Yes! Magazine

The Kadima Party, which was considered right-wing at the time of its founding in 2005, is expected to be included in the center-left coalition. Photo by Tzipi Livni.

Last month’s elections in Israel demonstrated that the Israeli electorate’s shift to the right is not inexorable. But they are unlikely to bring peace any closer by themselves.

Centrist parties—particularly a new secular group known as Yesh Atid, which won a surprising second place—did better than expected, while the right-wing Likud Bloc of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu lost seats. However, Netanyahu—who has made clear his unwillingness to allow for the creation of a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel, and who has escalated the illegal colonization of occupied East Jerusalem and other places in the West Bank—will likely remain prime minister.

If Israelis know that U.S. support will be forthcoming whether they pursue peace or not, they are likely to continue supporting the occupation of the West Bank.

The good news is that Netanyahu will need to put together a coalition government with more centrist parties, instead of with far-right and fundamentalist parties, as observers had expected. This makes war with Iran and other provocative actions by the Israeli government less likely.

Exit polls indicate that Israelis were primarily interested in domestic issues, especially the declining fortunes of the country’s middle class, which is struggling with stagnant wages, rising housing costs, and reckless privatization that has made a handful of Israelis very wealthy at the expense of the majority. In the decades since the government of the social-democratic Labor Party, Israel has gone from being one of the most egalitarian countries in the world to one of the most unequal, at least among advanced industrialized countries. A series of right-wing governments have shredded the country’s once-vaunted social welfare system, and exciting socialist initiatives like the kibbutz movement have faded. However, the Israeli people have engaged in massive protests against the growing economic injustice, including the first general strike in more than a generation, as well as demonstrations and occupations involving tens of thousands, easily eclipsing Occupy Wall Street in their numbers.

However, left-wing parties did not seem able to harness the energy of this movement, and progressives had to settle for the prospect that the new governing coalition will likely emerge from the center-right rather than extreme right and fundamentalist parties. Indeed, as an indication of how far to the right Israeli politics have gone, the Kadima Party, founded in 2005 by former right-wing prime minister and war criminal Ariel Sharon, is now considered part of the “center-left” bloc.

While Israeli politics has shifted to a more hardline position, the Palestine Liberation Organization has become more moderate. The PLO-led Palestine Authority, now recognized as a state by the United Nations, is solidly under moderate and pragmatic leadership, and has agreed to a peace settlement along the lines of the one proposed by President Bill Clinton in December 2000—a demilitarized Palestinian state on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, including Arab-populated parts of East Jerusalem, with some limited territorial swaps to allow Israel to keep most of its settlements.

The best hope for peace will have to come from the U.S. pressuring Israel to end its unjust policies toward the Palestinians.

This would leave Israel with 78 percent of historical Palestine and the Palestinians with 22 percent. Netanyahu, however, insists this is too much and instead supports only limited Palestinian autonomy over a series of tiny non-contiguous cantons in parts of the West Bank, with Israel effectively annexing the rest of the occupied territory. President Barack Obama has called for mutual compromise between these two positions.

Like citizens of other countries, Israelis are divided between left, right, and center. Those on the left—for either principled or pragmatic reasons—recognize the need for their government to make the necessary territorial compromises for peace. Those on the right—for either religious or nationalist reasons—are unwilling to do so.

The majority of Israelis remain in the middle. They are willing to accept these necessary compromises, but only if they know there will be negative consequences for doing otherwise, such as losing the more than $3 billion in annual U.S. aid or the assurance that the U.S. will veto U.N. Security Council resolutions that challenge the Israeli occupation. A threatened suspension of the U.S. economic largesse might finally force more Israelis to make the connection between the heavily-subsidized settlement housing in the West Bank and the lack of affordable housing within Israel itself, or the huge financial burden of the continued occupation with the cutbacks in domestic spending.

Conversely, if Israelis know that U.S. support will be forthcoming regardless, this key swing constituency is likely to continue backing parties that support the occupation and colonization of the West Bank.

As a result, the best hope for peace will have to come from the United States pressuring Israel to end its unjust, illegal, and ultimately self-destructive policies toward the Palestinians. And that will only happen if the American people are willing to pressure the Obama administration to do so.

Stephen Zunes wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Stephen is a professor of Politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco.

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Yair Lapid, a leader of Israel's new centrist political party, speaks to supporters on election night. Photo by The Israel Project.

The results weren’t nearly as dire as many predicted. The Israeli elections last month didn’t bring about a complete victory for the far right (and Israel’s far-right is very far indeed!). Right-wing prime minister Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s Likud Party, in alliance with the right-wing extremist Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel is Our Home) party, lost at least 10 seats.

Only the People of the United States Can End Israel’s Occupation
Peace will remain out of reach until the American people pressure the Obama Administration to end Israeli impunity.

The biggest victor was the new centrist party Yesh Atid, led by charismatic television personality Yair Lapid. He ran on the basis of personality and a claim to represent Israel’s middle-class interests, from the price of cheese to affordable housing to his most popular call, for “sharing the burden”—a euphemism for drafting ultra-Orthodox young Jewish Israelis into the military. Israeli commentators described the new Knesset as divided almost down the middle between center-right and center-left blocs.

That’s all good. But. The campaign was waged virtually entirely on economic and social issues affecting the 80 percent Jewish population of Israel; the needs of the 20 percent of Israeli citizens who are Palestinians were largely ignored. Israel’s continuing occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the besieged Gaza Strip were off the agenda, let alone its violations of international law and human rights. On the question of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the elections represented a clear victory for Israel’s status quo: the occupation will be left in place.

Palestine’s new status as a non-member state at the U.N. will allow it to join the International Criminal Court.

The far-right settler party known as Jewish Home, led by the American-Israeli Naftali Bennett, won 12 seats, and is a likely coalition partner with the Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu bloc. It calls directly for annexing about 60 percent of the West Bank, with few, if any, rights for Palestinians living there. And while it may be useful to clarify what mainstream discourse means in Israel, the rising power of a party explicitly calling for consolidation and legalization of Israeli apartheid –defined in international law as a legal system that privileges one group over another—is hardly something to cheer about.

Sure, Yair Lapid says he supports a two-state solution, and has said that even though the Palestinians can’t be trusted, Israel should still negotiate. (On exactly what Israel should negotiate isn’t so clear.) But doing anything to actually end Israel’s occupation wasn’t anywhere on his election platform. And of course Bibi Netanyahu says he supports a two-state solution, too—the kind of “two-state solution” that leaves Israel in permanent control, that leaves non-contiguous Palestinian Bantustans scattered across 40 percent of the West Bank while 60 percent remains fully under Israeli control, that leaves East Jerusalem part of the “undivided” capital of Israel, and Gaza remains permanently under siege.

Some optimistic Israelis seem to be hoping that the elections reflect the broad social protests that erupted in the summer of 2011, with hundreds of thousands pouring into the streets and the creation of a protest tent community on Tel Aviv’s upscale Rothschild Boulevard. That may be so, but one of the unfortunate things that the election results share with those protests was the complete sidelining of the occupation. Israeli activists made a conscious decision—rejected by a few brave Palestinian and Jewish participants—not to include ending the occupation in their wide-ranging demands for social justice. To do so, they felt, would have divided the “left.”

Looking beyond the election

The real optimism of the moment stems not from the Israeli elections, but from the continuing rise of nonviolent resistance across the Palestinian territory and throughout the world. The most recent development is the creation of Palestinian villages on Palestinian land under Israeli control. Utilizing the tactics of illegal Jewish settlers, who seize and hold Palestinian land, and build outposts considered illegal even under Israeli law (which of course does not acknowledge that under international law, specifically Article 49 of the Geneva Conventions, all settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are illegal), the young Palestinian activists are claiming land as well. The difference is that they are building these new villages on Palestinian land, not occupying someone else’s.

The Israeli government response, of course, has been entirely different when those claiming land are Palestinians. The Jewish outposts are mostly left alone, with legal efforts underway in the courts and in the Knesset to legalize them. On the rare occasion that one is shut down, there is great care taken that no violence is used. In closing down the Palestinian villages, however, significant violence has been routine. At least six Palestinian protesters were hospitalized after the first resistance village was shut down by the military.

One of the unfortunate things that the election results share with the street protest of 2011 was the complete sidelining of the occupation.

Outside of the occupied territories, Palestinians continue to investigate possible trajectories for engaging the International Criminal Court, perhaps the International Court of Justice, and other United Nations-related agencies. The goal is to take advantage of the U.N. General Assembly’s recognition of Palestine as a non-member state on Nov. 29—a status that allows the State of Palestine to sign treaties, join the ICC, and potentially the ICJ as well.

And globally, the civil society movement known as BDS—or boycott, divestment and sanctions—continues to grow. Initiated by a call from Palestinian civil society in 2005, the movement continues to bring nonviolent economic and cultural pressure on Israel to end its violations of international law and human rights. In one recent victory, the great musician Stevie Wonder cancelled a long-scheduled benefit concert for the Israeli military after other cultural workers, African and African-American leaders, and a wide range of international activists urged him to do so.

Settlement of Ma'ale Adumim in the West Bank, where Sodastream machines are manufactured. Photo by Decode Jerusalem.

And the widely anticipated (and multi-million dollar) SuperBowl ad for SodaStream was spoofed on Youtube, mimicked online, and ridiculed on Twitter—undermining the popular upscale soft drink machine’s appeal. SodaStream is marketed as “made in Israel,” but is actually manufactured in the industrial zone known as Mishor Adumim, a sector of the huge city-sized illegal settlement of Ma’ale Adumim in the West Bank. The factory exploits Palestinian land, resources, and labor.

Israel’s settlement policy began and continued throughout years of Labor Party governments. A new Knesset, even one including a new “centrist” party that is centrist only relative to Israel’s far-right polity, is not likely to change things now.

As Palestinians have learned, after 46 years of occupation and 65 years of dispossession, they’re going to have to rely on international law, human rights, changing U.S. and global policy, and their own work to end the occupation.

Phyllis Bennis wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions.Phyllis is a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. Her books include Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer.

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The new Rosa Parks stamp. Photo by Joe Seer / Shutterstock.com

Rosa Parks, whom the U.S. Congress called "the first lady of civil rights", and "the mother of the freedom movement," was born 100 years ago today, on February 4, 1913, to James and Leona Edwards McCauley. To celebrate the centennial of her birth, the United States Postal Service will unveil a stamp honoring her legacy.

Many accounts of Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the rear of the bus on December 1, 1955, focus on her being tired or her feet hurting. Too few review the life that had made her tired of injustice.

As a young child living with her mother and grandparents in Pine Level, Ala., Rosa sat at the feet of her grandfather, Sylvester Edwards, who with a shotgun in his lap guarded the family at night from the Ku Klux Klan. According to a biography of Parks by Douglas Brinkley, Sylvester Edwards was a fearless “race man,” an adherent to the beliefs of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

Rosa Parks recalls many black soldiers returning to the South after World War I, expecting respect and equality:

Whites didn’t like blacks having that kind of attitude, so they started doing all kinds of violent things to black people to remind them that they didn’t have any rights…I heard a lot about black people being found dead and nobody knew what happened. Other people would just pick them up and bury them. “I gained strength to persevere in my work for freedom, not just for blacks, but all oppressed people.”

In 1931, Rosa met Raymond Parks in Montgomery, Ala. Parks, a barber, was a charter member of the Montgomery NAACP, as fearless as Rosa Parks’ grandfather. The young couple married in 1932 and became involved in the Scottsboro Defense. The case contested the death sentences of nine African-American boys and men, none over the age of 20, accused of raping two white females. The meetings were held secretly because of the great risk of harm to those who protested the death sentences. Though it took decades to release the last of the Scottsboro nine, Rosa and Raymond Parks continued to be active in the movement. The last Scottsboro prisoner was released in 1950.

Voting rights and women’s rights work

Rosa and Raymond Parks were involved in organizing Voter League meetings, and encouraged their friends and neighbors to register to vote. Like the Scottsboro meetings, these meetings were held secretly because of violence aimed at activists. Rosa Parks was required to take the qualifying exam to vote three times because of the racial discrimination aimed at keeping the voter rolls “lily-white.” In her autobiography, My Story, Parks states had she not “passed” the test to vote the fourth time, she planned to “bring suit against the voter registration board.”

Rosa Parks continued her NAACP investigations through the 1940s and 50s, at great risk to her own life.

By 1943, Rosa Parks was the secretary of the NAACP of Montgomery. In that role, she took statements of people who were victims of sexualized violence and researched their cases. In 1944 she went to Abbeville, Ala., where she investigated the brutal rape of Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old mother and wife. Taylor was abducted and raped by six white men while coming home from church with two other church members. According to author Danielle McGuire, police authorities ordered Parks to leave while she was investigating the crime at Taylor’s home.

The courage of Rosa Parks and many others, including her friend Johnnie Carr, was shown in continuing this work, where those known to be involved received multiple death threats. Mrs. Taylor’s home was firebombed by white vigilantes and she had to move out. The organizational structure built during the Recy Taylor case was groundwork for the Women’s Political Council (WPC) and the Montgomery Improvement Association. Rosa Parks continued her NAACP investigations through the 1940s and 50s, at great risk to her own life.

