as they are known here in Hol­land) REALLY knows how to orga­nize kids. I’ve always loved their Pan­da Pass­port sys­tem, and I’m thor­ough­ly impressed with this shark cam­paign. Seems like every kid at Doon’s school knows the sharks are in dan­ger and the range of games and easy learn­ing mate­ri­als at their site is very cool. I’m glad they’re think­ing about that stuff.

Goodbye Lale…

Lale33, dead of can­cer. Lale was such a spark of love. Sharp as a tack, fun­ny and warm, she just walked into our lives one day as a col­league, walked a while as a friend, and walked out the next.

All day this has been haunt­ing me. I worked until almost mid­night at the office, throw­ing myself into a GoogleEarth map of Ira­ni­an tar­gets that the Bush­Hawks are prob­a­bly con­sid­er­ing for tac­ti­cal nuclear strikes, and how many casu­alties that will mean (3 mil­lion, by the reck­on­ing of the Physi­cians for Social Respon­si­bil­i­ty) and here was this sin­gle human death of some­one I knew and loved and was inspired by, snuffed out. Hov­er­ing. Some­place in a cor­ner of my mind where I couldn’t give it space, had to keep it at bay.
I man­aged to grab a moment in one of the qui­et rooms in our open-plan office. Just a moment, long enough to let some emo­tion through but not enough to let the weight of it come down. I was at work.
I was look­ing out at the sky and there was a sin­gle small smudge of cloud again­st a blue sky. And I saw Lale. And a gull flew across my vision. And I saw Lale. And I said a small good­bye, and I saw her smile in my mind’s eye.

And I went back to work.

–b

Tolerance, Tribalism, and my inability to speak Dutch

Tilly-BurkaThought-pro­vok­ing, dis­turbing arti­cle in the New York­er argues the Dutch “pil­lar” sys­tem of cul­tur­al tol­er­ance is a fail­ure, as evi­denced by the pres­ence of rad­i­cal islam­i­cism with­in its bor­ders. The mod­ern imple­men­ta­tion of the “pil­lar” sys­tem is the pro­duct of Ruud Lub­bers and the lib­er­al left in this coun­try, by which cul­tur­al sub-groups have been allowed to (and in some cas­es encour­aged to) main­tain their lan­guages and iden­ti­ties and val­ue sys­tems rather than inte­grat­ing into those of main­stream Dutch soci­ety. Jane Kramer, who wrote the piece, slams this pol­i­cy and (in my read­ing) the left’s fail­ure to con­fine the right in mak­ing this their issue — a bit of the same “why does the left miss pop­ulist oppor­tu­ni­ties that the Right cap­i­tal­izes on” analy­sis that the Democ­rats in the US have been wor­ry­ing over ever since the fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­tian right dis­cov­ered the fax machine.
I don’t want McCiv­i­liza­tion — a sin­gle homoge­nous mass. But I also found myself strug­gling to find a posi­tion again­st some of the argu­ments in this piece: that there is sim­ply no means by which one cul­ture which per­mits wife-beat­ing can live with anoth­er cul­ture which for­bids it. That aggres­sive intol­er­ance of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty can’t be defend­ed as a reli­gious right. In an Amer­i­can con­text, this is a fight in which the line is between the fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­tian right and the lib­er­al left.

Here in Hol­land, the left has cre­at­ed an envi­ron­ment of cul­tur­al tol­er­ance which has meant not just a tac­it allowance, but an active defense of the right to those fun­da­men­tal­ist val­ues.
And if you want to talk about fail­ure to inte­grate, I real­ized mid­way through the arti­cle that I learned more about the pol­i­tics and cul­ture of the Baarsjes, a neigh­bor­hood two blocks away from me, from a mag­a­zine pub­lished in Man­hat­tan than I’d learned in ten years of liv­ing here. I don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly want Dutch soci­ety to insist that I learn to love Edam Cheese, but I cer­tain­ly could have used a push to learn Dutch well enough to eaves­drop on the tram. So I’m sup­port­ing the posi­tion of the con­ser­v­a­tives, who have intro­duced manda­to­ry inte­gra­tion and lan­guage cours­es for immi­grants?? You see my predica­ment here.
Con­tin­ue read­ing “Tol­er­ance, Trib­al­ism, and my inabil­i­ty to speak Dutch”

Rare Amazon species, with ketchup

McAmazonAma­zon being cleared to grow soy which goes into the chick­en mcnuggets that go into Unhap­py meals in Europe.

I keep telling my son, Doon, that clown is evil.

Go yell about it.

And if you blog this one, tag it “McA­ma­zon,” would­ja? I have a feel­ing this one is going to have some legs, and it would be nice to be able to track it down.

I’m still try­ing to get Mov­able Type to accept a Blog Claim tag from Tech­no­rati, and if I can’t get around a mod­_se­cu­ri­ty issue I’m hav­ing with my host, I may just have to make the leap to Word­Press.

Of course, that’ll prob­a­bly bring on a whole new heap of humdingers.