Parks first met the bus driver James F. Blake in 1943, according to McGuire. Blake was known as a “vicious bigot” who called black women passengers “bitches” and “coons.” In 1943, Parks was told by Blake to put her money in the meter, then get off the bus and get back on using the back door. When Parks said she did not “see the need of getting off and getting back on,” Blake grabbed her by her coat sleeve and pulled her toward the door. Parks advised Blake that “he better not hit her.” As Parks was about to leave the bus, she intentionally dropped her purse and sat down. This act enraged Blake and he told her, “Get off my bus!” Parks got off the bus, vowing never to ride again. Twelve years later, on December 1, 1955, Parks, distracted, got on the bus with Blake again. On that day, she was arrested and the Montgomery Bus Boycott was born.

White women activists in Montgomery were involved with the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Virginia Durr, a prominent white liberal and eventual employer of Parks, who was an excellent seamstress, mentored Parks by encouraging her to attend the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn. Though first developed to address oppressed workers in the Appalachian mountains, by the 1950s the school had evolved into a training ground for civil rights activists. The summer before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Parks attended a workshop there.

“At Highlander,” Parks recalls, “I found out for the first time in my adult life, that this could be a unified society, that there was such a thing as people of different races and backgrounds meeting together in workshops and living together in peace and harmony. It was a place I was very reluctant to leave. I gained strength there to persevere in my work for freedom, not just for blacks, but all oppressed people.”

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The women’s political council

In 1946, Mary Fair Burkes, a member of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church where the radical civil rights activist Vernon Johns was minister, created the Women’s Political Council. (WPC). Many of the WPC Members were women faculty at Alabama State College, as was Burkes herself. Burkes had been attacked by a “club wielding police officer.” Many of the women of the WPC had stories of brutal racial treatment by Montgomery’s police, bus drivers, and white citizens. The WPC eventually had over 300 women members, according to journalist Juan Williams.

Other inequalities blacks experienced while riding the bus included a requirement that “negro” passengers pay at the front of the bus and then go to the back and re-board

In 1950, Burkes turned the leadership of the WPC over to Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, a colleague at Alabama State College. Robinson had also been the victim of a vicious verbal attack by a Montgomery bus driver, who stood over her and pulled his arm back as if to strike her. Stumbling off the bus, Jo Ann Robinson was crying and recalls being “inundated” by “waves of humiliation.”

In her book about the bus boycott, Robinson describes daily and brutal insults against the black citizens of Montgomery, including physical beatings, assaults, wrongful arrests for disorderly conduct, verbal degradation with obscene language, financial fines, and the death by shooting of Rosa Parks’ neighbor, a veteran known as Brooks. Other inequalities blacks experienced while riding the bus included limitations on service and a requirement that “negro” passengers pay at the front of the bus and then go to the back and re-board, leading to injuries or a slammed door, even though the rider had paid.

Robinson points out the unequal racial treatment on Montgomery buses, which led to the abuse and arrest of Rosa Parks and many others:

The front ten double seats on each bus (out of a total seating for thirty-six) were reserved for whites, whether there were enough whites riding the bus to occupy them or not. Even when no whites were aboard, those seats were reserved, just in case one or two did ride. In many instances black riders had to stand over those empty seats. Since about 70 percent of all bus patrons were black, especially on certain buses and in certain areas, it seemed to many riders that the reservation of seats was unnecessary.

The day-to-day injustices and emotional trauma on Montgomery buses led to community conflict, including domestic violence, juvenile delinquency, and dependency abuses. Jo Ann Robinson recalls that, “In 1956, the superintendent of a local hospital, which customarily treated many weekend fight victims, told a reporter that since the boycott began, the hospital had had fewer patients.”

The WPC, led by Robinson, received more than 30 complaints against the Montgomery City Lines bus company, with some going as far back as 1953.

From 1950 to 1955, Robinson worked with other activist women, including A.W. West, N.W. Burkes, J.E. Pierce, Georgia Gilmore, Edwyna Marketta, Ella Mae Stovell, Lettie M. Anderson, Horace Burton, Ruby Hall, and Ella Mae Henderson. These were only some of those who took up the cause of abuses on the city’s buses, in addition to the “shameful and deplorable one-sidedness” of the city’s segregated parks and recreation systems. As Mary Fair Burkes pointed out, “We were not fighting segregation, as much as abuses of Negroes.”

In May 21, 1954, Robinson sent a letter to Mayor W.A. “Tacky” Gayle, stating a warning. Since “three-fourths of the riders of these public conveyances are Negros,” she wrote, “if Negros did not patronize them, [the buses] could not possibly operate. More and more our people are already arranging with neighbors and friends to ride to keep from being insulted and humiliated by bus drivers.”

While neither Colvin nor Smith received the publicity that Rosa Parks did, both are now recognized in history as champions of change.

In March 1955, Robinson writes, the WPC was brought into public action after Claudette Colvin, a 10th-grader at Booker T. Washington High School, was physically removed, dragged, and pushed, then arrested from a Montgomery bus by a Montgomery police officer, who called the teenager a “black whore.”

The community responded to Claudette Colvin’s arrest by organizing the Citizen’s Coordinating Committee. After meeting with the police commission and the manager of the bus company, nothing was done, though the committee was able to show dozens of complaints filed by citizens with the WPC and other organizations. Claudette Colvin was found guilty of assault and battery and of violating state segregation laws. She was sentenced to “indefinite probation” and declared a juvenile delinquent.

In October 1955, Louise Smith, an eighteen-year-old maid, refused to move to the colored section. “I am not going to move,” she said, “I got the privilege to sit here like anybody else.” Though the NAACP met with her family through E. D. Nixon and WPC, again the decision was made not to make a constitutional challenge with Ms. Smith as the lead Plaintiff.

The cases of Claudette Colvin and Louise Smith were eventually selected as part of a class action lawsuit, which later formed the basis of the U.S Supreme Court’s ruling that struck down Montgomery’s segregations laws. While neither Colvin nor Smith received the publicity that Rosa Parks did while these events were occurring, both are now recognized in history as champions of change. The intense work around the Colvin and Smith cases primed Montgomery and the world for the visionary organizing of the 13-month bus boycott that would begin months later, on December 1, 1955.

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The courage of Rosa Parks’ arrest

On December 1, 1955, a distracted Rosa Parks got on the Cleveland Avenue bus with James F. Blake, the same operator who had mistreated her in 1943. Parks knew well the risk she took in protesting on the bus. On August 12, 1950, Brooks, an African-American veteran of World War II and neighbor of the Parks family, tried to board a bus, but the bus driver C.L. Hood alleged he was too drunk to ride. When Brooks protested, the bus driver waved down a police officer, M.E. Mills, while pushing Brooks off the bus. As Brooks struggled to get up, the police officer shot him dead. The officer was cleared of all wrongdoing.

“I did not want to be continually humiliated over something I had no control over: the color of my skin.”

When Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, she had twelve years of her NAACP investigator’s notes on nearly every case of racial brutality in and around Montgomery. There was no way to be without fear, but she “held herself steady” as the arrest occurred.

Learning of the arrest, the WPC sprang into action. Jo Ann Robinson and two of her student assistants met in the basement of Alabama State University and copied, cut, and bundled 52,500 flyers, which read, in part:

Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down. It is the second time since the Claudette Colvin case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing. This has to be stopped. Negroes have rights, too, for if Negroes did not ride the buses, they could not operate. Three-fourths of the riders are Negroes, yet we are arrested, or have to stand over empty seats. If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue. The next time it may be you, or your daughter or mother. This woman’s case will come up on Monday. We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don’t ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday … Please stay off all buses Monday.

Rosa Parks’ arrest became a transformative moment in human history.

“I was determined to achieve the total freedom that our history lessons taught us we were entitled to, no matter what the sacrifice,” she recalled in her autobiography. “When I declined to give up my seat, it was not that day, or bus, in particular. I just wanted to be free like everybody else. I did not want to be continually humiliated over something I had no control over: the color of my skin.”

By the evening that day, Rosa Parks, Raymond Parks, her attorneys Fred Gray and Clifford Durr, the NAACP’s E.D Nixon, and Virginia Durr were all brainstorming. They decided that Rosa Parks would challenge, with courage in the face of her own fears, Montgomery’s bus segregation ordinance on constitutional grounds. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund would support the suit, if necessary. With reason, Raymond Parks was fearful of his wife taking such a prominent role in a social justice movement.

History records a mass mobilization of community forces around the Montgomery bus boycott. The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was born, a coalition of civil rights organizations, churches, labor, WPC, NAACP, and black bus-riding citizens. Women held down the day-to-day work of the MIA, though most of the officers were prominent men, including the elected president, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Stalwarts of the MIA included Hazel Gregory, Maude Ballou, Erna Dungy, and Martha Johnson, to name just a few. White supporters Virginia Durr and Clara Hard Rutledge built support for the bus boycott with Montgomery’s white citizens.

The backbone of the ridership consisted of low-income domestic workers, cooks, nurses, and maids. Without their support and organizational involvement, the bus boycott could not have been a success.

The WPC members became a part of the MIA as well, with Jo Ann Robinson starting a newsletter for the new group, which proved a crucial organizing tool and became part of the success of this people’s movement.

The road to victory

The MIA also organized an alternative transportation system, which was one of the keys to the bus boycott’s success. The boycott affected the entire city, and the MIA tried to cover every need. With few exceptions, the rides were free. However, a fee was charged for rides to or from areas beyond the normal limits of the city bus lines. According to Robinson’s book, each day throughout the boycott some 325 private cars picked up passengers from 43 dispatch stations and 42 pickup stations.

Though the MIA first sought to negotiate with the city leaders, it became clear no compromise could be reached with them. Indeed, the White Citizens Council grew along with the boycott, employing tactics of violence and arrest of black passengers waiting for a drive to their destination. Violence was also targeted at the leaders of the MIA, including the firebombing of the homes of Dr. King and E.D. Nixon. Others received repeated threats.

One hundred and fifteen of the boycott leaders were arrested—including Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jo Ann Robinson, based on the decision of a grand jury of seventeen whites on February 21, 1956. The arrests were reversed only after an appeal to a three-judge federal court in June  1956.

Yet the catalyst for change had already occurred.

On December 17, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Montgomery’s unequal busing laws unconstitutional in Browder v Gayle. But Montgomery and its leadership, intransigent in its refusal to give up its unequal laws, refused to follow the Court’s edict until federal marshals enforced it on December 20, 1956.

Rosa L. Parks and thousands of other citizens made the Montgomery Bus boycott a profound example of a successful people’s movement.

Grace Lee Boggs has been an activist for more than 60 years and is the author of the autobiography Living for Change. Civil rights attorney Alice Jennings is a co-founder of the Rosa and Raymond Parks Endowment Trust and of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership. In 2009, the North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE) created the Rosa Parks and Grace Lee Boggs Award for Outstanding Service.

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Chris Woolery, a residential energy specialist for How$mart, explains a test of energy efficiency to Larry Watson of Flemingsburg, Ky. Photo by MACED.

Jamie Blair had owned his own business for about seven years when he started to think it was missing a crucial piece. He was installing heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems in and around Paintsville, Ky., but heated air isn’t much good if it leaks out through poorly sealed doors or underinsulated attics. That was right around the time he discovered How$martKY, a collaborative program designed to encourage better energy efficiency in Kentucky homes.

“Ten years ago, you never really thought about it,” Blair explained. “You went in and put the unit in, and you didn’t care how tight the house was or how well it was insulated.”

The Kentucky pilot works with 17 contractors, but Kansas works with hundreds—all of them now advocates for energy efficiency.

But all that is beginning to change. In 2011, Blair and his employees joined up with How$mart for hands-on training, learning how to perform energy audits and install higher-efficiency insulation. The homes where this training took place belonged to customers of four local energy cooperatives, which had partnered with How$mart.

“Now we feel pretty comfortable that we can come in and do a full-service retrofit,” Blair said.

Operated by the Eastern Kentucky-based Mountain Association for Community Economic Development (MACED), which seeks "economic alternatives" to "to make Appalachian communities better places to live," How$mart collaborates with homeowners, energy co-ops, and contractors to make local houses more energy-efficient. The houses get better insulation, HVAC, heat pumps, sealing—or all of the above—and the homeowners pay for everything on their utility bills, so there’s relatively little paperwork. The program not only helps the homeowner save money on every bill, but also creates an economic ripple effect by training contractors and cutting expenses for energy companies.

The potential environmental impact is profound. The pilot program has cut energy usage by an average of 20 percent in How$mart homes. That amounts to an annual projected savings of 552,829 kWh—equivalent to 390 metric tons of climate-warming carbon dioxide. It’s more energy than the entire country of Vietnam saved during Earth Hour 2010, when 20 cities and provinces turned off their lights for an hour—an impressive feat for just 108 Kentucky homes.

The program hasn’t just cut carbon emissions—it’s also spurred small-business growth. Since starting with How$mart, Blair has hired three new people to keep up with the extra work. His company now conducts energy audits with customers whether they’re with How$mart or not. And in the next few months, he plans to expand his business to include insulation and add on another three men.

Training local professionals

East Kentucky Power Cooperative (EKPC) first approached MACED with what might seem like an unlikely problem for an energy generator: Its customers were using too much power. As a result, EKPC had to purchase power from other providers, which was hurting its bottom line.

As it happened, MACED was already exploring ways of making energy efficiency more appealing to people in Appalachia. That’s how How$martKY was born.

Midwest Energy saw customer satisfaction among How$mart participants soar to 97 percent.

In two years of cooperation with four energy co-ops powered by EKPC, How$martKY has created five to 10 jobs for local contracting companies and saved customers almost $61,000, according to program coordinator Bill Blair.

The process starts when a homeowner asks his or her energy co-op for an efficiency audit. How$mart or a co-op staffer conducts the audit, though local contractors like Jamie Blair join in to learn the ropes. If the homeowner qualifies for the program, the contractor sets about repairing or replacing anything that is driving up the bill—whether it’s insufficient attic insulation or an oversized furnace. Finally, How$mart checks the quality of the contractor’s work. The contractor is welcome to come along during these inspections, but either way, he’s responsible for fixing any problems. It’s a part of the education process, Bill Blair explained—a way for contractors to learn from their mistakes.

Homeowners pay for their retrofitting in installments on their monthly bill. The average monthly installment comes out to just under $40, but homeowners save about $50 a month on average. In fact, How$mart won’t take on a project unless it’s sure the homeowner will save money each and every month.

Blair doesn’t like to call that financing a loan, perhaps because it makes it sound riskier for co-ops than it is. After all, customers pay back installments at 3 percent interest like any other loan—but unlike most loans, customers end up with more money in their pockets and fewer reasons to skip payments.

John Smith, owner of Smith Insulation Inc. in Flemingsburg, Ky., says he’s had trouble convincing customers that highly efficient spray foam insulation is ultimately a worthwhile investment.

“I’ve always been looking for ways to help the homeowner to be able to afford spray foam insulation by looking for tax credits and rebates,” Smith said, “and that’s how I found MACED.”

Experienced contractors like Smith appreciate How$martKY because it offers third-party validation of their work and the chance to spark word-of-mouth interest. But for those contractors seeking more extensive training, How$martKY’s namesake program in Kansas offers continuing education credits and a set of standards for HVAC size. The Kentucky pilot works with 17 contractors, but Kansas works with hundreds—all of them now advocates for energy efficiency.

Green customers are happy customers?

When Barb and Steve Ritchie signed up with How$mart to install a new furnace and insulation in their house in Ewing, Ky., the bill came to nearly $14,000.

It’s a daunting number. But a Kentucky Home Performance rebate helped, and their monthly bill is lower than it was before.

The results were striking: In 2011, the Ritchies used 28,406 kWh of energy. In 2012, that number dropped to 14,651 kWh. Barb Ritchie estimates they’re saving $400 a month now that they no longer have gas delivered for heating—not to mention the savings on their bill.

“I just feel like I was very blessed,” she said. “This is the warmest and coolest our house has ever been.”

Mr. and Mrs. Purdon, of Maysville, Ky., are How$mart customers. Photo by MACED.

Ritchie’s reaction isn’t unique.

“Most of the time they’re not going to say, ‘I’m saving a lot of money,’” Blair explained. “They say, ‘I’m actually comfortable in my house.’”

Customer satisfaction is a powerful incentive for utilities to take on programs like How$mart, Blair added. And Mike Volker, director of regulatory and energy services at Midwest Energy, Inc., in Kansas, has the numbers to prove it.

Midwest Energy took its inspiration for the original How$mart program from Pay As You Save, a plan developed by the Vermont-based Energy Efficiency Institute. After making a few tweaks, How$mart Kansas became the first utility in the world to implement the concept comprehensively, starting in 2007 with a four-county pilot.

Since then, Midwest Energy saw customer satisfaction among How$mart participants soar to 97 percent. Compare that to the 85 percent customer-satisfaction rate the company observes overall, and you can see why the program has expanded to 41 counties covering most of western Kansas.

Scaling it up

In Kansas, the original How$mart program now saves more than 1.9 million kWh of electricity and 234,000 therms of gas per year. Over 20 years, the reduction could amount to nearly 50,000 tons of CO2. Midwest Energy has invested $5 million in How$mart, but the program has also disproved the notion that green-friendly projects must be a financial drain.

A 2009 report estimates the U.S. could cut energy consumption 23 percent by 2020 by implementing efficiency measures alone.

In fact, How$mart consistently breaks even and could do even better. Midwest Energy doesn’t turn a profit on the program because its funding options are designed to be accessible to a wider demographic, including low-income households. But according to Volker, it has the potential to be just as profitable as regular utility service.

That profitability is possible in large part because efficiency measures beat out renewables for cost-efficiency hands-down. A 2009 report from consulting firm McKinsey & Company estimates the U.S. could cut energy consumption 23 percent by 2020 by implementing efficiency measures alone. Another study estimated that while wind power costs $38 per ton of CO2 saved, replacing incandescent lights with LEDs saves $159 per ton.

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That means any utility, co-op or not, could find a program like How$mart beneficial, Volker said.

Similar programs have already sprung up in Georgia and South Carolina. And when MACED launched How$martKY, Volker was there to help.

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“Doing energy efficiency is a lot less sexy, shall we say, compared to putting in some shiny black photovoltaics or a wind turbine,” Volker says. “But very few people would disagree with me when I say the most cost-effective kilowatt hour is the one you never use.”

MACED and three of its partner co-ops have applied for a tariff with the Kentucky Public Service Commission to transform How$mart from a pilot to a permanent program.

“We’re hoping to add four or five new co-ops this year,” Blair said. “Our goal really is to see every electric provider in the state pick it up.”

For contractors like Jamie Blair and customers like Barb Ritchie, environmental benefits are just an added bonus. Better lives and livelihoods are the everyday results they see — and that might just be enough to inspire grassroots efforts that help reign in carbon emissions on a nationwide scale.

Erin L. McCoy wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas and practical actions. Erin worked as a newspaper reporter and photographer in Kentucky for almost two years. She is now a Seattle-based freelance writer specializing in education, environment, cultural issues, and travel, informed by her time teaching English in Malaysia and other travels. Contact her at elmccoy [at] gmail [dot] com or on Twitter @ErinLMcCoy.

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Permaculture promotes sustainability and self-reliance by creating managed ecosystems—modeled on natural ones—right in our backyards. It’s “garden farming,” says Peter Bane in The Permaculture Handbook. Think you don’t have enough room? Bane grew more than 150 species on less than 2,000 square feet. He identifies 12 principles to guide your permaculture project.

1. Observe and interact.

Learn the patterns of your land. Where does the rain run off? Where does the wind come from? What’s sunny and what’s in the shade?

2. Catch and store energy.

You get a gift of energy from the sun. Use it to replace the fossil energy that’s changing our climate.

3. Get a yield (or harvest).

Natural systems produce a surplus, representing the captured free energy from the sun. In a managed ecosystem, we can harvest that surplus. The harvest may be as direct as picking an apple or it may take several steps: grass makes hay to feed goats that produce both manure to feed more plants and meat for humans to eat.

4. Self-regulate and accept feedback.

Taking too much out will make the system break down. If your harvest is sparse, take it as a lesson: find a balance between yield and maintaining the soil.

5. Use and value nature’s gifts.

If we focus only on products, we can miss the bonuses that nature provides. Chickens, for instance, produce eggs and meat. At the same time they increase soil fertility and will do light tilling as they scratch for bugs and seeds.

6. Make no waste.

In nature, everything’s food for something else—there’s no “away” where waste can go. Use animals, worms, and composting to make food for the soil.

7. Design from pattern to details.

Nature has had billions of years to work out how to design systems. Follow natural patterns to make the movement of nutrients and the interactions between plants, animals, and humans as efficient as they are in nature.

8. Integrate, don’t segregate.

There’s no separate living space in a forest and nothing that serves a single purpose. Trees provide shade for plants on the forest floor, habitat for birds and animals, and an annual supply of food for plants, animals, and birds. Integrating living and growing spaces makes for more production and more comfort.

9. Choose small and slow solutions.

The fast pace of modern life is not the pace of nature. It also requires huge amounts of fossil energy. Use the simplest, lowest-energy tools and processes. It may take more time, but it’s sustainable.

10. Cultivate diversity.

In natural systems, there’s always a mix of plants and animals. Include native plants and a wide variety of cultivated ones. It’s more resilient, more productive, and more interesting.

11. Mind the margins and look to the edges.

Where different environments connect is where the most biological action is: the edges of swamps and rivers, the border between forest and meadow.

12. Cultivate vision and respond to change.

Once your ecosystem is in place, the richness of its life allows it to adapt to changing conditions. Your observation and interaction allow you to help with that adaptation.

Doug Pibel wrote this article for What Would Nature Do?, the Winter 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Doug is managing editor of YES! The information in this article was sourced from The Permaculture Handbook by Peter Bane.

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I received a phone call recently from someone in the media, who introduced himself by way of exclaiming “Is it true that you have a family of four and live on less than $45,000 per year? And if so, how is that POSSIBLE?”

I answered his questioin, then hung up and ran my latest financial numbers. Turns out I’d lied. This year’s figure was less. MUCH less. Bob doesn’t lovingly refer to me as his “Cheap Mick Wife” for nothing.

Soon after, I received an email from a reader who had just come into an inheritance from her mother. She wanted my advice on how to invest it responsibly.

My first reaction, of course, was that I’m the wrong person to ask. I’m definitely not an expert on how to spend money. I’m an expert in how not to spend money.

I looked over at my financial calculations scratched on the back-side of a post-it note (yes, even they get re-used). It’s definitely been a tough year for cash flow, but it certainly hasn’t felt like our family has been living on so little money. We have a lovely home, we eat well, we have lots of fun, we’re warm, and we don’t worry about how we’ll keep the lights on.

For me, that should be the objective when investing money. Our culture typically instructs us to think of investing in terms of generating interest, so that we’ll have more money, so that we can invest more money, and eventually have a higher income as a result. It assumes a continual growth of the economy. Bob and I don’t believe our economy can (or should) be in a state of continual growth.

Our family financial goals are different. When we have extra money to invest, we want to use it in a way that will enable us to enjoy a good quality of life in perpetuity, no matter what happens in the mainstream economy, with the weather, and no matter what our annual income happens to be in any given year. Knowing this about our financial philosophy, here is how I would advise anyone to think about investing the occasional cash windfall:

When Bob and I have had the extra cash, we’ve used it for a woodstove, solar hot water and electricity, blown-in insulation, and replacement windows.

1. Lower your cost of living. First and foremost, this means paying off any interest-bearing debts. Monthly payments of any kind rack up the monthly income demands, and you get nothing in exchange for paying interest. Paying off interest-bearing debt is a guaranteed return on your investment. Get rid of credit card payments, pay off the student loans and car loan, get rid of the mortgage, or pay it down as much as possible. Once you’ve eliminated all debt, turn your attention to lowering your household expenses. When Bob and I have had the extra cash, we’ve used it for a woodstove, solar hot water and electricity, blown-in insulation, and replacement windows. We’ve also used it to do upkeep on our house, so that we’re not panicking about a leaking roof at a time when cash flow may be in the negative. For some folks, this might even mean buying a home in a place where the cost of living is cheaper, or moving closer to a job to cut down transportation costs.
2. Invest in your ability to produce. Those of you who follow my work know that one of my mantras is “Produce, don’t consume.” By producing for our basic needs and pleasures, we lower our cost of living, reduce our ecological impact and occupy ourselves with activities that are a lot more enjoyable and satisfying than simply buying things in the marketplace. And when you are busy making what you need and/or love, you don’t have much time to think about spending money. Producing can also generate income. Bob and I produce our own honey, candles, soaps, and ointments to cut our household expenses, but the surplus sales of these items pay our property taxes. Investing in production may be something small, like garden seeds, a stockpot to make broth, or blueberry bushes, laying hens or asparagus crowns, all which will lower food bills. It might mean investing money to start a micro-enterprise (last year we took a few thousand dollars and began a value-added wool business with our sheep’s fleeces), or buying tools you need to build, fix or mend things.
   
   In our family, one of our most important financial investments was in an expansive working kitchen that includes two cooktops, several large sinks and several yards of counter space. We created a space where a stockpot can be simmering, a meal can be prepared and a bushel of beats can be pickled, all at the same time that clean-up is going on (those of you who’ve bristled at the irony of having to order take-out on the nights you are canning can appreciate such an investment). That same kitchen lets us do our production crafts while running recipe tests, and still allows for the kids to run through and make themselves a snack or grab a glass of water.
   
   An investment in production might be something pleasurable, as well. In fact, during the winter months, when our cash flow nearly stops, it is probably one of our most important investments. Bob owns a couple musical instruments, which he loves to play. He spends hours in the winter strumming his guitar or plucking his mandolin, making lovely music. I once spent a few hundred dollars on a set of high quality interchangeable knitting needles, with which I’ve knitted several miles of our farm’s wool (and saved a lot of money on some great Christmas gifts). When we sit by the fire and he plays music and I knit, neither one of us craves a fancy dinner out, more fashionable clothing, vacations, or the newest iPhone. Heck, with the exception of Saturday nights (when we do like to indulge in a single martini), we don’t even feel the urge to drink. Cheap fun is priceless.
   
   
I once spent a few hundred dollars on a set of high quality interchangeable knitting needles, with which I’ve knitted several miles of our farm’s wool (and saved a lot of money on some great Christmas gifts).
3. Invest in your security. Even though they seem like lousy investments, I’m a big fan of certificates of deposit through local banks and credit unions. I’m the extreme epitome of a “conservative investor.” More than once I’ve had it explained to me how I can have far superior rates of return by using more sophisticated investment options. My answer is always the same: My ability to save can outpace any rate of return you can find in the financial markets. Therefore, I’d prefer to see my savings as secure as possible. Certificates of deposit are insured, they allow for emergency cash if the wolf is truly at the door, and they are conveniently locked away and inaccessible enough to make it difficult to simply withdraw them on a whim.
   
   If, like me, you are living in a place that seems to be falling victim to extreme climate events, investing in your security might also mean putting some funds into your self-reliance on that front, too, with things like generators, hand pumps, gas cooktops, woodstoves, and the like. It’s good to stay warm, dry, fed and hydrated when all the roads in your county are shut down and the power’s gone.
4. Invest in the economy that surrounds you. My parents have long taught me the value of this practice, and as they’ve come into the years when they have extra capital, they have consistently directed it into the local community. They’ve used their extra capital to provide mortgages, underwrite entrepreneurial ventures, finance home improvements, or just help someone to buy a car to get to work. They do earn interest on their loans, although they always collect less than a bank, and there are times when they have to make a few pestering phone calls in order to get paid. Our local food co-op recently ran a campaign to encourage the members to finance an expansion, and our entire family invested in that, as well. Local investment opportunities can be more lucrative than CDs or formal socially responsible investment forums (our personal “local” loans have generated anywhere from 1-6% interest, as opposed to the current 0.40% of a 3 year bank CD, or 1-3% for a socially responsible loan fund), but they are only as safe as your judge of character. They are also contingent upon being deeply embedded within a community, where the social networks help to guarantee payments, and also help to ensure more forgiveness than a national bank chain. In an effort to facilitate more local connections, the Slow Money movement has worked with community chapters to set up local entrepreneurial showcases where private investors can meet up with sustainable food entrepreneurs. Their website contains links to these chapters, as well as links to other like-minded social investment opportunities. You can learn more at www.slowmoney.com.

So there are my thoughts and suggestions when it comes to investing money responsibly. The returns are pretty small. When I do have money to invest, I try to strike an average return of 3%, and even that might be higher than what I can expect in the future. But if I can keep my family’s costs of living down, and we can continue to produce the things we need to survive and enjoy life, I think we’ll be okay. For those of you who have more experience on these matters, I hope you’ll take the time to write and share your thoughts. I would dearly love any insights you can offer. I’ll probably even take notes on the back side of one of these used Post-its that have been collecting beside my computer…

Shannon Hayes wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Shannon is the author ofRadical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture, The Grassfed Gourmet and The Farmer and the Grill. Her newest book is Long Way on a Little: An Earth Lover's Companion for Enjoying Meat, Pinching Pennies and Living Deliciously. She is the host of Grassfedcooking.com and RadicalHomemakers.com. Hayes works with her family on Sap Bush Hollow Farm in Upstate New York.

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If there’s a romantic image that tugs at our heart strings as much as the thought of homegrown tomatoes, it’s that of the multi-generational family farm.

In a culture that has spurned the union of the generations—that frowns upon the thirtysomething living in his parents’ basement, mocks the new family who moves in with Grandma, offers condolence to the empty-nesters who take in an aging parent, builds television sitcoms about the interpersonal conflicts between married couples and the in-laws, and peddles financial products to discourage elders from ever being a “burden”—the family farm has been America’s great exception to the now-expected independent nuclear unit.

Farms proudly advertise the number of generations who have lived on the same land; signs are hung on the side of barns to commemorate the 100th continuous year of business within the same family; awards are handed out, stories written, legends passed down within rural communities celebrating the differences from father to son, mother to daughter.

And in an era when the rest of the country is discovering that breaking ourselves into nuclear units is coming at an ecological, financial, and emotional cost, the multigenerational family farm feels like the last cultural example we can turn to as a reminder of what might make for a viable future, whether the multiple generations are in the city, the suburbs, or on the land.

But this week I heard three painful stories about the tensions among the agrarian generations. One young family, now indebted more than $500,000 from an effort to take over the family farm, is being crippled from making sustainable changes on the land by both excessive financial burdens, and a lack of physical and emotional support from the older generation. Another family with children, who’d invested several years in building an organic enterprise on the family farm and buying out the parents, is finally abandoning its dreams and is trying to find land elsewhere, because the intergenerational conflicts were insurmountable. And a third couple, who moved back to take over the family farm a few years ago, has just moved out again, their efforts at reviving the land having met too much resistance. Their marriage is on the cusp of breaking up, too.

When Mom and Dad made a choice to buy a farm, they weren’t buying a retirement asset. They were securing a resource for the family and its subsequent generations.

I know my generation can be a nuisance. We want everything instantly. We grew up with little to no training in financial literacy. We learned that controlling expenses wasn’t as critical as earning a big paycheck. And when the big paycheck never showed up, we were sold a bill of goods that we could afford more debt than was realistic. At the same time, we’re questioning how hard we want to work. We don’t ubiquitously buy into the idea that logging 80-100 hours of labor in a week is the best way to take care of family. And to add to matters, we’re expressing a lot of annoyance at the detritus bequeathed to us by our parents and grandparents: depleted fossil fuel reserves, excess carbon in the atmosphere, polluted water, environmental toxins, lost topsoil, nutrient-deficient foods, and the chronic illnesses that ensue from these things.

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At the same time, the older generations have their burdens, too. The 401ks that seemed so cushy a few years back aren’t quite so robust. The vision of “golden years” spent golfing and playing tennis in sunny Florida have been replaced by fears over medical expenses and the humiliating prospect of lost independence. It’s hard to be generous with grown children when you feel insecure yourself ... Especially when those kids enter the scene with crazy ideas about changing how the farm is managed and questioning the lifetime decisions of the elders; or they contrive newfangled ventures that seem risky.

We have arguments, we storm off, we hang up on each other. But after nearly 20 years, we’re still here.

I moved back to my family’s farm in 1996, at the age of 22. While I spent a few years in graduate school, I came home every weekend and summer, and have been an active part of the business since that time. In the 17 years I’ve been involved with Sap Bush Hollow, I fell in love with a man, convinced him to move here to start a life together, began a family, and bit by bit have grown more deeply into the family business. Bob and I realized early on that my parents were too young and vibrant for us to simply “step in and take over,” and our different skill sets and personalities have required that we find unusual ways to blend with the family business. Some of our livelihood from the farm comes from actual labor, some of it comes from our own entrepreneurial ventures. We don’t live in the same house as my parents, which has its benefits and drawbacks.

He pointed to Saoirse and Ula, then about 5 and 2, who were tumbling across the front field. “The land's not mine. It’s theirs.”

It isn’t all butterflies and rainbows here, that’s for certain. We have arguments, we storm off, hang up on each other, and occasionally sit down and have some good cries. But after nearly 20 years, we’re still here, still working together on this business; still in agreement that this family farm offers the best possible life for all of us. Along the way, there have been a few lessons and practices that have really made a big difference in the viability of our intergenerational cooperation:

1. The stated goal of the business. Posted on the wall of the farm office is a piece of paper, typed up maybe 25 years ago. Mom and Dad wrote it to express their goals and dreams. And the number one goal at the top of the page reads: We want to create a business that one or both of our children would want to run. It’s not saying that the kids have to take it over. It’s just saying that the quality of the venture needs to reflect the needs and desires of the next generation. Thus, every decision they make on that farm gets tested against this top goal. As the next generation, I have a sense of security that my thoughts and ideas matter, that Bob’s and my quality of life is critical to the success of Sap Bush Hollow.
2. No one “owns” the land. I remember the day a neighboring farmer drove into the barnyard to talk to Mom and Dad about the financial potential of signing a lease to allow hydro-fracking on our land. Dad shrugged his shoulders and said he couldn’t help him. “It’s not my land,” he said.
   
   “Isn’t your name on the deed?”
   
   “Doesn’t matter.” He pointed to Saoirse and Ula, then about 5 and 2, who were tumbling across the front field. “It’s not mine. It’s theirs.”
   
   And that’s the tone around here. None of us owns it. It is forever owned by the next generation. Whoever has their name on the deed is a temporary steward. Thus, while Mom and Dad are counting on the farm to sustain them as part of their retirement, the land is not a source of retirement income. It is a resource for each successive generation. When Mom and Dad made a choice to buy a farm, they weren’t buying a retirement asset. They were securing a resource for the family and its subsequent generations.
   
   For Bob and me, this means we’ll never “own” the land, either. We derive benefit from the resources it offers, and it is our job to bridge to the next generation, and to help make sure Mom and Dad will be able to be comfortable in their retirement, without having to sell that land.
3. Avoid debt. Keeping the farm in the family is a lot easier when the bank doesn’t have a lien on the property. At Sap Bush Hollow, we’ve been masters at diversifying our income with small ventures that are not capital-intensive, which keeps us in control of the money and out of debt. And all of us are pretty skilled at living on the cheap. One of the many benefits is that there is a lot less stress between the generations. Interestingly, since thrift and frugality is a defining quality of our family culture, we find it easy to be generous and trusting with each other. No one worries about someone else wasting money.
4. The most important “product” is the next generation. There is an agreement across the family that Saoirse and Ula are number one. This means that homeschool is not squeezed into the interstices between loading cattle and chasing pigs. The teaching space and time is sacred. Family meals are of paramount importance. Adequate rest to allow for a calm, happy family life is critical. And their safety matters above all else. As the parents, this makes Bob’s and my job a lot easier. We don’t feel as though our fidelity to the family business is questioned when we need to honor our commitments to our children. The person who leaves farm work to prepare the daily meal, teach the kids, or maintain the home is as valuable as the one making hay.

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We didn’t start out in our family venture knowing all these rules for success. Over the years, we’ve grown into them, and a lot of the lessons were learned the hard way, through emotionally trying experience.

I’d be a fool to suggest that these were the only keys to success, and I’d be even more of a fool to argue that, because of these attributes, our farm will be “sustainable.” No one ever really knows the answer to that question. All I can say is that for 17 years, life has been good. So good, in fact, that I can say I am happy where I am, and that everyone in the Sap Bush Hollow family seems to share the daily intentions to continue the quality of life we have.

Certainly, these words cannot salve the pain of those three farm families I mentioned earlier. What’s done is done. We’ve entered an era that asks us to un-learn the last 60 years of cultural conditioning, and to reclaim wisdom from generations that are nearly gone. It isn’t easy, and our lessons are hard-won. But hopefully we will hold onto the rediscovered wisdom this time, pass it along to our children, and enable each successive generation to grow up comfortable in walking sustainably on this earth.

Shannon Hayes wrote this article forYES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Shannon is the author of Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture, The Grassfed Gourmet and The Farmer and the Grill. She is the host of Grassfedcooking.com and RadicalHomemakers.com. Hayes works with her family on Sap Bush Hollow Farm in Upstate New York.

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These days, most people involved in buying and advocating for local and organic food say they want to support their farmers. They imagine the people that grow their vegetables as sweating in the fields, cheerfully smiling as they pull carrots from their own land, which they till until the sun goes down.

For a food system to be truly sustainable, we must prioritize the well-being of workers as well as consumers.

The image of the independent and industrious farmer is upheld in places where “alternative” or sustainable food is sold and promoted, such as farmers markets and food stores, which often encourage consumers to “get to know their farmer.” Grocery stores that carry natural, local, and organic foods, such as Whole Foods and food purchasing cooperatives, commonly post large, glossy photographs of local growers.

But who, exactly, is a farmer? Is it the person who owns a farm? The person who sells food at a farmers’ market? Or could a farmer be the immigrant who follows the work from place to place and picks the fruit of the season?

Almost all farms, even small and organic ones, require hired help. In most cases, that consists of immigrant farmworkers who are paid less than a living wage.

People need to ask not only, where does my food come from, but also, who performs the labor to grow this food? For a food system to be truly sustainable, we must prioritize the well-being of workers as well as consumers.

Who’s behind your food?

Farm labor is one of only a few occupations exempt from most federal and state minimum wages and work-hour limitations. Of the farmworkers who responded to the most recent National Agricultural Workers’ Survey (NAWS), about one-third earned less than $7.25 an hour and only a quarter reported working more than nine months per calendar year. The California Institute for Rural Studies found that in Fresno and Salinas—two of the most important agricultural regions in the state—one-fourth of farmworkers live below the federal poverty line, and between 45 and 66 percent are food insecure. (An individual or family is considered food insecure when members of a household lack access to enough food for an active, healthy life at all times, according to the USDA.)

In reality, however, farmworker conditions are even worse than those numbers suggest. Much of the research concerning farm labor is based on information gained from formal systems of employment, such as labor contractors. That leaves the majority of farm laborers who work informally, such as daily workers, unaccounted for.

Are conditions better on organic farms? Not as much as you’d think. Entry-level workers on organic farms in California make only 29 cents an hour more than their counterparts on non-organic farms do. That’s still less than a living wage.

And those workers on organic farms are actually less likely to have paid time off, health insurance for themselves and their families, and retirement or pension funds. Certified organic farmers have proven resistant to including labor standards in organic certification, according to a study published in 2006 in the journal Agriculture and Human Values.

Looking beyond the city

Some in the sustainable food movement work with the goal of directly addressing human rights issues in the food system. These groups and individuals make up what many call the “food justice movement.” Yet even in these circles, some organizations seem to have trouble focusing on the rights of farmworkers.

The Student/Farmworker Alliance has worked to bring farmworker injustice into the picture on college campuses.

Why are these workers so hard to see? Maybe it’s because most of our organizations are located in cities and staffed by young people attracted by urban life. Consider a group like Planting Justice, an organization in Oakland, Calif., which describes its work as “democratizing access to affordable, nutritious food.” It does this by “empowering disenfranchised urban residents with the skills, resources, and inspiration to maximize food production, economic opportunities, and environmental sustainability in our neighborhoods.”

Groups such as Planting Justice often work on initiatives to encourage and popularize urban gardening and to increase the availability of fresh food in poor urban neighborhoods. Although these are important efforts to improve the health of often underserved urban residents, they tend to limit the conversation to the urban core. Issues that affect rural places—including the plight of farmworkers—are left out of the discussion.

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If the growing food justice movement is to truly confront injustice in the food system, it must address the rural poor as well as the urban poor. The fact that the workers who actually grow and harvest the food we’re talking about are also poor provides a natural opportunity for solidarity and makes this even more important to the movement.

Good news and next steps

Some in the food justice community are starting to work more broadly on issues of farm and food system labor, coordinating with farm, food processing, and restaurant worker unions. These new coalitions include The Food Chain Workers Alliance, The U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance, The Rural Coalition, and the Student/Farmworker Alliance.

Working together, many groups are finding more power to motivate policy change and raise working standards, increasing the visibility of food worker issues in the mainstream food movement.

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The Student/Farmworker Alliance, for example, has played a major role in the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Campaign for Fair Food, bringing farmworker injustice into the picture on college campuses. In addition, The Food Chain Workers Alliance is working directly with rural as well as urban food justice groups, bringing labor issues into the conversations of foodies who may previously have thought only about whether their carrots were local and not about whether the people who picked them had health insurance.

By working in coalition, people who are used to advocating for healthier food in urban centers are beginning to learn from rural activists, as well as the other way around. If we are to truly see the creation of a more just food system, then organizations, individuals, and communities that claim sustainable and food justice ideals must start to expand their vision for a food system that is just in both environmental and social terms. That may mean pushing for revised agricultural trade and immigration policy, including stricter labor regulations and higher minimum wages.

Both sustainable food proponents and food justice organizers have shown interest in addressing labor-related injustice. But to truly make that change, those that care about our food system must broaden their views of food sustainability to include the rights and health of all producers and consumers of food.

(Editor’s note: This piece originally implied that studies of farmworker conditions in particular regions of Calfornia could be extrapolated to describe conditions across the United States. The text has been updated to avoid that implication.)

Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Laura-Anne has spent many years working on farms and with agriculture and food organizations in Guatemala, New York State, and California. She holds a doctorate in geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Goucher College in Maryland.

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Pando clonal colony of Quaking Aspen #0906-4317 (80,000 years old; Fish Lake, Utah). Photo from Rachel Sussman's Oldest Living Things in the World project.

As I was moved to learn recently, certain whales habitually congregate in one area of the ocean to compose a single piece of music together.

Did Peter Berg know this? It would not have surprised him. The phenomenon validates what he had been saying for decades. He understood so early and so cogently how we all collaborate, in the songs we sing and the thoughts we think—collaborate not only with each other but, by virtue of our very existence, with where we are. With place.

Whale songs would of their nature contain so much: the briny taste of sea water, for instance, or topographical features of the ocean floor over which they float as they sing, even the particular weather of the area. The sound that emanates from these majestic creatures reflects all that sustains them.

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That not just forests and rivers but songs are part of what defines a region was one of the great contributions Peter made to the way we imagine ourselves and the Earth today. Before he got hold of it, the word “bioregion” was a mostly technical term used to denote a particular conservation area. Peter enlarged our thinking by including in the definition not only every form of life, animal and vegetable, along with terrain and weather within a ­watershed, but also the human cultures that have adapted to the ecology of each bioregion. In this way, he contributed to a revolution in consciousness that is still occurring: we are beginning to see that human creativity does not stand apart from, but rather is born of, the land where we live, partaking of climate and trees and the paths water takes as snow melts and flows downward from the mountains.

From this angle of perception, it becomes clear that we are not above (or apart from) nature but of nature, embedded, our loftiest ideas emanating from the Earth and earthly processes. Made of clay, we have been generated and shaped, not only by our parents, but by the ten thousand beings of Hindu scripture, by all the life that surrounds us.

“Europeans came as invaders clearing terrain for an occupation civilization,” Peter wrote in an early Planet Drum publication. Once “man” falls from the top of the Scala Natura—the medieval “great chain of being” that placed humanity on top of a descending scale of animals, plants and minerals—many other hierarchies are also undermined, among those the idea that European civilizations were superior to the original cultures and civilizations of America.

I came across my first copy of Planet Drum almost by accident. Reading those fiery philosophical and political declarations on the soft pages of newsprint, I felt an astonishing resonance, as if something long dormant and as yet unnamed were coming to life inside my soul. I don’t know the year precisely—it was sometime between 1970 and ’72—but, appropriately, the memory is in my body. (“Your body is home,” Peter wrote in 1970.)

I know it was daytime: an afternoon light streamed from the south-facing windows. I had recently been reading Emma Goldman and had put down my copy of Planet Drum and turned to the bookshelf on my left to retrieve a copy of the first volume of her autobiography, My Life. In what is something like an intellectual ritual, I leafed through the pages, following the strong electrical force I could feel between Goldman’s ideas and what I had just read in Planet Drum. There was something here I knew, something in this connection, something I could not yet delineate, though from the strength of the feeling, I sensed it was significant.

In that period, the air was rife with new visions. For me, these were also the formative days of my own feminism. Listening to and telling stories in my “consciousness-raising” group, reading books that had been previously ignored or neglected because they were written by women, reviving the many suppressed histories of women, my own awareness was growing almost too fast for me to contain. And in this awareness there was a series of hunches, inclinations—what the French novelist, Natalie Saurraute, once called tropisms—pointing me in directions that I could not entirely map or even name yet.

Sagole Baobob #0707-00505 (2,000 years old; Limpopo Province, South Africa)

Concerned about the loss of forests, increasing pollution, and the diminishment of the ozone layer, I was beginning to make connections that I had not seen before. For instance, between the oppression of women I experienced and the wanton destruction of nature I was witnessing.

Slowly it dawned on me that the imaginary boundary, drawn centuries ago, that separates nature from culture is the same boundary that has also separated us from each other too, creating categories of gender and race, in which women or those with darker skin or those who earn a living with their hands are described as less able intellectually than the men at the top of the scale; by the same token, we are deemed untrustworthy because we are so mired in sensual experience and extreme emotion, or to put it more succinctly, since we are closer to the Earth.

No wonder I was electrified by a film I saw which drew a concrete connection between rape and the violation of a bioregion. Set in Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, Chinatown depicted the struggle over water rights that had occurred in 1937, six years before I was born. A series of machinations instigated by William Mulholland resulted in the diversion of water from the Owens Valley to the San Fernando Valley, in order to transform a desert to habitable and thus valuable land, but at the same time reducing once-verdant land in the Owens Valley to desert. This destroyed one bioregion and shifted another so radically it became artificial.

The shadowy men behind these transactions made millions. But this was just the subplot of the film, the background that subtly shaped the main plot, which was a story of a woman who had been sexually abused by her father and was trying in vain to protect her daughter from the same fate.

This film is moving to me for other reasons too. Though I live in Northern California, I grew up in both Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley and—if only for the soft feel of the warm, dry air or the way that the descending light glints off the Pacific Ocean, rolling into the beaches at Santa Monica and Malibu in the late afternoon and early evening as it descends, or the chaparral thick on the hills in Topanga Canyon—this region will always feel like home to me. Yet this area, made of four watersheds, all reaching at some point to the sea, stretching south from Santa Monica to San Pedro Bay, ringed by the Santa Monica Mountains to the south, the Santa Susana Mountains to the west, and San Gabriel Mountains to the north and east, has another side.

Welwitschia Mirabilis #0707-22411 (2,000 years old; Namid Naukluft Desert, Namibia). Photo by Rachel Sussman.

Of course there is much I love about the culture of this area, the paintings of my adoptive father, the small theaters where experimental plays are staged, Frank Gehry’s stunning architecture, the peoples’ history mural Judy Baca created on the Great Wall of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley with 400 local teenagers, and a diverse community of filmmakers, quirky designers, actors, and writers living on the edge.

But Chinatown also captures a less sanguine aspect of what has been built here since the early 20th century. A vast, often incoherent maze of housing tracts, shopping malls, gas stations, and a seemingly endless network of freeways clogged with cars. And in this way, the culture of Southern California is profoundly maladaptive to the watershed areas it occupies. I sensed this as a child growing up, not only from the smog-filled air, created by too many automobiles, but from what I can only describe as an artificial quality, as if the construction I saw all around me was not part of the Earth but sitting on top of the soil and entirely disconnected, almost at a molecular level, from the rich matrix of life we share.

Over the last 40 years, since the time the film Chinatown was made and Peter Berg articulated the deeper meanings of a watershed system, we have made great progress toward civil and equal rights, but the rapacious mentality portrayed in that film has also grown in size and influence. So many corporations are global now, with the power to radically alter landscapes, shift the directions of rivers, flood one region and deprive another of most of its water. And too often these life-altering decisions are made in the abstract, by men and women who spend their days behind computer screens or in board rooms, with no three-dimensional connection to the land or the people they are affecting by their decisions. The mind separated from the heart and the Earth at the same time.

I am thinking now of the unprecedented number of suicides happening daily in India, desperate acts committed by farmers who have lost their homes and livelihoods because of a series of decisions made in an abstract realm by those who do not experience or even witness the consequences of their actions, and who, since they live more in a world of numbers than any place on Earth, perhaps cannot grasp the depth of the sorrow they are causing.

But another world is possible. As a child, I found more than one refuge. All through the year I body-surfed in the Pacific Ocean, the rush of water in my ears singing to me of a vastness way beyond what was indicated in the strange dystopic landscape I thought of as ordinary. In the summer I camped in the High Sierras, the sound of wind through conifers becoming an inextricable part of my soul. Occasionally, my family would take a trip to the Mojave or the Baja Peninsula where I learned to see the subtle eloquence of deserts. And since I was very small, I took an interest in Native American cultures, which, though they spoke in languages I could not translate, seemed redolent with another response to the lands we shared, the diverse wisdom of earthly existence, voices, to paraphrase Gary Snyder, that capture the pitch of the phenomenal world “totally living, exciting, mysterious, filling one with a trembling awe, leaving one grateful and humble.”

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My own work sprang at one and the same time from this awe, and from the nexus between the idea of a watershed, which I had first encountered in Peter’s writing, and my perception of the oppression of women. In 1972, I had written an essay positing that rape is not motivated by simple sexual drive but rather the psychological (and socially constructed) desire to dominate. Two years later, I was to begin a new book, Woman and Nature, where I would connect the attempt to dominate and control nature with the domination and control of women. It is a theme I have investigated on many levels through several books.

I never knew Peter Berg well. But his presence was very important to me, has become in fact—like the bioregion of Northern California where I have lived most of my life—a part of me. Re-Membered. Like the best poetry, his words are still ringing in my ears while I continue adding my part to the great song we are all, like those whales, composing together, the waters of consciousness held by the watersheds we inhabit, our dreams woven on wild looms.

Susan Griffin wrote this article for What Would Nature Do?, the Winter 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Susan is an award-winning poet, writer, essayist, playwright, and filmmaker, and has written nineteen books.

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“Naked lungs,” nudibranchs: Undulant sea slugs, frilled and harlequin. They are hermaphrodites and cannibals. Male or female, mate or lunch: permutations abound.

Imagine: you meet at San Francisco’s sea-themed Farallon restaurant, “a resemblance of a beautiful underwater fantasy.” Jellyfish pulse around you. Flanked by glowing columns of kelp, your date eyes you, sensing your signals, your orientations. If the dénouement goes well, maybe you’ll get nibbled—or more. If the night is a catastrophe, you walk away knowing you escaped demise. Sometimes it’s a bit of both—you’re missing tentacles, but you can’t wait to see them again.

Perhaps it is anthropomorphic of me to suppose my way into a nudibranch encounter. Anthropomorphism, that arrogance that imposes human thoughts and feelings upon animals, is surely a sin. But like most sins, I also think it reveals some truths.

Invertebrates, or as biologists call them, “inverts,” like the nudibranch are critters liberated from the constraints of a backbone. They offer a particularly rich resource for examining the limits of sex and sexuality. Consider the limpet, a snail-like hermaphrodite that undergoes sex change during its life. It is born sexless, then matures into a male at nine months. After a couple of years, he becomes female. These little conical beings, no bigger than poker chips, deliciously pervert and invert our human assumptions about bodies.

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In general, we pretend sex is obvious, as if our chromosomes calculate our entire physiology. But as we’ve slowly come to realize—with the help of feminism, “queer theory,” and biology—sex is many processes that include X and Y chromosomes, hormones, gonads, internal sex structures, and external genitalia, as well as history, culture, environment, and variables still to be named. Some marine inverts “know” that sex is a process; know it as part of their way of life.

Which is not to call nudibranch or limpet reproduction “queer.” Sex change isn’t queer for these organisms; it’s their norm. Unlike some queer humans, they are not challenging sex, gender, and sexual conventions. Humans also change sexes, but oysters and humans change in vastly different biological contexts, specific to their environments and capacities.

The comparison is meant to defy sex determinism and essentialism, but could just as easily reinforce it. Books like Bruce Baghemihl’s Biological Exuberance (2000)—cited in the U.S. Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas as evidence that “homosexual behavior is natural”—and Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution’s Rainbow (2004) have turned to nonhuman sexual variations as a way to understand, and even legitimate, human sexual diversity. “Cold Cape Cod clams, ’gainst their wish, do it / Even lazy jellyfish do it,” sings Ella Fitzgerald, so why can’t we do it? Such comparisons elide differences among species and their environmental and evolutionary contexts.

So, what can we say about nudibranchs and people, when all such comparisons are dicey?

Consider Green Porno, Isabella Rossellini’s recent series of short films on animal sexual behavior. “If I were a snail,” says Rossellini to the camera in her “Snail” episode, “I could withdraw my entire body.” Dressed in a leotard, she curls into a large, constructed shell on a ribbon of slime. “I could hide both my vagina and my penis. I have both,” she continues, with a naughty smile. Then, we see her and another snail initiating courtship by stabbing each other with “love darts.” “Sadomasochism excites me,” she says, moaning with pleasure.

At first glance, Green Porno seems more problem than promise. However playful the video is, the habits of the snail are made salacious for us humans. The invert(ebrate) as pervert comes across as the same old problem of anthropomorphism. But Rossellini’s sighs of pleasure also open up parallels between our human fantasies and the life of the snail.

The snail, limpet, nudibranch, and even we humans evolve through our abilities to experience sensations and their limits. Charles Darwin teaches us that life needs variation to accommodate our ever-changing environment. Our differences as species are elaborated at the sensuous edge of our selves; we are defined by our abilities to sense and respond to the world around us. Pleasure and pain, attraction and repulsion: sensation is the engine of change. It is through our differences and our abilities to differentiate that life opens up to indeterminacy and potential.

There is no direct relationship between a nudibranch and me—not even when I, a woman who was a fag-identified male seduced a man who was a lesbian-identified female. We are now married “heterosexuals” living in a swing state. But the nudibranch’s particular sexuality emerges from the same fundament as mine: life proliferates difference. I’m a woman with a transsexual history, because transsexuality is part of my species’ potential—by which I mean the web of relationships that make us human, like culture, environment, imagination, communication, and physiology. Transsexuality is just one way of being human, of being a thread in the web.

While I am queer and the nudibranch is not, both our sexualities are permanently under revision, because life itself is changing. And all of us will respond and react to the environmental pressures that we humans have helped to create—polluted oceans and depleted resources—and those forces that none of us can control. Perhaps these stresses will prompt new kinships and surprising alternatives, or they might foretell catastrophe and demise. Or, more likely, both.

Eva Hayward wrote this article for What Would Nature Do?, the Winter 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Eva is a researcher at the Center for Gender Research at Uppsala University, Sweden. She has written on queer theory, science, and visual studies.

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The author is an organizer with Swarthmore Mountain Justice.

Members of Swarthmore Mountain Justice gather before the Parrish Hall, Swarthmore's main administrative building. Photo by Sachie Hopkins-Hayakawa.

Over the last six months, students in the United States have launched a new strategy to change the national conversation on climate change and shift political power away from the fossil fuel industry. We’re demanding that our colleges and universities take their money out of dirty energy and invest in a way that protects our future.

Then as now, businesspeople and politicians who had been insulated from hearing dissent suddenly listened when the people began to move their money.

Fossil fuel divestment campaigns have taken off on over 200 college campuses, and two of them—Unity College in Maine and Hampshire College in Massachusetts—have already committed to remove fossil fuel stock from their portfolios. And it’s not just students who are taking action—whole cities such as Seattle are pledging to divest as well.

As a strategy, divestment is a form of economic non-cooperation. By untangling our institutions’ money from the fossil fuel industry, we declare that we will not be complicit with the industry’s dangerous and destructive practices. Furthermore, divestment and socially responsible reinvestment create a sizeable demand for financial portfolios that are free from fossil-fuel stocks, and fundamentally change the way our institutions and governments do business. Students, churches, and city governments are taking decisive action and hoping that governmental leadership will do the same.

Old strategies meet new struggles

Divestment is not a new idea in politics. Students who developed the current strategy of divestment cribbed the concept from the movement in the 1980s against the racist apartheid regime in South Africa.

As other groups organize resistance on the ground, our divestment campaigns can help to erode the reputations of the companies they’re fighting.

Then as now, businesspeople and politicians who had been insulated from hearing dissent suddenly listened when the people began to move their money. Grassroots campaigners utilized divestment as a way to take away the social license of corporations doing business in apartheid South Africa and thereby changed the political discourse around the issue. We saw this begin to happen in our current campaign when Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) praised students working on fossil fuel divestment in a speech on the Senate floor.

“These students are imploring their schools to weigh the real cost of climate change against the drive for more financial returns,” Whitehouse said. “With American college and university endowments estimated to total more than $400 billion, this movement by students deserves significant attention.”

Not everyone has been so enthusiastic about the idea. Scholar and journalist Christian Parenti, who wrote one of the more widely read critiques of divestment for the Huffington Post, has said that real change cannot happen without significant federal leadership. Parenti points out that our federal government is the world’s greatest consumer of energy and vehicles, and the nation’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. He believes that if the government begins purchasing renewable energy for its buildings and cars, the market will drastically shift towards clean energy and investments will follow.

Of course, fossil fuel divestment and Parenti’s “Big Green Buy” are not mutually exclusive. But there is no time to wait for government policies to change. Furthermore, as centuries of social movement history reveals, state power doesn’t shift until you push on it. A large-scale divestment campaign is one critical part of that push.

Students examine their institutions

Rather than waiting for elected leaders to take action, students are swiftly transforming their own universities and communities by standing up to the dirty energy regime. The group that I work with at Swarthmore College, Swarthmore Mountain Justice, has been waging a fossil fuel divestment campaign for the last two years. Our campaign began with a trip down to West Virginia to see firsthand the impacts of mountaintop removal coal mining, and to meet the communities who are organizing against the dangerous practice.

Carbon emissions must begin to decline by 2015 if we hope to prevent a change in global temperatures of more than 2 degrees.

Beyond Appalachia, there are numerous communities who face the destructive environmental and health impacts of extractive industries daily—from strip mining on the Black Mesa plateau to coal exports in the Pacific Northwest, from tar sands mining in Alberta to fracking in Western Pennsylvania. In solidarity with these communities and with all of those who are directly affected by climate change, we have called on our Board of Managers to stop investing in 16 major coal, oil, and gas companies.

We have run into great resistance from Swarthmore board members who say that addressing climate change is important, but refuse to alter their portfolios at the risk of diminished returns. Treasurer Sue Welsh, for example, told The New York Times that "The college’s policy is that the endowment is not to be invested for social purposes." The college does not screen any of its investments for political or social impact, and is invested in companies such as ExxonMobil.

By investing in these companies, our board members are betting on the financial success of mountaintop removal, drilling for oil in the Gulf, and other deadly practices, without acknowledging the human cost.

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We have spent the last two years building student, alumni, and faculty support for fossil fuel divestment. Swarthmore College has a long history of leadership in social justice, and many of these values are integrated into the culture of the school. Through our work, it has become understood within the larger Swarthmore community that we cannot protect students’ futures and be a leader in sustainability while still investing heavily in the fossil fuel industry. Bold action is necessary, and the transformation of our own institution’s endowment is the first step.

Divestment links diverse movements

In addition to divestment’s power as a tactic, it’s also helping students draw connections between their institutions’ policies and the larger movement for environmental and climate justice. Kirsten "Sally" Bunner, a member of Earlham College’s divestment group, says that divestment campaigns are an opportunity to connect relatively privileged college students with people “whose lives are affected on a consistent and daily basis by the practices of the fossil fuel industry.”

Members of Swarthmore Mountain Justice visit the mountaintop removal site at Kayford Mountain in West Virginia. Photo by Karen Leitner.

Communities across the world, from Appalachia to Nigeria, have been organizing against extractive practices for decades. Within the last few months, we have seen a surge of resistance from Idle No More, New Yorkers Against Fracking, and the Tar Sands Blockade. These groups aren’t pushing divestment—their tactics range from lockdowns on pipeline construction sites to occupations of elected leaders’ offices. But as they organize resistance on the ground, our divestment campaigns can help to erode the reputations of the companies they’re fighting.

“By connecting with these communities and finding out ways that we can support one another,” Bunner said, “we can make a greater impact than if we simply divest from fossil fuels alone.”

In order to facilitate these connections, students and activists from across the country will gather at Swarthmore College in February for the Power Up! Divest Fossil Fuels Student Convergence.

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“One purpose of the convergence will be to examine divestment in the context of the larger climate justice movement,” said Bunner, who is one of the event’s organizers. Student-led, the convergence will bring frontline activists, students, movement allies, and climate organizers together to develop a cohesive vision and strategy for the next year.

The community at Swarthmore has given me an invaluable education and strengthened the conviction of my beliefs. But I believe my institution must do better. As a member of the younger generation, I recognize the profound weight of our planetary inheritance.

When I receive my degree in June, I will not be thinking about graduate programs or long-term employment opportunities. I will be thinking about the fact that carbon emissions must begin to decline by 2015, if we hope to prevent a change in global temperatures of more than 2 degrees, the tipping point beyond which catastrophic climate change begins.

Just two years from now, we risk passing that tipping point. The time to work together for climate justice is now. We cannot wait.

Sachie Hopkins-Hayakawa wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Sachie is a senior at Swarthmore College and is from Portland, Ore. She has been working for fossil fuel divestment with Swarthmore Mountain Justice for the past two years and was an intern for YES! Magazine in the summer of 2012.

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The following is a letter sent by Maude Barlow to David Johnston, who as Governor General is the representative of Queen Elizabeth II in Canada.

Maude Barlow speaks at an Idle No More rally in Ottawa on January 28.

Dear Governor General Johnston,

It is with sadness and regret that I return my Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Medal. I was honored to have received it and my husband and I hung it in our home with pride. I know many deserving Canadians have also been proud recipients of this honor and I was pleased to be in their company.

While the treaties may be old, First Nations today continue to look to the Queen as the rightful person to hear their concerns.

However, I am returning this medal to underline my deep distress over the passage of two omnibus bills by the Harper government that gutted environmental protections in Canada. These bills, C-38 and C-45, have made drastic and destructive changes to freshwater protection in Canada. At the clear behest of the energy industry, which outlined the changes it wanted in a letter to the Prime Minister, these omnibus bills destroyed the Fisheries Act, basically now only protecting fish of commercial value (but not their habitat). They killed the Navigable Waters Protection Act, stripping federal government protections for 99 percent of lakes and rivers in Canada. Major pipelines and interprovincial power lines now have the green light to cross over and under more than 31,000 lakes and 2.25 million rivers without federal scrutiny.

The omnibus bills repealed the existing Canadian Environmental Assessment Act and replaced it with a watered-down version that will reduce the number of projects that have to go through a federal assessment, narrow the definition of what might constitute a negative environmental effect, restrict the time allowed for assessments, limit public participation in the process, and give final decision-making power over to Cabinet, regardless of what the assessment panel recommends. Under the new rules, 3,000 environmental assessments are now cancelled.

In addition, the Harper government has shut down dozens of independent science research facilities and projects, including the world famous Experimental Lakes Area, and gutted the departments responsible for overseeing environmental stewardship.

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Idle No More has organized the largest mass mobilizations of indigenous people in recent history. What sparked it off and what’s coming next?

While these draconian changes to Canada’s environmental infrastructure affect all Canadians, they affect First Nations in an important way. Many of the resource, energy, and mining projects that will open up with no environmental oversight as a result of these omnibus bills will take place on indigenous lands. Under Section 35 of the Constitution, the government of Canada has the obligation to consult with First Nations before any such major access changes to resources on indigenous lands take place. As well, under the U.N.’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which the government of Canada has ratified, the federal government must engage in “free, prior, and informed consent” with First Nations about such changes.

When First Nations asked for your intervention on these matters, Government General, it was with the understanding that you continue to represent the institution with which their ancestors signed treaties. They negotiated these treaties face-to-face with the British Crown’s representative in Canada and while these treaties may be old, First Nations today continue to look to the Queen as the rightful person to hear their concerns. That relationship is still sacred in their eyes and vital to First Nations’ identity.

So, as a protest over both these terrible omnibus bills, passed with no consultation with either First Nations or Canadians, other than those representing the energy industry, and your refusal to meet directly with First Nations as the representative of the institution with whom they signed their treaties, I am returning this medal.

With respect,

Maude Barlow

National Chairperson

Council of Canadians

Maude Barlow wrote this letter to David Johnston, who as Governor General is the representative of Queen Elizabeth II in Canada. A former U.N. Senior Water Advisor, Barlow is National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians and founder of the Blue Planet Project.

Interested?

• Idle No More Rises to Defend Ancestral Lands—and the Planet
  Bill McKibben on the tradition of environmental activism he’s seen among members of First Nations, and the unique role of the Idle No More movement in the fight against climate change.
• Vandana Shiva: Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Forest
  Today, at a time of multiple crises, we need to move away from thinking of nature as dead matter to valuing her biodiversity, clean water, and seeds. For this, nature herself is the best teacher.
• The People v. the Pipeline: Time to Join In
  How you can get involved in the one of the most important climate struggles happening in North America.

The Way Home: Returning to the National Parks, by the National Parks Conservation Association.

Park Ranger Shelton Johnson has been telling the story of the Buffalo Soldier at Yosemite since 1998. In the late 1800s, these African American army regiments formed in the years after the Civil War and served as some of the park's first rangers.

But despite Johnson's familiarity with the story and the frequency with which he tells it to visitors at Yosemite, it is rare that he sees African Americans in his audience.

“What is hardly ever brought up,” Johnson observes, “is how that incredible, intimate connection to nature, to the wilderness, was incrementally whittled away and broken down to the point where African Americans are now the one group least likely to have a wilderness experience—the one group least likely to have an experience with the natural world.”

Follow the Los Angeles-based Amazing Grace 50+ Club as they rekindle their relationship to nature and to a history their ancestors may have played a role in.

“The last act of the civil rights movement is this embrace of the earth, this embrace of the continent,” Johnson says. “If Martin Luther King were alive today, he would be first and foremost to say we as a people need to go to Yellowstone, we need to go to the Grand Canyon. Because if this is America's best idea and we played a role in this creation, how dare we not choose that for ourselves."

Interested?

• Alice Walker: Go to the Places that Scare You
  Why a life worth living is a life worth fighting for.
• Vandana Shiva: Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Forest
  Today, at a time of multiple crises, we need to move away from thinking of nature as dead matter to valuing her biodiversity, clean water, and seeds. For this, nature herself is the best teacher.
• To Follow in MLK’s Footsteps, Join the Fight against Foreclosure
  How can today’s Civil Rights leaders follow in the tradition of MLK? Lester Spence argues that foreclosures are the issue and the church may just be the solution.

 

• To catch up on Hank's past visit the archive.
• Visit the YES! Cartoon archive

Photo by Sarah Gilbert.

This past weekend I made a trek out to central Wisconsin to speak at the state’s annual grazing conference, which typically draws farmers from all over the Midwest. This was the second time I’d been invited to join these folks, and I remembered it fondly from back in 2009, when the conference center was packed, the trade show was hopping with farmers talking about livestock genetics, raw milk, grazing plans, and fencing systems, and the sessions were filled with optimistic faces, eager to bring sustainable changes to their land and good food to their communities.

Did that mean that all those farmers, eager to make sustainable changes on their farms in 2009, had abandoned ship and opted to grow corn to feed the export market, America’s junk food habit, feedlots, and the ethanol craze?

Thus, I was surprised when I arrived at the conference center and saw that the number of attendees seemed to have dropped by almost half.

“Where is everyone?”

I asked the question repeatedly among the folks I met.

The answer was consistent: “Corn is over $7 a bushel.”

Did that mean that all those farmers, eager to make sustainable changes on their farms in 2009, had abandoned ship and opted to grow corn to feed the export market, America’s junk food habit, feedlots, and the ethanol craze?

Hard to say. That may have been the case for some of them. But when I called home to check in and tell my family what I was observing, Dad grabbed the latest issue of The Stockman Grass Farmer, the trade journal for grass-based farming, and read aloud to me that farmland prices were at an all-time high.

Long Way on a Little
Click here to get Shannon's brand-new cookbook from the YES! Store and save 14% off the cover price!

I did some poking around, and learned that in Iowa the average 2012 price of renting cropland was $235 per acre, and in some parts of Wisconsin the 2012 prices were as high as $300 per acre. The average price to buy farmland in Illinois last year was $6,800 per acre; in Wisconsin, it was well over $4,000 per acre.

A modest-sized farm could sell for more than a million dollars for the land alone, before even figuring in the value of any buildings on the property. A farm comparable in size to Sap Bush Hollow could rent for nearly $50,000 per year. That’s more than our annual net farm income raising out, processing, and direct marketing 1,000 chickens, 100 turkeys, 25-50 pigs, 100-150 lambs, and 10-12 head of cattle, plus all the value-added products we produce. And that’s spread out over four adults who share the labor.

The drought this past year has been extreme all over the country, and grass-based farmers everywhere have been in need of extra farmland to cut hay to carry their livestock through the winter months. At those rental prices, I seriously doubt a lot of the Midwest graziers could justify the expenditure.

In a time when most of us are still doing rain dances and hoping for a wetter 2013 growing season, the fact that it takes over 1,000 gallons of water to produce a gallon of ethanol doesn’t sit well.

“They’re plowing up everything,” one guy who worked for the Natural Resources Conservation Service told me, “fields that you wouldn’t dream of taking a plow to are getting turned under.”

And when every piece of land is seeded to monoculture crops, drought conditions get more severe. Water splashing onto the ground of monoculture crops might provide refreshment for a day, but it quickly evaporates into the air or is lost to run-off, carrying the pesticides and chemicals used on the corn along with it, in addition to valuable topsoil. By contrast, well-managed pastures rich in organic matter and deep roots draw water into the soil, where it can re-enter the water table as it nourishes the fields.

In a time when most of us are still doing rain dances and hoping for a wetter 2013 growing season, the fact that it takes over 1,000 gallons of water to produce a gallon of ethanol doesn’t sit well. For that matter, back east, farmers are cursing the blending of ethanol with petroleum, as it gunks up fuel tanks, reduces our mileage, and shortens the life span of our machinery.

It’s a good time to be in farming if you like to grow corn. It’s a tough time to be in farming if you see yourself as a steward of the land.

As I sit here and ponder what these Midwestern farmers are going through, it is easy to temporarily forget the pressures in my own state, where many farmers are being presented with contracts to lease their land to the hydro-fracking industry. Everywhere in the nation, it feels as though farmers are being pushed up against a wall and told they must make a choice: will you grow food or fuel?

And here I am, attending these grazing and organic farming conferences, joining the chorus of voices asking farmers to choose food. I ask them to choose it for the sake of their land, for the health of their soils, for the benefit of their local communities. I am asking them to forgo a higher income in an economy based on extraction, and instead to allow their spirits and their land resources to be the foundation upon which a life-serving economy can be built.

And to do it, I repeatedly explain, is really simple:

And all the while, you need to tell yourself over and over and over again that what you do is valuable, because it is so damn easy to forget, especially when the price of corn is over $7 a bushel.

You need to figure out how to live on less. You need to not just raise out your livestock, but you must contract with butchers and processors and state agencies so you can legally sell value-added products. And then you need to forget everything you learned about farming for the last 60 years, where your responsibility for the food stopped at your farm gate.

You need to get yourself up before dawn, find some clothes that don’t stink like pig shit, and haul this stuff to a farmers market; or you need to run around and pick up your kids’ toys, scrub your toilet, and dust your furniture and open your home and allow the market to come to you; or you need to open a shop and find a way to staff it; or you need to get on the phone and start calling stores and restaurants to sell your product. You need to squelch your inner introvert and smile, make small talk and be friendly at all times.

You need to tell people how to cook. You need to learn how to do an artful display. You need to learn to hold your head up and pretend you don’t hear when someone tch-tches your prices. You need to figure out how to give your kids a good education when you’ll never be able to afford college. If you’re taking over a family farm, you need to convince your parents or in-laws that you can do things differently and still succeed. You should probably separate your farm from your household, so it can’t be taken away if medical expenses force you into bankruptcy.

You can be in the black, but the process is slow. It takes years to build good markets. Then you must figure out how to sustain them. And all the while, you need to tell yourself over and over and over again that what you do is valuable, because it is so damn easy to forget, especially when the price of corn is over $7 a bushel.

“Oh, Bob,” I called home, on the brink of tears, “I feel like I’m just selling hope.”

He’s quiet for a moment, and then asks me “Do you believe in the product?”

At that point, Saoirse interrupts on the line, “Mommy! Mommy! I’m dressed up like a butterfly! We cut wings out of cardboard, and I’ve got two peacock feathers for antennae!” Her excitement breaks through my sorrow, and I find myself smiling.

“Well?” Bob prompts me for an answer to his question.

“I do.”

My final event for the day is a book signing. I go to the table, sit down, and pick up my knitting, an effort to still my nerves and calm my thoughts. The farmers begin to cue up, and one by one, books are passed in front of me. One farmer kneels down in front of me to capture my full attention.

“I liked your keynote this morning,” he says. I thank him. “I liked what you said. But there were pictures that I wanted to ask you about.”

“Yes?” I expect a question about our grazing rotations, or about our meat processing facility.

“In your house, you have a very big kitchen table.”

“I do.”

“And another one in your parent’s house.”

“Sure.”

“And there were many pictures around that table. There were so many people sitting around them. More than just your family. Who were those people?”

I thought back over the images. “Well, friends, people who have come to work with us for the day, neighbors, extended family.”

“And you always have big tables set up?”

“Well, sure, we need them.”

“And you share meals with that many people?”

“Of course. Not every day, but most days during the growing season.”

“That’s what I want.”

He didn’t want $300 an acre for rent. He didn’t want $5,000 an acre to sell. He wanted a big kitchen table with good food, and people with whom he could enjoy it.

I looked around at the gathering crowd as the final session of the day ended. People stood holding drinks, talking and laughing as they made their way toward the dining room. Suddenly, their numbers seemed huge. With the price of corn over $7 per bushel, this many people still cared about the land. This many people still not pushed out. This many people still willing to do what it takes to have not a million-dollar land sale, not a lucrative land lease, but a place at a big kitchen table, with others to sit beside them.

Shannon Hayes wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Shannon is the author of Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture, The Grassfed Gourmet and The Farmer and the Grill. She is the host of Grassfedcooking.com and RadicalHomemakers.com. Hayes works with her family on Sap Bush Hollow Farm in Upstate New York.

Interested?

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• One More Benefit of Local Food
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• More than Nutritious: Why Organics are Still Healthier
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Friends of Heaven Sutton, one of 2012's youngest victim to Chicago's gun violence, at a celebration for what would've been her eighth birthday on Sept. 26, 2012. Photo by Ashlee Rezin.

This article originally appeared in Sojourners and is reposted here with permission.

When I was in high school, my family moved from a Black Chicago Southside neighborhood fraught with gang tensions to a nice, multiracial middle-class community further south. Yet, my mom and dad still drove my brothers everywhere, so they would not get shot walking to the basketball court or to a friend’s home because of their shoes, their coat, or the color of their shirt. It was the ’70s and Marvin Gaye’s anthem asked the question on the minds of a generation: What’s going on?

Decades later, it is still my question. Six Sikhs killed in worship in Wisconsin. Thirty-three shot dead at Virginia Tech. Twelve killed and 58 injured in a movie theater in Aurora. One teacher and 12 students at Columbine. Six women, eight little boys, and 12 little girls in classrooms in Newtown. Those babies still had their baby teeth. What’s going on?

In many communities, like my neighborhood in Chicago, we’ve known for a very long time that our children were in the line of fire.

Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, cites these stats in her recent Huffington Post blog: 119,079 children and teens have been killed by gun violence in our nation since 1979. It is as though 4,763 classrooms of young people have been killed by guns. Twenty-two times more children and teens have been killed since 1979 than military personnel in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined. That cracks my heart wide open.

The shootings at Sandy Hook took our breath away. We felt in our hearts, this could happen to my child, to my neighbor’s child, and in my community. Unfortunately, in many communities, like my neighborhood in Chicago, we’ve known for a very long time that our children were in the line of fire.

Last Sunday, as Middle Collegiate Church prepared to celebrate the life of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we worked with Auburn Theological Seminary, PICO National Network, and Mayors Against Illegal Guns to mobilize faith leaders to combat gun violence through PICO’s Gun Violence Prevention Sabbath. About 200 congregations around the nation pledged to pray, preach, or act for gun control.

How tempting it would be to fight fire with fire, to add fuel to the angry hot mess, to pick up sword and shield and gun and grenade and call each other “enemy.”

At Middle Church, our multiracial/multicultural community was moved to make a nonviolent case against gun violence with music from many genres: gospel music, spirituals, classical music, and even Marvin Gaye’s Motown hit were prayers on our lips: Mother mother, there’s far too many of you crying. Brother brother brother, there’s far too many of you dying. You know we’ve got to find a way to bring some lovin’ here today.

Along with wondering about what’s going on, we asked ourselves in church on Sunday, “What would Martin Luther King, Jr., do?” How tempting it would be to fight fire with fire, to add fuel to the angry hot mess, to pick up sword and shield and gun and grenade and call each other “enemy.” It would be easy to turn our sorrow and anger into rage.

Yet, as we think about the nonviolent legacy of Dr. King, we recall that he said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

We’ve got to find a way to put some love in this equation today.

Early in Chapter 2 of his prophecy, Isaiah speaks a vision of peace in which the weapons of war are turned into tools that make life. Rather than beat each other into submission, the faithful people of God are called to beat our swords into ploughshares, our spears into pruning hooks and to “study war no more.” Transformed, these life-giving tools cultivate the barren and dried-out soil of our fear, and ready the planting of seeds of peace.

The vision Isaiah articulates is not reserved for heaven, or the afterlife. He speaks of a time “in days to come,” sometime between now and the end of our days. He speaks of a time sometime in human time when human beings can use human power for healing.

I think that time is now. This vision can feel so lofty, we might doubt its veracity, question its viability. But we who believe in the God of Peace must lean forward into the not-yet-here future we are promised, and live as though that day has come. We must use nonviolent means to disarm our nation, and make it safe for our children.

Trayvon Martin is a name on my lips. Those 20 babies’ names are on my lips. I am praying their names, and my heart is cracked wide open.

This is not a call for the cautious. This is a call from the strong word of God for the bold people of God. It is not for angels in the sky but for the earthy, imperfect, brokenhearted people of God to pick up their ploughshares and pick up their pruning hooks and get to making peace and making life!

Here is what I want us to do. Each of us knows someone who has been killed at the hot end of a gun. See that face. Think of their name. Whisper it in a prayer. Raphael Ward is a name on my lips—a 16-year-old, who was shot dead two weeks ago here in my East Village community, because of a coat, but also because a gun was there. Trayvon Martin is a name on my lips. Those 20 babies’ names are on my lips. I am praying their names, and my heart is cracked wide open.

I believe at the place of that fissure, God’s power-full presence grows in me, grows in your own heart. God’s strength is made perfect in our weakness, the Apostle Paul once wrote. With the power of the Holy One growing in our place of vulnerability, I want us to use our words to change the status quo. We do not need to join the cacophony of anger and vitriol in order to speak and write for peace. All of us—writers and poets; musicians and dancers; teachers and lawyers; clergy and factory workers; artisans and administrators; parents and children—we all have a captive audience to whom we can say, “Enough is enough. Stop the gun violence now!”

Use your own words, and say “Enough!” with passion and compassion. We can shout it or whisper it. Joined together our voices can bring change and healing into this land.

Would MLK Fight Foreclosures Today?
How can today’s Civil Rights leaders follow in the tradition of MLK? Lester Spence argues that foreclosures are the issue and the church may just be the solution.

Finally, I want us to get on the bus. I mean that literally and figuratively. There is a March on Washington for Gun Control this Saturday, Jan. 26, on the National Mall. I am going, and so are 30 of my congregants. Get on the bus, and go to Washington in this year that marks the 50th anniversary of King’s historic march for freedom and jobs. And if you can’t get on that bus, get on one for freedom. Get engaged in your faith community and create a Gun Violence Prevention Sabbath. Mentor a teen. Check out the Children’s Defense Fund website, and find a way to advocate for children. Do something about gun violence.

Faced with the urgency of now, what would The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., do? He would use his voice to remind us that the arc of the moral universe is long, yet it bends toward justice. What’s going on for me is this: I am sure that we each need to jump up and grab that arc and pull it down until it touches earth. I urge us to not be too busy, too sad, too afraid, too overwhelmed or too immobilized to make peace here on earth.

In Isaiah’s vision, the drama of peacemaking is enacted by God, who is mentor, mediator, and judge, and the people, who hammer their weapons into tools for peace. We are our better angels, called by God to boldly make Shalom on earth. Each of us is the one—gifted, equipped, able to be used in justice-making. Broadway’s Tituss Burgess wrote these lyrics, “You and I are the ones we’ve been waiting for; you and I thought this was somebody else’s war. You and I are the ones, the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

Rev. Jacqui Lewis, Ph.D., is Senior Minister at Middle Collegiate Church and Executive Director of The Middle Project. She originally wrote this article for Sojourners.

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This article was originally published by the Institute for Policy Studies.

Photo by Oxfam International.

EU finance ministers were scheduled to vote January 22 on whether to authorize 11 member states to proceed with the introduction of a financial transaction tax (FTT). As it turned out, the ministers didn’t even have to take a formal vote because it was obvious that there was sufficient support to move ahead.

The 11 countries are Belgium, Germany, Estonia, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Austria, Portugal, Slovenia and Slovakia. It will be possible for other governments to opt in at a later date. And in fact, the Netherlands has expressed interest, but they want to negotiate an exemption for their pension funds.

The aim of this proposal is “for the financial industry to make a fair contribution to tax revenues, whilst also creating a disincentive for transactions that do not enhance the efficiency of financial markets.”

Next steps

The next step is for the European Commission to make a proposal for the tax. The proposal will be based on one introduced by the Commission in September 2011 that would apply a 0.1 percent tax rate on trades of stocks and bonds, and a 0.01 percent rate for derivatives trades. As described in the European Council statement released today, the aim of this proposal is “for the financial industry to make a fair contribution to tax revenues, whilst also creating a disincentive for transactions that do not enhance the efficiency of financial markets.”

The proposed tax is based on the “residence principle,” meaning that a financial transaction would be taxed in each case where a resident of one of the participating EU member states was involved even if the transaction was carried out in a country that is not a participant.

The tax proposal will have to be adopted by unanimous agreement of the participating member states. EU Tax Commissioner Algirdas Semeta says it is possible that the tax could enter into force beginning January 1, 2014.

Destination of revenue remains unclear

Although some press reports have said the funds will go towards bailing out European banks, there is no agreement yet on how revenues will be allocated.

International campaigners who have been advocating for financial transactions taxes for several years will be redoubling their efforts to demand that revenues to go towards social and environmental purposes.

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project of the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive multi-issue think tank in Washington DC. She’s also the co-author of the IPS report, America’s Bailout Barons: Taxpayers, High Finance, and the CEO Pay Bubble. This article was originally published by the Institute for Policy Studies.

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Cateura, Paraguay is a town built on garbage. Located on top of a landfill, its residents make their living recycling and selling items that have been thrown away. Illiteracy rates in the area are high and many turn to drugs and gangs.

When local teacher Favio Chavez decided to teach the town’s children to play music using his own instruments, he soon had more students than instruments. The solution? He started teaching the students on instruments upcycled from trash and the Recycled Orchestra was born.

Made up of young people playing homemade instruments—particularly striking is a cello made from an oil can, repurposed wood and a meat tenderizer—the orchestra provides beauty, direction and inspiration to its members and the town’s other residents. There’s a sense of pride that exudes from those who have helped to make the instruments and being able to play music in an area where a violin is worth more than a house has proven to be no less than transformational to the youngsters. As one musician says, “My life would be worthless without music.”

The subject of an upcoming feature-length documentary titled Landfill Harmonic, the Recycled Orchestra has become a darling of the Internet as of late. The trailer for the film has been making the rounds, illuminating the resourcefulness and innovation that humans are capable of and challenging us to rethink our disposable culture. It also serves to remind us that every person has something to offer when given an opportunity. As Chavez says, “We shouldn’t throw away trash needlessly. Well, we shouldn’t throw away people either.”

Cat Johnson is a freelance writer who often focuses her work on community, culture and music. She has been featured in YES! Magazine, GOOD, Santa Cruz Weekly, No Depression and Shareable, where this article was originally published.

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Photo by Tilman Cornelius Dette.

In the late ’60s, my life changed forever. I asked, Why are millions of people going hungry? Every other species seemed to have figured out how to feed itself and its offspring. So what's up with us?

Headlines screamed, "scarcity! There's just not enough!" But lo and behold, as I added up the figures, one truth jumped out. There was enough food for all; and today, it's even truer.

So over the decades after Diet for a Small Planet came out, I tugged away at layer after layer of "whys" and finally I came up with a sound bite I loved: Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but by a scarcity of democracy.

Where is democracy emerging that's vital, engaging, and empowering enough actually to get to the root of needless hunger?

What does it mean?

At root, the problem is one of concentrations of social power so extreme that, from far-flung fields to the global supermarket, people are deprived not only of food, but of dignity and confidence in their own proven capacities.

My sound bite made sense to me, but what good was its "truth" without examples of people actually acting on it? What good was it without real-life proof of people seizing the root and transforming human relationships into true "living democracies"?

Certainly, I knew the weak notion of democracy I'd grown up with—democracy equals markets-plus-elections—wasn't it. So what did I mean? Where is democracy emerging that's vital, engaging, and empowering enough actually to get to the root of needless hunger?

Actually, the answer is: in many places, mostly invisible.

Never would I have imagined that one day I'd be sitting and sharing heart-to-heart with leaders embodying multiple dimensions of living democracy and simultaneously ending—not "alleviating"—hunger in their communities.

"I lived on sorghum and broken rice. Our life was dictated by bigger people."

Yet, this fall, there I was. In northern India, I celebrated with Navdanya its 25 years spreading empowering, ecologically renewing farming practices to hundreds of thousands of farmers. Then, in southern India, a few hours from Hyderabad, I sat surrounded by a dozen women in brilliant saris on a straw mat, gazing at beautifully arranged mounds of diverse seeds from their own fields.

These women make up the Deccan Development Society (DDS), a network of 5,000 women in 70 villages. They are farmers growing organic, diverse food crops and creating lives of courage, dignity, inclusion, and ongoing creativity.

I first asked the most basic questions. What was it like 20 years ago?

"We were so poor that in the rainy season our hut floors would turn to mud and we had to pile up branches to sleep on. We were always hungry. We depended on government ration cards. Sometimes the big landowner would pay us for a job with some grains and that would be the only food for our children. We were so poor we had only one sari—not even a second one to change into when we bathe.

My husband was a gambler, he was not ever here. I lived on sorghum and broken rice. Our life was dictated by bigger people. We had to suffer, even if they beat us. It was a dark time."

And what changed?

"We started meeting, talking. Every week now, at nine in the evening our sanghams [groups of women] come together and make decisions together. We tell each other our problems. If someone was abused, all of us go together to confront him. And now if there is a conflict in our village, they call on us. Through the sanghams, we've reclaimed the land. We don't use any chemicals. We grow as many as 25 crops on an acre or two."

"What about the village food security solution I'd read about," I asked, "where you come together as a village and reach consensus on storing enough food so the most vulnerable families get what they need in the lean season?"

"We don't need to do that anymore. Every family has food security now."

"We know what to do. If rainfall is cut by half, we know which seeds will work."

The next day I walked into the fields that these women and their families farm. I learned more about their years of effort to rid the fields of rocks, create water conservation trenches, and establish synergistic cropping patterns. The soil still looked pretty dry and rocky to me, but proof of the women's deep knowledge of how to make it productive anyway was waving above my head—yellow, white, brown, and red millet; and lower down, oil seeds and gram. There, too, were essential plants for natural pest control.

Like most of Indian farms, there's no irrigation here. Rain matters a lot. So I asked, "Aren't you worried about climate change bringing more drought?"

"No. We know what to do. If rainfall is cut by half, we know which seeds will work. If it drops more, we have other seeds."

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I learned how DDS women enhance biodiversity by saving and sharing seeds; how they create common plots for medicinal plants and learn and teach the healing arts.

A few years ago, DDS calculated that the women's leadership has meant the production of almost 3 million extra meals each year.

Their 3,000-member cooperative market is growing by at least 20 percent a year. And DDS women also run their own "media trust," learning and teaching videography through which they are documenting their journey, as well as their own community radio station that broadcasts tips on ecological farming, health, raising trees, and other relevant information, right along with traditional music.

Vandana Shiva: Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Forest
Today, at a time of multiple crises, we need to move away from thinking of nature as dead matter to valuing her biodiversity, clean water, and seeds. For this, nature herself is the best teacher.

DDS has calculated that the women's leadership has meant the production of almost 3 million extra meals each year, as well as almost 350,000 additional days of employment in their villages. And that same leadership is re-balancing gender relationships and radically reducing domestic abuse.

We have achieved food sovereignty, they told me. But what struck me were these words: "From the sanghams what we've gained most is courage."

And with courage comes dignity, there before me in full force in the pride of their gleaming smiles.

Today in India 46 percent of children are still stunted by malnutrition, and this state, Andhra Pradesh, has long been known both for its heavy use of agricultural chemicals and high rates of suicide by farmers trapped in debt, because buying seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides can typically eat up half a small farmer's income .

All true. But the women of DDS, and millions of people like them in India and around the world, prove to me that there is a solution to world hunger. They live it.

I see now that it happens when we break free of imposed disconnection, find our courage, and combine our creativity. Then democracy is no longer something done "to us" or "for us." It is our way of life.

Frances Moore Lappé is a contributing editor to YES! Magazine and the author of EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want and 17 other books, including the acclaimed Diet for a Small Planet. She is the cofounder of three national organizations that explore the roots of hunger, poverty and environmental crises, as well as solutions now emerging worldwide through what she calls Living Democracy. With her daughter Anna Lappé, she co-directs the Small Planet Institute based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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